So a year or so ago my friend Leslie told me to start submitting writing to literary journals and the like. There must be dozens of them she said. So I looked into it. There are hundreds. So sometime early in 2014 I spent a few days online submitting various stories and essays to a few dozen of them. I think around 50. It’s easy to do online once you get into the swing of it. I’d actually forgotten all that for ages, then today I got a rejection letter. Some journal from some college somewhere. Some arty name. It was a very nice rejection letter. Very polite and apologetic. Apparently writers are these sensitive little fucks, fragile as butterfly wings, always on the verge of disintegration and heartbreak. Yeah, right. I think those are poets. Anyway, this makes, I think, fifty rejection letters. I’m on a roll. There must be another couple hundred of these journals left. I could have two hundred and fifty rejection letters, all very nice, from every literary journal in the land. These literary journals all tend to look alike, though. A lot of stories about relationships. Apparently relationships are very popular in university creative writing courses. It makes for dull stories, lifeless even, but often very well written. Well written nothings, very academic. And I can’t seem to get myself to write like that. I mean that ain’t reality. It’s just abstractions, equations written out in words instead of numbers. Somehow the real world, the thing around us we touch and feel and smell and taste and hear, that all gets left out. But that’s what they seem to teach in college writing classes anymore. Words for the sake of being words. College seems to fuck up everything creative it touches. Sucks the life right out of it. Sanitizes it for rich people. They run everything, you know, the rich people. They dominate the arts like they dominate banking. But I dunno, fuck rich people, the hell with ’em. And fuck college too. Fuck the arts. Fuck everything. And there it is, that incredible rush you get telling the world to go fuck itself. It’s like breathing pure oxygen. You won’t make any money that way, but you’re alive, and that’s more than most people can say.
Author Archives: Brick Wahl
Addiction
Many, many years ago I had a job for a few weeks at one of the Skid Row missions downtown, setting up their databases. Worked with lots of recovering addicts. That was interesting. My assistant had been an executive in an aerospace firm, with a huge house, expensive cars, a yacht, some beautiful children and a trophy wife. Speed had helped him get more work done. He’d been through every addiction program his company offered but finally wound up on the street and then in the mission. He showed me the ropes. The addicts there had a hierarchy, he explained, almost like a caste system. The cokeheads–strictly powder–were the aristocracy, the Brahmin. Even in the mission they wore bling. Then came tweekers. Very busy. Then junkies. They were the thinkers. Then the boozers and winos. Theirs was legal, they could leave anytime they wanted and get a bottle, or not. They always did though. Finally, at the bottom, were the untouchables, the crackheads. Even the sorriest Skid Row winos were above them. None of the other castes at the mission had any respect for them. They’d order them around, drive them off like stray dogs. They aren’t even human, my tweeker assistant told me, they’re just pure addiction.
Zoe
Maybe a decade ago this sax player I know calls to tell me about a gig he had coming up. Some nice jazz club in the Valley, Spazio or La Ve Lee or somewhere like that. Now I really dug the guy’s sound on tenor. Still do. He plays a relaxed be bop, and plays some mean funk, too. This was his funk band coming up. He rattled off the names of all these great players. Heavy cats as they say. We also got a singer, he told me, named Zoe.
Zoe? What’s her last name?
No last name, he says, she’s just Zoe. And she’s just starting out. She’s been doing a lot of acting.
She’s an actress?
Well, sort of. Actually, um, you’re not supposed to know this, but she’s been in porno for a long time, but under a different name.
Oh….
So she’s a porn star jazz vocalist? I was actually kinda impressed, since no one just becomes a jazz singer, the way no one just becomes an opera singer. It takes years of practice. The porn by day, jazz by night (or other way around) lifestyle must have been hectic. And she’s just called Zoe?
Yeah. That’s her new singing name. She wants to move on from the acting and be a jazz singer.
Oh….
Well, I said, she must be pretty good to be in your band.
Um…well, this is her first gig. But she’s really excited about it, the new career move and all. Just come on down and check us out.
Well, I missed the gig. So he sent me a clip. The band was good, and I gotta admit she was hip. In fact she was all hip, and I never seen a jazz singer move them quite like that. Poly rhythms, I guess you’d call them. Funny he didn’t include her singing. Not a peep, not a note.
My wife is the lady in waiting in the south of Ireland
(I wrote this in 1980.)
There was a crazy man on the bus today, twitching and jerking, rocking back and forth, singing, talking to everybody about the Royal Army and Lord Mountbatten and that he himself was the ambassador to somewhere. He scared everybody with his broken brain. “My wife is the lady in waiting in the south ofIreland” he said, chain smoking cigarettes, lighting the next one from the butt of the last. He muttered about the Royal Army, and counted off British sounding names, and then sat there forgetting his cigarette until; something set him off again, drumming his fingers on the seat, clutching his bag, tapping his foot to some long lost march.
Good drummers are a dime a dozen
(I have about 500 stories in my draft file. Most are unfinished or just ideas, but occasionally I find something that I just never posted, like this. It’s a few years old.)
I knew I was a lousy drummer the day I popped myself in the eye with my left hand stick. I never lost a beat, however. Nor an eye. I was also never able to quite figure out how I’d done it. But it was punk rock, so no big deal.
