Bud Smith's Blog: Bud Smith , page 15

Sitting On The Hood

Yesterday I was driving around looking for a parking spot, skeptical. It was a weird hour.

I drove past my apartment building, scanning the street, side to side, either side of the street would do–but there was nothing.

Other drivers, who’d given up on doing loops–looking–were parked at hydrants. One driver was even sitting outside his car, on the hood, defeated, watching the pink sky where it met the purple sky where it met the orange sky. Night is always coming.

A lot of action happens at fire hydrants.

I made a left and headed away from the river, the bridge, the sky. I’m worried I’ll die in my car like this, searching, and that’s what I’ll be remembered for. It’s what I spend the most time on. And that’s what they remember you for. And now here I am writing about it.

A taxi was double parked ahead, a fare taking a long time to get the hell out. I swerved out of the way, thinking I could squeeze in between the cab and the line of cars parked on the right, but I was wrong.

My passenger side mirror slapped into the parked car’s driver side mirror and ripped it off. My own mirror just budged the tiniest bit.

Well, shit.

At the light I made a left. I followed the loop of the blocks back around, taking one way streets back to the parked car. A trained fish swimming downstream. Driving, guilty. I don’t know, planning to leave a note or slip $20 in the car or something, if the window was open a crack, anything.

On Fort Washington I got stuck at the light, fire trucks and an ambulance coming the wrong way up 176th street. I parked. I waited.

By the time I finally got back to the guy sitting on the hood of his car, the sky was even more purple and the guy was still sitting there defeated. And in front of my building, there was a woman separating glass bottles at the trash. And the car whose mirror I’d ripped off was gone, the spot vacant.

I took the spot. Got out, fixed my mirror. Went in my building.

That’s where I’m still parked, right now. Can see it out my window.

Can also see a woman with a measuring tape and a camera at the hydrant. She’s gotten a ticket and is measuring the space between the hydrant, the broken sidewalk and her SUV. I yell down, “Fifteen feet you need!”

“I got fourteen foot eleven inches,” she says.

Fire hydrants.

Green Flash At Sunset

disaster is okay

the rains will come and your car

will float away down a once ordinary street

or ants will carry it off

I’d rather have rains than ants, myself

fires will glow in the night

we’ll owww and ahhh

as the light flickers over the usually

blackened trees

and even hold our palms out

to catch ash like a kid would catch

a snowflake

got a postcard the other day

from my friend who’s lost his home

two years ago today

he’s doing fine now, though

has an apartment that overlooks the ocean

in a small town where beautiful girls

still roller skate in bikinis like the apocalypse never happened

front of the postcard is a campfire with the word ‘Utopia’

written in comic sans

one day medicine will stop working

the common cold will kill more people

on earth than even, the lowly mosquito

the bride will step on her own dress and fall up the stairs

alcohol will be banned again and we too, will drink blood

the man all alone on the stage will discover his band

has laid down to sleep, middle of the song

the ants will lug away the snowflakes

the postcard has a nice message on the back: “I’m glad we didn’t burn my house down to get the insurance money. It was better to let the bank take the place. It was better that my truck had water over the dashboard. It was better. It was better. I’m looking out my window at the spot where the sky meets the ocean and there was just a green flash at sunset. Have you ever seen that?”

Two Halloween Short Stories.

Happy Halloween Everybunny. I’m sitting here at work, costume-less, but that’s okay–going out tonight bar hopping in NYC and I’ve got a chainsaw hand a ram’s head fur helmet I’m going to wear. Don’t worry, I won’t kill anyone.

Have two Halloween short stories to share today. First of all, I’m real excited that Drunk Monkeys is running my story, “Mi Casa Es Su Casa” which is about a drunk driver who kills a man on a bicycle, fun ensues when the bicyclist shows up again at the man’s house.

http://www.drunkmonkeys.onimpression.com/mi-casa-es-su-casa/

The other story I’d like to share is a halloween story called “Falling Horse, Stacked Demons” which is about a girl who swings a hammer and sings on her way through a bad neighborhood.

http://theneweryork.com/falling-horse-stacked-demons-bud-smith/

Okay, thanks for reading.

What’s everybody being for Halloween this year?

Indirectly Found Jesus

Ordinary life has music, especially. She used to carry a thousand cassettes in her purse. Now she has no purse; lost it somewhere with me. In certain strained dreams, she has a crown she wears of all the fold out liner notes for the greatest albums ever saved from truck stops flanking mundane roads.

“Let’s drive around, anywhere but the malls.”

Delight in the Light, otherwise be crushed flat, otherwise be sexless and only thirteen dollars in your pocket and it matters.

“I’m too broke but not to dance, or syphon gas.”

But with our random radio on, and our wreck of a shaking car and any destination up the road, we’ll eat breath drink fuck live ordinary and never flinch from it.

“Bet we dream like nobody else does.”

