WANG DANG DOODLE

Kent McDaniel

Joe glanced at Robert and Lori feeding crickets to the tarantula in the dry aquarium. Lori, who was nineteen, had given it to Robert for his twenty-fifth birthday; then and there he’d decided he’d never leave her. Now their idea of a hot date was getting high, throwing it live crickets, and making mad love afterward  

Joe could only look at the tarantula in side-long glances. In the diagonal corner from it, by the window, he played Allman Brothers riffs on his Les Paul, while an in-coming train across the street rattled the windows. Robert and Lori knelt before the short bookcase on which the aquarium rested, tossing in crickets and giggling. The bugs’ doom enthralled Robert, but slim blond Lori kept glancing back and wondering why Joe couldn’t look at the tarantula. At last, leaving half the crickets in the paper carton, she and Robert made for the bedroom. 

Joe played another five minutes and put the guitar in its case. On the spur of the moment, he picked it up, left, walked down the hallway and stairs, and out into a sweltering evening, crossed the street, and climbed the stairs to the Oak Park el station. He entered a waiting train and took a seat. A guy in a security guard uniform came in, sat down, and started reading the Sun-Times. Reagan’s picture was on the front. Six months the creep had been in, and already the vibes had nose-dived.  

The train lurched ahead. Joe leaned forward, guitar case between his legs, headed up north to B.L.U.E.S. on Halsted, unsure why. Restless and bored, he was going to the blues jam, a dumb move: a) You played for free.  b) In a blues club, a white musician wasn’t the real thing.   c) Bars sucked. 

In the train’s window, his reflection glimmered over the storefronts and apartments below. Collar-length dark hair parted in the middle, wire-rim glasses, long nose, beard–his features were there but never quite in focus.  

Forty minutes later he strolled toward a black door, a white sign above it with blue letters that read “B.L.U.E.S.”  He ambled in; on stage in back, a grizzled brown drummer lead a band of young white guys, who strained to make every lick authentic. He was improvising lyrics about how sweet it was when his woman took out her false teeth. A few people sat at the bar, one couple at a table. Hip Truestone was at the bar, too, with his Derby hat, shaved head, gold chains, and his guitar. Hip’s band played B.L.U.E.S. and Kingston Mines, and Hip sang ok, but his guitar licks were flashy and easy.

The house band finished their set, and a guy behind the bar set up the jam. The drummer and the bass player stayed, and a glassy-eyed girl–a cross between Vampirella and a zombie–got on piano. Joe plugged into a Super-Reverb. Hip Truestone plugged into the other amp, and hit a lick. Not thinking about it, Joe called it back. Frowning, Hip tipped back his derby and hit another lick. Joe had missed Hip’s frown–he was so horny he’d been checking out zombie/Vampirella girl. Absently he called the lick back. Hip scowled, swayed his head, making his gold chains swirl, and ran off a longer lick, which Joe called back and then glanced up. Hip was glaring at him. Joe glanced away–and gaped. 

At the bar, Johnny Littlejohn grinned at him, Johnny Littlejohn, whose voice was on the cusp of baritone and tenor, and whose guitar licks said something, went somewhere, always. Joe had both of his albums. 

Hip Truestone called out, “ ‘High Heel Sneakers’ in E.”  After a couple verses, the girl on piano soloed once through the progression, then Joe took one time through, felt good and took a second time through. Hip jumped in and took two times through, and they wrapped it up with a verse and crescendo ending. People applauded, but Hip looked like he had bleeding hemorrhoids.  

The guy behind the bar sidled up to the stage, which stood high as the bar and abutted it. He whispered to Joe, “You need to turn down.”

Joe stared at the guy, who added, “You’re drowning Hip out.”   

Joe nodded, backed up to the drummer, and whispered, “Am I too loud?”

The drummer pushed up his glasses and shook his head, so Joe only pretended to turn down. The barman walked back down the bar. Hip called out, “ ‘Wang Dang Doodle” and started the riff. They jammed it out, zombie-girl, Joe, and Hip all taking solos, and when the song ended, the barman bustled up. “Okay, time for a new crew.”   

Weird: people always got at least three songs. Joe and the pianist got off the stage, but Hip stayed on. Another guitar player and a guy on harp took the stage. Hip said, “Hey, let’s get that piano player back up here.”  

Joe felt stunned; he’d been kicked out of the jam–the only one removed. He headed for the door. As he passed Johnny Littlejohn, the bluesman tapped Joe’s arm, and Joe stopped. Cigarette in one hand, Johnny wore a purple sports coat and black shirt and pants. He smiled. “Sounded good.”

“Guess I was too loud, though.”

          “You was too something.”  Johnny chuckled. He touched Joe’s arm. “Friend of mine, Ben Austin, needs a guitar player. Gimme your number, I’ll have him call you.”

Joe scrawled his number inside a book of matches. As he handed it to Johnny, he blurted,  “You were the first real bluesman I ever heard. My first time in Chicago.”

Johnny grinned. “I’ll give your number to Ben.”

Feeling like strutting, Joe headed for the el. It was only nine-thirty, but he started work at six A.M., a trade-checker on the Chicago Board of Options Exchange, and he had to get up in time to do yoga and meditate.

As the train clattered down the tracks, he wondered if Ben Austin would call. People in clubs always talked big, but why would Johnny Littlejohn bullshit him? On the other hand, if Ben Austin did call, would that be good? Joe had come to Chicago to get out of music.

Before coming, he’d played music fulltime seven years, working out of Carbondale, downstate. When he’d begun, he wasn’t smoking dope, having quit. By the time he decided to stop gigging, he smoked all day. His days were about music and partying, but his Transcendental Meditation teachers said dope interfered with meditation and the spiritual evolution it allowed, which would culminate in Cosmic Consciousness: a state of perfect peace, fulfillment, health, prosperity, and happiness.

