Wayne Allen Sallee

OK. I have no idea what that means. I just want to get this thing rolling. Somehow, in some way, I am writing this at 11 PM on Sunday the 27th because I worked today at the plant. For eleven hours. Go figure. I went to bed last night expecting to dream of Erica the blonde pharmacist at Walgreen’s who makes certain I’m not skipping my bipolar meds (and maybe that’s a hint for me to ask her out, the fact that I’m taking my meds in a timely way). Thinking to myself, yea, rainy day Sunday, write the essay, work on the comic, nap, dream of Erica ,alternate between reading George Pelecanos and Lesbian Pirates From Outer Space…then the phone rang at 7 AM. And that was that. I’m going to get through this now, then flop down and most likely dream the entire 108 minutes of CARNIVAL OF SOULS within an hour of waking up (all the better to feel like complete roadkill when I dream that early in the morning; I can’t have dreams about zombies that make me get up at 3 AM and urinate like the average person…)

Stalkers. A few weeks back, I mentioned to the SU group that I received an odd comment on one of my SU entries from 2007. I good-naturedly asked if anyone in the group had ever dealt with stalkers, or, what years ago might have been called “hangers on.” Well, one person I had never heard of was mentioned, and I again realized how out of the loop I am these days. I never even heard of the individual. I won’t mention her/his name because I am told she/he Googles her/himself regularly. I do the same, and somehow when I hit page 73, my name shows up alongside the phrase “sailor moon hentai penguins,” but there you have it. But there are many different ways to encounter the crazies that are crazier than we are, and I’m here to recount several instances of people who spend too much time up on Hard Rock Candy Mountain.

I have participated in book signings at several locations here, the Printers Row Book Fair, the TwilightTales readings at the Red Lion, and at the late, lamented The Stars, Our Destination. Before I tell you about the “it doesn’t matter” girl, I will say that I once had a man come up to me at Stars to have me sign a copy of SPLATTERPUNKS. The guy showed interest in wanting to co-write a story with me, then told me he had never read a story of mine and did not know who I was. All this before I even finished signing the book or spoke a single word. The kicker is that the guy had an old-timey plaster cast on his arm, the fuzz was coming out of the thumb area, and this oozy stuff like melted mac and cheese was caking to the book as I handed it to him. He tried to make further conversation in the cramped book aisles, and I recall sticking my finger in my ear and pretending to be receiving messages from the mother ship. Never saw the guy again, but I still recall that mac and cheese, which is why I likely will eat a bug before I open up macaroni.

The “it doesn’t matter” girl is another Stars story, though the origins starts about a year earlier. My chapbook PAINGRIN was published in 1993, and one night I received a call from *ahem* Stanislaus Darnbrook Colson Tal Emerson Lake & Palmer. He wanted to pass on the contents of a letter from some woman who lived in nearby Skokie, was deeply moved by my diary entries, and he gave me her phone number. Well, I had seen Griffin Dunne in AFTER HOURS, I should have known better. We talked a bit, she wanted to have lunch, it was a Friday during the summer, I thought what, I mean, WHAT could it hurt to meet her? She gave me an address off Clark and Kinzie. I’m thinking its that German restaurant now demolished. I see a big green building with no sign, no windows. Maybe it’s a trendy place with a side door, a back entrance. The sign to be read from the bridge or the elevated train. It was a methadone clinic. She comes out with this giant-size sippy cup of, I guess, methadone, and we go off jauntily to have lunch and run into her drug-addled friends. I’m thinking, boy, I am screwed. She is introducing me like I’m Jeremy Piven and she’s Drew Barrymore, only more like if her eyes were made of glass and made me think of John Barrymore, lying in a coffin with a sippy cup stuck to his embalmed lip. At one point, she went on the nod and I blew town.

She found me. Hell, she knew my name. It’s not like I use the name Vinnie Cthulhu or Mitchum Marlboro Spartacus. So I’m at Stars signing YEAR’S BEST HORROR:XX, and I’m sitting next to my artist friend H. E. Fassl. She waves, Harry says “who she?” and I mutter “it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter it doesn’t matter” before she shows up and slurs surprisingly coherent sentences to me. She started attending conventions, mostly hanging out with the goth crowd, and ended up becoming good friends with Karl Edward Wagner that last year of his life. I was at Yvonne Navarro’s house, one of her VonCons, when she called to tell me Karl had died. Then she went to live with R. Chetwynd-Hayes.

But there is one guy I have never been able to shake, going on twenty years now. He has three names, as most serial killers do, and, well, yea, me, too. I first met him when I worked at a comics shop on Archer Avenue, and he was all into MK-ULTRA and mind control–the in thing for the summer of 1991, evidently–and he also told me that he worked on computer programs overseas. Being 1991, and being me, I thought he was designing the new Ms. Pac-Man. Then he started showing up at, yes, Stars Our Destination, and, yes, Printers Row, and then I’d get off the subway and walk above ground and he’d be riding by on his bicycle, fer cry-eye! This last did indeed happen, and I began to question my very reality. Phil Dick was alive and well and was writing about my life.

