MOTHMAN SUCKS (AND OTHER POINT PLEASANTRIES): an excerpt from upcoming pseudofiction INDRID COLD IS DEAD

June, 2024 - downtown DC.

“Not all heroes wear capes.” – Aquaman

I am preparing my brains out for another sortie into the luscious innards of West Virginia, where I shall attend the grand opening of the Grafton Monster Museum (in a kook-centric bookstore on the main drag of the Grafton Monster’s eponymous hometown).

Driving in West Virginia is not for the weak of spirit. There are biker gangs, falling rocks, potholes the size of fully-grown manta rays, a technicolor variety of aspiring roadkill, tar pits, sand pits, leftover pterodactyls, Middle Earth holdouts, and “blackout areas,” where wireless internet curls up into a whimpering little ball and you have to consult esoteric stars like Alpheratz and Zeta Fuqmuhlife for direction.

I was to launch my ex-girlfriend’s little Audi back and forth from Grafton, were it not for a recent G-rated liaison with her that inspired her current boyfriend, some thin-headed ratero type who looks like he’s not had a warm meal in six to eight weeks, to threaten to make manifest her secret mild salsa recipe so I will be taking my boss’s vehicle instead—a babyshit-blue minivan that’s old as time itself.

Of course, this is all assuming that I live through tonight…

“You goddamn sausage eaters!” my friend Michaela hollered into the phone. “We will invade the holy spirit out of you sons of bitches!—and this time we ain’t taking prisoners!” Michaela was the big kahuna at the Italian Cultural Institute and was on the phone with the Austrian ambassador, who had just informed Michaela that the Italians were to bring only cold food to the EuroAsia Shorts Festival, a film event being held at the Austrian embassy tonight. Not only will I be attending this event, but I am in charge of all the food for the Italian attaché. I manage a kooky little Italian joint in downtown DC and my boss had whipped up enough hot-as-lava polpettine al forno and arancini siciliano to feed the whole cast of La Citta Delle Donna and now here the Austrians were telling Michaela and company you’ll eat cold caprese and like it. “I’m a serious as a snake bite, you Crypto-Stasi spinster! Italy is the culinary capital of the galaxy, whereas Austria was eating bugs and tree bark until like three Thursdays ago,” Michaela said, bug-eyed with rage. “Oh, and sausage, you’re right. Sausage upon sausage upon sausage… Let me guess, you will be offering sausage at the screening tonight, Herr Ambassador? Twenty different types of sausage, and each link with that stupid little flag of yours sticking off it… Hello? Hello? Porca vacca, that son of a bitch hung up on me… Van, I regret to inform you we may have to go to war tonight.”

“Whatever you say, Capitano,” I said, shrugging. I am about as Italian as a bowl of Gaeng Daeng pudding but here I am about to jump boner-first into a shiny new continent-sized bloodbath. Ah well. Better people have died for less noble causes. Besides, I kinda always did hope I died on a Friday…

Okay, back to West Virginia. To paraphrase that slinked-out gringo from Talking Heads: How did I get here?

My infatuation with West Virginia began in 2015 at the Mothman Festival in Point Pleasant, a living breathing Twilight Zone episode of a town that’s nestled into where the Ohio River meets the Kanawha way over on the western fringe of the state.

The Mothman Festival is a basically a flea market/jamboree for cryptidistas, ghost trackers, kooksters, ufologists, podcast bros, and every other strain of occupation that won’t win you any points on a Scrabble board.

The story of Mothman is well known, and it is a story with many exclamation points and question marks but few commas and periods. Sightings of winged humanoid critters reach back to ancient times, but Mothman’s main stage debut was in the guts of the late ‘60s, back when they called him Birdman and the Man-Sized Bird and other Sesame Street-inspired kookacana.

Every bag-of-bones in the Point Pleasant area seemingly saw Mothman, either reenacting the last ten minutes of Top Gun on desolate stretch of road, or skulking around in their backyard, or playing barnyard freeze tag with the family pooch, et cetera, et cetera.

