An excerpt from Steven Clark’s autobiography, Taking on all comers and versa vica, the rise and fall and rise and fall of Steven Clark: vol 1. (as read by T.P.)
Steven Clark - Musician, filmmaker, photographer, raconteur, creative cook, writer of prose, sometimes poet and actor, animal lover, freedom fighter, builder of what needs to be built - pulling things out of thin air...has done been professionally distorting the landscape of multimedia for the past twenty plus years for companies large and small such as Norton Healthcare, Baptist Healthcare, U.K. Healthcare, Vanderbilt University Hospital, WAVE3, Blessings in a Backpack, Freeli Foods, The Center for Neighborhoods, SRS Automation, Louisville Presbyterian Seminary, The Aviation Agency, Churchill Downs, VISA, Kentucky Health Justice Network, Old Friends Farms, Captain’s Quarters Restaurant, Down In The Alley Records, Virginia Chance School, Saint Francis School, Wyatt, Tarrant & Combs LLP, Bahe Cook Cantley & Nefzger LLP, Frederick Law Office PLLC …short film, documentaries, feature film, indie music (Trampled by Turtles, Bryan Fox, Ass Haulers, Laurie Jane & 45s, Vice Tricks, some goofy bluegrass band who's name he can't remember...) and lots lots more…blah blah blah...
The true story…
This from Steven Clark's autobiography, "Taking on all comers and ver-sa vice-suh". After a disastrous three year stint in high school and an even more dire run in college I drifted around old America for a long while. I wrote for a small town rag in rural Kentucky doling out romance advice in a column called “Heart Strings” under the pen name “Dominique Saint-Jermain” before moving on to pick apples or whatever needed to be picked for sixty-five cents a bushel. At the end of picking season I landed a job on a passenger ship as a welder and my only task was to be ready 24/7 to repair the hull if and when we collided with something that peeled us open like a can of rancid geriatric buffet swilling sardines. I eventually grew bored of languishing in my cabin getting pirate drunk on cheap watered down tourist-rum purloined from the top deck tiki bar, writing songs, and waiting for imminent disaster. I could easily do that on dry land without the seasickness I thought. When we made port in California I abandoned ship forthwith and started a highly successful dojo. That little venture slash adventure went gangbusters for over a year until news of “the child maiming” incident spread like wildfire and the locals figured out that the “Deadly Chicken Style” of elite fighting that I taught exclusively was made up out of whole cloth. Soon the citizens came with pitchforks and the state with a warrant, they revoked my sensei license due to me having no actual training in the martial arts, my stint as a street fighter in the jungles of Mississippi apparently didn't count. Thanks to a last minute tip from a student's mom (that’s another story) by the time the sheriff and his goons kicked the door off of the hinges I was on the other side of Cali in Hollywood proper, and it being the hot-bed of motion picture making I quickly landed a job through a barfly connection as a stuntman and did a few low budget pictures, the gigs were mostly saloon fights, motorcycle stuff, wipe-outs, walls of burning hay, etc. I relished the danger and the folding money was great but I refused to join the union so they pushed me out. My dad, when he was around, taught me from an early age to “Never volunteer, never join anything, and even when caught red handed deny everything and lawyer up”. So to get rid of me the union thugs started giving me the most dangerous gags with almost no safety oversight, you can only set a man on fire so many times before he takes the hint or his dumb luck runs out. Dispossessed and desperately needing big money to fund my poetry career I then took a gig running the “Cobra Pit”, not the go-go bar in New Mexico, this was a big filthy tattered canvas tent in a traveling sideshow that tagged along with county fairs piggy-backing on their event license. Yet again I was drifting from town to town with an adopted family of freaks, miscreants, and ne’er-do-wells, a foreshadowing of my future years on the road with my rock band The Ass Haulers. I never liked snakes, I’m more of a dog person, I have never seen a cobra catch a Frisbee, sniff out a bomb, or rescue someone trapped under earthquake rubble. Maybe they do that in Europe, I hear things are different over there. I found that giving the cobras names helped my trepidation but it was still tricky to bond with a critter that spits at you nightly and given the chance would kill you in your sleep. I’m not a quitter, but after Charlie the albino bit me and my hand swelled up to look like a sunburned donkey scrotum I decided I had had enough of the nightly emotional terror and intimidation so I set all of the snakes free, cut Lucy and Jimmy Wayne the pink elephants loose, siphoned some gas out of The Amazing Johnny Buckles stunt bike that he looped the “Ultimate Dome of Death” with and I lit that tent on fire. With the hellish orange glow of a burning sideshow at my back I walked to the train tracks numb to the screams of sirens and fleeing animals over my shoulder. "Fleeing out of Sodom" I whispered to myself. Once again I was an aimless tramp trekking into the night with empty pockets, a head full of ideas and a beating heart full of possibilities because deep down I knew there had to be some little village on down the line that needed a chef, or a private detective, or a peach picker, or maybe a dojo.