A Positive Review of Leaves from the Smorgasbord!

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Music Hath Charms

I worked with this lopsided cat named Glen back in the kitchen when I was a cook and he was a dishwasher and high-schooler. We didn’t work together long. He didn’t last. He would do shocky stuff like draw on the whites of his eyes with a felt pen and extinguish cigarettes on his arms or tongue. He did it to show people something about himself. Probably the shockiest thing he did was listen to Frank Zappa. See, the kitchen staff would take turns with the tape player and we were bent on irritating each other. It didn’t seem to be about enjoying the music. So, one kid would play Blood Feast and another kid would play Dinah Shore and I would puzzle people by playing abrasive “sound sculptures” I taped off college radio. And Glen would play Uncle Meat or something. We were using music to say, “Fuck you,” to each other.

But it wasn’t all negative. One night Glen drew a happy face on his eyeball. You can’t get more positive than that. 😃

Common Side Effects

I am alone in my fondest memories. 

In the late eighties I worked as a cook at a restaurant called The Crazy Horse Pub. I cooked for the dinner crowd. The kitchen closed at 11:00 p.m. so I usually punched out after midnight. I would go home wired on caffeine and adrenaline and unwind by drinking copious amounts of beer and watching TV. There wasn't much on after Letterman but one night I caught a gritty oddity called The Headless Eyes (1971) at around two o'clock in the morning. I couldn't believe my luck! I'd never heard of the film but it was a strange alchemical mix of New York grindhouse sleaze  and undergound arthouse weirdness. The eyeball gore surprised me (remember, this was on  broadcast television) as did its focus on the tortured villain who scoops out people's eyes (with a spoon!) to make his art. I ate it up. I have not seen the film since that wonderful night and don't want to. My memory is no doubt frayed and flawed but I don't want to destroy it by watching the film with fresh, contemporary eyes. I want to keep it pure. 

I treasure these 80's memories...

One night, again after a shift at The Crazy Horse, I was looking for something interesting on the radio and heard this weird show hosted by a guy who sounded drunk. His voice was grumbly and torn and he said, "Yee-yee," a lot. He played a strange mix of 60's garage and psychedelia  and 80's punk (Husker Du, Replacements etc..). The song that caught my attention the most was a long, psychedelic masterpiece that really blew my mind. It took me around ten years to learn it was Slip Inside This House by The 13th Floor Elevators.  Roky Erickson R.I.P.

Please note that my savoring these memories in no way endorses a nostalgia for the 1980's which I considered a kidney stone of a decade.
  

The Reach

The release of Pancreatic Carburetor was anticlimactic. Now I just feel ill and empty and old.

 Outsider voices from the void

Pancreatic Carburetor

My final collection of short stories is now available. I am depleted. It may take years to replenish my supply of short fiction. I'm going to direct my full attention to my novel-in-progress, Cocktails & Cancer (formerly Anosognosia ). Stay tuned...

The Book is Here 

 

Unguent

Welp, I uploaded my final book of short stories and I’m just waiting for it to become available. I always feel sick and depressed when I make my projects public. Now that the die is cast I want to change every word, or worse, destroy the evidence. Maybe I’m not cut out for this jazz. I don’t have the spirit for marketing and self-promotion. My confidence plummets at this stage of the game.

Anyway, I’ll keep you posted.  

   

Seizures and Skag

The proof copy of my book Pancreatic Carburetor arrived yesterday. It looks good, thick. The font is large and easy to read. A perfect gift for the farsighted senior in your life! Pancreatic Carburetor is going to be my last collection for a good long while. I need to replenish my supply of short stories. Right now I couldn’t fill a pamphlet.

     

     Having had seizures, I think I know what it’s like to be dead. It is abrupt nothingness. Seizures slam into you without warning and you’re in a death-like state. It’s lights out. You don’t think or dream or anything. It is stone cold zilch. This is not bad. It’s not scary. There’s no point in worrying about death because you won’t know what hit you.

     

     I once had a seizure and collapsed on the stairs outside my apartment. The guy who lived across from me asked me if I were okay. I came out of my miniature coma, told him I was all right and wobbled into my apartment.

      

     My neighbor then went around telling the other tenants that my collapse was due to heroin (which it was not). I was pissed off that he was spreading untruths about me. I didn’t want the whole fucking building to think I’m a junkie.

       

     And then the neighbor died. He was roughly my age. I saw them break through his door with an ax. He was dead all right. I never even learned his name. I don’t know what killed him. Wouldn’t it be poetic justice if he overdosed on skag?

      

  

Nothing so Appalling in the Annals of Horror!

Waiting for the proof of PANCREATIC CARBURETOR to arrive. It’s supposed to be delivered today. It’s exciting. PANCREATIC CARBURETOR might be my strangest book to date. Yet it’s remarkably tame. It doesn’t wallow in violence like so many of my other books. George Romero and Herschell Gordon Lewis were powerful influences on my writing. A story I wrote in college paid homage to Lewis complete with a gratuitous ax massacre. I lingered on the viscera Ala Lewis. My fellow students must have been APPALLED. Nobody remarked on the HGL reference. It went over their heads. They must have thought I was a psycho or something. Heh heh...

If I could go back in time and relive parts of my life, I would choose the period in which that story was written, 1988. I was full of confidence and making exciting new discoveries every day. Everything changed. My taste in books, movies and music changed with a vengeance. My view of the world and reality and my place in the cosmos was altered forever... 

Anyway, PANCREATIC CARBURETOR should be out soon and even without gratuitous violence I still think it’s worth a read. I also included a poem—a first for me. And I used my own art as the cover—another first. The book is more “me” than anything previously published.        

Head

Woke up early and it’s still dark outside. I can hear the morning songs of the birds outside my window. “I hate those fucking birds!” said Linnell, a guy I worked with at FedEx. I’m beginning to agree with him. 

I think I was regarded as “The Drunk,” at FedEx. I wasn’t fooling anybody. Once I had a seizure and smashed my face on a wooden crate. Half my face became a huge black bruise. My right eyeball was dark purple. I was a sight! I looked like a fighter after a savage pummeling. I was a frightening mess but I went to work anyway. A couple people asked about my face, “Jesus, are you all right?” “Whoa, dude! What the fuck happened to you?”

      

People joked, “You should see the other guy!”

      

I made up a stupid story about tripping and falling. It was an awful, transparent excuse. My powers of creative writing failed me. I’m sure no one believed me. I might as well have used the old, “Hit my head on the bathroom door...”
       I didn't want to admit to a seizure. It would expose too much.

     But most of my coworkers chose to ignore my raging battle wounds. It was almost comical how they nervously averted their eyes. They spoke to me staring at the floor.

     I never had myself checked out, medically. I wonder if I incurred any lasting damage. Whenever I forget something, I consider the damage I sustained. How much did I lose? How many memories did I dribble away?

     But as bad as the damage was, it paled in comparison to the head wound I suffered in New Hampshire around ten years ago. I fell straight back and SMASHED the back of my head open on a big rough slab of granite. Too drunk to go to the hospital, my friend patched me together using napkins and a stereo wire. He told me I had a hole in my head. Did I mention I was drunk? Anyway, he got me home safely where I continued to drink and eventually passed out. In the morning I got a phone call from my savior. I assured him I was fine while staring at my blood-soaked pillow. "No worries."

     Again, when my thinking becomes sluggish, when I fumble through my memory, when I can’t place a name or a location, I wonder how much is due to old age and how much to the deep lacerating scars under my cranium.
     How much of ME did I bleed away?