Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 23
November 8, 2017
The Making of Deadbomb Bingo Ray
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What the hell is that? Oh no, all the acid I took in the late 80’s is boomeranging back in vicious chemical slurry and- ah shit, nah. It’s a Philly thing.
I went for a walk this morning here in scenic, beautiful Portland. Right now it’s Fall. The leaves are bright, the sky is gray, and my neighborhood smells like a French bakery. Not bad. I go for a walk every morning, rain or shine. Gets the wheels turning, but more than that I want to see the birds. Feel the air. That kind of thing. This morning as I surveyed the development of local herb patches, mostly rosemary and marjoram, I though about the journey I’ve made out of projects like Deadbomb Bingo Ray. This is Day One in the life of this new novel. Publication Day was yesterday. What does this mean?
For me, nothing. I don’t mean that in a bad way, either. If I was in LA or San Fransisco or New York, I’d have probably gone out with some of the writers I know there and eaten something strange and good, then walked around and yammered about cool nerd stuff. I don’t know any Portland writers. The ones I’ve come across didn’t have good things to say about each other, and that didn’t inspire me. Everyone I know here is a chef, a musician, or an artist. Many good friends, warm and talented people all, but my book thing, the decades of constant reading and then later the writing, is a sort of endearing hobby they’re willing to look past as long as I don’t go on and on about how such and such got adapted into a play or dudeboy Y has a new book out. Immaterial anyway. The day to celebrate is the day you get PAID! Who cares when the book comes out? It’s spread out over a month! Another good day to celebrate is the day you sign the contract. Makes sense, right?
DBR takes place in Philadelphia. Ugly place, but for some reason I had fun there. In this life I will never see that city again, so not that much fun. The world is a big and interesting place, and the list of places to see twice, well, Philly isn’t on it. Happy I checked that off my list, however, and delighted a book came out of it. Making Ray and The Darby Holland Crime Series led to Hollywood as well. And that’s a road with endless opportunities. So! These are the things I’m celebrating or have celebrated regarding Deadbomb Bingo Ray.
Contract Day! Unfortunately, even though Fed X showed the contract was delivered, it was lost. Turned into a bummer.
Pay Day! Again, a bummer. They money was sent to the wrong account.
Cover Day! I love the cover of this book! Went out with my girlfriend Sylvia and ate sushi.
Turner Publishing tells me they have a meeting with Lionsgate regarding Deadbomb Bingo Ray! That was the day before yesterday. Let to honey and lavender ice cream at Salt and Straw. Fuckin’ good too.
There’s more. I can’t say how and I don’t know why, but everything you make leads neatly to the beginning of the next thing to make. And it’s all so fun. So I’m happy today. But no party hat. Just happy.
November 6, 2017
November 1, 2017
News and Events
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No way! Look! Its me!
That’s not my car. Not exactly sure what I’m doing in this picture. I think I’m wondering why I can’t grow a beard and instead get that wiry, irregular stuff. Anyway, stuff on the horizon and all of it good. In Deadbomb Bingo Ray news, I’ll be signing books at the-
Nov 11, 2017
11:30 AM
Beaverton, OR, , OR
Barnes & Noble Tanasbourne
Signing and socializing
at for A Long Crazy Burn, #2 in the Darby Holland Crime Series I’ll be-
Dec 7, 2017
7:00 PM
Portland, OR
Powell’s Books on Hawthorne
Reading and jabbering! From the Darby Ho…
with special guest Gigi Little ( at Powell’s). Fun stuff. In other news, good pal Tom Hildreth and I met with Bill MacGoldrich at SyFy/USA about Lune, the television adaptation of my novel Everything Under The Moon.
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Here we are in Maine in front of this giant haunted place. Tom is a fantastic actor and an oddly effective producer. Sadly, when someone tells you they’re a producer, your first reaction should be to tazer them in the mouth or spray them with RAID for yellow jackets and run. Tom stands out because he’s not only the real deal, but there’s no blood in his eyes. He’s a contributing producer instead of the much more common skimming producer. Anyway, fun times. I got my own badge to enter the Universal COMCAST building and I put it in my wallet in the transparent flap so I can flash it like a confusing Fed badge. We make our own fun.
We have now entered the edge of the Holiday Season! A few books I’d like to suggest for the gift giving season. They are-
The Twilight Pariah – Jeffrey Ford
This book will freak your shit out. I loved it. One of the best reads of the year. Almost anything I say about it will be a spoiler, so you’ll just have to trust me. Read the back flap. I’ve been following Ford’s work for years and he’s rare in so many ways. Check him out.
