Two days of mortal hell and I got $400.00 cash at the end, handed to me by a girl who looked like a young Loni Anderson. I walked the subway pretending I was a guy named Sonny who had just made a deal in the bowels of Chicago. Yep, I have no life. Got up at 5:30 every morning, got home at 7:30 at night. Rush hour blues, had to go past the Loop towards the Hancock Building and then west. Missed a 70 degree day on Wednesday and met yesterday from the morning onward in rain and wind. Plastic chairs, no water or drinks, twenty minute lunches. A guy that talked like William Hurt if he had a broom up his ass all the way to his mouth was Mr. Pissy and his character was offset by Liz, who reminded me of the Cerevik girls of long ago, when I worked at The Gap in 1980. Without saying anything about how I spent those days, I can say that just before, ah, deliberations, a woman lawyer from NJ gave, um, closing arguments. I was in the front row, 36 of us in all, and whatever perfume she had on was enough to sway me into admitting a crime against my country. A bit of grey in her hair, she looked like Eartha Kitt circa 1966 playing the Bride of Frankenstein in a purple blazer. However you might think I described her, trust me. Wow. But anyhow, this explains my absence, fingers healing from gripping a clipboard and writing forty pages of cramped notes kept me off the keyboard here. I walked the subway as Sonny mostly to avoid the rush hour but to no avail. Yesterday, the rain was my nemesis. But I can still recall the lawyer, and I have fabricated a portion of her name, so Melissa Melendez will soon be a character in HOLLOWPOINT, my current project with John Kewley. I also missed out on the death of Charles Unruh, which I'll write about tomorrow.
OK, so I'm working on this story HOLLOWPOINT with Horatio Salt, the guy who hooked me in on @joymotel. I tell him this story, back in 1978 I'm washing dishes at Sam A****ino's Sandwich Shop. Well, it was really called Pa's, but no one called it that. Same had a wife who looked like Carly Simon and they had just bought a new apartment in this huge building that is actually still behind the Red Lobster at 95th and Southwest Highway. One Monday near the end of July, he heads out to Mirabelli's Furniture on 103rd and Cicero to look at couches. Rush hour on a Monday. Three guys get out of a van and shotgun him away. No witnesses. Sam had the place as a front for a chop shop. After about a month of closing the place by myself and riding my bike home at midnight down SW Highway, which just about led to my backyard, I quit, because there were always (or so it seemed) suspicious looking cars parked across the way, when there was no reason for there to be any vehicle parked. In front of a bridal shop? a martial arts studio? I quit in August and before the end of the month, the place was torched. I want to say it was a month to the day of the killing, but I honestly can't recall. The photos above show what is now taking up the place the furniture place once stood, so yeah, no witnesses. I don't blame anybody, though. The third photo is simply there because I like old buildings that actually have a name. But that strip mall between Rosie's and Pluto's is where Sammy got his. It wasn't too long after the place was torched that I started working with the Elvis band.
Here is my June post over on STORYTELLERS UNPLUGGED. I posted a different photo, also taken on a bus, though at 87th and Central Park in the city. The one on SU is of the mannequin in that art shop.
Yearn For A Dream
Wayne Allen Sallee
June 28th 2009
We finally got our mid-90s here, so I’m listening to Cannonball Adderley and Charlie Parker. In the stinking summer subways of Chicago, the best thing you can hear is someone playing a saxophone with a pile of coins inside the case on the floor. One summer I heard a guy playing “I Can See Clearly Now,” and I can still see the moment, maybe fifteen years later, stopped in time. This temperature is great for me, health-wise, though I’m still one fingered, I can type for longer stretches, and this late at night I feel less tormented, as I sweat on the keyboard. Never at peace, just less tormented. Maybe that’s why men play the sax in the bowels of the city.
I am almost finished with a novel I’ve been ghostwriting, 91K out of 94K. I am actually excited, the original manuscript was turned on its head, but the author and I have worked closely so that the book is still his own. I’m sure with all of you novelists on board here, you know that feeling, being able to sit down and immediately be in the moment, know who does what next as the last five or ten minutes of the book’s life ticks down. I could say that I know that feeling from my short fiction, but not in the same way, as I always have the last line and title written before I start something.
