America - Rita, Lou & Tony

Before I say anything else, let me say this: would someone please go over to Alan Davidson's blog and enter his holiday-themed writing contest? The guy is over there, wearing out the knees on his good oilskins, begging people to send him stories. Jesus, Mary & Joseph, it's getting embarrassing. And don't look at me, I already sent him one – it's up to you now. Only one more week until deadline and he has actual PRIZES. Good prizes, even. So go. Humour me. Humour him.
Thank you. I now return you to our regularly scheduled program.

American Weeks – I may have to rename it American Month if this goes on much longer!
Seriously, though, we're in the homestretch with only two more American writers to feature.
Tomorrow night I hope to get Lou Freshwater up at the River. If you haven't come across Lou's blog at Baby's Black Balloon, you'd better show tomorrow. To me Lou is a female combination of John Steinbeck and Bruce Springsteen. She wears her intelligent heart on her emotional sleeve and her stories always take my breath away.
Tuesday night look forward to meeting Tony Noland, one of the most popular men on the #fridayflash circuit with a happy ton of faithful followers who applaud and converse with this prolific and – dare I say it – sexy male scribe. There's a village about an hour away from me named Norland (famous because Mike Myers sometimes gasses up there on his way to the cottage). So I always have to check myself when I'm talking about Tony for fear he winds up at the Petro-Can instead of his blog, Landless.
I have had so much fun doing this, I can't even begin to tell you. Scarfing back apple pie with Anthony, interviewing John in his bathroom, photoshopping Alan's pix on Uncle Sam, it's all been a blast. Thanks to everyone for participating and everyone else for commenting.
I was only going to do a quick note tonight to let everyone know I took the weekend off but will be back in the saddle tomorrow, but I believe I am incapable of writing short. Even a short note.
I would suck at haiku.
Tonight I leave you with a clip from one of my favourite American musicals, West Side Story. When I was a kid growing up in Markham, Ontario, me and my friend Mark and his little brother, Andrew, would dance around the rec room of my parent's basement, acting out this song. (We also did Radio City Music Hall-style tributes to Joni Mitchell and Jesus Christ Superstar, but that's another story.)
To an unwordly Canadian girl growing up in a small farming community, Rita Moreno's famous lilac dress and her incredible dancing were America. I thought everybody down there was glamourous and exciting and terribly, terribly exotic.
I still love this movie. I have I Feel Pretty on my iPod. I know most of the words to Tonight. And I still cry at the end.

John Wiswell - The Bathroom Interview

JOHN WISWELL

The Boonies Of New York, Far From The City, U.S.A.

Blogging at The Bathroom Monologues

Looking for John Wiswell? He's in the john.

Buahahahaha! Man, I was looking forward to saying that. John Wiswell? The Bathroom Monologues? Oh never mind.

Seriously though, the guy's in the bathroom. 

He's been in the can since I got here. I drove all day to see him, drank some of the worst roadside coffee imaginable, and now here I sit in the hall talking to him through the bathroom door.

He's been in there for hours.

When I got here the first thing I had to do was have a whiz (whiz? Wiswell? Get it?) but he was already ensconced in the toot suite. I told him about all the coffee and my T.B. disease (tiny bladder) but he didn't come out.

"Sorry," he calls out from the bathroom. "I'm hot in the middle of a great story. If I leave now I'll lose my train of thought."

"John, I gotta pee."

"Cathy, you're just going to have to hold it."

Like that's gonna happen, I thought, going outside and christening his hydrangeas.

"What is UP with your bathroom anyway?" I ask when I get back. "Most people write at desks, John. Thought you might want to know that. You might want to try it some time."

There was silence from the bathroom.

"Kidding," I say, not wanting to piss him off.

He grumbles something that sounds like fine. I take it we're good again so I ask why he named his blog after a bathroom.

"In college I took reading-heavy and composition-heavy courses, and exhausted myself with their work," he says, his voice muffled through the door. "A few years in I was worried I was losing my independent creative drive; that, after college, with no one to assign work, I wouldn't be able to come up with anything. So whenever I got up from the books to use the bathroom, I'd improvise a story or monologue."

Any kind of a story, I ask, or something relevant to your homework?

"It could be about anything except what I was working on," he says. "So if I was reading Chaucer in Middle English, then the story might be about Coca Cola cans, space travel or serial killing children. The improvisation lasted until I returned to my desk. Sometimes I amused myself and typed them up for friends. Sometimes my friends said they were funny.

"A little encouragement was all it took to create a lasting habit."

A little encouragement. Words to live by. I always believe people blossom with encouragement. There are those who refuse to give a compliment, even when it is due. Compliments cost nothing. Encouragement costs nothing. And yet it can be the force that makes a person seek their destiny. 

