Condensed Life Stories Read online

  CLS #44

  Sam Kinison’s dad was a Pentecostal preacher,

  and young Sam tried his hand at it for a bit too.

  Sam would shout and howl a lot while preaching.

  Taking up stand-up,

  because the church sent him packing after his divorce,

  Sam’s meteoric rise was fueled by much liquor,

  many illicit substances,

  and a beret.

  Sam died when,

  six days after getting married again,

  his Pontiac Turbo Trans Am

  was hit by a pickup truck

  driven by a drunk 17-year-old

  just outside of Needles.

  CLS #9

 

  Without a teaching credential,

  and with his doctorate still uncompleted,

  the 24-year-old Friedrich Nietzsche

  became a professor of philology at Basel.

  He soon renounced his Prussian citizenship,

  choosing to be stateless from then on out,

  but fought in the Franco-Prussian war anyway,

  where he probably got syphilis,

  but certainly got a bad case of dysentery and PTSD.

  He went back to Switzerland after that,

  taught some classes, wrote some essays,

  and became friends with Wagner.

  But some nasty stomachaches and migraines,

  plus the fact that he was going blind,

  led to his forced resignation from the school.

  In isolation, cutoff from his former friends,

  living off a nice pension,

  writing and moving around a lot,

  his books not selling,

  the 44-year-old suffered a nervous breakdown

  after hugging a horse that was being whipped in the street.

  He had a few strokes,

  gave his sister the rights to his works,

  which she didn’t really understand,

  caught pneumonia,

  which ended his life at 55,

  the same year the 20th century began.

 

  CLS #29

  Ellen Naomi Cohen

  1941: Born in Baltimore.

  1957: Started going by the sobriquet Cass in high school

  1965: After seeing the Hell’s Angels on a talk show, added a Mama to it.

  1968: Got hit in the head with a pipe, which added 3 notes to her vocal range.

  1970: Sang in Vegas for $40,000 a week.

  1971: Married a Bavarian Baron for a few months.

  1974: In a London apartment, after performing for two sold-out crowds at The Palladium, she died in her sleep.

  CLS #17

  The inventor of Life Savers,

  Hart Crane’s dad,

  sold the rights to the patent

  right before they became the next big thing.

  Although raised on a steady diet of Christian Science by his mom,

  Hart turned out to be gay,

  and he soon fell in love with a Danish merchant mariner.

  Always bickering, his parents finally divorced when he was 18.

  His big poem about the Brooklyn Bridge

  was published when he was 31.

  Nobody liked it, and he stayed drunk most of the time after that.

  A few months before turning 33,

  he jumped from a steamship into the Gulf of Mexico,

  after getting beat up for picking up on a man,

  screaming as he leapt, “Goodbye everybody!”

  His body was never found.

 

  CLS #14

 

  With his real father dead, a bit of an oedipal urge for his mom, and a militant martinet for a stepfather, Charles Baudelaire fled to the Paris brothels, caught syphilis and gonorrhea, and went about reciting his poems and getting into fights in the taverns, then upon turning 21 he inherited a fortune and some land, but it only lasted him a couple of years, and he was soon eating on credit and promptly tried to kill himself, but was unsuccessful, so kept having to borrow money from his mom, and at 36, the same year his stepfather died, he published his first book of poems, but a few years later, after his publisher went bankrupt, Charles, who was doing a lot of laudanum, hitting the opium pipe pretty hard, and drinking just about everyone under the table, had a stroke that pretty much left him paralyzed for the last two years of his life.

  CLS #10

  Baruch Spinoza’s mother died when he was six,

  and a little later his dad was killed in a war.

  The Jews kicked him out of the fold when he was 24.

  After that,

  he started calling himself Benedictus.

  He moved around some,

  and made eyeglass lenses for a living.

  At 44 he died from a lung disease

  brought on by breathing in glass dust,

  never having married,

  nor had and kids;

  and having published only two books—

  one anonymously—

  which nobody at the time

  liked very much.

  CLS #5

  Five

  words

  are

  enough,

  Hemingway.

  CLS #20

  Carrie Nation was a bulldog running along at the feet of Jesus.

  Her mom thought herself to be Queen Victoria from time to time.

  The first man she married was a drunk, and died from it.

  The 2nd one lent her that famous surname.

  God spoke to her one morning,

  telling her to smash up a saloon

  and break all the bottles with rocks.

  Later, she used a hatchet to do the job,

  while singing hymns.

  She called it “hatchetation.”

  When she died they threw her body in an unmarked grave.

  Nine years later prohibition went into effect.

 

  CLS #22

  When he was a kid

  Marcel Proust had asthma.

  He spent a lot of time at his great-uncle’s house.

  The army got him for a year,

  and then he moved back in with his mom.

  He never got a job.

  Later on his mother died.

  He spent the last three years of his life in a cork-lined room

  writing a book

  about his memories.

  CLS #11

  Leo Czolgosz was bullied as a kid.

  In 1901 he asked Emma Goldman for some reading recommendations,

  in Cleveland,

  where he’d voted Republican the year before.

  The anarchists there abhorred him and thought him a spy.

  With a .32 revolver and a photo of Bresci in his pocket

  he moved to Buffalo.

  William McKinley tried to shake his hand,

  But Leo refused,

  shooting Old Major in the gut twice instead.

  The crowd almost killed him before the cops showed up

  To drag him away.

  They electrocuted him 53 days later

  and dumped sulfuric acid in his coffin.

  His last words were,

  “I am sorry I could not see my father.”

 

  CLS #43

  Never one to skirt his duty to God or to country

  Asa Dunbar started the Great Butter Rebellion in 1766

  by leaping on a chair in the Harvard dining hall

  and screaming,

  “Behold, our butter stinketh!— give us therefore butter that stinketh not!”

  51 years later his grandson

  Henry David Thoreau

  was born.

  CLS #12

  At 21, Nellie Bly spent 10 days in a madhouse

  after faking insanity for a story.

  Four years later

  she wended her way around the world

  in less than 80 days.

  When she was 32


  she got hitched to a 72-year-old millionaire.

  Finally,

  in her 52nd year,

  she died of pneumonia.