Faded Dreams On Division Street

 

FADED DREAMS OF DIVISION STREET
By Wayne Allen Sallee
    “A writer does well if in his whole lifetime he can tell the story of one street.” Nelson Algren lived those words hard and unflinchingly, delineating Division Street with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. The avenue was Polish Broadway in postwar Chicago. Algren revealed to us the rules of the con games, had us examine the failure in the faces passing beneath billboards unattainably high–higher than the El tracks in the days before those viaducts were barricades protecting the gentry from the housing projects, days when a shot and a beer only set you back fifteen cents.
    Division Street has changed over the last sixty years, surviving a Jeykll/Hyde transformation (like the old Sinatra hangout that became a Mexican Laundromat) to reemerge as a gentrified hangout for a new breed of clubbers. The Monarch beer signs are long faded, and no one urges you to open a bottle and draw off a glass of Drewery’s. These nights it’s a Leinie–Leinenkugel–on tap, or Rolling Rock, and the bartenders bring their own CDs to play during their shifts. Screw the juke, give the boys and girls a photo booth to drop their jingle in.
    The Leinies are two-fifty for an eight-ouncer, and you won’t find factory workers down this sad street anymore. What you will find are wannabe hipsters and perpetual grad students, skinheads, all-nighters and more than a few greying Svengalis nursing house bourbon with toothless mouths.
    The old men are the only ones who wince when the flash in the photo booth goes off. They know, better than any of us, that frozen moments are the worst of memories.
    In Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm, first published in 1949, Frankie Machine dealt illegal card games in the hushed back room of Schwiefka’s, with his pal and partner, Solly Saltskin steering the marks through the door: monotone poker faces in a seven-to-three world, the elevated train reminding them when it was time to move on. Sinatra played the starched-collared, morphine-addicted Francis Macjinek in Otto Preminger’s film, and his words”It’s all in the wrist with a deck or a cue” were a litany for the next minute being better than the last. Or, at least, no worse.
    The elevated train itself has moved on. Where Algren’s iron thunder once moved level with the second floor flats down Paulina, there is now only the occasional gunshot from one of the seven gangs that populate the neighborhood streets. The O’Hare-Douglas line–The Blue Line–is now a subway. The face of the North Side changed twenty-five years ago with the creation of Interstate 94, the Kennedy Expressway.
    Where Schweifka’s used to be, on the corner of Damen and Division, is a bar these days called The Rainbo Club. The steerer is gone, replaced by a bouncer, a black man with veins in his biceps as big as a nun’s reproaching finger, and the neon in the window clots his face. At seven in the evening you can still hear your own breath in the place. Eleven o’clock and it’s a hive of opinions.       
    Most of the crowd consists of students from the Art Institute downtown. The cheap housing and cheaper regentrification–you won’t see health bars or luxury condos crafted in incomprehensible shapes and colors–have kept the neighborhood from going to hell as more of the old-country people die off. And they do die off, because nobody along Division Street ever retires to a different city.
    A television series about people trapped on an island has ended, a show about advertising set in the 1960s is running a marathon so new viewers can play catch-up: a corner table of students discuss the good and the bad of both, a method of bonding that in Algren’s day involved the cheapest portable radio on wrestling nights perched behind the guy pouring the cheapest swill off the stick.
    Sarah is working on her Master’s in journalism at Northwestern and thinks the former show referred to the American Dream. Joe found the former to be an audience participation thing, noting that similar shows in the nineties didn’t rely on computer and marketing tie-ins. Yong Koo, an Art Institute expatriate who both smiles and sneers in a zippered leather jacket befitting the best of the Elvis impersonators, would rather talk about Japanese monster movies.
    R. E. M. starts in “Electrolite,” Michael Stipe singing about a girl whose eyes are burning holes into some guy, he’s gasoline, he’s burning green, dig? There’s a painting of a group of people with bowling-ball shaped faces that shines when the flash in the photo booth goes off. The bouncer bouncing as he sees fit.
    File in, fill up and fall out.
    Where the poker table at Schweifka’s would have been, a Road Kings pinball machine now sits, with one of those Hamm’s waterfall signs off-center to the right. The music mix runs from the smooth piano of Duke Ellington, new waves bands that were famous when most of the clientele were in diapers, then back the Stan Getz on the sax, followed by John Coltrane, the essential sixties hard bop blower himself. Then back to Echo and The Bunnymen. Flashbacks and deja vu by the bottle.
    And you have to shout to be heard, so you know who smokes because they have nicotine breath. Or the kids just old enough to tentatively try Schnapps. No apple martinis in this joint.
    In the men’s room, once you look past the lolling skinheads, faintly visible in pencil on a pocked grey wall, you read “All in the wrist with a deck or a cue.” Someone hadn’t forgotten. The Svengali, perhaps? Below it, a cartoon caveman tells the casual reader that his two-dimensional dick is as hard as bedrock.
*****
    Division Street by day. Attain street level on the northwest corner of Milwaukee and Ashland and get assaulted by the smells of Mexican fajitas and chicken fried a la Kentucky. The neon stretches in the direction of the setting sun. Milwaukee used to be nicknamed Lunchpail avenue because of the large numbers of factory workers who walked to their places of employment, lunch boxes in their lunch hooks.
    These days, these years, there are plenty of listless bodies with ten-yard stares. Nobody back from Iraq or Afghanistan with the war jitters, just men who’ve had pet monkeys on their backs since Reaganomics. Your best bet is to just start walking west.
    Any Wood Street beat copper will tell you the only people who pay attention to their surroundings are cops and crazies. Writers might be added to that short list. Nelson Algren, in Chicago: City on the Make:
    “...it’s still a godforsaken spastic, a cerebral palsy natural among cities, clutching at the unbalanced air. Top-heavy, bleeding and blind. Under a toadstool-colored sky.
    “Maybe we all went to work too young.”
    But on a Friday night it’s time to put the week behind. Walk down the concrete under a sky of blue-green (maybe it was a bad day when Nelson wrote his prose poem), and see the horizon severed by three flats zigzagging down on either side. On an abandoned building just this side of Hermitage, flyers for new clubs further north are plastered over graffiti that most likely reads Long Live The FALN!, a throwback to the Puerto Rican terrorist movement of the 70s.
    And, for some inexplicable reason, the Cobras and the Latin Kings spray their gang symbols on garage doors along side streets.
    Bottles from a nearby liquor store litter the dead grass alongside each stoop where you can still hear the echoes of pitched pennies. Brown and white labels for the winos’ breakfasts, Night Train Express and Richard’s Wild Irish Rose. Nothing but the best, you can go find your damn malt liquor somewhere else, dad.   
    At the corner on Mary Court, there’s an apteka–a Polish drugstore–a vertical sign painted in the 1950s, there is no doubt, with a  nurse taking a man’s blood pressure. The man was had his hat and jacket slung over a vacant chair. A busy piece of art, no doubt. And we all know JFK killed the hat by not wearing one at his inauguration. Does anyone know why nurses stopped wearing those vaguely Puritanical white wedges on their lovely coiffed heads?
    Then there’s a Baptist church, its architecture made it look as if it was built by hand with whatever materials were handy. An empty lot. A taco joint with an overwhelming smell of jalapeños that is overwhelmed by the chlorine seeping from the Turkish-Russian bath house. Finally, the big time. A holdover from the last generation, and the one before that. No televisions, no air conditioning, and no more wars. For just a little while.
    Enough time for the baby boomer generation, and eye blinks that flip images like dated photos from a Polaroid Land camera, its 2011, and those post-war kids are half-century men who scratch their balding heads and wonder why this young hipster crowd feels the need to change everything.
    It’s the Polish Triangle, is what it is. This from a rumdum propped on a stoop littered with pennies and matchbooks from Sophie’s Busy Bee. Bright yellow, dull copper. No sun to make the colors wink. Milwaukee to Damen, then down Division, right back to Milwaukee. Remember RB’s, that big clothing store? Two stories, it was.
    It’s a gee-dee sports bar now is what it is, and you realize there was no bum, not even a stoop. Just a penny staring at you. Pick it up and toss it into the street, maybe it will fall in the gutter. Just cross the damn street already. Cross over to Hermitage.
    Phyllis’s Musical Inn, 1800 West Division, established 1954.
    The current owner, Clemont Jaskot, was born on the second floor two years after the grand opening. Sit down on a red-topped stool and tap the cigarette-scarred bar vas though you have caffeine nerves. A Wood Street squad rolls by outside. Clem draws an Old Style from the stick and tells his tale.
    He says how for most of the people in this neighborhood it’s a second home. Dressed in jeans with suspenders and a faded Cubs t-shirt, Jaskot, moving in on middle age, gesticulates alternately with hands and eyebrows as he mops up an errant spill from one of the kegs at the edge of the bar. As he turns, you can see Sandburg’s name on the jersey. Ryan Sandburg, another Chicago ghost.
    Algren would grin that lop-sided grin. He wasn’t Bukowski, he wasn’t Burroughs. Hell, he wasn’t even Philip K. Dick. He wrote a handful of novels, a couple dozen short stories, all self-contained within a mile radius. Henry Chinanski made the rounds, he’s still alive unlike Bukowski. Algren died in 1981 and left his ghosts in every doorway. Molly-O might just be freshening up in the ladies’ room at Phyllis’s. There’s a mermaid on the door.   
    Jaskot wipes his hands off, the guy grins like he could talk anybody into anything at all. He tells of the type of clientele, construction workers, painters. The nine-to-fivers from downtown. (Not the Loop, that phrase is unknown here, because nobody on Division Street goes further than Ashland Avenue.) The hipsters show up on the weekends, for the bands. Their kind slowly bleeds into the side streets.
    Few have the confidence of fictional Frankie Machine.
    Jaskot said they worked hard to keep the place, he’s talking about mom and dad, keep the place going after the riots. He was a kid back in 1968, but the near north side was a war zone all the way to Humboldt Park and those FALN bastards. Soon after, Martin Luther King’s death made the city burn. Everything cooled down, the world revolving like an empty barstool after last call.
    Jaskot goes back to work, the crowd builds and fades. Outside, a new glass high-rise royally screws with the horizon, and just next door, a man looks down at his waist and he could easily have been checking for a gunshot would as to see if his fly was open.
    Division Street: Irregulars welcome.
    The man checking his fly intended to become drunker than a hoot owl. Standing beneath an Old Style sign that read Zimne Piwo, he had hard muscular arms with liver spots on his hands that seemed out of place.
    Francis Majcinek, our ghost guide, used to lament in the pages of Algren’s The Man With The Golden Arm that every other doorway led into a tavern and you had as much on the other guy as he had on you. You find a place, you make it your territory. Liver Spots reminisced on the Orange Lantern, a place from back in the day when taverns put something behind their names. No gee-dee sports or theme bars. Dice girls, cigarette girls, cats that sleep atop a framed picture of Pope John Paul II , and a light behind the bar that went from green to yellow to red. Open to last call to get the hell out, all of you bums.
    He goes back in the way he came, into the Gold Star, an SRO motel above it, the weight crushing down on the painted logo. There’s a lipless wonder that everyone calls Cocobolo, making advances down the bar as if each stool inhabited by a female is a slot machine. Accordion music pumps out of an old jukebox and Cocobolo I shooed out like a fly ball 1moving past the Toyota sign out onto Sheffield.
    Time slows and backs up, the last stop being The Bop Shop, at 1807 West Division. Home to live jazz bands, in present day it is a failed sushi bar, the insides gutted to flecks of grey. What did they expect?
    Ten years back, huge booths with pea-green upholstery, a painting of Charlie “Bird” Parker wailing away, not far from Charlie Minus, John Coltrane, Bessie Smith, and Lester Young. All observing the stage from their individual places above those pea-green booths. The guy running the bar smoked Wantons, talk was small, 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. In a few minutes Ron Dewar on tenor sax will play with The Holly Cole Trio. Until then, a generic cop show flashes silently on a television angled below a Hamm’s sign. The beer refreshing.
    There’s a cat named Boogie, he used to come in during the summer, same as it is now, whenever the music was playing. The cat’s owner moved, the jazz cat of Division Street stayed. Word was he somehow helped a cop named Rizzi arrest a felon in the Norbe Laundromat, but that is open to conjecture.
    Before the Bop Shop, the joint had been the Lucky Stop, and it was Stanley Wozieniek that had installed those pea-green booths that were turned to rubble by fools a half century later. After he died, the place was run by his widow Mania, until her death in 198. Remember: no one retires to the suburbs from Division Street.)
    The Szostaks and the Mamachs who lived out their downtime away from the factories are slowly being replaced by any number of ethnic names. Mexican, Hindi, Jamaican, throw a pin on a wall map. You find them all, some of them students, others professionals, at Leo’s Luncheonette, next to...
    The Bop Shop is gone. Phyllis’s has evening hours now, the construction workers are building townhouses in Wicker Park now. It’s early summer 2011. A redhead named Kara serves eggs sunny-side up, hash browns and steaming coffee. Nix on the decaf.  The counter is a backwards L, taking quick glances at Kara’s green eyes is like looking at the moon before it fades behind the nighttime clouds. Leo’s is another holdout in a city that is perpetually changing.
    Algren’s Frankie Machine was a card dealer strung out on morphine who ended up swinging, in the worst sense, in a flophouse on Maypole Street back in 1948. Forget the spoon-fed crap Preminger put into the film with Sinatra and Novak. Forget celluloid, look for the word.
    Read about the real Machine, strung out on hope and trouble, on bad dreams and trouble. That was Division Street, then. The neighborhood changes, ever so slowly. Most trendy clubs look the same from the outside but for the Bud Lite neon signs shoved into the windows.
    The horizon of buildings is the same, the broken grin of a prizefighter. Sonny Liston. Gorgeous George. More ghosts. Why the hell would you want to leave anyway, baby? Where else can you haunt in peace.
    Sure, that tenor sax from a decade ago, moving up and down can still be hypnotic, but it doesn’t produce troubled dreams anymore. Division Street is on its way back up. Most of us never knew it was gone.
                                Wayne Allen Sallee
                                Burbank, Illinois
                                27 Mar 11

