Friends, seen and unseen

“Friends, seen and unseen. To you that are riding around in your automobile, to you that are sitting around the table, I greet you with the holy word, peace. Yes, I am what I am, and that is all I am, for I am it. And with my infinite mind I thinks constructively. For your minds is my mind and my mind is your minds and I am sending out my Christ mind to you, you and you. And I am able to draw whatsever I want into my immediately surroundings … ”

At first it seemed like a dream. But through the fading light of oncoming dusk it was becoming apparent that the old Philco was behaving strangely again, pulling in a static-drenched radio signal from a different place and time. Prophet Omega—founder and overseer of the Peaceway Temple, located at 488 Lemont Drive, Apartment Q-258 (“That’s the Kenmont Apartments”) in Nashville, Tennessee—was most definitely on the air. And the room, which reeked of burned Jinx Remover incense, Four Thieves vinegar and High-John the Conqueror floor wash, was faintly illuminated by a ghoulish presence who beckoned with a hooked, bony finger: C’mere.

The hooded wraith smelled faintly like the rotting striped bass I’d recently peppered with Run Devil Run powder, then buried, on Omega’s recommendation, head facing away outside my front door to keep the peddlers, solicitors and Witnesses at bay. It handed me a flyer for something called the Trash Film Orgy.

“Zombie Parade,” it read. “Saturday night, July 27. Be there.”

Hey, why not? After a year and a half of Baby Doc: The Sequel, which turned up unexpectedly eight angst-free years after the original Papa Doc horror flick left the theaters, perhaps a little live and personal Night of the Living Dead action might be just the thing to body-slam this upstart duppy contingent back into the shape-shifting reptile dimension where it belongs.

The parade is a lead-in to the midnight Saturday showing of I Drink Your Blood, the so-called director’s cut of a circa-1970 flick about a bloodthirsty Satanic hippie cult, no doubt “inspired” by Charles Manson and cohorts. Apparently a bunch of hippies take over a sparsely populated town, feed some geezer LSD, and his grandson retaliates by injecting blood from a rabid dog into meat pies, which he then sells to the hippies.

The parade will begin, appropriately, in front of a Carl’s Jr. restaurant (“Don’t bother me—I’m eating an adrenal gland”) at Second and K streets in Old Sacramento, at 11:30 p.m. There will be a gathering at a private residence on Front Street around 10; go to www.trashfilmorgy.com, then click on “message board” for the address and more info.