MR BAD VIBES NEIGHBORDHOOD GENE GREGORITS

WRITTEN FOR VICE: 7-8-16

August 2016: 20 BELOW ZERO: KICKING IT OLD SCHOOL WITH THE GHOST OF BOB STINSON

“You can really get some good, cheap stuff around here. I don’t really do it, but if you wanted to, we could get some stuff and do it, you know, later, if you wanted.” —Bob Stinson, 1993

“Mama send me downtown/ Saturday at noon/ I gotta service that transvestite/ or I’ll get kicked out of my room/ ya want the king of the losers?/ hey, I know that road through and through”

—Danny and Dusty, “King Of The Losers,” 1985

“I’m for rollin/ I’m for tossin’ in my sleep/ it’s not guilt though/ it’s not the company I keep” —Neil Young, “I’m the Ocean,” 1995

At the risk of alienating the dozen or so readers I have left, I’ll tell ya, with a long face, that I never was a Replacements fan. I’ve had more’n a few girlfriends who were, including one that fucked Westerburg in 92 and one that got to third base, whatever the fuck that means, what is that a fucking BLOWJOB, with Tommy Stinson in 95. But me? Not even close. Not even a handshake.

“Oh here we GO! Bashing anything and everything, just because it’s popular, that’s all you do, Gregorits.”

Ah HAH. Well. That’s lazy thinking, sir.

“Blah, blah, blah. No one cares about your snooty New York shit, man.”

Lazy and IGNORANT thinking. I haven’t been to New York City in 30 years, people. And I’m no SNOB. In fact I’m — always have been, which is obvious to anyone who ever actually READ my journalism — a POPULIST. In FACT, a pretty extreme populist, I’d say, albeit one with standards. When Hollywood gets it RIGHT, I’m the first to shout its name in ecstasy. But STANDARDS, people — I’ve been imploring you for 50 years now: have some fuckin self- respect. And yes, I am a POPULIST. No sarcasm in this statement. When THE KILLS came out with their second album, I mailed them a care package containing Springsteen’s Nebraska on CD, the actual CD, not a burned copy. And also David Peace’s 1977, a British novel then- unpublished in the states. (I’d paid thirty dollars for my import copy, and here I was paying another 75 to mail the fucking thing BACK to England, with 200 dollars’ worth of Springsteen CDs and First edition Larry Clark books and photos of Lydia Lunch’s pussy and god knows what else…ask them…and talk about SNOBS…my populism emerges bright and clear now.)

My finger was on the pulse of pure ART in the POP CONTEXT back then…I had to explain to the Kills who they really were, beyond all that hipster preening and gibberish. They’re too hip to acknowledge my influence…the point is, Springsteen gets it right often enough. And so do the Kills. They attack the void from opposite directions, opposite places. The only REAL difference between Springsteen — when he’s DARK — and the Kills is that the Kills are stupid enough to let me backstage with them. I am a PARAGON of populism. Are you fucking kidding? I was first in line to see An Officer And a Gentleman at the age of 4. I thrilled to Breaking Bad and True Detective in more recent times, right along with the dimmest o’yas. Uh….Fleetwood Mac! Joaquin Phoenix! Mickey Rourke! That “Xs and Os” song! Budweiser! Maxwell House! Netflix! Speed Stick! Frito-Lay! Palmolive! Aerosmith!

But the REPLACEMENTS? Eck.

“ECK?”

Well COME on. Allow me to point out that it’s Paul Westerberg who never left my CD tray for TWO-FUCKING-YEARS, 2004-2005, whose 7th solo effort “Come Feel Me Tremble” was my reigning obsession for damn near a THOUSAND DAYS AND NIGHTS, breaking all kinds of records for morbid pop music fetishes, at least in the circle of drunks I ran with at the time…I know the entire album by heart, and I feel almost as strongly about “49:00 (of Your Life),” Saucy Paul’s ill-fated download-only experiment which broke ALL the rules: you’re a BASTARD, Paul! Songs fade out, maybe to return later, maybe not, while new ditties kick in at the halfway point, like to spit in your face, kinda, and “what happened to the first half of the song, Paul?” (Boy are YOU not on board here.) New Westerberg shit, and it’s HOT SHIT alright, hot fuckin SHIT but hard to make out the finer points at times since Surly Paul has 2-3-4- even 5 of these bad boys laid down one-atop-the-fucking-other, if you can even imagine such hubris, let alone the racket, as Sassy Paul comes at you like a fucking Butte Blitzkrieg (maybe Green Baby would work better there, it’s all STARKWEATHER COUNTRY to me) ultimately producing an effect which veers dangerously close to PURE NOISE, and then we have the MEGAPOP MEDLEY at the end, featuring Sonny and Cher, The Monkees, Elton John, Alice Cooper, in short bursts, you know, until THESE start playing simultaneously also, AW HAW HAW HAW, it’s the FAWKIN GREATEST THING since Anal Cunt’s “1,000 Songs” 7” EP, dontcha know.

“That’s got nothing to do with The Replacements, Gene honey.”

And certain tracks on “Stereo/Mono” are so good they’re…just…fucking BLISS, you know, like the finest shit ever recorded in a basement, but it wasn’t until he went RAW —

“Gene…” “The Grandpa Boy shit is excellent!” “GENE.” The Replacements — “Yes?” — were mediocre.

And MAWKISH, yeah, MAWKISH is what they were. MAWK is Paul’s middle name, and he runs headfirst into that shit every single time, unless he’s secretly falling down drunk in his fucking basement churning out yet another Chilton-esque “roughie.”

OFFERCHRISSAKEWHAT. I’m TIRED of this now. That Midwestern MOPE facade, that POSE, is the EPITOME of mediocrity, and I KNOW, see, because I grew UP with the fucking shit, neck DEEP in the fucking shit. And it’s LAME, LAME, LAME. My former brother-in-law, back in 95, fronted a punk band called the Prostitutes, and it was the same gutless, bogus, “Ramones” trip, the “loser” trip, that the cretinous Replacements were on. It was a lot of the same music. It was flannel and shit beer and shit-for-brains beerhands. No one read BOOKS. Mentally retarded working class punk rock kids who live with MOM and buy cartons of Kools with coupons at the local Exxon station don’t read BOOKS. It was minimum wage HELL living with those fucking people. It was gasoline stations and road saltstains and numb fingers and toes and Scandinavian depression, it was suicidal ideation, and eating lots of toxic fucking waste at MCDONALDS, see? And I am not NOSTALGIC for starving-class post-industrial squalor. Beer drinking in the winter time? Go fuck yourself! NUKE the rust belt. NUKE the western Mid- Atlantic. NUKE the Godforsaken Midwest. (“I think I’d rather SMOTHER!” That’s what Sassy Paul sang on “I Don’t Know,” isn’t it? Well, I know, Paul. I knew that you ain’t got the guts! Not to REALLY smother, sweetheart. Personally, I’d rather SMOTHER WHILE A SUBNORMAL EXTRA LARGE JUNGLE RODENT GNAWS MY COCK OFF than live in Minnesota. THAT I KNOW!)

The main problem with the Replacements’ “loser-trip” is that it’s anti-intellectual, which means it is both lazy and cowardly, and in essence no better than any other conformist trip, including the ones your family and neighbor are stuck on. This shit— and really, the bulk of 1980s punk — had different aims than the vulnerable, aggressive, and most importantly, literary underground rock which preceded it. If anything, America’s “college rock” phenomenon was a softening and a simplifying, a sugar coating, of what had developed in the squalor of CBGBs and the psychosis of The Factory. When the suburbs became part of the picture, the game was up.

You don’t halfway bust out of jail anymore than you halfway rob a liquor store. It’s either revolution, or it isn’t. The Replacements just never grew up, and that’s boring. It’s horribly boring. They were never about growing up (neither were their contemporaries) and that’s idiotic.

Ah, all these endearing deficiencies of the Replacements. (I think that was their original name, “The Deficients,” or something similar. Would they have even been remembered with that name?) Well, fuck that. They were a precocious bar band with limited charms, those mainly having to do with Westerberg’s lyrical flourishes, and of course, he was perfectly alright as a vocalist. By their 3rd or 4th album, The Replacements had kinda mastered “perfectly alright” as would appeal and apply to the increasing snugly wuggily-ness of US underground rock, now defined by terminally self aware charlatans like Sonic Youth. This was the emergence of “indie” and the absolute death of “punk.” (Those at the center, like Thurston Moore or J. Mascis, may recall it differently, but of course they would, wouldn’t they?)

There were moments, mostly on or around 1985’s “Pleased To Meet Me,” like “Kiss me on the Bus,” “Left of the Dial,” and the rousing tribute “Alex Chilton.” These were enough to prop up a legend that at its base, was nothing more than navel-gazing slacker romanticism. The reality of the bang was simple: ATTITUDE IS ALL. And the reality of ATTITUDE IS ALL wears thin for the Replacements, that “heart on my sleeve” shit got stretched remarkably thin, but then again, look at the 20 year existence of the Ramones, a band with even less to say, and no half-ass Jackson Browne on board to say it. The Replacements were and are and will forever be OVERRATED. It is a legacy of wishful thinking over honest appraisal; they are, in other words, a CRITICS band.

“We’ve gotten our bearings, now. We will organize. We will plan. And we will come for you, Gene Gregorits. You’ve gone too far now.” “Hah! I’m in PRISON, you fool.” “Anyone can get got. Sleep tight, Genie Weenie.” Alright LOOK: I like “The Mats” okay. I’m being too harsh. It’s just…they’re too much like a dog that won’t stop pissing on the rug, and it looks at you with these huge sorrowful eyes but you know it ain’t really sorry and you know it ain’t gonna stop pissing on the rug and so you lace up your steel toed Timberlands real good and tight, special just to really GET the fucker, teach it a goddamn lesson, cuz…cuz ya just got to, you know, and, like, you’re not even wearing PANTS, but —

“You’re dead, Gregorits.”

I’m SORRY! I genuinely like “the Ments,” or “Mats,” however you’re supposed to say, how the FANS say, right? I do! As a matter of fact, I read the new book, erm, just now, okay, the one everyone’s talking about! Yup, I really did, and I’ll have you indie-rock bearzie-wearzies KNOW that I begged Perseus Book Group of Philadelphia for over two months, with a series of witty, inventive, but troubling letters soliciting a REVIEW copy of Bob Mehr’s Trouble Boys: The True Story of the Replacements (Da Capo Press, 2016, $27.50) which they did finally send to me (in PRISON!) and which I did giddily devour last week in 3 briefly separated 8 hour sittings as black men with names like Toddrick and Latravis had steamy rough maximum security penitentiary mansex all around me. I smelled the fresh glue of the book, inhaling deeply so as to disguise the fecal musk of soul brother love, but it didn’t work. Da capo should change its logo. It’s a swastika. One of the lovermen asked me if I was a Nazi.

“Because of the neck tattoo, right?’ “Naw man, that say ‘AIR-YELL STEEVE-SON a Nazi.’ I’m askin YOU now, is YOU a Nazi.” “Hell no.” “Cuz dat book, it gots a Nazi symbol on da spine.”

Change your logo, Da Capo. You’ve been hearing about it for YEARS. You must get off on it. But it’s a dangerous time for Nazi jokes, and if anyone ought to know that, it’s you people. Change your logo, boys. Also, on the exterior side of things: I couldn’t help noticing my onetime fan Nick Tosches’ blurb on the dust jacket. It made me snort and honk: “Bob Mehr has given us a book, a real book, that will draw you in whether or not you give a fig about rock’n’roll, or any world but your own.” JESUS. Didn’t even READ it! (He must owe’m money. A FIG!)

And now, 457 dense pages later (I read the acknowledgements too) I can’t say I learned a goddamn thing I didn’t already know, or suspect, or simply, naturally assume as fact about this egregiously mythologized, overly praised clutch of adorably alcoholic Milwaukee spudboys.

“Minneapolis, ass-hole.”

Whatever.

Mehr’s book is valuable for 2 things, those being a couple of very minor — but very amusing — Alex Chilton anecdotes, and some fairly disturbing Bob Stinson ones. Bob, for those who don’t know the Replacements story (MARRY ME), was the most interesting member by a long shot. (The others are schmucks.)

Bob basically filled the Brian Jones spot in the band, or — maybe more accurately — you could say he was the Dee Dee Ramone of the Replacements. He rescued the group from terminal mundanity, on an elemental level, by BRINGING THE DARK. Bob was damaged goods long before he met Paul Westerberg, just as Douglas “Dee Dee” Colvin had hustled his sweet sex-teen chicken meat on 42nd Street, and suffered acute “nutsness,” long before meeting that sinfully ugly Hyman boy in Queens who, if only he’d had the good sense to avoid St. Mark’s Place, and punk rock, and get a good job in waste management or the public sector, might have left the utterly unique Dee Dee to join — and possibly save from Malcolm McLaren — the majestic New York Dolls. (As nature, and culture, and good taste all intended. I know my history real good, see?)

Now where was I? Yes sir, in Trouble Boys, the best shit is the Bob shit. Really. At one point, somebody (I think it’s Chris Mars but I don’t feel like checking even though I’m currently using the book as a writing desk, in the cockroach infested vegetable prep room of this northwest “panhandle” Florida prison camp, where I have commandeered as a desk chair the same exact ten gallon white bucket we used last week to kill a 300 pound black sissy) says, “Bob always had these Bob things to do. Like it’d be time to go sit by the train tracks.”

YEEE! How fucking WONDERFUL is that? I am forever smitten with weirdo losers like Bob Stinson. I’d follow them around all day long if they’d let me, but they never do. And don’t you be inviting your crass ass along for my weird errands either. It just isn’t done. (Well, it is, but rarely. If you’re one of the 5 people I snuck into the Tradewinds Island Grand in 2014, prior to my sex beast bust, you can consider yourself very lucky. And now you know why I do not allow friends to accompany me there: your behavior was gauche, bawdy, and narcissistic in the extreme. You did everything — every-single-thing — that I told you not to do, your comments were witless and your energy was all wrong. Never again. I’ll get out of here eventually, return to my old spots, my old spot-obsessing, my existential “beat,” and some of you will creep back into my life and then it’ll be THE QUESTIONS AGAIN: “what’s with you and that multiplex, Gene?” Or the market, my cherished Lexington Market in Baltimore, for example, which I used as my office while homeless in 2010 and 2011: “when ya gonna take me to the Lexington, Gene?” No. “Wanna come out to Detroit this summer and show me the 12 Mile Grindhouse, Gene?” No. Hence THE LIST, which you’ll get — and which you’ll ENJOY, because it’s ALL you’re getting from me you limp jackoffs: NO-FUCKING-INVITES, except for Steve Wynn, my guitar hero, and HE only gets a pass because I promised him 3 years ago when I was on meth just to shut him up because everytime he instant messaged me it interrupted my PORN FEED and I just wanted him to leave me alone, and also because it’s for an article for a magazine, which I will no doubt cannibalize this one to write simply by removing all Stinson references or rather by retaining only explanations of my by now self-conscious lust for dingy dangerous surrealistically bleak loser extraordinaire type milieus — straightaway. But first, I must wrap up this book review, k? K.)

BOB STINSON WAS ALL ABOUT THE LOSER BEAT, SEE? He was a proper dignified UBER- LOSER. He’d done TIME, see, all kindsa time: rehab…psych ward…jail. Bob was a hardened veteran of the best and worst treatment homes in the whole Twin Cities metropolitan region! It’s dehumanizing, being incarcerated, but so is being the only person in a 30 mile radius with a basic understanding of Dada, or punk, or Naked Lunch. And you ain’t an ALPHA-loser without some good lockup scars. (At least a few tattoos.)

Alpha-losers are the only enlightened people. They are rare, rarer than millionaires, certainly, and probably a hell of a lot happier. Bob Stinson, at least in his prime, was an alpha-loser. He had a functional wisdom, to inform a spirituality that was both practical and aesthetic. Alpha- loser wisdom is essentially Buddhist claptrap for the profoundly minimum-wage damaged. It comes down to docility, a natural distaste for power on earth, a primal trust in the inherently Buddhist notion that beauty can not emerge from power, which is the source of evil in the world. From power, from lust for power, there can only be violence, perversion, suffering, delusion, dementia, death. Having spent large portions of his childhood and adolescence behind institutional walls, Bob understood the despotism of the human soul, and that the REMOVAL of power can only produce a more gentle, thoughtful creature…if one chooses to isolate himself from the despots and would-be despots around him. Bob alone on the railroad tracks at night: the man was enjoying his own wisdom, which could not be (or was not meant to be) shared. “It’s always the quiet ones,” they whisper to each other, in the wake of a domestic massacre. But I’ve always believed there would be far fewer eruptions of this nature if ours was a society that valued poetry over rap music, that respected its writers, that know when to shut the fuck up. It’s always the braying, belching, bitching ones, the LOUD ones, who won’t shut the fuck up about MONEY. People thought Bob Stinson was weird. I wonder if we’ll ever know the rest.

There’s a mention, also, on page 175, of Bob and his gal Carleen sneaking beer into the movies, the holiest of all holy loser rituals. That made me cheer. (It’s worth mentioning that of all the Replacements’ old ladies, the ones pictured anyway, Bob’s Carleen Krietler was by far the foxiest, nevermind that Bob looked all the world like a sadistic sex killer, the kind that gets dirty with the bodies several days after the fact. (I have a fetish for that Slavic thing, I guess, you know what I’m saying: the angular face, slightly hooked nose, a hard Russian stare, etc.)

The elder Stinson is largely absent from the second half of Mehr’s book, having been completely absent from the second half of the Replacements’ career. (Which, if I were the author, would not have allowed to pervert or intimidate my own natural, effortless faith in the HEART of the story, as I brazenly lost track of the band’s controversial Slim Dunlap phase (as string of Westerberg solo projects by any other name) and plowed headlong into a stupefyingly complex Dostoyevskian meditation on Bob Stinson’s tortured purity: a rock’n’roll version of The Idiot which that glib, guileless bimbo Iggy Pop’s solo debut was not.) (What the hell! It’s my book, right? Why not swing for the fences?) (You know, I’d really like to fuck this Carleen chick. What do you think she is now, 60? Lydia’s 60, and I’d still fuck Lydia. Boy, we sure don’t get much time down here. Thanks Buddha.) (Carleen? Are you there? SEND ME YOUR PANTIES CARLEEN.)

So anyway…Bob’s post-Mats life was an increasingly untenable mashup of deadening, demoralizing dog-labor, drug hustling, pity sponging, and scene slumming as something of a local legend playing guitar in an endless series of bar bands with names like “Static Taxi” and “Stieglitz Incognito.” He was frequently stuck working long back-of-house hours in various down-to-midscale Italian eateries, bout mostly his cash seems to have come from the Mats’ former manager, Peter Jesperson, who gave in to Bob’ pestering for advances on royalties from the bands’ back catalog. Meanwhile, with Slim Dunlap standing in for Bob, the Mats were falling from grace. Slowly.