I write my best in the evenings, and so I’ve taken advantage of summer, not wanting it to slip away so fast. I hurt from typing, but not everything is fine motor motion. This past week, I went kayaking for eight miles on the Chicago River, with the rains causing the river to be three feet higher and loaded with dead rats. As a kid, I saw a syndicated b&w cliffhanger-type thing on Garfield Goose, “Journey To The Beginning of Time,” which ran about 60 chapters. These guys go canoeing in Lincoln Park after being at the Museum of Science and Industry here in Chicago, go under a bridge and end up in prehistoric time and there’s some really cool stop action filming. I can only remember two guys’ names, Tony and JoJo, and it was kind of a rip to find out at the end that all 60 chapters turned out to be a dream of JoJo’s after falling asleep on a bench by the T. Rex exhibit. Well, a gyp, as we said back in the day. Also went to Taste of Chicago and had lunch with a few people in the Loop, came up with street talk and story titles as I rode the el. This last mostly comes from people being on their cell phones. I always wonder why the hell people are on the phone all the time, what did they do before cell phones?
What is the deal with the current trends in publishing? Some dude got a five figure advance from HarperCollins for a book that consists of, well, funny “tweets” on Twitter. Thing is, he has an email set up for people to send him these examples, which then leads me to believe that people will just make up funny entries. Now, there are some odd things I come across, the few times I’m on Twitter nowadays, my favorite being my writer friend Maurice Broaddus writing “I can’t believe I’m up this late trying to buy a pool for my son’s frog.” Mind you, no one would get this unless they have nieces who have Webkins. But I contacted my agent about this Twitter event, and suggested he market @joymotel, the Twitter novel I wrote with John Kewley (our hook being the review in the Boston Phoenix and the fact that John and I have never met or spoken on the phone.) You look at, say, Project Gutenberg, and you have bookshelf to ubernet. The new trend seems to be the reverse. Its no longer “What happens on Twitter stays on Twitter.” Another example is HARRY POTTER SHOULD HAVE DIED, which is entirely filled with speculations that had been posted on message boards on said ubernet. So I again contacted my agent, and working with a fellow in Los Angeles, have started writing LOST’S LONG CON, which intersperses a blog about the television show LOST that has been five years running with new material consisting of the two of us doing a Siskel & Ebert routine. The pitches can’t hurt, and for once in my life I’m looking at what’s on the shelves and knowing I have the time to write something that might slip through the window before the next trend hits, presumably “anecdotes involving iPhones,” and yes, you heard it here first, folks.
I suppose that if there is a topic to be discussed here beyond my usual ramblings, it is the net-to-shelf thing going on. I suppose it is a good thing, encouraging people to go out and buy a damn book, yet there is something vaguely insidious about it. If PK Dick were alive today, he’d find a way to write a great novel about it, likely involving corporate mind-control. He would certainly have invented the word UbikNet.
I’ve been taking a mess of photos, I always used to as references, and I have a Flickr account. Always use a disposable camera. Sometimes a multiple shot, but usually I want it to be a karma-like thing. In the last issue of WIRED, Hideki Ohmori talks about disposable cameras. A lot of what he says is right on target with my general feelings towards social networking, and I do have my toes in the water, but don’t really plan on dog-paddling daily on Twitter and Typepad and LinkedIn and Plaxo. Also, though no one asked, Facebook might as well be the Chicago River, in my opinion. I get more emails from FB than I do regular mail, and when I politely reply on FB, I then find myself replying to five or six other friends who have replied to my original reply, even though no one asked. Do I sound like Andy Rooney now, or what? I’m glad I don’t have his eyebrows. Imagine Rooney’s eyebrows on Larry King’s face. Yeah, good luck getting that image out of your head now.
Anyhow, Ohmori closes his interview by saying this. “We do not always want a faithful representation of reality. Sometimes we yearn for a dream.” Hopefully my photo will post; I took the picture while the bus I was on passed 91st and Cicero.
Enjoy July, my unseen friends. Call or hug a veteran next weekend, after you watch YouTubes of what’s going on in the streets of Tehran.
These are the rest of the ill-fated Indianapolis trip. The price for that pale son of a bitch hot dog should have been a warning. I do enjoy Greyhound, though. I like being on the bus at night, the only one awake. Seeing a red dot that might be a Coke machine a half-mile away at a gas station. Horatio Salt told me before I left that there are always bus stories. Richard Matheson wrote a few, his ownself.
I'm still getting notes about my head. Its OK right now, earlier I had a screaming headache, and I don't even want to talk about yesterday. As long as I don't get double-vision, I'm cool. After the contusions in my head after the accident in 1989, I described the headaches as like having a twisty nail hammered into my head, yanked out, then punched in just...a...little...bit deeper. This wouynd here, its cake. Not good cake, mind you.
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.
