Bring It On, Polly!

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Frazetta & Ross Present The USA 2007

I'm talking about Frank Frazetta and Alex Ross. Recently, I came across this beautiful rendition of my buddy the Wolf Man vs. Drac. I had once thought this to be a cover on an old CREEPY magazine, but I was wrong. The background is pretty much the coolest thing on the very cool cover. But it is Everyman fighting Count Dubya. Sadly, Everyman loses, then Bush gets his strength back by sucking on our individual liberties, courtesy of Alex Ross, who also provides the touching closure, with the Count embracing one of his lovely brides. This may not be a great post, people, but you gotta admit, the art is fantastic. Wayne

He's Your Uncle, Not Your Dad

An obscure reference, to be certain. The name of an Elvis song from the film SPEEDWAY. He was talking about Uncle Sam because, thanks to his accountant Bill Bixby, his race car driving character owed the IRS quite a bit of cabbage. Last night, during that hideous day/night/almost day again at work, this young kid Robert, a HS senior working part-time, wanted me to show him how to use the computer (he wasn't certain if he could while that massive job was running.) He went to the website that showed how you could apply for the Selective Service online, and he told me his teacher had mentioned how everyone his age would need to register or face five year imprisonment. And there it was on the screen. I don't recall the teachers scaring the hell out of us in high school, although I also don't recall us planning to invade any country back in 1977. There's no oil in Zaire, I recall a big war going on at that time. I'm usually not political in conversation or in my writing, but I'm really getting sick of this country and what it is turning into. I can see how easy it would be for someone to go Sirhan Sirhan on George W. Bush (and screw you, Echelon satellite and Patriot Act), I always used to wonder what made one guy so angry and Robert Kennedy or President McKinley, now I know. Deep down, the way a serial killer knows. Its a matter of restraint. Well, I've gone off and ranted a bit. Back in the early 90s, I worked at a comics shop. Archer Avenue had a mix of Polish and Bosnian families, the Mexicans not moving here until earlier this century. One of the regular customers was very patriotic--as so many of us were on 9/12 and 9/13 and maybe a while after that--and he went back to Bosnia and fought in that war. This was in 1992, his parents came in and bought his comics, then mailed them overseas. One day in August, they both came up to me, very solemn. He had died. At that time, that is all they knew, and I never saw them again. I felt very melancholy restocking the shelves with the X-MEN and SPIDER-MAN comics I had kept in his subscription bin. We fight and fight, but all of us will live and die in the same place, on this planet, the one we are destroying every minute of the day. Wayne

thy will be done

just...not...yet. hour fifteen out of sixteen and then a nice girl named patty drives me home. i smell like ink and soup. there might be a haiku i could get out of that, but i really can't concentrate that hard. if you were here, you would hear me talking to myself in a deserted room as the machine makes sounds like waves against a beach. sum-beach. wayne

The Devil Its Due

Chalk it up to a 14 hour shift (Monday/Tuesday), 8 the next (today), and then, inexplicably, I am working tomorrow from 9 AM until 1 AM Thursday. But my sleep habits are nil. I don't even know if that sentence makes sense. In the last half hour I have drank coffee, mango juice, and now ice water. I was watching RACE WITH THE DEVIL at 3 this morning, a great bad film from 1975 with Peter Fonda and Warren "I'm Getting Too Old For This Shit" Oates, where satanic bikers chase them as they drive a Winnebago all around the Dallas/Ft. Worth area. I look at the Chinese poem about the banyan tree, hoping to get drowzy. I listen to Yusef tell me the city is bad after dark. (Well duh.) I Google the advertisement that says Hayden Panitierre has got milk. (To keep it a level field, Masi Oka also has milk.) Still awake. Google "asian cult cinema" and see above. The button was a birthday gift from my niece Ashley. She knows I am afraid of clowns. Have any of you been told the story behind my fear of clowns? Its quite vivid and graphic. Christ, I wish I could drink some whiskey with my vanilla ice cream, but I only hit the booze roller coaster at conventions, trying to carry on Karl Edward Wagner's legacy to little avail. (But, damn, the Zanzibar club in Toronto was amazing; a Romanian girl told me all about a Romanian doctor who performed belly button surgeries for would-be strippers. Guess I can now write the, ah, bar bill off as story research). And, since being in Canada that first week of April, I have had two Budweisers. That is all. Roller coasters are better when blacking out in foreign lands. Bob thinks I should write a memoir without explaining who people are, like no footnotes or whatever, so this should be one whack-job entry. Ten after midnight. If I went to sleep now, I'd lie awake until 2. Guess I'll Google that asian cult site again...Wayne

The Candy-Coated Clown They Call The Sandman...

