AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ADVERTISEMENT

Hi, I’m Hank and I’m getting ready to release a black bucket of snakes called Pancreatic Carburetor, my fourth collection of short stories. It’s strange, I always considered myself a “novel guy” and didn’t start writing stories until relatively later in life.

I  had written ten unpublished novels when, on little more than a lark, I moved to New Hampshire in 2005 and embarked on a thrilling (but eventually disastrous) three year binge of drunken insanity and turmoil. I was consuming superhuman amounts of booze. I didn’t write a word at this time.  I didn’t read either. I just drank and somehow worked a job. It was dangerous and foolhardy and it eventually landed me in the hospital with a case of delirium tremens and an unhealthy interest in suicide. I wound up psychologically depleted. I thought it was over. I eventually stopped drinking and moved back to Massachusetts in 2008. It was then that I started writing short stories. They seemed to come from nowhere. My abused, busted brain was repairing itself.

I moved again and got two laborious jobs. Around this time I started contributing to Paraphilia Magazine and Antique Children. The good folks at Paraphilia published my first book of short stories, The Membranous Lounge. Several of the stories were written while I was “pink clouding” following stints in rehab. I continued to drink off and on with dire, disastrous consequences. It pains me to reflect on the circumstances so I won’t. I also don’t want to romanticize my behavior. There was nothing glamorous about it.

I consider The Membranous Lounge my “LSD” book. A lot of the stories use acid as a metaphor to convey my state of mind at the time. More the overwhelming weirdness than any sense of an expanded consciousness. At around this time Antique Children published a novel of mine, Conservatory of Death. It is an angry novel about snuff films and death as pornography. I don’t know where this stuff comes from. Sometimes I hate my proclivities.

The stories I wrote around this time were eventually collected in Bleak Holiday, published by the Paraphilia imprint, Apophenia. Bleak Holiday is uneven but contains some of my favorite stories. I continued to toil at two jobs, carry on a back-and-forth drinking career and write. I don’t know how I did it. I wasn’t a kid anymore either...

Then I got laid off from both jobs and was diagnosed with cancer. A lot of the stories I wrote at this time were about facing death and losing my mind. I could feel my sanity slipping away. My anxiety reached fever-pitch. I welcomed death.

Sadly, both Paraphilia and Antique Children had folded their tents so I published my third collection of stories myself under the title Leaves from the Smorgasbord. Stories about death and insanity (more than usual) and recovery.  In some ways it’s my darkest book. One story, Parole, is based on the life of “coed killer” Edmund Kemper. I wrote it for an anthology called Sick as Fuck that never materialized.

I eventually sought help and achieved a precarious sense of stability through therapy and drugs. I haven’t had a drink in over two years. I don’t go to Alcoholics Anonymous. I consider this my AA “share.” Also, my cancer is in remission.

This leads me to Pancreatic Carburetor, the final book in my mental health saga. There’s one story, Umbilical Berries, that I wrote years ago (and you can tell) but everything else was written recently. My concerns are still the same. I try to use humor to combat my nihilistic tendencies, which is a difficult endeavor for me.     

I no longer consider myself an “aspiring” writer or an “underground” writer or whatever euphemism I can come up with to make me feel better about myself here in the dead of night. This is my hobby. That’s all. I write because I want to. I release this stuff because otherwise it would just turn yellow and rot. A few people like what I do and I find that immensely gratifying. I try my best.

Pancreatic Carburetor will be available in June.

Coming Soon!

Automatic Brand Leprosy

Okay, Get Started.

As a water-critter is attracted to the metallic flash of a Coke can, so he is drawn to Damp Hallucinations. He vomits Stunted Stories based on the paltry Parlor Tricks his brain plays. Again and again (and again). Macabre poisons leaking like twists of Black Taffy, blurring like the panic of a slithering newt dropped into a soft, gurgling garbage disposal. There is a hole in his brain that leaks 90-proof pus and frames of black and white pornography. His choppy dreams are made manifest in the tacos he builds but never eats. Tacos bitter and cheeseless. The blood-red smear on a paper plate reveals a caustic truth. Salty schizophrenic American vibrations shed iceberg lettuce like the molting armadillo sheds dry carapace on Arizona macadam. In the end it is the story and not The Scribe that will survive. And he has polyps.

