Burner blends together hip-hop, quantum physics, and the stigmatized knowledge of Illuminati conspiracy theories, in a gritty tale that addresses the societal questions of, “Who’s in control?” and, “Are we as powerless as we’ve been made to feel?”

    

Featuring gangsters and strippers, and set against the backdrop of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, the book is ultimately about a young man’s self-transformation; the kind of conscious transformation that revolutionizes our perceptions of the world. To underscore this, the book begins with two inspired quotes. The first is from Robert Anton Wilson: “The border between the real and the unreal is not fixed, but just marks the last place where rival gangs of shamans fought each other to a standstill.” The second is from Albert Einstein: “Time and space are modes by which we think, and not conditions in which we live.”

     

Jason Teal, is a hip-hop deejay and producer who dropped out in his last semester as a college astrophysics major and moved to San Francisco with his rapper friends to pursue a career in music. Three years later, the hip-hop group he co-founded has signed a major label deal – without him. Meanwhile, Jason has lost sight of his dream. He’s working a job he hates, and his relationship with his stripper-girlfriend has hit rock bottom. And now, with greater frequency, he’s having hallucinations. He hallucinates walls and trains covered with graffiti pieces (burners):

    

   

He still remembered the brief obit piece that appeared in Rolling Stone twenty years ago:

    

PSYCHOPOMP (AKA Tommy Teal), an influential and respected member of the graffiti art community, is dead at age twenty-six. PSYCHOPOMP was an epic graffiti artist, among the greatest who ever lived. Although loved and respected by his peers, he was, to an equal degree, hated and feared by governments around the world. The methods used to suppress his work could only be characterized as ruthless. In 1978, the art critic Roland Rosenberg called PSYCHOPOMP, “the mystic Warhol of the freestanding wall.” But, unfortunately, due to universal suppression, none of the hundreds of murals and burners that brought him so much fame during his lifetime survives today, except as photographs. There seems to have been a systematic effort to eradicate PSYCHOPOMP from the face of the earth, as if he never existed.

    

PSYCHOPOMP— literally means “conductor of souls.” The word has roots that go back to ancient Greece. The Greek god Hermes was a PSYCHOPOMP, and the Egyptian god, Thoth, his prototype.

PSYCHOPOMP’s death, more than twenty years ago, has given rise to strange rumors:

His death didn’t generate a lot of sympathy from the public. The coroner ruled the death an accident.  A news reporter for local TV said he died like an outlaw, citing the black bandana covering his nose and mouth. The newspaper painted it as some kind of karmic comeuppance, a vandal getting his just desserts. At the bottom of the short article reporting his death, the NY Post attached this notice— “report graffiti in progress.” They provided a hotline.

      

The writer of the article poked fun at PSYCHOPOMP’s name, calling him Psycho-pimp, and then he took a couple of cheap shots at graffiti art in general. Finally, with tongue-in-cheek, he proposed a conspiracy theory—the Illuminati murdered PSYCHOPOMP. In the street, this idea caught on like wildfire and soon all kinds of crazy rumors began to spread. They linked him to the Freemasons, or to Rosicrucians, or to some

occult practice gone fatally wrong. This spawned other theories. Some said he committed suicide. Others said a gang—maybe even the police—had him killed.

The book has a strong sexual component. Jason’s girlfriend, Alicia, has become an exotic dancer to support her three-year-old daughter, and to put herself through school to earn a degree in psychology. But as she exploits her sexual power in the club, she also becomes its victim:

On stage she worked like a method actor. She channeled the ancient mysteries of Eros.  She became a diva and a fertility goddess. She became Pandora. She became Eve—the first woman on earth—born out of male desire and fantasies—a rib, a fib of heat, and some clay— the source of their highest pleasure and their most bitter torments. Sometimes she imagined herself in the role of Salome seducing Herod. She became a mirror and reflected back to these men their own insatiable illusions. And then, with the utmost grace, she led them towards the emerald glare of an ATM machine that stood like the last station to paradise, against the back wall.

      

The deejay announced her name. She appeared on stage wearing a polka-dot top, a frilly corset, and gold, open-toe 6”platform sandals with leather straps. She grabbed the brass pole, and flung her body into a wild corkscrew. She twirled and teased. Did her bump-and-grind. Peeled off most her clothes. And then she froze—and let everyone in that room know that she ruled the world with her presence. Her undeniably, magnetic presence was a force to be reckoned with. Every movement—every smile, every dervish turn on the pole — was a calculated, erotic algorithm.

*****

She opened her legs wider. He stuck out his tongue. She spun away.

    

In tribute, men threw bills on the stage. She scooped them up and tossed them in the air like a child playing in a pile of leaves. The men stared hypnotically at her moist lips.

The torrid passion that brought Jason and Alicia together has now turned sadistic and self-destructive:

They were practiced at keeping the noise down. If they woke Dora, they’d pay for it. “Fuck me hard,” she whimpered.  Alicia clawed his back as he pounded her.

   

“Look at me, bitch…” He grabbed a fistful of her thick hair. With each punishing thrust her eyelids trembled and involuntarily fluttered shut.

  

“No, don’t close your eyes. Look at me. Don’t take your eyes off me.”

Into the chaos of Jason’s downward spiral steps a mysterious figure with ties to a secret society:

…The business card read, CYRIL MAGBION. It gave a phone number, and an email address. On the flipside it said, “WE CREATE WORLDS.”

      

“In the meantime,” Cyril said, “I’ll need two things from you: a one page bio, and a brief sketch describing who you want to become in the future. Five hundred words, or less. Be specific and think big. Goethe said, ‘Dream no small dreams for they have no power to move the hearts of men.’ And that’s what you want to do. You want to move people’s hearts, right?”

     

“Absolutely, Cyril. You read me like a book.”

Cyril pumped Jason’s hand, and, in a flash, he was out the door. Jason watched him stride past a row of tall windows. Outside, a wine glass blew off a table and shattered. The sombrero umbrellas shook in the gusty wind.

Cyril has the power to transform Jason’s life overnight. He has money. He has answers. He seems to know everything. But first Jason must prove himself worthy of such a mentor and undergo “The TEST.” The TEST will take Jason down the rabbit-hole into the new paradigm of wave/particle duality where quantum physics meets mysticism at the level of the unseen. In the rabbit hole, he’ll encounter a dominatrix with a chip on her shoulder, a gangster who blew off his leg making a bomb, a man in a wheelchair dressed as a pharaoh beckoning him with ESP, a ginseng store owner who looks like Peter Lorre on speed, CIA MK ULTRA experiments, and many more weird and terrifying things that will lead to a head-on collision with himself, and the Big Bang of consciousness. But in a world where celebrities are treated like gods, and the corporate media molds our notion of Reality, consciousness of this degree comes with a price.