Stop Smoking Crack and Eat Bologna Sandwiches

My February 28th essay for Storytellers Unplugged.

Stop Smoking Crack and Eat Bologna Sandwiches
                               
Sorry. Busy looking at my screen saver of Michelle Rodriguez. After three minutes of me in deep thought, the screen will revert back to a shot of her sitting in some sort of egg-type chair. And it almost happened again. I switched over to a photo of the Loop in the early 50s, when the Borders had been the Greyhound station instead. Enough of that. I’m stalling. See, last month Dave posted my piece on the 31st, I was going to tell him my tank was empty, then realized there is no February 31st, and let go with a son of a bitch that was drowned out by the thunder and hail and Natalie Portman’s acceptance speech at the Oscars.

This month was hellish, though I realize that other parts of the country certainly had worse. We had a mild winter through January. I donated $25 to Children’ Leukemia Society and our sexy meteorologist on NBC 5, Ginger Zee, rewarded me with a promo photo as well as a sexy black and white split shot front and back, tank top and jeans, and my name and the words sunny skies and other words I forget because they are written on her @$$. All legit, and its for the kids, right? And then we were hit by the blizzards the East coast had been getting for weeks. 22 inches in Alsip, just south of Burbank, put us in the record books. Right now its at 30 inches, the most snowfall on record for this month since, like, forever. OK, our records only go back to the Great Chicago Fire, 1871, but saying forever makes it sound much more ominous. We’ve had a few days near 40, but it was a month for watching my breath frost and have that same old thought about hearing Springsteen lyrics skittering under the wheels of cars along with the thin lines of snow. Coming back towards the Fullerton el station with Mike and Darci last Monday, Darci asked why I didn’t have my gloves on, and I said I had my fists clenched. Anticipating that she’d ask about the gloves again, I said that its better if I just jam my fingernails into my palms.

