Jeff Stewart

I ordered us drink after drink

she talked about her pets and about her job and smelled

like perfume, cold air and cigarettes

and it occurred to me there that she could have had

any man on earth, but there was something there, also,

something that didn’t quite line up with her image.

Not that I cared, I lived in a town where image was everything

the more fucking junked out or weak a man looked

the more women he got

But I sat there anyway, tall and big and out of the

dating loop, but she saw something there, maybe the

total lack of concern on a damaging level, but

sparks flew and my blood ran hot and I sat there

and listened

She tapped her fingernail on the table,

“See?  I don’t really smoke that much.  Didn’t even bring my pack tonight.”

She talked and laughed, blushing, smiling and reaching across the table

to squeeze my hand

I sat and listened, watched her lips and her long fingers

while she punctuated the subject of herself with an occasional

question about me:

“Do you watch much television?”

“Not much, no.  How about you?”

“Certain things.  I just recorded a special about mortuaries.  I have a thing for mortuaries, oh, and serial killers.”

“Makes sense.”

She nodded, “Not that I’m a fan, just fascinated.  You know?”

“I understand.  Of course.”

She laughed.  Outside I watched

two skinheads standing at a red light.

Boots, uniforms, the whole deal.

I watched them and thought

about cancer

she reached over and squeezed my hand,

“But I’m not into sitcoms and shit.”

we drank there for a couple of hours.  The bill was 90 dollars.  I handed the

barmaid my card and the girl stood to go to the bathroom

I watched her reflection walk to the back doors and all the

necks crane out of their booths to watch

it move.  The sun had just fallen, and I looked at my hands then

out to the freeway.  All the years and dirt.  The running of sweat

and the frost of fear across the clock, the taming of youth and the

death of will had missed me for once.  A drink arrived on my table

I looked at the barmaid,

“I’m sorry, doll.  I just needed the bill.”

She touched my shoulder and pointed to the bar, at two men sitting together,

“It’s on them.”

She walked away.  I lifted the drink and nodded to them,

“Gentlemen.”

She sat back down.

“Who are they?”

“No idea.”

She laughed,

“Two men don’t send another man a drink unless they’re fags.”

The barmaid appeared with a drink for her.

“Same thing,” she smiled.

The girl smiled at them, sipped the drink and ate the cherry.

“Fags rule,” I said.

One of them walked over.  He was a good one, drunk and forgotten there

a bit on the depressed side, but also momentarily sedated

and almost happy looking.

The town was full of them.

I remembered his face from some promotion, some reading

one of those weird nights on my new job.  He smiled to her and leaned down

into the triangle of my ear and shoulder.  He smelled like vodka and body odor,

“We’re taking off,” he said, “I wanted to come here and tell you that I love your shit, man.  I know you probably get that a lot, but I don’t care, I love your shit.”

He put his hand out. I shook it,

“Goddamn, man.  Thank you.”

He slapped me across the back and walked off.  I watched them walk across the parking lot, past my car, a 1989 Honda hatchback, mostly rust.  I laughed.  I couldn’t help it.

She looked at me and smiled,

“What’s that like?”

“It’s fucking awesome.”

She laughed wildly.  Partly because she was hammered, but also I think

it was relief that I didn’t go on with some

bullshit artsy answer.

She got up and sat next to me, put her head on my shoulder,

“I’m drunk.”

“Lush.”

She laughed, “I love that word.  So sweet and cool sounding, so much better than calling someone a drunk.”

The barmaid slid the bill and a pen over beneath my card and two mints,

“Looks like you’re ready.”

She smiled and walked off.  I tipped her a twenty

and signed the receipt.

I drove us to a pancake house on Powell

where we sat across from each other so drunk that the night circled us in tracers.

It was just after 8 pm.  I went to the counter and ordered some eggs and toast.

I looked back

to see what she wanted but she was passed out in her seat.

The cook looked at me and laughed.  I waited for the food

and carried it over.  The place was dead empty.

I ate and watched her hair,

fallen over the booth seat, her body fetal, her fingertips

touching the floor, while she coughed and the vomit hit the tiles.

I took my long sleeve off and reached over the table

moved her hair above her face and

wiped her mouth and nose clean

She mumbled,

“I’m on my period.  But it’s your call.”

I removed her shoes and covered her lower body

and placed her hair back over her eyes.

