Still lonely after all these years

Everything you didn't want to know about my first book

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Toledo Panic, Sean Carswell on the far right, at The Tower Bar

Apologies for the delay in sending this out today, but one of our cars is in the shop and now every minor errand and major excursion must be mediated. You would think this would make me more dialed-in to my calendar but just the opposite has happened. Scheduling my days down to the last detail means I’m somehow less likely to know what day of the week it is. My bad.

Last week I hung out with my old friend Sean Carswell. His band Toledo Panic was playing The Tower Bar and it was a great excuse to hang out, eat pancakes, and talk about the unspeakable horrors of the literary life.

Sean is one of those people who is good at everything: he can play multiple instruments, he’s a first-class carpenter, can surf waves big and small, he’s ridden motorcycles all over the world, and he’s a hell of a writer. Plus, he can do all of these things while whipping up a built-in bookshelf in his spare time. I should mention he’s also a tenured college professor, a Pynchon scholar, and the cofounder of Razorcake. All of this would be incorrigibly annoying if he weren’t so goddam nice.

For a while Razorcake had a publishing arm called Gorsky Press and Sean asked if I’d be interested in publishing a short story collection with Gorsky. He’d been reading my stories for a decade so he knew what he was getting into. Naturally, I said yes. I put together a mix of new and old stories and after editing the manuscript for a few months we arrived at a title: Big Lonesome. It was published twenty years ago in either August or September of 2005.

(Amazon says September 15; I say August 15. Goodreads, which is owned by Amazon, says September 1. The copy I’m looking at now, which is inscribed to Nuvia, is dated July 2005. Who are you going to believe?)

So what is Big Lonesome?

It’s a collection of 13 stories. It’s a small book that fits in your pocket: 5”x7” and just 189 pages. And for a limited time it’s just…. I’ll get to that part in a bit. The first line of dialogue is “How’s the boxing coming along?” and the last line is “Applesauce.” Make of that what you will. Here’s a breakdown of what you’ll find:

Night Soil Man: Set in Belfast after the Blitz when the Germans bombed the city and wreaked havoc on a zoo.

The Previous Adventures of Popeye the Sailor: This story is exactly what it sounds like and tells the story of how the Popeye lost his eye, something the original creators never got around to explaining. Popeye was a walk-on in a comic about the Oyls and was so popular he got his own strip and the rest is history. At one point he and Jesus were the two most recognizable figures in the West. I used to worry that I was going to get sued because of this story but with Popeye officially in the public domain this year I guess I’m in the clear. Did you know there are three horror movies “about” Popeye? They all suck. If you’d like me to dedicate a post to it, I’ll tell you how and why. They should have gone with my premise.

Kessler Has No Lucky Pants: This bit of experimental fiction was made into a short film after the filmmaker found a copy of Big Lonesome in a used bookstore in Anchorage, Alaska. Seriously. You can read it in English or Spanish.

A Terrible Thing in a Place Like This: Writing this story radicalized me. When I started researching this story all I knew about the Haymarket Affair was that a bunch of Irish cops got blown to bits by an anarchist. I read the Chicago Tribune the month before and the month after the “riots” and I was shocked by the blatant racism and the brutality of the police against the working class. I was also captivated by an expose of the Chicago stockyards and the filthy working conditions there. So I told the story of the Haymarket Affair through the lens of someone who works on the killing floor of the Chicago stockyards. This would make a great movie IMO.

Pronto’s Persistence: An Elmore Leonard-style mafia story set in St. Petersburg, Florida with lots of allusions to Salvador Dali. An early version was called “Two Guys Named Sal.”

Still Beautiful: A creepy Hollywood horror story about obsession that I still get letters about.

Dick Tracy on the Moon: A crime story that takes Dick Tracy and makes him a retired police detective in the San Fernando Valley who is haunted by an art thief who got away named Poon who calls him every Christmas to taunt him.

Red Cap: Little Red Riding Hood in Nazi Germany.

The Eggman: This is the only story in the collection I had to revisit to remind myself what it’s about. It’s about a guy going through sensitivity training and it has a scene in a strip club. I’m guessing this one hasn’t aged well.

Brains for Bengo: For a brief period in the early 90s my cousin Mark and I both lived in North Hollywood. He was a Hollywood screenwriter and I was working at a coffee shop, trying to figure out what to do with my life. Every so often he would invite me over for dinner and screen a movie on his high-tech set-up. One of these was Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, which involves an attempted brain swap. This one left a mark:

The Hitman’s Handbook: If you read enough Barry Gifford you will end up writing a story like Hitman’s Handbook. I don’t want to say too much but this story is the ur-text for the novel I recently finished, which is also called The Hitman’s Handbook.

Eastwood: Another experimental yarn about a guy who steals another person’s laugh. This one killed at literary events.

Big Lonesome: A western about a hitman known as “The German,” a jailbreak, an escaped convict, and a fellow named Tonka who may or may not be a robot. I was working on this story right up until the last minute before I sent it off to be published.

When Big Lonesome came out, I didn’t know how to talk about it. I was hyper-focused on the different genres. If I was releasing the book today I would say that the stories riff on pop culture in a counterfactual way. Which is another way of saying, “What if?” What if Popeye faced off with one of his bastard sons? What if Little Red Riding Hood is about the horrors of war? What if Dick Tracy was alive and unwell deep in the San Fernando Valley?

You, yes you, can read Big Lonesome too

If you’d like answers to these questions, you can buy a copy of the book though my Etsy store. It’s like 12 bucks. After you read it you can ask me anything about it and I’ll tell you (i.e. talk your ear off about Thomas Pynchon) in writing or on the phone or via two-way wrist radio. To sweeten the deal, I’ll make the shipping free but only until September 15 but only in the United States.

All of which is a long-winded way to say: thank you, Sean, for taking a chance on a scribbler with too much drink in him. As I always say: “Life is short, but careers are long.” You only get one first book and 20 years later I’m still proud of this one we made.

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