New Year's Ghosts of Block 37, circa 1988

I've learned long ago that I'm happier to be by myself, at least in the sense that I am not as tormented inside as I am when I'm around others. And, through this diabolical and dastardly computer, I have made friends in all corners of the world, Etain in Johannesburg, Steve in Christchurch,Kees in The Netherlands, Jaime in Tasmania (he's the guy who found a copy of my novel in a used bookstore in Sydney), and have ended the year with a comic book deal through a publisher in New Delhi. I even traveled outside of the United States for the first time in my life, going to a convention in Toronto in April. That said, as much as I'd like to visit any and all of my new friends and witness their cities and towns through their eyes and not their text, I fear that I shall always be anchored to Chicago. One block in particular, the one I centered on in the novel that Jaime bought. Block 37 is bustling these days, the Oriental building across the street displaying signs for WICKED, the studios for our CBS afilliate Channel 2 being built on the northern side of Randolph Street, where the Treasure Chest and the Burger King and my make-believe Marclinn Rainey Home For The Handicapped stood in the center of the block, where that abandoned building appears in the photos and the homeless slept atop steam vents in the winter months. The entire block was torn down in the summer of 1989 and remained empty for almost twenty years. I've yet to come up with a dedication page for the anniversary edition of THE HOLY TERROR, but I think that I'll likely have to dedicate the book to The Ghosts of Block 37.

Midnight Confessions At The Rendering Plant

Bubbly Creek, the finale of "Shank of The Night", blips of methane forever rising from carcasses of animals (and mob victims) long dead, the former throwaways from the Stockyards, long gone. But the ghosts still ripple in the waters beneath the Ashland Avenue bridge. Several times, I have taken the el here, climbed the fence illegally, and tossed my own detritus into the waters, on the many boards lining the rocky shores, seeing if the currents of the South Branch of the Chicago River would move north, south, or simply leave the tossed items doing pirouettes, like a drowned ballerina. I am cleansing my past, using two scans of items I rediscovered as I continue the decimation of my belongings. The metal object came from a Greyhound bus bathroom door; I had been traveling to Louisville to get picked up by Cousin Slick, and spent much of the latter half of the ride talking to a Cherokee fellow who was going to visit his father, a neurosurgeon, in Elizabethtown. E-town, if you are a local. We were in the aisle seats just in front of the bathroom, I opened the door and the handle fell off. We both made the appropriately shocked looks and I pocketed my interesting new item. I parted ways with the Indian, John Cloud, and went to Shelbyville to watch Katrina destroy New Orleans. I also found a Dick book I had thought borrowed and gone. Philip K. Dick was one of the finest writers alive, even though he was fucking crazy. In a good way, though, except maybe towards the end when he thought a sentient spaceship named Valis was circling the Earth and monitoring him. The first time I felt that suicide would be simple was when I read THE DARK-HAIRED GIRL, which in part included letters from the Oregon Mental Hospital he had been admitted to voluntarily. In MARTIAN TIME-SLIP, he describes his theory for autism in a throwaway fashion, and THE CLANS OF THE ALPHANE MOON (circling Alpha Centauri, not of my hemisphere, Etain and Steve and Jamie Turner down in Tasmania), where each city is self-contained studies in mental disorders, the Obsessive-Compulsives, the Bipolars, the hapless and the sad, the manic futurists and those with eyes mirroring the empty void. The title story in I HOPE I SHALL ARRIVE SOON is an incredible short story about a man who cannot be "put under" for the ten year trip to his new home on a planet circling the star LD4, and so the ship's computer, with limited access, creates ten years of images into Victor Kemmings' brain, from his own past. But in true PK Dick guilt, the memories keep getting bobbled by memories of helping a cat eat a bird when he was four, the ownership of a signed Fabulous Freak Brothers poster, and images of his first wife, Martine. The trip ends, Martine has been contacted in the Sirius star system and is there to meet him, but in true PKD fashion, Kettering continues to think the reality is computer-induced, he thinks his hands go through a wall, or a TV is hollow, or a bee-sting is visible on his arm, a bee he once saved from a spiders web. PKD was a master of solipsism, the idea being that the universe is only what you can directly perceive; in my case right now, I am aware of my keyboard, a lamp, my Oceanic Airlines coffee mug on a stone coaster from Johannesburg, and my Psycho-Pirate action figure. The rest of the universe, even though I hear wind outside a window I am not looking at, is only an assumption. So...what did I confess to the happy dead of Bubbly Creek? In my late teens, I was walking along Cicero Avenue with my friend Dan, I saw an orange cat and spooked it, it ran into traffic and I watched the rear tire of a burnt sienna town car bing off its head. I went to get the cat, feeling guilty as all hell, and held it in my arms. He was able to walk, but I knew he had a concussion. (There were no veterinarians open at that time of night). I walked with him, talking to him for two hours, he looked at me with knowing eyes, fell asleep, and died. I cry when I think of this despicable moment in my life that occurred one summer Friday night 26 years ago. Like PKD and the weight of memory's madness.