Well, I have come to the realization that I evidently cannot die. Earlier tonight I had another encounter with the dreaded Closet Light Bulb. You might recall my post from back in August, whereas I shattered the bulb with my superhuman polak/hillbilly strength and blew the electricity through half the house. A few hours ago I pushed the Mortality Envelope a bit higher (lower?)and, really, its not like I set out to do these things. The cord fell off the ceiling fixture last night, so I unscrewed the bulb and went to bed. Bought a new ceiling fixture, one of those circular things, from the Ace hardware, which constituted a half-mile walk when the mid-afternoon temps were at their highest, about ten below. So later, I'm listening to one of the CD mixes GW Ferguson sent me, and I'm on my little stool, ready to combat modern technology. I take the old fixture off, thinking, hey I'm fine, the last time I touched the filament in the bulb, and said bulb was gone. You can see where I'm going with this. I put my hand up with the new fixture and OF COURSE I touched the green wire and the red wire together. Last time, I kicked the stool over and dropped to the floor. This time, I just found myself on the floor, I had been listening to a song about Charles Whitman, the Texas Tower sniper, but then I was hearing "Do You Think I'm Psycho, Mama?" The song in between that I (kinda sorta thankfully) missed was "The Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun". So there I was, maybe 6-7 minutes later and about five feet across the room. So, my theory is this: either I can't die, or every time I do, one of my alternate Earth selves is shunted over here. Wouldn't be surprised if that is what happened to PK Dick every time he OD'd on the 200 amphetamines he downed each day. I'm thinking of a story I might write and send to F&SF, where Earth-20 me, who is a very successful writer and still has all his hair to give him a David McCallum kind of look, ends up here and finds he has to suddenly be balding plus lead a pathetic and wretched life.
Speaking of PK Dick, I've also mentioned here about my joint venture with "Horatio Salt" @joymotel over on Twitter, the link to the blog (for those who'd rather read it chapter by chapter) is on the left. Well, it was mentioned today in the Boston Phoenix, by Mark Miliard, and in a second article, names @joymotel as one of the top ten Twitter novels-in-progress, with ours being the only one shared between two writers, and who have never met nor talked, no less. Here's the excerpt.
Novel idea: Twitter fiction
Post-modernism, post by 140-character post
By MIKE MILIARD | January 14, 2009 | Recommended By 2 People
Toronto ad man John Kewley — he writes concisely for a living — likens Twitter, teeming with constant updates, to a global "brainstream" where users can submerge themselves in others' thoughts, feelings, and existential particulars. So he's co-writing a language-dense, James Joyce– and Philip K. Dick–inspired Twitter sci-fi narrative, Joy Motel, the plot of which plugs the reader into the protagonist's stream of consciousness.
Kewley's writing partner, Wayne Allen Sallee, is someone he's never met. ("We've never even spoken on the telephone.") Nonetheless, they correspond online, and "share a wavelength," and one day, when Sallee tweeted Kewley with "a snippet of a film noir–sounding sentence," Kewley replied in kind. "I sent him one back, to sort of build on his, and we did about 20 of those."
The pair banged on back and forth, braced by the brevity and immediacy mandated by the medium. "You can just jump on there because you have half a thought, and then an hour later, Wayne will respond," says Kewley. "We don't know where this is going. It's real-time writing on Twitter."
I signed up with Twitter back in August, figuring it would be a good discipline to write coherently in only 140 characters, and if someone were to check my list of followers & those I follow, they'd see wayyy more people in advertising than writers. This is thanks to Paul Isakson and, to a lesser extent, Sid Williams. Here's the deal. There's a show on AMC called MAD MEN, centered around the Madison Avenue advertising agency of Sterling-Cooper, circa 1962. Don Draper is the creative director on said show, and Paul decided to take on the role of Don Draper on Twitter. It was an experiment of his, he's in advertising up in Minneapolis, not with AMC. I saw Sid make a funny remark and I jumped in, apologizing, saying that Sid thought it was 2008 because he had been hit on the head. From that point on, I was in 1962, whenever I talked to "Don," always keeping it in the past. We never did send messages much, but it was neat trying to squish 1962 brand names out of my brain, like Oasis cigarettes. Paul eventually stopped the charade, wrote about it on his blog, but it was fun while it lasted, as I now have a lot of 1962 references for when my stories are set in the past of my Humboldt Park childhood.