The story famously ends with the collapse of the Silver Bridge, which spanned the Ohio River, while it contained a whole herd of rush-hour automobiles. In addition to allegedly being poorly maintained, the Silver Bridge was built back in the 1920s—an age where dainty roadsters and livestock ruled the roads. It was not constructed for the behemothic motherships of the late ‘60s American roadscape. Forty-six people died in the cold December waters of the Ohio. The word “Mothman” left the lips of every Point Pleasanter and was replaced by ominously practical phrases like stress corrosion cracking.

Aside from the spotlight abandoning him for more fashionable prey, Mothman has indeed discreetly still been popping up in West Virginia and Ohio and beyond.

So, yeah, in 2015, a couple of buddies and myself went clambering westward across the wily West Virginia landscape until, along with an unholy number of other paranormalheads, we reached Point Pleasant, where we planned to drink the town out of Yuengling (and Mothman IPA, et cetera) and possibly maybe get a sneaky peek of what makes this little town so desirable to undesirables like Mothman and his creepy brigade of enthusiasts, present company included.

We stayed at the Lowe Hotel, a charming establishment that’s older than gunpowder. The Lowe was vast, with nebulous dimensions. It was also allegedly haunted, which made me and my two buddies (to avoid being sued into silly putty, I shall call them Ned and Zeb here) bug-eyed with glee at the prospect of getting tangled up in something from the beyond, though several cursory chats with the locals revealed that everything from the UPS store to the Jamba Juice was haunted.

We went down to the hotel’s bar and inquired further with the Lowe’s proprietor, the lovely Mary Ruth, who was congeniality personified.

“Oh, it’s haunted, alright,” she said. “We had this old boy in here recently who had come to Point Pleasant for work. Kept getting late night visits with a strange woman in a gown who wasn’t on the payroll, if you know what I mean. He ended up skipping town before he could even clock in.”

We sipped our three-dollar Yuenglings and nodded in optimism. There was an implied commotion around the hotel. Something, it seemed, had happened to someone somewhere.

“What’s the rumpus?” I asked.

“Some fella drowned,” Mary Ruth said. “Jumped in the river for whatever reason and never came back up. That’s actually his glasses right there.” A set of wire eyeglasses sat on top of a neighboring booth. I put on them and took them off. Later, on the internet, I learned that a fifty-nine year old man had been found under fourteen feet of water. Neither suicide nor foul play was ever suspected.

The next day Ned and Zeb and I ambled around town eyeballing the cosplayers (guys and gals done up as Mothman and Bigfoot and Men in Black and other low-hanging cryptidacana), while every paranormal hack worth their hundred dollar fedora was camped out at a convoy of tables peddling their books and DVDs and trinkets and crafts. I bought a panel of sheet rock with caricature of Mothman deftly painted on it (which was later shattered into two dozen pieces on DC’s 18th Street in a late-night encounter with a malign ex-ex-ex-girlfriend—a variety of living breathing cryptid I know all too well).

Ned and Zeb and I drove out to the TNT Area, as it’s known, where Mothman allegedly still lays his creepy little head at night. We parked and got out of the car and ambled around, spying for any indication that anything had been there recently aside from 100,000 Mothman fanboys. We poked our heads in the silos, which were sepulchral and musty and as empty as a Buddhist monk’s piggy bank. “MOTHMAN SUCKS,” read a burst of graffiti in the interior in one of them. A tragically asymmetrical swastika adorned another one, as well as “ BURN BITCH 666,” “VOORHEES WAS HERE,” and the obligatory pentagram, of course. On a broken baseball bat, someone had magic-markered “MOTHMAN WEARS GRANNY PANTIES,” which was a statement I could neither confirm nor disconfirm.

“It is my understanding,” I said to my colleagues, “that Mothman keeps a little studio apartment in Cincinnati that he zips over to during this laffy taffy festival.”

“He sure as shit ain’t here,” said Zeb.

“We’ll come across Jimmy Hoffa’s false teeth before we find Mothman,” said Ned.

This type of cynical banter went on until we agreed it was time to go back to the hotel and look for ghosts.

We got back to the Lowe just in time to catch Mary Ruth in the bar before she closed it up. We gunned down an attack dose of Yuenglings and went skulking around the guts of the hotel, working our way from the lobby up to the banquet room, which was vast and dark and sufficiently spooky.