I didn’t see him for months, and then he showed up at a TwilightTales reading. He explained in whispers that he had not been around because he had been working as a military contractor in Iraq. I couldn’t pretend I was getting transmissions from the mother ship with this guy, because he was piloting the damn mother ship! I sent Mort Castle a photo of this guy, who is in the background off a photo of Mort and I at World Horror 02 here in Chicago. Remind Mort it’s the guy in the bright green lei, trying desperately to get in on our conversation.

I saw him two summers ago at Clark and Belmont simply because I chose to walk on the wrong side of the street, or so Phil Dick would want me to believe, and I was able to brush him off fairly quickly, as he did know I had a certain time frame to get my last el train home. Oh, I forgot to mention the time he walked into The Gallery Bookstore and I hid behind the stack of recent acquisitions until he passed by and I could sneak out.

So those are my tales, my anecdotes, what have you. I’m certain there are other tales to be told, by some of you reading this, hopefully by nobody Googling this. Hell, someone might come across this entry simply by typing in ‘hentai penguins.’

Until next time.

Wayne Allen Sallee
Burbank, Illinois 28 April 2008

By Wayne Allen Sallee

I keep wondering each time the 28th of the month rolls around exactly when I’ll be typing my piece without snow on the ground. Well, OK, its mostly hail today. The hard snow that eventually bounces into Indiana, once its banged off my huge, middle-aged nose a few times. It is spring here, there are maybe two days in a row that one can feel it, not the temperature, but the sound of early morning birds and evening gulls in the parking lots. It’s the gulls and mournful they sound that bring up moments in the past, a gull with a broken wing I saw on a grey Good Friday who seemed resigned at his eventual doom. And from that I can recall most of that entire evening and weekend. Charles Gramlich, a writer displaced from New Orleans by Katrina and FEMA, hipped me to the term “iceberg memories.” Just as my dreams are incredibly detailed, in fact, the gulls and grey skies are repeaters along with the expected el trains and buses.

Music is probably the biggest instigator for iceberg memories that I may or may not choose to use in a story. This past Monday, I was up north for the book launch of HELL IN THE HEARTLAND, an anthology of stories set in Illinois, and Mike Martinez gave me a CD mix. Mind you, I still have an 8-track that could tape blank 8-tracks, and a cassette player with mixes from the early 90s. When one cassette broke, Charles’ wife Lana fixed it. While I had tried to fix it myself–imagine Jerry Lewis as a brain surgeon–I played my DEATHPROOF CD and kept Jack Nietzche’s “The Last Race” on repeat. Louder each time. Of course, when I got the cassette back, I realized I had Rick Dees’ “Disco Duck” on side two, right before “King Tut.” The only iceberg memory from that is the fact that I drank a lot in 1994 and assumedly had way too much time on my hands. Now, Mike had basically offered to burn some songs by The Ides of March and add a few other songs of his choosing. And what’s incredible about the mix is that most songs really do bring back memories for me. In a big way, images that I have put in my stories and used as springboards for other pieces.

Before I go on with a partial list, I ask if the same goes for those reading. I know music plays a large part of a writer’s life. I enjoy typing to Glenn Gray’s Cosa Loma Orchestra from the 1920s or Eartha Kitt’s song from the 50s. All I need to get back in my brain is the horns or Kitt’s voice and the crack of the ice in my glass of water. My Frankenstein’s laboratory is certainly different than most would expect. But, the memories this mix brings back, some spot on with stories I’ve written, songs I’ve mentioned.

Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love” was first, and it brought me back to Rogers Park, where I lived with three artists. I had a manual typewriter, a stack of SASE’s, and it seemed like I never stopped typing as my roommates listened to new wave. A song I wish was on the CD is Nena’s “99 Luftballoons,” if only so I could get the lyrics of “99 Words For Boobs” out of my head. Its on YouTube, and the damn phrase I keep mumbling at the bus stop is “comfy pillows and Don DiLillos.” “Lake Shore Drive” by Aliotta Haynes and Jeremiah is THE Chicago song. I first heard the song in the early 80s, and when I lived north in Rogers Park, well, everyone was on LSD “Friday night trouble bound” one way or another. I have several stories set in Denver, and two characters in a record shop vie for the 45 RPM, one giving it up so he could get Robert Mitchum’s “Calypso, Is Like So…” instead. George Pelecanos tends to put references to a ton of music in his crime novels, characters will drive through have of Washington DC arguing about which band had the best cover of some Marvin Gaye song. Pelecanos is much richer than I am in musical knowledge. Well, he’s much richer than I am, period.

“The Weight,” by The Band. I was starving in Bellair, Illinois, pop. 54 in the summer of 1983. There’s a long story to how I ended up in this town, living in a yellow house with no windows and writing for a farm supplement that went into the Casey Daily Reporter. I could never cash my checks because, well, you know, I was a hippie from up thar by Chicagah. The guy who got this writing thing in motion split with some chippee half his age about three weeks into it; there were eight writers who starved. Mark Rainey published my long poem “A Rural Truth As Ugly” in DEATHREALM, the first of many mentions of this experience. In other stories, I basically kill the same man only giving him different names, the bastard who left me calling for my father to pick me up because I had only eaten one pack of Saltines in three days. I still had cuts on my fingers from when me and Bob McCoppin stole a can of Mighty Dog from a back porch and almost cried when we realized we had no can opener. We used pens and then tried to scoop the stuff out, slicing ourselves as little as possible. The stuff tasted like cookie dough served in Hell. But Bob had a cassette of The Band’s Greatest Hits, and we sang the words to “The Weight” as loud as we could, shoving this crap down our throats, blood from our fingers making us look like Heath Ledger’s Joker.

