Hearts and Darkness - The Justin Fornal Guerilla Subterranean Interview

Background:
In Pursuit of the Baron Ambrosia Part 1
Bronx Canzo: The Continued Quest for Baron Ambrosia Part 2

Sometime in the middle of June, filmmaker/guerilla travelogue Justin Fornal sent me an email saying he was headed to Monrovia, Liberia to premiere his exploitative, underground gonzo-political epic Canzo Empyrean. Justin and I were curious acquaintances, guarded, monthly informants on the hush-hush of our experiences and projects. Justin, of course, more guarded.

Much more. After discovering him as a kind of internet master-of-disguise earlier last year, broadcasting my finds for The Plugg, and getting in contact after a few of my intrigued articles found their way to his multi-ethnic netherworld den in the South Bronx, Justin held our correspondence at a charmed arms length.
After the middle of June, I didn’t hear from him again.

If I hadn’t gotten so immersed in my own life and nearly totally forgotten him, I probably would have had to deduce that he’d gotten too close to some Monrovian street gang, and was either their punching bag or their new godhead. With the lore behind Monrovia, and the lore behind Fornal, both options would have been equally plausible.

In October I receive a phone call at 3am from a blocked number. Against my better judgment I pick up. “Let’s meet up. I want to talk about a few things –”
The voice is muffled, withdrawn and there is a lot of noise in the background. I’m only half awake, and quickly wonder if I sleep-dialled Bangkok and asked to be put in touch with the wildest bar in Southeast Asia. Of course I was put directly touch with the manager.
“Who is this?”
“How bout Wednesday? I’ll show you the film…”
“Fornal?”
His voice was suddenly recognizable, but lacked the high-energy singsong more typical of Justin’s usually maniacal wildfire. It was now distant, dark. Insistent but calm. Somewhat preoccupied. Somewhat creepy. I wondered quickly if Monrovia had many UFO sightings, and if extra-terrestrials permit one phone call home like prison.
“Yeah, it’s me.”
“You want to meet up Wednesday?” I ask in disbelief. I’m only now putting together particulars of date and time, the numerical green on my alarm clock interrupting its violent shake long enough to let me realize how god damn late it is. I grab my head in pain. Justin clarifies. “I’m back. It’s done. The Mastabah to Megiddo has been opened…”
I arrive at our rendezvous point around noon. The day is mild for autumn – akin to the preferences of Goldilocks – not too hot, not too cold.
When I push out my car door, I quickly don a pare of work boots, heeding Justin’s instructions of “wear play clothes. It may be a little wet.”
Following a hand drawn map gleaned from my email inbox that morning, I lumbered over a fence in the Bronx, trudging through a nearly deserted parking lot and then looked down into a gushing ravine, replete with broken glass and assorted city trash.
“A little wet…”
But I must confess, the particulars were invigorating. Where-ever this place was in the concrete mess of the Bronx, it was off limits. And the adventure brought me pangs of enthusiasm, despite my nagging reluctance.

Within minutes I was up to my waste in city water, and heading into a dark underpass that seemed to have no light at the end. I scrambled amongst the garbage and decay submerged in the secret waterway, my fingers crossed that Justin hadn’t become a dope fiend eager for a meticulous but circuitously well-planned 20 bucks. If I was knifed it’d be a while before anyone found me.
“You’re being dramatic,” I thought.
As the square of light at the entrance grew smaller and smaller I began to smell something sweet, comforting. No sooner did I think ‘pipe tobacco’ than I hear a pained whisper from the thick darkness – “Happy birthday”. Yes, it was my birthday.
I shine my flashlight on Fornal. He is resting his body over a cane in the knee-deep water nursing a Nording pipe. He is wearing a black three-piece suit with a gold cravat, all topped with the usual tilted homburg. Apart from the bombastic attire he’s hardly recognizable. Wails in a shrill cough as I go in to slap a reluctant five.
“Man are you alright? You sound terrible.”
Justin smiles with a wicked upturn in his face.
“Kuru and bad juju.”
Yeah, and I don’t know what those words mean either. He hands me a headlamp and we begin walking through the filthy torrent into total blackness.
“I’m going to turn on my Dictaphone,” I tell him.
“As you like it…” holding my arm as I nearly plummet into the water from a slippery misstep.
I start shivering in no time flat. First question in the interview:
“So, what the hell? Did you go to Africa strictly to premiere Canzo?”
Justin turns his head towards me. Smiles below his hat brim. A weak smile, full of some waning pip. He lets my arm go.
“That was adventure number 1.”
“Ok….What was adventure number 2?”
“Looking for General Butt Naked.”
General Butt Naked (aka Joshua Milton Blahyi) was a fighter during the Liberian civil war who commanded the Butt Naked Squadron. He and a group of teenage boys would often enter battles in women’s clothing, or butt naked (hence the name), believing such action would ensure victory. In addition to their unconvential attire (even for civil war standards), the Liberian rebels could often be found eating their enemies’ hearts, sacrificing children before battle, talking to the devil on the telephone – or so the mythology dictates. Often mythology is its own weapon towards liberation.