“If they do, I’ll kill them, or at least sue them for copyright infringement.”

Her toenails are painted bone white with green flecks like St. Paddy’s. I had half my head shaved like I lost a bet. We left a window open three nights ago and two hundred house flies came in. No matter.

“A floe lives two days, takes three days to come back to life, I’ve heard.”

“Pyramid scheme.”

Instead of solving problems we drove an hour to walk in a muddy field and look at pumpkins, that we picked up, and tossed back and forth like living footballs. Didn’t buy any; don’t have a front step to put jackolanterns on. Only a fire escape they’d fall off at midnight.

“Never seen someone in jean bib overalls scream like that.”

“It happens.”

At the farmstand store, I got a cinnamon donut and a cup of coffee and we split it, driving back, north and kind of east.

“We going the wrong way?”

“The other way is one million miles of nothing.”

“Take me to the river.”

At the last gas station ever, I filled the tank with the remainder balance from a series of daisy-chained gift cards. Hovering above a wall of wheat, there was a billboard missing a question mark that asked, “Found Jesus” or maybe it was saying they found Jesus, he was just walking around in the wheat—they’d finally found him, all quiet and song-less, no cassette tapes either. Him, all extraordinary, and with a bounty on his head.

“You can stop looking now,” told my love. Truth is, everything has slipped between the center console and the passenger seat. We only look to make music.

F-250 reviewed at Blotterature

The first review for my (yet unreleased) new novel, F-250 has come in. The site Blotterature did a write up on the book, and they can explain the whole thing better than I can.

Check the review out http://blotterature.com/2014/10/08/blot-lit-reviews-f250-by-bud-smith/ if you’re interested.

TOO MUCH Release Party/Reading This Saturday

Saturday October 4th, there will be an Unknown Press reading at jimmy 43s in New York City to celebrate the release of the TOO MUCH Anthology. Event starts at 6pm, goes until 9pm.

Here’s a list of the readers that will be at the event:

Robert Vaughan

Michael Gillan Maxwell

Julie Allen

Chuck Howe

Tracey Lander-Garett

Mark Brunetti

Ron Kolm

Senia Hardwick

and James Duncan

Chuck Howe was the lead editor on the TOO MUCH anthology, below is a short interview talking about the project.

Where did the idea for Too Much come from?

I thought the First Time anthology was a great idea. Everyone has a story about their first time. That got me thinking about other universally experienced events. Too Much came to me pretty quickly since maybe I had a few too many Too Much experiences.

What surprised you when submissions started coming in?

The diversity. People took Too Much to mean many thing I had never even thought of. I thought I would get all drunken tales. But Too Much meant something different to everyone. Too Much food, Too Much obsessing, or just having taken Too Much crap. I loved seeing everyone’s perspective on the matter.

Tell me a little bit about the cover art.

Erin McParland is awesome. That’s all I can really say about it. She got the idea and ran with it. I don’t have very much talent in the visual arts, but I like to think I have a good eye. As soon as she showed me the first mock up I said hell yeah.

Do you like to work with writers to edit content?

I didn’t have to do any of that here. The writers all did a great job and I got a lot of submissions. If it needed work, I generally passed on it. This was my first time editing something like this. I figured I would let the writers do their thing content wise and I would just have to worry about proof reading. Maybe the next time, as I gain more confidence as an editor I will feel more comfortable making content suggestions. But for this I felt it wasn’t necessary.

What’d you learn about editing/creative writing over the course of working on Too Much?

I think I will be a much better submitter after this. Extra proof reading. Getting into the meat of the story a little sooner.

The best part of this whole project was being introduced to so many great writers. I knew a few of the submitters before hand. But there were a lot of new great voices that I was introduced to. Even some of the writers who didn’t get in, I now follow a few of them and there are a lot of great writers out there.

Chuck Howe is the author of the book IF I HAD WINGS THESE WINDMILLS WOULD BE DEAD, a collection of linked short stories that follow the author’s own life experiences. He is an editor at Uno Kudo and Unknown Press. He’s a musician and a resident of Westchester New York.

Review of Where Alligators Sleep by Sheldon Compton

 

Paperback: 160 pages
Publisher: Foxhead Books (August 22, 2014)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 1940876087
ISBN-13: 978-1940876085
Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.4 inches

 

On a couple downtown subway rides I read Where Alligators Sleep. I first got locked into the short story “Case Study” about a railway foreman who has a tamping iron go through his eye and out the top of his head. When the injured man sneezes at the doctor’s office, a teacup full of his brains hit the floor. The foreman survives his injuries and uses the tamping iron as a weapon, when killing a man with it while working for the circus. These are the kinds of things that Sheldon Lee Compton is fixated on, the dark circle of one’s life and the ramifications of cruel and random dread. The narrator in “Case Study” is a man who says, “It’s fear that makes us the most human. I’d trade a thousand peaceful nights for one second of fear.”

