Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 22

Drug Waves In The Tattoo World

[image error]There they are! Doh!

Drugs in the tattoo world come in waves, and right now it appears that we’re in the second big wave of my career. The Great Adderall Pox is here. In the beginning, the victim’s skin clears up and becomes milky smooth, almost Elfin. Then, the first blush of micro acne appears. Teeth turn a tad brown right then, too. From day one they have a signature scent. Adderall makes you smell like pee, and a tiny bit like a beat up toilet stall at a roadside Taco Bell. No amount of soap gets it off, no amount of spray covers it up. Its coming out of the mouth and off the scalp. What are these drug waves? Let’s study the first one and see if we can divine the course of the second.

The Great Cocaine Wave started in the strangest possible way. It hit the West Coast harder, and it should be noted here that the East Coast always had deeper drug issues. In the late 80s and the early 90s, the new players in the tat zapping scene were either punk or weirdo earthy types (think proto Burning Man dorks). West Coast punks viewed cocaine, speed and heroine as ‘girl drugs’. Totally un-PC, I know, but those were different times and it saved us a great deal of trouble. Real drugs were LSD, mushrooms, glue, etc. Drugs with mighty, masculine consequences, like insanity or dain bramage. So it was odd that the Great Cocaine Wave hit the West so much harder. But it did, and I figured out why.

It was about 12 years ago now. Cocaine dropped in price by about 80% in a week or two. The bottom just fell out, practically overnight. Supply grossly exceeded demand. Great news, right? Yay for Friday night! And it was a blast. I missed it, but I did begin piecing the details together later when the prices slowly rose to their previous norm. By then, new habits had been born. The tattoo shop I worked in at the time lost almost half its people. The rest of us were super bummed, too, that these cretins had been doing all this coke and never told us. But it happened. It was devastating. And it happened to the subcultures that overlap our own- strippers, restaurant workers, the bartainment (working musicians, sound engineers, bouncers, etc) and of course the spastic high-end trust fund college set, a group none of us can successfully expel.

Now, Adderall is here. It’s made by a seedy pack of wads called Shire. Go to their web page if you dare and look at their all white Board of Directors and Executive Committee. They’re all beaming of course, fresh from cornholing all those kids I guess. So it should be called The Great Shire Pox, but that sounds like a weird blight on Hobbits. Everyone keeps yammering about the Opiod Epidemic. It should be called The Oxycontin Epidemic, but Purdue Pharma L.P. has waaaaaay to much clout on K Street to let that shit happen. Dudeboys and dudegirls, the pharmaceutical industry is behind both. The above wads all play golf together.

I still work in tattooing, though I’m mostly a writer now. Guest spots. I have a small gig here in Portland at Kilroys, mostly just to get out of the house a couple days a week. I dig it, what can I say, especially now that I don’t need the money. It’s fun now. Art is good for you. And writers should get out there and listen to stories anyway. But because of my first book, Tattoo Machine, I know hundreds of shop owners across the country. So this is an easy thing for me to map, and the Great Adderall Pox is different than the Great Cocaine Wave in that it’s nation wide. Kinda scary when you think about it. So, across the country, the weakest newbies are succumbing. They take huge gambles. Speed makes you crazy bold. Their work is all lines, no color or very little, and no shading. In a year, maybe less, the Pox will come home to roost on their heads, and they’ll kick when they start losing teeth, and from there they’ll gain maybe five pounds a month until they top out at American Obese.

I’m not old enough to be one of The Old Guys. Still thirty years to go before I can officially begin dispensing shitty advice. But more and more, people ask me what to do about this. So I developed a speech, one to be conveyed to the new guys and gals. Here it is-

“To begin with, never follow my advice, (This is important. It has to be their idea). Big Pill has been making slaves out of herd dipshits since day one. Now, one out of fifty customers is a drug dealer of some kind, give or take. A whack of ‘em work for these choads in an indirect way. And you’re about to have cash on a daily basis. Do the raw math, Grasshopper. You gravitated to this job because you want to stay out of the meat chutes, right? Avoid the whole ‘bust ass in a cubical until you get cancer and die’ thing, right? Huh.” And then look away. Imagine a Bedouin or something, and try for that moment to look like that. The Mutual of Omaha Indian. That kind of thing.

