At the Intersection of a Solar Eclipse, Quantum Mechanics, a Killer Angel, and a Plastic Chicken Egg Timer

Sometimes I hear the bells of Lausanne Cathedral from where I live. In a village of two hundred souls, mostly winemaking families, ten kilometers west of Lausanne. It’s here I wrote the Angelus Trilogy. In fact, I used my village in Angel City. I set a scene during the vendanges— the grape harvest where field workers gather in the evenings to sing and dance, and drink wine to the gills. It’s a happy scene, and one more real life event used to tell a story about the last of the good angels on planet Earth trying to save all that’s left of Paradise. I used unhappy events from real life, too.
In The Way Of Sorrows, when Katherine is burying the dead of Grover’s Mill, she pulls out a small jar of Vicks Vaporub and puts a dab of the menthol scented goo below her nostrils to mask the smell of rotting corpses. It’s a trick I learned while covering the ’85 Mexico City Earthquake. I stood at the foot of a collapsed hospital for a week. There were hundreds of bodies in the rubble. The smell was ghastly. I saw a cameraman from Los Angeles do the Vaporub trick. He offered me a dab. I was grateful. It’s something I continued to do through my career when walking through places of mass death. Have Vicks, Will Travel.
And I confess to plagiarizing myself in TWoS when Harper discovers the murdered Swiss Guards in the compound where Katherine was hiding in the States. The description of the bodies spread across the field was pretty much what I wrote in War Junkie when describing the slaughter I saw in a Rwandan village during the genocide. Positions of bodies, the wounds, imaging how they died — it wasn’t fun to relive the experience — but it made the scene in TWoS so fucking real because it was real. I had a bad case of shaking hands when I finished writing my way through it.
My God — so much of my life, day and night, including my dreams, was consumed by the characters from the trilogy. Their voices lived in my head for ten years. Then a funny thing happened. The box set of the trilogy was released nine months ago, and all the voices disappeared. Three books, more than fifteen hundred pages, nearly half a million words — gone. To say it was lonely would be an understatement. Unlike the angels in my books, I can’t rewind my timeline to see it again. So when I remember Marc Rochat, Jay Harper, Katherine Taylor, Max, Inspector Gobet and Sergeant Gauer, Astruc and Goose and Krinkle and every other character who spoke to me to tell their story — well, there’s a hole in my soul.
Then another funny thing happened — Krinkle came to the rescue.
Sidebar: In the Angelus Trilogy Jay Harper’s partner in saving what’s left of Paradise is an angel hiding in the form of a rock and roll roadie for the Grateful Dead. The roadie’s name is “Krinkle.” Guess what? I borrowed him from real life too.