Joe believed in TM, so he tried to stay off dope, but couldn’t. It silenced his inner critic. He decided it was accept doing dope or quit gigging. At thirty maybe he was getting too old anyway. Having written fiction sporadically since age thirteen, he decided to get a day job, and go back to writing, at night. 

Jobs in southern Illinois being scarce, he left. From way downstate, he’d never lived in a city, and he’d never worked a day job longer than a few months. Four days after he got to Chicago, he was doing data entry at the Chicago Board of Options Exchange (CBOE). He got an apartment in Oak Park and wrote but felt alone and nagged by self-doubt. He stopped doing dope for a while but was smoking again and drinking. This spring he’d moved in with Robert, who he’d met at the CBOE; Robert smoked dope, snorted coke, drank, and had been known to bang up smack.

*****

Next morning, after he finished yoga and meditation in the living room–just him and the tarantula–Joe went out to the kitchen, where Robert sat having his usual breakfast: a Camel straight and black coffee.  He had collar-length hair parted on the side, which when washed was light brown. Since that happened maybe three times a month, it usually looked as it did now: dark and lank. He had brown eyes, a long face, straight nose, and faint acne scars. Lean and muscular, at five-eight, he was almost a head shorter than Joe.  

  Joe got a bowl of Wheaties and joined Robert, who shook back his hair. “Hey, man.”

“Hey. I jammed at B.L.U.E.S. last night.”

Robert nodded.

“I  might have a gig.”

“Who with?”  

“Guy called Ben Austin.”

Robert drew back. “I’ve seen his name on album credits. Bass. Alligator Records.”  

“Really? Guess he’s got a band too.”

“Very, cool. Outstanding.” Robert cocked his head. “Hey, man, Lori thinks you don’t like the tarantula.”

“I had a bad dream about spiders once.” Joe shrugged.  “But I’m ok with it. Long as it stays put.”

“Yeah, well.” Robert took his cup to the sink, turned and grinned, holding up his hands like claws. “It’s our baby.” He dropped his hands and grinned wider.  As he headed out, he said, “I’m almost out of dope: keep your eyes open, okay?”

  At the table, Joe thought about his spider dream, which had actually been more of a vision. When he’d first learned meditation in ’72, whenever he began the process, his field of vision would grow vast, charged with throbbing incandescence and/or lighter, flowing shades that scintillated. And he began to find that whenever he closed his eyes, it might happen–resting his eyes from reading, playing guitar, making love. And even when his eyes were open he began to feel stoned, almost tripping. The TM teachers said that his nervous system was releasing accumulated stress, probably from drug experiences, and this was a side effect. To smooth things out, they recommended that he stay active and do breathing exercises and yoga before his meditation.

It all helped, but Spring break of ’72 he visited his sister in Naperville, where he lay around all day and began to feel stoned. One afternoon in the basement, he laid on his back, eyes shut, listening to It’s A Beautiful Day’s “Wasted Union Blues.” His field of vision grew vast, and the darkness began to sparkle and pulse with shimmering streamers of purple and dark pink. In the middle, a small spider appeared, and as Joe remembered Castaneda’s suggestion that hallucinations might be real, his stomach lurched, and the spider swelled, filling his field of vision. He sat bolt upright, eyes wide, heart pounding. A sense of dread gripped him for weeks, and left him with a fear of spiders. So, yeah, he was uncomfortable with the tarantula.     

He looked at his wristwatch, and pushed his chair from the table; he had to get to work.        

At Shearson’s stock options clearing office that morning, he and the other five trade-checkers had only ninety out-trades to divide, trades where Shearson’s side failed match the other firm’s side. Joe resolved his on the trading floor before the 9:00 opening. He did his paper-work and headed home around noon, unlike Robert, who worked for Ridgeway Options and remained on the floor till three.                                                            

The one good thing about trade-checking was Joe got home early. He had a B.A., and though it was in history, if he played things smart, he could end up a stock-broker. But he saw stock-brokers in the bars around Lasalle Street, and they all looked miserable. So whoopee-shit. Of course, his parents were delighted he had a steady job now, especially in investments.  He’d discovered, however, that it was mind-numbing, and trade-checkers got laid a lot less than musicians: he hadn’t had sex in months.  

           At home, he climbed the stairs. His door was on the left, but he went right, to the apartment across the hall. Like Robert, he was low on pot, and maybe Ralph could help. He grew magic mushrooms, glass jars of them filling a set of shelves in his living room, and might well have a pot connection.    

Joe knocked on the door, its chipped paint somewhere between gray and green. Wearing white t-shirt and jeans, Ralph answered, Joe’s height and emaciated, with frizzy blond hair. They walked to the living room, where Joe found Victor from next door sitting on the floor. Wearing t-shirt, jeans, and blue bandana headband, Victor soaked up the sunlight pouring through the windows.  Maybe twenty, he was short, had lank blond hair and a beer belly. He lived with his girlfriend Helen, who stood about four inches taller than he did and outweighed him by seventy pounds. 

Joe sat in a stuffed chair beside the stereo, and Ralph lounged on a sofa. 

“You’re the guitar player,” Victor said.  “Hey, man, you ought to come for our fireworks.”  Fourth of July was a couple weeks away.

Ralph said, “Victor brought back this huge stash of fireworks from Indiana.”

Victor grinned. “You should see ‘em, man. It’s, like, this pile of bright colors.”

Ralph rolled his eyes.

Victor beamed. “We’re gonna shoot ‘em off in my buddy’s back yard. You should come. Do some ‘shrooms.”

“Maybe.” Joe tried to sound sincere. “Speaking of dope, you know where I can cop any pot?” He glanced at Ralph, who shook his head, then Victor.  

Victor’s shoulders drooped. “No, man. I been out a week.” He smiled dreamily. “When I cop some, I’m gonna do a whole damn spliff.”

Joe stared. “A spliff?”