"Are you still out there?" he asks.

"Sorry, John, I was thinking. Um, what were we talking about?"

"The bathroom?"

"Oh yeah," I say, focused once again. "Your bathroom. What's it look like, anyway? I mean, I came all the way down here to see you and your bathroom and I haven't set eyes on either one yet."

I hear him chuckling.

"My bathroom is a pretty plain place. I like it plain. The inspiration comes from whatever I've lived, seen, read, watched, or wondered about lately. The habit allows me to compose in a lot of places. The other night I spent an hour waiting in the car. I left with an essay."

His writing is pretty amazing. His blog has a lot of followers and everyone seems interested in what this prolific 28-year-old has to say. 

"How would you describe your writing style? Are you happy with it?" I ask. "Would you like to change it? What kind of writing goals do you have?"

"You sound like a reporter," John says.

"Too much coffee," I say. "By the way, I like your hydrangea bush."

"Um, thanks," he says. "I'd rather my readers describe my writing style. I try to convince myself I don't have just one. But my writing approach is to find something – a quirky premise, an overlooked setting, a character or dynamic of characters, a strain of dialogue – dig into it and roll it out until everything essential about it is exposed. I've written horror, political humour, escapist fantasy and character studies. To me, they aren't of the same style, but they get the same faithful embrace. I hope readers think so.

"Now, how would I change my writing? I keep thinking I'll quit the Bathroom Monologues and write a new novel. Every time I get only a few hits or no comments, I tell myself, 'Should have spent that time on a book.' As though I don't spend so much time on longer for-pay fiction as it is. But I have those thoughts. What do you think? Should I do that?"

I dunno. My fast reaction is to say, no. No Wiswell blog? No #fridayflash? 

"No," I say, "of course not. People love you. For such a young guy you have fans who look up to you, who respect you. But then I think everyone should do what they want. Fans or no fans. Everyone at flash would sure miss you though. How do you feel about the fridayflash community anyway?"

I can't see John smiling but I know he is. "I actually wrote an essay about this, Exposure by Community. You might as well just get people to link to it. In short, though, it's gotten me significantly more readers introduced me to many new writers and gotten me to talk to them far more frequently."

One of the things he mentions in that essay is the time he had to have expensive gallstone surgery and didn't have the insurance or coin to pay for it. A friend talked him into putting a Pay Pal account up and blogging about it. He did. And wrote about it just once. That's all that was needed to get the #fridayflash lines buzzing.

"Friends promoted for me," he wrote in the essay Exposure by Community. "I couldn’t, largely out of embarrassment and the inability to sit up. Friends like Jodi MacArthur. Linda Simoni-Wastila. Michael Solender. Laura Eno. They tweeted it, put it on Facebook and added the Pledgie badge to their blogs. They cared. Half the donations I got were from people related in some way to this community.

"I even got a personal check from J.M. Strother, the founder of #fridayflash."

He is quiet. So am I. Humbled by the acts of people we had never met but felt tied to, like family.

"John," I finally say. "You have a whole bunch of health issues, don't you? What's up, bud?"

He sighs.

"My primary illness is a neuromuscular syndrome that I've had since age 13, the result of bad medicine. Constant pain in every part of the body, a crap immune system, slow healing, rapid fatigue, slowing or fuzzing up cognitive faculties (hence writing when my mind will cooperate) – fun stuff," he says derisively. 

"I was crippled by the onset, but taught myself to walk again. I also struggle with asthma and chronic bronchitis; attempting to treat my lungs is what brought on the syndrome. Even today my body is prone to infections and the like. I recently tore tissue in my left knee, which I did performing a routine stretch for exercise (ironically on my first day of exercise after recovering from gall surgery).

"I have returned to exercise and dropped 17 pounds so far. Weight loss does not improve my health or reduce the pain, but it does increase my threshold of pain and it'll help prevent weight-related diseases later in life. That's worth doing, even if my medical history is one long slapstick cartoon."

I wonder how he does it; write so well with such challenges. I can't write when I'm tired or when I'm hungry. He writes when he's in pain. Every chance he gets. 

And he's not just a writer, he's a reader. A big-time reader, who has a lot of thoughts on what he considers to be great American authors.

"Most that came to mind were only English-speaking, not U.S. writers. There have been greats everywhere and I keep trying to catch up on them. But among USers? Mark Twain, John Steinbeck, Eudora Welty and Stephen King leap up. I've been catching up on Richard Matheson and Roger Zelazny recently, but can't say if I'll love their canons as much as the few books I've gotten through so far."

I'm getting antsy out in the hallway. I'm getting a hankering for another cup of coffee, something to eat and a real bathroom – something with a better flushing system than the hydrangeas.