I’ll close with my prediction. In ten years, 7-11 and Circle K, maybe Denny’s, will all see an influx of double wide, prematurely aged clerks with bad teeth and super crappy tattoos. Around that same time, laser removal will hit an all time high and the artists with cover-up skills will begin making boat payments. A wave is a wave. It comes, it goes. This one, just like the last one, will make some people rich, some people dead, and some people mystified.

The Fantastic Cremation Of My Father

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I was thinking about tacos today, going back and forth with this cool guy in LA about the origin of pastor. The rich history and diversity, the pageantry of tacos is positively captivating. Afterward, I thought about the afterlife, as I sometimes do when tacos are on my mind. I thought of death, and the fantastic cremation debacle of JP Gayferd Johnson Jr.

My father’s fate was a cosmic one. JP stands for Jack Philip. He was over bright, one of those people who lived in a world that was slightly too loud and a tad too vivid for comfort. His psyche neatly trisected as a result, into the trifecta of constituents that would govern his existence all the way to the end. These three parts were largely unfortunate in that they didn’t work well together. One, a gluttonous satisfaction with darkness, specifically in being its architect. He enjoyed suffering, in the same way an orangutan might enjoy eating an entire boiled chicken. This attribute alone would have made him a fine CEO or politician had it not been for Two, a certain brand of whimsy, even creativity, that itself was like a raft that traveled on a fast-moving river of Budweiser. Those two attributes combined to give birth to number Three, a curious obsession with secrecy.

This triptych manifested continuously in his life. He had three sons, and they embodied the attributes in that order. I’m the middle son, cursed with a terrible fascination with creative problem solving. Whimsy figures large in my pantheon of motivators, sometimes to my detriment. I no longer drink, and that affords me clarity enough to see this pattern.

After an unfortunate union with my troubled mother, JP married a foreign woman he had absolutely nothing in common with. They traveled widely and enjoyed life as best they could, which probably wasn’t that much. I gather he was keen on stealing hookers underpants on these trips of theirs, and that strikes me as a conversation stopper when it comes to companionable chit chat. He worked as a food technologist, and this is key, in processed Mexican food. Another one of their favorite things to do was to take the speedboat to Lake Havasu, and their favorite place to go there was called The Cove. It was isolated when they first found it. Idyllic, shaded by overhanging trees, with a small patch of sandy beach, perfect for bonfires and Budweiser revelry. They visited The Cove countless times, year after year, and it features large in their scrapbooks.

When JP died unexpectedly, the cremation presumably went off without a hitch, but from there a murky but familiar pattern emerged.

Angry, because anger was her default setting, his widow set off in her car with the ashes. Rumors of wine might account for her destination, which was ‘nowhere specific’. Ashes are generally dumped off a cliff, or interred in some fashion. Sometimes they’re sprinkled into the ocean. The Cove it was!

Getting there was no easy feat for a single woman with a speedboat she couldn’t drive. But as luck would have it, development was encroaching on the fabled Cove. She got close, so close she could see it, and parked the late JP’s car. There it was, just on the other side of a new chain link fence. Once so isolated, and now civilization was right on top of it. So it was that the final cycle of three came to visit JP one last time.

The woman hero lurched to the fence, consumed with unfocused wino fury, determined to hurl JP’s remains into the now scummy water without ceremony and consign him to a watery oblivion. That instant was whimsical, too, in that it was spur of the moment, a combination of poor impulse control and the clockwork perfection associated with The Scales of Cosmic Irony. She wound up and hurled, and the box made a wobbly, girlish arc, fell short and exploded on the top of the fence. The ashes blew back on her and she wheeled and in Lebowskian awe discovered where she was. She was standing in a Taco Bell parking lot, the ashes of her late husband, my father, swirling around her, gusting gently over the tarmac toward the drive through.