Victor’s head bobbed. “Yeah, them Jamaicans roll up some paper like a ice cream cone.  Stick in a quarter ounce, maybe more. Smoke the whole fuckin’ thing. That’s what I’m gonna do.”     

Joe left. As he walked in his apartment, the phone rang, and he picked up in the living room.

“Yeah,” a voice drawled. “This Ben Austin. You the guit-ar picker?”  

“Yep.”

“The one gave his number to Johnny Littlejohn?”

“Yeah. He said you were looking for a guitarist.”    

“Uh huh, I do a jam up at On Broadway, Tuesday nights.”  There was a rhythm, almost a melody to his words. “I need a guit-ar picker for the gig. You play the blues?”

Joe hesitated. “I’ve heard a lot of blues in Chicago. Most the blues I know, I learned off The Allman Brothers.” He played southern rock and rockabilly.

“But you can plaaay, right?” 

“I can play.”  

“Alright then. You be there tomorrow night?” He gave Joe directions and told him to be there at eight. “The gig pay twenty-five cent.”    

The next night around seven, Les Paul in one hand, Fender amp in the other, Joe trudged up the stairs to the el platform. He boarded and sat down, guitar between his legs, amp on the next seat. Downtown he transferred, and lugged his gear over to the Howard line. On the Northside, he dragged the stuff a couple blocks to On Broadway.

The club was large, the ceiling high, and there was a long bar. Then there were tables, a 

sound man’s booth along the wall, dance floor, and wide stage. Joe sat down on its edge, and in a couple minutes, a stocky man, forty-something, strolled in carrying a guitar case. Maybe five-eight, with freckled tan skin, he wore a denim cap, leather vest, and glasses with purple lenses. He sauntered up. “You Joe?” He stuck out his hand. “Ben Austin.”  

Joe and Ben strolled out to a gray Dodge van and got Ben’s red Custom bass amp with two fifteens. In the next ten minutes, a piano player brought in a  Fender Rhodes, and a drummer lugged in his kit. Right before they started, Ben whispered to Joe, “Don’t worry ’bout the songs’ changes, man. We got that covered on piano. When I sing a line, you just call it back on guit-ar. Then when it’s time, take your solo.” Sounded easy enough.

Maybe forty people were scattered around, seven or eight with guitars. Ben counted off “Kansas City,” and they played the intro.  “I’m going to Kansas City,” Ben sang. Joe hit two quick notes. Ben sang, “Kansas City here I come.” Joe called the phrase back, the groove like a freight train. Ben turned his head toward Joe, the corners of his lips lifted. They went through two verses and a break, and then Joe soloed, feeling like he rode a roller coaster. After him, the pianist soloed, and Joe started a playing a boogie rhythm: Dada Dada Dada Dada.  Ben looked at Joe like Joe had just cut a vile fart, wiped the look from his face, strolled over, and said in Joe’s ear, “Play chords.” He nodded and smiled, walking backwards from Joe, dancing almost. 

After that, they did “The Thrill Is Gone” and “Next Time You See Me,” both of which Joe knew. Then Ben counted off  “Sweet Home Chicago.” Everybody else hit it, but Joe froze: there was a catchy guitar riff at the start that he didn’t know. Ben was starting to grimace, so Joe just started playing some standard rock and roll licks.  

Ben’s face relaxed. He could live with what Joe was playing, but why had Joe  stood there like a chump? After the song, the crowd clapped, including Johnny Littlejohn, who sat near the stage, with his guitar. Ben launched into “Why I Sing The Blues.”  Everybody fell in with the groove, Joe playing in unison with the bass riff. Ben glowered at him and mouthed, “Chords.”  Feeling stupid, Joe switched to seventh chords. Ben shrugged; he thought Joe needed to get more funky with it, but chords beat doubling the bass part.

The song ended to applause, and Ben smiled.  “We gonna bring up a friend of ours: Mr. Johnny Littlejohn!” Cheers greeted Johnny as he took the stage. During Johnny’s first solo, Joe started to add a little riff between chords to his rhythm. Johnny stopped, inclined his right side toward Joe in a semi-bow, and extended his palm, meaning take it away. Joe shook his head, and Johnny continued, with Joe leaving out the riff.

After their set, Joe hung around while the jammers came up. At the end of the night, Ben offered Joe a ride home. Turned out, Ben lived a couple blocks south of Oak Park. As they pulled off the Eisenhower, he said, “You play pretty good, man. Got stuff to learn bout the blues, but you can play.”

Joe grinned. “You watch. I’m gonna get better and better.” 

     Once he was home, Joe felt too keyed up to go right to sleep and had to get up at four, so decided to do without sleep. Around six Robert came in the kitchen, where Joe drank coffee.

He drew back. “You didn’t sleep?”

“Man, if I’d gone to sleep, I couldn’t have got back up.”

Work was okay at first, but by noon, Joe felt disoriented; when he got home that afternoon he slept till morning.     

  Next day, he bought B. B. King’s Greatest Hits, Magic Sam’s West Side Soul, and Ice Pickin’ by Albert Collins, from all of which he began to cop licks, hours on end. Friday afternoon in the living room, Robert played the chords to “Sweet Home Chicago” on guitar, while Joe tried to fit in Magic Sam’s licks. After five minutes, Robert stopped and laughed, shaking his fingers. He plopped down on the couch and lifted a beer from the scarred coffee table. Off to his left, the tarantula shambled about the aquarium.

“Sounds like you’re making progress.” Robert grinned.

Joe lifted a can of Bud from his amp and sat down on the amp. The tarantula continued to prowl the dry aquarium; Joe looked away from it. “I’m spending a lot of time on it.  I don’t know…”

  “What’s wrong with playing guitar?”  

“It’s just that I decided to quit gigging, and write fiction. I haven’t written a word since that night at B.L.U.E.S.”

“Maybe you’re gathering material.”  