I feel a story coming on. My drumming career. I mean good drummers are a dime a dozen, but the true fuck ups are something special.
My favorite drumming injury was when I noticed the crash stand, a big heavy thing, hadn’t been tightened properly and when I reached over to adjust it and the whole thing slipped and tore out a big chunk of my index finger. Blood everywhere. My wife ran up, duct taped my fingers together and I was ready to go before the guitarist was finished tuning.
I hear duct tape is good for severed limbs too.
At some point stuff like this stopped happening. No more injuries. No more screwball pratfalls. I had learned to play. And I got bored. Nothing went wrong anymore. You set up, sat down, played, got up, tore down. No fights, no riots, no naked dudes falling into my kit or naked chicks running across the stage. No crazy bouncers or outraged club owners. No demented mountain men threatening to kill me. No onstage joints laced with PCP. No police. No nothing but nice, safe rock’n’roll. It became tedious. At some point in a drummer’s life he’s cramming his bass drum into the trunk of his car and thinking why am I doing this? The real drummers know why, they’re real drummers. The amateurs know there has to be a better way of not making a living.
So I took up writing. There’s no money in it either, but at least I don’t have to lug a drum kit around.
Bikers
I used to hang out at a Hells Angel bar. Used to go see bands in a record store and when my throat got a little dry I’d head around the corner for a beer. So I’d hang with the Angels. They had better beer. Got a little tense in there a couple times but at least I didn’t have to drink Miller. The place eventually got shut down for beatings and murder and drug deals, but that was later. By then I was hanging at a pool hall run by bikers. They booked bands, too. Big biker goons running security. I saved a guitar player from getting his teeth kicked in one night. He’d had a fit, smashed his guitar and chucked the body clear across the hall where it destroyed a lighting fixture. Sparks and glass everywhere. Luckily he missed the pool tables. When he split stage left two or three bikers were waiting for him at the bottom of the stairs. I was overdressed and big myself and rushed between them, laying down a bogus lawyer rap. Said if they laid a hand on him I’d sue. Said it again. They backed off. Got him the hell out of there so fast. As we drove off they were outside, giving us death stares. Not long afterward another biker gang torched the joint to get even with somebody inside. They did too, burned him to a crisp. A bad scene. Great bar, though. I miss that place.
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California Dreaming
I remember times in the 1960’s and we’d be living back east again and everything was old and grey and cold and damp and the wind rattled the dead branches and cut right through you. The Mamas and Papas were all over the AM radio back then and on miserable snowless winter days California Dreaming was the most depressing song you could ever hear, even for a ten year old. All that sunshine and promise three thousand miles away. Not a week goes by that I don’t remember that. The cold, the grey, and California dreaming.
Zen
Emerging from Griffith Park, the stoned lady forget to press the button at the crosswalk, though she never noticed the difference as she walked across Los Feliz Blvd staring at her iPhone. The traffic stopped and blew their horns in admiration. The lady never noticed.
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Lyle
(Found this buried in the drafts folder. I have no memory of writing it, or when, or why. But what the hell, here it is.)
That was Burt Lancaster’s strategy as actor/producer. One for the folks, one for art, another for the folks, another for art. During his life he was famous for the big studio blockbusters, now he’s famous for the critical faves/commercial flops.
That’s always been my strategy too, except I think in terms of lives. In this life I write stories for intellectuals and arty fucks, in my last life I was a man named Lyle who wrote books full of big-breasted women and the magnificent men they loved.
Just my luck I’m not Lyle.
Better than Lyle’s predecessor, though, who wrote surrealist limericks and was beaten up by Picasso.
Maine
We were taught how to use the abacus in Maine. Meanwhile, the neighbor next door was writing music with a computer at Bowdoin College. This was 1965. He took us to see the computer…it was the size of Long Island. The first school I went to in Maine was on an island off the coast. We lived three islands off the coast, so we bused over an entire island to get to school. Area’s rich now, apparently, full of Boston summer homes and movie star money, but back then it was all poor lobstermen and cod fishermen on the water, farmers inland, plus the Bath Ironworks where my Dad worked. The second school I went to was a one building brick structure kids’ grandparents had gone to the same school. Winters were harsh. I remember walking home from school through sandy fields during gales, ouch. I remember snow on Mother’s Day, and the best creepiest Halloweens ever. Loved it there–3rd grade was the only time I spent an elementary school year in one school. (I’d been to five in 2nd grade…well four, went to one twice..started in San Diego, wound up in Maine with a detour to Tacoma.) Oh yeah, I remember seeing Minnie Pearl and ox pulls at the county fair, and I hated cod liver oil. Once the snow cleared kids played viciously competitive marble games everywhere. Tough bunch, Mainers, civil war monuments in the cemeteries, huge things, and they were still fiercely proud of their Abolitionism…Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin in our town there. We almost settled in Maine, in which case I’d be one of the people Jeff Foxworthy jokes about and you all would never know me, or me my wife, which is too scary to think about, or weird to think about anyway. When you move constantly your life is like brownian motion, seemingly random, to a kid anyway, but always an adventure. I loved it.
Brick Wahl 