No good. They are taunting you. Get Serious.

He is a Human Carcinogen. A Visiting Nurse came to call on him once and he drove her away with his noxious flirtations. Trying to get her interested in his nonsensical Television Programs. He is an accident waiting to be tested and evaluated. Her name is Alice, like The Goon. She cannot relate to him as he itemizes his fears but she dutifully writes each one down and down and DOWN. He likes this one TV show about Inches. It’s about the measurement, that’s all it is. For hours. But it’s Really Funny, he tells her. It’s called “Inches.” She tries to give him a smile, standing there in her Blue Gown, holding a Huge Clipboard pinned with a list of all his insecurities.

I’m sorry, am I interrupting something?

He stands in line with five or six Others, waiting in the rain. Nobody talks. It is too early for mosquitoes but he feels one anyway, stinging his naked arm. He lets it fill up its gas tank and then he smacks it and is met with a Miniature Murder Scene. The Color of his Blood makes him grow faint and he gives up his place in line to sit down on a wet bench. He carries a book about Hiroshima that has nothing to do with The Bomb. Not even mentioned. He reads it there in the rain, letting the rain rape the pages. Each raindrop contains a Curious Face. Yes, the very Weather is staring at him in millions of ways. He folds the book and puts it back in his pocket to get back In Line.

So what happens next?

A Church Bell sings through the drizzle. He feels something Strange once in a While and writes it all down in his Daily Planner. There is no RISK anymore. He has gentle memories too but they get SHORT SHRIFT in favor of bloodshed and pestilence and maniacal guesswork. He’s a Thug and a Prostitute.

You’re wasting my time with this silliness.       

Yeah, I know. Time to hang it up. The End.

    

   

      

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My Story In HERE COMES EVERYONE!

Sheila had one too many at last night's celebration

I wrote a story about Old Hollywood in all dialogue. You can read it HERE!

Bob

Hobble

This afternoon I walked two miles in stifling, tropical heat to keep a therapy appointment where I discussed my desire to develop a new persona. On my way back I ran into my old friend, Hobble (he has a wooden leg) outside a 7-11. Hobble’s sweaty face was decorated with silver spraypaint; he had obviously been huffing. He was enthusiastic and friendly when he recognized me. “Hey hey hey!” he said, smiling with his silver lips. He was fidgety and stuporous and started babbling at me. He was mostly incoherent but talked a lot about time-travel, Rita Moreno and radio repair in Germany. I listened to his manic rap for around twenty minutes and then told him I had to get going. That it was good seeing him again. He insisted on shaking hands and then he hobbled around to the back of the 7-11. I looked at the silver spraypaint on my hand and then headed home. I started thinking about a new persona again.

A cyst is a sac-like structure filled with liquid, semisolid, or gaseous material.

Outside my building, down there in the parking lot, I noticed a man with a bristling red beard and he was wearing one of those big yellow sleeveless ponchos, even though it wasn't raining (yet—it would rain later that day—the man was prescient!) and there was a large hump on his back and I figured he had a backpack, like he was on a long journey or something but then the hump started to thrash and scream (it sounded like a chimpanzee scream) and he swatted it with a sawed-off hockey stick and the hump relaxed (if that’s the right word—it fell still anyway) and the man looked around (real furtive like) and kept on walking (quickening his step like the guilty do) and I wondered, what on earth did he have strapped to his back? What was under the yellow poncho? I considered calling the police but it was too late, he was gone. It was none of my damn business anyway. 

"This tastes like radishes."

"It's sole."

"I know what it is, or what it's supposed to be but it tastes like radishes."

"Time tastes like radishes, not sole."

"Wait, are you saying thyme or time?"

"Are you saying sole or soul?"

"I don't know anymore."

"Me either. Pass me the sodium chloride."