1961: in a trailer in Tuscaloosa, a baby was born to hustle. This kid could switch identities as easily as shooting fish in a bowl. A shapeshifting ability that proved central to the notorious life of crime and 007-worthy globetrotting that would follow. But even at the start, the hustle was tough for a little kid…
Tired of the beatings, he ran away from home at age five. Hitching rides, he landed on the streets of D.C. and hung out at the grade school of hard knocks. Known as Smiley, he became proficient in seven languages, petty larceny and lock-picking. At least, until a hick farmer who needed an extra dairy hand abducted him off the street, and soon the boy was slaving for peanuts out in the sticks of the mid-Appalachians.
As ‘Hank’, the kid began wearing a mask as he masterminded his first operation: selling pot out of the woods. His Mexican connection, however, got fatally compromised. Hank was soon solicited and bribed by the Taliban to do political assassinations in D.C., but he doublecrossed the Afghans instead and thus was able to infiltrate their French hashish network! As Pot d’Thé, he changed his mask and began dealing bricks of Moroccan hash on the outskirts of Paris to European distributors. He got a taste of the good life, rubbing elbows with heroin-chic models, race car drivers, rock stars and funky nuns.
Pot d’Thé cleaned up at an expensive Montreal rehab and decided to give up selling chemicals, he discovered he had a surprisingly good head for numbers. His next incarnation was as 20-year old Little Big Head. Soon he was making million$ running a major gambling racket for the Italians up in Rhode Island. But after a year the constant mental pressure made Little Big Head’s brain snap crackle and pop. He got tired and mean. Time for a new mask! He acquired the nickname Road Drill thanks to certain skills he used while working for the Providence Mob; he gained further notoriety in NYC and Philly for being a Hell’s Angels ‘collector’ – one with a horrifying penchant for using power tools on the non-compliant.
When he was through with collections, he turned his back on late night basement lab madness and gory bullshit. It was time to go straight and get legit! As Sixty/Forty, he grew his hair long and slapped on a lot of makeup and went undercover for the cops as a drag queen in the San Fran red light district. Nobody suspected he had switched teams and was actually working for the Man. He got busy unearthing the kind of ugly secrets that dirty cops needed to blackmail confessions out of perps – or auction off to the highest bidder.
Sixty/Forty grew more idealistic as the 90s kicked into gear (apart from selling drugs again: his budding sideline of heroin trafficking was calling… with a new mask).
As Shiva Lovetotal, he joined the tribe of Burning Man aficionados who, once the annual festival was over, went wilding around the Northwest, practicing arson for politically correct reasons on McMansions of the 1% . Said burners were loose cannons – some would say terrorists – but Shiva found that while moving with these compadres at least his anarchist-arsonist streaks were being satisfied.
In 1997 Shiva honed in on the biggest targets of his lifetime. Disgusted by the devolution of 90s hip hop, Lovetotal took matters into his own hands. He gunned down the rival heads of the two main hip hop tribes, i.e. the leaders of the east coast and west coast gangs: Biggie Smalls and Tupac Shakur. Shiva made a clean getaway and was never prosecuted for either assassination (courtesy of the FBI witness protection program).
In 2000, he renamed himself 2 Flush, and with a new mask his rap career finally blew up. Homie made it rain from Singapore to Havana, thanks to his big hit singles, “Flush This” and “Flush Again (Sh*t’s Going Down)”.
In 2003, in a feathery golden mask as Colonel Christopher Crackoff he revealed that he had been a Russian double agent ever since the fall of the Berlin Wall. This announcement came after he defected – or at least retreated – back to Moscow. He needed to chill somewhere safe, and the KGB were willing to oblige him with a mansion and hookers galore. In Russia he recorded and released Bounce International, a CD about fellow double agent and Spanish femme fatale, Kryptika.
Clean and sober once again, Crackoff became Radiance, who appears to have achieved god-like status among his superfans. He is considered by some the premier tour guide for cosmic hedonists who wish to take their debauch to the next level. These days he criss-crosses the known and unknown universe through wormholes, traveling across multiple cosmic dimensions on a faster than light pod.
No more Mafia hits, acid hits, or Billboard Top 20 hits however. Radiance don’t do hits no more!