The cook was in the back watching television

I sat there and drank my coffee and watched the traffic on Powell.

It was a good night there

it really was.

Few things in the morning get me in a better mood than solitude, coffee and Slayer.  I’ve been fortunate enough to be staying with my buddy and his girl in southern California while I wrap up a few journalism gigs and other things, but this morning is particularly fine. Huge, empty house, just enough hot coffee left for 2 cups, the sunlight igniting the keyboard and the sounds of double base and fast scales spiking the counter top and bright yellow fur of my dog.  Not a big deal for me when I’m home, all the morning elements come easy, but when they’re there while you’re on the road in a different city, there’s something more vivid about it, something kind of holy, maybe, when your most sacred proclivities transcend travel and space.

Been working a lot with the article format lately, the build-up to interview  to conclusion. It’s good to stretch your boundaries with your work.  But nothing takes me to the core as fast as Reign In Blood and coffee.  It’s a warp into a world.  I would say that I have a Slayer morning once every couple of weeks.  Usually it’s something mellow, Jeff Buckley or Mahler or Merle Haggard in the morning.  Yesterday it was long blocks of The Damned…

Music has always gone hand in hand with my writing.  I have gone long stretches without it, but after a while it starts to feel cold in the room minus the themes playing.  Here’s what I am listening to right now, as the music shuffled.

As we get older

the more things,

pets and people

we know or love

go to their graves

one by one

they leave us

like limbs dropping

from an old trunk

or

you will know

or love someone

who has things,

pets and people

going to their graves

one by one

until it comes

for us, too

until we become

a headshake over

a glass of beer.

It’s the spine of a dog while he sleeps back to back with you.  It’s a strong cup of coffee and a beam of sun ripping across your typewriter.  It’s the first look at the inside of a beer glass during the first long drink.  It’s the spot of green grass holding a ripe plum.  It’s an unforgettable passage by Celine or Lorca or Hamsun.  It’s the blood that drips exactly on time with the music, the grips of your handlebars and the smooth turn of the pedals.  It’s the slightly overweight counter girl at 7 Eleven who looks at you like she wants to take you in the back and fuck.  It’s discovering that your favorite actor or writer or singer has a tattoo and has done time.  It’s a drive down the freeway with the beach set to the right and the sand glossed with heat.  It’s in the eyes of squirrels and deer and cats and pigeons that don’t take off at the sight of your approach.  It’s being behind the computer before noon, the light upon the glass of the room, Kill ‘Em All blasting through the speakers around you while you sip a beer and wonder and don’t wonder.  It’s where it lives, in the creation of us, the road and the heroes, the sunlight and skin, engines and rubber and the landing of flies upon your neck, the bars that reach across the night and hold us together, paused alive.

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Hungover in a hot room with no sleep.  I have driven across Texas to get here.  Every time I saw a dead armadillo on the shoulder, I had to weigh the pros and cons of pulling over and taking a picture.  What would I really do with a photograph of that?  It would be nothing but my own way of getting close to one, maybe even touching one.  Fascinating they are, like armored rats.  No reason to shake the image.  It somehow makes the morning sharper.  I like the idea of no sleep.  It brings up youth, calls back the idea that we are here to endure ourselves.  The room is big and floored with small red bricks.  My dog panted all night next to my bare leg, his head facing the open window.  I reach down and pat his snout, look out through the screen and watch the desert.  My eyes would sweat if they could.

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Corrales is a village just north of Albuquerque.  My buddy, Luke, and his girl, Rachel, moved here from the bullshit of Portland.  I’ve been meaning to stop by for many months, but I never had the time.  Not that I have a lot of it now, but I was determined to make it out to get here.  I was hired by The Albion to write some stories on the west coast this summer, and it’s right on my way, but I would have made it regardless.  Their pup, Maria, takes Chico on a tour of the neighborhood.  They run the small dunes and flirt. Rachel stands barefoot next to Luke while he hands me cold can of beer from the outside fridge. We watch the dogs and drink.  Their house is long and tall and perfect.  They talk about lucking into the place, about their good neighbors and the horse next door who Rachel has renamed Violet.

Connections.  Luke is one of those people you meet and instantly like.  I remember knowing him for about five minutes, we talked about living and so on, on Alberta Street, while I stood holding a coffee and watching ugly hipster girls pedal by, and he just goes into something randomly and personal about his life, without brakes.  It was refreshing, actually, totally away from the boring and guarded banter the NW is becoming dulled with.  I lost touch with Luke after I left on what became a long book tour, and when we met up again, he had found Rachel and they’d decided to go after a more substantive life, free of the weakness of trend, free of constant rain.