Ed,

Ahhhh...the PRIME of my loser life was 96 and 97: divorced at 19, trapped in the cruelest Hell, a kind of sadistic circumstantial nightmare, a situation quite obviously orchestrated by a carniverous and syphillitic God, and which is probably unique to certain unswerving young sociopaths, or maybe it's any man whose ticket gets punched TERMINAL by FATE, see, or by karma, or by his own accumulated temptations (DO NOT POKE BEAR IN EYE UNLESS IN LOCKED CAGE etc): it was the blossoming of evil from ruin, from wreckage, from hurt. Did I love the girl, or did I simply want to own her? Asking the question insincerely: no room for lies in the bunker. Truth is an acid bath. My skin did not remain tender under the lash: by self- cultivated regality ONLY, and through self-reinforced nobility ONLY, by an ASSUMED superiority ONLY did I survive at all. I *could* not do the necessary thing, because I *would* not do the necessary thing. Working the graveyard shift, I experienced two years as hallucnation. From 4-12, it was the emergency room. From midnight to noon, I ran an insane asylum called the Harrisburg YMCA. Between the two, I was up to my ankles in blood and puke. In shit. And piss. And cum. I never slept. I never slept. I never slept. It was dangerous, and the dope-running police were always shining high powered Mag-Lites in my eyes and I just never slept at all. Now, you grow up like that and you learn to hate the world and everything in it (except cats) like that, in a grimy post-industrial slash-your-fucking-wrists Grimhaven like Harrisburg, you become fixated on the abyss, quite naturally fixated, because you are locked into a holding pattern 200 feet abive it all, and you hold and hold, taking it all in, and you expand to accomodate the horror of all that voidstuff down there. Your only relief is demonic romanticism, the flirtation with oblivion and the local pastimes, the sports in season: loser politics, loser aesthetics, loser transgression. It's all you have, it's all you are: spiritual anti-matter. And you acclimate, you adjust, you acquiesce. You fade into the scenery. Nocturnal Harrisburg river scenery, and the putrid wallpaper of suffocatingly toxic adn terminal taprooms, like the rear section of te trans-dimensionally careworn and paranormally vibrant Alva Restaurant, always my first stop after exiting the thoroughly demon-infested Harrisburg Greyhound station, for three straight decades, the very last place I saw my wife before the papers came. And then my father who worked until age 92 as a janitor two blocks down the street, down Market Street, 25 or 28 years of my old dad in his work clothes, waving goodbye to me through mutilated plexiglass. If it's not all gone now, it soon will be. And should be. Here, I have prepared for you a 20-spot NATIONAL SPOTLIST for developing your connosieuership in DESOLATION and BOOZE. it should be of no consequence whatsoever that some of these places, quite possibly even most of them, have ceased to exist. Some of the towns have partially returned to prairie, and are now supporting large coyote populations. (That's a *good* thing.) Others are the same deadly urban overkill sectors they were ten years ago, and ten years before that. Let them continue, and let us drink to their continuance: every heathen bastard among us will face the music sooner or later, together or apart. If you take me up on one of these spots, only to discover a condemned building or a vacant lot, you need only loiter a short while: a homeless man will shamble on by and direct you somewhere just as shitty. It's hardly advisable, but confronting an officer of the law with, "please direct me to the most dangerous bar in town" will produce both a scowl *and* an address. It will not necessarily be accurate, but you can always get better directions at the lame bar. If yuo hop in the car right *now*, and follow my instructions TO THE LETTER, I'd say yur chancesof scoring a downright *indelible* punch of RIGHTEOUS desolation, of authentic old school loser USA feeling-and-vision, are pretty durn good. You're *late*, very late, morbidly late, but not necessarily TOO late, in 2016, for this list. Harrisburg's The Spot, that long-abused and shuddered about phantasmagoric reptile zoo, the state capital's numero uno PRIME TIME GRIME SHRINE, the gastronomic Grand Guignol and uncontested SPOT OF SPOTS, closed its doors forever in the early 2000s. The place was beyond-your-wildest-nightmares GHOULISH, and sold dollar drafts of Yuengling Lager right up to the very end. (They would also -usually begrudgingly- make you the very WORST grilled cheese sandwich you're likely to *ever* encounter). It sat on the corner of 2nd and Walnut, and its sign was actually *seven* signs, one for each letter of its name, and each leter surrounded by an orange circle. They didn't light up, but its large windows ran along both sides of the joint, and you could look right in at night: the Spot was open 24 hours, and one has only to recall that amous Edward hopper painting of Bogey, Marilyn, and...Elvis, I guess it was...but replace the Hollywood legends with a half dozen extras from season two of The Wire, fat caucasian men with tobacco and bourbon blasted faces, men of poor breeding, poor hygiene, then add the big orange dots: you've got the Spot in a nutshell. (And red BRICK. Everything in Harrisburg is red BRICK.) The THRILL of a good spot, initially, is knowing that it's on its last legs, either legally, physically, or financially. A true *spot* is coasting on fumes, hanging together with Scotch tape, reconstructed with Super Glue. The thrill is also in coming to realize tha the siren cal of a used- up, fucked-out old dive transcends KICKS or ACTION or even NIGHTTIME JITTERS but rather is rooted in -for many or most of us spot lovers- a seasoned respect for secret histo

...a seasoned respect for secret history, an empathy for the freak, sympathy for the weasel, an identification with crippled giants and dying monsters and false prophets...with vampires and failures: SPOTS affirm RAW HUMANITY, without pretense, in the most primal way, by *permitting* it. In the marketplace, wounded creatures are swarmed upon and killed. In the daylight of Main Street, the romance of the downtrodden will be punished simply for existing. Therefore, it stands to reason that getting kicked out of a full-blooded after-hours out-of-the- way SPOT, that most rare and sacred refuge for refuse, probably qualifies you as a scum- sucking square. An ASSHOLE. SPOTS, see, are not for ASSHOLES. Assholes go to hipster bars and and sports bars and BREWPUBS. Spots are for CREATURES. They are where creatures go, to BE creatures. And to drink battered, cigarette burned plastic pitchers of Rolling Rock, Busch, Ballantine, Natural Ice. They will swarm upon and punish each OTHER, sometimes fatally, which is o-KAY. So yes, the thing is serious. It is plain to see: SPOTS are the real SOUL KITCHENS of the world. With true hearts, the last hearts, hearts FULL of soul. We are the only ones DUM ENUF to be-LEEEV in love. (Who did "Heart Full of Soul"? Oh my GOD, I can't remember any of the Nuggets bands! I've been down too long! Was it the Kinks? The Flamin' Groovies? Who the fuck did "Heart Full of Soul"? Was it a pub rock band? Was it Eddie and the Hot Rods? 13th Floor Elevators?) (Ah yes, it was the Yardbirds.) ("Get help, you poor lost jackass.") (Okey doke.) Alright? Let us begin our long early morning of the soul. Our dog day afternoon, our journey to the end of the night, before this book review (it's still a book review, until I say different) runs its course altogether. THESE ARE THE FINAL OUTPOSTS OF OUR DETESTABLE SATANIC RUINOUS SPECIES' FINAL BELIEVERS: LOST BETWEEN TIME AND SPACE...INTERSTITIAL ROOMS OF THE INTERSTITIAL NIGHT...NIGHT ROOMS FOR NIGHT PEOPLE...NEITHER LIVING NOR DEAD...but don't let that keep you from savoring the tactless euphoria of rubbernecking when, so obviously, like car crash victims, like the wheezing, charred bodies draged out of a nightclub firebombing, these dumps to which I aim to introduce you are *in extremis* and could whimper off to hell at any moment. Ah! There's the signpost up ahead! Life on the EDGE! These 20 spots will go over it long before you do! Cherish them, you whinging, cringing bitches! Here's 20 BELOW ZERO!

MEET ME DOWN THE ALLEY: A Gene Gregorits Tour of Loser America in the Final Days

"You don't go up in life. You go down. And she couldn't get to where I was. There was too much night arund me." Louis-Ferdinand Celine

"You're a bedtime story...the one that keeps the curtains closed. And I hope you're waiting for me...cuz I can't make it on my own." Morphine, "The Night"

"Drinkin...once again...just to let the bad guys win." Paul Westerberg, "Knockin'em Back"

20. KITTY'S (Baltimore, MD) The best sex I ever had post-Lydia was with a hedonistic Olivia Hussey-doppelganger named Sarah Tilotta. Boys, you just don't KNOW, you can't KNOW: I fell *hard* for the little beast. I'm STILL quite mad for her, no use denying it. Girls, you'll never own anyone the way Sarah owned me and owns me still. The experience is recounted accurately -movingly, I would say although Miss T disagreed ("repulsive", "nauseating", etc) -in my searing psychosexual noir masterpiece, DOG DAYS, which has yet to be acknowledged as a modern classic but you go buy-buy now- now, yes-yes? And feel smarter and sexier than all the rest if the world ever happens to redevelop a sense of LITERATURE and recover a vocabulary, to in essence CATCH UP WITH ME and you yourself demonstrate class and wit when you puff up like a toad, proclaim to a clutch of cutting edge Brooklyn hipster scum, "I was there first, me, uh, hey." "Surrrrrrre you were." "I *know* Gregorits," you whine, getting a little hot under the collar, shaking your head. "He's really the guy in the books." (Throw in, "He gave me chlamydia," if you really want them to believe you. If you DO know me, well, you won't have to lie, will you?) Those clammy little muppet dinks'll buy you beers and maybe let you eat their Adderall. Uh...where was I? That sweet-cunted ex of mine, yes...rotten Sarah...I would weep upon that angelic child's fuzzy little dreambox until my brain went weid with pain signals but, to quote DOG DAYS, "all that unnaturally good fucking had built up in me over time without release (as no appropriate or functional release EXISTS for such love), turning into pure neurotoxin, pure cyanide, in her absence. I wasa crawling, weeping jackass, under seige and suffering God strength agony, too much of a True Believer to let myself die." (While accurate, this line appears nowhere in DOG DAYS. I wrote it afresh, just now!) (I should be in fucking CHATTAHOOCHEE.) So we're in herold station wagon, northeast Baltimore, I just KNOW she's gonna leave -and in fact she has ALREADY left but these are violations, see, these re-enties, these beyond-the- grave mercy fucks leaving me as naked to the slam-bang awfulness of the Baltimore ghetto where I can not HEAL she won't let me HEAL and her smell is so wonderful to me that I can not IMAGINE having gone without it for so many years and most of all I can not IMAGINE losing it these mercy fucks really not so merciful as she is stringing ALONG my strung-the-fuck-out poorboy self 32 years old now in 2008 exactly twice her age and I suppose maybe we'd just HAD one of those mercy fucks leaving me as RAW to the world as a de-shelled hermit crab

...as a de-shelled hermit crab, whimpering helplessly and openly, begging the brat to STAY and maybe that's where we were headed, to a BAR to get a DRINK and TALK about it no matter that I'd only just undergone (for HER sake) a 5 day detox session in Baltimore's dirtiest most drug-infested no-free drug program (get MORE get BETTER get CHEAPER crackheroinmethzannybarsandpercspercspercs in-SIDE Baltimore Detox Clinic than you can on the STREET haw haw haw but I was in NO LAUGHING MOOD those days NO sir!) so we're cruising down Greenmount Avenue in her 1985 station wagon and my muscles are aching because they're petrified from so much PURE ACID produced by grief and defeat and shock trauma I'm *pre-rigorous* as in RIGOR MORTIS, dig, I LOOK dead and I SMELL dead thinking of the blood all the blood of the previous spring the nightmare of my boy HANK my 15 year old Harrisburg tom my COMPENSATION for the idiocy of YOU for the treachery of YOU my Hank torn to pieces by pit bulls and me two weeks later 25 pounds lighter being taken by police by corrupt Baltimore cops at gunpoint BACK TO THE FIELD with steam rising off the green the Maryland Moors morning they hand me a shovel and they say, "get on with it then" so yes I DID drop from 200 pounds to 100 pounds by sweet summertime my breakup and breakdown summertime and Sarah LIKED me skeletal seems the tansformation rather inflamed and engorged her voluptuous narcissism yet it seemed for a short time that she very much did want her family to like me particularly her Irish grandmother and her rather delicious mama ("I know you have the hots for her, Gene") (not *really*, sweetie it was only you) and so I suppose there may have been a chance for some kind of permanence there oh well some kind of longevity then which I wanted very much and would find myself regretting my scars and my checkered past the rumors and the lies and the secrets cuz no simple "nice bit of alright" was the girl no mere sex thing nop cheap dalliance my Sarah but my female IDEAL I think or maybe MAYBE I have it all so impossibly twisted and could it be that the girl was rather on the plain side just shelter from the pain and death-horror the gore and rot around me like a little safety sought and found INSIDE, you know, because Sarah was not shy about her satisfaction and what was so often in the air with her then but *sodomy* of course and Sarah wuld happily ------, see, and let us not fall prey to the briars and thorns of our own placement and design in fear of moral scrutiny from brainwashed peasants and pedants: a sweet young ass is NOT A BAD PLACE TO HIDE! If you are anti-youth you are anti-FUN and I'll be damned if I'm going to allow such an accusation to stand against myself. The point is: when I lost my best gal Sarah and my best pal Hank, at the SAME TIME, I could not TAKE it and I stopped EATING (but not eating pussy) and came within a few millimeters of dying from misery and malnutrition oh it was baaaaaaaad, my friends, and I was so very PROUD of how far I'd taken it and how CLOSE I'd come rolling down Greenmount Avenue in the *opposite* direction after our TALK had gone all wrong with our imminent last kiss hanging in the air like a fart no one will claim or like a brooding passenger in the backseat with a well- documented history of unprovoked violent assaults and Sarah notices Kitty's there on Greenmount squashedin tight between a porn shop and a friend chicken joint with its classic neon sign and vicious looking black patrons blocking the tiny entrance: "Gene, promise me you won't go in there when I'm gone?" It didn't matter if she meant gone *today* after she dropped me off at my basement room a few blocks down or if she meant gone like GONE since I never did see her again and as for Kitty's, well of COURSE I began going in there immediately. That very night. Et cetera. For more on Kitty's, see my novel DOG DAYS (Monastrell: St. Petersburg, 2011).

19. THE SPORTSMAN'S TAP (LaSalle, IL) And there I was, fucking the old art gallery owner in this dirty chaotic backroom, a storeroom...she was living there to save money and now she HAD money because she'd spent it all to fly in the WRITER and the WRITER needed cocaine and the WRITER needed hotel rooms needed taxi cabs needed all the booze in Chicago and "special emergency things" like sauna and acupunture and a transvestite hooker. I was the writer. So the art gallery owner was flat broke when the "Chicago Fire" had been put out and we returned to her gallery in the sticks

...her gallery in the sticks where I tore off her black waitress uniform and then her orange cotton panties to reveal a large but handsome patch of strawberry blonde muff which I fairly launched myself upon like a famished hellhound to discover then a decidedly overripe (but handsome) pussy, and finding the pussy a tad piquant (at least for *mange*) (no, not MANGE, as in dog scurvy, what kind of unchivalrous vulgarian do you take me for? No-no, I mean *mange*, like *mon-ja*, the, um, French word for you goddamn-well-know-what), the decision to simply screw her proper old fashioned -before her husband, the gallery's co-owner- was made then, more or less on the spot, I suppose. The problem had been that the woman could not hold her liquor, requiring me to abandon her many times in Chicago and my nerves were shot from babysitting the six foot drama queen while destroying her credit at the best hotels in town. It was all validated, though, by an exceptional roll in the...whatever was down there, paint- spattered newspaper, empty paint tubes, and packing materials I guess. What I mean to say is that the woman was muscular, and very much Amazonian, which means I didn't have to worry about overwhelming her with the patented Gregorits werewolf-rage or maybe looking like the white Bill Cosby in the event of some bogus rape mania erupting when her Visa bill showed up, or when her period did not. Because, clearly, this was a healthy 200 pound corn-fed psychobitch, absolutely 100% capable of defending herself from the overheated coke-powered love-thrusts of a failing alcoholic hustler from Florida. Knowing this left me free to lose myself in all that flushed and tangy thigh, belly, breast, and best of all was this rare elasticity her cunt had, because maybe she'd not been fucked in several years or could it be that it was simply a result of her athleticism, irrelevant though anyway you might say because the end result was a most pleasing one, making me the recipient of an hour's perks and rarities such as to shock me out of a long season of sameness, oh that sturdy, springy old gal got my full attention to be sure and howeverit was, whateverit was, then, and even tough I could not stand the woman's company, there's no deying that she and I were altogether a swell fit, carnally speaking, amd oh! how swell that I've got a swollen rod right *now*, just writing about it. And later that night, it's true enough to say that there was an abundance of further lewdness, of bruises both physical and emotional, and minor breakage, including a cheeky spot of vandalism for which I am not nearly well enough known for. It was sport damage, however, for us sport drinkers, at the Sportsman's Tap. *Light* sadism. (But not light *beer*!) (*Never* light *beer*!) A *devilish* night of lowlife charisma and reckless, sexed-out reversals: "oh Gene look at you all helpless down there, get up you idiot, you can *too* stand up, oh my GAWD are you PISSING, oh my GAWD Eve he's a mess...GENE now you've PEED YOURSELF..." but that's the problem of central Illinois, or anywhere in Idaho, or the Dakotas...these are *cowtipping* states with no shortage of cowtipping binge drinkers. (And cuckolds, apparently.) So we did my thing at the gallery

So we did my thing at the gallery, which only 5 people attended, of course, although in the video document they are lined up out the door, all holding copies of Fishhook and Dog Days, 2 or 3 dozen corn-fed, cow-tipping Bobs and Johns and Ambers and Darlenes. We dragged them out of the Sportsman's Tap. The streets of La Salle have not changed in 275 years. It is a quiet, friendly, hermetic community whose well-preserved Victorian-style houses with half-acre front porches with swinging oaken benches rise austerely from the rich autumnal silence and stillness of (etc). It is a fat and fearful town of cornhusking deerslayers, wall-eyed Walmart shoppers with Christmas carols stubbornly lodged between the ventricles of their overworked KFC hearts. They multiply for the Lord, even the ones with Black Flag tattoos. Nothing exists out there for a hundred miles except big box stores, churches, and cornfields. It reminded me of a lss-populated version of Pennsylvania deadness, except the people were kinder. It may have passed for Nebraska with a little snow on the ground. I remember thinking to myself, "this is the next big nowhere. Someone's got to set it off, may as well be me. I'll do it for the right reasons...sell sme things...hire a good driver, take Sam to the vet for tranquilizer...I'll make the damn trip....find an apartment building like the one in Blue Velvet, really dig my feet in here properly...I could thrive out here, in my soul, really vanish into all this desolate miseryshit out here...it's hard-CORE shitty, which leaves certain work to be done, certain questions to be asked...people are INNOCENT here..." We wrapped early at the gallery book signing where no one had ever heard of me, which is why I gave away every last copy of DOG DAYS (what the hell, I didn't pay for them), and everyone wound up at the bar. Well into the evening, I became intent on fucking this toothy, hook-nosed fat girl, quite a comely dollop of trollop named Eve, in whose snottiness I forecasted all manner of esoteric heathen aptitude, and it was the right season for that type, the temperature having plunged into the teens and soon to become even deadlier. That's when you *want* a toothsome and cunty young gal of Rubenesque dimesions. But it was not to be, as Peg clung to me like a subnormal girlchild and my thoughts turned to the formation of a cult, a kind of cornfield SEX cult, see, because clearly cowtipping could find no support in the civilized world, not in the age of PETA, and it was clearly time for a re-intrepretation of hoosier reality. I would be that harbinger of culture and NEW possibilities beyond the obviously permissable. We would have to come up with something very much in keeping with the demands of the NEW kids, the vegan muppet hipsters who will never read Naked Lunch, to whom punk is a geriatric wet dream that only "nerds" would ever want to har about. "But what about Patti Smith? They've got to love Patti," you might wonder. No. Do not bother with the education of the Young People; they do not want to hear about it. "But wha about Nick Cave?" No. Possibly Nick Drake, the suicided eunich boy, but not horse-cock swingin Nick CAVE. (Don't ask me how I know this.) So yes, why not GO FOR BROKE with the sex cult caper? I ate 350 mg of Adderall and got right to work. I even came up with teh slogan, while I did imaginary surveying of the perfect cornfield in my mind, even coming up with a slogan: "In space, no one can hear you FUCKING." I'm standing at the bar, chewing my fucking lips off in a mild Adderall overdose gazing at all these muttonchopped country chaps and their mulleted women thinking to myself, "yes, your family tree is a STUMP anyway, so bring'em all together, like *together* together, your sisters and brothers, your first cousins, drag'em out for my hyper-isolationistic communist nihilist Satanist surrealist SEX CULT, BAY-BUH," and I'm taking it seriously, a GRIM determination to SEE THE THING THROUGH, and knowing that it's only a mattter of xplaining it to people, it's just that I don't have all of the particulars figured just yet, but why go through a delirious, passionate CULT PITCH that reeks of despotism anyway if my hick constituency is just going to jump ship on me anyway, a week or two weeks later..cuz I'm looking for BELIEVERS, see...to walk with me OUT of this crap reality and into enlightenment which is only fun if you know how to take the back seat to your lower instincts and, um, TAKE YOUR CLOTHES OFF because can't you SEE how much of yourself is strangulated and imprisoned by this inflexible barrier of so-called GOOD CHARACTER which is nothing more than an IMPLANT placed deep in your subconscious by fat, old, stupid, unattractive people with no VISION or bravado because they themselves have been poor hijacked pod-people for so long thathey can't even REMEMBER their true golden selves so come on can't I get a couple of hallelujahs, guys? It went something like that but only Peg had the stomach for it. She rolled her big, boozy, bratty cow-eyes at me, and made her lips al screwy: "that's the late 60s, what you're saying there, Gene, you just told the story of the the hippies, that's flower power you're talking about you know, Gene ." "Well then Peg I'm just going to fuck your best friend right here in front of you I can fucking smell her cunt from here holy shit." "But she's not into you, Gene." "Now listen here Peg she's INTO me, you corn-fed, mutton-fed, fucking pumpkin-pie fed freak, you popcorn brained corn chowder slurping, corn flake-"

corn flake-" "That's Eve, Gene, she's gay." "GAY? You have lesbians but no coke? Well THAT's all wrong. Let her <...> for the first time, Peg, clearly you have projected your own wishful dyke fraudulence onto a poor witless child of 20! You miserable, rotten...cynical..." "If she wants to <...>, Gene, no one's got a mind to *detain* her. I'm just saying that she's not going to suck *yours*." "If you had any *vision*, Peg, any madness, you would *all* be <...>, turn it into a brand new THING, see, because it's somehow become taboo and risque again, because preciousness is all the rage and no one's sucking dicks anymore, okay, so if you'd all just suck a bunch of dicks in a stylish, bold way, in a revolutionary context, my god, man, you'd save it all! Men! Women! Culture! You'd save punk rock, Peg! You'd have VICE MAGAZINE out here, with Lisa Carver, they'd show up the next day! With HBO! And Rolling Stone! Things stay the same because of FEAR, fear and modesty, Peg! Fear and SHAME! Fear and-" "Oh shut your mouth." "You just haven't got any fight in you at all! If you were *revolutionary*, see, you would *use* the desolation, like the Kills did in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, back in that bleak year of 2004, recording their second album No Wow, or like *I* did also, and also in Michigan, for six *years* Peg, floundering out there for the sake of art and up to my neck, literally up to my neck Peg, can you imagine it, in bipolar Midwestern snatch, but it was enlivening in a complicated way, as it should always be enlivening to be stranded in a VOID, y'know, like *why don't we do it in the CORN PATCH, bay-buh*...y'know?" "Oh I know that, Gene, that's the Beatles, you just quoted the Beatles, see, I'm not so-" "That's....that's very good! That's very, very GOOD, Peg, really, I'm impressed! Very well done, and I think you understand now: the horrible deadness turned back *upon itself*, the sexual panic of universal abandonment, and hum FOREVER those middle of nowhere power lines in hypersexual hermetically sealed midwestern limbo while you never-seen-New York noodleheads experience ECSTATIC TRUTH with a fat prick in your piehole and another one up your rump (that's all New York is anyway, I'll save you the trip), so get that good ephedrine dope in ya, and read your Rimbaud, children of the post-industrial, post-corporate, post- literary American wasteland night (I just caught a chill, Peg my god it's like we're actually doing it!) because this is your CHANCE probably your last CHANCE you stupid hoosier bastards you could change everything now TONIGHT with one single decision, fear or LOVE, Peg, FEAR OR- But they just wanted to drink at the Sportsman's Tap.

