chris king

I am sort of a Forrest Gump or Leonard Zelig type of guy - I'm in all the fine print of all the big stories. I was never really a major player, but I was somehow always, somewhere, in the game. Check me out ...

I grew up riding sleds down Indian mounds that once made what became my hometown the center of the civilized world, at a time when Rome was a cowtown and Paris was a pasture.

When I was 13 I won a nationwide letter-writing contest sponsored by the U.S. Postal Service on "Why write a letter?" (write it for the response, I said, prefiguring several million emails), and then at 18 I became penpals with an unknown singer named Natalie Merchant after seeing her little-known band 10,000 Maniacs on their first tour.

I missed ship's movement in the Mediterranean on the USS Saipan in the summer of 1985 because I was secretly ashore in the discoteque when the ship got on emergency underway to respond to an Hezbollah skyjacking.

I was invited to the book party for Miles' Davis autobiography, as the guest of the poet laureate of East St. Louis, my friend Eugene B. Redmond. Miles and I skirted the same olive tray. An old-head Black Panther usurped the evening to issue an harangue that we weren't doing enough to further the revolution. I heard Miles say one thing only, "F*ck this sh*t," before he bailed.

With me at that memorable book party was one of my best friends from college, an English exchange student named Sean Hilditch. I am still slightly amazed by the fact that my first international friend was from the birthplace of William Shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, an old market town nestled in the Warwickshire countryside where J.R.R. Tolkien lived and wrote and adopted the imagery for The Shire.

I traveled this country with an indie rock band called Enormous Richard; our first road gig, featuring Fred Friction on spoons, was at the Cabaret Metro in Chicago, Illinois, the night George H.W. Bush began dumping bombs on Baghdad. Enormous Richard bought Uncle Tupelo's first van, which they had previously had wrecked into The Replacements' van. We recorded our first record the summer they released "No Depression," and ours too had a Carter Family cover.

On the first Enormous Richard tour of the East Coast, our gig at fleabag punk icon CBGB was previewed in the local press by one Neil Strauss, who went on to ghostwrite the Marilyn Manson autobiography. Playing pool next door to the venue before the gig, we rubbed elbows with Ice T. When I told Ice T that his friend at the payphone said he was cool with autographs so long as I didn't disturb his shot, the rapper remarked, memorably, "Man, all my friends are dead."

Our drummer, Matt Fuller, would years later rent an apartment in Los Angeles from his own sister, who rented the apartment above him to an actress with some name recognition who was dating Mr. Manson at the time. It was Matt's misfortune at times to hear the ghoul rocker and his girl making love in the room above him. He testified that, at times, they did in the heat of passion knock the headboard of the bed against the wall, but not many times before coming to rest.

Enormous Richard became Eleanor Roosevelt, which wrote a song from the journals of Meriwether Lewis that appeared on one of Bloodshot Records' first "Insurgent Country" compilations out of Chicago, and we scored an independent film, "Omaha: The Movie," written and directed by the dude, Dan Mirvish out of Nebraska, who started the Slam Dance oppositional film festival.

We were all of us classmates at Washington University with the man who envisioned and produced "Jackass," Jeff Tremaine, and the head Jackass himself moonlighted to design the packaging for the first poetry score I had the pleasure to coproduce for the arts collective Hoobellatoo with Lij, my old blueblood road dog who is now a credentialed Nashville producer.

The first Hoobellatoo poetry score, Leo Connellan's "Crossing America," by the poet laureate of the state of Connecticut, was featured on The Verb on Radio 3. That was me live on the dang BBC.

I reviewed books for The Nation magazine, working for the encyclopedic John Leonard and Sue Leonard; I left their brunch once to take the R train out to The Coney Island Mermaid Festival with Alexander Cockburn's fact-checkers. I also got into a flame letter war about a book review I wrote with distinguished columnist and total asshole Christopher Hitchens.

One of my mom's cousins, Bobbie Butler, won the Pulitzer Prize for short fiction, writing under his professional name, Robert Olen Butler, about Vietnamese transplants living in Louisiana in "A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain," a very good book.

I covered Connecticut for The New York Times, my first piece a profile of a brother in New Haven named Winfred Rembert, who makes art carving and dying leather which he learned to do in the joint after having survived a straight-up lynching in Georgia.

