Bookmarks, leaflets and guerilla marketing.

Black Opal Books designed the bookmarks above for Ruined Days and I got 500 of them printed. About 450 of them went out to friends in five locations: Albuquerque, NM; Idaho Springs, CO; Seattle, WA; Nashville, TN; and Laguna Beach, CA. Should they accept the assignment, they'll drop bookmarks, strategically, all over hell and gone. Stuart, the CO agent will be travellng the states and Europe in the next few weeks, and no telling where those bookmarks will end up. He's crazy in a very good way, and a partner in Rival.com. The SoCal eminence, Kevin, had an agency in Long Beach for many years and is a legend out there. The NM personage, Kathleen, is no stranger to book marketing; her ex was a bestseller and they had an agency in L.A. The Seattle friend, Eric, is the west coast excec. CD for a huge agency. And, Sarah, the Nashville lady heads an agency office in music city for that same agency. A very colorful bunch. And I met them all through advertising. Oh, the stories. Over the years that business has been very good to me. It blessed me with these guys who are used to much more sophisticated tactics. I am looking forward to what happens.

The next wave of bookmarks are quite different. Designed by Ryan Simonet they have books on one side, all covers by his cohort, Ben Carmean. The other side bears an ad for my sculpture website, which also serves as my book website. These will be dropped by small planes all over Tulsa, Oklahoma. When I was a kid there, I saw such a thing--leaflets for a new filling station. I ran through fields and back yards and knee deep creeks to get these fluttering circulars. Don't ask why--they all said the same thing. They came from the sky I guess is why. And I was a very bored kid.

Well, the littering laws may be different these days. Maybe not planes. And maybe not Tulsa. Perhaps they'll go under windshield wipers and into books at bookstores before they kick me out. But they will turn up. Watch the skies.

And, as the copy on them says, if you use one to mark your place in a book of mine, I will thank you over and over. Love, G.

If You Ever Plan To Motor West. A Dustbowl Saga.

That's dust behind the vehicle. Hard to believe, the godawfulness of those storms...

I don't know where this one came from. I don't have any relatives affected by The Dirty Thirties, the terrible dustbowl days and the migration to California. Other than how everyone, anyone, was affected. And the subject of this hybrid prose (prose poem?), John Stark Settle, is no one I knew or knew of. When I moved out to Los Angeles some years back, I took some back roads, desert roads, and old Route 66 some of the way, and imagined the trials of people I'd seen in photos taken by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. The past has always been with me, and previous lives are not something I'd argue against. In Chino, at the old air museum, I felt their presence, those people thrust into WWII. Strongly. A book could come out of that place, the people talking to me over the years in that otherwise empty museum, with "Don't Sit Under The Apple Tree" piped in, old fighter planes sitting on polished floors. The cockpits seemed so small, but they held real people. Vital people who still shared their energy.

            Anyway, out in LA with my Kansas plates, I happened to meet a couple of dustbowlers, oldsters who had motored west, gotten their kicks on Route 66. One had started a motel after surviving the migration. I wish I had talked to him more, heard some more, but I was anxious to start my own California Dreaming. And I'll say this; the place was good to me.

            So here's a 500-word piece that jumped onto the page, started out as flash fiction, but turned a corner somewhere and got all hybrid prose/poetry on me. A saga in sixty lines. A word here: John Settle's worldview is not mine, though I envy him his time with the early Beat generation. This piece got picked up by Shotgun Honey, I'm proud to say, as I regard them as the Paris Review of noirish badassery. Give 'em a read when in that mood. And, of course, a plug for Ruined Days, another journey from Kansas in novel form.

Settle

            Eighty-seven. Full life they'll say. Full, anyway, of something.

Settle came to California in 1935.

                        propelled by dust storms like great roiling theater curtains, bulldozed shotgun shack, shared cotton crop zeroed out

            Now California is trying to be Kansas eighty years later. To dust.

Thought it was the green and promised land. Seen so much.

            Shuffle-stepped, soft-shoed humming, singing, "Getcher kicks. On Route sixty-six."

            He had.

                        Kicks to the head as a seven-year old.

Khaki-clad men, crop cops for the landowners, his mother going with a pair of them at night.

            goddamn why would you think of that? Migrant whore, they said.

