Whiskey Rite, The Imprisoned Painting and The United Satanic The Apache Front Goes to War (From Obscurity to Infamy)
“feeding time had really begun, bourgeois appetites especially whetted by Johnson’s in-your-face affiliation with San Francisco Anton LaVey Church of Satan. Now though some might blast it as adolescent, Johnson embraces the tenets of a philosophic viewpoint best described as post- Neitzschean self-empowerment, hardly the stuff of human sacrifice and goat -fucking. His sarcastic merging of Satanic church ritual with the disappearing religion of his ancestors is best summed up by his wry explanation that ‘We were called devils by the white man for so long, I figured it was time somebody accepted the mantle.’
Among the print journalists, the only one not to natter and bleat over Johnson’s views was the Chronicle’s religion writer , Don Lattin, whose only sour note came at the very end of the article, when he wrote that ‘ representatives of the Mescalero Apache tribe in New Mexico said they never heard of Leyba or the ‘Apache Whiskey Rite.’
An oddly placed sniff, after Lattin only a few paragraphs earlier had correctly referred to Johnson’s ‘self-styled ritual.’ And as for whether the Mescalero have heard of Johnson, perhaps some would rather forget, but they certainly have: just two months ago, the controversy over an exhibit of his politically-themed paintings made the front page of the Albuquerque papers when the mayor demanded that barriers be constructed to shield the faint of heart from Johnson’s disturbing Canvases”
- David Aaron Clark, Spectator Magazine (put at end-- Sex Beat, Spectator Vol. 38, NO.10 Issue 973 May 23-29,1997)
“You have gone to far”, the interviewer says to Salvador Dali. He responds, “But that is the only place I have ever wanted to go”
One should always be careful what one wishes for. You must be very, very specific because often you will get it, but not the way you had intended. Want is a spell, a ritual working that always has repercussions. Sometimes we are not who we want to be, who other people think we are or even who we think we are. My high ideals became faint. My standards were low and lowering. Often real life is stranger than fiction. I never had to create a mythology or fiction about my life like Dali, my life was fucken crazy, even when it was boring it was weird. I don’t know how to get to where I feel I should be or could be. I can hear Ginsberg’s “Howl” in my head, “I have seen the greatest minds of my time destroyed by........” themselves of course and obscurity and starvation. What about the worst artists? Am I a victim of over encouragement? I know I’m a good artist and I have sold work for good money, but why am I starving now? Only good artists starve, they say. But that is not always true in our bullshit world. There are really good and bad artists that will go to the grave thinking they will be discovered after their death. Picasso destroyed that myth; one has to accept that if it doesn’t happen while your alive, it won’t ever happen. It won’t happen in a hundred years or a thousand and why should you care anyway if you’re dead? If it doesn’t happen in your lifetime forget it. The days of the tragic and dead art heroes are long gone. People want the artist alive and suffering well past a hundred years.
I was suffering and starving and illustration assignments were few and far away. I hadn’t sold a painting in six months. Once again I was forced to take Dave’s thrown change off the living room floor to buy that ninety-nine cent Whopper. How many great artists are being kept alive by Burger King? Will I one day, after my fabulous career has faded, do some sickening ad for the new and improved twenty dollar and ninety -nine cent Whopper? Will the world ever know I am, or was a great or good artist? I know I am a good artist but is great even an option? If it is, is it relevant in the dumb and dumber consumer American culture? I am a damn good painter in a “dumb good” country. No one will notice I have ever existed, art is pointless and I am fooling myself. I need to give it up and get another day job. I refuse to watch more television to understand my fellow man. I know what I want. I want recognition and I want fame. I could hear, in my head, that stupid narrator from the T.V. show “Fame” say, “You want fame well fame costs, and now is where you start paying.” Hadn’t I paid enough dues? Hell I’d even settle for infamy at this point. I’d even settle for just getting laid.
It seemed it was just another un-fucked Saturday night at fifteenth and Natoma in the Mission in San Fran fucking cisco. It was nineteen ninety- six and no hope. I was feeling loveless again. I could feel my worst post Waco “Clinton” moment about to unfold. I wished that the ATF would kick in my door and haul me off, what a career move that would be.
There was no one to fuck, or talk to but myself. Well there was the cracked out homeless lady in the alley. She flashes me her purple and gray pussy whenever I take a look out the bars of my kitchen window on any night. Why don’t I accept the trickster’s offer? My roommate is out fucking some hot barely eighteen year-old stripper or dominatrix or prostitute, in some sex club and my jealousy is now permanent rage. It is now war, that fat son of a bitch gets all the chicks. Was it Yvette again or Chantrel? The women all want Dave to immortalize them in his spectator column? A column by the infamous David Aaron Clark was not only brutally honest, Hemingway and Henry Miller today- good journalism and real, but it helped the girl of the moment sell her goods, so they always put out for Dave. Dave wrote some of the best journalism and social critique I have ever read in my life for the sex paper the Spectator that wanted to be a step above New York City’s Screw magazine.
“You can flatter the ladies with an immortally sexy painting that appeals to their ego, but I appeal to their pocket book.”
This is what Dave always said when I asked him how he does it.
“Fuck you Dave, you can fuck all the pretty girls all the fucken time but it ain’t love and it ain’t art you bastard!”
I yelled out loud through the kitchen window to nobody on the street.
“I don’t care if you can’t hear me Dave, you can feel it.”
It’s been a year since I left New York City and I still can’t score. Why do I place my self worth on whether or not I have a girlfriend or money? Almost every night at the Porn Palace some drop dead gorgeous woman would appear out of the shit abyss of this San Francisco ghetto. When you walked into the front room off of Fifteenth Street the front room was all Gothed out with candelabras. Dave reviewed pornographic movies for magazines so most of the walls were covered from the floor to the ceiling with porno videocassette tapes. The explicit human animal action charged me every time I was in the room especially when Dave was fast-forwarding threw the tapes to write the review. I would jerk off to the movies when Dave went off to work at the Spectator office in Emeryville. The whole hallway was plastered with all sorts of baroque SM performance or documented sexual exploration. I remember thinking, “man what a guy has to do to get a women in this city. It was a lot easier in art school.” I had wished I had took up the offer from Dave’s X girlfriend Joanna to join her and Dave and Bridget in bed. Bridget was a very tall transsexual blonde who used to be the vampire poet Danielle Willis’s partner. I had not explored my bisexuality and had not yet acquired my obsession with transsexuals. I just wanted some god damn pussy and I didn’t want to fuck the whole sideshow to get some. Sometimes the beautiful and tragic father young ladies were sent to me in my room to see the angry so called “genius” painter’s art in the back room. I was like the retarded brother in the basement. Dave was sincere about it and he truly believed in my art but it didn’t change my wounded self-esteem. I was a freak of the freaks and a freak show in freak show San Francisco. Why do these women mock me? My stomach was flat my tits were firm American Apache tits and my dick was hard. I remember more than one lady talking to Dave in the kitchen, “what’s he doing in there? Doesn’t he ever go to the Power Exchange or Bondage a Go-Go? Is he gay?” Some of the girls felt sorry for me, but not sorry enough to go out with me, or fuck me; At least not on my budget.
That night there was no way out but through the bottle. I’d been saving the Jack Daniel’s for my most brutally honest night of self-loathing; a moment of supreme outrage, a moment of self-inflicted truth. But it started out like a sequel to my three month introspective affair with J.D. that ended like a very fucked up Tom Waits music video. Me singing along, drunk off my ass, spitting at myself in the mirror heartbroken over Miran. Was I over Miran? It had been over a fucking year already. I am so tragically American it is killing me. Poor me, they’ll probably call it the AMERICAN CONDITION.