“But it’s not just the time: I quit playing because it’s too tied up with dope and drinking for me.”

Robert scoffed. “News flash: You still drink and do dope anyway.”

“At least now I don’t smoke soon as I get up. I don’t drink seven or eight beers every day.”

Robert looked at the ceiling.

“Besides, I’m too old to make it as a musician.”

Robert held up his hands. “You’re thirty-two. Why take this shit so serious?” 

Joe leaned forward.  “I want to accomplish something.”

Robert almost sneered. “You got a chance to play with a good band. Do it.”  He lit a Camel.  “Hey, check this out:  Lou’s gonna be a floor-broker for Bear Stearns.”

Lou was floor manager for Ridgeway Options, the small firm for which Robert worked.  A disco type, sometimes he smoked dope with Robert after work. Basically he did the same job as Robert, trade-checking and phone-clerking, but also supervised Robert and the two runners the firm employed. He got more pay and wore a floor manager badge.  He answered only to Bill, Ridgeway’s Harvard-educated floor-broker, who was in his sixties.

“I think Bill’s gonna give me Lou’s job,” Robert said, “and I’ll be hiring my replacement.” He almost smiled: The idea of a floor manager’s badge pleased him as much as a raise.

Joe asked, “For sure?’

“I should know in a couple weeks.”

                                                           ******     

Tuesday evening after the Fourth of July, Joe stood outside his place, guitar and amp on the sidewalk, when Victor bounced up.  

“Hey,” he said,  “going out?”

“Yeah,” Joe said, “I got a gig with a blues band.”  He added, “Hey, sorry I missed the fireworks thing”

“Oh.” Victor clapped his shoulder. “We had to hold off on it. We’re gonna do it Sunday.  You can still come, man.”

Ben rolled up in his Van, and Joe grabbed his gear. Victor saw Ben and said, “Oh!  A real blues band!”

Joe nodded.        

That night at On Broadway, he played worse. He was tensing up, trying so hard to fit in his new licks that his play was stilted, and he missed half his licks. To make things worse, Big Twist was there. Twist was from Carbondale, and after twenty years playing there, had brought his band up to Chicago. Now he had a record out on Alligator, played the big clubs, and toured nationwide. Joe had known him in Carbondale, lived with some of his band. After Twist left town, whenever he came back, he’d stop by wherever Joe and his brother were playing and sit in.    

          After Joe’s set with Ben, Twist pulled Joe into a bear hug. “Joe Stevens!”  He turned Joe loose. “Up in the city!” Twist was big: six foot, two hundred seventy-five pounds, and he always wore a suit, tie, and Stetson hat. 

When Twist got up to jam, he insisted Joe play, but Joe was still straining. As he limped through his solo on their second song, “Bright Lights Big City,” Twist stalked up to him and bellowed, “Aw, man you ain’t playin’ shit!” He let his arms hang at his side and glared. After the song, Twist snorted, “Man, that’s it.” He climbed off the stage, and Joe unplugged his guitar and jumped off stage, too. He and Twist talked no more.

On the way home in Ben’s van, Joe slouched. “Man, I sucked.”

Ben didn’t deny it; he knew Joe was trying too hard. But what could he do? “Hey, man, you got to relax, that’s all.”

Joe went to work without sleeping, came home and slept fourteen hours. The day after that at work, he scored two ounces of pot and called Ridgeway Options. The voice on the phone, which Joe thought was Lou’s, said Robert was out. So Joe said, “This is Joe. Tell Robert I got his ounce.”

The voice asked, “Of what?”  

“Pot.”

After work he went to Trade Inn with some friends. Around five he got back to his place, buzzed; he joined Robert and Lori sat in the small kitchen. Lori stared at him, deadpan, and Robert glared. Joe froze.             

“You, fucking, moron,” Robert said. “That was Bill you talked to.”

Joe gaped.

“Yeah.” Robert flushed. “I came back, and Bill said,”–he made his voice hearty and well-modulated– “ ‘Oh, Robert, good news: Joe called; he’s got your ounce of pot.’ ”

“I thought it was Lou.”  

“Maybe you shoulda checked.” Robert glared at the table, Lori looking back and forth between them.

Joe leaned back against the wall. “This mean you don’t get the floor-manager job?”

Robert shrugged.  

“You still want the pot?”

“Why not? How much did you give for it?”  

It’d been forty dollars an ounce, but Joe said, “Aw, forget it, man. It’s on me. I’m really sorry.”  He handed over the ounce. 

He went to his bedroom and looked for something to read. He glanced at his manuscripts on the dresser, then at the unfinished one on the metal typing table but felt no interest. Robert’s bookcase in the living room held a trove of science-fiction–Asimov, Clark, Heinlein, Niven, Pohl, Vance, Zelazny–but Joe shied from getting that close to the tarantula. To his eye, its aquarium always looked precariously perched, sticking out three inches past the bookcase’s edge. 

From a bookcase beside his closet, he pulled out Tortilla Flat and lay rereading it. After a while, Robert and Lori left. Joe slunk to the kitchen and made a ham sandwich, feeling rotten.  Junior year of high school, Robert had dropped out to hitch-hike the country. After a couple years, he returned, claimed to be a high school graduate, and ended up at Ridgeway. His brothers and sisters had decent jobs, and a couple were college grads. The floor manager thing meant a lot to him. 

Next day, after work, Joe dumped a fourth of his pot out on his dresser, hoping Victor would buy the rest; Robert’s not paying him might leave him a little short till payday. Victor was delighted to buy the pot . (“Fuckin’ A, man!”)  Joe went out for a six pack and stopped by a bait shop for a little white box of crickets–another peace offering. When Robert and Lori rolled in about four, Joe was playing guitar in the living room. Robert grabbed one of the Buds, came in with Lori and rolled a joint, which they passed around.  