We were now in total darkness.
“Why were you looking for Butt Naked?”
“There are some things I have to speak with him about. When I was in Liberia he was in Ghana. When I was in Ghana he was in Nigeria. Cat and mouse. Mouse and cat. “
He pauses two seconds.
“His life is opera,” he confesses. I wonder about Justin’s next project – perhaps he wants to buy the movie rights. He doesn’t elaborate.
I was now almost completely up to my chest in water. I held the little digital Dictaphone into the air, happy I’d left my wallet in the glove compartment on dry land.
“Was Monrovia your first choice for the premiere?”
“My original choice was Mogadishu, since Somalia is considered the world’s only true anarchy. However due to the strict Muslim background it remains quite sexually segregated and radically conservative. Canzo Empyrean is a great date movie. And Monrovia is a very sensual place.”

Justin Fornal, once a charmed eccentric, was coming across more and more now as The Devil by way of Prince. I worried, but not seriously. Calling one of the most dangerous places on the planet a ‘sensual place’ seemed maybe odd. We pressed on.

“Well, from what I’ve seen, the movie aims to be fairly disturbing to say the least. That’s just from your Kinolingus Erectus bit, and the YouTube trailer, but still… What were people’s reactions?”
“This and that. Most people were fairly horrified. But then they all said they haven’t seen anything like it. That’s where I take my check plus and run. I feel like I’ve done my job.”
Ten more minutes lapse in the under pass, the two of us in total darkness, save the dimming luminescence of our headlamps. As we trudge deeper below the underbelly of New York, Justin lets a few more rasping coughs shutter out from behind his nearly diplomatic chatter. It’s like he’s trying to sell me something – but for no reason other than opening my eyes to something wicked and grimy, unfurled from the indifferent contents of the planet. We’re underground for nearly twenty more minutes before even the hope of light invites. And in that time Justin talks.

According to Fornal, not New York, but Liberia is perfect territory for the independent filmmaker. DIY establishments called “movie clubs” grace every neighborhood in the region, replete with generators, TVs and DVDs player (on the smaller scaled endeavors) and theater-type arrangements for larger ones. Film is apparently an enormous part of their cultural doings – and what better place to premiere a film about AIDS serums, multi-ethnic orgies and future torture.

“I was able to have 20 different Canzo showings in one night. It was like an infiltration.
The next day we went downtown to the Alpha Haiti Social Club and folks started lining up to take a picture with me. It was completely surreal. I’m like how do they even know who I am?
But I was told in Monrovia word travels fast.”

At last, the subterranean cave begins to brighten slightly with dim illumination. My eyes plan for it and some part of me thanks God.

“After you left I read a lot about Liberia being very dangerous, there being a lot of cannibalism during the war,” I say, still trying to maintain my interviewer status.
Justin begins his foreign diplomacy again. I don’t disbelieve him. But still, he sugarcoats.
“Liberia is a wonderful place. The Liberians are the most hospitable people I’ve ever come in contact with. I would recommend Liberia to anyone.”

What is he getting at? I think. I can start to see some of the spray paint on the walls again.
“There is no cannibalism in Liberia. Besides, I don’t understand what the big hang up is about cannibalism. “
I let that one fly. The underground world is beginning to brighten, the water draining to a more comfortable height.

He laughs himself into another violent coughing fit and then sips from a metal flask.
“We’re here.”

All of the sudden, the boxy concrete of the slipshod tunnel turns into a network of rooms, subdivided by brick archways. Fornal glides sickly into one of the vaults where some bodega candles reveal items peaceably inhabiting a tear of fabric. A few more pipes, some little whiskey nip bottles and a phonograph style record player.

I can’t help but laugh at the thought of him carrying all this shit over the slippery rocks, cursing and shimmying towards his little stage. The performance is refreshing.
He reaches into his dry bag and pulls out a laptop and some headphones. He signals me to sit on a large rock and sets the computer on one that is conveniently adjacent.
“Ready to watch it?”
“That’s why we came down here, isn’t it?”
He stands up and looks at me for a second. He then walks a few feet away, procures something with a inward pause, turns, and starts walking slowly back towards me, not taking his eyes off the gift until he sets it down nearby.

