The Lonely Life of Mike Ketchum

Mike left the facility in a daze, starting his car as the sun set for the last time on his mission. Having promised his father that he’d deliver the single to Marzine before she died, Mike had followed through with his promise, even if he’d kept the single for himself in the end. “But what was I to do, leave it in the hands of a corpse?” he’d answer, if his father ever came back as a vision, or worse, a nightmare asking why he didn’t fulfill his end of the bargain and why was he such a rotten son. Mike would feel that he betrayed his father for the last time, and would spend the rest of his life regretting it, feeling like a cheat. It was his father’s passion after all. Mike didn’t have any passion for music. At this moment though, he failed to see the money he stood to gain from holding on to the glass-encased 78 that sat in the back of his car, reflecting the last rays of the New York sunset, reflecting off the long shadows of the fading day.

In time Mike learned to live with the guilt that would eventually fade out in the corner of his mind thanks to the piles of money made when the single was digitized twenty years later and his life became a sewer rush of debt, alcoholism and petulance. He was amazed the phone still worked, when it rang out, disturbing his sleep patterns, dreaming of another cheap blonde whom he’d impregnate for the sheer bliss of raising children when he was still a child himself, and wasn’t that half the sport in it, raising kids when you are still a child yourself?

He’d see the money as the end of the tenancy of the motor hotel, no more working nights as an auditor to pay the room, no more drinking fifths of Finlandia vodka to swim himself to sleep. All of this ended the day the phone rang and he picked it up, still sweaty from the detox he had forced upon himself, spouting a guttural “Hello”, while barely hanging on to the drifting feeling, the pangs of guilt that had held onto him ever since that afternoon, when he’d broken his father’s promise, pretended to be there, hold her hand while she died, but in his mind he was oh so very far away.

“This is Columbia records, is this Hank Ketchum? I believe we have a finder’s fee for you. We want to bring Marzine’s Moonstruck Band into the new millennium, I was told you had the only existing copy of her single with the Moonstruck band?”

But it wasn’t the only copy. That diner, the one that would go undiscovered for 25 years, the same bar slash diner that Bert Harmon would frequent, the song he’d asked over and over for in his own inevitable way: “Again bartender, we aint sleepin tonight, cuz another one left me and this broad’s voice on the record over there is the only thing that keeps me between this stool here and that ground there.”

By this time the bar had fallen on bad times, only to be remodeled, became a victim of neglect, and then rebuilt again, each layer of improvement built over the previous one, until the place became more and more narrow. And if anyone ever thought to do a cross section of the place, why it would have shown the day-to-day history of the past fifty years. Every cup of coffee drank, cigarette smoked, every order of cheesy hash browns would be there on the walls, each layer sealing history into its own sarcophagus.

The layer where the record was contained was not found until last year. Rumor has it fetched a fair price on Ebay, purchased by Marzine’s grandson, son to Ambly, the son created by Marzine and her sea captain that fateful night.

But up until that point, only until last year that society knew about the second copy, for now it was the 1990’s (December 18th 1991, to be exact.) and only one copy existed, and Rhino Records called Mike and asked for the record to be digitized, so that Marzine’s legacy could be carried on for another millennium to enjoy.

Mike had said in his first interview that it was Columbia records who called him, but apparently he was trying to pick up another one of the blonde franchises he had set up, replete with two children and requisite trailer park that they would live in, the offspring that would eventually grow to police the area, after forming their own militia. But all of this was before the rise of terror in that area, and before the wars broke out. We’ll bring more on that last part up later on, perhaps in the appendix.

Rhino records released the box set “Legends of Folk History” in July 1993. The set sold modestly, but continued to be re-released until well into the 2000’s.