“Fuck you Dave! Fuck you Miran!” I needed a theme song for my night of pathetically sad aloneness and it wasn't gonna be anything by Tom Waits. Billy Joel’s song “Captain Jack” was my choice. It is a song of oppression from the nineteen seventy -two album “Piano Man.” The album made 3 million but because of a fucked contract the man owed eight thousand after his tour and probably slept in a laundry matt and ate out of a dumpster for awhile, it was pre- “ninety -nine cent whopper”. This song helped me feel post modern ironic, more real than Warhol, insignificant, more hopeless than Van Gogh, tragically human and slightly real, but alive.
“Saturday night and your still hangin around
Your tired of livin in your one horse town
You’d like to find a little hole in the ground
For awhile............. emmheemmmm
So you go to the village in your tie dye jeans
And you stare at the junkies and the closet queens
It’s like some pornographic magazine
And you smile............ emmheemmmm
But Captain Jack will get you high tonight
And take you to your special island
Captain Jack will get you by tonight
Just a little push and you’ll be smilin
La da da, Oh yeah,yeah”
I felt horny and took off all my clothes. I reached in my tool box for my hammer and shoved its wooden handle in my ass. It felt good, it felt real. The pain and pleasure gave me life.
“Oh shit I should have given myself an enema first” I spoke out loud.
Another swig goes down and I’m on my knees and naked. I push down, squatting as I sat my weight on the hammer. I get a hard on and my ass loosens up. Another swig or two and I unintentionally put all my weight on the hammer in my ass. Good thing I’m excited and loose or it would have been colostomy bag time. I feel so fucken pathetically great I reach out to turn up the volume and I fall back, knees up, hands in the air and the hammer handle slips all the way up my butt to the cold steel claw on my ball sac. I look down and see I am right in the center of the black pentagram that I had painted on the hard wood floor and for a second this seemed insane. I feel comical, but I also feel really good.
“Hammer in the ass on a pentagram! I am a living satire of a Hammer horror movie and this is the American Dream that I was promised!” I screech out loud my proclamation in a tone of sarcasm. It’s 3 A.M. I am swallowing more of the vile liquid. No one is going to call the cops, nobody is going to yell out their window, no one is going to fuck with me and no one is going to fuck me- but me. It is Saturday night and I am a sorry ass alone loser.
I’ve lost count of how many swallows made me warm but my whole body was warm. Drunk and alone, angry and disillusioned, I carried on. Out of nowhere I think of my father, Crazy Bennie. This destroys all my wonderful auto-eroticism. The Gestalt parent ego state enters my head, but I beat him to the chase.
“Fuck you dad, I can beat this. You are the loser and I am the winner! I am the proud recipient of your disease and I shall assimilate and re-contextualize this idiotic addiction of yours! I shall over come it. For you it is an addiction, but for me it is an obsession. My conquest of alcohol! I am not an alcoholic, I chose to do this. I would do this sober. I am not just like you; I am not out of control. I am not an alcoholic I am an alcoholist, I have been studying your alcohology for years and now I am a master!”
I always figured I could beat him at the drunkard’s game with originality. Isn’t that the one last thing us Americans are good at-originality? After all, artists were suppose to be creative drunks, mechanics fixed cars.
“Hey mechanic alcoholic, I bet you never had a hammer in your ass!”
I could hear Crazy Bennie’s scathing indictment,
“See son you are an alcoholic just like me, I told you so.”
And I thought, “yeah dad, so what now? Do you want me to take it to the next level? Should I take it higher or lower?”
Hearing my fathers voice in my head and Billy Joel’s music where too much all at once. My hand went for the hammer, but before I could grab it I shat it out. I picked up the slimy tool and smashed my CD boom box. The fragments of plastic and electronics went everywhere. Miran got me that boom box and I hated her for many things but at that moment I hated her because she convinced me to abandon my Billy Joel cassettes when we moved to New York because she felt his music was too conventional and was too much of a reminder to me of my youth and I had to move passed it. ”Fuck you Miran and fuck your lame ass stereo!” The hammer slipped out of my hand the third hit as it was wet and slippery, it hit my drawing table. I had to have another swallow of the nasty defiance. I could still hear Billy Joel’s music and lyrics, but not from the stereo. The stereo was dead but the music played on. The sounds emanated from my head.
“But still you’re aching for all the things that you have not got, what went wrong?”
Here I was naked covered in shit and rolling around in little pieces of plastic and electronic parts cutting my skin. It was too strange to ever be believed and too unreal to be cliché alcoholic behavior.
I began to speak out load again to my father.
“Dad some clichés are true, sometimes. You have been my hero most of my life, but sometimes you weren’t even an anti-hero, you were a drunken fucking Indian cliché’. Some Apache’s are tolerable on rum but give them whiskey and they go on the warpath. Fuck those stupid old westerns, those racist movies. Fuck Charlton Hesston and his shoe polished Indian wanna be face. From my cold dead ass! Fuck those dumb Hollywood movies that made no sense to me. Fuck them when their racist ideology became real. Why did you have to prove those assholes right? Remember all those years of your so-called ‘drunken observations’ as you call them? Some were observations and some were out and out attacks on any and everyone. I didn’t mind the crazy nights when you were fueled by Captain Jack rum; you where philosophical and tolerable, though sometimes you slurred and made no sense at all. It was comical and sometimes endearing. You’d tell me you love me ten thousand times. I know you don’t remember it, but I do. I wasn’t drunk. In fact I didn’t even really start drinking till I was twenty-two and living in another state. I remember the unfortunate nights of you on the warpath after drinking whiskey. I tried to laugh it off and imagine you on a horse with a Winchester rifle going to kill the primitive savage white men. I am not exaggerating you where a son of a bitch, raging at any and all. Worst of all you had no political target, no real enemy but yourself and everyone. Do you remember taking your loaded thirty -eight Smith and Wesson revolver out and pointing it at people? You never pointed at me. One time I thought you were going to. That time you swore that the U.S. Post office was threatening you because of my anti-government statements written on the outside of the envelopes I had sent you. I asked you to show me and you showed me a black envelope that was covered in clear tape that I had melted. Nothing was written on the envelope but our addresses and names, O.K. the heading on the return label said “TERRORIZATION ORGANIZATION.” That didn’t mean the feds were gonna come shoot you, why did you make me feel you wanted to shoot me? I don’t want to shoot you but I do have a mother-fucking drunken observation for you dear ole dad. I want to go back in time and take that fucking whiskey bottle and shove it up your ass. In and out till you feel the unnecessary pain I felt!!!!!!!!!!
“You son of a bitch, FUCK YOU!”
My hostility vanished and I forgot about my father. I don’t remember consciously making the decision to shove the Jack Daniel’s bottle in my rectum, but it happened. Call it transference. It felt like fire and the pain became pleasure. I went with it and fucked myself hard while on my back with my legs and ass in the air. Head down, bottle down and my butt up! It was a liquid acid dildo. I didn’t care if it killed me because it made me feel alive. My dick got extremely hard and I stroked it. I pulled the glass out of my butt and drank from the tainted bottle. It was cloudy and had flakes of brown gold and white tissue. A thick substance around the mouth of the bottle distorted the shape of the glass in my mouth. I chewed it off the bottle. It was clay like and smooth, slightly bitter paste, but not as bad as it smells. Shit is actually quite tasteless. A chunk of excretion stayed in my mouth as I savored the experience. The words of Billy Joel blasted at full volume; I cannot turn it up any louder. Then my discovery dissolved as the fiery taste changed. Jack Daniel’s actually tasted better with a shit chaser. I remember thinking,
“This tastes like shit, but tastes better with shit.” What a drunken observation. I put it back in my ass and got on my back and fucked my self harder and faster, and then I took another swill. Then I put it back in my burning ass spilling a bit in the process. I remember thinking the trickster Coyote would call this “backwards drinking.” Had any drunken Indian ever tried this and been fucked by their own alcohol? Perhaps they did but their Judeo-Christian shame would have convinced them to suppress the truth, or if he/she did they probably died from alcohol poisoning. Then I thought that if Coyote did this, why would he do this? My mind went back to the lame Hollywood westerns. I thought what did the white man do when someone was a drunken asshole? Well, they made the drunk walk through the town square naked and sober, except for a barrel around his body. It was a humiliation ritual that is what it was, stronger than jail time. What did the Apache’s do to their drunks? What would the Apache’s do, W.W.A.D.? I lay on my back in all the filth like a dog with the fifth still in my butt. Well us Apache’s, hell we have always been hardcore, what did they do a hundred years ago? What was the tradition I never read about? Many traditions are lost because they are forgotten and were never written down. It was the “APACHE WHISKEY RITE” the Apaches would fuck the drunk with his own goddamn bottle that is what they would do because they were no Jesus-freaking puritans. They fought firewater with firewater. With a smile and a bit of glee I pulled the bottle out of my ass knowing all to well that I was a sexual genius. I stared at it as if it was an oracle and could answer me and asked,
“What the hell are you doing to me Jack?”