“Here’s an appetizer.”
He unlocks a few metal latches, looking sullen, strange.
From a small, elaborately well-painted cigar box, Justin unwinds an ornate piece of dark green fabric. Inside gleams a tender, tremulous, gleaming red. It’s meat.
“Just something to start you off with”, he says with a seductive grin.
“I eat meat, Justin, but raw meat…”
“This is your opportunity to show me if you are a true gourmand or an imposter.”
I sit there for a second, looking at him. We could have done this interview in a Starbucks.
But that was always Fornal’s dispute. You had to create an atmosphere – you had to be sired into adventure.
Now this is difficult. Everything comes rushing towards me. Fornal’s demeanor, his recent obsession with Butt Naked – intellectual, removed, consuming, though – and then his waning health. How much do I actually know about this guerilla imposter and his closet of masks? I feel a certain ownership of his true identity – I have felt so to the extent that I’ve permitted him to lead me underneath New York City, through chest high current, hinted at with ideas of cannibalism, only to end in some ornate nether region, with an uncooked piece of red meat held up to my nose.

I do the only thing I feel safest. I laugh at him.

“Alright, alright. I get it. Lets start the movie,” I put the headphones on, saying.
Justin looks at me for a second. I would have assumed a smirk, a wink, a glimmer of recognition, ownership for such showman tomfoolery. This meat. This fabric. But nothing. Just a very cold look, some inner resentment. I couldn’t believe it. I almost considered eating a forkful.

We said nothing for a second. Eventually he turned away, his gentlemanly affectations attempting to hide some rage – or was it just more showmanship? He re-wraps the tender slab and secures the locks on the portable humidor.

I couldn’t believe it. It was subtle. But from here the entire air seemed to shift currents.
My teeth started chattering. Justin got up and put the cigar case back into a bag about ten feet from me, saying as he shuffled, “Well drink some whiskey at least. . .”

I pop off a nip of red label – ironically dated the same as my birthday. This whole thing was becoming a bad date – one where the guy had put his hand on the girl’s bra and felt the wounded flogging of his pride when she pulled away.

My major thought: Happy fricken Birthday.
The record player struck up in the background – hand cranked. It sounds like something Bollywood.
“Who’s this?”
He didn’t even turn around to look when he spoke. I couldn’t fricking believe it.
“I’m gonna get out of here now, Gori…”
“…The Canzo. Right.” Fornal was insistent about his film being shown in media res of a physical ordeal – something to make the experience even more visceral. I knew it would come down to something like this. The dark began to irk my senses.
“Should I just go back the way we came or is their a quicker?…”
“We never go backwards,” he said – his affectations somehow ghostly. I felt like I was in the room with a freaky butler. He just kept wandering farther until the darkness swallowed him. I was kicking myself. Happy frickengoddamnstupid Birthday, ass. “We never go backwards.”
StupidcoldrediculouswhyamIdownhere Birthday, ass.
Fornal relit his pipe. That’s pretty much all I saw of him. I couldn’t believe this. And still,
a revolt would mean losing cool, especially in the face of a possible prank. I’m dumb that way and stubborn. Dumbstupidcoldass Birthday, ass. ASS. ASS.
The last thing he says:

“This is Lata Mangeshkar,” and then totally disappears.
Okay. So this is ridiculous. I’m underground. I have a laptop on my lap, vigil lights on the periphery, perhaps a box of human flesh in a cigar box feet away and a record player spins a wild, operatic yapping.
In addition – the cave encasement begins to feel somewhat claustrophobic and a certain urgency implores my better judgment to quickly flee. I could take the DVD with me. I could take this guy’s laptop for just leaving me down there dumbstupidcoldgottagettheheloutldamnithow?
My only light source is coming from a storm drain, fifteen feet above my head…but I know I couldn’t lift a storm drain.
As for going backwards, the idea of heading back after Fornal’s haunting edict seemed only slightly less appealing than wandering forward into a potentially hazardous unknown.
I sit there, freezing and furious for about ten minutes.

I come to a sudden resolve.
Eject the DVD.
Fuck it.
Fuck him.
I won’t go backwards.
He got out safely forwards.
I’ll go forwards.
How can I convince you – this is real? Because I broke the rules.