I lived in Georgia, for a minute, myself, in the hometown of James Brown, Augusta. My gas man had a bicycle that he considered to be the funk legend's automotive sculpture, since it was reshaped after a collision between dude on the bike and The Godfather of Soul on wheels.

I cofounded a vintage base ball team that played barehanded by 19th century rules in Central Park and I appeared on National Public Radio as the (actually, factually) drunk umpire one hot afternoon; later that long day, I sadly picked a fight with a horse who trots tourists around the city park.

I mailed a baseball halfway across the world to Les Murray, the poet laureate of Australia, and he wrote a tiny poem on it and sent it back to me in a small cardboard box that once held nails. We became good buddies.

Chasing after Turkish poetry in New York, I befriended Defne Halman, who had been the first VJ on Turkish national television, in essence the Martha Quinn of Istanbul. Her father, the honorable Talat S. Halman, was the first minister of culture for The Republic of Turkey and the most diligent of its translators into English. Dude also translated the collected works of Shakespeare into Turkish, when he wasn't threatening to close down the cradle of punk rock, Max's Kansas City, for harboring his drunken, teen daughter.

I went to the desert of Arizona with Matt Fuller to write songs to poems. On a whim, I contacted Derrick Bostrom, founding drummer of my favorite rock band, The Meat Puppets, a native Phoenician. He consented to give us a windshield tour of places in The Valley of the Sun that were seminal to the band and the recordings we loved so much. Bostrom and I stayed in touch through the mail and email. I became a sufficiently useful sounding board to him that my name appears in the thank-you credits to the "Best of The Meat Puppets" reissue Bostrom produced for Rykodisc.

I produced Nigerian rebel radio for Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka's son at Radio Kudirat in the days of the Abacha dictatorship. My coproducer was the hip-hop mix master Adam Long, who did the early St. Lunatics stuff, before Nelly was NELLY, and who now does Broadway musicals. Adam and I made it onto Abacha's death list after one of our sources name-checked us on tape that went, oooops, out to Nigeria. We lived; Abacha died, allegedly in the act of coitus.

I appear for a sad second in Martin Scorcese's history of the blues, mourning at the graveside of my friend, the man whose jump blues jump-started ska, jump steady and finally reggae, the immortal Rosco Gordon, who posed with Elvis Presley at Elvis' insistence when Elvis was an unknown kid from the sticks and Rosco had the No. 1 hit in the world, a record produced in Memphis by Sam Phillips before Sam even called the studio thing Sun.

Had my sister Lori Anne, since deceased (and immortal), still believed in marriage, she surely would have married the love of her life, Mark Presley, who is blood kin to Elvis. Mark's grandfather was first cousins with Elvis' dad. I have a reproduction of a photo of Mark as a child standing on the front potch at Graceland during a family visit when Elvis was still alive.
Rosco Gordon stood up for me as my best man at the Queens County Courthouse when I married a woman, Third Daughter of First Son, who once nonverbally declined a nonverbal pass on her made by Bob Dylan in the West Village, circa 1994.

I helped Rosco to complete "No Dark In America," his song about 9/11, and those twin towers went down and down when Rosco and I were fellow Mets fans living in New York. Ours was the last song Rosco ever wrote. I tasted debris from the towers on my tongue for more than a week.

My family now owns 0.37 acres of land in the mountains of Ghana, just down the road from Rita Marley and right across the valley from the old chateau of Kwami Nkrumah, the father of that African nation.

Nowadays, week after week, a few of us are trying to keep it (sur)real at The St. Louis American, the best black newspaper in the U.S., or so our peers say. Pick us up every Thursday at most supermarkets and drug stores in STL and online at www.stlamerican.com. On a good week, you can read in our pages one of the best living poets, K. Curtis Lyle, a brother who has traveled on the bus with Bob Marley & the Wailers and faced off against Ray Charles in a game of chess.

Day by day, I'm just trying my best to be a loving family man and a reliable friend. You can never have too many friends. The only thing better than a new friend is an old friend. My latest point of pride, in fact, is that I have become personal friends with the great-great-granddaughter of Dred Scott, whose legal challenge to slavery precipitated the Civil War. She is a paralegal, of all things, in my cherished hometown of St. Louis, one of the many places that invented jazz and the blues, the old river city, the city of the vast Indian mounds, the city of the great confluence.