The Two Times I Saw Ava Francesca

The Two Times I Saw Ava Francesca
By Wayne Allen Sallee
          Everyone who reads my work knows that I rarely start a story until I know the title as well as the first line. In this case it’s the second line that is more important, because I am going to try and gain redemption for the night I was so drunk and talking trash, that Darcie later questioned Greg why he even considered me a friend.
    Darcie had met me maybe twice prior to that July night in 2006, once when she was dating Greg and another time when she was pregnant with Ava Francesca. Greg has summer parties, barbeque, booze, and hours of volleyball. I can’t make it out there that often, as I have no real way to get home. It’s common knowledge that my cerebral palsy keeps me from driving.
    But it sure as hell doesn’t stop me from drinking. Well, that should be past tense. I have stopped drinking, but that is a different story that has been told elsewhere. That second time, late into the evening, I had found myself in a truth or dare game and this blonde friend of Darcie’s dared me to strip naked, which I did inside the bathroom and then walked around back. Darcie was sore from the pregnancy thing and was sitting on the couch, on the phone. Who the hell knows what she thought. That had been, I dunno, 2005? Had to be.
    I didn’t mind doing the dare, as I had been looking at the girl all day, because that’s why guys who are drunk by two p. m. do. Greg used to joke that I never took my socks off, truth was I forgot. Greg is my best friend, one of the most incredible artists you’d ever come across, and years back, he would do the covers for my story collections, Fiends by Torchlight and Running Inside My Skin, as well as my meta-memoir, Proactive Contrition.
    I wish to hell I knew how to forgive myself before I started doing stupid shit back then.
    The past in ellipses: I’d known Greg since we were barely out of our respective colleges, and ended up having mutual friends, the majority of them artists. Well, I seem to have omitted the dot dot dots, I’m not stopping now, though. We’re talking thirty years, more than half our lives.
    Because of the distances between city and suburb, it would be a rare thing to meet at Baker’s Square or see a film and get hot dogs at Portillo’s afterwards. By the mid 1990s, he and several of my other artist friends were making loads of money from their commercial art. I was always living just above the poverty line, my one trick pony line being, I screwed myself to the bottom, and then crawled to the gutter.
    That was somewhat a joke, as I had one novel and had stories in over seventy anthologies, though the pay was next to nothing in most cases. I worked at a job I hated in the Loop, because I needed health insurance because of by stupidly being crippled. I’d put crippled people in some of my stories, with others involving personal pain, and these were the ones Greg liked most.
    He’d talk me up to everyone, like I meant something. The guy with no girl and maybe thirty bucks in his wallet. Come to think of it, since I mentioned never having a date, Greg’s wife and that truth or dare girl were two of the four women who have seen me naked in my entire life.
    OK. July 2006. The night I ended up acting with all the social graces of a man throwing the contents of a junkyard down a wrought-iron spiral staircase. I was in a bad state of mind for a few months preceding, being a new employee at a printing plant and my supervisor rode my ass every day until, months after that party, he ended up imprisoned for vehicular homicide. I had to work a few hours that Saturday, he was hungover, so I had shit slung at me for six hours, starting at six a. m.
    Afterwards, I walked a few blocks to 127th Street, waiting for the bus that would take me past the Cal Sag Channel and then northeast to the party. It was pouring out and there was no shelter; I was pretty much standing near an off-ramp for the Tri-State Tollway. The bus was late, and air-conditioned. So my muscles contracted as I sat, my elbows were shoved together and I held my hands in the air the way a surgeon who had just scrubbed down looked as he waited for the latex gloves to be snapped on.
    I showed up at the party midway through the festivities, just a small group in the kitchen, no volleyball because of the rain. I was introduced to a very tiny Ava, this after I had already dry-swallowed three Vicodin just so I could at least think that my shoulders weren’t bent like a hunchback’s. She was beautiful, but was soon back in bed.
    The hours passed. I drank, as did everyone else. Miller Lite. Tequila. Stuff I had never heard of because I could never afford it. And then one of Greg’s friends–I know this because she had been to parties before Greg had met Darcie–started in on this parody of a crippled person’s voice, all “aarrs” and “wrhoo,” which is how most people imitate someone without the ability to speak properly.
    I hadn’t been part of the conversation, but it led to my belligerence within minutes. I do not recall this, but I was driven home by a couple who went twenty miles out of their way to get me home safe.
    I skipped the next few parties, afraid to face Darcie. I knew she was upset because of emails Greg had sent me way back when. In the summer of 2009, I had been sober for two years, not out of discovering I was an alcoholic–I only drank when there was free booze–but because I was now taking a bipolar drug.
    I had purchased a pop-up book about a frog for Ava, and Greg put it on a high shelf in her room, planning on showing her after guests stopped arriving and things had calmed down.
    The train I planned to take home, something I couldn’t use when I was working off 127th Street, would arrive at 7:54 PM. Just about then, Ava was saying her goodbyes before bedtime. She walked up to me at the edge of the garage as I was grabbing a can of pop for the long ride home, and shyly thanked me for the book, leaning in so I could hug her.
    I can still recall her eyes, the red sun dress and her brunette hair haloed by the setting summer sun, a moment that makes your heart stop beating for a split-second. An image you see in films, for pure exploitation, syrupy music playing in the background.
    I hugged Darcie and Greg saw me to the front lawn and watched as I walked down the street, the train platform a few turns away. I had to pass through a block party and weaved around two black girls in white shorts who were laughing over cotton candy.
    I’ve mentioned when that was, but it doesn’t matter how long ago it was as I write these words. It doesn’t matter where I am now, or where I went in-between.
    All you really need to know how it was I felt that night, that second time I saw Ava, and the way my pulse thrummed in my eyes as I watched the approaching beam from the commuter  train in an orange sky that smelled of confections and perfume.