And-
Astoria: Astor and Jefferson’s Lost Pacific Empire: A Tale of Ambition and Survival on the Early American Frontier – Peter Stark
This is a great read no matter where you live, but as an Oregonian I found it riveting. The founding of Astoria was a crazy fuckin’ disaster, and Stark, reliably good, paints a clear picture of it. The most insane thing about this book is that its been adapted into a play. And that play is supposed to be really good!
October 24, 2017
Knottspeed, A Love Story- the saga continues in The Sweet Sonifications of Fencepost Beckenshire
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Wonder what happened to Fencepost, the erstwhile piano player in Knottspeed, A Love Story! Wonder no more! The story of our favorite piano player is headed your way December 17th, just in time for the holidays. Here’s a snippet-
“Welcome to the Hemlock. I’m Fencepost Beckenshire. I’ll be your piano rambler every minute of this magnificent happy hour. Says something about the world, right? Three hours long.” He riffed through bullshit jazz, in search of nothing in particular. “An extended happy hour is good for the whales, baby. Builds character in the trees.”
Fencepost shuffled around in D while he considered. “When you understand the Roman origins of happy hour, why, it gives you a feeling. Like we’ve come a long way and we’re still goin’ somewhere. Remember to tip your bartender.”
September 8, 2017
Tattoo Machine: Tall Tales, True Stories, And My Life In Ink, Seventh Edition.
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Seventh edition. It is a strange and magical world, dear reader. The stories in this book, many people say, changed the way they look at one thing or another. I hope for the better, but I hope for all kinds of things. Its my nature. I just thumbed through the copy of this book I kept, the advanced reading copy I carried with me to readings and radio interviews. It still smells like whiskey and Pall Malls, as well as it should. Those were heady times.
The aftermath of this book, and some books do have an aftermath, is ongoing. I have surfed it with the same steady hand as The Dude, or I have tried, anyway. Some of it I predicted, some I didn’t. Since TM came out, eight years ago now, I’ve written eight more books. No surprise. Knottspeed, A Love Story is one of my favorites. I might write a sequel to Everything Under The Moon someday. Soft Skull had the best marketing and publicity people. The Darby Holland Crime Series, Lucky Supreme, A Novel Of Many Crimes, A Long Crazy Burn, and The Animals After Midnight has been a total blast to write. I’ve long maintained that even a crappy tattoo artist is often a master of creative problem solving. Darby Holland plays what appears to be the madness card when confronted by the very forces we all struggle with- the rich, gentrification, the market darkness- but in that chaos is artistic determination, easily confused with stone cold crazy. Deadbomb Bingo Ray, out in November of 2017, is a fun house mirror distortion of my impressions of Philadelphia, the saddest city I’ve ever lived in and was fortunate to leave forever on the very day I sent the novel to my agent (side note! Susan Watson my main proofreader lives there, and a shout out to the rad rockers at Dakini Tattoo, one of my favorite guest spots ever). More in the way of words is on the way.
Reactions to TM were mixed. The tattoo world liked the book well enough. Difficult customers, so a pleasant surprise there. The loose, nebulous, crappy family I left forever in my mid teens, mentioned glowingly in the book, did not react well. I did lose my one surviving brother forever, though, and that was surprising. We were difficult friends at one time. His reaction to my writing a book is allegedly far, far darker than I can even imagine. He is not in prison or an insane asylum at last check. On the plus side, I gained an uncle in Texas. Balance, I guess. More importantly-
The Collector is still at large. I hope everyone is still looking for him. I am.
Rick Fennemore is doing well! He sends his greetings. Mark Ledford, the owner of Kilroy’s Tattoo, took over the care and feeding of Rick while I was gone. Mark was my apprentice more than ten years ago, and that right there is proof that I made the right choice. The guy more than just kicks ass. He’s actually a good guy.
I still tattoo. Guest spots now. My permanent home here in Portland, Oregon is Kilroy’s Tattoo. I like tattooing as much as I used to, but I’m a part time inksmith anymore. My agent Mark Gottlieb at Trident Media keeps me busy, as does television producer Tom Hildreth, who has an uncanny ability to get shit done in Hollywood. A word of unsolicited advice to other writers? Producer=Blowhole 99% of the time. Winos put that on their card so they don’t have to be embarrassed about being unemployed. But keep trying!