18. THE TOPS BAR AND GRILL (Paxtang, PA) The suburb of Paxtang, just north of Harrisburg, before you reach the dead railyard lunar horror of Rutherford, is exactly what life should never have been...or maybe it's the essence *of* life entirely: "we will gorw ANYWHERE." It is the existential crisis crystallized, fossilized, laid bare in is somnambulant bumpkins drag-assing in their little put-put cars from chain supermarket to chain drug store to chain-smoking on their davenoports waiting for the mail, the way to best surveil the scene: NEVER ASK YOURSELF UNPLEASANT QUESTIONS, NEVER LAY YOURSELF BARE TO HORROR, DO NOT EVEN ATTEMPT TO UNDERSTAND YOUR SOUL OR ANY SOUL AND DO NOT CNTEMPLATE WHAT IT IS TO SAVE YOUR FREEDOM BECAUSE THERE IS NO SUCH THING. Thiis is a fuddy-duddy capitalist cog's self-inflicted rural dystopia where it is cold in the summertime and dead quiet even on the 4th of July and it frightens me worse I believe than Selby's Brooklyn or Algren's Chicago or Willeford's Miami and of course HELL can be aywhere or everywhere but do not experience Pennsylvania at all if possible and under NO circumstances should you expose yourself to the hyper-banality of North Harrisburg. (You might make a druggy and shambolic road trip to Centralia -let it be undefined NAY, let it be *undefinable*- with good digital videocameras and 8 or 9 kinds of antique still cameras for the production of some top-class fucking outsider art: bring a good looking whore and instantly the evil mood piece is rescued frm all accusations of drudgery and pretension and miserblism because now it's a SEX film with accompanying coffee table photo book. Who's going to finance this? My GOD man, I can't believe I hadn't thought of it before? Why CENTRALIA? It's GENIUS, don't worry about the rest: write me immediately if you have 10K to invest.) (And a whore. Until we speak privately, I would urge you to research Centralia, PA and put the pieces together. We'll make millions in a joint venture with Suicide Girls.)

Suicide Girls. But if you MUST visit the Keystone State's creepy capital, there's no point in skipping The Tops on Derry Street, with its weatherbeaten (weathershot-to-shit) 1960s neon sign announcing STEAKS AND SEAFOOD, and its dining room that remains damp and dark and unused since 1981. My father lived out the last quarter century of his life right across the street in the most haltingly stagnant 2nd floor bachelor pad the darkest imagnation could possibly conjure: a shrunken, dingy, death-dank warren of a one-bedroom which summoned all the ways (in only a few seconds, with the first lungful of rancid bacon fat and musty old man musk) that my family had collapsed in on itself, a cruelly prolonged mistake. After countless generations of suicide, murder, incest, and schizophrenia, these fucking people had STILL not had enough. What I remember most about my dad's shithole apartment is the cheap brass doorknobs rattling loose in their ill-drilled fittngs, and the doors being alarmingly cheap, rotten things, these paper-thin wooden doors barely more than plywood sheets, and the alienating clank of the filthy 1981 aluminum blinds against the brittle, fractured 1976 glass and the enervating, claustrophobia-causing struggle of the bottom edges of the 1969 doors through and across my dad's crusty and matted 1977 carpet. The friction between the doors and the carpet would make the blinds (lawnmower blades) clank and bang. These troubled threshholds made the tiny rooms tinier, the low ceilings lower. My faher was not an unclean man, in act had a tendency towards fastidiousness, insofar as his clothing and appearance, but he *was* a bachelor in thay most classic sense, as he was eccenctric in a classic way of being eccentric. There was those areas of the apartment which were simply never cleaned: the rotary phone (1975), the microwave (1983), and behind the couch (1984). Not in 2 decades had they been touched, or so it appeared. The entire vortex of physical brown (and abstract brownness) seemed to be decomposing from obscure interstitial co-ordinates. My dad wasn't picky about "things", and his "stuff" was just that: remnants of other lives. Inherited bric-a-brac. Castaway detritus. Junk. I never knew anything about him beyond his shopping preferences and his beer drinking habits. In 2016, 3 years without him now, I would say that Eugene jasper gregorits was a mildly Miller-swilling, mildly Marlboro- puffing misfit who loved football and lunchmeat and hard crusty pretzels with sharp cheddar cheese, who jingled his keys in one three-fingered right hand while walking his funny bowlegged walk. He was always complaining about the fat old black lady downstairs, about her cooking, and he fairly loathed everything about *me*. Beyond his living room and unsecure aluminum mini-balcony was a traffic light and so in that living room or on that balcony I would sit, in the wee hours, guzzling Miller and puffing on his Marlboros, listening to him snore and watching the traffic light change, watching greenyellowredgreen pattern shine on the wet asphalt of Derry Street with all my 20 25 30 years of poverty shit and violence shit and mental hospital shit and I'd feel a gigantic aloneness open up, a diminishing thing, and I'd try to enjoy the sensation of freefall despite all that horrid cigarette smoke. The diminishing would rise in my chest and envelop me, I'd have my guts and my lungs and eventually my mind replaced by the damp late night mist, I'd rather painlessly become a ghost and so of couse I would glide down the stairs, or sometimes jump off the balcony, and whistle an old tune down along the shoulderless road to deliver my wretched ghostliness to the unholy salvation of The Tops. It would be open and and empy and perfectly unwelcoming. Having tried and failed to charm the bartender with some kind of small performance or manufactured handicap, I'd get to work there, toughing it out against the abyss, really *getting to work*, whiskey shots, 3-4-5-6 bottles of Yuengling or Beck's or Michelob, play the Stones or Tom Petty on the jukebox and smoke off another pack of Marlboros until closing time when I'd look up and there'd be my pop, scowling disgustedly and simultaneously looking vulnerable, frightened by my infernal drive, and jingling his keys: "Justin, what the hell you doing, let's go, you'll come home with me now, yeah?" In all thoseyears, living across the street, you'd think he'd have had a beer in there, just once, but he didn't like new places, and his bardrinking days, his baddrinking days, were far behind him. I knew it would upse him, and I tried ver hard not to get caught, sneaking out of the oppressive sad little dump into train whistle 2 A.M. in my late 20s or mid 30s after 2-3 hours of the traffic signals (the traffic signal *watching*) having filled the living room with cigarette smoke in the awful damp and witching silence of North Harrisburg. I was a pain in the ass and that's puttng it lightly, but he might have just let me drink at the the Tops, or hell just drank *with* me. just drank *with* me. I'm too old to care now about "the truth" or whose *fault* it is that we blah blah blah and the wreckage of it all. It's enough for me now just to know that the old man loved me as long as he could stand to. He'd drag me out of that barroom and many others, saying "slow down on the gat-damn beer, I never seen *nothin* like you boy, there's somethin a'wrong with you, Justin." Vaguely do recall making a DATE with the plain young woman tending bar at The Tops. She probably didn't show it for it either but I'm sure the stars, and the after hours lights of CVS and Little Caesar's, were shining brightly as I made my way back to 3850 Derry Street that morning.

17. THE FLAMINGO (St. Petersburg, FL) Downtown St. Pete's "last of the Kerouac bars" is a perfect shithole for getting afternoon sitty in the smelliest shitty armpit of the entire continental US of A. It's far from the beach, so lan for hoof, taxi, or bus time unless, god help you, "the 'burg" suits you durationally. On the other hand, as a very shitty Jack once told Steve Allen, "why *not*?" As a matterof fact, those were the final words that passed between the two men. Everything *about* the Flamingo and indeed all of St. Petersburg feels like the end of the road. Goddamn my lust for salt water and my shitty planning; I'm in prison now over some salty shitty business that went down at the Flamingo but nevermind all that. Xeroxed photos and newspaper clippings of the King of the Beats are *always* nice t have around, tacked up on the wall in cheap plastic frames, but keep in mind that Jack was *miserable* in St. Pete. Egads, he was *so* fucking miserable tha 50 years later the sozzled old duke running the place can't say a single decent word about him. So why should I? As far as Jack's "St. Pete bars", or some "Jack's regular liquor store" baloney, "Jack's favorite fry stand", whatever, look man, it's 100% horse SHIT. But the Flamingo does appear to have been a *minor* spot for the putrid ruined old sot in his darkest hour. And that's the key to it: you ought to be at least somewhat hip to the nature of the moral, physical, and spiritual decomp of Mr. Kerouac in 1968 and 1969, to the essence of *Thanatos* this bit of Jack's history arouses in the mind of anyone who's actually, y'know, *studied* Kerouac. We're talking some *vile psychic weather*, friends; suffering on a level most certainly incomprehensible to normal civilized folk, who do not experience (nay, *can not* experience) such demonic heights and depths as the acrobatically bipolar (and bisexual) Mr. Kerouac. This is what so many miss, the average "hipster" doesn't GET this ruin, in Jack or in anyone, particularly in the "heroes" we find so often indeed capable of such self-abuse, nor do they get that this is what makes them most enduring. We've lost all respect for self-destruction. We've lost all respect for genius, too. We don't have *lunging* men like Jack to celebrate because *that kind of thing is frowned upon here.* This isn't *that kind of place.* But forget respect, much less comprehension: the young people don't read Kerouac anymore anyway. They haven't read On the Road, they have no *interest* in reading On the Road, let alone Maggie Cassidy or Big Sur. So when they write about "the Kerouac bar" in the lobotomized local alt weekly, Creative Loafing, well...I guess all you can do is laugh, realy. "Hipsters". Jesus fuckin Christ. The road ended for Jack *long* before the Flamingo, andhis Tampa drinking, and his Treasure Island drinking, so if necrosis is your thing, you can bask in exactly *that* without feeling too guilty. THE BOOZE: $2.50 domestic bottles, and some standard piss on tap, but LISTEN, what you want here is THE KEROUAC SPECIAL ("shot and a wash") which as of 2014 was only two and a quarter. jack died 7 years before I was born so it's entirely feasible that I could *be* the reincarnation of Ti Jean, and you get a half-dozen of them "specials" in me I'll sweat to Jesus on the cross that ya gotta be blind fuckin shitty not to see it your OWN self, that I *am* the memory babe returned to earth a BETTER Jack a SMARTER Jack but maybe perhaps yet another hung-like-a-cigarette-butt Jack and this you see is why I did *come* to St. Pete to Jack's squalid white trash death-grounds to be BORN as a "proper novelist" which is basically the truth as I seeit, see, prison or no prison, and as for my so-called MONSTROUS SEXUALITY landng me in this very cell, well, JACK AND NEAL'S DIRTY WASHING makes me look like that limey Rainbow Brite-ish fella from Coldplay, or the weedy little faggot from Bright Eyes, right? Righty-o, then. The FLAMINGO...let's see...it's not far from the Greyhound station, and strippers drink there, you can *smoke* there, and it's got its own parking. There are pool tables but only douche bags play pool. If you PLAY POOL, stay the fuck away from me. By the time I get out of prison, this bar will definitely be gone, so g get your sots and washes and use the parking lot frequently for SEX: no one would fuck Jack at the end, he smelled bad and looked like a crazy person because he *was*, and he sure as shit can't get laid now being half a century dead. But *you* can! At the FLAMINGO! Make it happen! Post-coital drive-in burgers across the steet at Dairy-Made? Yes, you need your energy, young woulda-been post-Beat hoodlums! Which brings me directly to:

16. BEEP'S BURGERS (San Francisco, CA) I've told the story one hundred times: in the early years of this decade, Criminal Class was a ragtag outfit of amateur "crime writers" based in Chicago. I demanded to be included on their "West Coast Tour" in 2011, which turned out to be a complete fiasco because bloviating simpleton Kevin Whitely, who was spoiled rotten by wealthy parents, and who is so vapid and queeny that there's just no way this Jon Favreau-with-AIDS there's just no way this anal retentive, anorexic Jon Favreau lookalike is not a hermaphrodite, did not organize anything properly, or honestly, or at all. He knowingly bankrolled this obscene debacle with drug money by wooing convicted cocaine dealer, heroin addict, and scabby AIDS sufferer Brian Murphy on board with promises of literary fame. Never mind the fact that no one associated with Criminal Class, save for maybe one female editor whose name now escapes me, had any literary qualification, nay, any *interest* in literature, whatsoever. Among the 8 or 10 "readings" were a writing workshop (non-reading) at the legendary San Quentin Penitentiary, which was organized by high profile rock'n'roll biographers Kent and Keith Zimmerman and into which Mr. Murphy smuggled an unknown quantity of powdered amphetamine, jeopardizing our hosts, the event, and possibly ourselves. There was also a suburban house party for bourgeois twentysomethings (non-reading) which Criminal Class went over at like a resounding fart, or a case of dysentery. Next, a poetry "slam" event (non- reading) which I launched myself upon tactlessly, inviting record-breaking stretches of agonizing silences. The most galling of all was some kind of poetry competition (non-reading) that demanded a twenty dollar entrance fee from each of us. (No, I am not making this up. Would you also believe that the writers were then, once again, extorted for gas money, threatened in fact with abandonment right there on the Pacific Coast Highway at 2 A.M.? While being addressed haughtily by Queen Bitch Whitely (so ridiculously pompous is this artless clown Kevin that he appears at all times on the verge of sneezing, not to mention a permanent putrid smirk apropos of absolutely nothing) as though we were shit-eating retarded children? Fact. Fact. Fact. These are all facts! What are the statutes of limitations? Can I sue you, Jon Favreau-with-bulimia? Have you no shame, you cunty scenester? Be seeing you, Kev. On the upside, there I was, in my 35th year FINALLY hitting San Francisco paydirt, experiencing the majesty and wonder and Kerouacian end-of-the-world-sadness of San Francisco. I'd seen a gazillion S.F. movies in the perversely prolonged interim, read a gazillion S.F. novels, and so I knew what to demand of the place but regardless, sme places are just kinda *bigger themselves*, ya dig? It's not enough in the age of media overoad for a town to merely *be that town*. The average man, during the course of a lifetime having his brain gang- raped by digital programming and cellular psychosis, has no need for travel: he has, in a sense, already been everywhere. But exceptions can be made for places like San Francisco, which succeeds as a *necessary* place, superior in all ways to its pop cultural and virtual selves sheerly on the basis of electrical enormity. The city is alive like no other. It is possible that I'm spewing all of this nonsense because after six months in Flori-duh, I was brutally starved for *culture*. The *culture* I observed in San Francisco included a theater in the Tenderloin district announcing Iggy & the Stooges for that very night (I hadn't the money and it was sold out anyway)...naked locals casually strolling in broad daylight from bistro to botique while laughing into 2 thusand dollar communication devices...free food offered to heroin burnouts in open air drug markets...just endless examples like this, ample evidenceof subcultural integrity and literary cosnciousness. literary consciousness. The Steve McQueen movie Shame was opening that week, a psychosexual melodrama with Michael Fassbender which famously got slapped with an "X" rating by the MPAA (rah-thurrrr!) so when my cretinoid handlers at Criminal Class separated me from the group of amateur "crime writers" I'd apparently been expected to treat as equals (uh, *no*?), I fled the apartment of the in-recovery gay artist Miss Whitely had arranged for me to incovenience. My first stop, eyes wide with boundless passion for the last great city in America, was Trader Joe's, where I found the rare Monastrell wine I drink almost exclusively for only five dollars a bottle. Next up was the film, which was uniformly fine but a little too long for my liking: I drank too much wine in the theater and got lost on the way home in a four-bottle blur. Beep's Burgers came to me as a vision of mercy, of celestial intervention, a golden oasis after the miles of wandering seedy and expensive S.F. with feet rubbed raw by boots *not* made for walking and my libido rubbed raw from the toxic sensuality of the relentlessly depressing dirty art movie. I had two bottles of Monastrell remaining, and protein was in order, so when cheeseburgers and fries at the ULTIMATE 24 hour Tom Waits "outdoor diner" (with leering bums and seagulls and big-haired Mexican honeys cursing hysterically into cell phones) was staring me down like a dropped pink glassine bag of dope dropped in the middle of the workaday sidewalk, I did not say no. Beep's is my dream date spot, my favorite place in the world to do burgers and wine and I give it a euphoric 7 out of 7. They even took pictures of me feeding french fries to the birds with my disposable Kodak and let me sleep my load off the fucking DOLLS. I think Jack done it EXACTLY this way.

15. THE LEXINGTON MARKET (Baltimore, MD) More stuffing my face, this one. I can't recall the day I discovered the Lex *exactly*, probably because it was the first of over 2 *hundred* visits overthe next several years. I took a dozen, maybe two dozen girls there, and every single one of them fell in love with it, except for Hanna Badalova, the basis for "Izabela Slutzky" in my novel Dog Days, who hates black people. The Lex is magical for a thousand reasons, not least of which is the scarcity or outright absence of hipster clowns. Hell, I'll just *say it*: there's nary a *white debil* in SIGHT! And if one of the savage black bastards has a problem with YOUR hipster clown ass, well, I guess he's free to *do something about it*, isn't he? God damn RIGHT. Mind your manners, Connor, watch your mouth, Tyler, and act like a lady, Arielle. I kid! You don't *have* racial tension* at the Lex, because the one and only pretense for joyous *equality* -drunkenness- is just a given at this ancient market complex, where the stuff flows freely. Free flowing *humanity*, that is. Aided by 8, 10, 12 different ways to BUY yoir fucking booze! Have a DRINK ya tightass honky bitch! Get your SWERVE on, cracker! Bottoms UP, white trash! My best and gamest Lexington mainstay was the fabulous Baltimore loonybird KIM ENGLAND, who may have driven ME loony but also SAVED MY WRETCHED DRUNK ASS perhaps more times than anyone I've ever known. Recall now 2011 when I was homeless again, on Kim's cuch, while masquerading as the future husband of a major American film director's right hand man's daughter (got that?) and oh! certainly CERTANLY what a pleasant dumb life it was and could have forever been but if you've ever *seen* the fist-sized cojones some cruel god cursed me with at birth, you know full well why I am not a tucked nuts type of nigger. (They wouldn't let me DRINK! Her folks wanted to SAVE me! I could have been IN TIGHT with JOHN WATERS!) (I respect these people far more from AFAR far more from AFAR, and sincerely advise *all* people to *mind the gap* in this way, although it's not as if I have any fondness for Baltimore kitsch after 6 years of mind-numbing brutality (LAKES of gore, mostly mine) in that Hell-on-earth. One thing I *will* concede, and Mr. Waters told me this much himself, directly: it's a HORNY town, is Baltimore. And there's a lot to be said for that, absolutely, but...nightmares, babies, I have NIGHTMARES about the fucking place. And yes, there did have to be an end to my long and passionate romance with the Lexington Market. It was the halfway point, or maybe towards the *end* of the writing of DOG DAYS, in which the Lex is quite a large and vivid character, painted up like an H. Bosch, when I would hobble sick with yesterday's cataract of booze every morning to downtown Baltimore, hitch hiking from Southern PA where I lived with sexy dingbat Sarah, the daughter, or taking the city light rail from the northern suburbs if I was hiding from Sarah at Kim England's. I'd have a backpack stuffed with a laptop and pens, emergency items like Gatorade and a band new, cringingly sharp J.A. Henckel filet knife, to begin my day's work. This was an experiment in *transient writing* and I took to the raw, ruthless conditions with rare sublimity and grace. My office was actually *six* offices, *six* fixed locations and this system, ah, *network* of offices could be expanded or reduced at any time and for any reason. I took it all very seriously and I was very much a fluid presence, a ghost, my own self, and as intended, these hauntings of baltimore, post-Hank, post-Detroit Round Two, post-Baltmore (I was a GHOST, you dig? I'd died in Detroit, of blood loss, combined with Xanax overdose and hypothermia, all simultaneously, it happened behind the 7-11 dumpster where I crawled in a blizzard after snipping in a blizzard after snipping an artery with a razor sharp J.A. Henckel filet knife, Dearborn to be exact, corner of Telegraph and Michigan Avenue, edge of the world) did in fact produce the final chapters of DOG DAYS. Pure man-on-the-street music. I ghost-wrote my own dramatized history. My first stop of the workaday ghostwriter's haunt would be the MCA on 41st and Greenmount, where I'd sweat out the day before in a throbbing underground sauna with fat old black men masturbatng at/to me behind crumpled copies of the Baltimore Sun. (Fine - Jesus Christ - can't even - etc.) Next would be the Enoch Pratt public library a few miles south. I'd set up shop there listening to music, taking comfort in the fact that I was getting both *pussy* (well actuaclly I kinda was not but that was the problem I guess: I was *supposed* to be fucking but I just wouldn't fuck because Sarah -this is Sarah #4 we're talking about, John Waters' hairdresser's daughter, okay- she was a foxy little beast, no question about that, but she killed my libido, too bitchy, and nuts about her hair falling out, thought she was going *bald* (she was not going bald), and how is it that *I* am the sane one in the relationship (no time for that etc) but the important thing to me was that I had a life *filled* with women and I have never been very far from the implicit awareness of how much bitter agony is nullified by the *sweet* agony of these slithering monsters we are simply biologically designed to cry to at night and that with a pair of tits and a soft creamy neck to suck on just about anything can be shrugged off: you've left general admission, then, you're in BOX SEATING, the BALCONY where you can *see* how barbaric it all is, from all angles, you see how aloneness is *not* an option, it's a LIFE, a CIVILIZED life, until someone steps in to tell you all about how you're not fucking, and you're drinking way too much, and you're not making enough money, and you're too old to not have a driver's license, and you are too wrapped up in your cat, she's jealous of the fucking *cat* now...and if you think it'll EVER stop without the sacrifice of your fucking pride, you probably haven't got any anyway) and free Internet. The biggest problem, always the biggest problem, for me, was Sam. He was too lonely with em gone all day: cats are just human enough to have the dread of aloneness, and when you live in their emotional realm for 30 years, as I have, you know the feline plight can be remarkably humanlike. Anyone who accuses me of some kind of warped projectionism hasn't been forced to hold an abused baltimore bobcat for days on end under threat of 9 hideous fishhook talons: I *became* the small fellow. So the worry of Sam would plague me, and maybe the occasional psychodrama with sarah and Kim, but otherwise I was free in a way one *rarely* is