            Spat it, didn't just say it.

            Fear. Hate. Pain. Rage. "Don't forget Wy-nona, San Bernadeeno, kicks, ever plan to motor west..."

            Hummed it, little jump step, his knee hurt. 

                                    "Hell to get old," he said to the dog that watched him.

                        "But you know that."

            The dog's tail moved once, he thumped over on his side, exhaled, closed his cloudy eyes and slept.

            Early on, the scene, man. Seemed right, seemed cool. Got high. Read a lot. Jack, Howl, Bill, Road, Steinbeck stuck with him but a 1930's copy of Napoleon Hill in tatters thrust him forward, shot him at the moon. He shed the jungled friends.

            Jobs. Warehouses. Bridges. Boomtime. Scraping. Saving.

            Settle Inn Motels, all over the west, the dream. Three of them the reality.

Torrance,

Culver City,

San Pedro.

            Prosperous, then not.

            Fling with Vegas in the fifties. Part owner Cactus Flower Casino. Kicked out by eye-ties, the mean-eyed jew, muttering through cigars.

            had the knack for a few years, lost it.

            John Stark Settle. Back to the wall.

Splash.

Ol' Kentuck into the glass, two fingers. Cheap. Burning.

            Drink from a glass, not the bottle and you're not a shitbum.

            A clean glass.

Weighed the cold Smith and Wesson 357, released the cylinder to gravity, checked the loads.

.38 pluses. Hollowpoints.

Solid gun. A Burroughs piece.

            Snap the cylinder shut, click like an old Cadillac door. Pink convertible.

The dog's front feet moved. Chasing something in a dream, Settle thought. I was always doing that.

            Damn near caught it, too.

            One stored number on the cellphone. "Come pick up the dog tonight," to Marie's voicemail. She had dogs, a little land. "I'm going back to Kansas."

            Closed the door softly behind him.

Walked to the empty ruined pool, climbed down the chromed ladder. He'd sold this motel thirty years before. To be demolished next month. The sign said a health clinic. Coming soon.

            He remembered the chromed ladder and how much it had cost. Blisters of rust scraped his hands as he descended.

Expensive chromed steel. Custom made.

            Made irrelevant.

The pocked and gray and spray-graffitied pool wall obscured all but some of the faded steel turquoise sign from where he stood in the leaves and trash.

            Amoeba-shaped they'd called it.  the sign. when bright.

Settle Inn. "For the Best Rest in the West," said a smaller sign.

Beneath it.

The Heap, St. James and the Gospel of Comics

I'd smuggled it in, but there was no way to read "The Heap" comic book, sitting between my grandmother and my aunt, and sometimes, my father, in St. James Catholic Church off of 39th and Troost in Kansas City.The service was long, interminable, for a boy who, nowadays, would be classified as suffering from ADHD, and the church was stuffy in summer, the heavy air aswim with mingled perfumes, aftershave, musty clothing, and the cloying incense from the service itself.

I soon discovered that I could avoid church altogether by disappearing at a strategic time: the time between readiness and firing up the old family Dodge. They'd holler my name a few times, then go without me, shaking their heads at my insouciance. The summer was now total enjoyment, church being the only dreary thing about it.

The old neighborhood was a playland. Feral cats who followed me around. Neighbors with foreign accents and strange behaviors. Overgrown lots and garages with power mowers and half-built cars. A Zesto sold soft ice cream with a hard chocolate shell, and a seedy old used bookstore and candy emporium supplied me with comics, trading me one for my two. Sometimes I'd pull a whole wagonload of Air Boys, Actions, Supermans, Captain Marvels, and Green Hornets and trade them in.

On the way home, I'd hang around outside the pool hall on Troost, invisible due to my age, and pick up some colorful language from the ducktailed toughs smoking and talking, cupping their cigarettes in their hands, one foot against the building. I would do the same, at a distance, with chocolate cigarettes wrapped in white paper, but I wouldn't flip them out into the street like they would. I'd eat mine. Then head back to the old stucco house on Manheim Road, with my Western Flyer full of adventure, lighter by half. I supplemented my diminishing stacks by buying new ones from the drugstore rack.