Enter our closing humor- secrecy.

Death. Tacos. Whimsy. Secrets come to rest under the scorching Nevada sun. A gray film on the cars in a random Taco Bell parking lot. I don’t know why this story makes me happy, but it does. Maybe its because I like stories, and mysteries. Finding out where the ashes were scattered took some doing, after all. And maybe I enjoy it so much because, though I don’t associate with my family anymore, I do know where to put them when their time comes.

There are Taco Bells everywhere.

New Free Short Story Of The Month- The Tamale God, first published in ON SPEC

Head on over to http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com and check it out!

Hector Muñez sat on a stool behind his tamale cart, his toes curled around the footrest bar. He’d arrived early enough to claim a spot at the end of the pier. Sea lions barked and frolicked among the white charter boats. The surf sighed through the barnacle-crusted piles below him. Pelicans and sea gulls winged aimlessly against a cloudless blue sky. Hector sipped Budweiser from a can stashed in the cooler with his home-made chili sauces and watched the tourists from behind his mirrored sunglasses, perfectly content.

Rolling Stone Italy!

Check it out at-

http://www.rollingstone.it/cultura/libri-strisce/parla-il-nuovo-re-del-crime-americano-jeff-johnson-oggi-la-vita-e-un-noir/2018-02-16/

Christmas Memories

[image error]Life span art. The biggest, most complicated creative thing we can make, viewed by one at its conclusion. Sometime we have no control over the emerging picture, and I mean none, and we just have to hope in those moments. This morning, like most mornings, I made coffee and then went outside and smoked a cigarette, and in that quiet gray window of solitude I listened to my memories. Ideas from yesterday mix and mingle with fragments of dreams and the plots and threads in various things. Probably my favorite part of the day, really. It’s Christmas Eve, and I let myself wander around in it. Three holiday moments stand out more than the rest, loud, bold knotwork in the emerging tapestry, and I’m glad for what they add to the overall theme.

Christmas. One went by, no memory. Then the first trees and the music begins to register, mixed with snow and food and strange relatives and big, old houses. I liked it all. But none of them stand out until the supremely odd Christmas I spent in a motel in Houston. We were on our way somewhere, and wherever it was made no lasting impression, but it was the holidays. My mother, who always confused herself with Jacki Onasis, was scandalized that all the good places were full and we had to stay at some off brand motel. But for me it was pure magic, the powerful kid variety. The neon sign out front… man, I spent hours looking at it through the window that night. It was far and away the most beautiful Christmas ornament I’d ever seen, never to be topped I felt sure, and I marveled at how it looked as though they kept it going year round. Such was the holiday spirit of the little place. If you put a dime in the metal box by the bed it vibrated. At the time that too seemed like a technological marvel somehow in keeping with the season.

Next up, Christmas when I was 15. I remember how old I was. It was the year I ran away from the foster home. I made it from Springfield Missouri to Albuquerque New Mexico. When I talk about that time, people always have the wrong reaction. The truth is I had a great deal of fun that winter. It was so cold. The flop house I lived in with these piece of shit college drop out guy’s didn’t have heat or furniture, so I walked around at night. The student cafes were open late. I read all of Earnest Hemingway’s work in a 24 hour donut shop that winter. But Christmas Eve, I was walking down the street and I had such a good feeling. I hadn’t eaten for a few days and I felt light, the same temperature as the crunchy snow. The colors all seemed brighter than they should, smeared and washed in gold, and for whatever reason I knew I was having a better Christmas than most people. I was free. Life was hard but it was good. The future was right there, like a fruit tree in the dark, full of promise.