14. THE BLESSED OLIVER PLUNKET (Carlisle, PA) I learned only recently, reading the wonderful and long-forgotten boozing-and-whoring novels of J.P. Donleavy, that Oliver Plunket is a real life Catholic icon, a historical figure, but...so what, you know? *Not* so wonderful was Bloody Pam, AKA Killer Pam, my first ever confirmed murderess, whom I found during 18 pulverizing months of aggressively unmagical boozing-and- whorefucking in Carlisle, PA. It was the winter of 2002/2003, more specifically a time that was marked by a raging virulence, a banal physical violence, a death horror which made my skin turn green and my stomach bloat. I was a toxic, wheezing, mostly deceased fat man that no one could bear to face, and certainly not fuck, let alone love. Noone *decent* anyway. I've forgotte most of the etails: there was inarguably a severe aount of brain damage from the endless gallons of bargain vodka consumed, about 4 a week on average. I blame the violent, racist cops of Carlisle, who manage to outdo the Pinellas Counry Sherrifs sheerly in bravado: *these* cops did not stop at mere perversion of justice, no sir, and coercion for them was a simple matter of getting on with business as usual. No, the Carlisle cops would not be satisfied with normal corruption at all: for them, it was full-on GOON SQUAD. They thought nothing of outright muggings. I'd get stomped, clubbed, and then stripped of my night's drinking money on a fairly regular basis. Resistance meant the drunk tank. Oh brothers, it breaks my heart to think of the blows taken that year alone, and how I am not by now accustomed to it. I wonder about heavyweight boxers: I got no heart, I suppose. Please don't hit me no more. The demonic atmosphere of inbred thuggery served asa kind of bass line to the overal soundtrack in this record-setting Winter of Degradation and Rot. What memories I did not lose to alcohol, I sought willfully to bury in my subconscious through denial. Of course, some of them have returned, like that of my loser girlfriend Killer Pam. Pam was a daytime drinking thing that happened at the Plunket, a kind of happenstance "let's go back to my place and fuck on my futon" thing when we were the only ones in the place at 11 A.M. People don't just cut the bullshit and dive in anymore. When you are lucky enough to meet that rare lost soul who just wants to call a thing by its proper name, who wants to talk serious business, you're inclined to participate and even lead the charge: "wanna fuck?" These are my favorite memories. These small moments of revolution, tiny postcard glimpses of the dream we could all have, every day, if we were not petty, paranoid, duplicituous, hypocritical cocksuckers. It happens rarely and even then, almost by accident. Life doesn't get any better than when it happens to you. So maybe she wasn't really my girlfriend. But every morning, or ever other morning, in those winter months when I was spposed to be reconciling with Lydia Lunch, I would see Pam at the Plunket, dressed like a welfare case and sulking. She was fresh out of prison for murder and the whole thing was so very Fat City (Pam wasn't fat, I'm talking about the *movie*, the 1971 John Huston thing with Suzie Tyrell, and the theme song by Kris - ah, for Christ's sake, nevermind) and I'd take her back to my uncomfortably small and airless little cage on High Street where we would drink diesel strength screwdrivers and listen to the Doors and have psychotic loveless monkeysex on my cheap futon. It was a grim scene months later when I took the demolished metal frame back to the futon store and demanded a replacement. "Sir, this was done malicously. Your extended warranty does not cover this type of damage." "But it says NO QUESTIONS ASKED." "I'm not asking you a question." "But this was not done malciiously! It was an accident." "Oh come on. Do you think I'm *blind*? It's destroyed, it's bent in *half*!" it's bent in *half*!" "No questions asked means you give me a new futon." (The damage in question was actually done by Lydia's beautiful gigantic black-woman ass, on her final visit.) The man was on the verge of tears with rage, but I got my damn futon frame and took it to Detroit where it became the centerpiece of the bogus rape panic of 2004. But in 2003, at the Plunket, Pam and I would pretend we'd never done it before, and that we weren't *going* to do it, and then we'd be back at my place and we'd be doing it. I didn't enjoy the whole thing as much as I might have; I had a lot of thawing out to do. I wonder if I'll live long enough to thaw all the way, because now that I think about it, Pam was actually a pretty good catch. I wasn't there for her or it or anything. But I'm there *now*! Jesus. There were always fistfights and knifings at the Plunket, men would disfigure one another there and I wince to recall being drunk and reducing much larger men to tears with my expert verbal abuse, under threats that never quite materialized. I was a morning drinker, mostly, because I'd gotten on the terminal track, becoming a zombie as it were, and Pam was on probation...neither of us were in any kind of shape for the fast lane. Also, we tried not to ever be seen together. Pam had a fella, perhaps it was her husband. He never appeared at the bar, but did make one unforgettable appearance, catching us walking arm-in-arm down an otherwise unpopulated High Street after a delirious vodka-and-beer brunch-binge at the Plunket, three feet of snow mounted around us. No one said a word as he took suddenly-sober Pam by the arm in the deserted town square, wearing a haunted look, a stricken countenance, this beared hillbilly with spooky Meg Foster eyes, that crazy blue, and I remember the intensity of that silence, it could have been global like thermonuclear winter and then later, walking home alone and pretending I was in love with Pam like pretending it is Christmas when it is almost March. It was the last (only?) time I saw the man, and I have since come to understand that he was truly in love with her. He was in his 50s, cowed and sullen, hardly an imposing presence and me, I was only 24 years old, a jut-jawed prince of petty crime, and I'm not sure that I knew his pain at all then. It's funny how the process of being cuckolded physically reduces a man. He might have been an entire inch taller before I started fucking the daylights out of his woman. I've been through a lot of that since 2003, and lost *three* inches. There was murder in those eyes: sustained, perhaps, but real enough and if he'd done smething, even killed me, I think that he'd have been in the right. I didn't show any fear out of pride. That's how you psych-out dogs. Men and dogs are very much the same. Life among them. Wild America. Wild Idiot America. I did not return home immediately after Pam was apprehended that day, taken from me forever, since the snow was so thick and it had happened so fast. No, I stood in the middle of High Street watching the pair grow smaller between the snowflakes, contemplating the warm, ghostly groans of their footsteps in that silence among the snowplows. Something like that.

13. STEVE'S TAVERN (Glendale, CA) And where *is* Steve's, exactly? I want to say it's right off Colorado, but...my selective memory ain't what it once was, thank god, and it's like...I never *trusted* L.A. *or* Angelenos and I *don't* think it's okay to be a bad person, the cheap nihilism of ferociously sociopathic Tinseltown sickens me, it's just New York with a smaller vocabulary, but Steve's...yes...I went to *Steve's*. I found comfort in it's being a little *out of the way* for the Hollywood crowd, just like all of California was a little *out of the way* for me. I spent ALL of my time in Snuff City on barstools, especially the last 8 or 9 months, as all hell erupted around our little house on Vine Street. Steve's was not my regular place: not even close. That distinction belongs only to Duffy's, on Brand Boulevard, a comfortable but entirely sulless little sports bar means for the after-meal adjournment of diners from the pricey Italian joint next door. They were owned by the same man, so Duffy's, which had a cherrywood phone booth (in 2002!), could be exploited as a kind of "unlocked cabinet" until the place found its own footing as more than a smoker's car, or alcohol annex. During the transition, the "friendly prices" were public and universal. Did I want to "drink classy"? Not at all. The opposite, in fact. L.A. petrified me, Lydia saddened and kinda petrified me, the whole idea of it and her and everything

MEET ME did I invent him?) has been in County Jail, see? And now, 2 days before Christmas, he's on a *mission* to buy *toys* for his estranged *kids*. Oh, he's got it all lined up, don't worry, it's just the one *thing*, there's still this one *thing* he's gotta (etc). (But that would make it 2001, since by Xmas 02 we were already kaput.) (Wow.) (So this was *before* the collapse?) (Some *life*.) And it was COLD, a freak SNAP there in the LA basin that morning, just a few-three months after the 9-11 attacks and Springsteen's The Rising is the ALBUM OF THE YEAR and I require suck horseshit optimism to combat the teenage nihilism of that eternal sourpuss La Lunch, alright? So I'm crazy about The Rising, which, looking back now, is a goddamn good record (half-good, actually, what *more* do you want from 2001?) but in my 24 year old bird-brain was a goddamn GREAT record, see, and holy SHIT I GOTTA HEAR THIS sex my new Injun pal who now it seems to me bore a likeness closer to Richard Ramirez, the Night Stalker, that Satanic Hispanic from the mid 1980s who Lydia would have nightmares about back when he was on the loose carving up old ladies and she was a freshly expatriated 22 year old scum rock queen from the Bowery of Manhattan prone to leaving her Highland Park front door wide open all night to satisfy her torture/murder fantasies and screwing anything in leather jeans especially if it was a rock star because these were the dark druggy dum-dum days of LA hardcore when LA was 100 times filthier and so was Lydia whose stock-in-trade, hypersexual hipster nihilism, was a perfect fit, and maybe I considered her 1982 nightmares, her self-induced Richard Ramirez night terrors that morning with the jail-emaciated Cherokee psychopath, but probably not, I was all about THE PURITY then and so it had to be just HAD to be fucking SPRINGSTEEN HOLY SHIT MAN but *where*? Well, my house, of course, which would also be Lydia's house (little known fact: I paid the rent!) (my *half*, anyhow) and...let's slow it down here, see...I've never tld tis story, nor have I ever visited it privately, because it was one of many, many repellant or perilous situations which made my life all but unlivable in Los Angeles where I was surrounded by sub-celebrities, sycophants, and forgotten scene suckers. I can see now tha my bar life at Duffy's (and Steve's) was not a choicemade consciously at the time, but as I explained, I was simply FLEEING A PACK OF PLAGUE DOGS. I also realize that THIS situation with the Injun, was one of those lonnnnnnnnng torture scenes that I have in every one of my novels, where you SEE the tragedy from the first paragraph, you see it and know it with hard awful certainty even before it's started to cook, to move, but what it is, is a locomotive, taing its own sweet time to suicide, driven only by pain and lust and panic, shurning slowly toward the abyss.

12. THE FORD WYOMING DRIVE-IN (Detroit, MI) Stephanie was one that all my loser friends were after, like John Szpunar of Headpress, and Dan Cichoracki of the band Garter Snakes. That isn't saying much, of course. Those fellas have been known to get after each *other* after a spell, which makes them no better than damn dogs. What got my attention, and more or less impositioned me to ACKNOWLEDGE Stephanie Laney's mediocre good looks, more'n *kinda* begrudgingly, was when strangers (strange MEN) were after her, and not only *after* her but actually ATTAINING her, with increasing regularity. These would be sleazy men but of propriety, men of industry, men of GOOD FORTUNE as Lou once sang, on a record that was the exact reflection of my horrors with Steph Laney in 2009 and 2010, see, and...look now, I'm not saying I was a *pimp*, but if the shoe fits, and this one maybe does, I suppose it's a designation I can live with. If it's any consolation to you, and this is assuming that pimping (and/or pandering, I never quite understood the difference) was indeed the name of the rose,I can say that I was probably the *worst* pimp of all time, and that my girlfriend, as a whore, was, oh about average I guess. In hindsight, watching her get drilled and eaten by rich creeps was more erotic than screwing her myself, until such a time that I began to worry in earnest about the relative and innumerable risks, mainly psychological, of engaging in such bleak and sordid transactions. In having written myself out of the picture, almost entirely, or maybe altogether entirely, when the "johns" were all gettting wise to who was really wearing the pants in that relationship, I began experiencing acute dissociative disorder episodes which culminated in snipped arteries behind the 7-11 on Michigan and...yes, I already told you that story, didn't I? Michigan Ave and Telegraph Ave, on the corn- yeah, alright. But there was a weeklong coma from blood loss, yessir, but it didn't *start* so dramatically at all, really, I'd only moved *in* with the prematurely weathered Wal Mart wiccan to avoid freezing to death, and to save Sam from same. Within 4 or 5 months, we'd become full-fledged amphetamine freaks, ya dig? Adderall, mainly, which I admire and respect as a drug far more than its toothier big brother, methamphetamine. Those Addies were cheap and powerful, but god help you when you run out. Speed has al kinds of wonderful perks in a relationship, like say for example you're watching TV, maybe you're not *watching it* watching it, but it's on, and you're gripping a frosty 24 ounce can of Canadian lager with your gal's calves and feet with her little toes and blue nail polish on the toes all draped across your thighs when the domesticity and 4 day speed binges have essentially rendered you MELLOW if not three quarters fried beans and maybe you'll be getting up for another beer seeing as it's sunday and the kids are with MOM and it's all leaning towards a dull cowardly braindead marriage you're thinking as you OFTEN think to yourself, "groomed, it's GROOMING they're fuckin GROOMING you" and the kid situation will get worse and the drug situation will get worse and you've seen it all before with the burnt out geek girls like Steph and all your nebbish loser pals fairly pant after her endometriotic snatch her torn up child-bearing snatch what never recovered from three terms now three TEENS all gay and autistic and LOUD after 9 months of *in utero* amphetamine damage because ALL MOTHERS ARE UNFIT SURE UH HUH BUT THIS ONE *THIS ONE* IS HELLBENT ON SERIOUS DISTINCTION (right Stephy?) etc but when you rise from the couch in your paper thin Levis the dirty broken paper thin plaster walls still smudged with fingerprint dust left by the cops after the last phony police report when they swarmed the place correctly thinking to themselbes SPEED FREAKS and the cigarette burns in the carpet and the holes punched in the bathroom door and you feel the woman's hands on your ass now pulling you back fingers in your pockets now pulling you back and you think of your friends my GOD they're all so HOT for the brainy burnout slut thing which I don't get and she's NOT brainy just standard DORK GIRL with extra COOZE and I'm NOT in love but you see the devious young suburban but you see the devious young suburban welfare casualty has scored ADDY, scored the shit and said NOTHING which means big gullible Geenie Weenie suspects nothing when her little whines indicate that she's wanting to suck his cock for the third time that morning and it's the kind of thing that's easy to get spoiled by is al I'm sain whether speed or no speed but ON speed the young lady is gettng OFF which is so much better than having to ask like on your birthday when it's realyl forced and maybe an imposition like not that imposition can't be HAWT like this thing I read in the paper when I was in Australia about this teen high on meth who held a sibling and both parents at gunpoint and had them all get it on ya dig but like I say I'm more into it when the chick is getting OFF because at heart I'm a DEMOCRAT and a LIBERAL democrat at that no matter what I say about the blacks when I'm piss drunk and with Steph I never knew because she was a political ignoramus wich makes it tricky to get a feel for the situation which in this case would mean having to catch up to her which will either get you hot in the moment or possibly key aspects of the thing will crystallize for you weeks or months or years later so in a way as something really organic and deep and vivid and complex to jack off to that's even better isn't it the gift that keeps on giving and STEPH baby HEY baby I jac off to your spontaneous living room and kitchen blowjobs from 2010 *allatime* (not REALLY but it HAS happened and that's got to count for soemthing, right, and that's a good wank evry time, OKAY?).

12. THE FORD WYOMING DRIVE-IN (Detroit, MI) Hopw's about I give this one another stab: Stephanie Laney was hot white trash with the body of a 15 year old boy in the middle of a violent growth spurt, and she had the worst taste in writers of ALL my women. We had a lot of Hot Loser Speed Sex together until my dick stopped working and then I'd watch her -rathr keenly, at first- with other men, including all of my loser music geek friends who desperately wanted to fuck her but only got free had, no honey- badger, all ver up-and-up as far as that went. Eventually, about a year late, I decided I was in love with Steph but she latched onto a paramedic howdyboy named Kurt Brinker (which was also the name of my brother's previous toy poodle who died yesterday and when my mother told me on the phone I was dopey on prison xx and told her how happy I always am to hear about there being one less shit-eating dog in the world especially when the dog was owned by a corporate lobbyist) and KURT called me up one night all puffed up and GRIM to warn me to stop bothering STEPH but *smeone* has to remind her that having 18 abortions in only 19 months is not only financially devastating but geatly increases the risk of cervical cancer not to mention the HPV she never took care of and I'm only worried for the sake of her gay etarded children who are good kids never hurt nobody did they to which Mr. Brinker replied "you're a fucking dead men Grahgortlis" and then I sez awwwwwnow why you wanna but that's when he hung up, and this is what my gut tells me is the truest and funniest saga, and the essence of Michigan romance, the END OF LOVE in every way, spiritually, stylistically, and in traditional narrative terms, there's just so much to be done with it, like, and te main narrative being the present day, my post-apocalyptic beach life and that Brinks had called me ON THE BEACH which in order to REACH I'd had to survive dozens of mental and physical holocausts mainly due to my association with the whore S. Laney, and then the aftermath, an endless crawl on hands and knees to Louisville Kentucky where I hit another artery and just refused to die in a lake of my my own purple icky-sticky...to the Poconos...Lake Erir...back to Baltimore..Manhattan...and finally to Florida, and of course the IDEA, yeah, is to flap my humble but once again operational sex equiopment at teh jealous fool stuck with a dumb, douchey paramedic in Troy, MI...that's the obvious, wouldn't you agree? Well, you just don't know the story, realy. This is Dog Days 3, what I'm saying...a story about raising gay retarded children, and about raising hell. I threw the bitch down a flight of stairs! It's really a black it's really a black comedy about a poverty. The prevailing impulse is to TELL THE TALE. She planted a steak knife in me, but I can't say I "suffered", exactly. I was on a spirit quest. It was a good time to rediscover the first 2 Pere Ubu LPs. And she actually *preferred* me all fucked up. Boy did I like that about Steph. There's nothing more rare than that. I'd never been so close to a *total* piece of shit before, romantically. Scumbags are HAWT. The girl could *hang*. I miss her. So now you know the end. It's more of a bookend, than a real end-of-book, a book ending, and certainly no *storybook* ending. Depravity takes a while to find acceptance in its host body. It's wise to give in, and enjoy the plunge. You're dissolving anyway, but into mediocrity. Meet the demon halfway. There is no God. But the beginning reads just as juicy: our first proper DATE was the Ford-Wyoming, and before laying out *this* doozy for you, which is as deliciously PERFECT an expression, or *demonstration*, or a DEMON deconstruction, of the MIDWESTERN HEART OF DARKNESS as has EVER been written, I must first demand that you accept it as the UNVARNISHED TRUTH. (You could ask Steph, I suppose, her last name is LANEY, unless she married the paramedic.) (Hey KURT, she's FUCKIN CHEATIN on ya!) What we're dealing with, essentially, is FIVE massive drive-in "screens", just towering freestanding WALLS like celestial gravemarkers spread across 40 acres of inner-city WASTELAND on the edge of HELL ITSELF: Motor City Mutherfuckin DETROIT. FIVE movies play in steady rotation...you pay ten bucks a head at the gate, and they sell bunches of cheap flowers in convenient little glass stems, and once you're IN...honey, don't even think about crying for help, because you're IN. This madness rolls until, oh, around FUCKING DAWN and how it does not result in enough murder to bring in half the National Guard, I could not tell you, but the potential is mesmerizing. You know, to say that as sincerely as I do, to call it that, or to use a word like ENCHANTING to talk about a gravelled prairie booming with projected images of sex and violence where you yourself are very literally risking your neck, that's the essence of it, that's the deathly magic of the midwest, that's what its suffocating lovelessness (which is also its loveliness) is all about. Those empty godless skies swallow it all whole. The night Steph and I rolled in, overone hundred Escalades, Hummers, and otherhigh end "crack yachts" idled around us peacefully. We had come in a 1981 Volkswagen van which shuddered and lurched and shambled along Michigan Avenue like a giant man in a paper mache van costume. We'd made *two* liquor store stops and I was damn near out of booze AGAIN. Poor assless, chestless Steph was wearing cheap denim jeans and a threadbare sweater: she was FRUMPY in a way that advertised CHILDREN and fairly flickered a neon DAMAGED GOODS sign across my bloodshot eyeballs. She looked like a spent street whore on a night off, reading Stephen King at the laundromat. The Ford-Wyoming's principal landmark, a 7 story brick wall erected, assumably, for maximum landmarkness, is visible from a great distance. (Freeways in Ohio, for example, at certain elevations.) I let sweet ghetto-foxy airhead Steph tell me ALL about the place, which that week was showing Inglourious Bazterds (or however that leering VAINGLORIOUS bastard Tarantino spells it), along with Gamer, District Nine, and a few ugly slasher films. I sputtered and babbled and oooooh'd and aaaaaah'd uncontrollably, knocking back cheap Aussie shiraz and raher actively DISBELIEVING what I was seeing. "I told you," Steph giggled. If you've ever read Joe Landsale's pulp horror classics The Drive-In and The drive-In 2 (which i bought off of Joe PHYSICALLY, at the age of 11, recall now Big Joe putting my hard earned stableboy dollars into his wallet, how fucking cool), well, that's the Ford Wyoming *exactly*, except that it's allblack people and the genre fare is cntemporary, even first-run. (But still...all night and genre-only? Well AULLBEGODDAMNED!) We chose Tarantino's latest pre-adolescent three-hour jerk-session (have some more coke, ASSHOLE), but only 8 minutes in, it was plain to see I'd hd asmuch of that nonsense as I was going to take, explaining to Steph in graphic detail -no, wait, that's not...that was another tiem...what it was, was that I'd become *so* angry that I suffered some kind of apopletic seizure, and then seized upon the idea of using the woman next to me *sexually*, see, as a kind of *diversion*, yes that's right, as a means of *coping*: "better get naked right *now* Steph, or I'm gonna fucking explode, goddamn stupid fucking idiot Tarantino bullshit fake jerk motherfucker what the fuck's WRONG with people Steph whole goddamn planet of retards we're fucking doomed Steph," and I screw Steph for the first time right then (no "protection": niiiiiiiiiiice) right there in her husband's van (married, yes) but the Tarantino-fit is already brewing. But the Tarantino fit is already brewing. "Didn't it *help*," she asks me, giggling what I remember as a very sexy, life affirming, actually quite wonderful giggle. (It was even better as a full-bodied laugh, or maybe that;'s just me telling myself that due to my four years of celibacy in prison, nothing more, she might have had a repulsive laugh, she might have in fact sniggered like an imbecile, I suspect the truth lies somewhere in between.) But she really did not take me seriously, the heartless little beast, finding it very humorous as a ploy and not even for a second realizing that she'd just been raped. The real insult hit when Steph came around to accepting my demonic Tarantino-loathing as genuine, and doing so, found that even funnier: "Gene, you'd better slow down on that beer, you're gonna run out and won't that make you MAD?" It was at this point that the bitch's jabs and taunts drove me altogether mental, and I had a psychotic split from reality wherein I was able to sustain a brilliant, flow-of-consciousness anti- Tarantino rant in the form of an uncanny , disturbingly mean-spirited Tarantino *impression* that put Stephanie in stitches for the rest of the movie. I took 2 intermissions to screw Steph, a second time and a third time, drawing strength from the hops, returning each time to my one- man-show in which Quentin Tarantino looked back on a quarter-century of masturbating mindlessly upon the silver screen. Meanwhile, the real Q.T.'s three and one half hour, film-within-a-film fanboy WW2 fantasy hovered above us, on a 100 foot screen in 35mm glory, portraying the destruction of a Berlin cinema while the fim *never stopped running*, above all the flames and smoke, in 35mm glory. And all around is was the SNAP CRACKLE POP of economy processed cocaine base known, appropriately enough, as CRACK, being burned with little pink and purple Bic lighters by the natives. ("WOTTA finale! Gregorits is really something else, no one comes close in all of literature, you can go all the way back to FITZGERALD. But wait! We have 11 "spots" to go! And the Ford Wypoming night did not end *there*: HE THREW HIMSELF INTO THE NIGHT NAKED AS A FOOL, OR A JAYBIRD, DRESSING AS HE RAN OVER BROKEN GLASS WITH A HANDFULL OF HIS SHATTERED RAPE VICTIM'S MONEY. GREGORITS RETURNED AN HOUR LATER TO FIND HIS DRIVE-IN DATE ENGROSSED IN ANOTHER TERRIBLE MOVIE; HIS BACK POCKET JAMMED WITH BITS OF PAPER ON WHICH WERE SCRAWLED THE PHONE NUMBERS OF A HALF-DOZEN DUMPY "HOOCHIE MAMAS" ENCOUNTERED DURING THIS KAMIKAZE BOOZE RUN, SOME OF WHOSE BOYFRIENDS HAD GIVEN ME -I MEAN, HIM- LIFTS, OR "RIDES", IN THEIR SUVS. STEPH WOULD NOT TOUCH THE MD20/20 GENE HAD SELECTED FIVE PINTS OF, CALLING IT "NIGGER JUICE" WHILE HE HAD BARELY TAKEN A SIP BEFORE LOSING CONSCIOUSNESS ENTIRELY.) (Then, the van wouldn't start, so Steph had to call her husband and beg him to give us a "jump". Which he did. As I lurched and stumbled and fell to my elbows between the rusted speaker posts at dawn. One week later, I moved Steph into her new apartment, fell asleep on the couch, and remained there for 2 years with the husband watching my every move from his senile mother's house across the street.) (Best moment of the first Ford-Wyoming night: "you're running up quite a tab, Mr. Gregorits.") (There were many Ford-Wyoming nights.)