The origins of The Heap are fuzzy in my mind, but I recall he was a downed German ace who somehow made it into the swamps of the south. He was a mass of vegetation, leaves, bayou creatures, and he was dedicated to ridding the world of evildoers. He would envelop the bad guy in his compost pile and move on, looking for more. He usually saved scantily-clad beautiful women, who would shakily repeat the tale to unbelievers, while he watched from the shadows, never to be rewarded for his deeds. I met this heroic trashpile through Airboy Comics. It seems that during WWII The Heap flew against the Luftwaffe, through some stretch of comic book writing, easily accepted by my malleable mind. Sometimes Airboy was pitted against him in these sorties, and that frustrated me.

If they'd made these comics small enough to fit inside a hymnal I might have had a better church attendance record, but what goes around comes around. I was later forced to endure the whole confirmation process in the Episcopal Church by my stepfather and mother. My stepfather's old man was an Episcopal minister from London, England. There was no escape, when I was sent to live with them for various periods of my life, in Louisiana. But I was also free to roam the fringes of bayous and swamps to search for The Heap. I never saw him, but was probably watched over. By a higher power, or the leaf pile who moves through the cypress roots in search of miscreants. Or both.

Ruined Days is on the shelves. A short excerpt.

Now available in paperback and ebook:

Author Interview in The Big Thrill

When they reached the other side, he turned left to Ponchatoula and checked the directions Arnaud had given Cobb. Through the little town and past a tattered billboard that said “Are You Saved?” with the d and the question mark almost illegible. At his side, Emilie made a sound and nestled deeper into sleep. The road they turned down reminded him of Cobb’s place, remote, untended. A recent rain had made the dirt road slippery and he slowed to engage the Land Cruiser’s four wheel drive. At least it wasn’t a long road. The shack came into view. Brick pattern tarpaper sides. No Maisson De Vries.

He pulled up in front and stopped. Emilie awoke, said “Hmm?” She wiped her eyes with balled fists, yawned, stretched. Planted a kiss on Travis’s cheek, smiled. She woke up well. He usually watched her wake up. It was a pleasure. This time, the foreboding dimmed it. He almost ducked as a large shadow floated over them. It was a turkey buzzard, circling low over the grounds and trees behind them. It didn’t mean anything, shouldn’t anyway, just something dead in the bayou. The swamp was full of dead things. He’d put some of them there.

But the shape was wrong. The still air was too mute. There should be something more filtering into his consciousness. Tire tracks, fresh footprints in the mud—might mean nothing.

“Charming,” she said. “Did you pick it out?”

“Your kin did. Maybe they don’t like you.”

“God, do you suppose there’s running water?”

“If we hate it, we’ll get a motel. No big deal.”

“I hate it.”

“Come on. I’ll carry you over the threshold.”

“Not here you won’t.” She got out the passenger side door, leaving her purse and bags.

In the yard, she slumped her shoulders exaggeratedly, stood limp.

“We’ll find a place, don’t worry,” Travis said. “Arnaud was thinking any port in a storm. And I was thinking maybe I’d send you to Kansas City, anyway.”

She spun around, fists on her hips. “Oh, ho, ho, no, you won’t. I’m all in. You said so yourself. I’m not going anywhere. Even if we stay in this hovel.”

“We’re not staying here.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I don’t know. Something. Let’s see what else is available on the highway.”
His cell rang. Nobody knew the number but Cobb and Elsie. He answered. “Yeah?”
“Oh man, where are you?” Cobb said.
“At this picturesque shack in the swamp.”
“Don’t go in there. Do not go in the cabin.”
“Okay.”
“It’s wired. Semtex. One of Arnaud’s boys got bent. Money, we think. They were gonna take care of it in one blast.”
“No shit? We were ten feet from going in. How much do they know?”
“We’re finding out now. They questioning the dude back in the shop. We think they don’t know much, just that the guy they looking for was gonna hole up in the cabin. They don’t know about anything other than that. They think Arnaud is out of the loop, that his guys were doing some freelance for money. This need to know stuff works pretty good.”

“So what happens to the shithead who talked?”

“Need to know?”

“No.”