Of course, I had to laugh. Then I laughed louder as I looked closer at the label and saw that Jack Daniel’s is also known as Old Number Seven Brand. We’ll I thought of what the elders call the seven generations. One is suppose to always think of the seven generations past and the seven generations to come. Alcohol is a seven generation curse. Like Small Pocks it was a weapon of war and now in many ways it is a tool of oppression, even self-oppression. No body would ever believe the story of the “APACHE WHISKEY RITE” I would have to show them. Then I thought what if my Band U.S.A.F. played our song “APACHE?” That goes, “when you take the Devil in your mouth, your doomed” a sampling from another bad western, “deep inside that bottle of whiskey, waitin for you. To be taken into your mouth, to be taken down to your guts, to do the Devil’s work.”
I could see myself in front of an audience at a show saying,
“I’d like to talk about a tradition that goes back seven generations. My grandfather is full blooded Apache. Seven generations before me there has been this old Apache Rite. You won’t read about this in any book. It is too much for the tourists. It’s called Old Number Seven, the APACHE WHISKEY RITE. It isn’t a pleasant rite it fucked up my people. Alcohol fucked up my father, his father, seven generations back. Well if alcohol is gonna fuck me it’s gonna fuck me in the ass!”
I remember thinking, “Wow, how is that for a drunken observation dad? Hey, Coyote works in mysterious ways”
I was still coherent enough to map out the mechanics of how this would manifest in real time but to drunk to draw it. I had seen enough strap-on belts around the house to be able to design a working strap on from a tool belt. Tomorrow I’d make a trip to the hardware store and call Mistress Taira to see if she could and would do this to me.
I was so gleeful and high and could not stop yelling out at the top of my lungs “APACHE WHISKEY RITE!” “APACHE WHISKEY RITE!” “APACHE WHISKEY RITE!” My ritual working needed a final offering to be completed. I took the rest of that fifth and poured it into my enema bag, put the hose on then put the plastic tip in my rectum and squeezed the rest in. It fucken burned and I held it in. It burned like someone shoved a godamn machete in my ass and twisted it. I held it in like a real man. I could no longer hold on I grabbed the empty bottle and shoved it in my hole and let loose, all the liquid returned to its bottle. Hardly any fecal material was visible, just pieces of tissue. It seemed to have thickened as if corn starch had been added to the cocktail but it was my rectal tissue that made it thicker. I remember thinking “oh that is my intestine and rectum, liquefied”. In an act of defiant auto- cannibalism I downed it all, spilling part of it while gasping and coughing but still managed to get it down. I then threw the bottle against the wall. I yelled out “Punk Rock!” I grabbed my black leather trench coat wrapped up, put on my boots and grabbed the car keys. I drove to Ocean beach. It was about 4:35 am. I parked, got out of my Honda Civic two door and walked right into and through a group of sweater wearing yuppies. They said nothing. I walked to the ocean, opened my trench coat and grabbed my dick and stroked it back and forth till I came into the ocean. My boots were wet but I didn’t care, the working was finished. My sexual energy was put into the spell. I remember thinking about LaVey’s, Satanic Bible after a spell you say, “So it has been written, so it shall be done.” I walked back towards my car, with my coat open and my penis semi erect and dripping. I boldly walked through the yuppie crowd again. One of them yelled at me “fucken fetishist!” I didn’t look back, but I smiled and got in my car. I went home, didn’t bother to shower. I started laughing myself to sleep............ “Thinking, fuck next time I won’t drink the whiskey at all, that way I can pass the breathalyzer if I get pulled over.”
I passed out in all my nasty glory, covered in shit, in semen, ocean water, sand and this silly feeling that my life would never be the same. The world turned upside down never to return just like a crazy Coyote story. I felt like I discovered a new planet or a new color or something. I was the last American original. Whatever the drunken or sober reality I had much more fun than I would have had if I had went on a date with some hipster chick. Did that make me an artasexual? Sleep came instantly. I slept for almost nine minutes. Truly the wicked never rest as my phone rang and rang. It was five thirty in the fucking morning, the most un-Satanic hour. My machine picked up and it was M Stevens U.S.A.F.’s Minister of technology. He was obviously drunk as hell. “Reeeevvvererrrrenndddddd, Heyyyya Reverend. You know what? You know your rant’ M.A.I.M. when you say. “This is my declaration of war? M.A.I.M. - My American Indian Movement is my war- personal, symbolic, literal, metaphorical, theoretical, ideological, sociopolitical and artistically Satanical?” Well you know what? You know what rrrevurerrund! SATANICAL IS NOT A FUCKEN WORD! SATANICAL IS NOT A WORD! Fuck your non words! I may be drunk off my ass but I know your goddamn rant. I have it memorized. The same one you can’t remember, the one you have to read at every show because you can’t memorize! I am drunk and I know your material and I know Satanical is not a word”.
I got up and out of bed and instinctively grabbed the hammer in the dark before M could finish saying “SAAATANNIICAAA...........” Cssssshhhhhhh the answering machine exploded into hundreds of pieces of plastic. I then threw the hammer across the room. Then I could hear nothing but dead silence and was very happy and content. Finally I will get some sleep. Then I could hear the front door open and a female voice giggling and I hear Dave’s voice but can’t hear what he said. I imagine them fucking. I pass out.
The next day I felt the self inflicted alcohol after math of pain. My head was hurting, my thighs, my eyes, my stomach, my ass was hurting. It was bleeding and felt like it was on fire. It was a small price to pay for true art. It was an auto sacrifice. A contemporary version of various blood sacrifices of my ancestors and other natives through out the world. I knew I was doomed to be misunderstood but that didn’t matter because I had to say what I had to say the way I felt it needed to be said. I was glad to be alive and very happy I wasn’t a cabinet maker like so many American artists. Those monkeys who did what they were told in art school then did what they were told by society. Don’t get me wrong the contrived shit they created was often times done very well but those so called artists were mere cabinet makers and nothing more and nothing less. They did not have the balls and vision I had. I knew they’d hate me for this just as I hated them.
The room looked like some electronic geek’s rape fantasy or a forensic scientist’s worst nightmare. Every electronic device in my room was smashed, blood and excrement everywhere. Even my digital clock was smashed though I couldn’t remember at that moment how or why. Had I blacked out? If what I remembered was true then the blacked out parts that I couldn’t remember could possibly be far worse. I yelled out at the top of my lungs “APACHE WHISKEY RITE!” knowing damn well Dave was still asleep at 2:00 pm. He didn’t wake up, but whoever stayed the night ran out the door as I could hear the steel bar door slam. Were they running out of the house out of regret for the night with Dave or out of fear of having to confront the reclusive and loud sexually frustrated insane artist in the back room? I ran to the bathroom to take first piss before Dave woke up. I stepped into a big pool of piss in front of the toilet; Dave’s existentialist angst pool. I can hear in my head his last rant at me that was aimed at one of his nightly ladies that asked why? His justification of why he and I don’t do our dishes (though I always washed the dishes I used.) “Doing the dishes is a filthy and disgusting act that is far more bourgeois and disgusting than any dirty dishes could ever be.”