I call what Paul tried a "thought experiment," a phrase used by physicists and mathematicians. I figure, why can't a writer of fiction have a thought experiment of his own? As I mentioned above, its all about discipline. I was talking to Capcom about LOST, and how I long ago thought the Numbers represented people (and this was before viewers learned of the Oceanic 6; there are six "cursed" numbers in a doomsday equation, for those who do not watch the show). People would ask me to explain why I thought a number could be a person, and I couldn't explain, its not like I was thinking outside the box, it was like thinking out loud. Brainstorming an idea for a story. A thought experiment. Sid has started up a series of podcasts and I had another idea I visualized in my head, to make YouTubes of someone reacting as a short story is heard. Think about it, a podcast is basically someone reading to no one. So why not do a short story that has a person reacting (albeit staged) to the bulemic zombie or the obsessive-compulsive ghosts? It may not even work well, but I can see it in my mind, and, as with everything these days, the Net is all about self-promotion. So at some point in the future you might be seeing a few WillySid/SillyWayne videos when you hit search on YouTube.
Back to Don Draper. I made a few friends in advertising on Twitter, from Gulnar Ozturk in Turkey to Horatio Salt in Toronto. Horatio and I started a riff where Salt & Sal would have 140 character vignettes whenever the mood struck us. Last month we combined our individual thought experiments and started Joy Motel. Its a stream of information (replacing consciousness) novel, with its own blog for people to follow, though it intrigues people to see a new entry pop up out of nowhere. Like overhearing three sentences of a conversation on the street. Joy Motel might be the novel a man was writing when he died, we don't know yet. Horatio and I are still processing the information. We seem to be having success, whereas I failed miserably when I tried to send a message to Gulnar in Turkish, as it made little sense to her.
Anyways, this is part Happy 2009 promotion for @JoyMotel, the link at the left, along with Horatio's and Paul's sites, and my general discussion of thought experiments. I'm curious if Bob or Charles have had similar brain flashes, where something bounces around your head like Harlan Ellison in a Philip K. Dick novel, yet you can't explain it until all of a sudden it makes perfect sense. I'm sure it works for all of us when concocting our stories, but I'm thinking the comparison is more along the likes of deja vu from what Charles calls 'iceberg memories.' Or is it just me who is crazy?
First, the Playing Card Man. All good titles for the story, Steve, I thought of Travis McGee's boat, THE BUSTED FLUSH. Bob, he couldn't use the deck correctly because the cards were already on the tracks, each train blowing a few on the platform. Funny the train only blew red cards, I have an idea about how the story will go, thx, Bob. Horatio, like your thoughts, I'll use all three in the story, because that's what I do. Onward.
This is the last postcard I received from Harry, postmarked October 2nd. Those damn turbines. Years ago, I read a Starman comic and in the heat of battle someone asked Jack Knight who they were fighting and all he could say was "Answers on a postcard." I assume it might mean that the answer is short enough to put on a postcard, past that, I really do not know. I'll have photos soon, when they get developed, of Harry's photo lab and billboards. A photo of Sean Doolittle a decade past in the corner, me as the enigmatic Mister 1934 from a Woolworth's photo booth. His dad, now 80, Edgar Allen Poe. Odd little things filling the margins. And on a shelf, rubberbanded (new word, guys, use it), a stack of postcards going back to 1995. I would assume they were in order, because I could recall the Captain America postcard as one I bought at Chicago Comics in September, I think I sent Bob a Ditko Spider-Man that same day. A load of free postcards they'd have in slots at the Red Lion, for bands or hair products. One was in green ink, which baffled me, I don't recall ever using a green ink pen. Harry's last words on the postcard, Climo Bumpkid, your reporter on the fringe...
I've added Horatio Salt to my "Unusual Subjects" blog links off to the left, feel free to check the guy out. He can put words together like nobody's business, occasionally with a photo or art as inspiration. (Horatio also hipped me to Tumblr, which will keep a running entry of any number of places I jot things down, be it this blog here, Twitter, Facebook (which I treat as the kids next door having an all night party, giving away gifts and joining clubs, but, hey, its me inside just saying that I can't keep up). WayneManor.tumblr.com. (I did forget to check if I could hook up my Bobby The Mitch blog, something to look into at a later date.) Tumblr is cool, like keeping three notebooks together in the same spacetime. Well, back to what I started out talking about. No, no, go read Horatio's work, I can wait...
...ok. Glen Orbik certainly has more Daniel Brereton to him than Alex Ross when it comes to comics covers, if you saw his work for DC, you'd see that he's the only guy who can make Superman look swarthy. Big-lipped swarthy. There was a series in the early double-aughts--its what I call this decade, after Jethro Bodine wanting to be a spy like that double-aught seven guy--that DC put out called AMERICAN CENTURY. The covers are flat out beautiful, you'd see the newest issue on the shelf and you'd swear you could reach through the cover and touch the characters' hats or bellies or feel the breeze in most every scene. I found these covers at his website. I wish I could see everything this way, I'd certainly be a better writer.