A lot to be said about love and life.  A lot, too, to be said about being drunk in a desert cantina at noon with no sleep, shooting pool and sweating under the questionable mercy of an ancient swamp cooler.  I won’t go into detail about why I am lucky to be here and drunk and staring at the red velvet table while across the street donkeys and goats and chickens run the dirt yards adjacent to to the only main drag in the village.  That’s a different story coming in due time.  But standing here leaning on the cue stick and listening to the jukebox while the Bloody Marys and whiskey and ales go to their work on the other side of the heat is something I admire.  My time here is short lived, my friends here are beautiful, and I have the strong idea that I have a book waiting for me to write in this place.  I remain until I absolutely have no more time to stay, and I make the long drive back west, where I sit here and think about the dream of life, while a text message from my friend Dave in Long Beach finds me saying that Wurzel from Motorhead finally died from heart failure, an email comes in letting me know when to pick up the magazine photographer flying in from the UK, and outside the wind is cold but it’s sunny, and I have finally reunited with Trader Joe’s coffee.  Life is fucked but it’s also greatly good.  All tragedy aside, all complaints and worries noted, all the deaths and screams and corpses of animals, the smiles of children and the fields of dirt to be farmed for beer money, I have nothing but good things around me right now. Continue reading →

103 degrees in the high plains.  Cup of cold instant coffee, a stack of rough pages written from the weeks past, and my dog snoring under the kitchen table.  I hear him between track changes and breaks in Nothing’s Shocking by Jane’s Addiction.  I remember first hearing this when I was a teenager.  It instantly became a part of my culture, like it was when I first heard Nina Simone’s version of Strange Fruit.  I was a teenager then as well, in Chicago, where I was laying across the bed of some girl.  I was on a criss-cross maze around the states, working labor mostly, sleeping in the back of my Econoline and writing in my journals.  But I’d met this girl who was 6 years older while I was walking the river, and one thing led to another and it was 3 in the morning and she was in the shower.  She had a radio by the bed and I remember the El rolling past the window, the shower turning off and the first sounds of the piano and the vocals pushing out of the small single speaker.  It was the first time I could remember a song rendering me speechless, almost breathless.  A few keys of the piano and her voice crept to high corners of the bedroom, until the room absorbed her completely.  I laid there and listened to the basic elements of the song; a few notes and her voice were all that was needed.  The words were destructive and beautifully sad.  I watched the ceiling and the shadows of the city punctuated by the bittersweet chalk of her voice, and it was at that moment that I instantly fell in love with writing, because a door had opened for me.  It wasn’t the busyness or expanse of the work, but the impact of whichever expanse you had to give that gave it range.  Basic yet holding layers of feeling is what held me to that mattress, completely frozen and burning and fixated on the song of this woman.  It ended and the girl came into the room, awkwardly telling me she had to be at work in an hour and that her brother dropped by to sleep there after his graveyard shift because it was right down the street and so on.  She told me I was welcomed to hang out there and meet him, but I walked down to her car with her, said goodbye, jumped into my van and drove to a diner where I filled a notebook with the new base of everything I would ever write again. 

It’s not often that a piece of work adjusts the work of another form without an element of emulation, but when the feeling of music puts a shape into the work of a writer it is a pure metamorphosis, a dawning of sorts, and an exact beat that redefines the spectrum of that creation. In fact, I would say it’s a rare to never occurrence.  Now that I’m 40, I don’t really encounter any more things that get to me like a good song used to.  We build our own cathedrals, so to speak, and we learn our own styles and they become the base for what’s ahead of us next.   An outlaw or a leader, I’m thinking about power, the ways a man could use it, or be destroyed by it, the water hits my neck and I’m pissing on myself…

Sunday.  Hot as Hell in middle America.  Up this morning going over some pages I am working on, and waiting on a mechanic to look at my engine that started talking back last week.  I killed time and waited, browsing YouTube, where I usually get sucked into shit like To Catch A Predator.  There is no amount of it that I won’t watch.  I don’t know why.  I think it has something to do with the nasal drawl and presence of Chris Hansen, but also the fascination it presents, and the bloodlust, let’s face it.  Then I switch to serial killer documentaries.  Recently I watched a chain of videos on Kuklinski, the mafia hit man who lasted decades on the job before being caught.  I have to be lenient on myself for being behind the computer and not writing.  I am still blown away by laptops, iPhones, the Internet, all of it.  Needless to say it presents problems, but I am going to skate past that for now. 