Last up, the loud, big Christmas of maybe ten years ago. The writer Robert Sheckley was living in my guest room. We had pheasant. That Christmas Eve we swapped stories. I of course reminisced about neon signs and vibrating beds and the taste of the air when it snows at midnight in New Mexico, and he waxed on about New York in the 1950’s and his mother’s fur gloves, forbidden hams, and the years he spent in Spain. That one glows with the light of stories and potential. I can remember standing over the stove cooking and looking out into the dining room, seeing good old Bob wearing this rubber pig mask and regaling us. It was funny, and it makes me smile to remember how much my face hurt from laughing.

Have a magnificent holiday, dear reader. Have a memorable one. If the chance presents itself, do something out of the ordinary. The lights and the laughter and the moments of reflection all braid together in the end, who’s to say how.

The Prime Mote In Gravity Construction

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Maybe its bullshit and maybe it isn’t, but as a metaphor it can shed a little light on strange situations. I first read about this prime mote concept in a Roger Zelazny book when I was a kid and I’ve been fascinated with it ever since. Setting the story aside, the gist is that at the heart of our solar system, you guessed it, smack dab in the middle of the sun, is the atom that started it all. One lonely hydrogen atom in an ocean of gas in the darkness of space that pulled in the atom next to it. Then they worked together to pull in a third. That’s the concept. It hardly matters if that’s how stellar nurseries operate. What matters is that it sounded reasonable at the time, and it stuck with me. So I grew up looking for prime motes.

Let’s apply that same concept to memories and you can see where it gets interesting. Two brothers. They came from the same parents. They grew up eating the same food, going to the same schools, playing in the same parks. As men, one is happy and one is not. In the construction of their personalities, somewhere in the Lego blocks of the psyche, is there a prime mote? For the system governing temperament? For the architecture of how the tools of adaptation array themselves? I wonder, for instance, if a single moment, an unlikely one, can become a new prime mote. I doubt it. It all comes back to the characteristics of the original group.

Take a kid, like my old neighbor Donnie. Nice parents, easy life, only child. His prime mote might have been this sort of blank, off yellow, slightly happy mote that quickly picked up lonely, then rapidly added fear and wonder as he came into contact with other little boys. I remember one day, good old Donnie’s mother had insisted he eat this cracker and as he was in the act of putting it in his mouth, a passing seagull shit on it. That astonishing event certainly helped shape him. It added to his emerging pantheon horror of the sudden variety, and probably gave him some insight into the vengeful nature of the cosmos and even the cruel whimsy of probability. I wouldn’t be surprised then if, in spite of his earnest parents best efforts, Donnie became an accountant for a small lawn and garden chain instead of the dentist they always wanted.

That was my revelation of the morning. Seven AM and I’m standing outside the St Honore cafe smoking a cigarette. Yesterday was the 15th. I met all my deadlines. I don’t have shit to do today, so the day started as my prime mote and its most intimate aggregates dictated. Drink some coffee! Stand around under the awning of a little French bakery and wonder about the nature of my own prime mote.

Learning From Making

[image error]Recently, I was tinkering with the notion of encoded ellipses in the quanta associated with the water content of the brain. Using my brain to think about memory, forming memories as I thought about it. It was fun house mirror time. It all came together in the novel Deadbomb Bingo Ray, in an examination of the motivations of perfection and the complexity of altruism, but it also left me with an echo, a ghostly notion of something else that seems to be firming up into an actual idea. It all goes back, oddly enough, to music. At least that’s where the notion begins.

I was 14 or 15 the first time I heard a Jimi Hendrix song. It was at the time when I was being exposed to music in my social world. Lots of punk of course, because early on I knew they were my people, but I liked Jimi Hendrix. It was confusing. Juicy. Sound, riding a wave of energy type stuff. In fact I liked it so much that I managed to get a guitar. And over the course of that year, the damnedest thing happened. As I learned how to play it, the music I liked began to sound different. I still remember how those songs sounded before I knew anything about music. They sounded good! But after a certain point, they sounded… bigger. I wrote in Tattoo Machine that Hendrix could probably hear music in a different way than we do, that when he listened to a recording of Robert Johnson, he could probably hear when Johnson had his eyes closed. I still believe that. I never got there, but a door opened. Music, something I love, became something I could love even more when I understood something of how it was made.