11. THE CINEMARK 16 (Warren, MI) About a dozen miles across town from the Ford-Wyoming, on Detroit's soon-to-be abandoned East Side, is bar none THE finest moviegoing experience on God's green earth: the Motor City Grindhouse, AKA MOVIES 16, AKA "that fucking dollar show out there on 12 mile that Gene never shuts up about, I think he LIVED there for a while last summer, he's going to die soon just you watch", AKA the Cinemark 16 Megaplex. But having composed -lovingly, lovingly, lovingly- no less than FIVE stylistically unique pieces on the best and perhaps ONLY enduring shelter from the ceaseless lashings of my Michigan "personal life" (stations of the muther-fucking cross), I am less than optimistic about telling you shit-brained last-minute mullers about my "external id", and scrounging greedily for further riches down that well-mined old ghost hole (crackheads digging thru the shag carpet) but here goes nothing" ONE MILE WEST, you will find THE SALTY DOG (I'll come at the Cinny from a DIFFERENT angle, HAH!), a dive-bar-in-a-boat (it's just a boat-shaped *building*, you can't miss it there on John R in Madison Heights, last known home of Dr. Jack Kevorkian) where the altogether ACCEPTABLE working gals serve dollr drafts in the dark, and that's a dark so dark that you will experience temporary blindness every time the side door is opened by a new customer (because this is a place for DAYTIME drinking you dig? and the sun is BRUTAL on that treeless stretch of irradiated and soul-sodomizing commercial zone overkill sector) yet not so dark that you'll fail to notice the naked gams of your chansmoking servicewoman (men's dess shirts, loose belt, and...and nothing is the Salty Dog's "other" trademark). Is this a strip join- NO. Is it some kind of weird *front* for som- NO. Are the girls for SALE? Well, yes and no. I'd sooner narc on my own slimebag BROTHER than endanger the pathetic and fragile PURITY of the pirate ship roadhouse of Madison Heights. So G'WAN, amble over and figure it out for yourself. ALRIGTH GODDAMMIT: the moment of truth. A mile west...they've removed 99% of the heartbreaking banality of the UNIVERSAL MALL. Nah, they took it all, except for the picture show. 16 screens, buck-a-pop, noon-to-midnight, free popcorn (fish unvalidated empties out of the trash / eat for free), predominant genre bias, state of the art projection (I'm lying), booze friendly, asshole friendly, fifty cent matinees on Tuesday, coming attr

***

fifty cent matinees on Tuesdays, coming attractions, stalls with locking doors, free parking, on site security, and gift certificates available at the box office, all this in the middle of POST- INDUSTRIAL LIMBO SUCH AS YOU'VE NEVER DREAMED. Healthy people, as in thinking-of-voting-for-Hillary people, I'm-so-excited-about-"Pride"-this- year, should-I-go-back-to-school-this-fall type people will not like the C-16. They will not understand it at all, like they will not understand ANY of the spots on this spotlist. But if more folks had any cluse how ACHINGLY fucking COOL, how WICKED hip this cinema actualyl is, you culd get laid there, see, because at present I can assure you that *pne* thing *ain't* hap'nin down Cinemark way is FUCKIN. But maybe that's what *makes* it so hap'nin, that there ain't nothin hap'nin. 'cept alcoholism. 'cept cinema. Pure fuckin *cinema*, jack. Welcome to *heaven*, jack. Let the hipsters SMURF SHIT UP at the stick-up-its-ass BREW'N VIEW over in faggoty Ferndale (AKA Spermdale), with its 10 dollar microbrews and inexplicably muddy, blown out sound system and backbreaking wooden seats. Go alone to the Grindhouse, make a day of it at the Mark. I've been haunting the place like it was my jay oh bee snce 2003, when it was hidden deeeeeeeeeep within a haunted shopping mall, a "dead mall", and I've got the 500-odd ticket stubs to prove it. Until 2009, you could stroll through the mall and watch all the businesses dying, feeling so high above it all and beyond it all if you were young and I was quite young. On one occasion, I entered the Value City department store and found it entirely empty at6 PM on an August friday...until, in the dingiest, grimiest, corner of the sprawling establishment I found myself standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder with a stunning brunette of (possibly) Greek origin (she could have been Turkish) who gave not the slightest notice of me, and examined intently a bag of generic corn chips as I examined my own selection: a bag of generic cheddar cheese popcorn. We had that moment together. And it so spooked me, unnerved me, that surge of aloneness just then, the monstrousness of the American Capitalist Death Machine, you see, replacing fucking with junk food and love with hypoglycemia, it all came to me clear as a shot. I left the woman, who may have been a ghost, standing there in the greenish glow of rotting Value City and its fading comestibles, for the food court, to drink cheap malbec and nosh on Taco Bell tacos. Michael Jackson died that day, and the black girls were singing "Man in the Mirror". I thought that was an excellent choice. But now you understand what i mean when I say there was no sex at the Mark, or at the Universal Mall. The closest I ever came to gettin laid out there was in 2004, when Kill Bill 2 went to second run (which proves that I'll see anything for a dollar). It wasmore Asperger's Masturbation from King Neb (you know WHY Tarantino is never even referenced by Martin Scorsese? Becausehe's not a legitimate FILM DIRECTOR, *that's* why) and I'd arrived early, my Schwinn steed secured by a dog chain to one of the dead little trees lining the side entrance. I found a seat halfway down in one of the smallest auditoriums, where the occasional arthouse film would be assigned, or an exhausted Ben Affleck opus in its final days. There I am, serene, a truly SOZZLED young chap, as happy as I ever get, with my backpack o'six- packs, mightahad me about 3 sixes fo Stroh's in there, and I'm basking in the movie geekdom of it all, in the air-conditioning, in the QUIET. It's a fucking CHURCH for us psychic cripples! All movie geeks are psychic CRIPPLES! You! Me! Tarantino! There in the dark we have the smarmy self-consciousness of being AWAKE IN THE DARK and ALONE IN THE DARK like being ALONE IN THE WORLD (and movie geeks wonder why they never get fucking laid with putrid cowardly senseless infantile anti-social sensibilities such as this) (although I've never gone long without snatch but have you SEEN the women I fuck) and when the lights finally go down there are latecomers so I am no longer ALONE IN THE DARK and these are FEMALES now closing in and choosing the row DIRECTLY BEHIND ME in the otherwise empty theatre, I know this because I hear girlgiggling and smell real live girlsmell glowing inside as I STAVE OFF THE SHAKES and it's a classic loner situation real Q.T. (remember True Romance, his finest hour?) and all that but I keep copping it sweet keep popping them cans kinda playing it real cool you know because NEVER LOOK BACK (someone always giving me BAD ENERGY) until about 25 minutes into themovie I decide I have a SHOT with one no ALL of these women (no thanks to Kill Bill 2 which announces THE END OF INTELLIGENT CINEMA IN AMERICA) because I've noticed that every time I pop another can, the three chicks erupt in nervous gigglesand t be sure I "pound" a few Stroh's, actually timing the pops waiting for moments in Kill Bill 2 when there's nothing absolutely NOTHING remotely humorous going on which is no short order for a guy ike me because this here piece o'filmed entertainment weren't made with ME in mind, see, and in testing out the giggle theory against the movie (versus the Stroh's) I am left feeling naked, stranded by my senseof humor and my love of CINEMA hawkeyeing Kill Bill 2

****

fifty cent matinees on Tuesdays, coming attractions, stalls with locking doors, free parking, on site security, and gift certificates available at the box office, all this in the middle of POST- INDUSTRIAL LIMBO SUCH AS YOU'VE NEVER DREAMED. Healthy people, as in thinking-of-voting-for-Hillary people, I'm-so-excited-about-"Pride"-this- year, should-I-go-back-to-school-this-fall type people will not like the C-16. They will not understand it at all, like they will not understand ANY of the spots on this spotlist. But if more folks had any cluse how ACHINGLY fucking COOL, how WICKED hip this cinema actualyl is, you culd get laid there, see, because at present I can assure you that *pne* thing *ain't* hap'nin down Cinemark way is FUCKIN. But maybe that's what *makes* it so hap'nin, that there ain't nothin hap'nin. 'cept alcoholism. 'cept cinema. Pure fuckin *cinema*, jack. Welcome to *heaven*, jack. Let the hipsters SMURF SHIT UP at the stick-up-its-ass BREW'N VIEW over in faggoty Ferndale (AKA Spermdale), with its 10 dollar microbrews and inexplicably muddy, blown out sound system and backbreaking wooden seats. Go alone to the Grindhouse, make a day of it at the Mark. I've been haunting the place like it was my jay oh bee snce 2003, when it was hidden deeeeeeeeeep within a haunted shopping mall, a "dead mall", and I've got the 500-odd ticket stubs to prove it. Until 2009, you could stroll through the mall and watch all the businesses dying, feeling so high above it all and beyond it all if you were young and I was quite young. On one occasion, I entered the Value City department store and found it entirely empty at6 PM on an August friday...until, in the dingiest, grimiest, corner of the sprawling establishment I found myself standing almost shoulder-to-shoulder with a stunning brunette of (possibly) Greek origin (she could have been Turkish) who gave not the slightest notice of me, and examined intently a bag of generic corn chips as I examined my own selection: a bag of generic cheddar cheese popcorn. We had that moment together. And it so spooked me, unnerved me, that surge of aloneness just then, the monstrousness of the American Capitalist Death Machine, you see, replacing fucking with junk food and love with hypoglycemia, it all came to me clear as a shot. I left the woman, who may have been a ghost, standing there in the greenish glow of rotting Value City and its fading comestibles, for the food court, to drink cheap malbec and nosh on Taco Bell tacos. Michael Jackson died that day, and the black girls were singing "Man in the Mirror". I thought that was an excellent choice. But now you understand what i mean when I say there was no sex at the Mark, or at the Universal Mall. The closest I ever came to gettin laid out there was in 2004, when Kill Bill 2 went to second run (which proves that I'll see anything for a dollar). It wasmore Asperger's Masturbation from King Neb (you know WHY Tarantino is never even referenced by Martin Scorsese? Becausehe's not a legitimate FILM DIRECTOR, *that's* why) and I'd arrived early, my Schwinn steed secured by a dog chain to one of the dead little trees lining the side entrance. I found a seat halfway down in one of the smallest auditoriums, where the occasional arthouse film would be assigned, or an exhausted Ben Affleck opus in its final days. There I am, serene, a truly SOZZLED young chap, as happy as I ever get, with my backpack o'six- packs, mightahad me about 3 sixes fo Stroh's in there, and I'm basking in the movie geekdom of it all, in the air-conditioning, in the QUIET. It's a fucking CHURCH for us psychic cripples! All movie geeks are psychic CRIPPLES! You! Me! Tarantino! There in the dark we have the smarmy self-consciousness of being AWAKE IN THE DARK and ALONE IN THE DARK like being ALONE IN THE WORLD (and movie geeks wonder why they never get fucking laid with putrid cowardly senseless infantile anti-social sensibilities such as this) (although I've never gone long without snatch but have you SEEN the women I fuck) and when the lights finally go down there are latecomers so I am no longer ALONE IN THE DARK and these are FEMALES now closing in and choosing the row DIRECTLY BEHIND ME in the otherwise empty theatre, I know this because I hear girlgiggling and smell real live girlsmell glowing inside as I STAVE OFF THE SHAKES and it's a classic loner situation real Q.T. (remember True Romance, his finest hour?) and all that but I keep copping it sweet keep popping them cans kinda playing it real cool you know because NEVER LOOK BACK (someone always giving me BAD ENERGY) until about 25 minutes into themovie I decide I have a SHOT with one no ALL of these women (no thanks to Kill Bill 2 which announces THE END OF INTELLIGENT CINEMA IN AMERICA) because I've noticed that every time I pop another can, the three chicks erupt in nervous gigglesand t be sure I "pound" a few Stroh's, actually timing the pops waiting for moments in Kill Bill 2 when there's nothing absolutely NOTHING remotely humorous going on which is no short order for a guy ike me because this here piece o'filmed entertainment weren't made with ME in mind, see, and in testing out the giggle theory against the movie (versus the Stroh's) I am left feeling naked, stranded by my senseof humor and my love of CINEMA hawkeyeing Kill Bill 2

**** hawkeyeing Kill Bill 2 for humorlessness yeah because for me that's the entire film isn't it so what the hell I let another one rip *POP* that wet'n'wild sound, that macho BUKOWSKI NIHILISM sound that bone chilling DADDY'S HOME sound that turns perfectly healthy lusty young women into snarling old dyke cunts afteryears of domestic rape and battery, *POP*, *POP*, *POP*...and *then*, sure as shit: hushed giggles. And the descent begins... "Holy shit, they must know me from my column in Brutarian Magazine," I reason. "It's about time!" Time indeed...to break the ice! I hoist a tepid sixer from my befouled knapsack (reek of cigarette ash, stale beer, and soured wine from having been used several thousand times for transport of ten cent empties to the "party stores" of Hazel Park (MOVIE FARE) (this was my fucking LIFE for 3 years) and there I am, doing my best not to disappoint my young fans as I physically enter their darkspace, their sacred personal cinemaspace, mortally pretrified al the while of losing one or more of the cans to gravity and visions of it HAPPENING, one man overboard HELP! breaking on impact and spraying the young sex goddesses with skunky foam and then also fear of BAD BREATH (been drinking non-stop for weeks) and of the projectionist seeng what I was up to but as Lawrence Tierney sez in RESERVOIR DOGS, "just shit in your pants, dive in and swim" so HERE I COME: "Excuse m- HI! I'm sorry. Uh, listen, would you ladies like some beer?" (Kinda natural, I thought...I come on real smooth, smooth but...*direct*, yes...sincere, defntely sincere...) And they are lovely creatures indeed, I'm *sure*, but it's a dark scene up above us, Tom Sizemore mugging through another masturbatory KOOL moment, it's real KLASSIC Q.T., he's talking about 1970s children's cereal to a man tied to chair, while brandishing a very large gun, it goes on about 17 minutes and then he shoots the guy, dead silence, as I recall but it coudl be a different Q.T. movie, but anyway the time seemed right and so I turn around again and can't make the darlings out, quite, perfume, a flash of curls, giggles of course...they take the beer, the whole sixer, so *POP* and then *POP POP*...full laughter now, I'm going dizzy in the groin...they're WHISPERNG about me now...they think I'm sexier with my hallucinatory noir- infused pop-cultural writing spasms whether via laptop, typewriter, or spiral-bound (that's what they're saying) than any tattooed moron with an electric guitar, and well now, I knew the praise would come to me eventually, if not the pussy, but herenow is *both* and it's ABOUT TIME sweet suffering Jesus some TNEDERNESS out here in the toxic wilds before I turn totally queer or hang myself...I slurp down my remaining stash shaking my head at what it's all come to, comic books and action figures and movies about kiddie cereal by mentally retarded video store clerks, smug and imbecilic about my good fortune in finally being discovered and: BLACK. Wake in FEAR, credits rolling, a pair of hairy legs, and when I try to move them, using only my MIND, the legs explode with pain which means...my GOD those *my* legs and is that...popcorn? Omigod....I know what's next...POLICE! The legs are killing me with pinched nerve craziness, awash in traveling stings, millions of them like the aftermath of a roll in fiberglass insulation and I want to scream as one then theother leg, jolts to life with small spasmodic kicks knocking down all them that's been knocked back (dead soldiers) sending'em rolling down the aisle between the tiny runway lights like bowling pins and then *OH* THAT'S REAL I feel HANDS on my NECK and I whip my head backwards to find HE REAL SCENE: Three pretty, blonde, absolutely SHIT-FACED *children* telling me *get UP! get UP!* with grins that should not appear whorish but GOD HELP ME NOW I KINDA GET *THAT* WHOLE THING but it is pure backbrain survival instinct that sends me to my feet tinny hollow dead soldiers crumpling and clicking and hitting the floor and rolling into one another as a yung black man with a broom and a dustpan approaches wearing a bemused expression so I make a run for it unaware of it being either night or day on wobbling knees (I think I'm dreaming but playing along just in case the friendly environment having turned on me) and then feeling the blazing sun blinding me and unlocking my bicycle with heart palpitations gone cockless with fear barely avoiding a death scene at the 12 Mile intersection when I fail to yield for a cement mixing truck which nearly brings police also...good times...my WHOLE life like this...down the toilet... I retired from Cinemark-duty for the rest of that fall season, missing some primo BRANGELINA, but there was a certain thrill to it all and I didn't resist exploring the lurid possibilities there, had I been *that way inclined*, one must go where one is led, you see, but only in my *mind*, ya dig? I culd have caught 20 years, so I figured, "why waste it?" because *waste not want not* and so on and so forth. WHY indeed! Mere *children*! Oh!