The Ides of March. Their work is hard to come by, though you can hear “Vehicle” on most 70s stations. “I’m a friendly stranger in a black sedan…” That one, and “L. A. Goodbye” really send me back. The latter song has been playing on jukeboxes in several stories, and in THE HOLY TERROR. The band is long gone, but Jim Steronik lives in nearby Berwyn, looks twenty years younger than me, and has written about 80 songs for other singers that have made the Billboard 100. Virtually my whole life in the decade before my first writing was published in a saddle-stitched book out of Detroit called BEATNIKS FROM SPACE, all on one CD. There are other songs I could mention, but this essay seems one-sided. I hope some of you will imagine me and the Mighty Dog when hearing “The Weight” again. Do any of you put certain songs in your works on a conscious level? If I drift away enough, the closing guitar riff on “L.A. Goodbye” fades into the sounds of the gulls I hear every night as I walk home. As always, thanks for reading…

–Wayne

Wayne Allen Sallee

I had thought about calling this month’s entry “Butcher’s Raindance.” Sounds like a good story title, right? Even though I have no idea what it might be about…yet. Is it a ritual done by a serial killer, the dance being the way he sanitizes his crime scenes? Is it a song by an emo band (or whatever kind of music genre my oldest niece listens to these days), which, now that I’ve typed that, I realize I’d give up that route right now.

Butcher’s Raindance is the name of the floor-cleaning product used by Cardinal Cleaning twice a week at the printing plant where I work. A splash of blue in the mop bucket. There’s a Sundance product, I assume more of a disinfectant, but I’m really not keen on writing Butcher Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Call my silly. But the other product gave me two words that are enigmatic when slapped together, and I have it set aside in my commonplace book to use one day. The title above it is “The Brides of Science.”

Back in the day, Mort Castle offered me a chance to write a chapter for the Writer’s Digest book ON WRITING HORROR. It was already titled “Mirror, Mirror” and the point of discussion was where does a writer NOT get his ideas? Mort, being the wandering sage he is, had chosen me because I could come up with anything from that day’s news to simple scenes of the different levels of hierarchy in the citizens of Chicago, chain smoking executives bumping past the accordion man wearing shorts in November, or the preacher talking about the evils of tobacco and trying to convert shoppers at Old Navy on Washington Boulevard. I also added to the images, taking the “mirror” to be the bus or elevated train window, or even one’s own mirror seen first thing in the morning or the last thing at night.

Well, I’ve got this thing about my story titles. Certainly some images such as I describe above get my mind thinking, but I always, always, need a title before I write a story. I might know the ending line, but I cannot truly squeeze out a good opening line unless I have that title. One of most well-received cop stories, “In The Shank Of The Night,” is an example of where I had the title in my journal. When asked about it, I refer people to an overlooked Dean Martin song, “In The Cool, Cool, Cool Of The Evening.” In the shank of the night, if the doin’s are right, you can tell them I’ll be there. Yet “The Brides of Science” has been around for longer than “Shank”, which was published in 2005 in SEX CRIMES. I wrote a story called “Bumpy Face,” after learning it was slang for a cheap of cheap booze in a beveled pint bottle sold in the Loop. It took me five years to realize what or who Bumpy Face was, at times I even sunk to the point of thinking it might be a mutated hamster. Instead it became a story about an alcoholic and his daughter and statements given to the police. Looks like I’m ready to beat that gap in time with “Brides.” Hell, even my novel, THE HOLY TERROR, was a short story, a nice polack phrase from my childhood was that a kid could be a real holy terror. Peggy Nadramia from GRUE magazine sent it back, telling me that the story had all the elements for a novel. “For You, The Living” by Roadkill Press. A line from “Monster Mash.”

I’m a big short fiction reader, I suspicion it is more because I commute by bus or train instead of the fact that I write short fiction. So, if I have a collection by various authors, I will choose by title than by author or page length. Next to me on my desk, I have a copy of HELL IN THE HEARTLAND, which has stories, including one by me with a title I truly dislike, all written by Illinois authors and set in our state of five month long winters. Looking at the table of contents, I’d likely read “Wet Dog Perfume” by Michael Penkas first. The title stands out. The next book I have here is HIGH COTTON, a collection by Joe R. Lansdale, his ownself. How the hell to choose, right? Mind you, I’ve read many of these stories over the past decade, but sometimes you gotta re-read something simply because you need a reminder of how screwed up the world is through another writer’s eyes. I’d choose “Not From Detroit” right off the bat, just for the quickness of the title, followed by “Tight Little Stitches On A Dead Man’s Back,” because that story could mean so many different things.