So I stand up, all creaky bones and sleepy feet, and I tell John I'm going.

"OK," he says. "Thanks for dropping by."

"Aren't you even going to come out and say hi before I go?"

"No," he says. "I'm writing. And I'm getting to the good part."

"But I came such a long way, John. Don't I even get to shake your hand?"

The door opens, a hand comes out. It's a very nice hand. I shake it.

"Can you hand me a roll of toilet paper?" he asks. "It's in the hall closet."

"Um, it was," I say. "Now it's out by the hydrangea bush."

I leave you now with some of John's thoughts on his favourite American writers.

Mark Twain: Twain didn't found American literature but he supplied its first radical administration. He was funny in new ways. He was as keenly observant as Proust or Orwell, but armed with considerably more accessible prose, and considerably more characters (and caricatures) out of it. He controlled fiction. He was hilarious, very wrapped up in his own observations, but whenever he got full of himself, he'd spit himself out. Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn, The Diaries of Adam and Eve, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, Cannibalism in the Cars, A True Story, The Innocents Abroad – short, long, fiction and non-, what a canon.

John Steinbeck: Steinbeck wins with Grapes of Wrath. Okay, you lucky bastard. You wrote a classic. But look at his canon. East of Eden might be better, is at least as personal, and unwraps everything about the Cain and Abel myth that is so profound in our being. Of Mice and Men is a rare sort of deep, deep book that can be appreciated equally by children and adults – maybe only rivalled by Twain's Huckleberry Finn. The Winter of Our Discontent is an American Shakespearean tragedy – muted and forcing the victim to survive it. The Moon is Down resonates uncomfortably loudly in today's Iraq and Afghanistan.

Eudora Welty: Welty wrote fine literary novels that got the praise they deserved. But she should be read even more for her short stories. I've yet to read a short story writer so versatile. Why I live at the P.O. is goofy. A Still Moment is surreal. Where Is The Voice Coming From is what every disturbing first person story, horror or not, is trying to be. She could be sentimental, or depressed, or heartbreaking, or quirky, and if you didn't have her name atop every one of them, you'd never think all those stories were from the same person.

Stephen King: King is the iron man. The champion of every day and writing what he loves. The guy wrote supernatural and mundane horrors that had the religious right calling him Satan. When he had a massive audience that would pay for another bloody tale, he wrote Different Seasons and went versatile. He's written for literary readers who would hate him no matter what, and for mass market audiences who would never get half of his subtext. He gets fiction – On Writing shows the guy grasps it. He expresses what he wants. Sometimes it's bad (Gerald's Game), but more often than not it's the best short story or novel I see that month. Nobody grabs me with voice as quickly or for as long as King. Fans have said his best work was behind him but, as someone who struggles with disabilities, Duma Key resonated profoundly. There are a lot of successful writers. You admire the success. But I admire a lot more in King's writing.

Hold Down the Fort

by John Wiswell

Recently David Mitchell of The Guardian asked foreigners to stop using the phrase “hold down the fort.” He did so at the behest of the Queen. Mitchell and the Queen don’t see the meaning in the phrase; “hold the fort” would mean keeping our location safe, but what was up with “hold down the fort?”

In the spirit of international brotherhood, I would like to explain the origin of this American phrase. I hope it suits newspapermen and royalty alike.

The 1800s were contentious times in the United States. You had the War of 1812, the Mexican-American War, the Civil War, and they even slipped a Spanish-American War right in before the century ended. There were numerous backwoods wars with Native Americans and lumberjacks, unofficial navel battles with France and the Mer-People, and a completely unsung war against sky hooligans.

Sky hooligans didn’t even have the decency to live on land. As such, they didn’t have a country that could be declared war upon like decent people. They stayed in their zeppelins, trolling over the great American frontier with anti-gravity cannons. One shot and whatever was struck floated heavenward. They stole Grover Cleveland’s one true love, our first two great national monuments, and the original biggest lake on the continent. That lake ascended, evaporated and became a monsoon on the far side of the world while we edited textbooks to say that Lake Superior had “always” been the largest body of water around. That was humiliating.

Davy Crockett was an avid anti-hooligan. He’d never encountered a thing he couldn’t grin out of the sky. Even eagles went bald from his grin, but these zeppelins would not pop. He refurbished Fort Ticonderoga as an anti-hooligan base, but they shot it and away it flew, with half of Crockett’s militia and most of the country’s primitive moonshine technology. Crockett was haunted for weeks afterward by the drunken singing of the sky hooligans, and it wasn’t just a mental thing. They actually followed him around the country singing bad bar tunes.