“I am 100% certain that if we find a ghost, it’s gonna be in this room,” I said, skulking around, bending over, and looking under the dining tables, all the while using our cellphones as flashlights.

Zeb scoffed and said, “Any type of a ghost or, you know, autonomous residual energy or full-blown poltergeist or whatever, would hopefully have the wherewithal to steer the heck clear of us three drunkards.”

“There’s an old saying,” I said, “I forget who came up with it—maybe me?—it’s simply, if you start blabbin’ about how drunk you are, you probably ain’t that drunk.”

“I am six wool blankets and a couple of sleeping bags in the wind,” said Ned.

“Me, too,” said Zeb. “I am loaded beyond belief.”

“Horseshit,” I said, strafing them both with spittle. “We’ve only had like twelve beers each. Nobody’s even cracked into that bottle of Old Muskethead yet.”

This went on until we finally wriggled our way back downstairs and into our hotel room, which, for better or worse, seemed to also be sans ghosts.

There is one prospective ghost that I was not at all interested in coming across, provided I wasn’t equipped with a proton pack: the ghost of Shawnee supreme stud Hokoleskwa, known as Chief Cornstalk to the palefaces, and who was buried right here in Point Pleasant. Chief Cornstalk’s life was not an easy one, which is basically where the facts stop and the speculation starts, but what we do know of his story makes the movie Platoon look like a spotted puppy on Christmas morning. After enduring a lifetime of headaches caused by being in the middle of the unceasing trifles between the French and the English in the 18th century, Cornstalk, his son, and two other Shawnee were shot at close range by a bunch of cranky American militiamen while being held in arbitrary captivity at Fort Randolph (a revenge killing, the militiamen called it, in response to one of their own getting offed in the vicinity by a Native American who had nada to do with Cornstalk’s diplomatic little visit, the purpose of which was to basically scope out the Americans and learn their handshakes and congratulate them on their breach baby of a new country).

Due to the humans again confusing reality with fiction (this time by way of a 1921 outdoor play, whose scripter decided to whip up some hocus pocus hubbub about Cornstalk applying a “200 year curse” to the whole creepy region right before the Americans plugged him), Cornstalk has posthumously been blamed for western West Virginia’s eerie disposition, setting the stage for Mothman, Indrid Cold, the Men in Black, Sheepsquatch, dogmen, the Grafton Monster, and ten zillion moving lights in the sky. In short, the world has always been sufficiently weird.

We checked out of the Lowe in the morning, all three of us wrangling with saber-toothed bewilderment that tags along with that ferocious variety of hangover known only to ambitious boozers like ourselves. We troubleshooted with coffee and pastries, wreaked havoc on every American inch of porcelain in the establishment, and then Quasimodo’d our way to the car, all stumpy syllables and dark sunglasses and missteps and directionless apologies to the inanimate objects that impeded our amble.

I expect the upcoming weekend’s sojourn to Grafton shall be a similar messcapade, thick with everything from despair to rapture. In fact, “expectation” is the only four-letter word the good people of West Virginia allow to cross into the state without a notarized letter from Yahweh or His attorney. And if you expect to roll into to West Virginia to just “take it easy,” you will be beetle bait before Wheel of Fortune comes on. With that in mind, I have packed a snake-bit kit, a “family-size” box of gauze, enough band-aids for the whole cast of the Walking Dead, a six-hundred-dollar crossbow and a whole gross of arrows, each tipped with freshly squeezed poison dart frog juice, eight sticks of CVS-brand dynamite, a helmet big and thick enough to midnight as a kiddie pool, an imaginary sidekick (Jiffy Hormel, per usual), a DIY hang glider, a taxidermized paw from a monkey that won both the Fantasy Five and the Powerball, some night-vision goggles, a few flares, and an unopened VHS of the original Red Dawn, in the event I need to barter with the natives.

For luck, which I will need in unlimited gobs, I have tossed a freshly minted nickel into every pond, pool, fountain, river, run, lake, and bayou from my doorstep to Planet X. I shall report back here from the bleeding belly button of the beast, inshallah. As David Bowie said, it ain’t easy….