Do any of the collected authors here have similar problems with titles? I don’t always use a title that comes back to be a phrase in the story, such as I did with the Bumpy Face image. I have a story about a nice doctor in my old polack neighborhood of Humboldt Park who becomes a vampire, and he chooses to end the suffering of many of his patients by biting them in turn. Most were invalids, or in wheelchairs, and I played on their chronic pain being gone in their new lives, therefore keeping Chicago–or at least the Polish neighborhoods–free from a plague of vampires. The story is called “Skin of My Birthright,” and I simply despise it! I could think of nothing better, nothing that wouldn’t smack of yet another typical vampire story, and, frankly, I have no freaking idea what the title even means!

But where the hell does the title of my essay figure into things, you say? Well, recently someone was screwing around at my parents’ 49th anniversary party and was going to beknight my father. In doing so, he sniffed the familiar odor of my father’s hair, and there you have it, Sir Brylcreem.

I’ll eventually write something using that title, possibly a nonfiction piece for KENTUCKY EXPLORER, my father’s home state. Until that time, I need to figure out what “Butcher’s Raindance” will be about…

Your chattel,

Wayne

Wayne Allen Sallee

November 28th 2007

I’ve been giving a lot of interviews lately, though none really touch on anything I am promoting. Upagianstthewall (on Phil Nutman’s website), and Doorways magazine. Dark Scribe ran an interview, but it was mostly about my witnessing John Wayne Gacy’s execution and my correspondence with him in the early 90s. (One of my albatrosses, along with being remembered for “Rapid Transit, my first dad-blasted story). But David Bainbridge asked some pretty decent questions of me for Doorways, ending with talking about my day job. I mentioned being 48, making ten bucks an hour with no health insurance, then adding that that is this century’s American Dream: simply having a job.

I created a character called The American Dream, he appeared in stories back when I was of a different frame of mind. He wore a heating pad for a cape, had wrist braces as gloves, an invisible sidekick named Blind Justice. A utility belt of plastic baggies filled with pain meds and sinus sprays. But he served his purpose, I got to write stories with Evan Shustak (his real name) as my alter ego, he could handle his daily pain, if only with insanity, the sphincter-shrinking thoughts of craziness I was constantly fretting about in the 90s. Of course, I’m on the bipolar meds now. But I wrote the craziest things when he was involved and it helped me cope. Through the winters, mostly. Hard to believe a time when there were the harsh keystrokes on a manual typewriter. And no spell-check, I should have had stock in Liquid Paper. I wonder how many people put themselves into their characters, the loners like Marv in SIN CITY, Travis McGee, or Superman. I was always partial to thinking that I would continue to act as noble as Steve Carella in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, as I went further into adulthood, maybe looking for voices of reason in a world I found increasingly tough to continue living through. I wanted to be the guy who maybe only got tension headaches from an unsolved murder. The American Dream stories were the only ones I wrote at the time that weren’t not narratives, though I cheated at times by having Evan write in his diary, much as I wrote my stories on the buses and el trains. As I said, his stories were fairly silly, to hide my real life.

But I’m nearing the Half Century Man mark, and I keep reading about a better breed of bastard more and more, from molesting priests to wife-killers to models who try to commit suicide by ramming another person’s car at 87 MPH. People who get away with things, so I decided I needed another alter ego. I have a series of stories centered around a serial killer named Jimmy Dvorak, Every Mother’s Son. All the stories involve people who really needed to be dead to be dead, dead and gone. See, as an adult I have to watch my blood pressure, and I can get relief from those “little maniacs,” as Richard Chwedyk calls them, by giving them justice in my stories. There’s been a story in the news from downstate Illinois about a woman who made up a fake name on MySpace to lead a 14 year old girl with low self-esteem on and then taunting her enough that the girl hung herself in her bedroom closet. I read that article online on Thanksgiving Day and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Of course, the woman, a neighbor in the family’s same subdivision, can’t be convicted. Not even for a hate crime. Its the kind of bullying that would make other students go Columbine or VA Tech if they were male and the name calling was happening face to face and not by a cowardly woman hiding behind a fake male identity.

Its time for me to send Every Mother’s Son on the road again. And to be brutally honest, in this one case, because it involves someone who was my niece and godchild’s age, I’d really like to go down to O’Fallon myself. I don’t think it would be hard to get a neighbor to point a finger in the right direction. Its a small town, plus the subdivision was mentioned in the article. I read the Act of Contrition every day now because of moments like this. Its better than it being Proactive Contrition, where I expect to be absolved of crimes after the fact. I had wanted to do a riff on Lovecraft and write a story called “The Colour Off of MySpace,” but I don’t think I can do that now.

And I want to get people to believe that I am SIMPLY a writer, a writer of all things, but, thanks to “Rapid Transit” and my Freddy Krueger story and all the stuff that made me get noticed Back In The Day, well, if someone backed me into a corner and asked me why I was a horror writer, I’d ask them to pay attention to the crap going on around them, and gently push the MySpace newspaper article across the dinette as they sipped their green tea and ate their wheat crackers.

Thanks again for your time.