***

F***ing poets, man

I own a t-shirt from Barrelhouse Literary Review that says that with no asterisks. I'm not sure why I bought it, as its sentiment seems to express frustration with poets, and I've never felt that. I guess I just thought it was funny, that perhaps I'd wear it to a poetry slam at the Uptown Theatre or somewhere. A long odds possibility, since I only leave the compound to get groceries or welding supplies.

I do have an issue with some of the sycophantry that surrounds Maya Angelou, mainly by those who've read maybe one of her lovely poems. And the reason is this. Years ago my brother-in-law attended a reading by Angelou at Unity Auditorium in The Plaza, as a volunteer helper. The main guy who'd set it all up was steering Angelou to the easiest access to the auditorium, and said something like,"Maya, this door over here is..." at which point she drew herself up imperiously and snapped at him, "Do NOT call me Maya. I don't know you. Call me MISS Angelou." Jeezo capeezo. Give me a break. Dissing the help is just bad manners.

I asked my brother-in-law if he encountered any of that huff and he said no, she was quite nice to him, but there was a little group of admirers standing around which sort of dispersed at that point, looking startled. Maybe she'd had a bad flight or something. (Free, but maybe not First Class) Let me be clear on this: I wholeheartedly admire Ms. Angelou for many things: talent, creativity, the survival and triumph over the godawful crap that blacks have had to withstand over many years, making it to the top. She can certainly be forgiven for flashes of attitude. She fought the good fight, as did thousands before her, thousands after her. She doesn't need my whitey approval. Greatness was hers and the legacy endures.

I'll leave it at that, dead poets and all, but I think there is a limit to how much one believes in one's own press and well-wishers. Her real name is Marguerite Johnson, by the way. And William Least Heat Moon's is William Trogdon.  He takes his name from his father's experience in the tribe of Mic-O-Say, a Boy Scout Council. I briefly bumped against Mic-O-Say at Boy Scout camp in Locust Grove, OK as a kid. Look for my name change soon. I hope it sells books like crazy.

I had the honor of attending a reading by Robert Frost years ago at Rockhurst College. He didn't take umbrage at anyone, just read a goodly amount of his wonderful poetry. At the end, Monsignor somebody said "Please stay seated, then Mr. Frost will pass out, and I shall pass out after him." To which Frost said, "It must be all that communion wine, as I'm usually the last one to pass out." What a grand old dude he was. I passed out after them and felt quite good about it. I later checked out a record album of his from the library. I still have it. The late fees would probably pay for a new Corolla. It was about worn through anyway, very scratchy.

I'm happy to say that I've submitted some poetry of my own and, so far, two have been accepted by widely diverse journals: Shotgun Honey and Straight Forward Poetry Review. Both pieces are prose poetry, in which I was careful to link words and phrases in a way that appealed to me and which, I believe, took it out of the purely prose realm. I don't call myself a poet, and still go by any name anyone wishes to holler. Usually, "hey." That may change when the next president appoints me poet laureate.

One piece, "John Settle," is about a Kansas migrant who goes to California in Dustbowl days, later starts a string of motels, goes belly up. The other, "The Wildcatter," about an oil field entrepreneur who asks a young lady for a dance and wins her heart. They're both from "The Dancing Men" series, some of which are awaiting acceptance--or the "R" word. (Help me out here, Maya, I mean Miss Angelou, you ever get any of those rejections?)

Just got one! Bennington Review. They appreciate the time I took to send it to them.  Hey what about the time it took to write it? Oh well. Anyway, I regard Shotgun Honey as the Paris Review of noir and badassery, and for them to accept a prose-poetic, not firmly in-genre, piece is unusual. Straight Forward is the first pure poetry journal to accept my stuff, and I've perused their fare. I am humbled indeed. Real poets are to be found there. And, now, me too.

My favorite poets? Frost. Dylan Thomas. Anyone who writes at all should read Dylan Thomas. James McMurtry (lyrics to Choctaw Bingo are stellar) Langston Hughes. Rimbaud. Ginsberg. Bob Dylan (Allan Zimmerman) is a huge favorite. And Thomas McGuane. McGuane writes only fiction, you say? Well, it's how he writes it. He turns a phrase that moves like the workings of a very fine watch. His pages flow. His words fall into place. I will review his "Crow's Fair" in an upcoming blog. And that, as they say, is that. Until then, don't diss the help if you can help it.

Love, G.