Rewind: Back in the early ’70s I was spinning wax at KBCO-FM in Boulder, Colorado. I lived in the legendary Hotel Boulderado. This was before the place was renovated and turned into a respectable joint — back when it was the haunt of hippies, artists, mad poets, and drunken Buddhists from the Naropa Institute two blocks away.
I had a tiny room on the fourth floor with a shared loo and bath down the hall. Every few months a mysterious fellow would come and take over Room 500. It was a corner suite with a kitchen and a great view. Word spread the occupant was a famous rock roadie looking for some downtime in a quiet place. His name was Richard Kreuzkamp. He was large man, the kind who could carry a stack of amplifiers on his shoulders with ease. I learned he crewed for some of the top names in the business — Heart, Bob Seger, Yes. His dream was to work the Steely Dan Aja tour, but the tour never happened.
Mr Kreuzkamp learned I was the guy he listened to on the radio each evening from six to ten. He called me and invited me for a dinner of Heuvos Rancerhos washed down with pitchers margaritas. We smoked a lot of dope, we talked music for a long time, then I said —
“So, Richard,” I said, “Where are you from?”
“Outside Detroit. But look, you need to call me ‘Krinkle.’ Roadies go by nicknames. It’s one of the rules of the road. Which means I’ll be calling you ‘JD’ instead of Jon.”
We talked some more. He turned out to be one of the smartest, most well read, and kindest men I’d ever met. I always looked forward to his visits to the Hotel Boulderdo. But in 1981 I was fired from KBCO and made the completely illogical jump to TV News as a cameraman in Washington, DC. Krinkle stayed on the road living his load in/load out life with rock stars
We lost contact with one another. Weirdly, we nearly crossed paths in Sarajevo. He was there in April of 1992, setting up a massive outdoor stage, lighting and and sound system for a Yes concert. The band was flying in the next day for the show. There was a small hiccup as Krinkle was putting the finishing touches to the stage — the Bosnian War kicked off. Locals with guns rounded up Krinkle and his tech crew. Not to kill them, but to save their lives. They were rushed to the airport and put on one of the last civilian flights out of Sarajevo. They left the entire stage, sound and light rigs behind. Here’s the weird part — I soon started making trips into Sarajevo to cover the war as a cameraman. One of those trips made it into War Junkie.
Flash forward to 2011: I was a writer of books. I had finished the The Watchers and was writing Angel City. And there’s a passage where Jay Harper travels to Toulouse, France to meet someone who would guide him to the next job. A curious idea dropped in my head — the guy Harper would meet would be Krinkle. Not a kind of Krinkle but him.
So I needed his permission to use his name and life. I searched the internet for any sign of one “Richard Kruezkamp.” I found a few, and one living outside Detroit. I got an address, then wrote a letter — “Hi. I’m looking for the one and only Krinkle from the Hotel Boulderado. Are you him?” He replied, “HOLY CRAP, BROTHER!”
I wrote I wanted to use him as a character in the trilogy — “NO WAY!” I told him he’d be a killer angel disguised as a rock and roll roadie — “NO FUCKING WAY!” He also have a magic bus from which he’d be broadcasting into space over what he called The Last Radio Station on Planet Earth — “NO FUCKING FUCKING WAY!”
Obviously, real life Krinkle liked the idea. From that point writing him into the story was a piece of cake. And the literary Krinkle jumped from the page like a force of nature. But he wasn’t some imagined character, he was the guy I knew from many moons ago — same voice, same sense of humor, same outrage at injustice inflicted on the innocent in the name of corporate profit.
We finally caught up with each other in Boulder, Colorado in 2012 during my AC book tour. We’ve stayed in touch ever since. He drops the most wonderful messages via Facebook. His encouragement and support for my writing is not much different from the back-up my literary Krinkle gave to Harper — so when he calls me “Brother,” I know the word comes from his heart.

Which brings this tale to nowtimes. There’s a total eclipse of the sun heading for the States in August, 2017. Krinkle’s going to make sure he sees it. He wrote me saying, “You can take the roadie off the road, but you can’t take the road out of the roadie.” He wanted to know the co-ordinates of the location of the Swiss Guard compound in Washington State — because it’s from that very spot that he wanted to see the eclipse.
Then he wrote to say he found the location on page 125 of The Way of Sorrows —

— and that he was leaving Detroit for Boulder, Colorado, and from there he’d jump into the literary world of the Angelus Trilogy to see the eclipse. He sent a picture of two items he was taking with him. One pair of solar eclipse glasses, and one plastic chicken egg timer. I could not stop laughing.
See, there’s a scene in TWoS where literary Krinkle is sending Harper on a mission into a collapsing time warp to discover what happened to Kat Taylor and her son Max. Inside the warp, the laws of quantum mechanics no longer applied. One minute would seem like ten, then hundreds, then thousands, then the time warp collapses and you’re trapped in Hell. Krinkle tells Harper he’s got only forty-five minutes of real time to complete his mission, but the only way to keep track of time is by using an egg timer because it’s mechanical, containing no electric circuits. Unfortunately the only egg timer Krinkle could find in Lausanne came in the form of a plastic chicken.

Then came the magic—because the setup with the plastic chicken egg timer (and the conversation between Harper and Krinkle over seven pages) was one of my favorite passages in the entire trilogy. But it was nothing more than a killer angel I’d created in my imagination sitting across from the stoned rock and roll roadie I knew from the real world.
As I was laughing and thinking about it, I thumbed through the trilogy, stopping to read a passage, then flipping to another. And wham — all the voices came back to me — Rochat, Harper, Katherine, everyone — as if I’d finally mastered the angelic art of rewinding a timeline, and I was reliving the whole wondrous journey of writing the trilogy again — if only for a few precious minutes.
Which makes me wonder. perhaps Krinkle isn’t a literary angel at all, perhaps he’s the real deal and he’s only revealing the truth just now.

Jon Steele is an America writer living in Europe
contact: angelustrilogy@gmail.com
