The Last Time I Saw Blaster
Humorist, poet, painter, raconteur, performance artist, and mail artist extraordinaire Blaster Al Ackerman died late in the evening of Sunday, 17 March. I'd have said something about this sooner, much sooner, but I was in the middle of wrangling with InDesign on the tribute book for the late cartoonist Luisa Felix when I got Ackerman's daughter Stevie Greathouse's email on the afternoon of Monday the 18th. Yet it's not as if I wasn't trying to digest the information in Stevie's email as I plugged on. I knew he'd been in a nursing home since last October; yet it was a bit of a shock that the end apparently came so quickly.
Our working relationship went back to the 1990s. The first story of his I turned into comics (with his advance permission, of course) was "2,976 Vienna Sausages," a work for which the art is so primitive that I have happily allowed it to go out of print among my mini-comics.
The Ling Master stories moved our interaction to another level. Blaster didn't just give me permission to make comics of the Ling Master short stories; he was an influence on my work overall, and a kind and generous man. I know I tried his patience sometimes with my relentless questions on the meanings of certain obscure turns of phrase in the stories I was adapting. His correspondence was sometimes deliberately cryptic; but I knew (or, rather, learned) better than to press him on the matter.
I met him face-to-face four or five times. There was the time I had dinner with him in Baltimore, when I knocked over my bottle of cider onto his dinner plate (I swear it was only my first drink of the evening; also, after that incident, my last). There was the time I took the Greyhound from Amherst (MA) to attend a Wig Nite event in downtown Balto -- a soirée that had been postponed due to a chemical-laden freight train catching fire in a tunnel beneath the city -- to see him perform his readings in person before a crowd of devotees. (I still have the VHS tape of Eel and the Haunted Icebox that Steve Steele gave me at the end of the evening, after showing it at the event.) There was the time I hung out with him at Normal's Books, catching a few precious hours with him while I was in town for Baltimore Comic-Con.
The last time I saw Blaster was almost exactly two years before he died. Two years, ten days, and sixteen hours, to be precise. It was the first weekend of March 2011. He had moved in with his daughter Stevie and her family in Austin due to declining health and, he said, the inability of the Baltimore city fathers to figure out how to keep streets and sidewalks cleared of snow and ice in winter, posing a hazard to older persons such as himself.
I had decided to fly into Austin to attend STAPLE, the small-press comics convention there. I stayed that weekend with Blaster and Stevie and her husband and toddler and dog and cat. (Actually, Blaster explained, it was his late ex-wife's cat.) Blaster had covered most of the bill for my exhibitor table at the show, a gesture I had not expected but did not refuse.
He also paid the taxi driver who brought me to his house from the airport at 11:30 at night the Friday before the show began. I was sheepish about arriving so late but it was the only flight I could get at a remotely reasonable price. I felt even more sheepish when I realized it was Blaster's custom to get up at 4am to write poetry.
That weekend was the most time I ever spent with him face-to-face. He didn't come to STAPLE, but we had time together at breakfast, as well as Saturday dinner. (I met my cousin in Round Rock for dinner that Sunday.) I'd brought a bottle of Massachusetts hard cider that we didn't finish that weekend. Much of the time we spent gossiping about old 'zine-scene personalities we'd known over the previous two and a half decades (longer -- and deeper -- on his part).
I told him about my 2010 run-in with breast cancer. When I informed him about how my post-mastectomy reconstruction consisted of transplanting a flap of fat from my butt to my chest, he said, "Oh, yeah -- the strippers in Vegas do that; they take the fat out of their ass and put it in their boobs." Ever a keen observer of the intricate dance between the zeitgeist and the eternal human condition.
Stevie, of course, was a kind hostess. She squired me around some of the bohemian sights of Austin. I will never forget hanging out in the back yard with her the Sunday morning before the show, listening to the boat-tailed grackles making a racket in the highest parts of the trees.
I'd corresponded with Blaster after my stay in Austin, and wrote "My Date With Blaster Al Ackerman" for Susan Poe (a.k.a. Irrev. Crowbar)'s Popular Reality. It was Sue who wrote in December 2012 informing me that Blaster was in a nursing home and no longer answering his mail.
I called Stevie after Christmas. The brain tumor he'd been developing (for I don't know how long) had finally caused sufficient disorientation that it was best he have 24 hour care. He was in a wheelchair much of the time, though still feeding himself, and partaking of nursing-home activities such as balloon volleyball. He looked at his mail and seemed to enjoy it but didn't write anything in reply. His years of working in hospitals informed his decision not to have the tumor biopsied.
When I did my year-end inventory on self-published comics and the like, I decided that instead of reprinting any of the Ling Master comics when they ran out, I would prepare a perfect-bound book collecting not only the nine stories I'd already drawn, but a few new adaptations of Ling stories I hadn't yet adapted -- some of which I'd only heard rumors of.
In reply to email, Simeon Stylites emailed me a PDF of a Ling story that Blaster had mentioned to me years before -- Blaster was notorious for not holding on to his manuscripts -- "Ling and the Leg of Arthur Godfrey's Leg" (yes, that is recursive). I also scrambled among my Blaster files and combed through thirty years of John Bennett's Lost & Found Times archives. There were two Ling stories in my own files that I'd never adapted. The L&FT materials yielded a lot of Blaster writings I'd never seen before, but the only Ling story was one I'd already drawn. The hunt for "missing" Ling stories continues.
Not knowing what kind of tumor Blaster had, or how fast it was moving, I hoped against hope that I could put together the new book while Blaster was still around to appreciate it, or at least appreciate that it had become a reality. Alas, I've missed the boat on that score.
I still plan on putting the book together. But it's not going to be the same without old Blaster around to see it. It really isn't.