Portland tattooing changed while I was traveling abroad and writing, too. What has been dubbed as ‘The Student Revolution’ took place. The tattoo schools pump out way more artists than the classic apprenticeship system did, far more, and the results are in. Tattoo shops are more numerous than Starbucks, the price for a tattoo is half of the national average, and these poor kids aren’t very well trained. Some of them beat the odds, and they deserve a pat on the back. The warning about the changing education system in TM came true here. Here are two new prediction. 1) These students, widely shit on for incompetence and deservedly so, will grow up strange. That will not be a bad thing. Progress can come from any direction, even that one, and it will. I see signs of it already. 2) Washington, you are next. The power hungry ‘movers and shakers’ are moving like eels in the muddy chop of the state legislature right now, just as happened once upon a time here in Oregon (we had a different power eel). In the next decade, the Seattle tattoo scene will tank as a result, just like it did here, and it will probably recover, but for a variety of non related reasons never rebound completely.
The best part of writing a memoir is the oddest thing, something I never would have imagined. It helped me examine not my life, but the person who was living it. Me. The net effect is that I try harder to find balance on a daily basis. So hippy, I know. I feel vaguely disgusted with myself. But I can see the difference. I can feel it. I’m a slightly happier dude.
Here’s a slice of pie from the end of TM. Dudeboys and Dudegirls, this shit is a real as a motherfucker today.
A lot of tattoo guys and gals I know have a suspicion that I sometimes agree with, especially in my less cynical moments.
There is a singular quality in every person, a thing inside all of us that yearns to be free, to stab the boss in the eye with a pencil, to screw off some pressing obligation and get drunk on the porch, to just take a deep breath and stop worrying for a single afternoon, to say “I live in this skin. I will be me from now on and I respect your right not to give a shit what I’m doing in here.” Everyone knows those people are out there, the ones who slipped through the cracks, dodged the man, foiled their family’s bleak dreams, took the yellow brick road and sprinted over the star-speckled horizon into the land of dreams of their own design.
There are a lot of tattoos in that crowd, some good, some bad and some that defy evaluation, and the numbers are growing. I hope more than I’d like to admit that this is true, that the rise of this intimate art form it is a sign, a harbinger of something good that is as yet a hazy outline flickering in tomorrow but growing stronger. And if it is?
Welcome to the party.
Welcome to the part.
Welcome.
August 28, 2017
The Animals After Midnight, Book Three in the Darby Holland Crime Series
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Every novel is an exploration of the psyche on some level. Some people say that isn’t so, but for me it is. In The Animals After Midnight, Darby has risen as high as he can in the food chain of Old Town. It cost him a great deal along the way, but in the end, the penalty for success comes from his past. There is unfortunate precedent here.
David Knoll was a pretty cool guy who lived down the street from a tattoo shop called The Hell Factory. I worked at HF and we became friends. He went from a guy with a little studio apartment, a futon, and a sharp leather coat to a guy with his dreams coming true over the course of two hard years. Dave busted ass, but the key to his success was a change of venue. He left all of his scummy dipshit New York pals behind and moved to a new town, where he could spread his wings and try to take flight without all those bricks weighing him down.
Flash forward one year. Dave has a bad break up. His new bar in Atlanta hits a snag when the building sells out from under him. His old friends from New York, cheering him from afar all this time, sweep in as he staggers punch drunk from misfortune, and they eat him alive. Then Dave is dead.
Around 3:00 AM, after the bars close and Old Town powers down, that was when I could sense it most. Change. The bad kind. The spirit of the city was a hobo’s garden, almost gone every second it was there, and Ming’s Shoe and Boot Repair was a hold out in the middle of it all like myself, a relic, too stubborn to move and too strange to understand it should change, so not long for a new world that kept getting newer. The old neon boot icon was set to slow blink and so was I. It was Wednesday. No matter how hard I tried, I wound up drinking in the alcove in front of it two or three times a week. Recently, more often.
A good guy I worked with for years, hard working family man, was headed for divorce. They had three kids and she was tired of him. It happens. This guy had collected a chorus of squeaky wheels over the years because you could count on him. Need a couple bucks? He’s your guy. Depressed? He’s your guy. But when his turn came, that chorus went silent. His psycho social support network failed to manifest and down, down, down he went. Now he’s a husk of what he was.
The list goes on.
I’ve seen versions of this play out time and again. For Darby, as a teenager he lived close to the edge, skirting homelessness, doing one petty crime after another to stay warm and eat. You make close friends when you’re desperate, but those same friends and family, later down the line, will view you as food. If you cross the line into prosperity, then family, friendship, even love, all of it breaks down if the ties were made from sorrow and shared fear.