                                Wayne Allen Sallee
                                Burbank, Illinois
                                27 Apr 11

Retrievals:001

Recently, I gave my battered old Dell to this fellow in Indiana and he did a data retrieval and I put everything on an external hard drive. You might recall an incident several years ago where I had a spasm and moved my Photos folder into someplace unknown, and I've slowly been sifting through the 7,000 photos (!), many of which I do have, but not the exact variation as shown here, such as Greg Loudon's 2000 shots by the el or the 2006 shots for the Fiends by Torchlight cover. The same for my niece Grace and the great Buddy the Mitch. I might put a few more of these posts up, we'll see.

December 21st 2010

I was downtown to have lunch with Greg and get some presents at Borders, it was in the 30s and foggy. More photos tomorrow.

Chicago, Winter, Summer

I've been following a blog by Justin Kern, The Windy Pixel. Just stopping in now and then. Since we've had our first ice/snowstorm this winter--the last three storms literally hit Michigan thanks to the lake winds--I thought I'd post a few of his shots. He simply asksd to mention his name and where to find him. He has a Flickr account, as well. I love the tentacles of frozen rebar, this is at the North Avenue beach. The scary fellow is Frank Lloyd Wright and then we have the Milky Way. Tomorrow is Elvis's birthday and we all know that he didn't die in 1977, her just went home. The bottom photo Kern posted on New Year's, but it is a photo taken last summer and so I dig it even more.

Greg Loudon will be giving me a digital camera the next time I have lunch with him. Not saying I'm going to use it. Has a telephoto lens attachment. Not saying I'm going to use it. But there are those helicopters and...well, helicopters. All I have in my life right now. Maybe I'll compromise and use the digital camera while I'm listening to my Omega 8 transistor radio. But if you like the above photographs, check out Justin Kern at www.thewindypixel.com and knock your socks off. Or slaqp yourself silly. Whatever snaps your garters, kids.

