The Sound of Hooves Knock at Your Door

J.D. O'Brien, Make It Stop in Arizona & Great Moments in Heavy Metal,

Greetings from Los Angeles!

Last night I had the pleasure with reading with some new and old friends at Stories Books & Cafe. It was an eclectic mix of performances that included Francesca Lia Block’s short video about her new novel House of Hearts, Chris L. Terry reading from a work-in-progress, Dan Ozzi reading from a zine he wrote about a missed connection, J.D. O’Brien read from his new novel Zig Zag, and I read the scene in Make It Stop where Melanie starts a riot.

Although I’ve never held a Vermin on the Mount at Stories Books & Cafe last night felt very Vermin. I must not have been the only person who felt this way as my old reading series came up several times. A couple people told me about Vermin on the Mount events they went to in Chinatown and Highland Park, which was very nice to hear.

Am I ever going to bring Vermin on the Mount back? Let’s just leave it at maybe because we’ve got more pressing mysteries to uncover. Today I want to tell you about my friend Joe O’Brien, aka J.D. O’Brien. Almost 20 years ago Joe emailed me out of the blue about a zine he was pulling together called Flop Sweat. I sent off a few jokes and I was in Flop Sweat #1. Joe was living in Portland at the time so when I did an event at a zine shop called Reading Frenzy for my first book Big Lonesome, I asked Joe to read with me. He agreed and I’m very glad he did because if he hadn’t brought a few people along the place would have been empty.

Our paths crossed a few times over the years. We were catching up during the lockdown in 2020. He had written a screenplay called Harry that he was adapting into a novel. I’d turned Make It Stop into a six-episode season of a television show and needed to adapt it back into a novel. We agreed to swap chapters. Joe works in his family’s business and I was writing and researching Corporate Rock Sucks but with nothing else to do we spent an hour or so each night working on our adaptations and sending scenes to each other. Improbably, here we are three years later celebration our books together.

I immediately fell in love with Zig Zag’s protagonist, a bail bondsman who is aging out of the business and looking for one last job on which he can retire. Harry Robatore is an urban cowboy who smokes a lot of weed and for whom it is always 1973. When Harry’s bartender’s son knocks over a dispensary in Van Nuys, the bartender turns to Harry for help and the chase is on. Zig Zag is a tightly plotted crime novel with a ton of atmosphere and humor in the mold of Charles Willeford and Barry Gifford but why don’t I let him tell you about it?

Interview with J.D. O’Brien

Jim Ruland: Do you remember when you got the idea for Zig Zag? 

J.D. O’Brien: I was under-employed and exiled to a studio apartment in Van Nuys. Walking around the neighborhood, I became interested in all the bail bonds offices and dicey dispensaries. And the local charm of establishments like Louie’s Liquor & Check Cashing and Carlito’s Way Cocktail Lounge. Then some version of the characters and story started to form.

JR: I love Carlito's Way Cocktail Lounge! One of the few bars I've been to a bunch of times that I only have fond memories of. I wouldn't call that part of the Valley cinematic, but Zig Zag started as a screenplay? 

JO: Carlito’s Way went under during the pandemic. They started a Go Fund Me which netted zilch. I don’t know if the Electric Shaver Shop is still next door. Having a drink while waiting for your clippers to be oiled was a convenience unique to Van Nuys. I call that cinematic. But yeah it was a script that came about 40 years too late in terms of what it was going for. So I figured why not do a 70s movie as a novel.

JR: What was it like adapting your own screenplay?

JO: The script helped shape the novel a lot. My previous runs at writing a novel meandered too much (not that Zig Zag doesn’t meander a bit). The script had me thinking more in terms of scenes, dialogue, momentum, an ending. Instead of just ruminating.

JR: You describe your protagonist Harry Robatore as "a permanently baked bail bondsman styled after Harry Dean Stanton." Why Stanton? 

JO: I just love him and when I think of Harry that’s who I've always pictured. He could be ornery, funny, sweet, sad. A cowboy or a cop or a criminal. At the time I would also lurk around Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood, which was his hangout, hoping to have a drink or a smoke with him. I lucked out a couple times.

