Jeff Johnson's Blog: Will Fight Evil 4 Food, page 3

The Crossroads Motel on Central and my very first tattoo

Yesterday I was watching Better Call Saul and there it was in all its forlorn dumpiness. The Crossroads Motel on Central Ave in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The memory of my first tattoo rose up in the back of my throat in a ghostly chemical wave. There are days when you just can’t believe what happened to you. Those days can stretch into months of such days, even years of them. I was in there, roaming that landscape of zeros, when I got my first tattoo. I’ll never forget that fucking motel.

It was the winter of 1986. I’d been on the run for a few months and for some reason I’d gone to Albuquerque. When I look back on the pages that form the book of my life, I see there a strange and sorrowful miscalculation. I should have never gone to that town. I had an alternate plan at that time, one I’d abandoned for sentimental reasons. I almost went to Boulder, Colorado, to work in a plant nursery and disappear forever. I didn’t. I went to Albuquerque. That winter my pal Derek and I spent every night at the Dunkin Donuts on Central. He talked to the bums who hung out there trying to get out of the cold. I read all the books of Earnest Hemmingway. And we did crime, too. Small stuff, just to keep going. We scored weed for the Iranian guy who manned the night shift as a kind of rent. That was the cornerstone of our gig. Two pieces of shit were regular customers, especially when the cold got bitter, and Derek and I fell in with them part-time. Rob Trouble and Tattoo Dan. Rob and Dan were pro schemers. They ran some kind of burn every single day, usually ripping off college kids from UNM, something Derek and I dabbled in as well, and they rented a crappy motel room every night. They had no fixed address. Tattoo Dan had some compadre tat zapper who would loan him a machine and one of the old National Eagle power packs and some tubes, and once a month or so he’d ‘sling ink’ in one of the motel rooms. Rob and Dan both thought it would be a good idea for me to get a tattoo. They were eager to fold me into their operation full time. I wasn’t interested, and for a super ridiculous reason, too. I was a Sonic Youth slash Jimi Hendrix LSD kid. Those two bozos liked Journey and speed. It was as simple as that. They were beneath me. But one frosty night I decided to get a tattoo anyway. Our guy at the Dunkin Donuts had the night off, Derek had hosed off somewhere, and when I ran into Rob and Dan and they told me it was tattoo night I thought what the hell. Even if I was just a spectator, it would be warm. So I went. Flash forward several hours. There are a few prostitutes in the room, just there to score, Rob Trouble has taken down the bathroom mirror and put it on the bed to lay out some truly tiny lines of speed, and Tattoo Dan is in his element, grinding a reaper into some sweaty mullet’s arm. And that’s when my number came up. The machine stopped, Tattoo Dan, who seemed twice as muscular as he normally did, taped some toilet paper over it (it was crazy gory, I never understood how that could work until three years later), and Rob Trouble motioned me over.

“What ya getting’ little dude?” He was so excited, too. Tattoo Dan knew I was going to con him somehow and he was less excited.

“Nothing,” I replied sincerely. The prostitutes looked on, sensing a burn in motion. “I don’t have any money.” It was true. I probably had less than a dollar.

“Come on dude!” Rob whacked Dan on the arm. “That magic trick! Show Dan how to do the magic trick! He’ll tat you up!”

This is where the story becomes slightly unbelievable. But it’s true. I’d flummoxed these two Journey skeebs a few times at the Dunkin Donuts with one of the two magic tricks I know. Keep in mind these were two con men on the lowest rung of a busted ladder. The tattoo itself is about the size of a quarter and took Tattoo Dan all of forty seconds to do. The symbol of chaos, ala Michael Moorcock. I snorted a line of speed in there somewhere, a drug I never cared for at all, and at dawn I emerged feeling hollow, hallucinating just a little. I hadn’t eaten in a day or two. I looked back just as I hit the sidewalk and that’s when I saw the name of the motel, spelled out in western letters on the faded sign in the cold gray light. The Crossroads Motel. I’d just traded a magic trick for the symbol of chaos at The Crossroads Motel.

