Telmetale

A brief biography for Derek Denton

To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record I was born to Anton Denton and Chanson (Laderly) Denton on a Lawrence, Kansas mild spring day on June 21, 1964.

They met rather oddly. My mother was a young veterinary student specializing in canine cardiology at the University of Kansas. One spring break she and three other friends drove across the river to Kansas City to take in a little night life. None of the girls knew the town very well and soon found themselves in a dodgy club. A handsome, promising young ventriloquist was onstage dealing with some anti-Kennedy hecklers. Rather than waste the audience's time reasoning with the belligerents as to why Catholics were not so bad, he let his dummy do the talking. Mom can never recall what precisely the dummy said, but she gets starry-eyed thinking about how the crowd cheered when the humiliated hecklers left the club.

After a few drinks they discovered a shared fondness for Skiffle bands and heatedly argued as to whether that or Calypso would be Rock 'n' Roll's lasting legacy to pop music. A phone call later they were dating. A few dates later they were engaged and finally married. Eleven months later I was born.

(Left) As a child I complained that there weren't any baby pictures of me. My parents dropped me off at my grandma's house the next day and a week later they "found" this picture. (Right) I think my Mom is wearing a dress she had got that Christmas when I was actually four. Dad likely carved a dummy of me then they posed with it. Mom tells me I'm wrong, yet note the disappearance of Dad's right hand and how conspicuously her left arm has to reach around my back.

Childhood was good for many years. Unfortunately when I was nine years old my father died. By then he had moved out of Accounting into the world of espionage. The FBI had flown him to New York City to investigate John and Yoko. One day Mom came home from the clinic to find a clammy handed man in a suit on our doorstep. I was back from school but had refused to let him in. While he loitered our five dogs barked constantly at the stranger. I remember then looking through the bay window at my Mom's face when the man told her the news. Even though I started crying because I saw she was sad, the dogs just kept on yipping and I yelled at them trying to get them to shut up. The government would never get specific about the cause of death.

Finally with the Freedom of Information Act we petitioned our Senator to obtain my Dad's records. Eventually that came through and we had a tall stack of forms and memos, only to discover the cause of death was listed as "Egregious infection resulting from a severe paper cut." To this day I watch every single documentary on John Lennon in the hope of seeing what my Dad was up to. Rarely do I actually catch anything, but on one of his old requisition forms we got from the government he did list "Candy Chess Pieces: white & milk chocolate" and John and Yoko did play Chess with chocolate, eating each piece as it was captured.

Another family legend has it that he was Timothy Leary's lead acolyte who encouraged him to say all that silly shit. There's an aunt (which branch of the family she's from, no one can vouch for) who insists that he also coached Al Capp, convincing the cartoonist to become a public figure. Apocryphal stories, to be sure, but video and candid photographs are so blurry from that period he can be placed anywhere. I myself was convinced that he was in at least seven different photographs in my high school's U.S. History textbook.

So when imagining my life, think of his presence floating behind the scrim, or nesting snugly in a warm forgotten corner of my psyche. Maybe someday he will arrive with a butterknife and cut through the diaphanous membrane to present himself as Senator Bill Bradley, or comedian Andy Kaufman. My whole life has been built around attaining a state of readiness for just such a surprise.

Bye grade school, hi high school!

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