Where Alligators Sleep concentrates on hard lives. Hard lives written well. I’ve read a lot of flash fiction in the last few years and most of it hovers on the fridges of the bizarre, the other worldly, the near-supernatural. Where Alligators Sleep is different. Sheldon Lee Compton is mostly a realist, writing about reality and all of its ugly consequence.

Stories here strike a match in a dark room. Even when the narrator is a famous gunman/folk hero, as in “Billy the Kid After the Photo Shoot” where Billy explains, as only a gunman can, what true love is and why you’d kill a person for telling you to stop grinning, or, why you wouldn’t kill them. In “Textbook” a girl suffers through biology class, her mind on a bigger problem of her own, than a mouse about to get eaten by a boa constrictor.

Standout story, “The Shiniest Shoes In The Graveyard” is about a man attending his father’s funeral and recalling how proud his dad would be to know that the grave isn’t being dug by the family with their own shovels in hand, but by a man with a backhoe.

Another standout, “Random Things at the Bottom and the Beginning of My Cliche” is a trip through the Polaroid snapshots of a youth spent growing up in the south. The story eats cliches for lunch. It crushes nostalgia in its bloody jaws. It’s writing done with a wrecking ball.
Check this book out if you like your beauty to be laced with darkness. The evening news if the newscasters were fucked up poets. The humanity is deep in these pages and the read moves along like a downtown subway, through much underground darkness, that explodes up into the unexpected light of 125th street. A surprise.

Raining.

It’s raining like crazy here and I’m sitting in the work truck, watching the rain soak a chemical plant in New Jersey. That’s the state of things.

Nine New Poems Published at Negative Suck

good morning! Just woke up, just put Beethoven’s 7th on my little record player. I need bacon and eggs and a gallon of coffee. Got an email from Negative Suck, that the fall issue is running now and they have something like nine poems from yours truly. A few years ago when I started sending submissions around, I thought Negative Suck had the best name of any lit zine. What do you think? What’s your best lit zine name nomination?

here’s the poems from the issue:

Poem Written While You Cut My Hair; Punk Rock Rituals; New Love; Details of the War; First Date; Poem Written While Searching, When I’m Drunk At PF Chang’s With Aaron Dietz; Mad Max Visits New Jersey; It’s Only July

read it here

In other news, tomorrow is Sunday September 21st, and that means two things, #1, the Brooklyn Book Festival, so I hope to run into some of you there(?)(oh please), and #2, tomorrow night I’ll be reading at La Poisson Rouge with theNewerYork, and damn, I think it’s going to be a real great time. They’ve set it up like a performance rather than a reading. Shout out if you’re in NYC this weekend and going to the festival.

Review: King Shit by Brian Alan Ellis

King Shit by Brian Alan Ellis
House of Vlad (2014)
paperback, 60 pages

synopsis: A Chihuahua-toting Mexican dressed as Santa Claus. A cross-dressing bartender. A drunk, philosophizing “Classy” Fred Blassie look-alike. Two rockabilly-greaser junkies. A bow-legged burlesque dancer and her angry dwarf lover. A man in a smelly lavender suit who rides a mobile jukebox. A quarreling, beer-spitting couple. No, this isn’t The Breakfast Club. This is a not-so-glorious night in the life of Elvis McAllister: factory worker, storyteller, Graceland enthusiast, and overall hornball. Join him and his knife-wielding sidekick, Ralph, as they bar-crawl the “Sick-Sad” avenues and alleyways of questionable hopes and dashed dreams.

review: I grew up in flea markets. I grew up in a campground in New jersey. I grew up at the Seaside boardwalk, a slimy place, where everything was half tilted and bizarre. King Shit reminds me of where I come from. King Shit reminds me of the kind of art I used to be seek out when I was browsing through Captain Video, looking at VHS in cardboard sleeves. Brian Alan Ellis is writing works that are all these things: funny, doomed, water damaged, drunk, high, unfiltered. I like that. I identify with that. Maybe his characters are saying some things that shouldn’t be said out in public, and hooray for them. This a work of fiction written outside of a writer’s workshop, but instead, maybe written in the basement of a VFW hall, right before the hardcore bands show up. Right before the spiked punks in their leather jackets show up. Right before the night gets weird, violent, skewed. The other good thing about this book, is that it’s illustrated in a way that is reminiscent of one of my favorite books, Vonnegut’s “Breakfast of Champions”. The drawings in both books are perfect and they give absolutely zero fucks whatsoever. King Shit, is a bar crawl adventure, written as novella. Can be read on the toilet, but your ass will be numb by the time you’re finished. Can be read at the DMV waiting to get called, but you’ll probably start flipping chairs and screaming when the book is done and they still haven’t called you. Can be read at a bar. But that’s kind of silly, bars are for other things. I recommend reading this one in jail or at work, can’t go wrong there. When a book takes itself this un-seriously, I can’t stop doing the happy happy dance