Pierce Askegren: The Man, The Legend
The following appreciation of writer Pierce Askegren is adapted from the afterword to my short-story collection “Pierce Hitler: Dada Detective.” As God is my witness, I swear that every hard-to-believe word is true.
The unlikely exploits of Pierce Hitler were among the final writings I managed to rescue from the failing hard drive of a PC I bought in 1986 but hadn’t used in more than a decade. Immediately after I made copies of the files (onto a five-inch floppy disk, no less), that long-neglected machine gave up its inner ghost.
All six stories were written between 1989 and 1990, meaning 2015 marked the silver anniversary of the collection’s non-publication. Not that I didn’t try getting the stories into print last century, mind you. I submitted them to markets as diverse as Playboy, High Times, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine and The New Yorker. Believe it or not, even The Paris Review said no!
These weird tales were inspired by the most intriguing, intelligent and occasionally infuriating person I ever met, the mercurial genius known as Pierce Askegren (and sometimes as Lyle Chesney).
I first met Pierce through a mutual friend at the high school I attended for most of my senior year, after my parents moved from Florida to Virginia. Pierce had graduated from the same school a year earlier. Despite being a freshman at a 120-miles-distant college, he always seemed to be back in town.
The female who had the misfortune to become my first wife had been Pierce’s prom date the previous May. She said he used a centerpiece candle to set a tablecloth on fire during the festivities.
She and Pierce also were teammates on a TV quiz show that pitted area high schools against each other. With a straight face, Pierce bragged on camera that their alma mater recently had gotten around to installing indoor plumbing.
Pierce and I shared a love of comics that inspired us to start the “Take That, You Fiend!” Comic Book Society when we were college roommates the next year, which says as much about me as it does about him. That living arrangement lasted less than two semesters, thanks to a thousand minor aggravations. Example: When I got back from classes one day, Pierce told me that he had used an invisible-ink marker to draw on a limited-edition art print I kept above my bed. The only way I could confirm this would be by using a different pen to make the ink appear, but that process would leave behind its own marks. To this day, I don’t know if he was kidding.
One of his previous roommates said he thought “it would take a whole team of psychiatrists to figure out what’s wrong with Pierce.” He may have felt so strongly about the matter because Pierce made several late-night phone calls to the guy, pretending to be a reincarnated madman who wanted to drown him in a cold, cold river. At least, I think he was pretending.
To say that Pierce came up lacking in the social graces department would be a gross understatement. I once watched as he mustered the courage to call a girl with whom he was infatuated. His end of the conversation got as far as him uttering “I…I…I…” before he slammed down the receiver in angry frustration.
On another occasion, after he managed to request a date but was turned down, he anonymously mailed a hardcore porn paperback called “The Whore of La Mancha” to the coed in question.
As a favor to a third girl, he agreed to play a costumed monster at her dorm’s Halloween haunted house. (At six-foot-five and over 250 pounds, Pierce was nothing if not imposing.) He was rewarded for his efforts during that event with a punch in the nuts from some grinning jock, whose date thought this was genuinely hilarious.
Although it’s somehow easier to remember Pierce’s almost reflexive rudeness, selfishness and careless cruelty (the time he literally made my girlfriend cry was a particular low point), he also could be unexpectedly thoughtful. To this day (quite literally, because I was outside during a storm before writing these words), I remember Pierce’s loud and oddly parental admonishments to anyone within the sound of his voice about running on wet surfaces. He broke a hip doing so as a child, ending up with a permanent metal pin in his leg. As a result, he seemed to feel he had a catcher-in-the-rain obligation to keep others from doing the same.
Although he could win medals for grudge-carrying, he also could be remarkably forgiving. When I was laid up in the college infirmary for a couple of days with some long-forgotten virus, Pierce loaned me one of his vintage Arkham House hardbacks to read. The damned thing turned out to be so fragile that I cracked its spine, despite my best efforts to be careful, but Pierce shrugged off the damage. Anyone who is at all familiar with the ridiculously anal-obsessive nature of typical SF/fantasy/comics collectors will appreciate the incredibly magnanimous graciousness of that act.