Well, shit.

Strangely enough, I talked to Derek just last week and I asked him about Rob Trouble and Tattoo Dan out of the blue. Derek still lives in Albuquerque. Of Dan he had no word, he vanished years ago. BUT, he did run into Rob Trouble a few years ago at a party where Rob, now much older and worn, was chilling with some Deadheads. Derek thoughtfully beat the shit out of him on general principles.

The same eyes that were almost blinded by that motel sign would later watch the sun rise over the Sahara Desert. Behold the streets of Paris in a perfect rain, the golden shimmer over the Bay of Thailand at sunset, a blizzard in Zurich lanced through with crazed disco light, a million wonders and more to come. This story has no moral, most biographical stories don’t, but if I were to imprint one, it’s this- get the tattoo. If you don’t, all the ensuing chaos is actually your fault, and the cosmos itself takes no share in the blame.

Cruise on by http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com and see what’s shakin’. Below, some Death Valley 69 by Sonic Youth.

The Batman, a film by a creampuff mama’s boy, reviewed

You can’t unsee this suckdog masterpiece of runny shit. Take a story and boil it. Render off the fat and sieve out the bones. At the bottom of the pot, you will have something worth examining or you won’t. Rarely, as in the case of The Batman, will you find something transparently insulting. Sad but true, this movie is about orphans who grew up in a world of shit. You know, poor, starving, cold, lost in an uncaring system. The Riddler is one of them and he’s pissed as a hornet. He’s the downtrodden in this classist nightmare of a city, and remember Gotham is a metaphor. He’s also gross, like the rest of the downtrodden (read here the poor are gross), and his streak of brilliant detective work comes to a stunning and contrived end when he wildly deviates from character and targets a mayor he didn’t research and has no evidence on, thus establishing volatile ineptitude. The Batman prevails AND he even rescues a fellow rich kid before the end. Bravo. At the bottom of this pot there is only subtext, and that subtext indirectly implicates voices like Banksy. It smears counterculturalism with a brazenly forked tongue. Matt Reeves is the creampuff mama’s boy rich kid behind this film. I’m not saying I’ll beat his ass on sight, BUT I will politely offer to assfuck him in the mouth should I ever meet him. The Batman is no longer The Dark Knight, but a pouty establishment henchman, hero of well-heeled bozo snobs and worthless finger sniffing affluenza wads- The Dark Douchebag. This offensive skid mark of a film is available now on HBO. I seldom review movies. This time I felt I had to.

Science Chastity and the Horned Fate of the Neandertals

Good things happen in the world at all hours of every day, but you’d never know it if you read or watch CNN, the hourly omnibus of horror, or NPR, which comes with a big pink dildo. The BBC is bleak, and it has an English accent even in print. FOX is primarily cartoons about how bigfoot stole all the McNuggets from a factory in Kentucky. Science news is clean. There are times when it restores one’s faith in humanity, when you read something that, while delivered with a squeamish and delicate mincing of words, points to the pageantry of our species. Case in point- new revelations regarding the fate of the Neanderthals.

Our European hominid cousins vanished some 20,000 years ago. Gone. It was believed for some time that modern humans killed them off in a kind of rude prehistoric colonial expansion. Some claimed our diseases did them in. Others blamed climate change and the end of the last ice age. All plausible. But now they know the real reason and… they’re having trouble putting it in words because scientists are scientists. Reuters or Forbes might have the lingo, but I can spell it out straight for you. It seems our ancestors fucked them into oblivion. Armed with our might cocks and awesome vaginas, we horned them out of existence by folding them into our gene pool. We shagged the Neanderthals so hard they became us and disappeared into our DNA, where they live on to this day. That says something important about us. Something good. I seem to recall a time when it was believed we ate them.

Believe in yourself, dear reader. Deep down you are good. You come from good people.