A blinking light suddenly hit me from the distance – from behind. I’d asked my friend Alexandra to follow us…far behind. It was a breadcrumbs operation – very Handsel and Grettle. I told her to follow and bring her camera. I figured Fornal wouldn’t permit pictures, but the least I could do was have a companion flash a few if he wasn’t looking, or when we hit daylight maybe.
Really I was just covering my ass.
“Alex!” I hissed. “Alex!”
Suddenly her form came into the light beaming from the sewer lid.
“Holy sh*t!” she tells me and means it with her characteristic cartoon-ish mug. I can’t believe I asked her to do this.
“What the f*ck, Andrew. How did you get roped into this?”
I bag the DVD in a small baggy nearby (probably from Fornal’s entry to the lair) and smile – happy to have a co-pilot on the Titanic.
“Did you get any pictures of us?”
“No way. I wasn’t gonna steal a picture in the dark. He’d see the flash.”
Damn. Right.
“Are we going back that way?”
“No we can’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because. I dunno. We can’t.”
We’re both shivering. I look ahead of us, past the segregating archways into the darkness ahead.
“Grab a few whiskey bottles and lets go.”
From the distance I see a vigil candle, licking the pitch black ahead.
“You’re flashlight still working?” I ask her.
“Uh – losing light.”
We would just have my headlamp. We held hands and headed back into the current, towards the candle.
After about thirty feet we stop in front of the flame. We can’t believe our eyes.

In front of us, entombing the gushing torrent, now just knee deep, is a cylindrical tunnel of deep concrete leading into what appears to be total broad daylight. Lining this tunnel, is a continued parade of vigil candles, spacing out intervals of probably ten feet until the distant opening nearly 30 yards ahead.
And hanging on the wall next to us is a deflated raft.

We look at each other for a second, overjoyed at the prospect for escape.
“Well, at least you can get a picture of me riding out.”
It takes maybe five minutes to blow up the tube, the two of us taking turns. Alex wades behind me as I get on, one leg out – my brake at present.
“I’ll yell to you once I hit the light that everything’s fine.”
Alex gives a look.
“No – I’m taking your picture, and then I’m holding on and going with you. You’re not leaving me in the dark, dummy.”
Fine. Whatever. The pulse of the current makes me anxious. I’m shivering – the roar of the tunnel just dulling our teeth chatter. The DVD is secured in the baggy in my sweatshirt pocket. I release the brake.
“Here we go.”
In seconds I’m caught up in the current, flashes from Alex’s camera dulling my senses as the raft spins me helter skelter. I try and orient myself, exhaustedly – a child on a snow tube.
Suddenly a hand grabs on.
“Hold the camera.”
I take the Panasonic, raising it into the tunnel air for protection, peddling with my other arm and feet. The roar is louder. We approach the light – that blinding mess. Happy freedom.
When my eyes adjust we’re floating peaceably in the Hudson, total bewilderment
embalmed. I’m just holding the camera, in absolute shock. I suddenly remember my Dictaphone was left behind. My only proof is in the camera in my hands.
We wade to the nearest bit of coast, avoiding a similar fanfare of glass, trash and possibly things so much worse to be beyond mention. But we both feel very much alive…and very hungry.
As the two of us mount the concrete boulders that lead to some factory fencing, I’m only too happy to see typical Bronx roadside so nearby.
We get looks of all sorts – soaked to the bone in October. I ask several people about the parking lot – just barely remembering the street name. Eventually we’re back at the car.
A small sign rests on the dashboard with the address for a Mexican restaurant.
When we get there two women seem to automatically recognize us. Without ordering they serve us two enormous tortas – Mexican sandwiches, stuffed with flavored pork, Oaxaca cheese, other things. Nameless things to us, the famished exiles from underground – happy to be
living now visceral life.
As the short, pock-marked woman holds out our meal, we are in disbelief. He had known to leave two…?
She says one thing:
“He will call you again when he has found General Naked.”
Our mouths agape, we accept the donations.
“He said you would be hungry since you didn’t eat before.”

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Posted on September 18, 2008

Comments

12 Responses to “Hearts and Darkness - The Justin Fornal Guerilla Subterranean Interview”

Peety on September 18th, 2008 1:50 am

Very well written. It kept me wanting, “more”.

Charbarred on September 18th, 2008 2:13 am

There’s a book by Paul Auster called “True Tales of American Life”. Auster asked people to send in true stories that sound like fiction. This one would have felt right at home there.
Pretty intense stuff Andrew, hope it didn’t mess with you head too much.
Oh, and the book:
http://www.amazon.com/True-Tales-American-Life-Auster/dp/0571210708/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221729093&sr=8-1

DThompson on September 18th, 2008 3:52 am

Amazing. Amazing you lived to tell the tale so well told… You should hook up with some local urban explorers, you already have more experience.

Emon on September 18th, 2008 10:43 am

Wow…it takes a lot for something to hold my interest - esp. if I’m reading - and this had me hooked.

Brilliant stuff!

Itax on September 18th, 2008 1:39 pm

I felt like I could smell the the sewers.

Excellent piece, left me wanting more.

Charbarred on September 18th, 2008 11:12 pm

Wanting more sewers?

Kendall on September 19th, 2008 6:52 am

The meat he had was probably cow, and he knew you’d think it was human. Since you turned it down, he had the mexican lady make you a people burrito to get you back!