Crockett hatched a new plan when he refurbished Fort Sumter. There was still enough militia and booze to get a fight going, but he reached out for something more. Crockett invited Paul Bunyan, who was running for the Nevada State Senate at the time, uncontested in his race both because myths are very popular and Nevada wasn’t a state yet. Crockett offered him all the flapjacks he could eat in return for his services.

Now if you know anything about Paul Bunyan, you know the giant had an endless appetite. He ate breakfast for three days before going out to work in the morning. The entire militia had to give up their guns and pitch in on cooking his eternal breakfast.

The sky hooligans inevitably showed up and fired on Fort Sumter. To their shock, it wouldn’t leave the ground. At first they thought they were just wasted – but no, under Bunyan’s reality-bending mass, the fort simply would not leave the ground. It struck doubt into the hearts of their scientists.

While they struggled with the American giant, Crockett climbed the nearest structure and lassoed the zeppelin. A squad of privateers (legalese of the period for “licensed pirates”) scurried up the rope and brought the zeppelin down. The sky hooligans were arrested in short order, with a few getting parole in exchange for working with the space program.

Ever since, “hold down the fort” has been a saying in the U.S. I hope this clears up any confusion.

This one's for you John. I think you're the youngest of the scribes I've been featuring for American Weeks so it seems appropriate. By the way, I still have two more top notch Americans to feature here at the River - up next is Lou Freshwater followed last, and certainly not least, by Tony Noland. For now, here's some Bowie on a Saturday morning.

CJ Hodges-MacFarlane - Queen of the Wind

CJ HODGES-MACFARLANE

Duluth, Minnesota, U.S.A.

Blogging at Mostly Other Things

& loving Anthony Quinn

She is the Queen of the Wind.

When I think of CJ Hodges-MacFarlane, that is how I see her.

She has the most amazing hair, you see. Long, insanely curly. Like Peppermint Patty's, only sexy. Like the way we all wanted our hair back in the '80s, only we paid a week's wage for a spiral perm and we still looked like Mom did us in the kitchen with a box of Toni.

I see CJ in the wind, her hair lifted and lingering, her arms outstretched against the massive blue sky above the rocky shores of the great Gitche Gumee. 

I see her as a goddess, a goddess with a pierced lip and a broken heart, a fierce mother with a fast comeback, a mouth like a sailor and an insatiable lust for wild blueberries.

She is a walkin' dude.

She rolls the sidewalks of Daloot, taking the Magster to junior kindergarten, picking up Drumsticks at the supermarket for Chris, having waffle fries at the Duluth Grill. She walks ceaselessly, along city sidewalks, forgotten forested trails, pebbled beaches. She brings her camera and her iPhone and her beaming, shiny personality. She is a wrangler of people, rodeoing them towards her with a ceaseless CJ energy that is the life force of all who cross her path.

She walks because she can.

She writes because she can.

She is also an artist - a painter, a creator of stained glass, a purveyor of beauty in any and all respects.

She was a marine, once.

She is feisty, always.

And loving, always.

She is my friend, I know this in the dark bowels of my soul, I know this like I know the faces of my children, like I know Dave loves me, like I know anything, and I miss her, I miss her like crazy, even though we have never, ever met.

And might not, either.

I ache for this.

Damn this crazy online lie that makes us feel like we are so close, like neighbours borrowing brown sugar, but we're so far away, so fucking far away. And don't give me any shit about being able to visit because we can't, we just can't, for way too many goddamned reasons than I care to count.

Even the Queen of the Wind can't walk this far.

Even on our carpet of mingled tears.

The List

by CJ Hodges-MacFarlane

Milk

Cereal

She took a bite of her cereal and looked at the grocery list. The slip of paper with a cheery Hello Kitty design had a lot of space left on it. Those two items always topped the list - no brainers. The family went through cereal and milk in seconds in seemed. It would be a jug of 1%, for her husband in his paltry way of trying to be healthy by making the family drink milk with a percent less fat in it. There would be a jug of 2%, because she hated to listen to the kids complain that the cereal (which would be a mix of healthy and sugar-laden fun ones) didn't taste right without that extra percent of fat. That's how she did things - tried to make everyone happy.

Soy Milk

Blueberries

That was for herself. She was trying to eat healthier and had read somewhere that soy milk was healthy for lots of reasons, although none that she could remember. More than that - it tasted delicious on her multi-grain Cheerios with a frozen blueberries and a sliced banana. Soy milk came in assorted flavors and she always picked the vanilla, because it felt like she was indulging herself every morning, as it froze around the blueberries and made her breakfast taste like some posh frozen dessert.

Bananas

Fruit

She hoped the fresh cherries had come down in price a little, but wasn't sure if they were quite in season yet, but they probably weren't. Grapes, apples, melon again. Maybe she'd pick up an exotic fruit. She used to do that when the kids were younger - come home with star fruit, for example, for the first time and they'd all sit around the table nibbling it and laughing while trying to figure out what it tasted like and if they should buy it again.