This Is Why That Slap Was So Disturbing

Will Smith slaps Chris Rock. Why was it so disturbing? Why did it make people, even people like me, wish they hadn’t seen it? I thought about it this morning and I came up with this. Those people are supposed to be different. The hapless jizz toilets and preening, vacuous mamma’s boy Bad Pitcocks, vain and empty and ultimately loathsome, are nonetheless our trusted ambassadors, our human gateways to the artificial world of lights, camera, action. And we love that world dearly. So when one of them crosses the line and reveals himself as a simpleminded schoolyard bully, as Will Smith did when he strode up and slapped that smiling little man, it breaks a contract we paid for time and again at the box office and it’s a reminder of how fake it is, and worse, how even human beings who live in a shell that only resembles reality are still just animals. Every newsfeed for years has been nothing more than an endless episode of Humans Behaving Badly and now our fake humans are doing it too. We might be lost. In some way, deep down, we’re all waiting for enlightenment, a time when people will rise, when the baseline of ethics will firmly move upward and the common man and woman will move up with it. We can, this slap says, give a human being oceans of money, the best of everything we have, even our adoration, and all that is simply not enough. Our rise will still have to take place only in the movies, a bitter paradox and the final fly in the ointment.

There are some great people working in film and television, dedicated and noble craftspeople with vision, but as an art form, it’s topheavy with bottom feeders. There are hustlers in that world, just like in every other art, but the glitter and light and the possibility of celebrity notoriety- one of the emptiest aspirations- seems to attract a peculiar variety of soulless gollum, one that might have otherwise gone into politics or cultism. If the magic is to work seamlessly, if this art is to grow and complicate and become ever more, the men and women with passion and zeal, dedicated to the best in their craft and its finest ideals, to craftsmanship and storytelling, to the robust and the sublime… They have their work cut out for them, more clearly than ever. Maybe an unscripted awards show is a bad idea. Start there.

The Breakfast Club- my fond memory all these years later

Ah, The Breakfast Club. I see things about it on the internet today, stories about seeing it and how it resonated with people and touched them in some way. My Breakfast Club memory is a comical one. Springfield, Missouri, I was 15, the punk misfit kid raising himself and pretty much having an okay time doing it. To my everlasting astonishment, I was to see this movie with the head of the Parkview High School cheerleading squad. Blond hair, blue eyes, and she drove us there too in her sporty little gray BMW. I just couldn’t believe it. Afterward, we left the theater arm in arm, totally in the clouds. We sat in her car talking for a little while and then, awkward teen kissing ensued. She was a few years older than me, more experienced I knew, but I was still absolutely floored when she unzipped my fly. For a moment, I was an Olympian on the gold medal pedestal, an unlikely king, about to get questionable head from a cheerleader. I stared straight forward, very deer in the headlights as she went in, and I was looking at the top of her head, a mere second before contact, where there was a loud rap on the window. We both froze, her with my dick in her hand an inch from her mouth.

“What’s going on in there?” It was a cop. A cop with cosmically bad timing. I’ll never forget the look on her face as she looked up- horror, guilt, terror. I looked up then too. The cop realized what we were doing, and I’ll be damned if he didn’t freeze as well. All three of us were locked in place by the supreme freakishness of the moment. None of us could move.

I farted. Pweep. Just a little one. It squeezed out in the tension. And just like that, that cheerleader and I started laughing, huge, unstoppable, gasping, heaving laughter. The cop just turned and walked away. I think we laughed about that on and off for the rest of the year. My Breakfast Club memory. What a great movie. I smile every time I think about it. And somewhere, a sweet woman tells a funny story on March 24th, about the time she went to see The Breakfast Club with the punk kid.