Your chattel,

Wayne Allen Sallee

Burbank, Illinois

by Wayne Allen Sallee

You can thank Mr. Wilson for reeling me back in from the troposphere. Last month I had fully intended to do an entry about how writers, at times, have to write on the holidays–May 28th was Memorial Day–but I was in the middle of a private meltdown. Almost all my stories are thinly-veiled autobiograhical, so one day I’ll email everyone a nice story about a crazy bald guy blah blah blah.

Needless to say, Dave told me not to bail on SU, that I had something to bring to the table each month like everyone else, and to not think of the 28th as my day to write an essay, but to think of it as another blog entry. You know this guy was in the military, he would not let me leave this place. (Not saying its Iraq or anything, of course). So here goes:

I had to put on my Robert Mitchum CD to get settled after coming in from work. I couldn’t get Rascal Flatt’s “Life Is A Highway” out of my head for hours. I didn’t hear it on the radio today, I didn’t watch CARS with my nieces, I DON’T DRIVE, so why its in my head (or was, until Bobby the Mitch started singing “Thunder Road”) is beyond me.

Most of what I’m typing here was written down while I worked at the graphics shop this afternoon. Call me Jonny Analog, I still write things down as my first draft. After I fill a notebook, I send it to someone. Once I sent a journal to Peggy Nadramia (editor of GRUE) and she called me, thinking I was going to jump off a bridge because I had parted with something so important. Its almost funny, because now I can write my deepest thoughts (or my purpleist prose, and there I go making up yet another new word, recognized only by me), and “burn” them on a disk or simply email them to several dozen people. Or post them as a blog entry. This is my brain. This is my brain online. Any questions?

I had a specific topic in mind when I titled this post. I’ve been proofreading my past. I wrote a novel back in 1992, THE HOLY TERROR. Later this year, Midnight Library will publish a mass market 15th Anniversary edition of the book, with a new Forward by me relating how page 243 languished in my word processor for 68 days because I was hit by a car after leaving my doctor’s office, and how I wrote in snippets between operations on the mangled bones in my only good limb, my left arm, and when I couldn’t write, Yvonne Navarro received the supreme pleasure of typing chapters after deciphering my Demerol-slurred voice on an old-timey cassette recorder.

The book is set in downtown Chicago during the winter of 1989–I was hit by the car on March 18th of that year–and so many of the buildings and local iconography like Gold Coast Dogs that I mentioned are gone, replaced by parking garages for the high-rise condos next door. Its not like rereading, say, PROTOTYPE by the illustrious Brian Hodge. There is nothing directly definable within those pages as, say, the city streets in my book, but I remember Brian as he was writing the book, hell, I knew him before his second novel saw print.

But there is a weird sensation to again read a book by someone you know closely, as I do Brian and Beth. I look back to the early to mid-90s when there were no computers or dozens of area codes, and I’d receive letters from other Brian, Beth, and other writers on dot-matrix printers. Then the Pentium chip came along and I started falling behind everyone else in the sense of keeping in touch. Technology is my worst enemy. One of my stories, “Mitch,” is available as a podcast and I barely know what a podcast is. I’ve never seen one, except when someone burns one for me on a CD. However one burns a CD (just kidding, I’m not the Unabomber when it comes to these contraptions).

One of the extra AOL screen names I have is DrMilesBennel, after the main character in Jack Finney’s INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS. One by one, my friends became sucked into cyberspace, pods pulsating as they grew beneath the computer desk in each home. I was no longer in the race, keeping pace with handwritten script, rather moving along with one typing finger, two on a good day. Never mind the pain caused by the fine motor function of touching the keys. (I can lift an eighty pound box, as I did earlier this afternoon at work, with no problem whatsoever, yet typing a word with three syllables–for example, syllables, ha ha–sends shards of glass into my neck and back).

I’m an old coot nearing the age of 48 and don’t care to use voice activation software because, well, because I tried and the damn program still isn’t that big a help (it can’t quite grasp my stuttering words which I do when spasming), and also because after I’m dead I’d like whoever is left reading my work realizes I never tried to do things the easy way. Mind you, I’m not pissing and moaning now. Certainly, I wish it was fifteen years ago and the world itself was a little bit simpler, conventions were a hell of a lot cheaper to attend, not just me trying to type and sell my stories to print magazines not e-zines or whatever they were called when this whole internet thing started.

I finally got a new friend of mine to submit a story for some werewolf anthology (online, of course, not an actual #%$#%$ book). She emailed me back all worried that she hadn’t heard anything back and was certain that her story was reviled. This was TWO DAYS LATER. I explained how it was Back In The Day, feeling increasingly older with every sentence. Sure, it was the first time she had sent out a story, but it shows the immediacy of everything now. If I am writing a new story, I’m not looking at my email for at least a week, never mind answering any of it. Its not that I can’t multi-task, its that I’m too damn slooowwww at doing more than one thing at the same time.

Oh, gee, look at the time. I suppose I’ve taken up enough of yours for this month. I don’t think I’ve written anything that the collective readership can learn from, I just did what Dave said and approached this as if there were a bunch of us sitting around a table in between panels at some unnamed convention.

Though its OK with me if someone starts the legend of a bent over bald guy named Jonny Analog, an urban myth who shambled from town to town, babbling odd stories about having to use self-addressed stamped envelopes and ink pens and other things from the dark ages.