TP

Paper towels

Bacon

Eggs

Pasta fixings

Potatoes

Tomatoes

Cheese

Yogurt

Butter

She tapped the pen on the table and surveyed the last entries ... Same ol' shit, but it filled the list a bit more. Hadn't she found a new recipe she'd wanted to try? She couldn't remember, but figured she'd end up going back to the store at least 4 more times this week. Chewing thoughtfully, the pen tapping gently on the table, she gazed out the window.

Birdseed

She was pretty sure she saw birdseed in the pet aisle at the grocery store, and had been meaning to fill the feeder for a year now.

Chicken

Italian sausage

Meat

The "meat" meant anything on sale that was tasty. In the warmer temperatures, she could get away with any meat because everything tasted good on the grill. You didn't need any fancy ingredients or sides when there was grilled meat on the table. One of her daughters had become quite adept at handling the grill, too, which was helpful.

Shampoo/Conditioner

Deodorant

Razors

Toothpaste

At last count there were 17 assorted bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the bathroom, as her husband so kindly pointed out. There were four females living in the house - all with hair that needed some sort of special attention - curly, wavy-about-to-be-straightened, dry, oily, brittle, colored, etc. The scents alone were fascinating (refreshing tangerine, red raspberry, ocean breeze, juicy green apple, waterfall mist) and the girls had a lot of fun flinging their hair under someone's nose and showing off the silkiness and scent-staying power of the latest acquisition.

Laundry detergent

Fabric softener

She put the pen down and read through the list. Nothing else came to mind and she wasn't so interested in the whole undertaking to bother checking the cupboards and refrigerator. Another trip to the grocery store was always in her near future, no matter how detailed and researched her lists were.

Finishing her cereal, she got up, rinsed the bowl and gathered her wallet, phone, cigs and keys. The screen door slammed shut and the list fluttered gently to the linoleum floor, Hello Kitty smiling cheerily.

This one's for you CJ, my very, very, good friend.

A Hard Worker - #fridayflash

Who do you please when the father is gone?

She thought this, watching him plant roses beside the front step. 

He knelt in the black dirt, digging with a steel claw, ripping dandelions out by their straggly roots. He held a particularly long one up for her to admire. It looked like a dew worm. She made a face, for his benefit. His smile said he was grateful for her acknowledgement.

That's all he sought. Acknowledgement. Gratitude.

She sat on a cushioned lawn chair in the gazebo, iced tea with lemon on the table beside her, paperback in her lap. She hadn't opened the book. She was watching him.

He had a face like the statue of David.

Fleshy lips, rounded cheeks, eyes perpetually wide yet blind to human cruelty. Devoid of narcissism, rife with need for kindness. Arms thick with muscle from a lifetime of bitter toil.

It was never enough, the work he did.

And it was never good enough.

He would never stop trying, though. 

She rarely asked him to work and yet it was she that he sought encouragement from.

She bathed him in it, giving him the compliments he so richly deserved. 

Still, he hungered for more.

She wanted to tell him to relax. 

She wanted to say, "He's dead, ok? You don't have to try so hard anymore."

But a wife is no substitute for the void in a man's heart.

Anthony Venutolo- Order Me Another Coffee, Waitress

ANTHONY VENUTOLO

New Jersey, U.S.A.

Blogging at Bukowski's Basement 

(If this tribute sounds familiar it's because I stole most of it from Anthony's flash story 'A Gossip Nation' )

He said he had something for me.

Meeting one of the hacks for my American Weeks blog always made for interesting conversation. Especially with this one.

I was late and Anthony Venutolo was already eating at the diner counter. God forbid he waited. As I approached, it dawned on me that I never saw him in real life. A picture, maybe, but never a full-fledged guy. Now this was odd considering he didn't exist for me except in cyberspace. 

I pinched his arm when I sat down. Just checking to see if he was real. "What's that for?" he yelped. 

"Just because," I said. I glanced at his tie. For the record, the knot sucked. It looked like two broken knuckles wrapped in an ace bandage. I thought maybe he'd be better at tie-tying. He looked like the kind of guy who wore one every day. Wore it cleaning out the garage. In the shower. In bed with his wife.

"Huh?" he asked, his Jersey accent thick as the waitress' ankles. For a hack, his vocabulary was sadly lacking.

It was hard to hear over the clanking of the dishes and glasses that came from the kitchen.

"You look like a fucking Sopranos souvenir salesman," I said. I guess that's what happens when you're a Jersey boy who grew up in an Italian family and went to an all boys Catholic school.