9. ZARAPAMPA: The Village Behind the Mountain (Chicago, IL) I don't know the...I mean, it's got a "Z" and a "P" and I'm almost positive there's a secnd "P" and the "M", well, I'm at least 60% solid on the "M". But whatever, it's on Division and when I tell you it's my favorite bar experience of the last decade, you'd be wise to take the tip seriously, and put on your sleuthing jacket (?)...but it's the only "Z"-name bar on Division Street so quit your goddamn bellyachin, Mary Ann. I really love Chicago, did you know that? No, I really do. It's dumb, dumpy, full of hicks and fat sports fans, half-simian psychopaths who kill more of their own than Baltimore sims, and b

*** who kill more of their own than Baltimore sims do in Baltimore, and best of all are the hopelessly cheesedick "theater people" slowly disappearing up their own tight assholes right there in front of you at the bar. Chicago is what would happen if New York and Pittsburgh were smashed tgether, and there's nothing GOOD about that exactly, yet somehow Chicago is wonderfully alive in all the right ways, the best ways, if you know where to hang out. And that's as good as any city in this country gets anymore. Chicago has the best bars, in other words. The magical, misery-proof Division Street bars, to be exactly specific. These are not hipster pussy pickup bars, or csually downscale AFTERSHOW joints, they're not GASTRO-pubs or BREW-pubs or DRAFT-houses or even what could safely be considered DIVE BARS: the have-agood-time-or-get-the-fuck-out barrooms of Division Street are SHIT-holes, as in RAT-holes, as in HELL-holes, and when I say they are ethnic, I don't mean sme fake-baritoned smoothie stockbroker cunt named MATTIAS had the BAR shipped in SECTIONS from County CORK, because first of all I'm not paying eight dollars for a beer what ain't even got bubbles in it. No sir, I'm talking aout a Polack SPEAK, as in EASY, with a busted crapper and cigarette burns in all the seats and stains on the bar from where the Polack owner's Polack wife gave birth to some blood-and-shit streaked wailing Polack babything 4 fridays back cuz no one would drive the poor screaming bitch to hot hospital on account of you goddamn well know why. These are places where you can do what you want as long as you don't "hurt n'buddy", where a king-size hard-on for hops, heroin, andhead-jobs can be hurriedly hooked-up as hangover hashbrowns at the International House of Pancakes. (Thank you, thank you very much.) On a mid-winter Division Street drinking binge evening, you can picture quite vividly the blood- n-jism spackled Gomorrah of the late 19th century and early 20th century, the playground of pushers and pedos going all the way back to H.H. Holmes, to Henry Darger, to Al Capone, to Nelson Algren. And if you've lived as long as I have emotionally investigating and inhabiting those immortal works Never Come Morning and The Man With the Golden Arm, well, here it is, motherfucker. Here it IS. The act that there even ARE places like Zouzapurma: The Mountain Village Tavern left in 2016, like some kind of passionate theatrical re-enactment of Algren's Tug And Maul Saloon, with Frankie Machine and Solly Saltskin lurking at a corner table, should touch the hardest hearts among us. During my 2013 visit, I lost my temper and smacked my female companion who had become infantile and unruly. Of course, she responded by wailing and making ugly threats involving "my brothers". (Acccch! Always "the brothers" with these nutty cunts.) Our bartender, with whom we'd been downing authentic Polish liqueur with, was a 52 year old grandmother whose terrible beauty haunts me still. She was decked out in leopard print, leather, and heels like an Eastern European Peg Bundy and I would have done anything, absolutely anything for her. (Anyting except not smack Jillian in the face, I guess. You'd think I could remember her name, at least, but I can't.) As Jill blubbered away like a subnormal child of six, the bartender leaned across the cheap pressed wood bar and, making direct eye contact with me, growled in my ear, "dothat again and I'll cut your fucking throat, boy." I fell in love with her in that moment. Beyond the frosted hair and thick makeup and tacky ensemble was a wman more magical, more naturally breathtaking, than anyone I've since laid eyes on. I think she wanted me. I know she did! And this explains Lana, the Russian hitwoman. Another story for another time.

9. MAC'S CLUB DEUCE (Miami Beach, FL) I embarked -this is aout 6 or 7 years back- on a weeklong crack-driven crime spree on Miami Beach that involved whoring myself out to rich old drunk women, and humping fat Sri Lankan teenagers on the beach, and hauling ass out of Walgreen's with all the St. Pauli Girl I could carry, and breaking into the poshest resorts with only a Jay gatsby gaze and a fancy whiskey tumble filled with ginger ale and shit-vodka as my cover, and...you get the picture. (The Fountainebleu at night...jesus...the sick majesty of it all...) The nature of my crimes was petty, I suppose, but my M.O., the steadfasness and frequency of it all, the fact that everying occurred in broad daylight, that I was barefooted and severely sunburned, not to mention in the thick of what had to be instantly recognizable cocaine- psychosis, defies all logical explanation when I reflect bck on it today. The best thing about that week of living dangerously was *not getting caught*, of course, while the worst, besides the sunburn, was having no control over the presentability of of my personal, eh, *person*, which was so disarmingly overripe that I had effectively distanced myself from all possible sexual opportunities of any estimable quality, because such potential was definitely abundant in quite a pleasing variety of low-cost, low-class beer joints whose diveness mayb have been pre-fab but whose mid-day brannigan was as real as it gets. (Given just *one* day of rest, a shower, a few sheckles, my jeans and boots, and my Lou Reed shades, hey-hey! But I was about as STOMPED as anyone's ever seen me, and the *smell*? Fuckin peel paint, I'm sure. So... Sadly, during my fugitive Florida run BACK to Miami in 2014, with a dazed and crippled Sam in tow, I found those bars all gone, except one, which has been around since rock'n'roll: Mac's Club Deuce. The place has been immortalized in a half-dozen lousy movies and umteen lousy TV shows, so unlike the more self-consciously shambolic college-drunk scenes happening arund it, Mac's is *old* school cool.

****

Mac's is *old* skool kool. And that could mean, for most of us, that fucking is OUT. But where else you gonna score Sam Adams for three bucks on Miami Beach? Nowhere, baby, nowhere. Mac's has an irregulr-shaped wraparound bar, walls bedecked with Bogey portraits, Capone portraits, dingy B/W life-size studies of Cagney and Sinatra for a younger streetwise clientele that couldn't give two fucks about these leering old hams. The icons seem to gaze vacantly through the smoke awaiting acknowledgement which never comes. Mac's is dark, see, *real* fuggin dark, and smokey, and simple, the place has been *around*, see, it's well-preserved hardcore neo-noir, street-noir, it's BAR for BAR's sake and no one willbe rude to you at Mac's, the people are DECENT and LOW-KEY and with good reason, because Mac's Club Deuce is an institution as much as CBGB or the Frolic Room or Cafe Dumont were institutions, it's pure 50's hipster class and anyone in there was *drawn* there because the place looks like an old time spade joint and once inside, well, you either get it or you don't. Now maybe I bumped into the odd crackhead or two but if we had any business, let's just *say* we had some busines, well, it woulda been transacted elsewhere cuz Mac's is just not that type of a place. (The last time I left Mac's, a blithe young mulatto queen-bitch in chinos and patent leather shoes propositoned me, and I hit'm hard there on Esmerelda Way in the rain with "hundred bucks" to which HE say, "ah HUNNIT DOLLA? I got BLOW, I got ICE, wutch you need a hunnid DOLLA fo?" Well, I get hard hearing that, me, hard as a rock in 2 seconds to think of the ALTITUDE but I say, "I have a special needs cat waiting for me back in Coconut Grove" and that don't sit right with Nelly so I get the hell OUTTA there, me. Fast.

8. THE ABBEY (New Orleans, LA) I don't remember her name, but the face remains clear enough, especially now, since that awful TV show Broad City appeared. She looked like the halfway talented one, Ilana Glazer, but not so rhinocerousish. Nawwww...my corkscrew-haired young Hebraic shygirl out of nowhere was the very essence of vulverability and guile both, and she was so organically and genuinely ruined by life because although choosing me as her evening's company would seem to expose her as a simpleton or a tramp that was NOT THE CASE AT ALL, she aceepted me along with the circumstances that brought her to the Abbey that night with an almost undefinable style at a remove yet not detached, and with a sadness, yes, but I would hesitate to call it resignation. I don't remember her name, but it's better, she's better that way, like Ruby Tuesday, without a name, which would only make the story sadder anyway: you want to think you're above it all, having taken an anarchist philosophy to heart, a romantic anarchism that when all is said and done really doesn't play very well on the street. You want your memories to hold up and you want your most significant slips and falls to be the kind that indict the macine, the system, the human condition, the devil, you want them to slander god in heaven but it's YOU, *you* who gets targeted, in your little allegory, your parable, your fairy tale from the ruins of time, salvaged like a box of cash from a busted up card game, a triumph of the *heart*, the romantic goddamn SOUL OF MAN rising to extricate itself from WAR and RAPE and SLAVERY and INDUSTRY, from any and all unholy APPETITE: what a SAINT, a goddamn CHAMP, "hey did ya SEE that," "we're really all-RIGHT, Jack, deep DOWN" but read the fine print, take off the greasepaint, SOBER UP: the hero of the story is an ASSHOLE. Tell it again and tell it right...so I'll save ya the comedown and just give you the ASSHOLE VERSION straight-out with minimal justification. Because it was that awful TV show, the guys here in prison get off on it I guess, BROAD CITY, which is what happens when a pair of goofy upper-middle class twats attempt comedy and no one outs a stop to it, that's all it takes, seeing this now on the televsion to bring the past lapping at your front porch like a run-over mutt, or like the Susquehanna River during the great Harrisburg flood of 1995 when I was still all-kinda-wrong in all-kinda-ways, knowing, really, KNOWING that when it came down to it, I'd both exemplify and dignify

**** both exemplify and dignify what led lesser men down blind alleys and stripped'em of all sense and honor because I was already naked to the world and I'd take my hits like a martyr jus to make one corkscrew-haired shygirl smile to dream that dream one more hour but now its New Orleans 2002 and my god what the devil's done to me: I leave my woman, my girlfriend/ mentor/mother/wife/sister sure she is all them things and more but it's over and we both know it and it's high time I came to ponder certain HOLES IN MY THEORY certain GLARING INCONSISTENCIES in tis PLOT like maybe I ain't such a good guy y'know but of course I am not going to do this, am I. It's cowardice, textbook, categorical, and you have your reasons to BE a coward and a deserter and a cheat but now and do not ever forget that you d not GET that ticket back once you trade it in: the rollercoaster is what you still had in mind back in 1995 even maybe 99 at that late stage in degenerate self-abuse there was still a lick of decency in your brigand bran but we can say for certain now that the haunted house with its ten cent shadows and urine stench to hide behind, is where you wound up and one thing about the formative years, they really do tell the whole tale beforeit's really begun which applies to where you go to what you read to how you treat people so there we are me and her me and Lydia diggit New Orleans 2002 you ditch the bitch back at the hotel it's the end anyway she says she's tired so when she tell you that says have a nice time you make for the rollercoaster like you didn't know haven't known for some time now but you know very well when you're enjoying some very nice rock cocaine with the wetbrained doorman of the Abbey when SHE walks in. You notice her right away or maybe you don't notice her at all maybe it's all her doing that in no time at all her friends are gone and your drug packets are empty that the sun is coming up over the French Quarter with two degenerate ruined kids trying to vanish into one another hips grining against thighs and teeth against lips teeth against teeth lost in drugstink cigarette stink beerstink still biting and sucking and kissing in empty barrooms 24 hour beer joints the kind'll let kids like these here USE the backroom for sex sine they ain't holdin NOTHIN back and everybody's been smiling we represent hope the ROMANCE of the DOWNTRODDEN us poor kids TRAMPS LIKE US and like who could say NO to'em when they ask to sweetly your heart just fairly plops out onto the bar, to see a thing lik that, hey I was young once too and what the hell they ain't hurtin nothin have a good time kids and dawn has hit with our dream dying a stinking old expired drugdream death in the street no money for nothing and nothing and sharing the very last cigarette on Bourbon Street puddles of pink vomit everywhere the drugs'll ruin ya exactly like that and you promise the olive-skinned shygirl body that you'll meet her at midnight and maybe you have a few slips of the tongue to make up for anyway so hell or high water you make her BELIEVE and the dream dies like that with you crawling back HOME ay 8 A.M. smelling blatantly of PUSSY and being too much of a child to LIE LIKE A MAN a bad scene all around and we had to PACK for the fucking AIRPORT goddamn me god DAMN me I made her BELIEVE IT WAS TRUE because I COULDN'T and now I suppose I culd say I killed two birds with one stone but naw man that ain't quite right either see the truth is right there man cuz they were both stronger than me I only killed ONE see and time to face FACTS man you were already dead.

7. MARY'S CLUB (Portland, OR) It is a wel known FACT that Portland is home to more strip bars per capita than any other American city. it's the Reeperbahn of the entire 50-state Ronald McDonaldland, in *some* ways, but in this humble writer's limited experience, whateverunique charm or energy or magic WESTERN sexuality can be said to have, whatever remains from the hellishly wonderful 60s and 70s that I missed entirely, is lurking in the smoky bars of Portland's damp old downtown. (See, that's the question, I think: can you handle the WEATHER?) And nevermind that vile, boneheaded affront PORTLANDIA (NOT the birth of culturally self- reflexive irony porn, actually, but certainly, God help us all, the NADIR of it) and calm your nerves re: NU-HIPSTER cliches and all neo-Beatnik (bratnik) obscenity of the spirit: a SMART town, a town that PUTS OUT, a town all growed up both sexually *and* intellectually? Well, it measures up! You can GO to Portland! And have a CONVERSATION! A real smartypants BIG IDEA conversation, with BIG WORDS! Like EXISTENTIALIST! And ALLEGORICAL! And APHORISTIC! You can talk about crazy smartypants DEAD PEOPLE like Henry Miller and Delmore Schwartz, over BEER on Monday morning with a PERFECT STRANGER, you met her at Mary's, reading a book of POEMS by Richard HELL, and you're a pair of pathetic alcoholics, always saying things like "of COURSE" and "life is for the living, no?" and "Dostoevskian"! What you can also do is go see raw naked pussy. What KIND of rawnaked pussy? ANYkind! This is PUSSY HEAVEN! I'm talking about the whole CITY, you know, *generally*, of course, but *specifically* I'm talking about Mary's, the greatest strip club in...I don't know, listen, would you believe that I've only been to 9 or 10 strip cubs in my entire LIFE? I don't care for the atmosphere. It reminds me of...death and defeat and rot, that's just redundant I guess, but...in a *bad* way, and besides, I don't like paying for sex. My ego can't handle it. To be even more frank, I'm sensitive about my POVERTY and when you hang a price tag on pussy, then shove the bald naked pussy or hairy naked pussy in my sozzled poorboy face, it kinda rubs in the other thing too…but that’s the point I guess. To inspire a man to “go fucking EARN some, then.” But I don’t *wanna*!

I’m drunk now, you see, in prison, I’m drink — hey where was I? How many spots are left? What? Mary’s? In…Portland?

Lemme tell you about fuggin MARY’S, where I…yeah, it’s the heart of Portland, the *heart* of the heart of Portland, and the very idea of visiting Portland without a Mary’s morning or a Mary’s afternoon is just…you know…and I saw Gus Van Sant in there one time! I did *too*, you boys, it was him and that guy that looks like Sam Shepherd but isn’t Sam Shepherd…and…I can’t th-OH! I wrote a BOOK about it! The Portland Eight Mile. So there! Mary’s puts up with all *kindsa* weird shit! Mary’s is ALL NUDE! Mary’s is walking distance from the Greyhound station! And the Western Union office! And at least one homeless shelter! (Why pay for breakfast? Save your money for MARY’S!)

This could be ANYWHERE! (But it isn’t.)

Life could be a DREAM! (Sweetheart.)(But it isn’t.)

Tell Mary GENE sent ya! (Yes, there’s an actual “Mary”…oughta know! She threw me OUT! For molesting a Korean BUSINESSMAN! You heard right!)

6. PEPPER'S TAVERN (Ocean City, MD) The arrogant "hicksters" of "Charm City" baltimore like to vacation from scurvy Baltimore in even scurvier O.C., sure do, but wouldn't you know the swingest snakepit in all of Maryland is a decidedly non-descript little boardwalk burrito joint that ain't never *heard* of ARCADE FIRE. (If you've ever read a book written before 1975, you oughta know that the word "arcade" actually means...nevermind.) Yes, *here* is a dive bar where you can avoid the day-glo and pastel colored Asperger's set, where you might have an intelligent conversation about literature, where you might even get laid. Dark, dirty old Pepper's Tavern is actually the basement and rear patio of the unreservedly sordid Sea Scape Motel where this writer found himself the focus of a diabolically overripe Russian tart back in oh-six (sweet sex-teen! Totally legal!) (I think)...see, the bartender would not serve her, and it was very late, so off we go, Lilja and I, to room THAIR-TEE SEEKS. Hint one: someone was waiting for us there. Hint two: I got the clap. (And not just normal clap, but HIGH-TEST KGB-SPONSORED GENETICALLY ENGINEERED TO KILL YOUR FUCKING ASS *superclap* I really thought I was a goner. Buy INTRA-COASTAL Volume One (Monastrell Books, 2014) for the gories, A GODLESS TALE.) Indeed, Pepper's Tavern acts as a kind of drain catch for the low-class, often mentaly retarded guests of the Sea Scape. Technically, the joint is a RESTAURANT, and all summerlong, large screaming families in football jerseys and sunhats may flock to the patio section for rubbery, over-battered chili-lime shrimp and slimy enchiladas and not-so hot enchiladas while staring fixedly at an Atlantic their fat asses will never actually touch. But off-season, the infernal seekers of ecstatic truth may materialize there as from some illicit quantum wormhole, heating up in the wee hours when the Tex-Mex girll is cold and dead, having hard the rumors or possibly following the natural pulse of their own organic drug compasses: lucky visitors on a lucky night will discover a ki nd of bacchanalia of world's end bad vibes, a righteously stoned-out, caned-out, sexed-out nightmare scene pulled out of David Lynch's earlier work, or darkest, weirdest Charles Bukowski. On a GOOD night, the after hours scene at Pepper's has a hallucinatory effect on both the imagination and the libido, in fact marrying the two in a kind of peak experience which is so otherworldly that one can not be bothered to question the morality or even the personal danger associated with what transpires, internally or ternally, as the dawn begins to break. Myself, on *my* Pepper's evenings...you ought to know by now that I took the thing from every angle, which included a two-hour Hell and back blackout dip in the "pure state of birth and death", waiting on Cthulu and the Old Ones as naked and weightless as one ever gets in this life. Pepper's Tavern, da basement for debasement, reminds a lost and old wretch of the phantom life, of the metaphysical purity of all those who are damned and damaged and deranged, who are searching, who are in the world as their brothers and sisters are not, who are forever detached, adrift, asea. Sometimes, a tiny human's American night feels like all the dark universe, and lets you float awhile: you ARE that dream. In other words, Pepper's Tavern is Disney World for Night People. Enjoy.

5. DIVISION STREET LIQUOR STORE WITH CONJOINED FULL-SERVICE BAR (Chicago, IL) Accept no substitutes, but *please* accept my apologies: I forgot the god damn NAME! Rest easy, it's only a few blocks down from Zaposhka's Little Town on the Mountainside, on the other side of the street. I just PUT you there at the front door, more or less. GET OFF MY CASE. It's on DIVISION, Mack! Ya don't gotta be Sam Spade. Now lissen *up*, Dad: HERE is the dustiest, smokiest, oakiest, folkiest, lovliest example of old time Chicago lowdown, if you’ll permit that minor Kerouac theft, that I think you’re ever going to see. IT’S not grim, QUIT YOUR BUBBLE-GUMMER BELLYACHIN AND sidle up, sugar, we gonna get wasteD! Dig that virginal blonde! She’s only 17 — THE OWNERR’S DAUGHTER AND IF SHE DON’T BREAK YOURR HEART…GRIM, YOU SAY? THIS ANGELIC LITTLE BEAST IS PROOF OF ETERNAL LIGHT! LOOK AT HER, WHOOPING IT UP WITH THE OLD TIMERS, THE GIRL IS MAGIC, WITH THAT PONYTAIL AND ALL THAT SASS, ALL THAT SUE-AS-LOLITA POISE AND SNARK, SHE’S AWFUL, JUST HORRIBLE. CHEMICALLY CASTRATE ME, GODDAMMIT, I’M DENYING MYSELF NOTHING TODAY! AND SINGING, NOW, WHAT THE…WHY GOD, WHY, WHY MUST SHE SING NOW, LIKE SHE JUST STEPPED OUT OF JUNIOR HIGH, ON THE LAST DAY OF MAY…WHY LORD, WHY? MAKE HERR ST- “err, hello…so I can really drink here? I thought it was just a packa-“ “C’mon honey honey watcha want, I got customer waitin.” (A FUCKING ANG—) “Just, like…Old Style?” “That’s it?” (FUCK!)

And so it began over the course of 2 days, 2 entirely blissful snowbound afternoons duding my 3rd and final Chicago visit and no matter how shot to splinters shakin in my boots hungover that I took shelter in THIS spectral hovel, leaving each time with sparkling, clanking little glass half-pints of Gorden’s booze and Canadian Club booze, Crystal Palace booze and Mohawk booze, in between helping myself to other low society drinking experiments in the most culturally pure innter-inner-city drinking district left in America. I smiled big. I smiled surreptitiously. I smiled and smiled, every kind of smile there is. All day, the girl would be tied up with the constant flow of Division St. skells, old black and white and Hispanic stumblebums in checkered woolen coats lining up to buy half-pints and nip bottles and to play the POWERBALL, at the LIQUOR STORE, while I, smoking my Marlborros and thinking pure clean Chicago thoughts, waited patiently to order another Old Style tallboy at the BAR.

Are you confused? I’ll ‘splain.

First of all, we could bicker all day about the difference between drunks and alcoholics. The famous alcoholic drunk Nick Tosches once put it thusly: “an alcoholic, see, may piss his pants, but he will not…try to…to fugger your mom.” Well, there you have it. But one think I know and have always known is FETISHISM. I study it in people. I study it in myself. I am META- FETISHISTIC. I have a fetish for fetishes. And heavy DRINKERS, by any other name, are as fetishistic about their ingestion rituals as any other flaming drug addict. We dippy dipsomaniacs twitch involuntarily when red and blue neon signs first appear upon the landscape, at the edge of our vision. These will have to be inspected further, closer, (Increased heart rate, increased boy temperature, shallow, ragged breathing) as they are probably advertising beer. They are bars. Or they are liquor stores. Or they are cheap motels, which means they intersect with or are neighbored in some way by rotting old shithole barrs, and liquor stores with bulletproof partitions. They have names like Nightengale’s Lounge, and Jack’s Cactus Lounge, and Star-Lite Motor Inn (And Lounge). There’s 365 Liquors, Parkside packages, The Neshitt, Trubee’s Place, Kinghorse Lounge and Grill, the Hideaway Lounge, Danny’s Irish Pub, the Trident Inn, Mona Lisa Liquors. And so we tingle and shudderr, we are giddy even, if it’s been a while, to see these signs. People get knifed and sometimes DIE in these dirty joints, but we think that’s GREAT, man! The most anti-social sonofabitch among us pickled pukes now all of the sudden has the urge to get out in the world and mingle. We try to commit to our non-photographic memories all the background: the parking lot vibe, and the lot itself, the real weather and the psychic weather, and this transitional scene, the night ahead, all as part of our own imaginary vanity project: a 4,000 you art-film called SLOW DEATH. Or maybe we’re doing research for the real thing, which we’ll short on DV, with porn actors and Lindsay Lohan, as soon as a rich relative dies and leaves us a quarter mill. It will be an experimental documentary about THE NIGHT, based on Van Morrison’s “Wild Night,” The Pretender’s “Night In My Veins,” and Morphine’s “The Night.” OUR night is more of a Warren Zevon song, a super-funky one that never made it to an LP, that’s what we think as we enter the bar, the liquor store, the after-hours whatever the fuck it is. We contemplate the sad hum of anonymous traffic, everyone chasing sex, sex, sex, one way or another, and the twilight is a menacing thing, the murmurs of approaching strangers getting ready for THEIR night making MORE wistful, melancholic, elegiac, quietly devastated by our syncopated annotations of THE NIGHT and our important estimations of our alcoholic pasts, the gains (pussy) and the losses (everything else). We swing back the scarred metal handle of the scarred commercial glass door, thick and heavy, it sticks to the concrete and you scrap it open once again. We pretend to prefer the losses, which are laughs. Our friends’ laughter is important, for it allows us to laugh when we are alone and we are almost always alone.