February was also an odd month for my writing career. Maybe this is my decade. After all, the world ends in, what, 22 months? Now the last few months, I’ve been blessed that Crossroad Press put a few of my works out there. Then I had my werewolf western story “High Moon” chosen for a book that is similar to Year’s Best Horror, only done by the decade. And I can finally announce that Gauntlet Press is releasing JN Williamson’s The Illustrated Masques, which collects a two comic series by Innovation in the early 90s. The artist for my story, “Rail Rider,” is Mike Tokamato, and the work is amazing. One version of the book will sell for $1500.00 because King & Barker signed it, but for those who want the tipsheet with us D-listers–I’m next to Flava Flav–the price is affordable. I loved Jerry Williamson. Not like my man-crush for Kurt Russell, or my affection for the unshaven jawline of Gordon Van Gelder. Jerry had gone from being a dentist to writing dozens of books. In the original edition of Masques, he changed my story title to “Third Rail” because the implication, to him, was that the man in my story had an erection. Nope. In fact, he gets frightened when a Polish bowling team passes by on the el platform. And, bless his soul, he gave The Best Blurb Ever for James Kisner’s STRANDS, back in the late 80s. I quote: “This is a novel that was written to be read.” This is true, I swear, my hand on Rahm Emmanuel’s nutsack. But when it’s the first hardcover sale, my name on the back cover, Jerry could have renamed it whatever the hell he wanted. To add to my forward moving news, there’s progress with my novel Proactive Contrition, but I’ll not jinx it. Oh, okay, I will. The guys who do that Nigerian lottery will publish it, but I need to send them only $437.22 for printing costs. (In all truth, the novel is not just gathering dust, and you all everybody will be the first to know.) And just yesterday, I heard from a guy I sent story to in 2008, a French fellow who now tells me the story will be in a French horror/fantasy magazine with the dubious name of Promenade. Again, with the train wreck that is my career, does it matter what the mag is called?

My good friend Bob Maddock sent me six CDs of The Holly Cole Trio, which is great, but it kinda sucks when I start singing “Girl Talk” while I’m in the shower at LA Fitness. Hey! The title of this piece, right? Earlier in the week, I headed downtown around 2 in the afternoon, took the 87th Street bus to the Red Line. Well, this black guy with one prominent tooth spent the next ten stops preaching about the evils of smoking crack and how the Lord demands us to eat bologna sandwiches to humble ourselves. This, as he waved around a Bible and a bag of Doritos. I have photos to prove it. Spring’s coming, but the meltdowns are here all year round. Take it from one who knows. Happy March, gang!

The Last Moving Picture Show

The Last Moving Picture Show
28 Jan 11

Last week, I appeared in a short film, “The Shadow,” at the Columbia Film College. I took the job for reasons all writers should, both to write about the experience, or at least take notes, including every contour of the girl applying my make-up, as I could only stare straight ahead, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it. The other reason is the obvious one, to whore myself completely to those producing and directing the film. I know several writers who teach at Columbia, which has multiple campuses in areas both good and dismal. But I thought it was time to make a few contacts who worked in film, and I had the good fortune to talk up my writing to a few guys in the green room, “The Jail Guard,” and “The Tenement Boy.” The waif who put my make-up on was happy to know that two of my books have that evil “e with a hyphen” in front of it, I’d say it made me feel older, but let me just describe how it all came about.

A month ago, I was skimming craigslist for gigs, and I’ve been lucky to find a few focus study groups in the [ETC] section (a few years back, I was paid to give my opinion on Gatorade yogurt, which by the grace of Elvis is not on the shelves at 7-11s everywhere). And there it was: actors, 20 minute film, etc. Send head shot. Well, my resume photo is a shot of me standing in front of Jonny O’s Hot Dogs at 38th & Morgan, near the old Stockyards. Well, it worked. Got the call, a confirmation date, then the sheet with everybody’s name and what they do and who they are in the film. I was “Dapper Old Bald Man Holding Sign.” And with that, I understood how I got the job. Wardrobe gave me period clothes from a hundred years ago, my wool pants had a fly that kept sliding down, the story of my life, really. Then I went to makeup, and had sideburns and a handlebar moustache glued onto my face. Afterwards, the girl about a third of my age put all that powder and non-shiny stuff on my head. Now I know why so many women are so happy: they are stoned on their own makeup. It was like having Kit Kat-flavored smelling salts shoved up my nose. And that stuff had to keep getting applied whenever I was under the lights. All I could eat was croutons because everything else stuck to the moustache glue, so after seven hours of filming and getting my head dusted, I likely had a blood alcohol level that would have my pull my own fly open as soon as I left the building. (Well, I really wasn’t going to do that, we had a minus ten wind chill that day.) And I don’t know how it happened, but I gouged open my fingernail while holding this sign above my head in front of a green screen, and asked if it was going to be a silent film, as I wanted to start crying uncontrollably.

I cut out after that damnable moustache was gone, and shoved as much of the remnants from lunch in my mouth as I could. Salad greens, tinfoil, that seemed to be it. Those jackal film students. It was a stretch back from 16th Street to the Roosevelt el stop, and within blocks State Street goes from industrial to hipster-y lofts where the people walking towards each building have voices that sound as if helium was pumped through their nasal passages. An aside: there is a product sold her for these idiots who live in high-rises and have pets. A chunk of Astroturf and a plastic fire hydrant for the balcony. Yes, I’m serious. After that the neighborhood briefly gets creepy, enough that when I turned onto Roosevelt, I was completely startled by a giant full moon not far above Lake Michigan. I might have shrieked like Nathan Lane, I just don’t know. And I was home ninety minutes later. I had taken some photos in the prop and wardrobe rooms, made some notes of the day as well as working on “A Once-Told Tale,” which will play out as if Shirley Jackson had sneaked into a tea party rally. All good discipline. And I learned that I could get high if I wore women’s makeup. Maybe its weed, maybe its Maybelline.



My January 28th essay for Storytellers Unplugged.

Constant Winter Scattered

My November essay for Storytellers Unplugged.

I’m listening to Roxy Music at the moment. I sometimes forget that I own certain CDS, and I’ll bet none of you would have guessed that the first CD I ever bought–sigh, in 2000–was the B-52s Greatest Hits. Wait a second. Okay. I just switched to Sonny Rollins, I swear that jazz is like crystal meth. I listened to Bryan Ferry sing “Avalon” and that was enough. Thinking on it, I should be glad that Bristol Palin wasn’t involved with one of Roxy Music’s dance numbers on that wonderful show on Monday nights that has now spun off into Skating With the Stars. The show I really want to see I Dancing With the Ice Road Truckers. The reason I was listening to RM was because I had been talking with my roommate of twenty-five years ago, Rich Stergulz, on the phone a few hours ago. Rich had illustrate the painting of my dead collie Buddy and Robert Mitchum in the opening credits from Thunder Road. Back in 1985 on the far north side, as we carried everything down four flights of stairs, someone had a cassette player on in the laundry room, and always equate leaving the Rogers Park neighborhood with that song about riding in your car and a song comes on the radio and it drowns out...well, gang drive-by shoot-outs in that neighborhood at the time. Enough of that, the more I think of the band even after I’ve put on Rollins and Max Roach, I get this image of Bristol being forced into performing to “Love Is The Drug” and making moves like Ripley did in that yellow robot with the clampers in Alien 2. Hey, if I have to have that image in my head, now so do you. And if you want the CD, I’ll mail it to any one of you and I’ll even throw in The Sweet’s Greatest Hits and one of Ron Jeremy’s porn movie soundtrack, because I somehow have two of those.

A few people here in Chicago who have read my novel, upon hearing that I have no intentions on writing a follow-up, have pushed me towards thinking otherwise. I have given it some thought, and I suppose my travails during the colder months might sensibly follow Proactive Contrition, but if I do this it would like writing a sequel to my metatextual memoir less than a year later. Haven’t truly decided yet, but I’d likely call it Constant Winter Scattered, and then each of these books could be compared to yet another Doobie Brothers farewell concert. Of course, I should also point out that in my state of mind during the colder months, the book might just look and read like one ridiculously long Chick tract. Stay tuned.

My year is structured differently than most other people. Thanksgiving and Black Friday have little to do with it, but 2010 is effectively over for me now that the day rarely reach thirty degrees. Of course, that means that the next year has started, because I can’t just stay in limbo until March. Except in my head, a place where I can talk to cows, make unicorns on rainbows for Asian women, and be either a NASCAR driver or George Clooney’s stunt double.

Maybe that’s why I’m more addled than usual, because for these first few days of cold weather, I really am somewhere in-between places. A polar bear with menopause. Any of you seen The Walking Dead on AMC, or read the books? You know what would be worse, would be if the apocalypse didn’t turn people into zombies, rather followers of the Westboro Baptist Church.

She Died Smelling Brylcreem

My column for Storytellers Unplugged, October 28th 2010.


She Died Smelling Brylcreem
October 28th 2010

I come up with the craziest story titles. But there you go, and I’ll explain how delirious I was to even think such words in a moment, and it will also explain my not posting last month. This was my September (plus a dollop of the last hot nights of August). My crappy $30.00 bike was stolen from where I locked it at the grocery store. The right brakes did not work, so I hope some sort of melodrama ensued for the thief.