After a few minutes, Joe said, “Hey, I picked up some crickets for…” He pointed his thumb at the tarantula.

Robert glanced at Lori. “Tell you what, man. You feed her the crickets, and all is forgiven.” His face was impassive, but Lori broke into a grin.

“Me?” Joe pointed to himself.

“Yeah.” Robert nodded. “I don’t think you’ve ever had the pleasure.”

Lori’s eyes gleamed.  

Joe went into the kitchen, where he’d left the crickets, and ambled back, trying to look nonchalant, moving as if in slow motion toward the hairy black beast. Robert and Lori stared. Stoned, but every muscle in his body tense, Joe reached in the box, pinched a cricket between his thumb and finger and lowered his hand into the aquarium.

Lori screamed, “Look out! It’s jumping!”

Joe leaped away, his forearm hitting the aquarium, which toppled and shattered on the floor. The tarantula scuttled into the room. Now Lori screamed for real. With one backward hop, Joe was on the couch, then leaped to the arm and then the top of the couch, where he repeated, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck…”

Robert grabbed his guitar by the neck, its body down. Lori was backing into the hallway, and as the thing scurried toward her, whimpered. She kept backing up, till she reached the apartment door and leaped out into the hall, the creature following. She screamed for Robert, and he ran into the kitchen. Joe peeked around the corner as Robert dashed from the kitchen with a cardboard box. Reluctantly Joe followed out into the hall, where Lori was yelling, and the tarantula scurried in drunken circles.

Robert pointed at Joe, “Go get the broom! I’ll put the box in front–you sweep him in.”

Joe yelled, “Just stick the box over him.”

The door to Victor and Helen’s opened, and there stood Helen, “Buffalo Soldiers” blasting on her stereo, reefer smoke hanging in the air. She growled, “What’s going–”

The tarantula shuffled into the room, one of its hairy legs brushing her bare foot. She glanced down, howled, and charged for the door. She forgot to turn sideways and wedged herself in, screaming.

Joe ran over, squeezed his hands past her waist, and tugged at her back. Inside, Victor spied the tarantula almost at his feet and yelped, jumping over it and tossing up a lit spliff. Like a jet bulldozer, he bolted for the door and crashed into Helen, who popped out and smashed Joe into the wall.  

As he gasped for air, she turned to Victor. “Are you all right, baby doll?” Then as an afterthought, she called: “Where’s the spliff?”

The spliff was on the back of the tarantula, where it had landed, and the crazed arachnid scuttled into the fireworks in the corner and clambered up the pile.

Outside, in the hall, a frenzy of explosions jolted them, as roman candles and bottle rockets screamed up from the pile, and M-80’s and cherry bombs blasted like cannons. It lasted several minutes, and before it stopped, the sheet over the couch and the lace curtains burst into flames, as fragments of tarantula littered the room.

Lori cried, “Fire!” and ran for the stairs.  Joe raced back for his guitar and amp, and by the time he got back, Victor and Helen were watching Ralph from next door lug a fire extinguisher into their place. Robert was running up with a fire extinguisher from the far end of the hall, Lori watching from the stairs. Robert and Ralph got the flames out, but the bottle rockets and roman candles had blasted chunks from the plaster and blown out the windows. The couch was totaled too, the apartment choked with smoke. They’d managed to douse the flames quickly, and no one called the fire department, a minor miracle in itself.

                                                            *****         

Helen and Victor ended up crashing on Joe and Robert’s living room floor; repairing their place was going to take a while.     

After the next jam, which went better, on the way home Joe told Ben about the fire and about his conflict between writing and music. “You think grabbing my amp and guitar means I resolved things? I left all my stories on my dresser.”

“Maybe it just mean, you chose the amp and guitar that day.” Ben shrugged.

Joe frowned.

Ben glanced his way. “Maybe a month from now, it happen, you grab the stories.” 

“But it’d be better if I just did one or the other, wouldn’t it?”

Ben glanced his way again and looked back at the road. “Prob’ly be better if you could walk on water, too.”

Joe thought about it and grinned. “Right.”       

Reblogged from kentmcdanielwrites:

 The other day I ran across a copy of Outre #4 , a SF fanzine I published in 1969 for the Southern Fandom Press Alliance (SFPA). Took me back, allright. The cover is by Glen Brock, who was also in SFPA at the time, and I think it's pretty cool Sixties fanzine art. A lot of energy in that drawing. Debbi Staton, my girlfriend then, paintakingly cut the drawing onto a mimeograph stencil using a stylus, and we printed it up on my father's mimeograph.

Read more… 1,088 more words

Alien landscape by REG

With their generally bold simple lines, his drawings were perfect for the

An REG fanzine illo from the Sixties.

A few years ago I rejoined the Southern Fandom Press Alliance (SFPA), after having been away a mere four decades, and as SFPA’s 50th anniversary approached, some discussion arose about how to commemorate it. I suggested to the group’s official archivist, Ned Brooks, that a portfolio of REG

cover from, Amra, a Sixties Sword & Sorcery fanzine

Having thought of Robert E. Gilbert for the first time in years, I Googled him. I didn’t find a lot, but I did get two surprises. One was that REG had made three professional sales of SF stories. (These can be found at: http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/author/34313) Another was that a gallery had purchased over 400 of his drawings and paintings. Paintings? I never knew REG painted. I found all that interesting but soon forgot about it.

November, 1952 issue of Galaxy, in which REG’s story, “A Thought for Tomorrow,” appeared.

That’s because, unlike my old friend, Bill Plott, I’m not a seasoned professional journalist. Back when he was in his teens and early twenties, Bill Plott edited a couple of now legendary zines, Maelstrom and Sporadic, before he left SF fandom behind for a distinguished career as a journalist. Much like myself, he was recently drawn back into publishing through SFPA, after four decades away, and resurrected his zine, Sporadic. As he relates in the latest issue (#18) of that zine, this eventually prompted him to delve into his boxes of old fannish material, where he discovered a trove of some 20 unpublished REG illos.