Wayne Allen Sallee
jonalgiers@aol.com

Wayne Allen Sallee
04.28.07

Okay, bad pun. I’ll admit it. But at least a large amount of the SU group will get the reference; I used this as an entry title on my blog, and I know the cigarette slogan went right over the head of most of my readers. (I digress, as usual, but that advertisement had to be meant for people who drove cars. How the hell FAR is a mile that makes Camels so special? I’d walk a mile for a damn Butterfinger). But my attempt was to find a witty way to throw a new word I’d learned into my title.

I am sometimes amazed at how long it takes me to read up on certain things. In my twenties I learned about solipsism from reading Philip K. Dick. Ten years after that, I learned about vestigial twins–too much, actually–from researching a story for one of Ellen Datlow’s anthologies, LITTLE DEATHS. (A cousin in Kentucky that I use as the Cook County Medical Examiner in my stories because of her medical knowledge mailed me a packet of photos from a manual that would make pictures of suicide bombers on Rotten.com seem tame).

And a week ago, while reading a website about the tv show LOST, of all things, I learned about Julian Jaynes and his theory about the bicameral mind. Right now, this aspect of my thought process is at work; I am thinking in my head as if I were talking out loud, hesitating as I choose words to make each paragraph into its’ separate brick.

Jaynes was a professor in Princeton who wrote a book in 1976 entitled THE ORIGIN OF CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BREAKDOWN OF THE BICAMERAL BRAIN. The simplest way to explain his ideas are to compare modern-day schizophrenics with ancient cultures who believed that the “other voice” in their head, i.e., the one I’m using now, was a religious vision. He gives a literary example in Homer’s THE ILIAD, stating that “there is in general no consciousness” in the tale. There is no subjectivity, the heroes of the book heard voices from various gods whom pushed the men about like robots. The men from The Iliad had no internal mind-space to provide for introspection. An argument could be made for, say, the Epic of Gilgamish, a tale from out of Mesopotamia which predates Homer’s work and illustrates the ideas of individual volition and emotions. The flip side of that is that the original writer is unknown and changes could have been made as the story was told repeatedly over centuries, a retroactive continuity of sorts.

Some brief brain biology here: there are three speech areas in our grey matter, the supplemental motor cortex, Broca’s area, and Wernicke’s area, the last of which is responsible for human speech. Jaynes focused on the corpus callosum, that little bridge as narrow and curved as one of Homer Simpson’s two remaining head hairs, that collects information from the temporal lobe cortex, but also the middle gyrus of the temporal lobe in Wernicke’s area.. If I think to myself how I’d like to walk a mile for a Camel, one of my ancestors might be hearing a voice he thought was God, possibly a benevolent one who thought that all tobacco lobbyists should burn in Hell.

I do my best writing when I am using first-person narrative, I write a bit faster and more excitedly, the atmosphere of Chicago–its’ smells, sounds, its’ entire being– is lost if I try and write something descriptive without it meaning something to the person describing it. As another example, it would take me much longer to write this if I was asked to write an article without the use of first-person. (Yea, yea, I can hear Dave from here, saying, if you’re so fast, why am I getting this in my email basket when I wake up on Saturday morning?!!!). Blame my bicameral mind, I think too much in my narrator voice–tonight I “sound” like William Demerast, Uncle Charlie, from MY THREE SONS, frazzled as I try to squeak this out before Dave wakes up at the crack of dawn– before actually writing, and then typing, it down.

My first published story, “Rapid Transit,” is the personal albatross around my neck. A lot of people seem to like it, and it has been reprinted seven times in four languages (Brian Hodge and I share having our stories reprinted in a Danish book, along with Joe R. Lansdale’s “Bubba Ho-Tep,” God help those throughout Finland). But there is not one shred of dialogue in the story, about a man who witnesses a murder from the elevated train platform and is too cowardly to do anything to stop the deed. But there is a huge sensory overload, a heaping helping of the intersection of 23rd and Western on a warm October Chicago night in Sallee-o-Vision.

Compared to my later work, I see that very few of those sights and sounds came from Dennis Cassady’s mind; it was me describing the area in photographic detail– I still take photos for later reference–tossing in a few nuggets about the smells of certain restaurants and fast food chains. But it wasn’t cowardly Cassady using his five senses; he only accomplishes this later in the story when he has nightmares about what he saw. My next published story, “Heartless,” about–get this–a guy who doesn’t get a Valentine and wakes up after a drunk night out to find a human heart in the mail slot of an apartment, at least had a sense of the main character initiating the descriptions of the bar scenes and the, um, gooey mess that dripped from…well, enough said already.

Years ago, as I waited on downtown train platforms in weather too cold to scribble in, I would talk into a small cassette recorder, much to the disdain of people who most likely now are carrying on conversations wearing one of those cell phone things that fits in your ear like a piece of designer shrapnel. Back in the eighties, I might have been a lunatic when it came to seeming one-sided conversation. I despise technology, as most of you know, but I found a battered cell phone a few months back; I carry it with me to pretend I’m getting a call to avoid having conversations with opinionated buffoons who seem to populate only the bus stops where I am waiting each day and evening.

