The following excerpts are from an article by Gorman Moloko entitled “Here We Go Again” originally published on the Ken Socrates World News Organization website in late 2006. It served not only as a chronicle of what was known about Ken’s then eight previous wives but also as an intended warning from his friend and co-author that might hopefully help prevent some of the mistakes of the past as he entered into a new engagement at the time.
The highlighted segments are those concerning Ken’s three tumultuous marriages to Hildy Volksverstagg, one of the more colorful and noteworthy, as well as recurring, relationships in his chequered past.
Marriage Number 2: Hildy Volksverstagg
Married February 14th, 1981 – Divorced February 17th 1981.
Upon receiving the advance for his first novel, the legendary and as yet unpublished Zither Fragments, Ken went on what is now widely regarded as the most infamous and influential two week benders in recorded history. The entire affair need not be recounted here but, suffice to say, it resulted in the first Banishment Order signed by the British Monarchy in over a century and the immediate dismissal of nearly half of the members of the Royal Ballet. It is also significant to note that Ken remains one of the only people known to have been deported from a country while unconscious. Upon his return to America he was unwillingly committed to the Garlandwood Rehabilitation Center in Talladega, Alabama, where doctors, to this day, marvel at the astonishing quantity and quality of the substances found in his body.
It was there that he would meet the most dangerous and important woman that he would ever know, Ms. Hildegarde Volkverstagg, a bush pilot and gun runner from Andalusia trying to shake a chronic amphetamine habit that had her hallucinating violent attacks from rampaging gila monsters, a volatile situation when one is proficient in four major martial art forms and has a knack for weapon concealment. They had both been committed for sixty day programs and during that time the two grew close, finding commonality in a verve for life and adventure and an innate cleverness at sneaking intoxicants into the clinic. When, finally, it was discovered that they were single handedly responsible for providing all twenty four residents of the treatment center with a two week supply of methedrine, they were expelled, as it happened, on Valentine’s Day, 1981. Unstable and drug addled as they were, they took it as an immediate sign and vowed to be married. Later that evening, aboard a Salvadoran freighter captained by one of Hildy’s nebulous associates, Lothar Mandible, they were legally united in a ceremony at sea.
Little can be confirmed about the ensuing two day journey from Mobile Bay to Tampico, Mexico but the journey has been speculated about for nearly twenty five years. One thing is certain, that Captain Mandible’s freighter, Old Squid Kicker, arrived at port with only two passengers. One, a dazed, incoherently gibbering Ken Socrates, garbed in the ragged shreds of a teal satin prom gown, lashed to the craft’s prow like some ancient mermaid figurehead and Hildy Volstagg, grim, angry and intent as she drove the ship into dock at full speed, destroying seven wharves and sinking numerous small craft and a 45 foot oceanography yacht owned by Robert Ballard. Fleeing the scene like a wild fury, guns blazing, Hildy escaped into labyrinth of the city’s waterfront neighborhoods and, despite an exhaustive search by authorities, remained uncaptured. Captain Mandible and the eighteen man crew of Old Squid Kicker were never found and are presumed missing at sea.
Ken, rescued and nursed back to health at a local shelter and with no memory of the events of the two days aboard ship, was granted an immediate annulment.
Marriage Number 4: Hildy Volksverstagg-Socrates
Married November 18th, 1986 – Divorced November 29th, 1986
1986 was a year of grisly disasters.
The Challenger explosion. Chernobyl. Billy Buckner. The Fox Network begins. Arnold Schwarzenegger marries Maria Shriver. The return of Halley’s Comet had signaled every sort of horrifying event imaginable and the life of Ken Socrates would be no exception. He would be dismissed from Ricardo Montalban’s service when a series of strange, sexually explicit letters to William Shatner, written on Ricardo’s personal stationary, were brought to light during an awkward dinner party from which Angie Dickinson reportedly departed sobbing uncontrollably. The fact that Shatner had initiated the dialogue and believed he was corresponding with Montalban himself did not mitigate circumstances and Ken was released. He’d been writing small articles for a underground comic book fanzine under the pseudonym Heady Borgland but was fully aware that such work, while entertaining, would never pay the bills. When, unshaven, intoxicated and pantless, he was turned away from the Mexican border and his moped confiscated, it became painfully obvious that he had reached a dramatically new low point in his life. In the post midnight hours of a cool November night, wearing nothing more than a soiled white t-shirt and an adult diaper, Ken eluded the Border Patrol officers supervising him and disappeared into the desert outside of El Centro, California.