What really gets me going is when I see a great artist these days, in the midst of all the millions of fast food “artist” success stories.  I would say that 80 percent of all the “music” stars and television shows, young writers of books, actors, directors, all of it, would absolutely not have gotten anywhere 20 years ago.  Not because they didn’t have the resources they have now, but because they are just that fucking awful.  

Today I was lucky enough to run across this artist called Blu.  I am sure millions already know of his work, but I sat here almost unblinking watching his street art literally come alive.  The vision, time, process, and overall magic of this talent is inspiring to say the least.  The very least.  I thought I’d share it here.  Click the link below.   

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGaqLT-gO4

I made 830 miles in one shot, after getting almost no sleep in a rest area an hour south of Needles.  Seeing a tall palm standing still in the heat from upside down is inspiring by itself, let alone the dead things halved on the road and the mirage that keeps pushing you back the closer you get to it.  Once it goes away with the mountains, you check the time and the placement of the Sun.  My dog, Chico, watches the road while I blast my music, a mix of everything but this morning it’s Poison Idea.  I find a cafe and eat, watch the old skin of my waitress.  The coffee is weak but it should be.  Nobody under the age of 70 is in here.  I almost feel guilty for being 40.  I listen for awhile, check my phone and make my 800 plus mile shot, where I find myself in a bar with my niece.  We close the bar, and I wake up in a room, then I’m on the road another 6 hours.  Then I get some real sleep.

…I am going over a book I wrote called Flotsam for Jetsam. It’s an anti-novel, really, a writing teacher’s worst nightmare, but that’s its beat, its pulse beneath what it became on its own.  I just wrote it out as it barreled through.   Here’s another small piece.

***

We are bound by nothing for a considerable amount of time.  Two good Irishmen lie dead in one of several parts unidentifiable in the wake of our second pilgrimage west, laid to death with their families, and their money rides with me hidden like their bones.  My wife deserves to know the truth.  But I don’t want the secret to weigh her down, or to sway her thoughts of me, from fondly in love to criminal.  The guilt eats at me.  We drive silently for miles, each of us pondering the future.  We decide not to eat until the first town inside of Illinois, which is Chicago.  We’re wired on coffee and words.  I buy a straw cowboy hat when we stop for a bathroom.  Mirrored sunglasses grip my impulses at the counter.  She sees me in the hat and shades and runs her tongue up my sideburn.  The wind is warm and humid and our tongues work over each other there in the field by the station while Lucy runs after a small animal.  I’m thinking about flipping some Franklins in the casinos off the 40, lose five or ten on the C-note to get the clean bills back for an alibi, but I remember the bills are washed already, and the only alibi to clear my conscience will be the truth to my wife.  Not like I was a real criminal.  I ran deliveries on a courier capacity.  Big fucking deal. And the 125 large, if turned over to the cops would have been corruptly distributed.  At least we were going to start a life with it.  I’d already decided to quit Dave’s when we were in Vegas, back before the walls came down, before the curtains closed on them like satin.

Alright.  Just after 11 in the morning.  Coffee, post-punk 80s then a shift to Neurosis, Enemy Of The Sun.  Up until 2 in the morning, getting the covers and PDFs lined up for The Book Patch.  As far as luck goes, I am probably one of the luckiest independent authors when it comes to great visual artists lending their skills to my work.  Chris Noble conceived, designed and executed Dead Birds Hot front to spine to back with a layout that I can only describe as perfect for the content.  I strongly encourage anyone in search of a graphic designer to get a hold of him before going anywhere else.  When it came to the cover of Hit Break Bleed, and the author photo for the back of it, I was fortunate enough to get the help of Doug Winter, who happens to be not only a pioneer in photography, but also a sharp eye when it came to the conception of the front image for the cover.  He worked his style into an impact of sky and road, then worked the back cover in tribute to Chris Noble’s design on Dead Birds Hot.  Now they are available in print at The Book Patch.  Below are the full covers.  Click on them to get them in print.  They are also available on Kindle and Nook.