I had some coffee and decided to make a few art business phone calls to try and raise a few bucks so I could buy some new art supplies and perhaps some food. Then I called my HOT new dominatrix friend Mistress Taira; Celine. She was a very beautiful Asian American woman in her early twenties born and bread in Hawaii. I thought of her milk chocolate skin and small tight firm perky pierced tits. She said she was part Chinese and not part Pilipino but I didn’t believe her. She was the hottest woman I had ever seen up to that point. She was a masochists dream, because she was a true sadist. She graduated from CCAC art school in photography, one of the art schools I went to. She was very much into working with me ever since the SOMAR show as she had not done any art for quite awhile and was fascinated by my sexualized political performance art and my content filled masochistic rituals.
“Hello Taira, it is Steven Leyba How are you? I have a great Idea for our next performance.”
“Oh really what do you have in mind”
“The Apache Whiskey Rite”
“What’s that?” she said
“It is an alcohol protest performance piece”
“What?”
“ It is a humiliation ritual. I speak of how alcohol has been forced on us Native Americans for generations; How it has fucked up my family for seven generations and well, if alcohol is going to fuck me, it’s gonna fuck me in the ass!”
“Ha, what the fuck?” she asks
“I have my rant while I am holding a fifth of Jack Daniels and I hand you the bottle and you put it in a strap-on and open the lid and fuck me with it”
“Wow, Steve you are fucking brilliant! What a fucked up but ingenious statement. I would love to fuck you up the ass with a bottle of Jack Daniel’s! You fucking ROCK! It’s punk rock! It’s avante garde and it is real and brutal.”
“Well Taira I don’t know where I could do this without getting arrested. I will figure something out. I need to have you come over to the studio and fuck me with a bottle of booze to figure out how to do this right.”
“I’d love to. When do you want to do it? I’ll come over right now if you want.”
“I need to make the strap-on belt today, how about tomorrow afternoon at three o clock?”
“Leyba I wouldn’t miss it for the world. I would love to fuck you up your ass with JD!”
“Thank you Taira, I’ll see your sexy ass fucking mine tomorrow”
“Right on”, she said as she hung up. I remember thinking to my self why can’t I be like other men? Why can’t I get a girl the old fashion way with flowers or something? Why must seductions always be flamboyant artistic creations? I am mixing art with lust for female pursuit. I am blurring all lines of life, art and all rules. She is going to fuck me before I fuck her. We are doing art but I want her perhaps it’s a bad idea to have her fuck me before I fuck her. I blocked the thoughts of her out. She is just a helpful friend and I better keep it that way. If she had found me attracted we would have had sex by now. I thought of the higher order of art and arts superiority to mere conventional courting and coupling and fucking. Who was I kidding I wanted to fuck her. I had to put the art above all else- above the need of a girlfriend or sex or even food. The message I had to make was down right religious to me. I went to the hardware store, got the tool belt, and went to the leather store to get some western style pieces of leather. I scored because they had cowboy style belt buckles with fancy tooled leather. The good traits I inherited from Crazy Bennie must have kicked in because I returned home with all the right hardware and instinctively new how to make this mechanical fucking device. I had one carpenter’s belt, one cowboy belt buckle with a tooled leather belt, leather scraps, a 3 inch solid steal ring, small nuts and bolts, rivets that screwed together, a bottle of black leather dye, some K.Y. Jelly and a brand new bottle of Jack Daniel’s. All of these things are tax deductible art supplies. I then took the leather and cut the belts up and folded a u shaped inch thick cup to hold the bottom of the whiskey bottle and bolted it to the front center of the carpenter’s belt. I cut three pieces of the cowboy belt and riveted the ends to the cup, and then I took the other ends and folded them over the steal ring at the exact length to hold the bottle in and I riveted the ends. I took the cowboy buckle that still had leather on it and put it by the forth side of the bottle so it would buckle and unbuckle for easy access to the glass phallus. I dyed the apparatus black and left it to dry, I was sexually charged by this. I couldn’t believe how high I was from my own crazy brilliance. I was so turned on and hot and horny from this functioning fetish object I had a hard on. I jerked off onto the sculpture. Completely exhausted but insanely ecstatic I fell onto my mattress on the floor. I passed out.
When I woke up it was eleven or twelve at night. I could hear Dave moving around in the kitchen. I took the bottle and belt and went into the kitchen. I slammed the evil object down on the kitchen table where Dave was eating his Captain Crunch serial. He didn’t flinch. He had his sunglasses on and did not give any indication he even knew I was there. Then he slowly removed the glasses and without moving much he looked at the object and then at me and said, “ You better get it patented. So when are you going to fuck Mistress Taira with that?”
“I wish”
“Oh so she’s going to fuck you with it?” he said disappointedly.
I explained to him the idea and my reasons behind the madness; the politics, the history, the tragedy, the metaphor and the speech. He said, “Crazy Indian you will do anything to justify your own self genocide and of course you have to sexualize it you masochist. You are quite the modern Da Vinci”
“Thank you Dave” He was both joking and series and I knew I could take some compliments.
“You better fuck her first before she fucks you or you won’t fuck her”
“Art is more important Dave”
“Maybe but why not have both”
“I hope so”
“When is Celine coming over to rape you?”
“Tomorrow at three in the afternoon”
“I have to be at the Spectator. I won’t be around to give first aid or call an ambulance but I will let you borrow my video camera so the police can have the evidence of your homicide.”
“Thanks Dave you’re a thoughtful friend. I have to go paint I will video tape the ritual so then you can see the atrocity for yourself.”
“Good, the camera is in the front room. I will see you tomorrow night.”
“Goodnight”
I wondered if he was a bit jealous because maybe he wanted to perform such a brutal act on me. What would it mean to people if a man sodomized me with the strap-on whiskey bottle and not a drop dead gorgeous mistress? If that happened I’d never get a girlfriend and everyone will think I am gay. Certainly it would be more brutal but it wouldn’t have the hetero sex appeal needed to hold the attention of your average over saturated, over stimulated jaded San Franciscan. Certainly it would be seen as an affront to the gay community if Dave fucked me with the bottle. I imagined fucking his huge stinking ass with the liquid acidy dildo. Oh what wonderful colors that would drip from his tortured artist’s ass. I wonder if I could do such a thing. I probably shouldn’t have sex with him since he is my roommate. I got all my paints out to work in the “Apache Means Enemy” book which was almost finished. I opened it to the freshly collaged virgin pages of local performance artist and cyber punkette goddess Simone Third Arm. I forgot about Dave and sodomy and whiskey and Mistress Taira for a few minutes while I painted some bright yellows over Simone’s face. It was a wonderful composition with her all bald in front of my headdress. There were dried flowers embedded in the painting that became translucent and ghostly from the clear acrylic gel medium that incased it. This technique gave the painting a strange sci-fi feel that she is going to love. I imagined her completely naked. I imagined what it would be like just to photograph her in the nude, to get a close up image of her cunt and her asshole. What would it be like just to kiss her or hold her hand? What was wrong with me? Why did she refuse to pose nude for me even though she had posed nude for Charles Gatewood and for the spectator? After all she was also a stripper. While I was engaged in self-pity it seems the painting got painted. It was almost done. I took the final pure white highlight on my. The flattened flowers embedded in the painting around her with watermarks of coffee, coke and blood from a tiny cut on my hand sucked out with a snake bite kit suction cup. It seemed pathetic after Dave’s ex girlfriend Mistress Shane had heard I was using blood in my paintings and wanted to cut me up with a scalpel. I had no idea where the pain would take me. I agreed to do it because I felt many people in the SM scene made a big fucking deal about being cut up. It took me places that my art did but calmed me, even grounded me. I couldn’t quite explain it to people but the important people in my life like Dave understood. Not everybody in Dave’s circle of friends understood why I politicized the ritual cuttings. Gatewood agreed to video and photograph my Halloween show. I can’t wait to see people’s faces when they see the Whiskey Rite.