Anthony tried to flag down a waitress. "You gonna ride my ass all night?" he asked. "Cause if you are, I'm leaving. I got plenty of stuff to do beside listening to your bullshit."

The waitress looked over, concern on her tired face. I pointed to Anthony's coffee.

"I'm just fuckin' with ya," I said by way of apology. 

Anthony shrugged, still mildly irritated. "I thought you was a stand-up guy."

My face colored up like a Detroit ruby red. "I'm a woman, Anthony."

Shit. It was always weird when that happened. Ant looked as weird as I felt. So I changed the topic.

"Where's Bukowski? He late?"

Anthony looked at me like I was dog shit on Italian loafers. 

"He's dead, you idiot."

He hated it when rookie reporters didn't do their research. He slid his laptop my way and told me to google. I found Buk fast, in between a raft of grainy black and whites showing a grizzled old lech with a gaggle of half-naked dames. I read out loud from Wiki: "Henry Charles Bukowski, born Heinrich Karl Bukowski (August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was an American poet, novelist and short story writer."

I looked up from the laptop. "That's the guy you named your blog after? Bukowski's Basement? Couldn't ya have picked something easier to spell and pronounce? And why's he mean so much to you?"

He shook his head. It was now clear he was dealing with a moron. 

"I first discovered Bukowski around 1987 when the Bukowski-penned film Barfly came out. That's when I first heard his name. Being a Mickey Rourke fan, I saw the film – I even reviewed it for my college paper. What struck me, though, was the tone of the movie. Something in it spoke to me. Little did I know that it was Bukowski himself. It was the semi-autobiography of the author during the time he spent drinking heavily in Los Angeles."

It was clear Anthony liked talking about this guy. He looked all misty-eyed, his coffee getting cold in the diner china cup.

"Buk's work was extremely influenced by the geography and atmosphere of the City of Angels and he emphasizes ordinary lives of poor Americans. His stories, novels and poems delve into the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women and the drudgery of work. He was more than prolific and wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels – eventually having roughly 60 books in print. By 1986, Time magazine was referring to Buk as a 'laureate of American lowlife.'

"But I've often found that people either love him or hate him. There's usually no in-between. When I started reading him, I instantly related to those characters and his world."

I opened Anthony's blog on the laptop to see what he was fussing about and noticed the skanky pair of drunks on the top of the page. I asked who they were.

""Why that's good 'ol Charles Bukowski and one of his thousands of conquests," he said.

I marveled at how skinny the woman's legs are. My gams weren't that thin when I was born.

"When I first stumbled over your blog I thought you were that guy, and the hairy guy at the microphone, and the whole thing fascinated and scared me," I said. "Then I saw the movie star glamourous photo of you and that kinds freaked me out, too. Put all that together with unbelievable writing and incredible style and I get blown away every time I visit. You must spend an incredible amount of time on your blog – what's the attraction?"

Anthony settled in and took off his jacket, revealing no yellowish armpit sweat stains on his wrinkled oxford. The guy had class.

"I'm an online editor at work so the medium comes very natural to me," he said. "I also happen to love the online world and have always had a computer since they were available in the early '80s. Commodore 64, anyone?"

He laughed and waved the waitress over for more coffee. "A few years back, I used to have an entertainment-related blog where I basically just regurgitated news that people already knew. It was fun, but I wanted to do something a bit more substantial. I started putting creative posts on the old blog but I knew it just wasn't the right place. Eventually Bukowski's Basement was spawned more out of necessity than anything else. While it hasn't been updated in over a year, the other blog is pretty defunct. I keep it around pretty much just for posterity."

I asked him why he did it.

"I like to think of blogs as new versions of 'little magazines' – those counter-culture presses that highlighted experimental material or stuff on the fringe. They were small, independent and very underground. Can you imagine if Kerouac was around today? He'd have a blog. No doubt."

And then I asked him what he had in mind for this whole writing thing. What he wants to be when he grows up.

He laughed and then drained his cup. 

"I started out wanting to be a screenwriter. I think part of me still would easily gravitate towards that writing discipline. As a film buff, I know movies inside and out and I really should be doing more script writing. But it's all a game that you can easily get discouraged with and if you don't live in Tinseltown – good luck with getting anything sold. You really have to run in those circles. Publishing is here on the East Coast and entertainment is all California.

"Back in the early '90s, when I was dumb and young, I managed to get an offer on a script from a video production outfit during the VHS boom. They offered a decent chunk of change to me – this idiot 23-year-old – but I was holding out for more. I dunno. I guess I read the trades too much ... I thought I was Joe Ezterhas.

"I think when all is said and done, I'd love to have a chapbook or two of poems published. I'd love to hunker down and write a novel and some day, in my fantasy world, a script that can actually sell."

