THE DEEP SOUTH-

Robert Ducote was sucking down ponies from a 24 pack and racing his souped-up Chevy 85 mph down Twin Bridges Road.

He lobbed an empty bottle over the top of his car and laughed as it shattered against the black and yellow sign.

Ducote had a smart mouth and we were always going back and forth, teenage boy BS, insults, threats and cockfight strut. In 8th grade we warred for class favorite. I heard I won by a landslide but Robert insisted he lost only by a few. “Nobody white voted for you,” he sneered.

(more…)

TAMPERE, FINLAND-

Wednesday 5th August, 2009.

It is not every day one finds oneself on a train, heading north out of Helsinki. Just such a day is this. Nor is it every day one walks into the restaurant car to find elegant brass railings separating upholstered chairs and tables with tablecloths, and an ice-blond woman smiling coolly behind the counter. I order some meat soup.

“What sort of meat is it?”

“It’s… hmm? I don’t know.”

“Just say it in Finnish.”

She says something strange. Then makes a mooing sound.

“Ah, beef!”

“Yes. Biff.”

(more…)

LAWRENCE, KS-

“Joi, I hear you’re moving! Where ya going?”

“Kansas.”

“Kansas?!” they would shriek. “Why are you moving to Kansas?!” As if I had said, “Siberia,” or “New Jersey.” Why, even banshees cry, Kansas, don’t they?

I’d have to go through some variation of the above several times a night in the months prior to leaving New York City. Most often, this would be shouted across a bar. Typically this would be one of the two bars I was tending at the time, but it just as easily could have happened when I was on the other side of the bar, already halfway done with my Hendricks martini, or Hendricks Collins, or hell, Hendricks and tonic if I knew the bartender was inept at making a 2- or 3- step cocktail. I had developed quite the Hendricks habit once I started my drinking-for-free career in New York. It’s inevitable once you are a bartender. Ok, not the Hendricks habit per se, but definitely a top shelf habit.

(more…)

NEW ORLEANS, LA-

You have just left work for the night, backpack slung over your shoulder as you make your way back to the car. It is 4:30 a.m. and still dark, the early spring air already laced with the coming summer’s humidity, and as you walk a fresh patina of sweat fills the void between your T-shirt and your back. Though the nightclub you work at is closer to the Canal St. side of the French Quarter, you habitually park on the far side off of Esplanade Ave., congratulating yourself on once again outfoxing not only the overpriced parking lots but the draconian New Orleans meter maids.

Four nights a week you make the half-mile or so trek each way down Decatur St. You find the stroll allows your mind time to unwind from the stress of work, and if it needs assistance, well, there are plenty of good bars along the way. The boisterous tourist crowds have largely vanished by this hour, and the few individuals you encounter are service industry employees like yourself, off the clock and looking for a little fun. You’ve got an early afternoon meeting with one of your professors, though, and a few blocks past Jackson Square you turn onto a darker cross-street, hoping for a short cut.

As you come round the corner a knife dances out of the dark, headed for your face.

(more…)

VANCOUVER-

I kept thinking about the night I didn’t take her to the prom.

(more…)

DAEGU, KOREA -

Rodney Munch is the sort of guy you’d normally consider pretty damn lucky, but lucky folks fall, too, and they fall harder than the rest of us.

I once saw Rod being dealt a Royal Flush, only a week after his first game of poker. Another time, I saw him decline to choose heads or tails in a coin toss, only to have the coin land on its side.

(more…)

WASHINGTON, NJ -

Every time I open a new book of fiction, there’s a part of me that hopes for the improbable: to encounter something new, something utterly original.  So as you can imagine, I’m let down a lot.  But sometimes I get lucky.

It’s been two weeks since I finished reading J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand, but here’s this little gem of a book, still sitting on my desk.  I don’t know when I’ll return this paperback to its designated shelf, but it won’t be anytime soon, for I keep going back to it, reading one of the 100 anecdotes in this collection at random, smiling and chuckling along the way.

(more…)

PHILADELPHIA, PA–

We are weaving in and out of lanes, and I’m trying to feed my children almonds, but they just keep asking me to put on the rap radio station, and they keep kicking the back of my seat. We are in between reading and writing camp and on the way to guitar lessons. My nine-year-old daughter suddenly starts peppering me with questions: What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw, Mom? What’s the wildest thing you ever did?