Mistress Taira came over in the shortest of skirts. HOT AS FUCK. Tiny perfectly pointed pierced nipples probably hard because she was literally going to fuck the shit out of me. I fell in lust with her at the Somar pre-Burning Man performance event and she along with a few other friends hacked me up beyond belief then I was hoisted up above hundreds of people. She had blood lust and I fed her. I put both of my hands in her shirt and grabbed and twisted both of her nipples and I stuck my tongue down her throat. This was the first time I had ever been so bold with her or any woman for that matter. I was about to stick my right hand inside her and she twisted herself around and out of my grasp. She pulled away from me and the look on my face must have been defeat.
She said, “When I first met you all I knew about you was that you were this badass asshole, cunt and dick Satanist painter turned performance artist. I thought it was pretty hot that you turned out to be the truest masochist and fuck you artist. But I was a bit turned off that you were so nice. I wanted to call you an asshole for being such a nice guy. You are a contradiction Leyba. Now let me fuck you with the whiskey bottle”
What could I say I had never been called an asshole for not being an asshole before?
“O.K. lets go test the boundaries of reality and my body” This was the first time I realized that people, even the people I know and call friends had another view of me than I did. I didn’t know at the time but in less than a year hundreds and even thousands of people all over the world were going to have things to say about me that were not true, or were they? I was used to getting fan letters for my illustrations in national magazines like when I got this letter from a gentleman named John who asked me “Is that an asshole to the left of Christ?” about my first national controversial work of art that I painted for the cover of the Advocate’s “Is God Gay?” issue. I was delighted and wrote him back immediately, “No that is a vagina to the left of Christ, but to the right of Christ are several assholes.”
I knew how the U.S. Government could misinterpret my art because of the various F.B.I. investigations into my visual art. I did not expect agents from a corrupt organization to see me as a social critic, true artist or a mirror of culture. Maybe they realized early on, before I even realized that I had that perhaps I could have a wide influence on people. I was going to be a lifetime of unpredictable, uncontrollable trouble. I did expect people and other artists to respect an artist for their vision, conviction, execution, skill and conveyance. The only artists I felt had the balls and conviction who were saying ANYTHING AT ALL about the control systems of the all pervasive culture and what to do to keep your soul were Lydia Lunch, H.R.Giger, Anton LaVey and William S, Burroughs but somehow there wasn’t going to be anyone up to bat after them unless someone fought to create a platform or at least a new option. I realized I had no more heroes of painting out there in the world. No one was doing the new work I could get passionate about. No painter seemed genuine and truth in painting in art and life seemed of the past. Something the artists of today avoided like the plague. Fashion and propaganda were crowned king and even the most underground artist wanted that local acceptance. And if you want acceptance you got to wear the right outfits and fuck the right folks, right? Is this what they meant in artschool when they said, “Art for art’s sake” what CIA agent wrote that propaganda slogan? Will Taylor was write when he said that “AIDS killed the creative class” What was left was the PUSSY-ARTIST class. So when the whites came here it was progress and innovation and it was the place to be to create new possibilities for the future but that all ended with the I want to be famous and do nothing generation. But the case for volatile art could still be made but nobody seemed to be doing it. Whatever the reasons they taught me that art had no influence and no one cared about art, that it was harmless was not entirely true never before in history have artist had such a platform and they are wasting it. The only difference is now we have more systems of control and distractions. People, other artists and institutions have so much influence on artists and the art creation. The art critics are no longer critics but are art dictators. And the dictators of art critics are money people who decide what art is important to the market. And the modern artist being a weakling bottom feeder follows the agenda of the moment. If we went back in time to the days of the old masters and showed them what we consider great art they would most likely start murdering some of these contemporary bullshit artists. There were way to many middlemen putting pressure on artists to be something they were not or to create something for the media machine. Despite there being lots of art in the world almost all of it was just product and propaganda. Never before has it been so easy to control so many artists. The doors of possibility were closing in on my generation and I could feel it. I was going to get my chance to bat one way or another and I was going to smash any and all bullshit I felt that was in the way of truth as I saw it. Only I had not quite learned yet that truth preferred over the lie. The lie was the only salable truth. Most artists were inept rebels creating propaganda for the status quo or bottom feeders pre-selling out for free on speculation that their compliance would somehow be rewarded with fame and fortune. It wouldn’t be so bad if artists that thought they were truly innovative and critical realized they were just propagandists. If they would just realize that they were the tools of their corporate masters, but not many manufactured rebel artists were getting rich either. I was punk rock pissed off and bent on mirroring the pussy ass poser artists and apathetic culture I despise. I did not expect to be mirrored myself. I got into performance art so I could face an audience head on and get immediate feedback something as a painter you don’t get in the studio. I thought most performance art was ludicrous, spontaneous and chaotic and to me that was the perfect vehicle for projecting back at the dumb ass culture and the contrived “radical” so called “subversive underground art scene” something that started out genuine in the 1980’s but degenerated into hipster fashion by the mid 1990’s something the internet would perpetrate and render completely marketable and harmless by the year 2000. I wanted to get out of the studio, perform music with my friends and affect people and the culture. I needed to get out of my studio and into people’s faces. It seemed all there to trivializing my choice to live as an artist on my terms. I wanted to challenge, attack and destroy the notion that artists didn’t have to be the bought and sold “rebel’s” the marketplace shat out every second of the day in 1996 especially in San Francisco.
My mind was blissful from all that I imagined would run through people’s minds while viewing the Apache Whiskey Rite.
“Take your pants off and get on your knees”
I stripped in front of her but thinking way too much about art to get a hard on. She took off her top and only had her leather pants and high boots on. I got completely naked and put on my loincloth. I grabbed the fifth of Jack Daniel’s handed it to her and gave her the strap on belt for the whiskey.
“Whagghh haa haa!! You are a fucking genius Steve”
For a second my dick started to get hard but she had already had a latex glove and a hand full of KY. She shoved her right hand in my ass crack and one two then three fingers went in side me. I was completely erect and hoped for a second I was going to fuck her first. She shoved me to the hard wood floor and a submitted. My cock went soft as she pushed my head to the floor and my knees hurt until that open bottle went into my rectum. It was amazing and it worked! She was the perfect sodomizer, just the right height and could thrust hard. The booze swished in then swooshed back into the bottle. I took it for what seemed like over 10 minutes. She slapped my ass and just kept fucking me. The pain and pleasure became one and the same.
“Are you ok bitch you want some more?”
“Please keep going Celine I want to see how much I cold take”
I started to get slightly drunk and she pulled out and grabbed my hair and shoved my head onto the bottle and I gave her head while the whiskey went down my throat. I gasped and coughed then she pushed me away and shoved it in my ass and fucked me with the strap on whiskey bottle harder this time pulling out and putting it back in so that air would push the whiskey in further and my asshole would burn until all the whiskey was either in my ass or on the floor. She said lick it up bitch!
I licked the floor. She kicked me while grabbing my loincloth so when I fell to the ground my loincloth was off and I was sideways on the floor almost in a fetal position. I noticed then I was completely hard. With my left hand a stroked my hair back so I could see and to dry my hand. My dick was wet and it wasn’t from the whiskey. It was cum and somehow I came either from the excitement or the bottle or whiskey hitting my prostate. I tasted it to make sure it was semen and it was. Somehow Celine had missed this. I came at her and grabbed her left breast with and rubbed her nipple with my cum. I shoved my face into hers and was about to kiss her and she shoved me and I fell back into the mess.