Everything about the new, improved Lucky Supreme, that pinnacle of neon whorls and gold leaf, old fashioned barber chairs with polished chrome and speckled star field vinyl upholstery, the refurbished 50’s jukebox with bubbly lights and Cash Only, it was all my idea. My doing. I was rich after all, and we’d been rebuilding from scratch. There was some resistance at first. Delia had nit picked and micro managed everything, at every step, attempting to distort my vision through willpower, tantrums, and cold, bony shoulders, and some of her had ultimately crept into the place. But in the end, the blame for transforming a venerable tattoo shop in Old Town into a swank bordello tangled with a phony yuppie stereotype was my bad.
This has no doubt weighed on many people over the years. You second guess yourself because of it, just as Darby does. But he learns in the end that- no spoilers. I learned much about myself writing this book. If you read it, and I hope you do, consider. The antagonist is a common one. Made large here, but common enough. There is a Midnight Rider in your life somewhere. Because we all have one. In all of us there is also the will to be free. Persevere! And have fun while you do. Below, Darby is indulging in internal comedy. Give it a try!
Flaco’s squamous little hole in the wall had just opened. The smell of white onions and cologne wafted out, nauseating at the best of times, and the old man beamed at me and chortled in delight, knowing exactly what my morning had been like. Flaco’s Tacos had withstood the beautifying tides of Disneyfication with the same implacable gusto as the Rooster Rocket, but with different results. The signs, painted on old plywood, had somehow failed to take on a magical ‘antique’ or ‘authentic’ aura and instead remained boldly crappy. The white and yellow base was peeling around the edges where the wood had soaked through one too many times, and the scrawled, semi-literate descriptions of the food, all in Spanish, had been rain-blasted away in places and redone with Sharpie, also fading. The tiny stainless steel counter was bent and dented from a service life it had endured years before it was installed. Its time at Flaco’s had added an additional patina of scratches and dings and even a hole or two. The sticky bottles of hot sauce looked straight up evil. To top it all off, Flaco had taken to leaning out the window as he was now, and perhaps as a sorcerous talisman to ward off errant health inspectors because of the frozen dog situation, he’d added a hairnet to his ensemble.
August 5, 2017
Deadbomb Bingo Ray- Stories I Didn’t Use, #1
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Philadelphia. The setting for Deadbomb Bingo Ray, out this November from Turner Publishing. Now, when I wrote this insane noir, I actually did live in Philadelphia. I was there for about a year, and dudeboy above, the urban opossum, well. They’re scary (they’re harmless) and they are everywhere. Here is a story I didn’t use, but its a good one. Contents: a rap group, a camera crew, several women in tight clothes, and all of them screaming in front of our last story component, an abandoned building they’d just pried the door off of.
Mysterious, how shocking horror finds its way into everyday life. I remember that episode well. I was standing in front of this pizza place. Terrible neighborhood. Across the street, a film crew was setting up. In much of Philadelphia, you don’t want things like cameras to be visible. So, curious. But that’s also why they had so many guns. It was a music video of some kind, I reasoned. A van pulled up, and several models were deployed. More curious, still. An old black guy was standing next to me, watching too. I knew him, so I asked what was up.
“Used to be a night club in that building,” he explained. “Closed in 1970 something. They bought it, them big boys with the gold chains there. Gonna open up. All kinda people gonna get killed in there.”
Ah.
On cue, the cameras roll. Music blast from the van. A huge guy with huge jewelry walks to the door (a plank of plywood) and uses a crowbar in the background as another huge guy, probably the leader, gives a speech I can’t make out. Tension rises as the speaking looks back in confusion, running low on material, as the crowbar operation is taking so long. The women all turn to look. All eyes are on the giant straining at the plywood, which had been reinforced in some way. There is a high whine as nails sing out of old wood and then BOOM! The plywood falls outward as the man steps back. Collective moment of silence as we all behold the new black rectangle that leads into the remains of something else. The speaker takes a tentative step forward and then stops. Something has caught his eye. Then he takes a step back.
The entire group screams in unison as the first possum scrambles out, the leader of an awesome tribe. In seconds, several more appear, weaving through the pandemonium. People are running. Some are trying to climb up on the van. One man brandishes a gun.
“Oh dog,” the old guy next to me says. “I bet they been up in there feeding on mice.”
I tossed the pizza slice and left. Disgusting, I know, but high comedy as well. I never did find out if they opened that club.
Deadbomb Bingo Ray: Jeff Johnson: 9781683367246: Amazon.com …
https://www.amazon.com/Deadbomb-Bingo-Ray-Jeff-Johnson/dp/1683367243
Crime. Vengeance. Love. Physics. The infamous Deadbomb Bingo Ray is a high level fixer in the City of Brotherly Love. He’s the man you call when you’ve …
August 1, 2017
Will Fight Evil 4 Food
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