Run, Jonny Algiers, Run!

Jonny came into existence the same year Forrest Gump popped into the world's collective brain pan. Algiers is the scary little ghetto across the waters, past New Orleans. Jonny had been Johnny, but AOL insisted that I could only use 5 characters (WTF?! to use Etain's parlance), so I made my P. I. into something more like Dashiell Hammett's Continental Op, and settled on Jonny. This was back in 1997, now I could name him Rumpelstiltskin_Wojiehowicz_Algiers and AOL wouldn't bat an electronic eye (yes, I am on the Echelon watch list, I keep using coded words like Rumsfeld sucks donkey dick and my threats of wearing a blood-stained clown suit on the steps of the Capitol (or maybe the local Wal-Mart) and yelling ATTICA! ATTICA! like Al Pacino in DOG DAY AFTERNOON. So there you have it, Jonny Algiers. Photos taken by Dan Szostak, AKA Cousin Slick, who also took the shots of my new business cards. That's the way the mop flops, kids.

Much Better, Thanks

Thanks for all your comments on my last post, everyone. I explained to Etain that I used the wolves metaphor as just being a cool image, in truth my daily life is a constant dog paddle, trying to keep my nose and mouth above water at least 50% of the time. The hexagonal pink pills I take for BPD (thx, Jr., didn't know it had an abbreviation as simple as, say, MS or OCD) really do nothing to stop my physical pain. So (again, referring to Jr's remark) if I were to suddenly go on a rampage, I'd be more like a bulemic zombie than a Viking berserker. The FoxNews cameras woulds be trained on me as I tripped walked right into the reporters because I can't focus out of my right eye, no depth perception. A complete MRI of my body could be made into an interactive video game. Thanks to Charles, because I even learn from what I right (though sometimes I do not listen to what I learn, if this makes sense), and it was good to hear from Stewart after a long absence. Oh, the photos. Right. As you can see, the medical facilities in Tyler, Texas are much more advance than here in Chicago, particularly for a guy with no health insurance. So while Dr. Sid has all the proper tools to give that bearded fellow a bikini wax, I'm left with fellow writer Jeff Osier winning a bet reagarding Richard Denning and John Agar an thus getting his wish to take me into an Oak Park basement and drill a hole into my skull. Fun was had by all. Except maybe Dr. Sid.

Strangers On A Blog

Most of you are aware of the Hitchcock film STRANGERS ON A TRAIN, where two killers swap victims so that they both have the perfect alibis. A friend of mine, let's call him Thibedoux, is giving some thought to change some of his intend blog entries with another friend, let's call that guy Boudreaux. This way, either can write entries about their specific jobs at, oh, say NASA and the hidden military base near Dulce, New Mexico, and no one could find entries on Google; say someone typed in Tyler Thibedoux NASA and found a blog entry where the guy wrote about a secret project where chihuahuas were being raised from birth in zero gravity. Well, he'd likely be fired. Or disappeared, as they say in novels. But if that same Google entry was for Stashu Boudreaux NASA, either nothing would come up, or if by some bizarre circumstance, that same secret project info came up, well, NASA wouldn't find anybody with Stashu's name. (If you need to know, Stashu is Stanley in Polish, and he is the guy Who Stole The Kishka? in the famous polka.) Well, everyone by now knows how convoluted my stories and ideas are. Mother Mary save us if I ever try to do something with Stewart Sternberg's flash fiction assignments. I suppose everyone is concerned with the graphics posted above my babblings. I work a crappy little Xerox machine at, uh, the hidden military base near Dulce, NM, yea, that's right, and this is what I get to print all freaking day. 196 page booklets on some freakish cult in Philadelphia that are an off-shoot of Freemasons. That job took almost 20 hours, yesterday and today. The root canal procedure was rather fast, but Elvis, Gladys and Vernon, is it too much to ask that I get to run the ten-color press when they are printed 32,000 copies of a blonde eating a vanilla ice cream cone? (Myself, I'd have chosen a redhead as a model, but I suppose the decision for a blonde was decided by some ad agency guy with a fixation on Kathryn Heigl or Lassie.) OK, "Thibedoux," the balls in your court.

in the mist, my werewolf calls

long day of cussing and swearing a blue streak, reminiscent of my years in purgatory behind a cheap desk downtown, my computer finally repaired on the cheap, the hard drive gone like a freight train gone like yesterday gone like a soldier in the civil war bang bang. did i have a back up disk? me? kinda sorta. i shall start a new blog of scanned photos, because these words, these photos will be here long after the beetles have feasted on my brain. each of you reading this, inundate me with photos. they will be safe. my belief is that the blogosphere will be the equivalent of the talking, spinning rings in the time machine. wayne allen sallee, alsip, illinois, thursday evening, 01 march 2007.