The Saturday of that same week, I was robbed at gunpoint. At two-thirty in the afternoon. Now I’ve been mugged before, punched in my right eye which doesn’t really feel anything because of my cerebral palsy, the little twerp high on weed must have thought I was a robot. In the end, I was bloodied and all he got was my rolled up copy of Avengers#500. I might have mentioned that once before, but yes, true story. So I was ready to do the Ernest Borgnine jumping into the lion pit thing, but in my head I was thinking, I only have twelve bucks in the wallet. I’d need to get my Disabled Ids from the city and the RTA bus system. Figured, let them try and use my ID for credit, my rating is worse than Lindsey Lohan’s. I gave them the wallet, they left, like it was a business transaction. Walked down the street bordering the Dan Ryan Expressway. The only other part to that story was that I went to TJ Maxx to buy a new cheap wallet and was ready to knock this woman down the escalator because she was texting right in front of it. Like she was from Rangoon, and didn’t understand the concept. And now my wallet is filled with my Fresh Values card and all that crap I didn’t really use in the first place. And my new ID makes me look like that Ray Harryhausen Cyclops. Only tanned from the summer.

Then my border collie died, he was only seven. Buddy the Mitch, because my nieces wanted to name him Buddy and I wanted to name him for Robert Mitchum. We reached a compromise, money was involved. The grifters start at such an early age now. I still mourn because we were like Starsky & Hutch, now that I’m on disability, I was with him pretty much every day for the last three years. In fact, we had a pact. If I died before the finale of Lost, Buddy was going to dig my corpse up and tell me the ending by means of his telepathic dog powers. He was very arthritic, we made quite a team, I soldier on. There’s a guy in the subway at State & Lake, one of the songs he’ll sing is Johnny Nash’s “I Can See Clearly Now,” and I cry just like I’m doing now, because of the lyrics, how the pain is gone and there were no obstacles in his way. Damn that Johnny Nash and his one-hit wonder. No, not really. I’m sure he’s a cool guy and maybe still sits around with his leather suit on with a bunch of bunnies all around him.

Yes, I’m delirious. Because nine days after my collie died, my right lung collapsed from bronchitis–which I have never had before–and my weight dropped from 162 to 142 in five days. I had dreams about Redd Foxx, I don’t know why. Because of the antibiotics, I can’t take my bipolar meds. I’m barely at 150 pounds and pretty much see floating clowns with seltzer bottles full of bleach and air horns that shoot out goat intestines everywhere. I call them as I see them, gang.

But here’s the thing. 1I finished the damn novel. Proactive Contrition. Scared as hell that I’d see the Reaper and say, hey, there’s my ride! Before I hit 104K. It was all written out, those last thirty pages, I made copies, sent them to a few people, and to better add to my insanity, I rolled my pages into an empty pint can of Steel Reserve malt liquor I found on the way back from the cheapest clinic I could find. Pretty much followed the trail of passed out guys in overalls and sport jackets as I walked further west, where the gentrification stopped like a terminator of light to dark. My can of Steel Reserve gained me passage to a place where I got adrenaline shots and anti-inflammatory shots to the base of my neck and my back and my single, pathetic typing finger. All in the shadow of an abandoned building that had been a harp company. I was looking out past Sangamon Street as the needle hit bone and thought, hmph, I suppose harps came from somewhere. See, I did this on the sly because there was no way my main doc was going to give me the steroids that kill the pain for a few days–get out of my head, Johnny Nash!–and I needed to finish the book my way. I did, I’m back on my meds, they take about three days to kick back in, the side effects being like you see on television, euphoria, thoughts of suicide, menstrual cramps, taste for human flesh.

Seriously, this is what the book reads like. This is ho I pitched it to my agent: Think of Charles Bukowski mud wrestling me along with an Al Pacino sex doll. If there are any new readers here expecting a lesson, let me just say: Don’t try this at home. Really, the power drill to my forehead when I was fifteen probably wasn’t a good idea...

Storytellers Unpluigged, June '10

Aint It Always a Dame?

By wayneallensallee, on June 28th, 2010

 

I’m listening to some Art Pepper right now, picked up a used CD at Reckless Records. Also snagged a nice Sonny Rollins, with Max Roach on the tubs. Sunday night in summer jazz is the best kind. And the sax always reminds me of skirts and powdered noses. No, I don’t talk this way, but depending on my mood, its the voice in my endless narrative head.
Jazz can make me feel old and young at the same time, if that makes any sense. I can put it better like this, the music can send me back to the early 90s, when I hung out on Augusta Boulevard when it was still a Polish neighborhood and not a haven for hipsters, me smoking pot with a girl I knew, Stan freaking Getz on vinyl and I’d swear the exhaled smoke curled in the air as if trying to catch up with the musical notes. Almost twenty years later, I still know her, only she’s married now (so there goes my one pot connection), and there just aren’t any old neighborhoods anymore. Just old men like me, my brain now playing the flip side of the aging process. Still single, the summer heat allowing me that feeling of immortality, heightened by the fact that most everyone else in the homes around me are asleep. Sitting here in my reading glasses, the ones that make me look like Mr. Six, the guy on the Six Flags commercials, I mull over still being single and with the coming of summer I might again hope to meet someone who will either have an attraction for someone who resembles their grandfather, or maybe resembles James Carville. The best part of this whole ‘being single’ gig I’ve got going twice again as long as the Broadway run of Cats is that every few years I’ll actually find someone I actually want to know better, mostly because I’m dense and miss the times anyone is trying to flirt with me pretty much every single time. And the neat thing about that is, I write more because, well, because it’s the only way to keep from thinking about said female. So there’s that.
First, I shall make you cringe with a story about what might have been simple flirtatious moment. I’m waiting for a few writer friends to arrive at Clarke’s, a diner across from the still-shuttered Red Lion, and am perusing a book by Jim Silke called Bettie Page Rules. I bought it because there were chapters on many women going back to Clara Bow, and I was a bit annoyed that he had skipped Chicago’s own Sally Rand. I’m drinking water, served by a guy with a beard. For the past few months, its always been guys serving on Monday nights. I look up and see a redhead walking by, eye contact is hard to avoid, and that’s that. Within seconds, I swear it was that quick, I hear a voice asking me if I want more water, I look up, and it’s the very same redhead. And the page I was on had Ms Page in all her unfettered glory right there, no way of getting around this one, my brain thinking first on why the guy had left and then on just how the hell and the girl sneaked up on me, it wasn’t like I was ogling the pages. (I wasn’t.)
She peeks over the book I’m trying to hide, even though the cover is much more bright and suggestive, and pretty much squeals Bettie’s name. What else can I do but what all writers do at certain embarrassing moments, they tell a little white lie. I told her I was in advertising and that I photographed models and then someone else would make it look like, instead of a table, the girl had her arms folded over a pack of cigarettes. I gave other examples so bizarre I can’t even recall them because sometimes writers just don’t know how to shut up. And, quite frankly, if I did have my pen in hand, instead of pretending I needed to write, I would have likely shoved the my Uniball into my ear. My friends arrived, I ate breakfast as always, and we readied ourselves to leave. We get to the door and the redhead appears, playing with her hands as she asks me about if I’m looking for new models and how much I would pay. Of course, at this point I realize that I had to get out of there before I would have to forcefully leap down to the next level of Hell. My friends had abandoned me, not knowing the first part of the story. They just knew that some girl was asking to pose for me in the nude, and in retrospect, I likely could have asked her out once I had told her that, well, quite obviously, that is, you see…but in the end, I simply said that, no, maybe another time, times are tight, the government has me working as an advisor on that oil spill in the gulf, I’m really a vampire detective hunting werewolves from Pluto and hey, there goes one now. So there are those who believe that she was using my lie to hit on me, and even if that were the case, it would still have been wrong. And if I had started that first conversation with stating that I was a writer, she would have flitted away like a flaming-haired will o’ the wisp. Who was taller than me.
My buddy Greg is an artist for a Big Pharma ad agency, and when we have lunch together, I’ve learned to arrive just at noon, when this gal named Caroline takes over for someone at lunch. First few times I’d say hi, she was pleasantly surprised when I recalled her name, and I’d sit and read or scribble more notes in that inane novel I’ve been working on. I’d sneak looks at her when I knew she was busy transferring calls, and Greg got to waiting a good five minutes before showing up. She’s in her thirties, and I could say all sorts of things that will end up in some sort of fiction so we can skip that. And last week, with summer and jazz having a hell of a lot to do with it, I did ask her out after work, grab a bite before we went our separate ways. And, yes, she knows I’m a writer. She also said she was engaged, but I didn’t look down for the ring I already knew wasn’t there, but then told me the intersection where she lived and said an after five thing would work, so I was likely going through a pre-screening process. So what do I do? I write a story, a wonderfully romantic story that Might give her, I might not. But. Simply by adding another paragraph to it, I have a tragedy that I can send to some magazine somewhere, because of course I’m a whore. That is how it was, I finished writing the story while on the Red Line, re-read it, and thought, hey now. Played with a new paragraph, and then wrote one down. Do I suck, or what? Caroline will have three pages of coolness while I’ll have four pages that I can hopefully sell to someplace truly obscure like Butt Monkey Quarterly, if only that she never, ever sees it. Until I discover that her cousin from Lackawanna publishes the damn thing and she’s on the mailing list.