We mythologize the bars, the liquor stores: not only our long, sturdy relationships with them but the mysterious lives of these places independent of us, before we found them. We melt into a bittersweet retreat, maybe catch a chill to feel the death marching towards us, to imagine the reasonable facsimiles of ourselves who will outlive us as customers of these selfsame shitholes, who will haunt these coolers and counters and racks of carcinogens and aphrodisiacs and epressants after we quit or die. If it's likely that the establishment itself will *not* outlive us, we ponder the *energies* of liquor stores and bars, the *ghosts* of taverns long since shuttered, and the cosmic cruelty of *big bad night*. They (and therefore we) are the very essence of SCUM HISTORY, the SECRET history of the street, of Dark America, and darktown, mumbled memories of CRACKtown wich we giggle about over happy hour cold ones in the prime of our roving years as though it were all a devilsh prank which we surrender to mockingly like Harvey Keitel fucking with De Niro in Taxi Driver, on the stoop of that building in the lower east side that I walked by for *years* without even knowing it, all that secret scum history hiding in plain sight and we *know* it's just blood down a storm drain and that the blood is OUR blood too but in the urine and sulfur of NY night air or Detroit night air or any urban piss factory night air we continue lighting up and guzzling down we smile at our cleverness like Harvey's pimp in that movie yet most of us will die without reading Tolstoy or Proust or even Joyce, maybe not even Dostoevsky OR Dos Passos, which is really not so very clever at all and i you read them you understand what was missing all those years in the dark but until then what wehave instead is the casual nihilism of buying and consuming booze any old way but especially to kick it old school like the ghost of Bob Stinson who didn't read the great Works either but the Stinson thing or the Thunders thing or the Bukowski thing lets us feel the sting a little, not *too* much for most people being tourists and *none* of us plan on giving up our dumb youth so soon despite what we say drooling into our leather sleeves at 6 A.M. with the same Pogues song playing in a loop since midnight the night before, such memories those, our SINGULAR man nights which always led to SINGLE man mornings with SINGLE man hangovers which nullified us in a dramatic fashion and careful now you might lose a decade that way but don't take it personally cuz time is just time however cruel we can not hide now. Women of any class or sense will call us morbid. And juvenile. And putrid. But nothing-nothing- nothing ignites the masochism and nostalgia and the wonderment of the hopeless romantic boozer like that rarest beast of all:

THE CONJOINED BAR AND LIQUOR STORE

You can get take-out, you can get a package, from any old liquor store or any br with a take- out cooler and a take-out license (CARRY-out being the proper terminology for that). But that AIN'T wha we're after here. I'm talking about a 100% legit BOTTLE-O (as they're called so charmingly in hick Australia), you know, a PARTY STORE (Detroit), a PACKY (Boston), a BOOZERIA (Cleveland), a goddamn LIQUOR STORE (my preference)...that which, like one of those old Transformer toys I had when I as a kid, or like a hermaphrodite, opens up miraculously into something ELSE: all it takes to blow my mind is for me to go sniffing around some rotten old take-out joint for a boring old six of something neither cheap nor fancy, Michelob, say, on a dead-ass late-September late-afternoon and finding a crowded BACKROOM with a half-dozen tables or -thank you Jesus- a full service BAR of any length or width, and CHAIRS, so you can sit the fuck DOWN, you know, until you decide which way you wana fuggin SWING with this, which way you GOIN, in or out, like when you was a little *KID* and your ma was always sayin, "in or OUT, kids, in or *out*", all worried about her just vacuumed *carpet* or whatever when you, like any halfway intelligent little bastard, wanted to be in *and* out, right, so here you are two decades later, at the conjoined bar/liquor store, letting it quickly and jrringly dawn on you that you do NOT HAVE TO KNOW WHICH WAY YOU WANT TO "GO" with it, alright? It took almost 20 FUCKING YEARS, two ASSKICKING LIPSPLITTING DECADES to find the TRUE FREEDOM, the true MEANING of "*in and out*" which is maybe neither in NOR out, nut rather gone, slipped into the delicate folds of sensual self-abasement, a interstitial alcoholic foxhole and the essence of GOLDEN OLDIE FUGGIT I'M OUTTA HERE BOYS *gone* so G'WAN SIDDOWN BUDDY order a DRINK buddy which you wll be served instantly if -get this- if the BARTENDER isn't ringing up six packs as the CLERK because HE is actually THEY and THEY is just HIM, the one the other and the other the one, running night and day with the *same cash resister*, JUST ONE TILL FOR BOTH because the liquor store is the bar, and the *bar* is... Mother-fucker, you may as well be lying in a bathtub filled with draft beer or a whole swimming pool of Thunderbird, so immersed in etha-null soulfullness, so *died and gone to hooch heaven done DRANK your rum cake and et it too* are *YOU* to sit and watch SME men walk in for fifths and cases and pints and forties and quarts and six packs andmagnums and halfpints and liters and tallboy singles and oil can singles and nip bottles and jugs and kegs and boes and now they even got POWDERED hooch so g'wan and ADD POUCHES TOTHE G.D. LIST as meanwhile you sit and watch OTHER MEN sit and sip singles and doubles readin the paper watchin the news smokin cigarettes playin video poker well well well...and right behind you is a full display of Budweiser Black (made with triple-filtered water, 6% ABV, it's piss but strong and Anheuser Busch has decided on its success with hyperaggressive marketing so you'll accomodate them of course) 12 packs yet by some perversion of nature you've got one in your hand and while the display cases are room temperature, yours is ice cold. And you're consuming it. Legally. In the store. It's kinda like having the key to the city: TODAY IS GENE GREGORITS DAY IN EAST DETROIT. Oh yeh? Hrm. Well, give the cops the day off, I guess. Legalize everything, including murder. Fow now. Lemme think on the rest... What I'm describing here is not the figment of a wet-brained imagination, some cartoon chimera like Homer Simpson's "Skittle-Brau" or the Mickey's "Bigger" Mouth I once swore I'd bought only to realize...yeah. The place laid out so inimitably poetic here (you're welcome) DOES exist, perhaps not commonly, perhaps as an aberration of our nationwide "urban problem", of our inner-city starving class, but it's out there. Your hipster friends have never set foot in such a place, because they are HEALTH conscious, because they are CIVILIZED, because they are EDUCATED, and because they are fuckin RACIST. But it DOES exist, and you might as well go there. *Tonight*. Save the demonic self-loathing of Dostoevsky for middle age, when you can *really* understand what a horrible cunt you always were.

4. THE CHARLES THEATER (Baltimore, MD) As you can see, I have...difficulty...avoiding this rat-infested out-of-order men's toilet of a city. I want to DIE, I want to have BEEN dead, 20 30 80 one thousand years every g.d. time I THINK of Baltimore. But then i recall the civility and decency and elegance of my three year tenure as "Evan Williams Jr", the "Whiskey Phantom" of the Charles. Those years were ablaze with sex; it seems that every other night I'd find myself indisposed with a slobbering drunk she-muppet, another brain-damaged art student from the Maryland Insititute of Cartooon Animals, because RICH LITTLE CUNTS ON SPEED = ULTIMATE SELF- DESTRUCTIVE FUN, the MOST fun, do you follow, that a man can possibly HAVE while KILLING HIMSELF TO DEATH. Oh, those filthy little sprites. God bless you all. Meanwhile, I hopelessly imagined that a proper (adult) relationship might form with one of the overworked, middle-aged manic depressive nymphos who waitressed the Zagat-rated tapas joint next door. Oh, I *wanted* one of those mature tramps, they seemed so HUMAN to me, so beyond broken, they were SURVIVORS, but being too far gone on whiskey, and close to becoming a, um, NON-SURVIVOR, I was rejected, and furthermore I see now that I might have been confused aboutt he TYPE of humanity which occurred to me as me/them/anyone...for I was THE PHANTOM, the WHISKEY Phantom, and my pallor was death my body odor was death and perhaps this worked in small doses for the Cartoon Animal Adderall scamps but was very much to the detriment of my standing with Tiny Alice and Bambi and Kate from Tapas Teatro. What was I to DO? I'd already TRIED the detox cinic! It didn't TAKE! Ah hell...I made the best of it. I screwed half the college. So *what*? It was never my dream, you see. My dream was Tiny Alice, in her black server's uniform, and the cocaine hollows under her eyes. 70, 80 hours a week...they worked herhalf-blind. Her boyfriend savaged her...she'd break down in tears. I lusted for her dark boozy kiss, her sour aura. I'm attracted to rotting flesh, I can't help it. Alice baby. Come back to me. In 2016, on Charles Street between North Avenue and Lanvale Street, there are new Tiny Alices. A whole new fleet of rich cartoon cunts from the art college. All you have to do is befriend one of them with sme good coke, then you TOO can drink in the lobby afterhours watching the shadows on its hundred foot high bare brick walls. You may even find employment there as an usher and become the new Phantom. You could be the Vodka Phantom, the Meth Phantom, or maybe the Phentynl Phantom. *That* spot never did get filled. It is too heavy for any but the truly damned. PS: DO NOT BOTHER JOHN WATERS. He's an old man, and tired of public molestation. Mr. Waters cherishes the Charles; rightly so. He comes in on the weekends, or any day he pleases. He sits and reads the paper. He sees a movie. Sometimes he sees two movies. Leave him *be* for Christ's sake.

3. GREYHOUND STATION (CLEVELAND, OH)

Here is where you’ll find me when I get released from prison! I’ve been drinking beer at the Cleveland Greyhound Station for a quarter CENTURY you little faggots. Kickin it old school with the ghost of Robert Crumb. You can take me anytime you’re ready, Lord. Things ain’t gonna look up. Ever. I was gonna tell the story of punk rock Sarah. She was the foot job queen. But this list is depressing the FUCKING SHIT out of me. The Handsome Family’s “Passenger Pigeons” just started playing in my head. NEXT!

2. MAHUFFER’S (REDDINGTON SHORES, FL)

Mahufferr’s sits on the bay side of Gulf Boulevard so I’d say it doesn’t count as a beach bar. But, the proximity’s nice. It’s real nice.

Inside, it’s the underground labyrinth from the end of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre Part Two: hundreds of layers of…of SHIT, salt-wind damaged bric-a-brac tacked to every wall, to every surface, including the ceiling. It’s mostly dollar bills, photos, lingerie, beer labels…the bar stools are unsound, the whole place is unsound, and it’s just the right biker’s haven for non- bikers, a good roadhouse joint for a slightly literary man who loves subtropical torpor, loves to get grotesquely Tanqueray TKO’d in the yay-m. Last time I went to Mahuffer’s, it was a HOT DATE: the place was desolation at 10:30, the machines not even burping and popping yet, I arrived early by public bus to meet a meth-dealing little screwball named Vivian who I did not think would show but did show and damned if we didn’t go off in unison like a string of M-80s dry humping the goddamn SKIN off each other on Mahuffer’s rotten old sofa. The bartender did not kick us out for this, but rather made sure we got twice or even three times what we paid for. Truly one hot crazy evil bitch, that Vivian. I was told, in no uncertain terms, that there would BE NO SEX unless I helped her break into a research facility in Clearwater to free a dolphin, or a group of dolphins. We had to go there immediately, “Erm, well Viv,” says I, “that don’t sound too smart there, yer know, and, like, I’m sure you have, like, a really amazing pussy, but I’m too old to be going to jail over —“

“You won’t get ARRESTED for my PUSSY?” “Erm, ah, NO…” “You sissy bitch. You’re a fuckin GIRL!” “I’m not a girl.” “Then get in the CAR…” “No.” “I’ll give you a blowjob when we get there.” “No.” “You SISSY BITCH fuckin GIRL.” “I’m sorry.”

All Vivians are like this, by the way. I remember her screaming down Gulf Blvd. at 2PM, 20 miles over the speed limit and SCREEEEEEAMING, and there was good red wine, the girl knew her wine alright, and later I tried to drown her in the surf, on Mad Beach, and the police came when she stole a baby. Well, it was because she stole the baby. Cuz we were already gone, you know, we took that baby back to the mother. (“mon-sters, you’re, you’re MON-sters, MON- sters…”) and we…well I don’t suppose I can recall what we did next except that I woke up in time for happy hour at the Old Oar House feeling refreshed and pretty goddamned proud o’myself: blueballs at age 37. Nice. (Hey Viv, honey, I still jack—nevermind.)

1. THE HOTEL CONGRESS (TUSCON, AZ)

Will the war for America’s OUTLAW SOUL be fought in Tucson?

Hmmm…what a nifty thought! Tucson, birthplace of Green On Red, Giant Sand, and the Gin Blossoms, is CLASSIC VAGABOND COOL. I mean, fuck Phoenix and Santa Fe, they’re shitholes, and Albuquerque is a shithole, but it didn’t fare so badly on Breaking Bad…did it? (It did. JESUS, I says to myself watching every episode of that evil show, must not EVER allow myself to become stranded in fucking Albuquerque.)

Would anyone argue that Tucson is the East Village of the desert territories? But as far as America’s outlaw SOUL… that particular war was lost around the time Ronald Reagan came in, LOST because no one showed up to fight it. That’s called a DEFAULT JUDGEMENT, I believe, and it was not made in our favor. Today, you need only walk from one end of Williamsburg to the other to understand this. Our feral young gods will not happens again, our Jooplins, our Lovecrafts, our Algrens, our Menckens, our Faulkners, our Dallesandros, our Brandos are no longer even possible. Now we have a new war, and as always, every soft-headed office stiff, every wage slave, every cheap flavor of the month pop culture putz and every hack comic- turned-pundit is standing in line, now that we are ALL pundits, anyway, to tell YOU what IT is. Well, no one really knows, which is the scary thing about the Donald Trump situation, and the climate change situation, and the ISIS situation….all symptoms of a suppurating wound which could have and should have healed 200 years ago, the time to begin nipping the POPULATION situation in the bud via eugenics, taxation, foreign policy, or any means necessary. Sow and ye shall reap.

But today I see a different picture than most, since unlike most, I value BOOKS, I value ART, and I value the redemptive power of SELF-ACTUALIZATION in the face of ENCROACHING CYNICISM, INTELLECTUAL STERILITY—ANEMIA—FEMINISM—LIBERAL LOBOTOMY— UNCHECKED CHARLATANRY. We are beset on ALL sides by aggressive tumors, the kind you don’t remove without testing your patient’s tolerance for extreme body trauma. The kind he’s not likely to recover from.

This is a war between the young and old, two very different kinds of Nazis, two very different kinds of soullessness, with two very different IDEAS of making the world worse, especially for people like me. And if one has to vote for Donald Trump to vote against political correctness, against the lethal myopia and spinelessness of liberalism, well…the implications of that, which do not need another itemizing, are enough to give even the most politically remote man a stomach cramp. When it is Trump’s face which seems kindest, when such a man can be made to appear sympathetic at all, we have entered a cold new dawn indeed. In 2001, my guitar hero Steve Wynn, longtime collaborator of my mescal hero Dan Stuart (native of Tucson), said, “the Hotel Congress is the Chelsea Hotel of the southwest.” WAIT! No- no…I got it all WRONG! It…it weren’t Steve ah-tull, it were…ME! T’was I made the statement, when Steve brought up Tucson, where he had just recorded his best album to date, and eaten many goat brain tacos. We were sitting on my significant other’s red velvet sofa many, many years ago, when things made a kind of sense, at least in Los Angeles, and a cassette tape was recording our every syllable, I could see the red light and the little sprockets turning inside the thing’s window, when Steve leaned a little closer to my mic, placing his third empty Heineken bottle on the coffee table, and said, “yes, and all the things that that implies.”

Our talk up until that point had centered mainly on rape, incest, arson, necrophilia, and alcohol abuse, so I assumed he was referencing the Spungen/Vicious murder case. I dusted off my old story of cornering poor Stanley Bard in the Chelsea’s lobby in 1994, demanding to see the room, “the room, you know, the fucking room,” provoking RAGE in the beleaguered manager. Anyway, the point is, Steve agreed with me. Course, that don’t mean you can expect to see Patti Smith or Richard Hell, or even Abel Ferrara strolling across the sleek, lazy, sunshine-noir reflecting tile of the Congress’ lobby — you definitely ain’t seeing Bob Stinson, or Sid, or Dee Dee, or Rockets Redglare, not there or anywhere else — but maybe Tucson is sleepy-smart such as to sit OUT the coming ideological civil war half my friends are writing panicked, pleading, yet somehow shell-shocked letters to me about here in prison, as if I can possibly know FUCK-ALL with no internet, no newspapers, no…well I do have a subscription to Rolling Stone, so yeah, I guess in that way I DO know how fucked we all are, but most you cunts, yeah, you fucked yourselves, pretty well I’d say, and a long time ago.

“There is no center anymore. Everything is scattered.” — Leah Kowalski. I believe civil war is coming, mainly because the marginalized are going to be left no voice at all beyond radical Islam. The cretin hordes of ISIS, if nothing else, have balls, large ones, and there is no shortage of American cretin-scum watching them, admiring them, perhaps learning from them. I’m locked up with nearly a THOUSAND of this society’s WORST…and I’m watching them watching ISIS…the writing is on the wall children. And then…then we have the letter writers, my alleged readership? The alleged progressives of the alleged NEW world, the NEW left: a slovenly bunch, cretins themselves, make no mistake, and probably more insidious than the gangs. The new left is largely composed of militantly gentrificationist, marijuana supremacist, caucasoid PC Nazis, they are political ignoramuses, borderline brainwashed turds, and they have rendered themselves SPIRITUALLY complacent via marijuana. (Neil Young, ignoramus SUPREME, is behind the Bratniks 100%, and they are, like, behind him, but not like they’re behind Stephen Colbert. Point is, it’s called dope for a reason.)

The Bratnik Left supports their own self-serving startups (like UBER) and couldn’t give a damn about the working class. The ones who rise to prominence do so only after their generation’s collective mediocrity has succeeded in establishing such low standards that intelligent criticism no longer even applies. (The critics were loaded into the cattle car right behind newspapers, back around 2010, I guess you could say it’s no longer tolerated….certainly it ain’t a wise career move to attack any liberal, even apolitically….the word NAZI does apply.)

But as I say, these people have been my bread and butter for years. I no longer need money to live, so I’m free — as never before — to say whatever the fuck I want. It wasn’t until I came to prison that I realized how FEARFUL I’d become, that fear had replaced pleasure on almost every front. My girlfriend at the time of my final breakdown was a thoroughly corrupt, black- hearted fraud of an alt-weekly journalist, and it was to a great extent through her admissions of plagiarism, avarice, and cut-throat gossip-mongering (“shuck and jive, baby, shuck and jive,” she would say while shaking her hands like Al Jolson, altogether oblivious to my horror: she was proud of it, and worse still, I was expected to applaud the little monster’s pathology, to endorse her sick credo) that the nature of our BRATNIK PROBLEM came into a tight focus: these people would ruin all that remained of what we have so often struggled to interpret in a Western Context: bohemianism. I came to understand that the current youth mindset was inherently predatory, amoral, anti-intellectual, and impossibly deluded about its own merits. For sincere seekers, the time of the assassins had finally arrived: and I was fucking one of them. But I had my reasons: I’d been promised the COVER of the newspaper she worked for, and I was about to lose my home to eviction. It was this woman’s false testimony and battered woman performance that got a 15 year sentence. I never touched the woman in anger, and I never even knew where she LIVED. Shuck and jive, indeed.

And once I was turned loose inside the department of corrections, in the spring of 2016, the morgue rats began to come sniffing around, and they all wanted to talk politics. Sure, there would be the obligatory 3-4-5 paragraph lather of blather about the OBSCENITY of my sentence (the human being is a SPITEFUL cocksucker, above all things…and clearly, I’d gotten away with too much sexual and artistic FREEDOM, hadn’t I? Can’t be having that in these Neo- Liberal times of change and discovery.) I’d have fun trying to play up to the author’s righteous indignation and moral panic. But then it would be politics. What have I ever had to say about that bottomless pit or Hell? Didn’t I leave high school because of politics? Wait a minute, didn’t I leave the fucking human RACE because of POLITICS?

“But Gene! Everything is politics!”

Well, fuck everything then! I’ve heard it all before. And I think I’ve made myself quite CLEAR, always, every time.

Nevertheless, I’m bombarded with THIS monkeyshit:

“It’s getting real weird out here what with the election.” “If the shit hits the fan, should I join the right and become a war criminal?” “Ya think it’ll be nukes, Gene? Won’t they kill all the inmates if it happens, isn’t that the plan?” “I’m afraid to ask, gene, but what’s your take on the trump show these past few weeks? Do you think this is a staged election? Is Trump a shill for the left? Do you think the New Right is, like, a real thing?” “Would you fuck Megan Kelly? I mean, just based on her looks?” “It’s been too many years since 9-11. It’s like it never happened. No one thinks it’s possible to do that again. I wonder how much of this is manufactured anyway…including ISIS. But I’m scared anyway.”