Martel Sardina drove all the way out here to the seventh level of Hell--accessible only by the Tri-State Tollway--to interview for DARK SCRIBE magazine, mostly about John Wayne Gacy and my current projects. That's not the clown I'm talking about, though. As I told Martel, I have this somewhat condensed diorama of Chicago in my dreamtime, el tracks that always turn in different directions to stations with different names, an archway in mist on a rise above and outdoor market just past the Halsted Street bridge at Archer. I forgot to tell her about a specific area towards Sheridan Avenue that has different angled streets that somehow entangle themselves so there are several intersections involving the same streets, always with the same buildings, none I can cull from my memories. Last night I dreamt of the pinkish-red funhouse again, I'm assuming because I read the LA Weekly article on Philip K. Dick at 2 in the morning. HE Fassl was in the dream because I fwd the article to him, that much I know for certain. I get off a train and am at the far end of the opposite side of the street. There are seven three-flats, all grey and quiet. This never changes, and it was daylight in only one dream that I ever had, more like dusk. The sky is aqua, at the end of the block, taking up two lots, is a two story building with lights and lanterns outside, the stone sides of the building going from pink to blood red and back. It might even look like a layered cake, in a weird way. I always go inside the building in my dreams, and sometimes I sleep long enough to actually leave the building, several times from a fires escape on the roof. Most times I am shocked awake by funhouse mirrors or leering faces, there is great depth to the hallways, and I was dreaming of this place long before any Rob Zombie films. The only anchor to reality in this recurrence of the pink-red building was that, early this morning, I was happy to see Harry Fassl, though he seemed hurried and pressed $40.00 into my palm and left. I woke up at 7 AM sweating, as I always do because of these front-loaded monstrosity dreams. I do not know the name of this building because I have never walked to the cross street to see the other angle of the building. I suppose the true terror would be that if I did, I'd see an empty lot like in the westerns filmed in Old Tucson. That would mean that the mirrors and the ghouls were someplace else my brain was visiting but trying to give me a happier exterior. I write this with melancholy because these dreams wipe me out, but I also feel nostalgic because I haven't visited this place since last century. Again, I chalk it up to Phil Dick, because our I am running parallel paths to his roads of insanities. That's Harry at the bottom, at Jeff Osier and Cathy Van Patten's home, the night before we invaded Afghanistan. The middle photo is of me goofing on a set photo HEF was using for another story and the top one is my head as a prop for a story called "Wilson's Ghosts," by an author whose name escapes me. Maybe I'm going on and on in this post so I can get the dream out of my system. Stupid candy colored laughing house...Wayne

How My Border Collie Got Stabbed

She has died and her home was demolished, a monstrosity now standing in its place that blots out the stars, but the widow Debo used to live in that Hansel & Gretel house-type building, with my bi-level to the north with the flag out in front. Just a few days after my 40th birthday--this would be 1999, we had been living in Burbank for less than three months, ah yes, the safe suburbs--my border collie Barbie (named by Ashley when she was four) went up against the barbed wire fence separating the properties by the garages and barked at a couple of white trash fucks on meth who were trying to break into Debo's garage. They stopped to shut my dog up by stabbing it and then ran off. They might've been the guys who were arrested a week later, but, the justice system being what it is, they are likely on the streets by now. The vet at Scottsdale Hospital was very patient, giving my dog 212 stitches. There were two holes in her torso (I guess) with a rope inside, knotted at either end. I would moved the rope inside Barbie to keep the blood from coagulating. Within a week, the vet removed the rope and said that tampons could be inserted into the small holes as the closed up. I slept on the living room floor with my dog, holding her paw, the Tylenol#3 barely working the first few days. I will never forget her whine, but I held her paw and stayed awake as long as she did. She was four when this happened, she healed and spent the autumn wearing t-shirts instead of bandages as they provided more comfort. Barbie died in June of 2003, just over the age of seven. She had cancer, and the stabbing could have hastened it along by weakening her immune system, or however doctors put things in their taciturn words. Every other dog I have owned has lived to be at least 16. I am still angry that the meth heads had to be so cowardly by reaching through the fence, the fact that Barbie fell over into the grass may have helped the initial bleeding into clotting, but if any good came from it, it was that as least the fuckers didn't end up stabbing a defenseless eighty-five year old with a walker, should she have tried to call them off. I have another border collie now, but I still hear the echoes of those pain-filled whines, optimistic as they were, because at least I knew that Barbie was healing.........