Buddy the Mitch & Black Helicopters

The roll of film I got developed yesterday was likely the biggest lump of crap one could imagine, though the first ten came out fine, the remaining good one are of the helicopters, only later in the evening. Most of the shots were simply too dark, yet I took them outside. Maybe the shading reflected my brain at the time. What got cut away by my fucking stupid right hand spasming, I was going to say that my logic gateways slowly snapped together, though I had one weird experience on the 87th Street bus, it was like my left eye was filled with TheraTears and things were too close and too far at the same time. I presume I wasn't moving, that it was something knitting inside the pulp in my head. I went downtown to have lunch with Greg Louden, and I was pretty much the old me, or as good as I get, when I woke up this morning. After, I mailed a package at the post office, then wandered the section of the Loop I knew from when I worked at the corner of Monroe and LaSalle. Went into Reckless Records and bought a CD of Merle Haggard for a buck ninety-nine. Walked around like I was living like a fugitive, hopped on the el, lucked out and got the one bus that curves down 87th and drops me at my corner, by the Jordan Baptist Church. I know tomorrow will be a slide downward, I expect that, but right now its like I have oil in my veins and my concentration is secure. Signing off.

Do Not Attempt To Adjust Your Television...

...we control your surroundings. Or however the theme from Outer Limits went. Yesterday I went downtown to have lunch with Greg and talk about LOST, as he and Darcie have finally watched "The Incident". We joked about the helicopters in email, and there one was as I walked to the bus at 9:45. Then, in the Monroe Street subway, I looked for a phone, because I was early and wanted to pass it on to Greg that I was moseying around. Two phones did not work, more the norm here than not. And yet the phones still remain, some just the shells. The last one on the left worked, and as you can see, Donnie Rumsfeld must have gotten to the phone just before mwe to put that sticker on the receiver. Next thing you know, I'll see Rod Serling, David Janssen, and Bobby the Mitch chain smoking away, asking me why I won't accept that I'm part of the happy undead.

Bayou Bob, The Baton Rogue

Robert Petitt. Bayou Bob. I met Bob through Sid, and the two of us have written stories with a character named Remy Petitt, the Baton Rogue, as he tells the pretty ladies. In fact, "Skull's Rainbow," published in CONSTABLE NEW CRIMES in the UK, was written almost entirely while we were at the World Horror Convention in 1991, and the story is set at the Crown Plaza, where the con took place. Sidebar: the name of the story came from a little Blues joint down a side alley in sight of the Capitol of Tennessee, SKULL RAINBOW. Not long after we wrote the story, the owner was robbed and shotgunned to death, but I did not hear of this until year's later.

1I'm reading James Burke's SWAN PEAK at the moment. Dave Robicheaux has left post-Katrina New Orleans for Missoula, Montana, and he's brought along his old cop buddy Clete Purcel. Clete reminds me very much of Bob, though Purcel is described different, I still see Bob. Clete is also the dark center of my heart, and I think that's why Burke creatwed his character, for people like me. Clete takes revenge when he wants, yet lets some things slide. Bob left Louisiana for East Texas years back, my understanding is that he got involved with a woman and it was made clear that he was no longer wanted in the state. Of course, it could simply be a story, a barroom tale. I met James Burke at a reading at the Tattered Bookcover in Denver, and bought two copies of BLACK CHERRY BLUES, asking him to sign one copy to "Willy Sid, the con artist." Told him it was Sid who hipped me to him during the dot matrix letters days. Few years later, Sid interviewed Burke, his job at the time was entertainment reporter for the Alexandria (LA) Town Talk, and Burke recognized Sid through my storytelling a year before; Burke mentioned me not by name but that I was from Chicago. In my writings, Willy Sid usually hangs with Lisa Sestina.

SWAN PEAK is a huge book, something I needed for today's travels, as I went out to Homewood for Greg Loudon's annual party. I have to go downtown then backtrack on the Electric Line to about 172nd Street. I could take the bus to 87th and Avalon, avoiding going to Block Zero and then passing Block 87, but Avalon Park is no longer a safe place, even during the day. And so it was that I left the house at 1:00 and arrived there at 3:30, adding waiting 40 minutes for the train and a few blocks walk. Played volleyball all afternoon. I totally LOVE volleyball. I adore Greg's wife, Darcie, and his three kids. I bought Ava, the oldest, MAGIC TRIXIE AND HER DRAGON, illustrated by local artist Jill Thompson. I love Greg's folks, Fran and Len, who sounds like Dennis Hopper. Just about everybody there I have known since 1985 or thereabouts.