Art came next. What has twenty plus years of being a professional artist taught me? You guessed it. I’ve learned to appreciate art in a more robust way than I did before. Sometimes I look at something and I can get a feel for the mind behind it. At least I think I can (see paragraph one, smile in the mirror with me).

Last up- the words. There are books that have positively haunted me. I Served The King Of England by Bohumil Hrabal is at the top of the list. Was Hrabal that man? The person I see between the lines? Am I seeing some part of him when I consider the architecture of this book? Maybe. Maybe not. BUT that I suspect I am makes the reading of it even more enjoyable.

The upshot is that making things has enabled me to enjoy the things I like most a little more than I already did. A perfectly gluttonous blog topic for the holiday season! So sally forth dear reader! If your favorite food is French, buy a Jacques Pépin cookbook for yourself, it might be the best gift you’ve ever given anyone.

The Miraculous Litmus of Rick Fennemore

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No way! Look! It’s Rick! Or its Rick. Or the most revealing, shit, its that guy. Your reaction to Rick is telling. Here’s proof.

Almost two decades ago, Rick crossed over from sane to bi polar. The world was going to eat him alive, and for whatever reason, I decided to save him. In the beginning, almost everyone doubted the wisdom of this move. Rick sometimes thought he was Batman. He enjoyed answering your phone overmuch. He was often in need of special services, things beyond half my lunch or a pack of cigarettes. Things like pants. But I kept at it, and about a year or so in I began to understand that this easy thing to do, the saving of one human life, was valuable in ways I would not have guessed.

Rick is harmless. There is no reason to recoil from him, especially after you talk to him. He’s funny. Sweet. Trusting. Honest. Rick is a dreamer. Now, think about those qualities for a moment. They’re ideal, aren’t they? Therein lies the test.

After about a year, I noticed that the people I worked with who recoiled from Rick were people I had trouble trusting for other reasons. Five years down the line, I began to see even more clearly that I’d unwittingly designed a complex test for the world around me. The people who thought the saving of Rick Fennemore was some kind of extraordinary thing turned out to have unsavory characteristics as well. In the end, after all these years, the people I’ve worked with were all exposed to the Rick test, and the results, I realized, are conclusive. Some of the tattoo artists I’ve worked with I’m glad to see if I bump into, but I don’t remember their last names. One or two, maybe they should stay on their side of the street. But a handful of them? A handful I’m still friends with after years and years. And guess what? All of the artists in the last group have only one thing in common. They weren’t unhappy when Rick came around. But they didn’t think saving Rick was a cool guy thing to do, either. Nah. Every last one of them decided to help, too. Because it was easy, and somehow it seemed natural.

Happy Holidays to you, Rick! You rascal. You’ll never read this. But thanks anyway. Thanking you feels natural too.

Lucky Supreme on cruise control. And cruising.

View story at Medium.com

25 Best Fiction Books 2017




MEDIUM 




Lucky Supreme by Jeff Johnson. Don’t be surprised if you pull an all-nighter to finish Lucky Supreme which starts off with a theft in a tattoo parlor in Portland, Oregon and launches the protagonist on a dark, thrilling adventure full of deception, freaks, and surreal situations.

Made it in there with some extraordinary company, too. This is a list of great books (an mine, accidentally) but a few I loved here are-

My Absolute Darling by Gabriel Tallent. On Stephen King’s shortlist of recommendations along with this high praise: “This book is ugly, beautiful, horrifying, and uplifting. The word ‘masterpiece’ has been cheapened by too many blurbs, but My Absolute Darling absolutely is one.”

And, a straight up beautifully crafted, deeply thoughtful, timely read-

The Locals by Jonathan Dee. What happens post-September 11th between townies and a Manhattan billionaire when he decides to move full time to his summer home in the Berkshires. The Locals explores the dichotomy between the haves and -nots in a way that does not diminish either. It’s also a poignant read in an era of Trump. Don’t be discouraged by the brash narrator in the first chapter. He’s there to make a point. The book is told from the POV of many characters. Still thinking about some of the themes weeks after.