She always asks me these sorts of things when I’m driving, or stressed out, so my typical first response is, “Uh…I can’t think right now. I’m…driving.”

“Come on!” She gets annoyed. “Tell me something. Tell me about yourself.”

“Well, what about you?” I counter, stalling for time as I maneuver through a busy intersection. “You tell me about yourself. What’s the weirdest thing you ever saw?”

“I don’t know,” she mutters. “Once, I found a quadruple peanut… But I’m only nine.” She grows suddenly, strangely sentimental. “You’ve had this whole life I don’t know about. What were you like as a teenager? Tell me a story.”

(more…)

THE DEEP SOUTH-

I stop by the spot where the old bar used to be and dig through the ashes of days gone by.

We used to be the hottest college nightspot in town. Our Thursday night line would wind down to the Campus Fil-A-Sack and back but now they’re closed too. I heard a strip club came in but from the look of things it’s been shut down awhile. There’s nothing but the shell of a sign, some trash and scattered glass. Weeds growing up through cracks in the lot. A slit still exists in the blacked-out front door so I cup my hands around my eyes and peer inside. Other than the requisition runway and metal pole things still look a lot like they did so many summers ago…

(more…)

BUSAN, KOREA -

“I’ll never trust another old person,” Bart Simpson once said, and for that nugget of wisdom I’ve always half-respected him. The fact is the elderly are as capable of screwing you over as a menacing looking teenager, or a hardass, stoneface punk twenty-something. Worse, the elderly won’t just take you for a ride… They’ll say they ‘fleeced’ you and call you a ‘rube’. Of course, if you trust the elderly, you can have no complaints about being called a ‘rube’. That’s just exactly what you are.

And that’s exactly what I am. A rube. A pure-bred, plain-as-day rube. I met an old man and let him have his wicked way, and he damn well did it on national TV. No, not Korean national TV, which is of interest only to Koreans, and which is so backward, racist and pedophilic that no one could seriously give a fuck what is said there… but the BBC!

(more…)

LAS VEGAS, NV-

I called Brad Listi from some sleepy little suburb in Sacramento. We chatted. I think I strong-armed the poor fellow and told him that I wanted to read at TNB’s first L.A reading. He’s too kind. Dear and charming.

I got the gig.

So, L.A.  I had to go. Haven’t seen my birth city in years. Memories of crowded streets and concrete buildings tumbled through my head. 

I gassed up and hit I-15.

(more…)

OAXACA CITY-

This is Rock ‘n’ Roll, but not rock ‘n’ roll music.  This is some heroin addict losing a thumbnail on a G string, Al Green on his knees, Sleepy John Estes alone beneath a streetlight screaming, “Aaahh’m just a pris’ner!” into a Coors Light bottleneck.  This is Mick Jagger finally castrated and Marianne Faithfull juggling his balls and a chainsaw.  And this is accordion.  Just accordion played by a Zapotec girl in a night alley that has no business being this orange.

(more…)

ATLANTA, GA -

In photos from his youth he looked like a porcelain doll, a severely myopic puppet. When I knew him, he was in constant motion, a coiled spring: knee bouncing, fingers grasping and lighting cigarettes, eyes darting, lips moving and always talking sports. I couldn’t keep up with him though I knew I was smarter.

He was my mother’s only sibling, born when my grandmother was in her 40s, eventually becoming too much for her to care for. Back then my Uncle Billy had a sweeping range of unspecified mental issues (widely ignored by all around him), yet he possessed an eidetic memory for sports trivia. (Asperger’s Syndrome wouldn’t be recognized until 1944 and only officially named for Hans Asperger in 1981, a year after the good doctor’s death.) He was hyperactive, displayed attention deficit tendencies, was susceptible to stimulants and depressants alike. We merely called him Silly Billy, but not to his face. Billy was simply complicated.
(more…)