“I am not kissing a shit face”
“Thank you Celine” I said gleefully as I was thinking how nice it was to get it for free and in the name of art. Oh the things we do for love. But I was artistically satisfied and for the moment sexually satisfied.
“I got to go see a client” I was disappointed, as I wanted to hold her and snuggle and watch a movie. The phrase “I got to go” would soon be the San Francisco mantra I would hear from many doms and dates and friends as I came out of my shell and pursued people and experiences in the city.
I spent the rest of the night rolling around in the filth drinking the floor and laughing hysterically off and on like a mad scientist who just brought something horrible to life so as he could get his revenge.
The next day I called my father Crazy Bennie and told him all about “The Apache Whiskey Rite”
“Dad it’s a brutal account of what has happened to our ancestors and what we face. What do you think?”
“I wouldn’t do it. Hahhh haa ha!”
“Yes but would you do it to me?”
“You’re fucking kidding me?”
“No not at all. I want you to cut me as I read M.A.I.M.; My American Indian Movement then I will give my rant about how alcohol fucked up our family seven generations. I will then hand you the bottle. You will put it into the strap on, put the strap-on on and take the lid off. Then you will fuck me with it.”
“Son that’s some mean reality motherfucking shit”
“Yes reality is a motherfucker that fucks you over and over. It will wake some people up the good old school harsh Apache shit”
“Why do you want me to do this to you?”
“It will be a pay back for all the shit you put me through while drunk. It will break many social taboos on many levels. A homosexual whiskey sodomy protest ritual something the world has never seen or heard of. A literal metaphor for how alcohol abuse is passed on from generation to generation.”
“Well if you put it that way, why not? Let’s give it a shot.
“Fantastic! I will be in L.A. next week and we can rehearse the cutting and fucking.”
The United Satanic Apache Front minus stage manager Rex Mundi packed all our gear into our friend Ken’s car and headed to Silver Lake Los Angeles. Durk Dehner and the Tom of Finland Foundadtion was hosting our first U.S.A.F. show. This was a magical time for me as it was also my first show as an erotic artist. My homoerotic illustration from Honcho magazine and some of the straight mag work was to be displayed but it also marked my first California exhibition as a fine artist. It was also my debut headliner as a performance artist and musician. John, Neal and M were also pretty excited. We got a shitty hotel room with our musician friend the Jubilant Rombalero. We got lost and couldn’t find the hotel so the Jube asked a crack whore who told us how bad the hotel room and gave us incomprehensible directions. When we got to the room John and I remarked that it was Burrough-esque, a real naked Lunch shoot up room. We were very happy with the fact that there was no Gideon’s bible in the nightstand drawer just used syringes. Blood spurts all over the walls from those syringes and cockroaches congregating around those splats and everywhere. Pubic hairs in the sheets and a shit covered toilet. It was the real American Dream the one you had to be asleep or on heroin to enjoy.
The next day we got to the Tom of Finland gallery just down the street. The band was setting up the equipment and I went inside to my exhibition. It was a two- man show “Industrial Erotica” with Martin Holland a shit fetishist that did a colorful comic book style of men shoving tunes into assholes and mouths and shit going into and out of orifices. The theme worked with my art but was comical next to my brutal realism. They had my book “My Stinking Ass” with the William S. Burroughs introduction displayed on a podium that screamed please touch and open.
Almost as soon as I got into the gallery Durk told me I had a phone call. It was from some alcohol rehabilitation clinic that said that Bennie Johnson was under treatment and cannot be contacted for a month or more till he is done with their program. I was shocked and disappointed in a way but very happy. I remember thinking; “Wow the Apache Whiskey Rite hasn’t even happened yet but it worked! Good for you dad” I had to tell the band that the Whiskey Rite wasn’t going to happen but we needed to find someone to cut on me. It was one thing to hand anyone a scalpel to cut me and another thing to just hand anyone a fifth of Jack Daniel’s and a strap-on to fuck my ass unrehearsed.
The exhibition and performance was well attended. An awesome L.A. mixed crowd of rockers, hipster model chicks and hard-core leather daddy’s in full regalia. The Jube ended up cutting on me while my Apache Gahn headdress was on after tying my arms to the headdress. David Aaron Clark filmed the performance and the band was fantastic! Durk had all the floodlights on but lit a garbage can on fire to add light and ambiance. Everyone was pretty happy with the whole event. By the time we got back to San Francisco I found out I sold three pieces and three were pending! The most I had ever sold in one show. It was a good thing as many of my gigs as an illustrator were drying up and Honcho Magazine stop using me because the new art director was deeply disturbed by my work. Dave wrote about the show in the Spectator and I started to feel like I was getting somewhere and would gain notoriety as an artist. I really liked being in the public eye. Dave’s brutally honest and confrontational style of journalism was as good as my work and in a similar vein. Whatever expectations of fame and fortune were balanced by Dave’s insistence on emphasizing my uncompromising vision. To compromise at this point or at any point would destroy all the reasons I was an artist. I wondered if an artist without compromise could make it in this country of trite trademarked “individualism.” I felt like I was doing what I was alive to do and that things would get better. It seemed the days of obscure poverty were going to end.
In the Spectator sex rag Dave wrote:
“As the band bleeped and churned away behind a burning ashcan, Johnson stood on a raised platform, naked except for a loincloth and an unwieldy, dangerous-looking four-foot high headpiece of his own construction, an adaptation of the traditional Mescalero devil (gahn) dancer headdress utilizing, among other materials, a rubber bondage hood, a black dildo, knives and meathooks.
After reading his Satanic Apache manifesto, Johnson jammed a number of hypodermic needles beneath his flesh, and then summoned a close friend to the stage who cut sacred and profane insignia into his chest. The muscle boys clutched their beers, not exactly sure what to make of it all. But liking it.
Inside the gallery, a series of illustrations executed by Leyba for porn mags ranging from Honcho to Leg Show revealed the world of disembodied lust, shadowy atrocity and rerouted viscera that evidently squirms around in the artist’s head: the centerpiece of the display, My Stinking Ass, is an oversized, eight-pound book, thick and bloated with the extravagantly tactile work within.
This is the book William S. Burroughs, Clive Barker, H.R. Giger and Anton LaVey have all contributed written testimonials; a seamless evolution of outrages yet thoughtful sexually and politically transgressive images and text collaged together through the mediums of drawing, photography Xeroxography, blood, come. A message delivered by whatever means necessary.”
“Johnson deconstructs the body-hatred of post-industrial American society, rearranging endless vistas of depersonalized genitalia into storm warnings, juxtaposing and underline his flesh runes with brute snapshots of violent desire; an anonymous ass leaning against the hood of a car, open and ready to be stretched; a feminine torso rendered in a spidery fashion that echoes the Venus of Willendorf while subtracting all hint of consolation or safety from its feminine topography.”
- David Aaron Clark, Spectator, “Indian Bummer”. Vol. 36. No. 23 Issue 934, August 23-29 1996
Life at home in the mission was non-stop work. I finished the “Apache Means Enemy” Some of the last mixed media pages in the book had portraits of the women who have affected my life titled “Women as the Enemy” one of those was my X Miran from the last Advocate magazine illustration blown up and painted over again. On it was the mark of the scarlet women, a symbol of sacred defilement that Crowley liked to use. Next to her portrait was six inch circled black and white Baphomet sewed into the paper page next to it with seed beads. Most of the Apache book has beads that are glued in. I finally realized the hard way that it is quicker and better to sew the beads in. I took a class from fellow Apache art is Celeste and she showed me how to sew beads in a circle and keep the design underneath. The first time I invited Celeste over to see my art I was hoping we would hit it off and date but when she saw my huge 12-foot New York paintings she said, “Why do you hate women and why are you doing rape paintings?”