View story at Medium.com

Neo Noir Now

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Noir is a genre of crime film or fiction characterized by cynicism, fatalism, and moral ambiguity. Use of the definition, interestingly, is on the rise. Bleak, sleazy settings. Hard-boiled. Violent. Suggestive of danger. Sexy. Mysterious.

Also, French for black.

CNN is noir. MSNBC. Twitter. Facebook. Network television commercials. Newspaper headlines. Two out of three billboards. We live in a noir now. Why? How the fuck did that happen? The product with the most advertising revenue behind it, the one that receives top billing across the board, the one that comes up a thousand times a day in a thousand different places, is fear. Fear is the name of the game.

Fear is also the word missing from the classical definitions of noir, and yet it figures hugely in every single noir film and novel. Strange, right? But the two go together in a way that’s so obvious that the writers of definitions failed to point it out. As ingredients go, it simple enough to understand why. Let’s take two products and compare them to get a handle on it.

Hair gel– Purified water, PVP, Propolene glycol, Carbomer 940, Triethanolamine, Polysorbate 20, Fragrance, etcetera.

Budweiser– Water, Barley Malt, Rice, Yeast, Hops.

Two very different products, the same main ingredient. The water component is immediately dismissed in an evaluation because its in everything. Its all the other ingredients that determine how the water presents itself.

Noir is bigger now than ever before. The definition is broadening, to include base ingredients. As it does, it’s picked up a new prefix of sorts. Neo. New. Neo Noir. Great big broad spectrum deep as a hole in space black, with all the juicy elements associated with it. Now the dead end, the character who never learns, the jaded mess of a hero, he or she is a little different too. It isn’t enough to paint that picture and be done with it anymore. Now, we want to understand those characters. Why? Because we can sympathize with them like never before. They aren’t so far away from us now. They’re our neighbors. Our friends. Us. You.

In the case of my characters, the have another commonality I like to the think does well in neo noir and daily life in general. I call it The Motivation Of The Two Edged Knife.

In the two edged knife, a character, like Deadbomb Bingo Ray for instance, will solve a vile, wicked, semi-insane problem, but the solution itself will be useful to achieve a further, obscure objective. Without ruining DBR with spoilers, the reversal of the primary burn in the novel (the vile, wicked, semi-insane problem in question) conducted by erstwhile shit heel hedge fund manager Tim Cantwell nets many positives for Ray, but in keeping with noir tradition, these positives would not be viewed as joyous cupcakes by the common man or woman. ‘Positive’ for Ray is different. In keeping with the noirish values of our time, they’re a little dark by the conventional standards of even a decade ago.

Knottspeed, the main anti-hero in Knottspeed, A Love Story, employs the two edged knife to great effect. For him, it is an act of contagion. He actually loans the other characters his knife, and it permanently alters their mentation. None of them are the same after he passes through their lives, and the changes don’t fit the cookie cutter definition of good, either.

In Grand Estuary Grand, the central character Baby Moon Gow also employs the two edged knife, but the idea has been evolving for me a writer. Gow does it in a natural way, as the impulse is ingrained in the root of his character and not a learned behavior. Every action adds momentum to his hidden agenda. Every solution has inside it the solution for an entirely different problem, often one that has yet to materialize.

Why is noir making a comeback? One so strong that the definition itself is changing?

“Newton’s three laws of motion are less a product of novel experiments than of the attempt to reinterpret well-known observations in terms of motions and interactions of primary neutral corpuscles”

― Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Same deal. Neo noir is literally right in front of us in the same way.

Are we looking to noir for something? Fear is the water ingredient of our culture. How do the characters in neo noir react? What is their water ingredient? They are fearless. So maybe we are looking for something. Dark times call for dark new models of behavior. Here we are. Neo Noir Now.