He smiled ruefully and then brightened. "I'm also working at getting a comic book off the ground. It's called Lucky Town and it centers on a tattoo artist in Atlantic City who suffers from panic disorder. It's dark and pulpy. Good stuff."

There was something I really needed to know

"Your photos, who took 'em? Annie Leibowitz your second cousin or something?"

"They took them at my newspaper. They were shots for a column I was going to write called 'A.C. Guy' (Atlantic City Guy). It was supposed to be a gambling, casino and lifestyle column. They were prototype shots for an offshoot publication that sadly never came to fruition. But it would've been a fun gig. 

"I've worked my whole life in newspapers. I went to school for it (well, that and TV production) and instantly got a job once I realized that my masters in corporate communication was a bullshit waste of time and money. I spent five or six years in the trenches at a few weeklies and then got hired full time at The Newark Star-Ledger, the official newspaper of Tony Soprano. No foolin' ... The newspaper was actually in many episodes and then even thanked us in the credits."

I'm a big fan of Tony. Sexy as hell, that guy. Thinking about him made me all melty inside so I changed the subject again and asked him why he loved the whole Americana trip so much.

"Your love for diners like this one, for example, and in these poems you wrote, showcase the darker seedier side of American life. What's up with that?"

Anthony shrugged. "I don't do it consciously. I like to think that, with my stories and poems, I go where the good stories and characters are. And where else but bars, flophouses, diners or pretty much anywhere on the wrong side of the tracks. It's all about conflict. 

"I think that I do have a nostalgic sensibility that can't help but lean towards Americana. Part of the reason is that my parents were older and, growing up there was always a radio on. This was back in the '70s when, ifyou can imagine, the big band and the Great American Songbook could still be found on AM radio. By day I heard the likes of Benny Goodman, Sinatra, Glen Miller et. al. By night, the station would play their radio dramas and I think that's when my ear for dialogue may have developed.

"Also, my father was stationed in Japan during World War II and there were plenty of pictures, trinkets and stories that he shared. He would talk about what it was like growing up during the Great Depression and, as I matured, I would always go back to those stories about '30s-era poverty, long before America was a superpower. They made for powerful images. If that doesn't make subconscious fodder for creative writing somewhere down the line, I don't know what would."

He was a big thinker, this Venutolo guy. I needed more coffee. And maybe some pie. Anthony felt the same way. He waved her over and we ordered apple. It was America, after all, was there any other kind?

He had made some off-the-cuff remark about getting married in Vegas. I figured if anyone on earth was destined to get hitched there, it was him. I asked him for the juicy details.

"Like thousands of other betrothed couples, me and the future missus [Allie - they also have an 'adorable' two-year-old son] figured it would be cool to get hitched on July 7, 2007 – the so-called luckiest day of the century. No hassles with wedding planning. No big production. No muss, no fuss. Just eight of our best friends and relatives to help us celebrate. Sounds easy, right?"

I rolled my eyes. I knew where this was heading. I'm planning my own nuptials and I know nothing's easy about weddings.

"Think again. From the moment we arrived in town, it was clear that we weren't the only couple to fancy triple sevens as an anniversary moniker. And if you were in town on July 7, chances are it certainly wasn't on a whim. Like the thousands of others, we were in Vegas for only one reason – to sanctify our new marriage with Lady Luck.

"After enduring the Vegas heat wave of 125 degrees and bumper-to-bumper limo traffic on the strip, wehad to wait outside in the heat – with all the other couples. Me in a suit, she in her gorgeous dress. We chalked it up to experience. 

"Before the ceremony began, an AP photographer told us he'd be snapping some shots. I figured he'd be capturing all sorts of couples and thought nothing more of it. Until the next morning. Imagine our shock when we landed in every daily paper and news site from Macao to Maryland. I felt like a New Year's baby."

Because we both got weddings on the brain, I asked him why he wrote the poems on this page. 

"Honeymoon on the Atomic practically wrote itself. I've been to Vegas more times than I could count and have covered the gambling industry for years in gaming magazines so the environment came easy. Plus, I'd just got hitched in Sin City and it truly was a grand affair. Great hotel. Great meals. The works. That said, I wanted to tell the story of two kids who maybe weren't as lucky, ran away from home and had Elvis sing to them. I wanted to paint a picture of sheer happiness through their eyes juxtaposed against the barflies in what is probably an otherwise sad dive.

"I think it came out well. It was one of the first poems that I was truly happy with, which is rare, for me, at least.

"As for The Bootlegger, I wanted to immortalize Popcorn Sutton. I saw him one night on the history Channel an he was a genuine character straight out of central casting. You couldn't make him up. But two things about Popcorn's story. The first is that it's inherently sad. Didn't end well for him. Second, making moonshine is fundamentally American – directly from the Appalachian mountains to the speakeasies of Chicago – there is a legacy within the illegal act that could fill a full-length documentary about how it shaped our nation."