PS I HAVE FOUND OUT THAT THE HEALTH INSURANCE THAT I DO NOT HAVE COVERS MY CO-WORKERS FOR--GET THIS--BLACK LUNG DISEASE. HOW QUAINT AND DIRE AT THE SAME TIME. WORKING IN THE COAL MINES, GOIN DOWN DOWN DOWN...

Face Value

Many people commented on my post involving the men pacing the steam vents last Saturday, marking their territory. Charles Gramlich mentioned something that also happened to me, and I turned it into a story back in the days when I wasn't writing very good stories. Again I mention sucking with hyperlinks, so you can go to Razored Zen and read Charles' newer entries. Check my links at the left sidebar, below my horrid self-promotion. Back in the early 1980s, when I barely had money for bus fare, I was approached by a guy near the old Hotel Leland on Wabash, with exterior and interior shots provided. He was bearded, fairly lucid, and wanted to sell me pages of drawings and random thoughts from a stack of sheets in his hand. I still remember the stack, it was like order receipts on one of the pointed things in a low class restaurant. I explained that I could barely get home, the irony of the green and red building behind me not lost, and I promised him next time I would have a few extra dollars. But I have never seen him again, at a time when I would see the homeless often enough to know them by name, Jerome with his crippled leg pulled up under him like a broken puppet, Dave the guy with the Elvis sideburns, and Mike in the wheelchair, who became the model for Mike Surfer in my novel THE HOLY TERROR. But I never saw the bearded man with the drawings again, even though I was at the bus stop almost every day. Did he get a job? Did he take a bus to Portland? I ended up writing a story called "Face Value," which in my own ham-fisted way of writing in those first five years or so, was a story about my quest to find the man, culminating in following him into an alley, after spotting him after months of looking. Turns out the reason I wasn't seeing him was that the bearded face from real life was a mask, one of many skinned faces he had on a wall in an old factory, my face likely to be the next. It appeared in Gorezone, an offshoot of Fangoria, and marked the first time that my name appeared on a cover of a magazine. This was 1990. The man and his drawings that were always out of my grasp had stayed in my head for almost six years. Maybe he had moved south to bother Charles or found his way via steamer to Johannesburg, where at least the weather is warmer all year round, and eventually he will run into Etain and she will write a story about him, as well. Sometimes it is those with nothing that allow us the six degrees of separation.

We Even Lost Superman

Etain had an interesting blog dealing with a book on writing prompts that she talked at length about in her usual brilliant multiple personality stream-of-consciousness way. What was interesting, though, was the majority of comments men made about what makes men cry. I was emailing both Sid and Dan earlier, and the thought kinda stayed in my head. I cried after 9/11, but not until I had a complete meltdown about two weeks later, when the reality of our new century sucker punched me. I wasn't able to write for weeks. I worked it through by writing a story which involved my niece Ashley, titled "I'll Never Be Able To Protect Her Again." Many times my stories answer questions that need to be answered before I can move on. Also, there is a country and western video of Kenny Rogers singing his song "The Last Ten Years." (Sorry, Etain, that its not Headbanger Ball time). There's a line that goes "we lost Johnny and June Carter Cash, we even lost Superman." Then he looks up at a shooting star and says "We miss you, Chris." I can tell you forever about my love for the words and voice of Johnny Cash (who incidentally passed on 9/11/03), but the only other sucker punch I got this century (not counting my two muggings), was when Christopher Reeve died in October of 04. It was a Sunday and I saw it on AOL as soon as the screen blipped on. I wept completely before even reading the story as my dial-up computer brought the images up so slowly. Crap. I'm actually welling up now, quite seriously. In my collections of stories, I list those recently passed, and I added Chris Reeve to FIENDS BY TORCHLIGHT even though I never knew him. I always say "I'll catch up with you and tell you how everything else played out." I can take my border collie out later and we can stare at the sky together and I can tell him that one day I am going to meet Superman.

Moon Suits & The Cows Who Love Them

I have been telling Sid and Etain, the two friends I usually email on a near-daily basis, that while our weather has me dressing in enough layers to make me look like a color-coordinated astronaut (quite a few people look like giant scoops of varied blends of yogurt or Play-Doh). Last night the last bus I could take broke down, I waited an hour for a bus in wind chills that were minus 30 degrees and pretty much seeing my life flash before my eyes, usually portions of my life that happened in the summer months. I thought of setting a fire, but all that was around me was frozen snow, and a briefly cackled like a hyena and wondered which layer of clothing would burn longest and that I wouldn't miss, and of course, cost the least amount. When I told Bart at work this morning, he said I should have walked to his house, maybe a half-mile away. I said that thought had also crossed my mind, but my legs were so cold, I moved like the Terminator would if he for some reason wore a diaper and for still another reason had crapped in them. Another bus finally showed up with a replacement driver, my feet warmed up about an hour after I arrived home, and I finally posted my photo of the cows looking at the meteor. That damn meteor was probably warmer than I about eighteen hours ago.