EVERYONE'S GOT ONE #26: THE LEGACY OF TABARD INN

Most of you who know me know that I’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into the 21^st Century. It’s not that I hate tech, it’s fine for other people. Me? I’m usually satisfied with what I have. The computer I write this on is about twelve years old. I just recently got internet in my home a couple of years ago. I first got a cell phone maybe five years ago.

My internet presence started because of my late magazine, TABARD INN: TALES OF QUESTIONABLE TASTE. Getting the name out there was just too expensive without the aid of social media. I couldn’t get anyone to pay attention to me except writers who wanted me to publish them. A bunch of friends harassed me, trying to get me to join MySpace. I relented, but only because I wanted to use it as a tool for marketing TABARD INN. I got on board just in time for MySpace to become irrelevant. I joined Facebook for much the same reason. I joined Twitter after the death of TI, mostly to keep my own name out there. My blog and website are all testament to TI’s past.

Of course, social media is fun as all fuck. That helps.

But my internet presence isn’t the only thing that survives my ill-fated publication. Back in the day, TI’s biggest audience was composed of prisoners and mental patients. That sounds like a joke, but it isn’t. I received more correspondence from these groups than from anyone else. It was enough so that I started getting nervous about having TI’s address be my actual house. There was one guy who decided that I was his agent, and he wanted me to pay Google on his behalf so that every time someone searched for “science fiction,” his name would come up.

The rest of the world has gotten the message: TI has closed its doors to submissions, for now and ever. However, since the prisoners and mental patients are locked away, word has yet to reach them. They continue to send me submissions, or they ask for my guidelines. Every time I get a letter from the department of corrections from anywhere in America, I know that TI has received yet another submission.

But all of that changed when I received a letter from the Arizona Department of Corrections. I’m not going to name this guy because I’m afraid someone out there might read this and take him up on his offer. I doubt I could get sued over this, since his crimes are a matter of public record, and I have the letter he wrote and signed to me, but I just don’t want to take the chance that someone might mistake my purpose in writing this.

This guy, shockingly enough, did NOT want to submit a story to my defunct magazine. No, he wanted stories FROM me, in addition to any TI writer who wanted to take him up. It would seem that he’s got a ton of money. He wants people to send him stories, and in return, he’ll select three he likes best and pay the writers for them. First and second place gets a thousand, and third place gets $500. He promises that these stories will never be used for publication, that they’re only for his “own personal reading pleasure.”

They can’t be any ol’ stories, though. Oh no. He has themes he wants writers to follow, and anything not fitting either theme “won’t be considered in any way shape or form.” What are these two themes, you might ask?

“The next two months are to be strickly erotic mind controled stories with Mother or Wife is Submissive and Son, husband, stranger male is dom or white couples where husband has a Black boss who Blackmails white wife into submissive sex. [Too many “sic’s” to note here.]”

That’s, uh, pretty creepy. In fact, that might be the creepiest thing anyone has ever sent to me. It’s harmless on the surface, but when one considers the prisoner’s motives, things get a bit more intense. I have no doubt whatsoever that this dude intends to jerk off while reading these stories, since he starts out his letter by telling me he can’t get nudie pictures behind bars.

Every time I get a letter from a prisoner, I research them. They’ve all turned out to be murderers. Not serial killers, but one-and-done killers.

This time, I jumped the gun and told fellow Napalm Assaulter Cliff Breaux about this crazy letter I’d received before looking up my letter writer. He immediately researched this guy and found a lot of disturbing things about him. He was charged with nine counts of sexual assault, two counts of sexual abuse (I’m not sure how that differs from assault, though), one count of burglary in the 2^nd degree, one count of armed robbery and, last but not least, one count of kidnapping. Holy. Fucking. Shit. Apparently, all of this took place over the course of two years. He was once released, and within five days, he’d been arrested again for raping someone. Guilty of everything. 100 years from today’s date, if he lives long enough, he’ll still be in prison, and he’ll still be looking at 11 more years behind bars.