The Secret Nachos of The Royal House of Windsor

The House of Windsor is loaded with secrets, many of them XXX Hapsburg-level sordid. Freakish tales of sodomy gone wrong, the Panty Wolves Bacchanal, the noble Rhinoceros horn jizz cannon gala, the Orifice Jubilee, the Saliva Pageant, the august chastity weenis corset forged from enemy steel, the regal bedroom dunce bonnet, but in these dark days none of it shines like the secrets of the royal kitchen, and here I mean The Windsor Nacho. When you eat these, you’ll feel like royalty. You can do away with the dress code and 70’s finery and get right down to it by following these simple instructions.

The ingredients-

tortilla chips (your favorite kind)

sharp cheddar cheese

a little bit too much diced green chili

chili

This last ingredient is the only time consumer. But it’s easy.

Stem and deseed 6 New Mexico or California chilis, plus 2 Anchos

Steam in half a can of crushed tomatoes, 4 cloves garlic

Blend

Add 4 cups of pinto beans

Cook at low heat. You’ll need to add water as you go to keep the beans submerged. Salt, pepper, cumin to taste. This makes a HUGE amount of chili, so you can enjoy a royal lunch for a few days. And you deserve it. Simple, basic, and yet refined. It’s the nacho with everything.

Lightning And Snakes For Peckerwood

I’ll refer to this long-splatter swayback peckerwood Coors toilet as Gus. His western shirt was faded and worn thin as fly wings, straining over his tool chest beer gut, and his jeans were work worn and stiff with dried sweat and rimed at the joints with human oil. His boots were dappled with squirt chili from gas station nachos and dried yellow mustard. Early fifties, but with a half a million too many miles. Gus was that guy. He came into the tattoo shop on a sunny afternoon to get a cow skull, and once he was in the chair, I knew I’d have to steer the conversation when he started complaining that Portland daytime strippers were too skinny. I veered to travel, and we got on the subject of Montana. Totally offhand, he told me a truly insane story that haunts me to this day.

It was payday after a solid month of stringing wire, and Gus cashed in and quit in Butte. It was a fine morning, but he was in the mood to get indoors, so he hit the bar scene. There, day drinking in a Montana dive and horny as hell, he met a frizzy haired blond with thick legs and a halter top. It was like she was made for him. They were on the crazy train from the second they met, he claimed, man, woman, and bottle, bound by destiny. The next two days were a blur, but on day three they parked on a dirt road in the middle of nowhere, too blasted to go any further, and partied until she passed out. Gus listened to the wind as the sun set. In was night when the storm kicked up. Thunder, hard and deep and rolling for long minutes at a time, came to the van over the still fields around them. There were distant flashes of light, like bombs going off over the horizon. It got closer. The woman was still out cold when Gus climbed up front and looked out. A storm from the bible was headed their way. He watched it get closer, a huge black wall of cloud lit from within by almost continuous rivers of lightning. He woke the blond and she screamed at him for a few minutes, really pissing him off, and then the storm was on them. There were times when the lightning strikes were so loud he blacked out, so bright that he thought he saw her skeleton. They clung to each other and even though both of them were screaming, he couldn’t hear it. It was the most terrifying thing that ever happened to him, and his eyes were so distant and blank when he said that. It went on and on, and eventually he lost consciousness all together. In the morning he climbed out to a bright day. All four tires were flat. He’d picked up the van for two hundred bucks, and most of the value was in the tires. Far in the distance across a field was a farmer driving an old tractor. Gus started walking his way. He was so hungover, so shell shocked, he didn’t really know what else to do. When he was a few hundred feet away the farmer saw him and started screaming, really freaking out. Gus stopped and tried to make out what he was yelling. Snakes, he was screaming. Snakes, snakes, snakes. The storm had ‘pulled ‘em up an’ riled ‘em’. He was screaming for Gus to run to him and get up on the tractor. Gus looked down and his bleary eyes focused, and to his mighty horror, he found he was surrounded, walking through a field of snakes. “I like to levitated,” he said calmly. He ran to the tractor, and they made it safely back to the farm. There, broke once more, he worked for the farmer for a few days until he had a couple bucks, then he hitched to Idaho. I asked him what happened to the blond. Gus didn’t know and he seemed surprised by the question. He never went back to the van. He just left it. Four flat tires, he explained again, like I hadn’t been listening.