There are still times that I will talk out loud, just to hear myself say something that I will then understand to be foolish or wrong to write in some certain passage. More often, it is that inner voice that sounds it out, which might be a lot easier if my consciousness sounded like Robert Mitchum and not Phyllis Diller after smoking a blunt.

My inner voice is now asking Dave if it is time for me to climb back in off the window ledge and let the next guy have some room. If you need me, I’ll be somewhere out in back.

Of my skull.

—-Wayne Allen Sallee
jonalgiers@aol.com

By Wayne Allen Sallee

In the spring of 1996, at my granddaddy Grover’s funeral, I turned to my cousin Denise and said “We are our parents now.” My grandmother had died in 1992, and my point was that the generations had shifted. In an abstract way, we were now older and more mature, within four short years. Denise recalled my words when we spoke a few days ago.

I’ve been selling my stories for over two decades now, I was selling to GRUE at the same time Beth and Brian were two of the “rising stars” on the cover of THE HORROR SHOW. I had yet to meet some of you on this list, to others I am still an enigma. But as far as I am concerned, I am no longer part of the current generation of horror, indeed probably have not been since the last century. Some of our grandfathers, such as Richard Matheson, are still around stirring trouble, while most–Karl Edward Wagner, Robert Bloch, Evan Hunter (Ed McBain), and Charles Grant–have passed on to that great spinning rack in Heaven-Eleven, where we all expect to be one day, sharing shelf space with Slim Jims and Johnny Paycheck cassettes.

Pretty damn scary, when I think about how many people I have come to know over the years, since my first convention in Providence in 1986, some who gave up on writing too soon, out of frustration or simply because of family concerns, others who kept punching and kicking through all the necessary doors. And here we all are, most of us hovering around either side of the half century mark.

I find myself being a parent. As often as I can, when I am not trying to struggle with my own writing (I didn’t say I was a great parent!), I will provide moral support to new writers who really do not know anything about the publishing field, never even having been hurt by receiving their first rejection slip via email. (For those who didn’t catch it, I replied on Janet’s entry that I once received a handwritten rejection note dated 1956, three years before my birth. Maybe they were trying to tell me something and it wasn’t a misprint at all).

I work with a guy named Barton Fanning, about ten years my junior, who has a fantastic grasp of Lovecraftian prose. We work at separate computers in the middle of a press room, looking like Emeril and The Iron Chef at our huge flat box-like work stations, talking about everything from Cthulhu to Chick Tracts. His wife, Deb, is a pretty decent poetry writer, too. Even though I am not in any way a literary role model, having chosen my own Sallee patois over actual sentence structure, I have encouraged Bart over the last few months to truly follow his desire to write. He has nearly completed a story that fits right in with any Innsmouth nightmare, “The Drudgery of Abner Bode.” Here in Chicago, the Red Lion Pub hosts the TwilightTales reading group every Monday night (I was the first reader, back in November of 1993; a pall was cast over my reading by the announcement that Bill Bixby had died of prostate cancer). The first Monday of every month is open mike night; writers are encouraged to read novels- or stories- in progress, flash fiction, any genre. Before summer arrives, this Fanning guy will be reading about Mr. Bode in front of a drunken and well-fed crowd on Lincoln Avenue, across the street from where John Dillinger was shot to death. (The Biograph Theater is changing to the Victory Gardens, whatever the crap that is, but the double feature on that November night thirteen years ago was emblazoned on the marquee A PERFECT WORLD WAYNE’S WORLD. I still have the photo). Hopefully, I’ll also have a photo of Bart Fanning reading that story damn soon. Reading it to aloud to people is the first step towards sending it out to strangers.

At my job, I have no access to email but I can access blogs and comment on them. Long story short, I have been talking with a woman in Johannesburg, Drizel Burger, who is a big fan of Roald Dahl, and has posted many short vignettes that, to me, resemble the kind of writing one would see in Ben Hecht’s 1001 AFTERNOON IN CHICAGO, in which he took the task of putting something down on paper in the Chicago Daily News from 1921 to 1923. A few of her blog entries, particularly “My Pet Heart,” shows the gallows humor that deserves a wider audience.

Last week, she wrote her first long fiction story, involving werewolves and past lives, and she submitted it to an online magazine. Drizel is ready to accept a possible rejection notice, and I have taught her what the old-fashioned–is it perhaps considered obsolete now?–phrase ‘slush pile’ means.

It is a joy for me to see people going through those first stages I went through back in the days of new wave music and Miami Vice sportswear. Writing fragments and setting them aside, finally getting the encouragement from others to put something into what is now called snail mail with about seventeen stamps plastered over the envelope. I myself have now written for an online magazine, JanuaryMagazine, and my story “Mitch” is a podcast through the TwilightTales website. I see nothing wrong with Drizel or Bart wanting to have their stories in print online instead of in a magazine or paperback, at least until their careers get rolling.

Does anybody else here in the realm of Storytellers Unplugged feel like a parent? Just curious. With every new fragment I might read at work or through gmail, I feel like a proud daddy seeing a passing grade on some piece of homework. I revel in recalling that same feeling I had back in the 80s, unlettered, finally helped along and eventually making what amounted to me as the big time.

