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LUDIC LOG

Price was always at the best parties, despite the fact that no one actually knew whose friend he was. That is, a lot of people liked him, some even considered him a friend, and certainly somebody always invited him, but no one had any idea how he came to hang around in the first place. No one could recall how he first got invited.

Everybody seemed to have known him for years, which was odd, because everybody knew Price Western was only nineteen years old.

If this had been another era, Price would have been the guy at chuckle-titter Noel Coward cocktail parties who tinkled out clever songs on the piano while everyone else moved gaily about making clever remarks to one another. But it was, sadly, this era instead of that; no one kept pianos in their parlors any more, and Price was too odd to play the guitar, so he carried around a very old accordion that looked as if it was once owned by a man named Luigi who had a pet monkey that did little dance for a penny. It was that kind of an accordion. Instead of clever little ditties, Price sang bizarre and disturbing and occassionally hilarious tunes of his own devising in a kind of throaty whiskey-and-cigarettes warble that sounded much like Tom Waits would sound if he spent his time not in gin joints and honky-tonks, but at parties where they did jello shots and played the Smiths on Japanese CD players.

Price Western's parents were killed in a freak accident when he was 14. They were quite wealthy and Price, having a fierce independent streak, an accomodating family lawyer, and no other living relatives, found himself on his own, with more money than most 14-year-olds can reduce to the lowest common denominator. He soon came into possession of an extensive real estate portfolio, a constant supply of very friendly and experienced high school girls, and an incredibly serious drug habit.

Price Western's relationship with these women were, in the strongest possible sense of the word, disastrous. He started off on the wrong psychic foot right off the bat because, of course, his mother had died, and there's nothing that screws a man up with women more than unresolved maternal conflict, as Emma Freud could have told you. Second, he got involved with women a bit too early and got a bit too attached to them too soon; always a mistake. Finally, word of his extreme and sudden wealth got around quickly, so the kind of women he started attracting were of entirely the wrong caliber. By the time he was old enough for his penis to receive the emergency signals his brain kept desperately sending out, he was very embittered, depressed, disturbed, and worst of all, terribly good-looking.

On his seventeenth birthday, Price bought an old accordion at Central Pawn, and the young man had himself an epiphany. He fixed it up (to the extent that it worked well; it still looked like it should have been set out on a glacier at birth), learned to play in record time, and began assembling his life's work: a purported 1000-song cycle that would, in order of sequence, explain Price's views of reality, what they meant, how they came about, and how he felt about them. All of the songs would be written for voice and accordion only, and he kept the sheet music for each successive song in a big Mighty Morphin Power Rangers notebook. He was constantly writing songs, and claimed the cycle would be finished on his 30th birthday, when he would attempt to play it in its entirety over worldwide satellite feed from the Red Rocks in Sedona.

The argot of the day called the gloom-rock, black-clad, androgynous neo-mod look that Price favors "vampire" style; and indeed Price resembles a vampire in a number of ways. He reacts harshly to sunlight; he never gets up in the daytime; he is dressed in elegantly tailored black; he avoids mirrors; his skin is sallow, chalky, and thin; his movements are elegant and graceful, as though he spends time at home practicing how to walk; and his relationships with the opposite sex are abnormal. In many ways, however, the nosferatian analogy falls completely apart. Unlike Count Dracula, Price affects to wear his hair in geometrically improbable chunks of royal blue, resembling Robert Smith far more than Christopher Lee; Vlad the Impaler was much less likely to be found bathed in a choking haze of patchouli; few of the bloodsucking army of the night chose to smoke an endless stream of clove cigarettes; and the Transylvanian count preferred a simple black patent-leather dress shoe to Price's choice of fake-leopard-skin-festooned pointy-toed suede creepers covered with studs and buckles. But before we watch him creep snakelike into the comforting darkness of Hair of the Dog, we will inform you of one more similarity between Price and Vlad: like Count Dracula, young Mr. Western ends up dead by the end of his story.

Onward!