Once he stopped doing backflips around the neighborhood, he got curious: Maybe Robert E. Gilbert was still around. So he Googled him, as I had done, and found the site with all of REG’s paintings at http://www.folkartisans.com. Unlike me, though, he didn’t think, “Oh, that’s interesting,” and shrug it off; he eventually contacted Folk Artisans, a gallery in Mentone, Alabama. First, he went to their website, where he saw that REG, a Tennessean, had died in 1993. Bill sent that information to his friend, genealogist and fellow SFPA member, Larry Montgomery. Larry got back to him with the information that REG was born May 26, 1924 in Sullivan County, Tennessee and died April 4, 1993, seemingly in Jonesborough, Tennessee. Further REG had served in the US ARmy from January 31, 1943 to August 9, 1944.

That was pretty much all they had, until Bill reached one of the gallery owners, Matt Lippa, by phone. In Sporadic 18, Bill writes:

Another strange landscape by REG, 1964

The gallery acquired the collection in 2003.

Later in Sporadic 18, Bill writes:

I have speculated a lot on the estrangement from his [Gilbert's} estrangement from his family. Living in that mountainous region, I wondered if his family was very fundamentalist and found pictures of scantily clad women sinful. I wonder if it was science fiction, being something just too weird for them to relate to. Or some behavioral situation totally unrelated to his art. We will likely never know.

Like Bill, I’m curious about REG’s black sheep status. I’m also intrigued by the picture of REG that emerges. Estranged from his family, living in a small town in the rural South, creating hundreds of illos for fanzines, writing the occasional SF short story, and painting hundreds of unearthly paintings, few of which, it would seem, ever sold. It’s an archetypical image of the lonely artist, toiling in obscurity.

What parts of the picture are we missing though? Does anyone have any more information on Robert E. Gilbert?

To view more of REG’s artwork, go to http://www.folkartisans.com.

Jimmy Stu Lives!
Kent McDaniel
Penumbra Publishing
$9.99, http://www.amazon.com

The words of faith are easy to skew to corruption. Jimmy Stu Lives! is a novel following a twenty-first century preacher who awakens in the twenty-second century to find his church has gone far beyond what he ever expected, himself now a major figure, shocked at what he sees. Author Kent McDaniel presents an humorous twist of faith and life, and its future. Jimmy Stu Lives! is not to be overlooked, highly recommended.

Margaret Lane
Reviewer

All that said, I decided to self-publish an e-book entitled Through Their Strange Hours, a small one on the order of a so-called Kindle single. A collection of four interconnected short stories, it runs about 17,000 words. With all I said at the start, why did I do this? Well, for one thing it cost me next to nothing. I ended up paying someone forty dollars to format my cover, and I paid Library of Congress thirty-five dollars to register my copyright of the book, so I did spend a grand total of seventy-five bucks on it.

As far as most self-published books’ selling very little, I don’t care. Three of the book’s four stories are reprinted from literary journals and the other is a related tale that I included here without sending it around first, because it was connected to the rest. The way I look at it, rather than sitting in my desk drawer or computer, the stories are now out there available to anyone who cares to spend $ 0.99 to download them. If only a few hundred people end up reading them, that’s a few hundred more than would have otherwise. And hope, of course, springs eternal.

A couple of other things made this seem worth doing. One was learning that if I self-published an e-book through Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP), I didn’t have to release it exclusively through them. The other was learning that if I uploaded the e-book to Smashwords (www.smashwords.com), they would not only sell it on their site, they’d also distribute it to the online catalogs of Barnes and Noble’s Nook store, iTune’s book store, The Kobo e-reader store, and virtually anyplace else that sells e-books.

Another plus was that Smashwords has a free manual you can download that explains how to format your work into an e-book, Smashwords Style Guide. I downloaded it and by following its step-by-step directions, managed to format a good-looking e-book, complete with an interactive table of contents (the kind that allows readers to click on a story or chapter heading and go straight to it.) The book also has a picture of my smiling face in the back, along with hypertext links to this blog and other relevant sites. I won’t claim that the formatting was a breeze for me, exactly, but I’m not the world’s most techno-savvy guy, and I got through the process OK. Before I actually started formatting I read the entire manual two times, which took me probably three hours all together. Then I just followed the manual’s directions step-by-step.

If you really hate the idea of doing the formatting yourself, you can ask Smashwords for a list of independent contractors who will do it for you. I checked out the list and most of the formatters want from fifty to a hundred dollars to format a full length book for Smashwords. The information Smashwords will send you also includes a separate list of people who will format your cover for you, and I did resort to using one these formatters, a lady named Rita Toews, for my cover. I probably could’ve formatted the cover myself, but I didn’t feel like it after formatting the text. I sent a photo to the formatter; for forty dollars she designed the cover, and a very nice job she did of it, I think.

Once Through Their Strange Hours was uploaded successfully to Smashwords, I tackled uploading it to the Kindle Store via Kindle Direct Publishing. KDP also has a free formatting guide, Building Your Book for Kindle, which is considerably shorter than Smashwords’ manual. There were some differences in how the formatting was supposed to be done, the biggest being that KDP wanted you to upload your e-book as an html file, whereas Smashwords wanted you to upload it as a Word file.

Anyway I uploaded my book following their directions and then checked it on KDP's simulator of various Kindle formats. I checked it first on the Kindle Fire format, and it was perfect. Then I checked it on the other formats and there was a problem: when you clicked on a story's title in the table of contents, you went to the story just fine, but the title there wasn't centered; it was on the left side of the page. Grrr. I spent a couple hours trying to fix this and only managed to give myself a really sore neck.