Cliff asked me if I would write those stories for that kind of money. No, I wouldn’t. Those stories don’t appeal to me. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve been paid for writing porn, but I can’t let someone else dictate what I want to write. But say we take away the specific subject matter and just say porn. Say we take away the rap sheet. Would I write for someone in prison for pretty fucking good money for a story? Because let’s face it, writers get paid shit. A thousand bucks for a story? That’s mighty enticing for a guy who usually gets paid between $25-50 for a short story.

That question’s a bit harder. Ultimately, I don’t think I would. My conscience would trouble me too much. Sure, I’d be the one financially benefiting from such an arrangement, but I don’t think I could bring myself to bring such sexual satisfaction to a guy in prison. I’ve done a lot of awful things for money, but I don’t think I could ever forgive myself for being such a whore. Besides, who knows what kind of fantasies I’d be fueling?

Well, in this guy’s case, I know. He says he’s got a bunch of friends already writing stories for him, and it disgusts me to think about the kind of person who would do this. But he’s aware of how fucked he is, since he ends his missive in this self-righteous way: “If your not interested thats fine to, theres lots of places like yours who will understand my money is as green as the next persons. [Again, too many “sic’s” to mention.]

I always prided myself on the fact that TABARD INN was an oasis for extreme writers, unafraid of tackling any subject, no matter how gruesome or questionable, but I found my limit when this guy wrote to me.

GRACELAND CEMETERY: A GREAT PLACE TO VISIT, BUT YOU PROBABLY WON'T BE BURIED THERE

[NOTE: I'm fairly certain that no one has ever done a review of a cemetery, so I hope this is the first of a new . . . subgenre, I guess? If anyone has heard of someone reviewing a boneyard, let me know. So far, I only have two of these pieces. Enjoy!]



It’s an unusual place for a cemetery. In fact, driving by, you wouldn’t believe that there’s a boneyard at the corner of Irving Park and Clark. The walls are high, so unless you’re in an SUV, you won’t be able to see any of the towering graves within.

But Graceland Cemetery is there, and it is the grandest graveyard you are ever likely to see. The people who are buried here have no interest in plain stones, and they would never settle for a mere plaque in the ground. No, these are probably the richest corpses you will have ever heard of.



Grecian pillars reach for the sky. Gray pyramids stand as the opening to mausoleums. Some graves are so elaborate that they have benches for weary wanders to rest upon. Life-sized statues, some who look suspiciously like Caesar, rest in positions of thought as grave markers. There are even crypts leading down into the ground. It’s easy to think you’ve entered another world upon driving through the gates to this place. In fact, if you stand on the island with the mausoleum on it and peer out over the pond, you can see what looks like ancient Greek ruins poking out from between the strands of a willow tree.

It isn’t hard to see why so many horror stories have come from this place. There are rumors of a green-eyed monster who stalks the graveyard on full-mooned nights. There is the requisite lady in white, in addition to a large grim-reaper-type statue; the rumor is, if you stare into his face under the hood, you will see how you’re supposed to die.



The most well-known story, though, is about the statue over the grave of a little girl. On rainy nights, the statue has been known to move around the graveyard of its own free will. It became such a common occurrence that the caretaker took it upon himself to put a glass case over the statue in the hopes that it would wander no longer. This plan did not work, and it is still common to find the glass case empty on wet evenings.

Who is buried here? The richest people in Chicago, of course. Some of the pioneers who helped found the city. Notably, Allan Pinkerton, the very first private detective in history. He died of an infection he received when he stubbed his toe on the way to his outhouse one morning. His grave now resides in Graceland, a triangular testament to his life.

Other “residents” of this graveyard include Augustus Dickens (brother of Charles), controversial boxing champ Jack Johnson, George Pullman (the inventor of the Pullman Car), Phillip Armour (of Armour Hot Dog fame), Edith Rockefeller McCormick (daughter of John D.), Charles Wacker (you’ve probably driven on the street named after him), John Jones (the first African American to hold an elected office—County Commissioner), and John Kinzie (the first permanent white settler of what would come to be known as the city of Chicago).



If you’re free for an afternoon and don’t mind a trip into the city, you might want to consider wandering the grounds of this cemetery. Death has never looked quite so beautiful, and you will while away the hours in the presence of gravestones that were meant to be more than just a place to mark where a corpse resides.

They were meant to be art, and nothing less.