Walking to get the 8:53 PM train, I had hoped to see the old-timey downtown Homewood at sunset, me a fugitive on the lam with my backpack, but Homewood Days was still going on, so an opportunity was missed. But I did watch the orange sky from the second tier on the train, annoyed that I would again make a U-shaped trek home, instead of an L, all because of jackasses with guns.We passed 87th and I sighed, continuing to read SWAN PEAK. Walking downtown on a Saturday night is always bizarre, there are very few people on certain streets, others are teeming, you just never know. I lucked out that el pulled in as I hopped down the stairs, and it wasn't too long a wait for the bus. I had stopped reading by then, because I had an epiphany re: my novel, the bridge between SHOTS DOWNED, OFFICER FIRED and PROACTIVE CONTRITION. There's no Clete involved, it will be a dame that helps Frank St. Cyr reclaim his career. But how it happens was in front of me all along. I got home around 11:45 PM, a bit longer because of waiting on the bus, I guess. Now I just need to think of the name of the dame. She tends bar at Uptown Jo's, but that's all I got so far. Guess this means to be continued.....

Well, I Didn't Plan This

Sometimes, when it gets to be too much, I just spasm out, becoming, well, the real me. It was by far our warmest day this year, it might've hit 90. I had lunch with Greg Loudon, then went to Reckless Records and bought CDs on the cheap of Cannonball Adderly, Roxy Music, and Dizzy Gillespie, bought some great stuff at the Unique Thrift Shop at 35th and Archer (having noticed their 50% off sign on the way downtown), rode my bike to Walgreen's and back, sat with Buddy the Mitch and read a bit of DREAM BABY by Bruce MacAllister. Never once feeling tired, so I kind of expected my brain would pop a rod at some point. It just happens. There's no trigger point. Not in this weather. In winter, a stiff wind will jolt my neck and make me clock out. Not in this weather, though, it can happen any time. I ate Pepe's tacos and watched the Cubs. Nothing. I talked with my agent about a pitch regarding @joymotel. Emailed Horatio Salt, my partner in crime who started it all, just fine. Nothing. Bip bop Bip. Emailed Salem Press about some articles I'd write for their Masterwork Plots books. By now I was quite sweaty, so I thought a shower was in order before I continued with this lengthy writing project I'm involved with.
And THAT is when it happened. Best I recall, I smashed my skull against the side of the soap dish, chest-high, because it was dangling from one end. There's some swelling around the soft tissue area, gee, good thing I bought a Bricklayers Union cap at the thrift store, hey? (For those keeping track, I currently have 39 visible scars). And it hurts like a bitch. But I used that pain to put in the very scene in this writing project that needed it. I think I pulled off a much better Chapter 68 than if it was just another night. Maybe Karma is like Rain Man. Hurt Wayne. Uh oh, Wopner. More of Indianapolis tomorrow. If I wake up. K-Mart, Cincinnati. Three o'clock, Wopner's on.

Frankenstein's Den

I have more outdoorsy photos to post, but its late (the time is posted below, but I think I have my blog set to American Samoa time, not sure). Here's what the lab looks like, I'm kinda glad Mitchum and Jane Greer from OUT OF THE PAST are faintly visible on the computer screen. Yea, me. The shelf on the right, the one with Steve McQueen, has all the books I am in. The shelf beneath my desk holds odd books I have found at thrift stores, like the first guide to America Online and Writer's Market 1973, a Polish and Ukrainian cookbook, and various Chicago reference books. I'm also sitting there with my August 16th 1977 Sun-Times front page (which I bought for fifty cents in 1982, and yea, I know!) before I hung it up in another section of my room. Then there's the Greg Loudon painting. Yea, I posed for it. That's my face, and hair, in 1991. I've tried to take a few photos of this recently and they've never been this good. I even set it out front Sunday with Buddy the Mitch so it would scare away the Jehovah Witnesses. Its early in American Samoa, but I need to eat my ice cream and blow this joint. I'll keep the Tesla coils on low...Wayne