As one might imagine, and as is often the case with Mr. Socrates, he can recall little of his pilgrimage to the desert. Images haunt him of nights spent sleeping in dried river beds while strange, gargantuan shadows swept through the skies above him, obscuring the stars, searching for him. He recalls stumbling through the torrid heat, his mind ablaze with hellish visions, his diaper getting ever heavier with each step he took. In the end, he remembers warm waters soothing his blistering face as he collapsed at the shoreline of The Salton Sea, lying half immersed in the heavily salinated waters, waiting to die.
Which he, of course, did not do. The notion that he was rescued, however, is quite debatable because the circumstances he soon found himself in could arguably be considered a far inferior substitute for death. He awoke to the sensation of being helplessly thrashed about the interior of a filthy horse trailer, his dazed, limp form bound entirely in duct tape. When he grimly managed to slither upright and look out of the screened window he saw that the trailer was being hauled behind a madly careening beat up old pick-up truck racing through the rough dirt and gravel roads of a desolate desert landscape. One glance at the eyes that greeted him in the rear-view mirror and Ken immediately recognized the diabolically grinning visage of none other than Hildy Volksverstagg mere seconds before the vehicle slammed around a violent turn and he was dashed back to the manure covered floor into unconsciousness.
How she found him is anyone’s guess. Some believe she was tipped off by some of her government contacts, others that she participated in some other-worldly shamanistic ritual that allowed her to detect his very soul. Suffice to say, she abducted him with ease in his weakened form and drove him quickly to a remote encampment she had established in the rusty hills outside Sedona, Arizona which she had disguised as a Dude Ranch. The facade was tenuous and a close inspection of the facilty would quickly reveal that the staff was entirely made up of heavily armed UFO enthusiasts and that it was, in fact, a militia base with only three actual horses on the premises. Waiting for them at the camp, among the guerillas, was a shaman of the local Havasupai tribe, as well as Whitley Strieber, and after all involved were forced to consume gargantuan quantities of peyote, a ritualistic ceremony was performed. Under the vast twilight of an autumn desert sky, and at the point of several locked and loaded M-16’s, the two were married for the second time.
The marriage was consummated in an aggressively confrontational manner over a period of several days in Hildy’s cabin. During the night she would ride Ken like a mechanical bull while, during daytime hours, his head was chained to a wood stove with a bicycle lock while she left on training exercises. She proclaimed her undying devotion to him in an elaborate ventriloquist’s performance after which she enacted a bizarre menage-a-trois involving herself, Ken and the dummy, heedless of her husband’s incessant weeping. This was more than enough to break the spirit an already weakened man and Ken found himself slipping into a profound dementia, drooling and constantly mumbling that he’d “gone to Fantasy Island…” and he wasn’t coming back. For a time he would only answer to the name Vee-Garr and would eat nothing but oyster crackers. To Hildy, it was the honeymoon she had always imagined and she spent her days in a state of unbalanced bliss.
Until the afternoon of November 25th. The television had been left on while Hildy had hiked to a local stream for an hour of self-flagellation and Ken, despite being bound to a radiator with steel strapping, was able to watch a fascinating national news story develop. Attorney General Edwin Meese was just announcing the very peculiar details of the diversion of funds from the sale of weapons to a certain Central American paramilitary group when Hildy burst back into the cabin, her face seemingly drained of all blood. She paused only long enough to confirm the details that were being announced and she knelt to Ken, kissed him lightly on the forehead and said “Farewell, my love,” before vanishing into the surrounding hills. Sometime in the night a shadowy figure that Ken could only identify as being “likely a midget” slipped into the hideout and freed him of his shackles. He exited the cabin in the morning to find the camp deserted aside from an oddly bemused Whitley Strieber wandering the grounds naked, unresponsive to all communication attempts.
After a thirty-six hour hike through the red mountains, Ken found his way back to civilization where authorities, amused and unsympathetic, assisted him in acquiring a legal divorce.
Once again, no trace of Hildy could be found.
Marriage Number 7: Hildy Volksverstagg-Socrates-Melmoth
Married December 31st, 1999 – Divorced January 1st, 2000
Following his break-up with Lana Smythe-LaGrange, Ken spent six months in Scotland on the much publicized Minotaur expedition that would ultimately uncover the sickening truth behind the mystery of the Loch Ness Monster and result in his fifth consecutive bestseller, Nessie And Me. He travelled the globe relentlessly producing one profound story after another as his writing skills reached truly masterful levels. He had reached “living legend” status in the industry and his name was chanted in ritualistic song by aboriginal tribes from the hidden passes of the Himalayas to untouched Australian Outback. Such adoration was an ill fit for a man so otherwise grounded in the gritty, backwater streets and alleys of the dangerous reality that was his chosen way of life. Few knew how heavily it weighed upon him and how he drifted further and further into the shadowy dream worlds of altered reality accessible only to one who understood the rare chemical and spiritual frequencies in which they existed. He seemed possessed by a strange melancholia and one week before Christmas 1998 in Quebec City, he vanished once again, leaving no trace of his whereabouts. A member of the paparazzi who had been tailing him said that his footprints in the new fallen snow simply ended abruptly as if he had somehow dematerialized into the ether.