If someone wants to make a country song out of this, be my guest. I get 10%. Head on over to my website for cool book news and more magnificent song ideas.http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com

American Gods- a scathing review

I just caught up on the spastic freestyle trainwreck American Gods. So much great source material, so many good actors and actresses, they obviously had cameras and lights and microphones and people who knew how to use them, and they made this impossibly stupid shit for three seasons. If you take out the nonsensical dance parties, the closeup montages that look so cool but don’t mean anything, the lectures, the dead end roads, the Tuesday night poetry slam garbage, the flashbacks and dream sequences, and the stunning, stunning, stunning fact that the old gods and the new gods never actually fight? All that shit is most of the show, but without it, you’re left with about ten minutes that would be better spent at the dentist.

The Potency of the OG Typewriter

Check out this mofo, an incredibly cool gift from my sweet fiance Sylvia. I have a good history with typewriters like this. I wrote my first novel, Bertram’s World, on a manual typewriter. I wasn’t satisfied with it when I was done with it, so I never showed it to anyone or sent it anywhere. There were structural problems that I thought were unfixable, and it didn’t have the ‘flow’ I’d come to recognize as an avid reader. I wrote my second novel on a manual typewriter, too. Mirage was bad, but slightly better. Same thing happened to that one. Never showed it to anyone and eventually, I lost it. Then I wrote Fugitive Crash, I like that one but it still wasn’t good enough. Lost it, too. Then I wrote the first draft of Miracles of Altitude. I was learning, but this one was also no good. I showed that typo-ridden draft to my friend Ben and to my surprise he read the entire thing. After five years of writing, much of it in secret (I wasn’t surrounded by supportive, nurturing voices, something I learned late in life to never, ever tolerate) I had yet to get a single piece across the plate. Then I lost the typewriter itself. When I finally got a new one, almost everyone had a computer. I didn’t, mostly because I didn’t think I could learn how to use one in the privacy of my own experiment. I got a new (to me) manual typewriter and the first thing I wrote on it was a science fiction story entitled Jimson’s Universe. There were oceans of blood and forests of bone involved. I liked it. I felt like I’d made a breakthrough! I’d sent a few short stories out and got standard rejection letters in my self-addressed stamped envelope, but with Jimson I got one of my first personal rejection letter. I framed it, too. I lost it long ago, but I still remember how touchingly frank it was. “Dear Mr. Johnson, This was the most disturbing story I have ever read. Please do not send us anything ever again.” Signed, prominent science fiction editor (I’ll withhold the name). You aren’t supposed to send out short stories to more than one place at a time, but fuck that stupid rule. As luck would have it, my first acceptance letter came the very next week, as I’d sent it to two magazines. “Dear Mr. Johnson, This is the best science horror story I have ever read. I had to read it twice to believe my eyes.” Signed, Kenneth James Crist, Black Petals Magazine. Sale number one, manual typewriter.

I quit writing for years after that, but when I eventually got back to it I wrote the first draft of Tattoo Machine in notebooks I bought at a RiteAid in Santa Monica. Lucky Supreme, too. Miracles went into a computer at one point, though it was lost. The second drafts came when I entered the text into the computer. Then I slowly switched to all computer. I never really found another manual typewriter with good action. Until now. My sweetheart has a degree in jewelry design and one of her hobbies is restoring antique sewing machines. She was able to identify a good manual typewriter and tune it up. We’re waiting on the new ribbon as this one is a little worn, but this thing snaps. It hails from 1917, and the attractive round keys are yellowed with time. I have two projects I have to begin on in the first week of January and for the first time in a long time, I’m going to peck it out old school. I know the medium makes a difference. I don’t know exactly what that is, and I bet it changes over time, but this is gonna be… New again. Check out the cool cover from Spring, 2004. That’s my main character Eneseph in her shipsuit, on the trail of a madman who made a meat planet. Haha! The full typewriter is below that.