Grasping The Obvious

Daniel Faraday, mathematical genius. Short term memory from overexposure to Kerr Metric time travel. And to the right, me. We both have instruments that we need to use, but whereas Faraday is making a strong time paradox argument, I am simply staring at my palsied hand. You think my look there is bad? Think about when its time for the old man to shave. Picture the scene of Robert DeNiro's character brushing his teeth in AWAKENINGS. (The photo above is one of dozens Greg Loudon took in preparation for FIENDS BY TORCHLIGHT. His wife Darcie just gave birth to their third child on Wednesday. Gives me random moments of happiness). Summer winds down. I cannot type without clenching a toothpick between my teeth. Later I'll take my border collie out and while he takes a piss standing up because he grew up in a box at Pet Luv and doesn't know any better, I'll be searching the stars for blessed redemption....your chattel, Wayne

Rockabilly Dave

There are two kinds of down and outs--the cops here call them meltdowns, the ones on drugs--and its either the kind that just do not give a shit, an example being a guy that sits by the boarded up Waldenbooks barely shaking a cup and just yelling "gimme chaaange!" over and over. If the guy was next to me and I heard him speaking anything but those two words, I might not recognize him. He's not missing a limb, nor is he mentally deficient. He is just too lazy to work, otherwise he would be making an effort to actually exist past two words and a plastic cup from White Castle. He's not an alcoholic like the guy in the second photo, which I took way back in 1990. He is actually flat on his face outside a voting parlor. He's not a drug addict, like the short dude I posted on a few weeks back. I looked for work more than White Castle guy while I still HAD a job downtown.

Then there is Dave. I ran into him after must be four years easy, I was having lunch with Greg, so he snapped a photo of us. We were eating outside, just near where Dave usually hits the lunch crowd, by the Walgreens on Monroe & Clark. See, people know Dave by name, he sells STREETWISE, which is a weekly paper about homeless people and certain Chicago events and every dollar copy they sell the person gets fifty cents of it. Might've been my Elvis tie that got Dave talking to me about old times, and I'd see him often after that, though sometimes not for weeks at a stretch because he found work of some sort. Not just Elvis, but our town's answer to Jimmy Ellis, Ral Donner. Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash. As we talked people would come by and drop a few quarters in a box thing he has just because they knew he was cool. Always acknowledging him by name. He was interviewed in the paper once, not offering his last name, just asking to be called Rockabilly Dave. He'd lived in L.A. a lifetime ago, and I doubt Chicago allowed him a tabula rasa on its' bastard streets. He can talk about certain concerts the way some writers use their knowledge of cars or old wax platters, examples seen in any George Pelecanos novel. Maybe there's something that keeps him from holding a job. It sure isn't drink. Maybe Dave can't deal with the public in private, or maybe the employers are assholes who don't like it if he scares the clientele. Rockabilly Dave deserves more.

If You Believe

Nothing on Bubbly Creek yet, folks. Not trying to drag my photo trip last week out too long, but I've had to deal with a few minor things today involving a possibly-lucrative writing job (which I cannot talk about) to anti-inflammatory pain injections in my neck and forearm (which all of you are tired of hearing about), plus a few other things like watching parts of the All-Star Game and walking my dog. Years ago, I would get myself involved with projects with a specific artist that never saw fruit, as opposed to say, ANYthing that I worked on with Greg Loudon. Anyhow. Since I might find myself entering uncharted territories in this writing venture, if I'm even deemed worthy, I thought I might post the fastest thing I ever wrote as a paying gig. Sadly the words are not to be seen anywhere but here. My other artist friend wanted to do a circular painting based on the old Man In The Moon film from the 1920s. And he wanted me to give him a three word "title" (to appear in bold at the twelve o'clock spot) and exactly sixteen words to cover the rest of the outside. Even though the painting was never done as planned, here is what I wrote, northbound on the Pulaski bus between 71st and 63rd. My artist friend told me I had hit it dead on, but, well...other projects came up. But here you go, thinking of REM's song "Man In The Moon." Wayne

IF YOU BELIEVE
a wink of an eye
and practiced hands of the new
dreaming men

There Is Nothing Wrong With Your Television...