Well…prison is nothing if not a good exercise in stoicism. But it’s gotten to the point where I feel that I may be playing into that classic strategy used most often by conservatives, that deadly rhetoric trap whereby your opponent exhausts himself into blind rage snapping after your subtle applications of reptilian repetition, his sincerity used against him…the zealot understands that politics is a combination of penitentiary rape psychology and Haitian voodoo, yet he doesn’t understand. At the very least, he is rarely prepared for the black mamba assfuck when it commences. And Trump is too HUMAN for behavior of such metaphysical, almost mystical perversity. Trump is a rapist on many levels, but the full-frontal Fascist soul-fucking dealt on a regular basis by Hillary Clinton, or my ethically-challenged ex-girlfriend, is something quite beyond his capability. Again, when he’s the good guy, you don’t want to be within a thousand miles of ANY major city. And underneath it all is Generation whatever, this THING which seems to be the very middle to the TRUE end, the first generation with absolutely NO redeeming value, nothing to justify its arrogance but youth itself, and the rhetoric of a future dream which no sensible man or woman alive wants anything to do with: NEOLIBERALISM!

But who among you is sensitive anymore? I’ve been predicting this onslaught of vapidity and caprice and fraud for 20 years. And you want me to say it all again? Nah. I’m not falling for it. (FUCK!) Dear letter writer… Dear letter WRITERS… Dear READERS… Dear EVERYONE…

It is you, and it is the charlatan borders of you, who Must and Will fall. Even if it takes another century. America was founded on raper, this the rest of the world has duly noted, even the cave dwellers know we are damned…and in rape, in murder, in delusion and in deception, it will one day end. By then, Williamsburg will be underwater. And Silverlake will be ash. Europe may follow.

Oh yeah…Arizona. Look, what you really want is the GOB! 100% environmentally safe with zero rainfall (it’s strictly BYOW). But for non-millionaires only looking for 6-9 months of relative functionality before the northern militias begin to drift towards the equator, or the plague hits or the cancer gets you, a little patch of AZ wasteland looks like your only hope, stateside. And for now, for those enlightened dinosaurs to whom SPEED MEANS FREEDOM OF THE SOUL, Tucson’s Congress might just be your last hotel.

(But there’s better meth in PHOENIX. Everyone I know says so.)

EPILOGUE:

In the near-future, we have learned not to beg the question of tomorrow. We have seen bombs, we have seen men with guns. There is a memory of a better time, beyond this sparkling old 1920s lobby, beyond our borrowed Jim Thompson and William Lindsay Gresham memories, our Doc Pomus memories and Dos Passos memories, our John Huston memories and Nic Roeg memories, our Dream Syndicate and Green On Red memories…right here, this very lobby.

In the distance: the sound of a world being unmade.

But closer…a little closer, there, around that corner, through the velvet drapes, the taproom, Hotel Congress, 9.17.27 where —

“Oh for CRYIN ALL NIGHT GREGORITS, 84 PAGES, ENOUGH!” Don’t ruin it! It’s the perfect allegory about — “GAWD you’re a fucking idiot. ENOUGH! WRAP IT UP!” And in the small room with photos of Jayne Mansfield on — “We GET it, Gene!” —the wall, there is an old-time jukebox with — “OH! Oh how fucking CHEESY can ya—“ Fuck you! My entire epic travelogue, my allegory, RUINED you heathen bitch, I’ll find you, I’ll fucking—“ “Careful, Gene…go ahead and finish, I’ll keep quiet.” Promise? “Yes. Go on.” Ah fuck it. These are dark days, but not too dark to observe this miracle…in the cool dark taproom, on the old time JUKEBOX, and…now LISTEN, JUST SHUT YOUR IGNORANT PIEHOLE and, and… “We’re waiting…” Listen when I tell you that what is on this 1967 jukebox is REAL EVIDENCE OF THE LIFE OF THE COOL, EVEN. “Alright already for the love of fucking Christmas Gene!” Even…EVEN NOW, through THIS we can… we can BURN WHITE HOT WITH IT, WITH THIS, THE GREATEST B-SIDE OF ALL — “Goodbye Gene. Better edit that a little.” YOU’LL NEVER GUESS! “Be safe in there, sweetie.” IT’S…well if that’s how you…it’s…the TROGGS, goddammit, the TROGGS! Hello? HELLO? Ah shit. I almost had it. Next time, then.

From orig ms pg 11 (meet me/20 below). Awaiting pp 1-10, and 75-90. *please* do not ignore, need these pages urgently ASAP.

Yes, who as it turns out is the end of the road for many a scabby heroin burnout; it's a psychopharmacologically natural development for junkie pop musicians, particularly during the grim "shooting toilet water" stage of the opiate seige, to succumb to Yes and Electric Light Orchestra records. I strongly recommend seeking out Dr. Ambern Young's article in the March 1997 issue of the Utne Reader, perhaps the only explicit dissection of the link between progressive rock and riding the "H" train. Sadly, it fails to acknowledge the key role the crack cocaine epidemic of the mid-1980s played in stemming two full decades of heroin devastation, including such ghastly perversions as the deplorable slide into prog rock psychosis which, it bears mentioning, has also been observed among the foul personal habits of daily marijuana smokers and hashish eaters.) (They give mrijuana to cancer patients for nausea, while I, a perfectly healthy middle-aged alcoholic, have never failed to endure *extreme* nausea, often to the point of vomiting, when I smoke the slob's sacrament, cannabis sativa. Perhaos someone culd explain this to me as well.) Anyway, what a loser. And what a *sad* story! This guy Bob was a real piece of work, and you can *see* it (you could probably smell it too, those last few years) in the photos: he's alsways staring off into fucking space with a Cheshire grin, real cat with the canary like one o'them autistic kids who can talk to ghosts, or spirits or whatever, only they ain't *nice* spirits, cuz the thing is they ain't even really ghosts, they's *demons* and they get *into* the kid, like, and make the kid (who everyone was scared of in the first place) run around in the dark cuttng people's brake cables and putting ground glass in their Jiff Extra Chunky. (My Aunt Betty had one o'them kids, s'how I know it's not just from movies, but he wasn't really my nephew on account o'herhaving adopted him from a Serbian family who'd lost all their other kids in the Balkan genocide which I guess might coulda left this one kinda, er, *pre-disposed* to certain kindsa, er, Satanic, like, *energies* that, when your spirit is weakened by trauma, they get *inside* ya, and make ya start seein all kindsa visions, Hell visions and chaos visions, unspeakable things from other dimensions where stuff happens that makes the Balkan slaughter and the Nazi slaughter and the Khmer Rouge and Boko Harum look like folly so then you go around with all that demon craziness in you, poisoning the neighbors' pets and putting snakes in their laundry baskets and laying upon all human frailty to sow chaos among the family, what little of it ain't been hacked apart by next-door neighbors back in the old country, until your harried mother has to put your infernal black hearted sexually perverse little ass up for adoption so that you can sow *more* chaos among *more* families except instead of a new family you get my lonely and timid Aunt Helen who is now living in a halfway house for psychotic women which I'm sure has something to do with the diabolical humiliations and miseries young Goran visited upon her cuz she wasn't shikzo (shikzophrenic) before him, just a little lonely and reclusive like I already did explain, which ain't hardly a crime and definitely is no reason to terrorize and mlest a person but I guess the kid couldn't help it on account of how he was full of devils and all the ghosts of them that was raped and butchered, see? So anyway, poor ol'Bob wasalways staring off into...into *nothing*, and -my mom tells me that Goran, my demon-possessed foster-cousin, is a police officer now. Jesus, can you imagine the possibilities *there*? I catch a chill sometimes, just thinking of the king-size corruption, the honest-to-goodness Lou Ford caliber nefariousness, and imagine THE MOVIE: an urban THE KILLER INSIDE ME, that book *exactly*, yes, but set in deepest darkest Philadelphia, or Detroit, shot and edited like Narc, but, you know, smart...and you're thinking you've seen it all before, until we pull the literal demon business on ya: here you have this typical shiteating hard-on deputy douche bag, the worst villain in any other movie, real standard bad guy but here

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He's the vilest villain in any other movie, but here, he's the hero, okay? We give him a tortured soul. We identify with his self-loathing and alcoholism. But he gets, like, the EVIL EYE, or just BIT, maybe, by some voodoo crazy project spook during a routine traffic stop, and proceeds directly to transform -literally- into the COP FROM HELL, a no-fucking-around Theodore Robert BUNDYCOP, and not the clean-cut Northwest Ted Bundy that sustained relationships and wore the mask of sanity, NO - *our* bent copper goes into full Bundy "Florida Frenzy" mode, tearing off people's lips and tearing ut eyes and yanking entire limbs out of their sockets. What? It's human *nature*, Jesus, I didn't fucking invent the world, *did* I? HELL of a movie, that would be, the way I'D do it, with god damn...Tom HARDY, yessir, and..well, tha's getting too far off-point, and I'll tell you about it another time...but you'd fucking piss yourself in mortal terror, the way I'D make that Satanic demon cop on the rampage movie. Oh my...pardon my self-indulgence...these dreadful lapses...what was I...Bob, Bob...he was a sweet fellow, an organic personality, they're rare...yet prone to fits of violence...nothing crazy, you know, ust sort of *pop-pop* and out the door...he'd get upset...hypersensitive...a sexual abuse victim self-medicating to kill the (etc). Bob coulda been a REAL sonofabitch but all in all...his worst *crimes*, as detailed by Mehr in Trouble Boys, are hitting his girlfriend (infrequently), not showing up to gigs, and some swiping of theband's cash for dope (also infrequent). Now, is that even Johnny Thunders-level awfulness? Barely. (If you wanna examine the rock'n'roll heart of darkness, consider the serial cat-killing of Sid Vicious, the caned-out/ armed-and-dangerous onanisn of Marvin Gaye, the misogynistic sadism of Brian Jones, the phoney baloney mysicism of blackout rapist Jim Morrison...that's to say nothing of the homicidal arsonists who comprise the whole of Scandinavian black metal, or the retrograde Floridian scum who spawned death metal.) (Like the horror genre, the subject of any kind of heavy metal is best avoided altogether.) (Just...ewwww.) One suspects that the real dirt on Bob Stinson was suppressed by the guilt ridden ridden survivors, or maybe Mehr's portrayal, like the book overall, is "impeccable" in that hyper- conventional, hyper-*responsible* sense which means that a strenuous reach for both objectivity and decorum is made at the expense of down-in-it urgency, of a cutting edge, of the ugly truth...a good, honest STINK. (The Replacements had a record called "Stink". If they'd *truly* stunk, they might have been interesting.) But "impeccable" *why*? For what? And for who? The *fans*? Fuck the fans, and espcially *these* whiny, limp, mawkish fans. Obviously this was a fully *authorized* piece which means ROCKFAN HOMOGENEITY, always. And on the other hand, you couldn't ask for a better "straight story" if the exasperatingly straight Replacements are really your bag. Bob Mehr is a PRO alright, dedicating the book to Bob Stinson and his son Joey (who are both dead so it's, in all fairness, dedicated to the *memory* of Bob and Joey, but whatever) and taing plenty of time to spell out in morbid detail the financial realities of the group's "always almost" ten year existence. (Accounts of Paul and Tommy literally *burning* money instantly erases any sympathy for the little pricks. Like I said, rock'n'rollers are morons.) Westerberg's midwestern bathos may have defined the group lyrically, but the real heart was always the Stinson brothers, and as a story element, it's Trouble Boys' strongest element as well. Mehr's decision, then, t put so much focus on record company malaise is unfortunate. I've learnedmore than a hundred times more than I ever wanted to about industry mechanics and politics reading unimaginitive and and soulless books like this. That shit sucks the life out of my record collection, and yous too, maybe. The record label vets I've been unfortunate enough to actually *know* in my lifetime...well, they're all cocksuckers, how's that? But there'll be a movie, one of these days, you bet, either based on or prompted by this here book. (While Holly George-Warren's edgier, far superior A Man Called Destruction didn't (and isn't going to) do much good for the posthumous career of the edgier, far superior Alex Chilton.) Wait, am I actually *reviewing* this dull book about dullards? My apologies, and I promisenot to let it happen again. What you young'uns don't understand is that straight reortage *killed* journalism. Good rock'n'roll needs good journalism, so it's also killed rock'n'roll. It killed all of counter-culture, it killed everything that was good about art and performance, everything that was good about music, it killed and *is killing* and WILL KILL anything GOOD...ANYWHERE...FOREVER...PERIOD. K? But RAWK rots your brain anyway, which is why people who base their lives around it are, generally speaking, not the *sharpest* knives in the drawer. On a single hand I can count the musicians I know who might be found quietly pondering the bigger pictures of literature, or civilization, or God, over a civilized and sophisticated meal, in civilized sophisticated solitude, on any given night. On NO HAND AT ALL can I count the rock'n'rollers of my life who can write a lick of engaging prose. I'm not even sure that one can *exist* in both places at once, the inner ear and outer ear, for surely we all understand that music can be experienced, can be heard, without sound. And maybe you have to be some kind of extroverted, slovenly heathen mutt to make traditional, functional rock'n'roll music. And maybe that's why 99% of it makes me embarassed to be alive. "Oh shut up, Gene, for the love of-" Oh and don't people get TOUCHY when you criticize their ROCK AND ROLL MUSIC?

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Oh and don't people get SORE when you criticize their rock and roll MUSIC? You think I'm a frustrated musician? A failed, er, wannabe BAND GUY? "Probably." I've regretted it all my life, not learning the guitar in my teens. I'd have plundered every RIPE HOLE from Bayonne to Bensonhurst. Are *all* writers failed musicians? "I don't know, Gene." I can tell you THIS: show me a guitar-playing writer and I'll show you a LOUSY damn writer, for sure. "You've turned into Archie Bunker, Gene." But do all writers *envy* musicians? "I don't care, Gene." YES! Yes they DO! But the reason is so shameful, so insulting, and so mundane, I won't bother telling you. "Is it pussy, Gene?" It is indeed. Oh what a sorry state of affairs, this human problem, this ART problem, this culture problem. Women will rule the world soon, or shall in any event be led to *believe* that. The superpowers, Bilderbergs, Rothchilds, Rockefellers, etc., they'll be calling all the shots as usual, but the girls'll get to hold the wheel momentarily while it serves the interests of the 'fellers, while it has value politically. Women are starting to *look* like men, have you noticed that? But it's true, musicians get it, and writers do NOT get it. Yet it is the wrter who needs pussy most, because it is the writer who must dwell on death all the time, who grapples with suffering, who in a sense suffers *for* suffering, for without suffering there can *be* no Great Art, my point being that in the day to day logisitical scheme of the writer's reality, well, it's any port in a storm, and *he* is lucky to get a lousy damn handjob. The writer is the Garbageman of the Human Spirit and who needs pussy more than a Garbageman, after a hard day's work, neck deep in used Kleenex and Tampax and catshit, so the mediocritons and nincompoops of the world can believe in fucking fairy tales? "How are you getting plonk in prison, Gene?" I'm *mocking* it, duh. "*Why* are you in prison, Gene?" That's...that's a very differe- just never you mind that. "Was it *pussy*, Gene?" You know god damn well it was. She said she was 18! "Well, we always knew you were a child molester, Gene. But a Replacements-hater? Uh-uh. Just not buying it." Wuh...*what*? "It's like a drag queen, Gene. A manufactured conceit. You fucking *love* those records." No, no I fucking do not. "You're from *Harrisburg*, dude." So? "Those songs are about *you*, and wo you *were*." Like fuck. Harrisburg isn't even the midwest, for starters. "It's close enough. C'mon, don't you think Westerberg's whole thing hits you, like, maybe a little too close to home?" But you're also convinced that I am a latent homosexual. "You *are*." Allow me, dear three remaining readers, t apologize for this fictional yet brutally accurate heckler intended to represent my last 47 girlfriends. And I'll tellya what it *is* really about, one more time, like I've had to tell most of those fucking women: the REPLACEMENTS, like every other rock band, were either *non*-literary or *anti*-literary, and the worst of all was when Westerberg -now *there's* a dandy for you- would get *faux*-literary. It's PAINFUL! It's OBSCENE! There's NO cringing such as when Paul starts to reference LITERATURE. Iggy does it too! It's a ROCK STAR THING, to be self-consciously LITERARY in that way. Because what they do is GROIN MUSIC, after all. "You're not going to make a case now for Big Star as a fucking LITERARY-" Well, no...no-no...still groin music...but Chilton was fucking *mental*, wasn't he? And he was smart enough to know that his despair, his mental illness, was great ART, and he was driven enugh to deliver that madness, to communicate his natural hideous SOUL through that groin music, in what feels like moments of genuine spiritual transcendence which may very well have been accidental and so what if they were? I say he was *counting* on those accidents and *looking* for those accients and that he KNEW when he had something on tape. And to have had so *many* of those mments throughout his career...see, this is what makes Westerberg great, *when* he's great: it's eeing the mistakes, the futility of it all, you know, touring, recording, making records that don't sell, giving polite interviews to idiotic interviewers for polite and idiotic magazines, watching it all slowly dissolve into porn and cartoons...remember "Anthem" by Leonard Cohen? "There is a crack...in everything. That's how the light gets in." Chilton *got* that! So yeah, you could say that Big Star was, in a sense, literary, because Chilton was literary, or at least he had the *depth* of a literary person. He understood more than just *rock*. He was in touch with a higher feeling. He was in touch with art. He could hear God's voice. I believe that error and vice, the blemishes of us, are what endears us to our Maker. I believe in divine error. Not the happy accident but the *holy* accident. "You make no fucking sense. But at least you appreciate Leonard Cohen." Cohen was the biggest damn smooth-talking phony of all time. But back to Westerberg...I guess what irritates me is that he retains that bumpkin-ness. It's easy for me to spot, because *I've* got it, like you pointed out. It humiliates me, far more than the gay thing. I've been slowly killing that dumb hick in me for thirty years, and I'm still seeing footprints around. But Bob- "So you admit it!" What? "You and Westerberg are a lot alike!" Like fuck. I did *not* say that. "Why?" Because I mean, like...that's like comparing Gary Gilmore to John Wayne Gacy. "And you're Gacy I presume?" You're damn right. "You're crossing a brand new frontier of bad taste, Gregorits." I see nothing wrong with what he did. He loved women too much.

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He loved women *too much*. "Gacy was gay as blazes. He killed young men, you idiot." Henry Lee Lucas, then. "Gay." Of course Dahmer was quite gay. "100%." Did Westerberg write songs about Wisconsin also? "Wisconsin and Minnesota are kina the same thing, culturally." Ted Bundy was exclusively hetero. "Bundy was a *jerk*. Not even you are a jerk like *that*." I'd rather be Ted Bundy than Mr. My Only Hit Ever Was On the Singles Soundtrack. "I think you have closets *in* your closet." I think you're right. "Isn't this supposed to be about Bob?" Ah, Bob the trainwatcher. Good ol'black tar Bob. Still-greasy-from-8-hurs-on-the-flat-top-grill- and-another-3-in-the-dishroom-because-the-kid-bailed-in-the-middle-of-dinner-rush-to-go- get-stoned-Bob. Yes. "Nice." Aloof-as-fuck-non-dandy-yet-not-quite-manly-blue-collar-rock-and-roll-animal-Bob. CURSED FROM BIRTH LOSER BURNOUT EXTRAORDINAIRE BOB FUCKING STINSON! *Resquiat in pace.* "Awwww. Glad to see *someone* meets your requirements, Gene." Wellllll...I'm not sure I'd got that far. The man in all fairness appears to have been dumb as a post. "Here we go again." BUT IT'S THE LOSERS I LOVE! I'm *in* love, see, with all these mangled people I've never even met! Nelson Algren! John Holmes! Peter Laughner! Flannery O'Connor! All those dead Warhol ninnies, fuckin LOVE'em! Every last one! Ron Asheton! And Bob's in there, certainly, certainly. So I often commune with LOSERS, in my HEAD, but I used to do it out there in the world, too, more or less kinda PHYSICALLY. "Gene," my loser toad friends would ask me, "why do you sleep with such homely girls?" It's the LOSERS I love! Tom Petty's "Even the Losers", remember! Wotta tune! It's the LOSERS I love! Detroit very readily comes to mind, and the women who came into my life out of circumstance, out of perverse fascination with my *own* loser life, such as working in a car wash with black killers, scum of the earth, on 8 Mile Road, or at a desolate shopping mall, having affairs with banal ruined housewives, sex out of inertia because I'M a loser, pure and simple, doin the same ol'old school loser *shit* that losers have *always* done: kinda touristy and kinda not...smetimes it's better to *not* examine your surroundings or your recent past or your present company or your bleak future...too closely...that's the problem with Americans, it's all dumb mutt extroversion, from top to bottom. In Europe, the have ideas, in EUROPE they know how to APRECIATE a no-fucking-around, aim-for-the-ditch American dirtbag *loser* (Mickey Rourke). I'm often utterly matter-of-fact about my loser status. I accept that THE GUTTER has grown on me far more than I'd ever intended to allow it, and I'll be the first to admit that I did not *really* always "root for the villain" the way some bikers are so quick to let you know, the same as any toothless sack of shit in county jail is sure to let you know with "BTL" on one hand and "FTW" on the other: the truth is not romantic, it's not sexy, it's not even *interesting* except to Hollywood prettyboys and sex queens when they feel like slumming it up for street cred. Most of us losers have *emotional problems*, see, and chemical problems, like our crack- withered choppers and knife scars quickly indicate: we are the gnarled remnants of Pan's lost boys, now just collecting raindrops at some raw bus stop, the drges, the fuckwits, the no- serotonin club, and we are too damn spineless and selfish to kill ourselves. "Always rooted for the bad guy" is CODSWALLOP. "Always caved in and fled due to absolutely ZERO sense of duty and *no* coping mechanisms" doesn't have the same panache, but it lingers in the air anyway. We're as phony as 80 days are long. Hence the allegiance to anti-social brooding fits in anti-social brooding *places*. Bukowski and his racetrack. Algren and his Division Street dives. Trocchi and his barge. Kerouac and his alleys.

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