—-Wayne

by Wayne Allen Sallee

Hello to everyone at the Round Table and in the audience. I’m making a late entrance here, thanks to David Niall Wilson and Stephen Mark Rainey, the Dukes Of Hazzard in modern horror. Dave has kindly offered to cut and paste what I write here and post it on the blog, as I am, and always will be, computerally inept. And yes, I made that phrase up years ago; use it as you see fit. I have read past entries, but still would like to jump in cold, by describing the last year of my life and how it changed the way I had to market myself as a writer.

First off, much of the reason for the sporadic manner of my writing has to do with my cerebral palsy. I type with only one finger and, even though I am in much better health overall since the days of Beth Massie’s Pseudocon’s a decade ago, thanks to the non-addictive beta-blocker Gabapentin, my strength still ebbs and flows, changing with the weather (currently with below zero wind chills) and my mental state ( I started taking Lamictal this past summer, which is primarily prescribed for those with seizures and/or bipolar disorder). The slowness of my typing keeps me from writing novels and longer stories like, say, Brian Hodge, whose novel PROTOTYPE stands as the finest, yet most dismal, novel I read in the 1990s.

I had the security of a day job in the Loop for twenty-three years, until I learned the real truths of job security in this new century. The company was bought out, and the only employees kept on were older than me yet making half my hourly wage. I received unemployment, which basically covered my rent and the cost of my pain medication without insurance. I found myself looking for writing assignments in places I never thought to look before, because of the immediacy of the situation, not just the joy of receiving a contributor’s copy of a book and forty dollar royalty checks fifteen years after the fact. (I’d bargain that Brian Hodge and I share the most appearances in the same book, starting with NIGHTMARES ON ELM STREET and LOVE IN VEIN).

While still looking for gainful employment in any way possible, even as a birthday party clown named Slappy for Clowns2Go, I discovered various writing jobs through Craigslist. (I also had more time to type; back when Rainey and James Robert Smith requested me to write a story for Arkham House’s EVERMORE, I declined as much because of my illnesses as to the few hours per day I had to type). This type of literary whoring I had not done since going to the first World Horror Cons, the equivalent of what they call at City Hall the “grip-and-grin” handshakes and introductions. Only now, just as in the case of the majority of my job applications, I was forced to contact people via emails and feeble attempts at drawing on sending an attachment of a shorter piece of fiction that might show my writing skills. As should be apparent here, whereas I am fairly decent with my stream–of-consciousness big, bad city fiction, my nonfiction still needs help. But, as with the late Karl Edward Wagner and Dennis Etchison and Ed Gorman, I found some very patient editors. I contacted Jeff Pierce at www.JanuaryMagazine.com about writing a tribute to the late Evan Hunter, who, as Ed McBain, wrote the 87th Precinct novels. No money changed hands, and Jeff had me rewrite several sections, but I ended up with an article on a website that is a stepping stone for many who break into the mystery genre. And, face it, how I survive each day in a city like Chicago is still a mystery. Larry Santoro and Marty Mundt, two local writers who started a website, www.FeralFiction.com, had me write an article about the history of Block 37, a long demolished piece of land in the new theater district that was the setting for many portions of my only novel, THE HOLY TERROR, set in the skid row era of the 1980s. That one paid me $75.00 and covered my expenses for a few weeks, though a follow-up on our infamous Fullerton Avenue Underpass Salt Stain Virgin Mary never materialized because I had yet to start taking the bipolar meds. The biggest boon of my time writing nonfiction was when I literally shoved my full leg in the door of BenBella Books, writing a 56 page, 650 entry glossary on the television show LOST, for a book entitled GETTING LOST, edited by Orson Scott Card. At this time a year ago, I was likely poring over index cards, writing the four hundred something entry.

I found a job I was thoroughly unqualified for, working at a graphics shop in suburban Alsip, with the gracious help of fellow horror writer Joe Curtain, writer of DAUGHTERS OF THE MOON and a fantastic werewolf novel, MONSTERA. At about the same time, I was putting the finishing touches on putting together a collection for Annihilation Press, FIENDS BY TORCHLIGHT. Because of my new job, Marty Mundt and another Chicago writer, Martel Sardina, helped proofread the book for me. While my new job provides me with more time to write as I have the complacency of a twenty-minute commute by bus as opposed to two hours when I worked downtown, I make ten dollars an hour and have now been without health insurance for just under two years. But, hey, I’m employed. Because I’ve always known that I’d never make a true living from my writing. My joy is the printed word, the idea that others can be inspired by what I have written, not having a pocket full of bills like Tony Soprano. People have encouraged me to try a voice-activated system, so I could write without having to chomp on toothpicks or chew on my shirt collar for inner strength, but I’d like to be remembered as someone who wanted to be in charge of at least some part of his body, choosing my left forefinger over my nasally Midwestern voice. (Also, to be honest, that stream-of-consciousness I mentioned earlier might easily lose its edge if I relied on “typing” faster.) I even harbor the delusion that I will even be more well known more after my eventual demise, when I wave to the Grim Reaper and tell everyone who might be with me at the time, “Hey, there’s my ride!”

—- Wayne