He also was genuinely funny. We once got into a discussion about what a great story it would make if Captain America had been black when he was created in the 1940s, because racist scientists at the time wouldn’t want to use a white soldier as a guinea pig. (This was decades before Marvel printed the mini-series “The Truth,” which used a similar idea.) Cap would have to wear a full face mask to hide his skin color, but otherwise he would be the same noble hero in every way. I said the punchline would come when he was back in America as a civilian and was refused service at a “No Coloreds” lunch counter. That’s when he would tear open his shirt to reveal the star on his costume, shaming the proprietor and awakening the conscience of the
nation.
Pierce added that the last panel of the story should show Captain America sitting on the curb and putting a gun to his head in frustration — because the amended sign in the diner window behind him now says “No Coloreds EXCEPT CAPTAIN AMERICA.”
One of Pierce’s attempts at levity involved filling a sock with 500 pennies to repay a five-dollar debt he owed a fellow dorm resident. “Take your money, knave!” he proclaimed, throwing the tied sock forcefully to the ground. Unfortunately, it landed on the unfortunate fellow’s foot, resulting in Pierce getting shoved against a wall and nearly beaten up.
I later ended up moving into a room that had been vacated by two freshmen who got expelled for robbing a convenience store (lucky me!), but Pierce and I stayed off-and-on friendly enough. Both of us got our first freelance bylines writing reviews for the fanzine The Comics Journal. Pierce also managed to sell a couple of comics scripts to the Warren magazines Eerie and Vampirella in college, accomplishments that somehow managed to make him even more insufferably smug. (Or perhaps I’m just projecting.)
In the coming decades, Pierce would go on to write numerous Marvel Comics novels, his own original SF trilogy, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Alias” TV series tie-in paperbacks and many short stories.
At the other end of the literary spectrum, he also was the creator and publisher-by-photocopy of the extremely small-press free newsletter Brain Radio (originally known as the Third Eye Express), a hilarious compendium of his very idiosyncratic likes and dislikes. In addition to reviews of books, comics and cult movies, Pierce cast his critical eye on topics ranging from the fare at Roy Rogers fast-food restaurants (“a nasty, gooey, too-sweet block of something billed as cornbread, but tasting more like botched yellowcake”) to plastic soft-drink bottles (“the bottoms aren’t flat, the way God meant them to be, but some kind of weird quadruple-tumor structure that makes
them unstable on all but the flattest, most level surfaces”). He referred to one letter-writer as the publisher of a guide to the skin bars of Pennsylvania called “Shake It, Baby!” — a magazine that, sadly, never actually existed.
Pierce said he once tried doing stand-up comedy at a club’s open-mike night, without informing any of his friends beforehand. I don’t know anyone who got to witness that unimaginable performance, but if I ever come into possession of a time machine, that definitely will be one of the first dates I set the controls to visit.
Immediately after graduating college, Pierce went back to living in his mother’s basement (in time-honored fanboy fashion) while managing a succession of 7–11s and then a couple of book stores. During subsequent years, when he was penning the prose paperback exploits of The Fantastic Four, The Avengers, Spider-Man and others, his day job consisted of writing defense-industry government proposals. It’s hard not to wonder how much more prolific (not to mention how much happier) he might have been without a nine-to-five grind that made no use of his creative talents. ’Twas ever thus.
My brother and I helped Pierce move into his first apartment sometime in his late thirties. I predicted that he either would be back living in his mother’s house within a month, or that he never would move again for the rest of his life. The latter turned out to be true. Pierce’s body was found in that apartment after he died of a heart attack in 2006 at age 51.
If there’s any justice in this senseless universe, he’s now setting fire to tablecloths in Valhalla.