As before, he remained missing for over one year.
Three days before New Year’s Eve 1999 there was a strange incident at Piazza San Marco in Venice, Italy. In the pre-dawn hours, every pigeon that called the ancient plaza home suddenly flew from the safety of their homes amid the rafters and spires of the surrounding city and flocked to the center of the plaza, swirling in a massive tornado shape, a whirlwind of beating wings. Then, as quickly as they had assembled, they scattered into the air in a million directions, each and every one disappearing from the scene. When they were gone a man stood where the center of the vortex had been. From seemingly out of nowhere, Ken Socrates had returned. Somber, serious and unwilling to discuss his previous whereabouts he checked into a hotel in the city and prepared to observe the Millennium celebration that would ensue.
In the following days Venice would come alive with festivity. The streets were increasingly crowded with tourists and locals alike lost in joyous revelry. A brutal war between rival gondola gangs and their frequent battles in the canals could not detract from what would be a transcendental celebration. On New Year’s Eve the entire city had become a vast carnival of sorts with throngs of party-goers bedecked in their finest haute couture, many of them with finely detailed, bejeweled face masks. Amidst this Dionysian conflagration, among the cat-faces and fairy wings, walked Ken Socrates, moving between revelers like a ghost, a notebook in one hand, mixed drink in the other. The world would never know what he was writing, however. Just after crossing the crowded Rialto Bridge he found himself pulled from the crowd by black-garbed ruffians to a waiting mini-sub that had risen beneath the bridge. His protests lost in the crowd noise, he was swiftly secreted to the sub’s interior mere seconds before it once more vanished beneath the waters of the canal.
Underwater, within the sub, Ken once more found himself confronted by none other than Hildy Volksverstagg, garbed head to toe in a black patent leather submariner’s uniform. She was piloting the sub and surrounded by a group of wild-eyed thugs dressed in dark, navy seal gear, weapons pointed at their new captive. Hildy was weeping, but whether from joy or angst or sheer manic dementia was not readily apparent. She proclaimed Ken her one and only true love despite what she described as an ill advised, brief marriage to now deceased Norwegian expatriate and guerilla artist, Fantomex Melmoth, whose mangled body had been found some six weeks earlier in the Jotunheimen mountain range, the victim of a suspicious snowmobile accident. She pointed out that one of the gentlemen pointing his automatic weapon at Ken was in fact, Gaynor Fundt, an uncle of Hildy’s from Andalusia who happened to be both an ordained Lutheran Minister and part time mercenary. Beneath the chilly waters of the canals, seven minutes before the dawn of the new millennium, Ken and Hildy were wed for the third time, depsite Ken’s vicious attempts to escape and his ceaseless hissing and spitting during the ceremony.
Then it all went wrong. The man piloting the sub while the vows were being taken removed his headgear with a triumphant screech to reveal the scarred visage of an aging Ken Tanaka, his face a mask of twisted hatred for the man who had soiled his honor those many years ago in Tokyo. He leaned on the controls, ramping the sub’s speed up to maximum and steering it toward the submerged columns of an ancient Venice hotel, all the while screaming incoherently about revenge and honor. The only clear words to come out of him, as the assembled throng tried in vain to wrestle control of the submersible from him were “banzai” and “kamikaze”. Ken understood, with a grudging respect, that it was the man’s last attempt to save face. As the vehicle crashed, all around them became a chaos of rushing water and screams.
In the darkness of those midnight waters, his consciousness flickering in and out, Ken would be unable to recall exactly how he was saved. There were figures in the water around him, he knew, sleek forms barely visible, darting here and there, one of them man-shaped. There would be the memory of a hint of gold and teal reflecting the moonlight from the surface above and strong hands guiding him toward the life-saving, cold winter air. There would be one other image as well, of a looming dark shape beneath the waves, amorphous and tentacled, clutching writhing human forms in it’s grasp and dragging them swiftly out to the dark sea. Dazed but alive, he would find himself lying on a cobblestone walkway, wet and shivering, as fireworks exploded above him like dying stars signaling the passing of a millennium and the beginning of a new year.
The marriage was annulled by visiting, still-drunk Vatican authorities the following afternoon.
© Gorman Moloko 2006 All Rights Reserved
If There’s A Road… 