Look at the cool keys! Writing is one of my very favorite things in life. Such a nice gift.

Reflections on the eyes of the monkey and the ears of the hyper-bat on my 52nd birthday

I’m 52 today. I don’t feel old. And I don’t know why in all honesty. When I look back, it seems like I’ve been alive for a long, long ass time. I’ve seen some super gnarly shit. Long ago I learned the road through hard times is the hard road, and that might be why I keep entering wide pastures of life. I’m in one right now. Quarantine or no, the last few years have been increasingly better, and I’ve had a great deal of fun in life already. These are interesting times. 35 years or so ago, me and many of my chums set out down a mysterious highway with no rest stops and no speed limit, and while many of them died, the survivors became curiously good at being alive. Obvious. But interesting. After 50 is when we get to enjoy this.

Once, I looked into the eyes of a small monkey at the zoo. It’s hard to describe the haunting things I saw there, but I’ll try now to illustrate a point. His eyes were a shade of brown you don’t see in human eyes, a golden root beer, and there was somebody home in there. Placid, but just below the surface I could see the fat serpent swallowing the moon. I imagined I could see some hint of his behavioral coding, that he was connected to his history at every moment, that this monkey was in fact the tip of a temporal mountain that spread backward through time until at its ancestral base there was all of proto-monkeydom. Later, when I envisioned that money’s eyes in my mind, I saw other things. It was all my imagination, not in this monkey. What I saw, in truth, were facets of myself. That thought completed a metaphor that took two decades to construct. As I changed, I saw different things. I will interpret things differently in the future if I continue changing, as I will. I should be careful to study the right things because everything I internalize will be part of that change. I should also be careful not to ignore certain things, the other side of the same coin. In any case, I can still close my eyes and see the monkey’s eyes.

I think about bats now more than I should, but it passes the time. Imagine- a bat enters a cave. CLICK. He hears in the echo the contour of the walls. Imagine if the bat could hear twice as well. Then escalate from there. The grains of sand become evident. Then the topography of spores. Further. The molecules in a falling drop of water. Now imagine the hyper-bat left the cave and faced outward. CLICK. Escalate. That bat would soon be able to read the writing on the surface of a piece of paper on the far side of the world. This is my favorite metaphor for thought. I trade ideas for currency, and the inside of my head is a loud place. I have to listen closely, and the older I get, the better my hearing becomes.

The eyes of the monkey. The ears of the hyper-bat. We should all have thoughts like these. What is a life well lived? I can sometimes hear echoes of the answer, see reflections of it. It has to do with highs and lows, twists and turns, miles beyond measure, movement. I’ve met many guys and after a moment had the curious understanding that I was in the company of a mama’s boy who would go from birth to death without significant pain or turbulence, without ecstasy, without moments of earnest confusion that give rise to at least a measure of what comes from trying to understand anything vast, and so pass from this earth like a cow’s grassy burp gusted into a gentle breeze. As luck would have it, I am not that guy. I take no credit for this. The cosmos and entropy picked my starting point in life, as it did yours. It is better to be one who thinks of monkeys and bats. I have paid for the privilege.

There were good players on the field in my 52nd year. My sweetheart fiance Sylvia is the most positive, bubbly, incredibly kind woman. She likes everyone, but she loves me with all of her great big heart. She tells me so all the time, and I believe her. My Kill Bill agent Stuart Miller, at the very end of the year, in a final feat of sorcery, introduced me to a producer I can’t help but greatly admire. Stu also sent me a miniature Cadillac for my birthday. Thanks bro. My good friends, most of whom forgot my birthday again, are a fine pack of rascals. I feel… Lucky.

Go check out http://www.greatpinkskeleton.com for details. Updated contact page.