The realm of the corndog revisited

Bolaño, Burroughs & me

Greetings from Mexico City! I’m writing today from a coffee shop called Constela Café on Calle Colima in Roma Norte.

I have some exciting news. Yesterday

Aaron Burch

published my short story “The House on Dead Confederate Street” in his new Substack literary journal Short Story, Long. It’s a twisty story that has its feet in a couple of different genres. I set out to write a crime story set in a haunted house and it turned into something quite different. It’s also deeply personal in a way I didn’t expect. I hope you check it out.

Here’s the set up:

A boy crushes hard on a girl he meets while doing community service. Their mission: to staff a haunted house set up to raise money for kids with cancer. That’s when things get sexy, dangerous, and weird.

When Aaron asked me if he had any ideas for the illustration that accompanies the story, I knew just the person to ask. My friend Carrie Anne Hudson is a San Diego artist who makes stunning works of dark art across a variety of media. Her painting “Haunted House Head” is perfect for the story. Carrie’s always making new work so give her a follow and check out her Etsy shop.

Publishing short stories is hard. This one racked up quite a few rejections after I finished it last year. What makes the timing of this publication so special is that I wrote “The House on Dead Confederate Street” while I was in Mexico City last summer. In fact, I wrote the final scene at, wait for it, Constela Cafe.

Regular readers of Message from the Underworld will recall that I wrote about that moment in a piece about finding inspiration in Mexico City:

On Saturday, sensing I was close to finishing, I spent a few hours at a café in Roma where something very unusual happened.

A character with a face full of tattoos made his way to my table. He was dressed in a colorful suit jacket and wore a hat with feathers sticking out of it. I’d seen him approach the other tables outside the café. He had a pitch I didn’t quite catch, hitting up patrons for pesos. He offered me a leaf, which he described as a mystical flower, and in exchange I gave him the pesos I had in my pocket. He went on with his day and I went on with mine, tapping away at my laptop, pushing the story across the finish line. That’s when things got strange. An idea for a twist at the end of the story arrived and when I looked down at the leaf it was glowing, not glowing but trembling, not trembling but fluttering in the breeze blowing through the streets of Roma.

Okay, that’s not true. Here’s what happened: I finished the story that afternoon but it wasn’t because of the ghost of Roberto Bolaño or a magical talisman. Making my way through the universe I wrote a story that was influenced by the places I went, the books I read, the people with whom I interacted. It is a result of the alchemy of the imagination, a mix of memory and conjuration. To say anything more risks venturing into the realm of the corndog.

I live for this kind of serendipitous coincidence. Speaking of which, Calle Collima happens to be the street where the sisters Maria and Angelica Font live in The Savage Detectives. The Fonts live further west of the café in Condesa and a lot of the sex and violence in Part 1 of the novel takes place.

And then there’s this: I was reading The Savage Detectives on our way to the hotel last week. We were stuck in traffic, crawling along as one does in CDMX. I was near the beginning of Part 2 when a solution to a truly terrible short story I wrote last spring about the indie music scene in the early ’90s presented itself. I took out my notebook and wrote it down and in that moment I realized I wasn’t fixing a short story but starting a new novel.

"Navigare necessse es. Vivare no es necessity." William Burroughs uses these lines as the opening to The Job. Here’s the translation: “It is necessary to travel. It is not necessary to live.” He attributes the words to sailors from the golden age of sail. Now, William Burroughs is the last person you want to look to for instruction on how to live—especially in Mexico City—but I think he’s on to something here.

Magical things happen at the confluence of reading, writing, and travel. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a quiet cafe or a crowded car. You can read anywhere. You can write anywhere. But when you step outside of your routine and put yourself in situations where you’re constantly processing new information interesting things are bound to happen.

That’s it for this week. I want to keep it short in the hopes you’ll support Aaron’s new project and check out “The House on Dead Confederate Street.” I’m going to finish my coffee and work on a new story full of sex and violence that I’ve been playing around with this week. Who knows, maybe I’ll even finish it…

Stay safe and see you next week!