Rednecks & Terrorists

Rednecks & Terrorists (sung to the tune of Incense & Peppermints)

Well, in my head at least. I wrote a story called “Derby Geeks & The Thunder Chiefs” because I never understood the line from Cheap Trick’s “Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap). My hearing couldn’t have gone that bad by working with the Elvis band. This paragraph isn’t even a lead in to my monthly visit, nor does it have anything to do with trying to explain the finale of LOST. I hate word association; after accidental self-combustion, it’s the thing most likely to get me jailed in a small town jail that still smells of Johnny Cash’s pomade.

I’ll be heading down to see my daddy’s relatives in Shelbyville, Kentucky, this weekend. An informal reunion, we used to have them every Father’s Day for my entire life until my Granddaddy Grover died in 1996. He was a rascal, married five times, twice to the same woman. I have an aunt who is my age, she appeared in commercials for Coca-Cola and Dentyne in the 1970s. Everyone there knows I’m a writer, my cousins’ kids are fascinated by that. I’m a polack raised by hillbillies, and that might explain a lot of things. No one is a redneck, though there are a few durn fools lurking in the taverns. Here the signs read Old Style: Zimne Piwo (or Cerveza Fria), in Shelby County it’s Sterling: Time For A Beer. I’m talking signs dangling the sidewalk, not that neon crap. And if you walk into a joint that advertises Sterling like that, you’re stepping onto the set of Barfly, so get ready for it.

I love being down there, and I get at least some writing done, because there is no way to not find inspiration in the wind itself. I’ll write after everyone is in bed. Now, I’ve taken Greyhound to hang out with my cousins Danny and Denise several times, the last time coincided with the weekend Katrina hit New Orleans. My family was last down there in July of 2003, and I snookered–this is some obscure Chicago word that I’m likely using with the wrong inflection–my namesake, Wayne Henley, to surprise my dad. They were high school buddies. After the trucking company he worked for went bankrupt, Wayne moved to Madisonville with his wife Bobbi. My dad hadn’t seen Wayne since the 1980s.

My namesake kept on me about writing a western, and his son David really wanted to see Two-Gun Henley in action. Best I could do was wrote a werewolf western called “High Moon,” and Wayne liked the story, even calling it a western, and he died from cancer two months after the story saw print. I am always overwhelmed by the ghosts in Shelby County. “Dracul’s and Am’tyville thangs,” is what I write about, depending on who is doing the talking. If I visit relatives in Illinois, I am going to subdivisions that are maybe twenty years old, and all the talk isn’t about people who live off the land, but people who buy the land.

Moving on to Exhibit B. Two weeks back, a friend was in town from Manhattan, and we were riding around the old stockyards area taking photos. Mark posts photos at Chicagoswitching.org, and I had my dopey old CVS disposable. There we were at 38th and Morgan when this black Chevy cuts us off as we’re walking down public property. This kid gets out, sunglasses, pearly teeth, no partner, no notebook. Who were we? What were we doing? Mind you, this is near Bridgeport, where all of the Mayor’s goons live. He even brought up 9/11 and terrorism as he gave us stern warnings. Funny thing, he uses a cell phone to call “his boss at the 9th District,” and the guy who strolls over is a guy who looked like a pudgy Dennis Farina in a yellow hard hat. He seemed to take control of the situation after that, which was basically we were chums and the kid was a douche. What it came down to is that we took photos of a train car that had the words Nitrogen Blanket written on the side. The kid in the Chevy was probably pouting because he couldn’t have a play date with his fellow neighborhood idiots. Bad enough when someone pretends to be a cop, it’s worse when the guy’s acting skills are worse than Charlie Sheen’s.

Mark stayed at this SRO in Chinatown, and I should throw in some details here before I hang up my hat and get ready to hit I-65 southbound. The bed came up to my calves. Every fire escape seemed to converge on Mark’s room, but I never found out if he was concerned about ninjas. I love searching new hotel rooms, and I found a broken smoke alarm in the mini-bar. That was it, the two pieces of plastic. The greatest find was the medicine cabinet, which contained a razor, three blue toothbrushes, and a bottle of Elmer’s Glue. Maybe that was for fighting off the ninjas.

Soon I’ll be on the open road, under a full moon. Before I leave, I pulled up one of my favorite songs on YouTube, by Johnny Russell. There’s no place than I’d rather be than right here, with my redneck, white socks, and Blue Ribbon beer.

She Blinded Me With Science

Storytellers Unplugged, April 28th 2010


She Blinded Me With Science

Well, actually, it was a he, and it involved psychiatric craziness, but I couldn’t get a working title out of that. Last month, Dave commented on not knowing about my so-called hippie days. Well, I was even wilder than that. 

I smoke, did any of you know that? Marlboro Lights, the cigarette of the enlightened. Not often. Started in college because it cut down on my hunger pains, and I think a pack of cigarettes was cheaper than a Dunkin’ Donut in 1981. Stevenson Hall, 2nd Floor, all the writing workshops. A half-dozen vending machines filled with coffee and scalding hot chicken broth. I wish I had photos, particularly black and white film, the alcove near Room 203 filled with kids hidden by cigarette smoke, grown men shrieking from the broth spilling over their fingers. Spring outside, but bleak inside, due for the most part by the overhead lights discolored by the smokers. Now that you know that I wrote “Rapid Transit” while hopped up on coffee, broth, and nicotine, well, I bet that explains a lot, right.

I quit easily. But over the years, I’d be so pissed off at the boss or the sky that I’d buy a pack, hotbox three or four of the cursed things, and then pay the rest of the pack forward. The last time was at the printing plant, the winter of 2007. Too many guys on the night crew smelled of bachelor ass and making my clothes reek helped a bit.

Which leads me to this. As I’m ready to be off unemployment and back on food stamps, I have been looking at Craigslist every night, looking for focus studies and the like. I got a reply from my alma mater, UIC, and I’d be at the Behavioral Science Building, which I knew was behind Stevenson Hall simply because it looked...well, now I’d say it looks like a hunk of crystal meth, but back then it was this clunky, grey building that didn’t fit with the shiny, bright buildings that all seemed to be named for politicians.

$30.00 for two hours, a smoking study. With my handicapped pass, my bus ride was 75 cents each way. Most importantly, I figured I’d be able to fake smoking by not coughing my brains out. This kid came in, he reminded me of how old I am because of his resemblance to one of the characters from Animal House. I had to do a Breathalyzer thing, which was fine because I smoked two cigarettes, a little less than manly because of the wind that day, on the way across the campus. I’ll skip past the part where I typed into a computer why this and when that...let’s get to the good part. A cautionary tale, perhaps.

The kid came back in and asked if I wanted to make another $70.00. He was naked under his labcoat, so I felt safe in answering with a shrug. He then brought up a screen on the computer with a strange purple square made of smaller squares. Up and down was “Bad” and across was “Good,” but I couldn’t understand how, by moving the mouse around the other squares, I could describe a varying amount of goodness or badness. I didn’t have a chance to ask, because the guy zoomed out of there, back to the camera I was being monitored on.