I'll get back to my photo adventure tonight, but several people brought up the old Outer Limits trading cards, Jelly Man in particular. Here's my set, though my favorite is a tie between The Thing From Mercury and the Xanthi Misfits (which were wasps with heads like Norman Fell). One day, I'll do a post on my Univeral Monsters trading card set, of which I'm missing only three out of 106. And no trading card posting would be complete without me showing myself in a 1992 trading card that Greg Loudon did for the AIDS Awareness series. If Greg could one day do a zombie card set, I don't think I'll have to do much more than just show up and make my nose bleed...Wayne

In Color and Black & White

Bob asked if I owned the Therrio painting, and I told him no, it was sold before I even saw it. Wouldn't have been able to afford it regardless. Here it is hanging at the art show at the old Bop Shop on Division and Hermitage in 1996, that's when the painting had already been purchased. But there are other items I have the originals or at least signed lithos, Greg Loudon had to do a painting of an Aliester Crowley-type vampire, and back in the 80s, he took advantage of my skinniness to use me on the cover (and in an interior shot I am NOT posting) for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Alex Ross, well known for his comic painting in gauche, has used me in several books. Here I am in the UN building listening to Superman. With my finger under my nose. I had posed for photos, and would in real life make an L of my thumb and forefinger and place them over my left jaw if I was truly attentive. Wayne

A Little More Hard-Boiled

Not me, the font of the book. Though I think I need to see the dentist soon. If you look at the reflection in the glasses, that's my figure as well. I'll bet after this book comes out, people will think Michael Berryman posed for the cover. Maybe.

Painkiller Looming

The way this cover plays out, it looks as if the victim in my book is Martin Last, a guy who at times crawls inside the base of the Picasso sculpture to keep warm. That was me on Sunday, the same glasses I'm wearing now as I type, the three-day beard I saved for the photo, the fire escape from the photo I took Saturday. Seems like Greg always gets better with what he does and here I am, just promoting a reissued book (at least as a trade edition, the original costing $29.95, the kiss of death for any first time novel). Hell, Greg's work is so much better, I can see my nasal passages and why I have trouble breathing in the winter. The cover might change, there were many poses and shots taken. That other thing is me posing back almost twenty years ago, Greg had a gig illustrating an article about married men who were incarcerated. He's been doing his voodoo as long as I have, but back at the beginning, I was still stumbling around like Jack Lemmon in AIRPORT '77. Well, that's a bad comparison, but its late and I probably dressed in sport jackets back in the 80s. With the same sinus passages, no doubt. More people need to be aware of this guy...all I have to say. Wayne

Downtown Again, Naturally

Even I was getting tired of looking at me in that Resevoir Dog Elvis pose. Hmnnn, Reservoir Hound Dog, Sid, get me Tarentino on the phone yesterday. Gramlich, get me rewrite! Yesterday, Greg Loudon came by and I posed for him for the cover of the new trade edition of THE HOLY TERROR. Greg did the cover of FIENDS BY TORCHLIGHT and his work can be found in his sketchbook CRUEL & UNUSUAL, and I basically posed as one of the Painkiller's victims. I went downtown after work on Saturday to take a few background photos with my disposable Kodak from CVS, kind of showing Greg my idea of the vanishing point of the cover, I guess. He will be taking similar shots of that alley with the elevated train tracks with his digital camera. The alley runs behind the Chicago Theater and actually looked much different in 1989, the year the novel is set. Its called Benton Place and the background buildings were not even under construction, the parking garage to the right was the old Trailways bus terminal, with Mammy's Restaurant in front. I took other photos, but the main one was of that alley where the Painkiller put the novel in full motion. The other shot is of the theater's fire escapes--I love fire escape photos, all angles and metal--and a quick shot of pigeons in the moment before the Orange Line pulled in. This would be the el line you see in the background of the alley shot....Wayne