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Title: Watching the Wheels

Author: Simon Morris

Premise: Simon Morris was born in Blackpool, Lancashire in 1968. In his fourth book for Amphetamine Sulphate he plays a rock journalist whose sensory floodgates have been forced open wide due to grief and loss. We explore the nature of time, the differences between epiphany and apophenia, buried childhood memories, the 1980 and 1981 output of Queen and how it shadows the death of John Lennon. For fans of PKD and Pynchon. Adults Only.

Publisher: Amphetamine Sulphate

Note: Italicized excerpts are taken from Watching the Wheels, the lyrics of Nirvana’s third and final studio album In Utero (1993), Kurt Cobain’s suicide note, and Charles R. Cross’s biography of Cobain – Heavier than Heaven. The rest is fiction.

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1. “Serve the Servants” (3:36)

You write me insane letters and send me dead things in the mail: a bat you find on the way to the post office, though you don’t preserve it right and it rots, a snake submerged in salt. I think I kept the letters, although it’s possible that I burned them and scattered the ashes near to where I dumped the dead, rotted things.

Meanwhile Queen were filling Madison Square Garden for three consecutive nights. Freddie Mercury sprayed the front rows with champagne and called them all cunts.

You ask me to wake up at four in the morning and hike several miles to the Detroit River for a swim. Intense gut pain, fatigue to the point where I’m going to the grocery and have to plop onto a bench because it feels like I’m walking through quicksand, can’t catch my breath. Crying jags happen randomly between now and the abdominal surgery.

Everything’s my fault.

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2. “Scentless Apprentice” (3:48)

It’s been a while since I’ve seen you in my dreams. I don’t remember if I dreamt of you before you died, but ever since your accident in the Detroit River, you’ve shown up a lot.

When we’re back stage and the lights go out and the manic roar of the crowds begins, it doesn’t affect me the way in which it did for Freddie Mercury, who seemed to love, relish in the love and adoration from the crowd which is something I totally admire and envy. The fact is, I can’t fool you, any one of you…thank you all from the pit of my burning, nauseous stomach…

The ending was impeccable. Stranger and stranger desires finally lead to total disintegration. And because it’s a novel, it’s perfect, not messy like real life. Nothing left behind but a scent.

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