The first photo was of a young black kid with his jaw missing. Then a flower vase. A can of re paint, then a severed finger. Each photo remained on the screen for five seconds, and I still couldn’t get how I could feel good AND bad about a damn severed finger. Why, because it belonged to an adult? I saw photos of people having sex, women on the bottom, women on the top, naked men against a wall that looked suspiciously like the alcove from my college days. A man being tasered, more flowers in a field, and then an honest-to-God eyeball with optic nerves attached, floating in a glass of fluid. More sex shots. The plane hitting the South Tower on 9/11. The jumpers. Tienaman Square, the guy who stood up to the mighty tanks. Back to 9/11. Girls in bikinis.

I was actually wetting my lips with the tip of my tongue, something I might do in November when I’m on a crowded street corner, just to get the sharp tang of the nicotine ever so close to my throat. The screen went blank, the kid came in and told me to smoke. I wanted some bleach for my eyes, to be honest. Then I had to smoke again, only after he handed me the money, all crisp fives and tens. We made small talk, I left, pissed that I was not dressed for the weather. Now late afternoon, it was in the 40s, and I was wearing my Polkaholics t-shirt and my leather jacket. I stopped in the food court to get something to eat, to get my body warm. $3.89 for a biscuit with cheese, bacon, and a Jimmy Dean sausage. Now I know why Jimmy Dean is so damn rich.

I started walking uphill towards the entrance to the Blue Line train, which ran between the east and westbound lanes of the Eisenhower Expressway. Maybe I ate to fast, maybe it was the taste of the tobacco, or the visuals of the truly disgusting photos I did not describe, but I suddenly walked to the railing and threw up onto I-90. Nobody swerved, so I knew I wouldn’t be making the news that night.

What is the point of telling this? Well, again I am pointing out that there’s a story in everything, I could change various parts of this story and sell it to Penthouse, Soldier of Fortune, or turn it into a manga comic of big mouths and big eyes. The lab guy could have been Pokemon.

But I am also telling you this, all of you. If anyone in a lab coat offers you money without telling you why, haul ass.

Misty Mother Fog

My Storytellers Unplugged entry for October 28th...

The Misty Mother Fog In A Dead Poet’s Dream

I wrote that phrase back in college and I still think of it whenever the fog hits Chicago. More often than not these days. If the photo shows up above, it’s the Trump Tower that dissolves into the greyness. That was last Thursday. But if I hadn’t been crossing the street and seen the building, I likely would have continued on to the subway stairs humming Hallowe’en songs. Instead of my dumb line from an okay poem I wrote almost thirty years ago. The Ramones’ “Pet Semetary.” Elvis’s most haunting song ever, “Long Black Limousine”, from the Memphis sessions in 1968. Henry Mancini’s “Experiment in Terror,” which was the theme for our long-departed Saturday night CREATURE FEATURES, which ran only the Universal Monster films. About the only one I catch myself actually SINGING is Jan & Dean’s “Surfing Hearse.” She might be cherry, but she could be worse, my surfin’ hearse. Fun fact: they also rhyme spooky with kooky. Oh, those wacky surf musicians.

I missed out on the entire month of October these last three years. Last year I was involved in a writing project not my own, typing maybe twelve hours a day, and the previous two years I was at the infamous printing plant, back then it was standing on my feet twelve hours a day. And I love October, not just for Hallowe’en. This entire month I’ve been putting monster-related content on my blog, including scanning most of a fumetti of HORROR OF PARTY BEACH just because it was time someone saw that thing online. I never had the time the last three years to do something every night, and before then my blog was barely had legs. I’ve had the chance to reminisce about childhood toys like the old Vac-U-Form that made Creeple People and an old vinyl record my older cousin had with audio clips of Lugosi and Karloff.

October is also a month of death. It seems that I know an abundance of people with September birthdays. Thankfully, the deaths are far between. Important deaths, just the same. Karl Edward Wagner, back in 1994. Harry Fassl last year. A neighbor girl with epilepsy, so long ago I can’t remember the year, the first non-familial wake I attended. Fog and crappy piles of muddy leaves and I wonder how it must be in Houston or LA, what orange and black decorations look like in sweltering heat.

There will be another death this week, my oldest cousin on my daddy’s side, down in Shelbyville. Off the respirator since Friday, now with a lung infection, she has a DNR. I was joking with Dave in an email earlier about how I had started this essay and was interrupted by updates from different aunts in Kentucky, then while I was in the middle of our email the phone rang yet again. My dad’s hard of hearing and so I’m the mouthpiece. He’s also the only one up here, staying after Korea to join the police academy. I’ll likely be on Greyhound to Louisville on Friday. We never traveled as I grew up, but for Father’s Day in Shelbyville when my granddaddy drove down from Dry Ridge. My first time anywhere besides Streator, Illinois and the I-65 corridor through Indiana was when I attended the World Fantasy Convention in Providence, in 1986. People come home to die in Kentucky. Quite the different world than Chicago.

I sometimes wonder what I’d be writing if I grew on a farm thirty miles from the big city instead of this place. Well, the farm is gone, and so are the road marks on Flat Rock Road, the “colored” cemetery (as I was brought up with that word on both sides of the family) on one side of a gravel road and another cemetery across the way, one with rusted spoons melded to thin pieces of metal that read BABY. Flat Rock Road is a subdivision now, the homes in an oval around an egg-shaped man made lake. Maybe it would be like course correction, my dad a Statie, or working for the Simpsonville police. And yet, the second most vile story I’ve ever written, “The Shank of The Night,” is based on events not in Chicago, but from a small town just over the Ohio River from Louisville. So I might have ended up writing what I do. All in the past now, I haven’t had grandparents in fifteen years. If I go to Kentucky, I go it alone, on Greyhound. The bus pulls in at Sixth Street and Muhammed Ali Road a block or two from the river. I’ll wait for my cousin to pick me up and sit in the food court while he makes the half-hour drive, in the early morning hours. There’s a Chevron across Sixth, and I drink coffee and watch shadows become people lumbering to their early shift like zombies, walking through that misty mother fog.

Karma Goodness & Vampire Bunnies

Here is my April 28th entry for STORYTELLERS UNPLUGGED

Karma Goodness & Vampire Bunnies
Wayne Allen Sallee

I received an email from Amazon, just a few days after I had placed a few orders with them, it was a refund with the reason stated as “karma goodness.” This was the very first time I had purchased something from Amazon, I didn’t even know you had to register with them first, doh. I had made some money from my current writing job, and two back to back royalty checks allowed me to have more money than I have honestly ever had at one time. And so I used some of the dough to stock up on a few of my books that I’m down to my one reading copy, as I had sold several books when I was unemployed in 05 and 06. One of the books was my first collection, With Wounds Still Wet, and I grabbed a few copies of Getting Lost, which has a glossary I wrote for the television series, and Love In Vein, because people always want that book as it has my story involves strychnine enemas. I had to write an erotic vampire story and, yes, to me vampire eroticism=strychnine you know whats, because really, a story about a masochist who then can’t feel pain because he is turned into a vampire would make him do drastic things. And, yes, it is a love story.

So I get this refund, and her’s the dilly-o. This fellow Dave McIntosh was actually selling from his own collection, and thought it pretty strange that I was buying my own collection, so he gave me a chin nod on it. (I’ve got his address, and I’m still trying to figure out what to send him, besides the extra Shamwow I have). Well, the next day, I get an email from this other fellow about my purchase. Turns out he’s an editor and he invited me to be in an anthology centering around all the 2012 hoo-hah. So there I am thinking, ok, Amazon is, like, magic. Well, maybe more like Paul Lynde as Uncle Arthur on Bewitched. A week passed, I had more copies of The Holy Terror, and I get another email, not from Amazon, but from an independent film maker in Los Angeles by way of Louisville. A name was thrown around but I’m not saying because 1/ the whole jinx thing and 2/ I’m not even certain I know the guy. All I’ll say is, it’s not Kurt Russell. And that is a bit of a disappointment to me. I’ve always wanted to get in good with that guy.

But what about the paying it forward part, you are asking. Two weeks back, I was downtown having lunch with Greg Loudon, then walked around Millennium Park taking photos. There is this magnificent sculpture, Cloud Gate, which most everyone calls the Bean. Because they are idiots. So there I was, taking a few photos, one with a decent reflection of the new Trump Tower curving like a robot finger behind me. Next to me is a black fellow and two young girls. As I am taking the photo, the man is reflected also, and through the lens of my disposable camera , I see him fall to the ground. Just crumple. One girl says he is their cousin and has seizures, but not epilepsy. It was our first hot day here, maybe 75 degrees. The guy’s lips were chapped and his legs just started bouncing off the concrete. Another fellow, a Greek tourist I later learned, came by and we held him down. Neither with cell phones, so I was doing the old fashioned “Is there a doctor here? Call 911!” Which, of course meant that I was ignored. I held his head up, the two girls were scared totally shitless, and turned his head to the left. Blood or cherry drink spilled from his lips. And then a cop on a bicycle showed up and called an ambulance. Sadly, that’s the end of the story. I have no clue what happened to the fellow, but I think I’ll always remember the look on the two girls’ faces as they clung to each other.