After a week of brooding over it all, I broke down and emailed one of the formatters on Smashwords’ list and asked her if she could help me upload my e-book to KDP. She said sure, send her the file, and she’d see what she could do. I did, and she wrote me back saying that the only thing needed was to save the file as a “prc” file instead of as an html file. She gave me a technical explanation, which was probably very simple, but which I’m not going to attempt repeating. Anyhow, a kind soul, she said that I owed her nothing because it took her next to no time to save the file as a prc file. Lucinda Campbell is the formatter’s name, and as far as I’m concerned she’s an exemplary human.

Anyway, long story short, I uploaded the prc file that she’d sent me, and now the e-book is up everywhere you can buy one.

I’m not sure I’m going to do anything to promote Through Their Strange Hours. Promoting a book on the internet is tedious to me, and how else would you promote an e-book? I’m not much worried about how the book sells, either: I was just interested to see if I could put together a presentable e-book, and happily I found out that the answer’s yes. The book looks beautiful in my unbiased opinion, as nice as any e-book I’ve read. If I follow Joseph Campbell’s advice to follow my bliss, I won’t be spending many hours on the internet promoting my e-book, but if I do decide to promote the thing, that’ll be another post, maybe Self-publishing an e-Book Part II.

I’m posting an audio recording here of my song “He Flies,”

Dorothy

Alpha

I wanted to add a vocal harmony to the song, but had no luck coming up with anything, so I gave our pal Lew Leibowitz a ring. We got to know Lew, an excellent guitarist and laid back mensch, when Dorothy was in a blues ensemble with him at the Old Town School of Folk Music. Ever since, we’ve gotten together with him to jam now and then; a lot times he improvises vocal harmonies when we’re playing, and they always sound great to me. I was pretty sure he could come up with something. When I called him, he said sure, he’d come over the next Sunday.

We did some catching up with Lew, before he went to work on the harmonies. He ended up spending a couple hours, recording one idea after another. I thought they all sounded good, but Lew was sorta grimacing whenever he listened to the playback. Finally, he said he thought maybe the part he’d just recorded was OK, but I ought to sing it. By that time, we were both frazzled, so I said, OK, I’d give it a shot later. Really, though, I was thinking maybe I’d just use what he’d done. I kept listening to it over the week, and finally decided that I’d like it better if I changed a changed a note here and there. I sat down and recorded the part (in lots more takes than one), and was happy with what I had. I thank Lew for his help with it.

I wanted to add some lead guitar tracks on the song and wanted to do them with Robert Marshall at The Cave Recording in Evanston. I’ve known Robert since he mixed and mastered my first CD, About Time, back in 2,000. Recording tracks is tricky enough, but it’s in the mixing and mastering that a recording engineer really shows his best stuff, and Robert is unsurpassed at it. By day he does the sound in a lot of the commercials you see and hear in the media around Chicago, and at night he runs his own studio. Man, this guy loves his work, and he puts in some loooong days. It’s a lucky person who loves what he or she does, and Robert is definitely crazy about his work. He’s also smart, funny and professional. (I think what made this project so enjoyable is that there were no idiots or boors involved.)

Robert

We transferred the tracks I had from my Tascam to Robert’s system. I’d brought my Les Paul and Reverb Deluxe and recorded a couple of guitar parts: One was basically a rhythm made of two note clusters; the other was two solos, one in the song’s middle, the other, shorter one at the end. That all went smooth. After which, Robert did his usual meticulous job of mixing and mastering the song, and–wa-la!–it was done. Driving home, I put the CD of it on the car sound system, blasted the volume, and played it again and again, big grin all over my face.

Me

So here’s the audio:

And here are the words:

HE FLIES

Little bird sittin’ on a telephone wire

Little bird sittin’ there all alone

He’s a singer, and he’s a high flyer

He’s a rover from parts unknown

Tomorrow ain’t got him upset

He don’t care about yesterday

He got here last spring, I bet

Leaves turn brown, and he’ll fly away

He flies, yeah, he flies.

Little bird singin’ ‘bout the new day

Little bird singin’ ‘bout the dawn

He feels fine and don’t care what you say

He’s gon’ go where he feels drawn

That blue sky and him go way back

Him and that sunshine sure do too

He’s got wings and got the knack

When it’s time he knows what to do

He flies, yeah, he flies

Little bird can’t say where his own home’s at

Little bird don’t even care

He ain’t worried ‘bout a bit of that

It’s on beyond and he’s bound there

He don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong

He don’t know the time of day

But he knows the day is long

And the breeze flows and, oh, by the way

He flies, yeah, he flies

So there you have it–how we recorded “He Flies”. The song is available for download just about everywhere, Amazon, iTunes, Spotify, you name it. That’s another different thing about this project. It’s the first time I ever uploaded a song for sale that wasn’t part of an album. We’ll see how that goes.

Cassie Valentine can sometimes see the restless dead, even commune with them on occasion, and oh, her house seems to be haunted. Her first love, Daniel, died a year past, and her grief and her love for him remain undiminished. Then she encounters Michael, whom she knew years earlier and who also has lost loved ones and sometimes sees ghosts.

I don’t want to give too much away, so I’ll just say that I think there’s a lot to admire about Julien’s storytelling. I mentioned her character and plot development, and I’ll repeat that I think they’re very good. I also appreciate her prose’s lack of excess verbiage. The book’s sharp evocation of a small town setting and its residents pleased me, too, and brought Bradbury to mind with its clear-eyed sympathy. The well-drawn relationships between Cassie and her friends were another pleasure and reminded me of Charles De Lint’s work in that regard. Finally, the story’s pacing was good, not too fast, not too slow.

If you enjoy reading fantasy and mystery, mixed with fictional family dynamics and, yes, love, I think you’ll have a good time with Haunted.