Obviously she was projecting.
“You see I was raped and…”
“They are not about rape, they are about genocide. About the American Holocaust”
“Oh okay. Lets change the subject. Show me the new bead work in your Apache book”
The whole two years working on this was intense. I started it in New York with the idea that it would have text. A sort of Manifesto Memoir and much of the writings turned into rants I spoke or yelled with U.S.A.F. with chapters like, “My Father’s Warpath, Homage to that Apache”, “So You Say You are a Satanist, Interview With Myself”, “The Only Good Indian is a Dead Indian, The Only Good Christian is a Dead Christian”, “Balance of Triviality, Apathy and the Masses”, “Modern Terrorism; Subjugating the Hollow Shells of Humanity- Feeding the Cows”, “Semiotic Photographic Disaster, a Technique in the Appropriation and Subversion of Established Meanings; Taking it out of Context”, Sexpressionism; Modern Apache Auto-Erotic Orgiastic Satanic Ritual for Shamanic and creative Evocation” While I was living in New York a record label turned book publisher “Gorse” gave me a contract to publish my first hand painted book “My Stinking Ass” because Dave had written an article about the book in his book publishers newsletter and they also published the introduction William S. Burroughs wrote for it. This publishing company wanted me to do some sort of public ritual performance to promote the book. They even gave me $500 to make my Apache Gahn headdress and write about how I use auto Erotic ritual in my paintings especially the books. They never published “My Stinking Ass” and breeched our contract because the partner who wanted to do my book left the company. I had never thought to write it down what it was I actually did with auto-erotic sex magik before. Basically I have an intention, something I want from life like sex love or money. Then I focus on the painting when I am working on it especially when I am finished. I visualize having what I want already when I jerk off on to a painting. Basically a self-styled sigil magic through art manifestation. I started doing this in 1989 the year I started my first hand made book and have jerked on every painting I have done since then, even the portrait of my mother. The last essay in the most of the text from Manifesto Memoir “Apache Means Enemy, Visions of A Satanic Evolutionary” was not used in the Apache book but the text that was used was blown up with Xeroxes and glued and taped cut-up surrealist-Beatnik style on the pages facing the paintings. The last essay was the M.A.I.M; My American Indian Movement that turned into a USAF favorite rant of which Neal and John created some great music for. I decided my fifth hand made book of paintings would be called M.A.I.M. and when I told Rex that title he was delighted. He said it was appropriate and historically correct. He also told me that it was prophetic and ironic he had just visited the Marin American Indian Museum and had laughed at the poetic justice the abbreviation made. Especially since none of the hippies turned yuppies in Marin seemed to get the historical accuracy.
So the Apache book started with the intention of doing sex magik rituals as public performances and ended with pictures of my Apache grandfather Antonio Leyba and his brothers and sisters and my great-great grandmother on my dad’s side of the family Julia Zamora who was half Navajo and half Irish and a picture of myself with the Apache painter Billy Warsoldier in Baker facility prison. I visited him as his spiritual advisor and Satanic Priest. It has been written in many books that he was the person the movie “Billy Jack” the half breed Indian freedom fighter rebel was based on. I wore the Geronimo headdress war bonnet I made to give rants with U.S.A.F. The other inmates thought I just appeared in the prison as if I just was in the parking lot one minute wearing the headdress and then magically inside with them. They were pretty shook up. Billy was very excited to see me. My friend Elija introduced me to him years ago over the phone. Elija was an awesome friend and inspired me politically by introducing me to American Indian Movement legends and contemporary activists. Billy would send these awesome letters with drawings all over them. One of the letters he wrote me just before I visited him read.
“ Statement while incarcerated in the cyclone fenceo-B-wiredgun tower State of Cal. This manifestation humankind calls ego in all centuries since our discovery in our own inhabited lands has produced a fateful destruction to our collective thinking. In order for the invaders to be successful our people’s would have to be labeled- Evil, Devils, Evil, Heathen, Unclean Savages, so to make all the killing expectable in the eyes of those invading forces.”
The first United Satanic Apache Front press release read, “ U.S.A.F. is a performance group created by Steven Johnson Leyba as an aesthetic revenge on the West. Basically to vent a lot of frustration and anger that developed as I became interested in my Apache heritage and learned about all the horrible things the Christian settlers have done to the American Indians.
The idea for the group developed when I visited Billy ‘War Soldier’ an Apache painter who has spent most of his life in the prisons of this country as a war criminal. Billy took part in the siege of Wounded Knee in 1973 with A.I.M. that began and ended with shoot-outs with the F.B.I.”
“ He told me of the way of the warrior and what that means in today’s world, and that I had three choices: I could run away and pretend that all my ancestors came over on the Mayflower and forget about what our people went through, or I could let the anger and frustrations destroy me, or I could use my talents to present to the world how I felt about being Indian. He pleaded with me to get the truths out there through my art. It might sound cliché but he was telling me not to make the mistake he did, to channel my rage through my art and not get caught up in what others perceive an Indian to be.
I realized that hiding out in my room painting how I feel is not enough, so I wrote a few Satanic Apache rants for rallies and performances. Now some friends and I have created USAF. Hey, I was sold a lie about this country and my ancestors. The way of the warrior is to even the score. I am Apache and Apache Means Enemy!”
However I tried to create my own culture and rituals and art with very specific
Meanings and messages people who didn’t want to think about the things I wanted to think about were going to trivialize my art because that is what American media is good at. It zaps any meanings and all meanings it cannot dictate to people. In direct communication is an affront to the so-called culture.
USAF was invited to go to post hippy art-camp apolitical ultra hipster “Burning Man” event as guests and have time to the main stage. That didn’t happen we ended up in the playa of the Black Rock desert camping and performing at the “A.M.F.; Aesthetic Meat Foundation” another performance troupe of San Francisco. Luckily M had brought an amp and speakers. AMF had electricity.
Neal and his girlfriend Trish snuck Dave in came late night after Rex and M and I had arrived. They were lucky enough to find the camp in almost total darkness and drove the range Rover in the middle of the camp. Much to the horror of Neal and Trish who were vegetarians they were offered by Louis and Anya skinned goat heads and could see many dead animal heads on sticks burning and 55 gallon drums of flesh burning. It was like a 70’s cannibal exploitation film come to life.
They were in shock while Dave smiled and complimented them on their camp.
I had made a tent out of my 9x14ft canvas “Wounded Knee Decomposition” by tying part of it to my car and staking it to the ground.