I mentioned royalty checks a few paragraphs up. The two big checks I get twice a year are for, well, vampire stories. One is more a novella. But I hate vampires, though they have finally been overshadowed by zombies. Yea, there’s Twilight and Anita Blake, but Permuted Press has a half dozen zombie novels on display at Borders. I got to thinking about those Somalia pirates–actually, I’ll bet we see piracy up and down the Mississippi soon, which is fine, as long as only the bad guys get hurt–and then recalled that there is a young adult series called Vampirates, which was a name I came up with in the 90s but filed it under goofy. One of my nieces told me of a book to buy her, Bunnicula. I thought about it, then said, no, can’t be. But there it was, a hardcover collecting the first three books about, yes, a vampire bunny. Who does good, not evil. So let the vampires stay on the bookshelves, I’m getting too old to question why there aren’t a bunch of werewolf novels out there. Yea, yea, Wayne, go ahead, write one yourself. Hello, Mr. Agent, I’ll have that werewolf novel for you, an updated version of Dog Day Afternoon, sometime around 2012. What’s that you say? Oh, right. That’s the year all the doomsday books will be out. Thank you, Mayan civilization. You ask me, I think the Mayans were vampires.

Time Dilations

Here, again, my monthly post for Storytellers Unplugged.

Time Dilations
Wayne Allen Sallee
28 January 2009

I’m in the process of working on a book project for someone that, for the most part, takes place over the course of several hours. The meat of the book is sandwiched as a flashback between the expected setup as well as the eventual hint at a sequel. To help center the book, I put the middle part in lock down mode, quite literally, as the characters can not leave the building they have trespassed upon, and in doing so I succeeded in dilating time as well as space. Certain scenes allowed for a choreography, one I likened to the football games where a first down gets replayed in slow motion and a yellow marker draws arrows and circles amongst the players. I am enjoying how this plays out.

There is a character from the 1940s, he was actually created less than two years after Superman, named Hourman. Rex “Tick-Tock” Tyler, the Man of the Hour, worked for Bannerman Chemicals and developed the Miraclo pill, which gave him strength and stamina for an hour. And also made him comic’s first functioning drug addict. What made his eight-page adventures so enjoyable was that, after he popped a pill and started swinging his fists at thugs, a small countdown would appear in every other panel, reminding us of Hourman’s limit. 47:03. 24:00. Hourman usually beat the last armed robber with about seven seconds left on his internal clock. I often (well, you know) think of myself as Hourman, because of my pain medication. I can type pretty fast right now, but come see me around 2 AM. So, again I digress, but I really got a kick from that countdown.

The same can be said of the book I am working on, though it’s a bit more claustrophobic. Part of me wishes there was a way the book could be condensed into a twenty-four hour format, if only to have it fall into the category of “novels that take place in one day,” one of Wikipedia’s vague headings.

I’m currently reading Duane Swierczynski’s THE BLONDE. Duane’s the editor-in-chief of the Philadelphia Daily Paper and novel has a great premise (as does his current novel, SEVERANCE PACKAGE, check him out), and aside from a two page epilogue, the thriller does take place over the course of a day, each new scene giving us the time and location. The book moves along, certainly from the strength of Swierczynski’s writing, but the mention of the time in bold print works much better than starting the next chapter with “Three minutes later...” This guy has been doing some comic of late, maybe I should tell him about Hourman, if he doesn’t already know.

Most of my short fiction work by the “first 48" rule of police procedural, you gotta try your damnedest to solve the murder in two days or all bets are off. I wrote a novella about a plague, FOR YOU, THE LIVING, of which I’m thinking of turning into a novel (since zombies seem to be cooler than romantic vampires now), and that little love story covers about three months. For any of you reading this, I’m curious. What is the shortest amount of time that has transpired in any of your meaty pieces (not flash fiction or the tiny nibbles like I have in several anthologies)? Anyone?

To See If I Still Feel

A friend of mine out east had posted the Sonseed YouTube on her blog awhile back, and I swiped that. I guess it was all real, the band played in East Brooklyn in the late 70s, stranger still one of the male singers eventually headed a school district and died choking on a sandwich. So, yeah, I guess every little thing is on YouTube now. So if any of you choose to look up Wayne's Veins and see me do my vein-popping
trick, well, that's my sole contribution to the YouTube library. For those of you who have already seen my parlor trick, skip ahead to read my December entry for Storytellers Unplugged, as follows.

TO SEE IF I STILL FEEL

by Wayne Allen Sallee

28 December 2008

Years ago, I starved myself one day just so I could write about it in my commonplace book, this was when I thought it important to experience something instead of guessing or taking someone else’s word for it. I’d make notes of whatever random words or metaphors came to mind as I hungered. Mind you, I share my father’s metabolism; we both bleed long and fast, and we burn through calories like nobody’s business. I’ll eat three to five times a day and I’ve never stayed above 155 lbs. for long, and I do feel (my own patented) physical pain faster if I do not eat. I’d often have a milk shake to ease the spasms in my back, maybe the same way people grab a smoke, so on that long ago late Saturday afternoon, I made my notes, I took some photos of my immediate surroundings for story referencing, then spent fifteen dollars at Gold Coast Dogs under the Wabash el tracks. My metabolism pretty much plays a big part in how fucked up I am when it comes to the spasms I get this time of year, my body eating up calories in double time when Chicago spends three days without topping the zero mark in temperature.

Present day now, and, yea, I’m listening to Johnny Cash, and, yea, his cover of Trent Reznor’s “Hurt.” In the last eight days we have gone from sub-zero temps to thunderstorms and the expected flooding as a foot of frozen snow sank into the erff and into my crawlspace, still there because its still raining as I type this, still nearly 60 degrees. Yesterday morning on Twitter, I was kidding the local gang that the only thing we are missing this week is a volcano erupting on the Tri-State Tollway.

A week ago today was the memorial service for Harry Fassl, though we did not go to Lake Michigan because of the ice and cold. Everyone gathered in Oak Park, his 80 year old dad amazed at just how many people were webbed together because of Harry, who signed his work HEF, and his ashes will instead be tossed along Pratt Beach on the vernal equinox. I no longer have to make notes about things like hunger pains and the effects of the weather, but I was thoroughly amazed that when I had left my home in Burbank it was -15 and two trains and two hours later, it had dropped to -35. (The gathering had been planned for the solstice sunset.) I had to cross a park to get to Harry and Diana’s place, when I rounded the conservatory building I entered a white out. I felt as if I had been punched in the bridge of my nose while simultaneously being force fed ammonia. I actually dropped to my knees and bounced back up like a marionette. Harry passed away in October; Jeff Osier put it best, saying it was as if he had left at the end of a paragraph. After my co-conspirator in Texas, Sid Williams, I emailed Harry most often, the crazy stream-of-consciousness stuff you’d expect from two guys who shared a love Green Lantern, H. P. Lovecraft, and sumo wrestling. Two months later, I still feel as if I lost a roommate I knew over fifteen years. I went in the basement and took photos of his lab equipment, various sculptures and pinboards. I found a rubber banded stack of postcards I had sent him going back to 1993, many more in recent years as I did not get a chance to visit once I fled Chicago to this relatively boring street just a mile from my old house, because bus schedules changed and a mile west translates to another hour travel time. He sent postcards, as well, I think we both just liked mystifying our respective postal employees, and his last one was signed Your reporter on the fringe…

By Tuesday the weather hit the thirties and it was snowing amidst thunderstorms. Thunder snow is what they call it. I had stopped taking my pain medication–those goofy things that jiggle the receptors in my brain–for close to a week, because what is the point if you are constantly in pain regardless. Part of it is getting no respite from typing my one-fingered tap dance, but I suppose I could throw being lonely and insane into the mix. So Tuesday afternoon when I started up the snow blower, I closed the garage door and stared and the blades, determined to know what it felt like to want with every synapse in my brain to shove my good arm into the blower, just like I wanted to know what it was like to be starving that time years past. I stopped thinking about it once I realized I was rationalizing about it. On Christmas Eve, I spasmed while checking the amount of water I poured into the coffee pot for the next morning, and I smashed my head into the bottom of a cabinet, waking up on the floor a few minutes later. Sometimes my body will subconsciously screw with me so I don’t have time to rationalize; Wednesday I waited for the bleeding to stop and then I applied Super-Glue, which works almost every time. Doubtful this one will scar, so I still look like Frankenstein in spirit only.