I was sitting there, pie crumbs around my mouth, dumbstruck by Anthony's words. Plus I was thinking about how my future husband's father once lost his eyebrows when his still blew up.

It wasn't the Appalachians but it did blow up real good.

The waitress cleared her throat and we both looked at her. "More coffee?" she said, making an obvious display of checking her wristwatch.

We had been sitting there for hours, shooting the shit. Time had flown like Lady Luck on loser's night.

We stood up and I shook his hand. He put on his jacket and I started to think how much money the supermarket tabloids would pay for the juicy bits on Bukowski's biggest fan.

Did I feel bad, sucking up all his information, taking it in and keeping it for my own evil purposes? No. People tell me I have a dirty job. Maybe. I tell people to scoff all you want. I also tell them to think of me when they're on line at the supermarket, flipping through our pages, just jonesing to find that one juicy bit before the cashier asks for coupons.

As Anthony said in one of his stories, A Gossip Nation, "you're a nation of gossip junkies and you love it."

Yeah, well, maybe.

Or maybe they just love Anthony Venutolo.

HONEYMOON AT THE ATOMIC

Inside one of the

darkest bars on the planet,

away from the smoldering Vegas

sun, two kids barreled into

my daytime bar, just off of

Freemont. Fresh faced and scrubbed,

he with his craggy polo and

flip-flops; she with an equally

wrinkled sun dress, they didn’t jive

since it was the kind of

joint people came

to when they just

didn’t care anymore.

The Atomic. A would-be beacon in a sea of

grimeholes, beckoning its

hopeless. And what of them?

Lonely Nevada drunks, crappy pickpockets,

former goddesses well beyond turning

their tricks and sunken men without

prospect who abruptly discovered

they were 46, scratchy and achy.

Even the fucking jukebox gave up.

It plays once a year on St. Patty’s Day.

Gillmore behind the bar,

a failed strip magician

plum out of illusions served

the kids their booze. The boy paid

with a thick wad of crinkled

dollar bills, which, by the

way still got you pretty

far at The Atomic.

As the afternoon progressed, their

giddiness got worse and it broke

everyone’s concentration. A few times

I had to put down my magazine and give

them the ol’ once-over. Didn’t do much good.

Clutching my mug, I asked if they

took that clichéd Vegas plunge. The cutie

nodded and Eduardo the Ecuadorian who,

up until then, never uttered a word

to anyone -- in Spanish or English --

raised his Pabst and told Gilmore that he’d get

the next round.

Their bliss told me that no one in

their lives knew where they were or even

even cared. Another sip.

I went back to my magazine.

Five drinks in, they still grappled

onto each other in that sickening

Eskimo kisses sort of way.

At the same time, the act made

me love them for it’s

innocent audacity and hate

them for my own sense of cowardice,

never having the balls for such

public displays.

The boy strutted to the sorry juke

and I knew there’d be nothing in

there for him.

But it didn't matter, today was his

St. Patty’s Day and he was

ready for the world. Here.

On his honeymoon.

At The Atomic.

Away from the smoldering Vegas sun

and inside one of the darkest

bars on the planet.

The music started. I put down my

magazine and shut my eyes until

it was quiet once again.

____________________________________

THE BOOTLEGGER 

His outfit was buried deep within the foothills 

of the North Carolina Appalachian mountains and 

his potent clear liquid made him a local legend. 

They called his hooch White Lightnin; 

Who Shot Sally and even Brown Mule. 

But Popcorn Sutton knew you were The Law 

if you came around askin' for that 'White Liquor.' 

Descendant from a long line of moonshiners, 

Popcorn took his art seriously and would often 

brag that he made more runs of liquor than 

there were whiskers on his jaw. 

Every morning he'd mix corn, water, yeast and sugar 

in that big 'ol copper still and wait for the mash that made 

some of the best Painter's Piss in all of Maggie Valley. 

But what's a moonshiner to do when his life's work 

can be bought in a bottle at the local Walmart? 

Still, liquor was all he knew. It was a fundamental right. 

By 2009, the jig was up and Popcorn was sentenced 

to 18 months in the big house for illegally brewing 

those mason jar spirits. 

Cancer-stricken, the mountain man pleaded with the 

judge to let him serve his sentence under house arrest. 

When the petition that thousands signed couldn't help, 

Popcorn tooks matters into his hands and comitted 

suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning to avoid prison. 

That 'White Liquor" finally done him in...

This one's for you, Anthony. I know you're jonesing for some Sinatra but from now on I'll be thinking of you when I hear this song –