LOS ANGELES—

My best friend in my early L.A. days was a German guy I’ll call Christoph. I lived on the porch of a house in Silver Lake, which I shared with a gay musician, a film student from Austria, yet another film student from France, and the birdlike former frontwoman of the noted band A Certain Ratio; and Christoph was a constant guest who’d often stop by at night and drink with me till dawn. Like me, he’d lived in New York, where he worked as freelance photographer, and when I met him, through my Austrian housemate, he was launching his cinematography career. He later progressed to shooting blockbusters, and when he returned from far-flung locations, he was always full of gossip. I heard much that I won’t repeat, though I’ll share this much: If Christoph is to be believed—and, whatever his faults, I can vouch for his credibility—Julia Roberts is a major bitch.
(more…)

BOULDER, CO-

I am a huge fan of fermentation. There are few things I enjoy more than a glass of red wine in the evening. Especially merlot. Yeah, that’s right I said it. Despite the best efforts of the writers of the movie Sideways, I am still in love with the “M” word. Give me a glass with a nice bowl to roll it around in and I am one happy chick. And while I am not an addict, I have come to look forward to this experience with at least some measure of regularity. For me, the hardest part of pregnancy is not the back pain, difficulty of sleep – or even the labor. No, it is the necessity to cut back from that sublime burgundy in the glass.

Unlike most of my peers within the conservative Evangelical church in which I grew up, I was not taught by my parents that the drinking of alcohol is a sin. Rather, my training was of a more subtle nature. It wasn’t that drinking alcohol itself was a sin – unless of course it crossed over to drunkenness, at which point it ranked fairly high in the seven deadliest. It was more that drinking in front of somebody else who might be inclined to have a problem with it was.

(more…)

PHILADELPHIA, PA-

My father was a prodigy who left school at age seventeen to go on the road with a big band. At the pinnacle of his career, which occurred when he was twenty years old, he landed a gig as a trombonist in the Buddy Rich Band until, as I would learn years later, he got fired for being too fucked up – and how fucked up must he have been for a jazz musician to lose his job over that. After Buddy reamed his ass and booted it back to Philadelphia, my dad did a brief stint as a session musician, which meant if someone like Peggy Lee or Sammy Davis, Jr. came to town and needed a trombone player, my father got the call. And so he eked out a living that way, until, he insisted, the Beatles killed jazz.

(more…)

MUNICH, GERMANY-

Adolf Hitler moved to Munich in the early ’20s to improve his chances of making it as an artist. Before the Nazis came to power, their HQ was in Munich.

During this time, Hitler always ate at the same cafe.

Well, until 1927. In 1927 the owner kicked him out as he hadn’t paid his bar tab in months. Hitler moved on up the road to a cafe at the other end of the street.

The old woman who owns the cafe was a little girl in the ’20s. She remembers Hitler eating there. Remembers him having screaming matches in the toilets.

That’s another weird thing. I’d never really thought about Hitler going to the toilet. I guess he must have done.

(more…)

LOS ANGELES—

After one of the first Die Princess Die shows I attended, Pete, the guitarist and co-frontman, asked what I thought. I allowed that the show was pretty good, except I wished the band would break more stuff.

He considered that a lame reaction—or “stupid” is the adjective I believe he used. I was surprised, since we’d initially bonded over our shared enthusiasm for …And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, a band notorious at the time for breaking stuff.

Over the next couple of years, however, Die Princess Die evolved into perhaps the most destructive, if not out-and-out violent, band in Southern California. They scared people, and I think that partly accounts for the large following they deserved but never acquired, despite having not just one but two frontmen with movie-star looks.
(more…)

SAN DIEGO, CA-

I plan on having a low-key 4th of July. I’m pretty dead-set on staying in, as come the holiday weekend crowds of tourists flock to the beaches and downtown, often heavily drunk; traffic becomes a snarling nightmare, and ever since a drunken brawl broke out a few years ago, SDPD has taken to patrolling the beaches like a paramilitary force during the summer holidays.

Not for me, thanks. I’m well past the point where I have the patience to deal with huge out-of-town crowds, and anyways, I’ve managed to sunburn my back fairly badly while out boogie boarding the weekend before, which is only just starting to heal. From what I can see in the bathroom mirror, there is no discernible difference between my dorsal side and an iguana’s.

(more…)

LOS ANGELES -

I guess you could say I got in on the ground floor.

Along with Brad, Dawn, Zoe, Reno, Blaine, Lenore, R Kent, Kip, Boose, and others, I was one of the original writers when TNB first launched three years ago.

(more…)