One writing venture I took up this month was starting a novel on Twitter along with Horatio Salt, its called Joy Motel. Even when I’m at my worst, typing then stopping and rubbing different muscles while I chew a toothpick, making so many gestures I could be mistaken for a third base coach in an asylum, I can still dole out 140 characters, the limit of a Twitter entry. Over the last few months, Horatio and I–complete strangers–had started writing about Salt & Sal in odd crime noir sentences that we batted back and forth like a ping pong ball. We thought it was time to write something more modern to reflect Twitter, yet we ended up with a still-ongoing tale that reads like a mix of PK Dick and James Ellroy. Horatio, much more versed in technology than I, has started a blog, http://www.joymotel.blogspot.com that reflects the novel from the beginning, each few days beginning a new chapter. It’s the kind of mental displacement like Bruce Willis had in 12 MONKEYS, so I’m certain my portion of the novel has my brain on spin dry at false dawn each morning. I’d suggest checking it out, if only because part of me sees this as one of my last big writing ventures. It has taken me two hours to type this, yes, a lot of thought going between each brick of a sentence, but still. Without spell-check, I’d be lost. I’ve learned from the ghostwriting gigs that it does me no good to meet a deadline by typing for ten hours a day and not doing much of anything else. Yet still not being able to write in a timely manner. I think my biggest disappointment was not being able to get the voice activation software to work properly, I had set my hopes too high. I really do want see if I still feel, and those snowy blades looked damn inviting, so that means I’m still making mental notes for some reason. Things getting clearer as I head west into the black. Your chattel, Wayne

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 28th, 2008 at 12:21 am.
Categories: advice, forensics, inspiration.

I'm Your Vehicle, Baby

From the song "Vehicle" by IDES OF MARCH, one of my favorite songs. I'm your vehicle, baby, I'll take you anywhere you want to go... And tonight I'm taking you to my monthly post at Storytellers Unplugged. Hope you enjoy my road to crazytown...Wayne


Well, damn it all, I can't cut & paste like I have in the past. You can find the link down on the left...

I Name Thee Sir Brylcreem

This is my February entry for STORYTELLERS UNPLUGGED. For those of you who haven't checked out the site, the link is on my sidebar. Take a peek.


I NAME THEE SIR BRYLCREEM
Wayne Allen Sallee

I had thought about calling this month’s entry “Butcher’s Raindance.” Sounds like a good story title, right? Even though I have no idea what it might be about...yet. Is it a ritual done by a serial killer, the dance being the way he sanitizes his crime scenes? Is it a song by an emo band (or whatever kind of music genre my oldest niece listens to these days), which, now that I’ve typed that, I realize I’d give up that route right now.

Butcher’s Raindance is the name of the floor-cleaning product used by Cardinal Cleaning twice a week at the printing plant where I work. A splash of blue in the mop bucket. There’s a Sundance product, I assume more of a disinfectant, but I’m really not keen on writing Butcher Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Call my silly. But the other product give me two words that are enigmatic when slapped together, and I have it set aside in my commonplace book to use one day. The title above it is “The Brides of Science.”

Back in the day, Mort Castle offered me a chance to write a chapter for the Writer’s Digest book ON WRITING HORROR. It was already titled “Mirror, Mirror” and the point of discussion was where does a writer NOT get his ideas? Mort, being the wandering sage he is, had chosen me because I could come up with anything from that day’s news to simple scenes of the different levels of hierarchy in the citizens of Chicago, chain smoking executives bumping past the accordion man wearing shorts in November, or the preacher talking about the evils of tobacco and trying to convert shoppers at Old Navy on Washington Boulevard. I also added to the images, taking the “mirror” to be the bus or elevated train window, or even one’s own mirror seen first thing in the morning or the last thing at night.

Well, I’ve got this thing about my story titles. Certainly some images such as I describe above get my mind thinking, but I always, always, need a title before I write a story. I might know the ending line, but I cannot truly squeeze out a good opening line unless I have that title. One of most well-received cop stories, “In The Shank Of The Night,” is an example of where I had the title in my journal. When asked about it, I refer people to an overlooked Dean Martin song, “In The Cool, Cool, Cool Of The Evening.” In the shank of the night, if the doin’s are right, you can tell them I’ll be there. Yet “The Brides of Science” has been around for longer than “Shank”, which was published in 2005 in SEX CRIMES. I wrote a story called “Bumpy Face,” after learning it was slang for a cheap of cheap booze in a beveled pint bottle sold in the Loop. It took me five years to realize what or who Bumpy Face was, at times I even sunk to the point of thinking it might be a mutated hamster. Instead it became a story about an alcoholic and his daughter and statements given to the police. Looks like I’m ready to beat that gap in time with “Brides.” Hell, even my novel, THE HOLY TERROR, was a short story, a nice polack phrase from my childhood was that a kid could be a real holy terror. Peggy Nadramia from GRUE magazine sent it back, telling me that the story had all the elements for a novel. “For You, The Living” by Roadkill Press. A line from “Monster Mash.”
I’m a big short fiction reader, I suspicion it is more because I commute by bus or train instead of the fact that I write short fiction. So, if I have a collection by various authors, I will choose by title than by author or page length. Next to me on my desk, I have a copy of HELL IN THE HEARTLAND, which has stories, including one by me with a title I truly dislike, all written by Illinois authors and set in our state of five month long winters. Looking at the table of contents, I’d likely read “Wet Dog Perfume” by Michael Penkas first. The title stands out. The next book I have here is HIGH COTTON, a collection by Joe R. Lansdale, his ownself. How the hell to choose, right? Mind you, I’ve read many of these stories over the past decade, but sometimes you gotta re-read something simply because you need a reminder of how screwed up the world is through another writer’s eyes. I’d choose “Not From Detroit” right off the bat, just for the quickness of the title, followed by “Tight Little Stitches On A Dead Man’s Back,” because that story could mean so many different things.

Do any of the collected authors here have similar problems with titles? I don’t always use a title that comes back to be a phrase in the story, such as I did with the Bumpy Face image. I have a story about a nice doctor in my old polack neighborhood of Humboldt Park who becomes a vampire, and he chooses to end the suffering of many of his patients by biting them in turn. Most were invalids, or in wheelchairs, and I played on their chronic pain being gone in their new lives, therefore keeping Chicago–or at least the Polish neighborhoods–free from a plague of vampires. The story is called “Skin of My Birthright,” and I simply despise it! I could think of nothing better, nothing that wouldn’t smack of yet another typical vampire story, and, frankly, I have no freaking idea what the title even means!

But where the hell does the title of my essay figure into things, you say? Well, recently someone was screwing around at my parents’ 49th anniversary party and was going to beknight my father. In doing so, he sniffed the familiar odor of my father’s hair, and there you have it, Sir Brylcreem.
I’ll eventually write something using that title, possibly a nonfiction piece for KENTUCKY EXPLORER, my father’s home state. Until that time, I need to figure out what “Butcher’s Raindance” will be about...

Your chattel,

Wayne

Night Of The Two Moons

OK, OK, there are four moons there, I know this. I just couldn't decide on which one from my "Universe" folder to post. Tonight is the night of the two moons, an event which actually occurred in 2003, and you needed the aid of a telescope. Mars was at its closest for the first time in decades on August 27th 2003. Not again until 2287. Yet I have again received this email, presumably this will go on for however many years before 2287 that I have left before my dirt nap. Its a harmless email, I'm not expected to email it to a dozen people, its just a minor amusement for me to see this arrive from well-meaning friends and relatives towards end of July. For those who care to read more of my babblings, you can see tomorrow's post on the Storytellers Unplugged blog--http://storytellersunplugged.blogspot.com--and I babble about a few other things as well. Don't go looking for two moons, look at the lunar eclipse instead. If you want, I'll call you at 3:10 Central Standard Time to remind you. Just email me! Wayne