Each year I take some time to look back on the previous 12 months and pontificate on what I think were the best dozen comic books of that period.
As in the past, I remind my readers that these are MY opinions. End of sentence. Of course, as a reader and collector of comic books for more than 50 years, I believe I’m qualified to put my own judgmental stamp on what is good and what is not so good. This year, I estimate I read between 800-1,00 comic books.
I also need to point out that I don’t read every comic book that comes out, meaning there is no doubt that there are titles that I miss or totally ignore here that should be mentioned. So, use that to balance just how you accept or reject my listings. With that said, here are my choices:

1. DARK HORSE PRESENTS (Dark Horse, an anthology, by various) — If I could only buy one comic book a month, it would be this one. A hodgepodge of excellent writers and artists giving readers a taste of their talents in short, often continued, stories. What is superb about this book is that it offers a wide variety of sto- ries and characters, ranging from super heroes and villains to oddball tales. It’s expensive — $7.95 an issue — but worth it.

2.FABLES (Vertigo, Bill Willingham, writer; Mark Buckingham, penciller) — This has been on my list for years now. Truth is, I still look forward to this comic book more than any other each month. Remarkably consistent writing and framing by Willingham, and Mark Buckingham’s work on this title has certainly put him in the upper echelon of artists in the comic book industry.
3. POPEYE (IDW, Roger Landridge, writer; Vince Musacchia, artist) — If you have ever enjoyed the brilliance and humor of E.C. Segar’s Popeye comic strips, you need to give this comic book a try. The star is Roger Land- ridge, who “gets” the reason the old Popeye was the best and translates it well into this comic book. Musacchil’s art is just as well one.
4. FATALE (Image, Ed Brubaker, writer; Sean Phillips, artist) — Ed Brubaker knows his stuff when it comes to hardcore detective stories and it shows in Fatale and the other titles in his crime series. Sean Phillips’ style of art fits well with this book. It never fails to challenge the reader and I like that.
5. SPONGEBOB COMICS (United Plankton, various writers and artists) — You don’t have to be a SpongeBob SquarePants fan to enjoy this comic book. It’s funny, wacky and clever beyond most comics out there. Somewhat like Dark Horse Presents, this title features an array of writers and artists, all of who are allowed to give their own take on t he famous TV cartoon character.
6. THE ROCKETEER: CARGO OF DOOM (IDW, Mark Waid, writer; Chris Samnee, artist) — I didn’t know Rocketeer creator (and fabulous artist) Dave Stevens, but I somehow get the feeling he would approve of this continuation (and others by IDW) of his most famous character. It’s a fun series and certainly appears to fit well in the type of stories Stevens did before his death.
7. BONGO COMICS (all of ‘em) — The Simpsons and the various spinoffs from that great TV cartoon series are still popular not on what happened years ago, but in the fresh and funny episodes the cast of writes and animators continue to produce. Simpsons’ creator Matt Groening has seen to it that such excellence has spilled over to his bankrolled line of comic books.
Special Mention: Before Watchmen (DC, various writers and artists).
I wrote early in 2012 of my distaste for DC’s going against The Watchmen creator Alan Moore’s wishes and continue to publish comic books expanding on his original series. My comment was that it was being done purely for financial and business reasons and would succeed no matter who they assigned to writer and draw the series.
My opinion hasn’t changed, but I do believe I should make notice of the excellent work being turned out by those assigned to the series. Darwyn Cooke, Amanda Conner, Len Wein, Art Adams, Jae Lee, Brian Azzarello, J.G. Jones, J. Michael Straczynski, Eduardo Risso and John Higgins have turned out superb work. They should be complimented and — I hope — richly compensated. But apparently DC wasn’t confident that these gentlemen and lady could do such extraordinary work on other characters. They had to assemble them for Before Watchmen, probably fearing that with regular, less accomplished creators, the project would fail.
Hooray for these writers and artists. And a continued shame on DC.
WORST OF 2012
Marvel Now, etc., etc. — I, along with a lot of other fans, hate these major revamping of characters. They are done, obviously, to boost a failing line of comic books by jumping up and down about more No. 1 issues and how much better these characters will be. Just look at DC’s New 52 and you’ll see a surge in circulation for a few issues, then a drop to the same old levels as books are handed off to questionable talents. It appears as though Marvel and DC have narrowed down their business model to three aspects: 1. Keep running continual crossover series featuring various guest stars trying to save the country or the planet or the galaxy or the universe; 2. Pay a top name to write or draw a comic book for three to six issues to boost sales, then dump the title off on someone else; and 3. when all else fails, reboot the sucker.
Heroic Publications — A little known comic book company that has its own model: produce comic books — especially covers — featuring tall, nice looking women with huge breasts and engaged in various angles of crotch shots. I’m sure there are at least a half-dozen 16-year-olds out in comic book land who love these books, but then, who am I to deny them a bit of fun?

Gary Brown is a Florida journalist, who has been involved in comic book fandom since its inception in the 1960s. He has been a member for decades of both Capa Alpha and Southern Fandom Press Alliance, where his zine, Oblio, is one of the highlights of each mailing for me.

You can contact Gary at garyfbrown@bellsouth.net

And to my surprise, it caught my interest with the first page; the story hit the ground running and never flagged. Besides which, it had quite a bit more going for it. The spunky heroine was one to whom I could relate, the stakes for her were high, and the plot complications were handled well. I also admired Campbell’s spare prose–crisp and muscular, unlike what I was expecting in romance fiction. Campbell had also obviously researched her wild west setting well, and its details consistently rang true. And a murder mystery figured prominently in the plot, which is always good, far as I’m concerned.

All in all, the novella was throughly entertaining, a good read. My wife, who might more closely resemble most readers of romance fiction than I do, said that she enjoyed the story, too, so I feel pretty safe recommending it to aficionados of the genre. I think you’ll enjoy it.

The Law and Annabelle is availabe for Kindle at http://www.amazon.com and for all other formats at http://www.smashwords.com.

Revenant is a Louisianna-based zine, edited by Shelia Strickland, a librarian and long time active science-fiction fan.