At dusk was the debut of the Apache whiskey Rite. Nobody had heard of it and nobody knew what to expect. I had only my loincloth on and my chest was perfectly tan and my tits were firm and perfect with hardly any scars. Our set started off with me reading Rimbaud’s “Seasons in Hell” taped in a sketchbook. While there was fire pit on the ground it wasn’t enough light so I had to read by flare. The sparks from the flare burned the sketchbook that would become the M.A.I.M book. Somehow with my reading Rimbaud and standing then falling in the dirt and getting back up I ended up completely naked and still yelling as it got darker. I got up disappeared into the camp then returned with a burlap sack skirt and carrying my headdress. Mistress Izabella and Mistress Taira helped me with the headdress. Then they sutured feathers into my arms and set them on fire. Then Taira cut a pentagram into my back and I started my Devil dance. The headdress was far to heavy for my neck and was quite obvious so my dance looked like I was fighting my headdress and heritage and it was trying to kill me. At one point the headdress went all the way back and the mask made from leather taken from woman’s purses and shoes squashed my nose down and the four-foot headdress touched my back. I pulled the headdress back up by leverage and my neck. I approached the fire while looking straight ahead. My skirt caught on fire and it looked like I was going to also. Neal had already wanted to run up to me and ask me if I was ok because of the headdress but my whole skirt was on fire. He ran up to me grabbed my sides and asked me if I was okay and I said yes. You could see the concern and confusion on the faces of the observers while the fire, our only light reflected Goya-esque 17th century faces. The skirt fell off and I ran into the darkness then came back and did a dance of death then fell to the ground. It looked like I had collapsed and fell unconscious from exhaustion. Rex ran to my assistance and tried to untie the back of the headdress and Izabella tried to help. Rex cut the leather laces. I was ok. I got up the crowd clapped and screamed with approval and relief. I took a bow found my loincloth put it on then my Geronimo headdress. I grabbed the bottle of Jack Daniel’s while Mistress Taira appeared topless in a short-short bright yellow latex skirt and no panties. She had the strap-on belt already on. I moved towards the fire so as to get the light coming up from the ground to help convey the intensity and bring an authenticity to a fire side tale of the Apache whiskey Rite. I told the story of the “seven generation” curse of alcohol and how it fucked up my family seven generations and “If alcohol is going to fuck me it’s going to fuck me in the ass!” I handed Taira the bottle and she put it into the harness and buckled it then opened the bottle while holding the neck up. My ass had already been lubed up. She shoved me to the ground. I got on my hands and knees with may ass to the audience and fire. I put my head down she lifted the loincloth and fucked me brutally hard. I went with it hard also and as she thrusted the glass into me I pushed in to it hard. She fucked me in time to the USAF tune Apache for almost the whole song. Over four minutes straight then she pulled out grabbed my hair as she pulled me around and fed me the bottle. I gagged on it as it went down my throat then it some of it came back out. I could feel my asshole burning and wondered if it had gotten torn. Then she jerked some of the Jack onto my cut back and it burned so much I fell to the ground. She grabbed my loincloth and pulled my ass up. The loincloth fell off and she fucked me more. The red and yellow firelight occasionally would flicker and I could feel the warmth. The audience might have even gotten splashed they were so close. She kept on and slowly as the bottle began to empty she humped me slower as the band played slower and she pulled out and walked off as the music faded. Then M noticed that the gas can one of the AMF members was using and had left by us was burning. I jumped out of the way. M kicked it and threw dirt on it till it went out. I got up and Mistress Taira returned and we took a bow. People were applauding and almost whimpering like dieing animals.
The next day our friend Raven who had cut me at the SOMAR night Taira could not cut me at. She told Rex and I that she had overheard these two guys that had told someone who had given them acid they were doctors discuss the Whiskey Rite. She said that they couldn’t believe I could get sodomized with a glass bottle for six hours.
My life got stranger and stranger with every performance. With each performance I would take many of the pictures Charles Gatewood had shot and gotten color Xeroxes so I could collage them in the M.A.I.M. book and paint over them. Charles and I signed a contract that said he could publish the pictures any were he wanted and I could use the images however I wanted for paintings.
The next month we rented the 848 Community space on Divisadero Street just down the street from what used to be the Kennel Club in the 1980’s. In 1980 I filmed the Industrial band tragic Mulatto at for a friend. We were taking a big risk having a show on Halloween but we needed to take that chance. We flyered all over the city and M helped me post all over the new newsgroups on the Internet. My first experience on the Internet was M showed me the Usenet images of bestiality. The exhibition/ performance “American Indian / American Devil” was already being talked about weeks before the show and hate mail was coming back to us from the Internet.
“ You and your ilk are a total waste of flesh, and an affront to people of all ancestries. Satan is an introduced concept, and although there was an acknowledgement of the existence of evil. Evil acts and evil-doers have always been deplored by all Native nations in Americas. Leave Natives out of your little theme party… If you must have an early American theme for your little soiree, emphasize the evil and villainy of the early settlers who professed the virtues of Christianity while practicing rape, mass murder, slavery and many other documented atrocities against a people who initially extended a friendly hand. Therin you will find the evil you seek, not in some ridiculous (but still offensive) dark side of the NU-Age Yuppyism. You are just assholes pretending to be bad”
- Karen J.
“ I’m in the process of contacting my friend Rupert who’s the vocational education director of the White Mountain Apache and nephew of the tribal chairman regarding your continued postings associating Apache traditions with Satanism. Out here in Indian Country, nobody believes for a second that you’re Apache or even Indian for that matter (or that if you are, you’re completely insane).
At any rate, the White Mountain Apache, San Carlos Apache and the other branches of the Apache Nations take threats to their cultural survival very personally, and believe me when I say that these are people that I don’t ever want to have pissed off at me. So, I’m thinking that if I were you, I’d probably stop advertising myself in such bold terms on the internet…your actions aren’t going to be without consequences. This isn’t a threat, just a warning of the realities of life, because believe me, I’m Lakota and I consider these particular Apaches that I know to be a proud, fairly unforgiving and extremely dangerous group….It’s up to you pal… But I think that if it was me in your shoes I’d be doing some apologizing or some running…”
Mike Twohorse (Rosebud/Crow Creek Sioux)
The night of the show the two strongest and closest women in my life told me that they didn’t want to see me being hurt and that they would stay down stairs with the art exhibition. Along with my work was the paintings H.R.Giger pages he did in My Stinking Ass, the typed written and signed introduction by William S. Burroughs, art by Warsoldier, Rex Mundi, Navajo collage artist and friend Lyle T. Yazzie, Elija and Traci both my protectors and good friends that long night of my rapping. Upstairs backstage Taira was being her usual indignant dom self. I try and hug her and she grabs her beer and points it towards my ass. So of course I lift up my loincloth and let her stick it in. “A Bass in the ass!” she exclaims. Gatewood takes the picture. Our Sid and Nancy days were about to end on a sour note. We had agreed to get an aids test together. There was much flirting and hinting at much more than an artistic relationship and in the bay area if you both go to get an aids test it meant if you were clean you were going to fuck. So I took my rent money and took her out to a very expensive Cambodian restaurant with very beautiful young traditional dancers performing while we ate. At dinner we both told each other we were clean, no HIV. She told me she had something she really was looking forward to telling me. I thought she was going to tell me she couldn’t wait to get fucked by me for a change. Especially since just a few days before I had gone to her house to discuss the Halloween show and she asked me to come in when I knocked on her door and she was completely naked standing on her head. I couldn’t stop staring at her pussy it was gorgeous just like her. I walked towards her and I was just going to stick my face on her cunt and I hesitated for a second. She fell over and on to her feet. It was another disappointing almost moment. She grabbed a blanket and we went into her backyard and sat in the hammock together.
I kept my cool and switched to art mode and we discussed what she was going to do to me then I left. She said she loved the eel and that all the food was great. And then proceeded to tell me, “I met this wonderful guy and now I have a boyfriend” My face dropped and I went silent. I didn’t say any more than oh and ah the rest of the night. I was cool that night but things weren’t going to be cool on Halloween.
The chaos of the night was driving me. I got beads sutured into my chest by the famous Ilsa Stryx and it took way to long and sutures were the one thing that hurt the most. She was dressed as a cowgirl and would later write in the M.A.I.M. book. “Confessions of a Christian cowgirl……..Wanting, forcing steal through… Penetration of spirit through to permeate and see the flesh tear through to the other side to the WET and the HOT. That night I had Celine write in the M.A.I.M book like a fucked up High School year book. I was hoping not to see her after this night. “The scream of raw sex, sweat, scat, searing, singing, hole. Fucking hard, fast, furiously. You wanted it, bottle in hand I shove it down your throat forcing you to ingest ass cum and Jack. Make you beg for more. Tearing you wider and slaming my glass cock deeper I see your face contort in anguish and I become drenched with the fluids of prurience and desire. Only my laughter heard in the still of the playa. –Taira