JR: So now that Harry Dean has passed on to that great car lot in the sky, who would play Harry Robatore if your novel gets adapted back into a screenplay?

JO: Billy Bob Thornton. 

JR: Did you have to do a lot of research about bail bondsmen? I think that most people who have never run afoul of the law or read a lot of crime novels have no idea what a bondsman does. 

JO: I talked to a few. One was exactly the kind of jaded crank I was looking for and he gave me some good stuff. Someone told me the best way to really learn about how bail bonds work, how low they’ll actually go, is to call and pretend you need their services. I tried and my cover crumbled in a minute. You can’t be in that business without a state-of-the-art bullshit detector.

JR: Zig Zag isn’t a western, but it isn’t not a western either. What influences did you draw from? Are you a closet Louis L'Amour fan?

JO: More movies than books, but I like western novels too. The Drop Edge Of Yonder by Rudy Wurlitzer is a favorite. Wurlitzer wrote an essay called “The First Two Pages Of Louis L’Amour” about how much he liked his openings, with the lone rider in the western landscape, but tended to tune out when the plot kicked in. I can’t resist buying pulp western paperbacks, but I haven’t actually read many of them.

JR: Are you working on a sequel?

JO: Yes. Harry is currently at large in Las Vegas which means I’m going to need to call in the Ruland cavalry soon to help me make sense of it.

JR: I sense another road trip in our future…

As you read this, we are making our way to Phoenix (or Tucson or Flagstaff). Here’s the disposition:

Wednesday May 3 
Poisoned Pen in Scottsdale, AZ at 7pm with JD O’Brien. This event will also be broadcast live (and recorded) on YouTube.

Thursday May 4
Wooden Tooth Records in downtown Tucson, AZ at 5:30pm with JD O’Brien.

Friday May 5
Bright Side Books in Flagstaff, AZ at 4pm with JD O’Brien. Book signing with festivities to follow at Uptown Pubhouse at 5pm.

Sunday May 7 
2060 Logan Ave in Barrio Logan in San Diego, CA from 10am to 3pm with JD O’Brien. Book signing and hangout at my studio above Valazoz Art / Strange Daze Books.

For information about Make It Stop events in the Midwest May 11-21, visit my website.

Great Moments in Heavy Metal (A Personal History)

Last week my review of John Wray’s new heavy metal novel Gone to the Wolves ran in the Los Angeles Times. I loved the book and it got me thinking about my own experiences in heavy metal.

When I was a student at St. James Elementary, someone brought a KISS album to school and it scared me. Someone explained that KISS was an acronym that stood for Knights in Satan’s Service and I decided on the spot that these were very bad men.

At Bishop Denis J. O’Connell high school one of the most outspoken headbangers was a kid named Steve Richmond. Steve was short, had longish hair, and always wore a denim jacket. He went to St. James so I know him a little bit. There were rumors that he would pedal his BMX down the bike path into Washington, D.C. to buy drugs, which now strikes me as an obvious falsehood. One day I was sitting next to Steve in class. He was drumming on his desk and dramatically turned to me and said, “Now is the time to die!”

The summer between my junior and senior year I worked for an electronics company installing security systems. I was essentially a helper and the guy I worked with was much older. We mostly worked at construction sites where new homes were being built. This was my first exposure to classic rock and my coworker took me to see my first stadium concert at the Capital Center: Rush’s Grace Under Pressure Tour. It wasn’t that memorable except for the guy and the girl in matching Ronnie James Did t-shirts having sex during the show.

When I was in the Navy, I spent a miserable Christmas holiday at Great Lakes Recruit Training Command for seaman apprenticeship training. Stuck in the barracks, I borrowed a knock off Walkman from one shipmate and Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All from another. Punk spoke to me on a personal level but this felt way more intense.

I met all kinds of headbangers in the Navy. Most notably Jeff Martinek, an Arizonan who played guitar in the band Sacred Reich but joined the Navy to get his shit together. Apparently, his band played with Flotsam & Jetsam whose bass player Jason Newstead went on to replace Cliff Burton in Metallica. I got the sense that Jeff regretted joining Navy and he didn’t last long. He nuked a piss test and got kicked out. I looked him up a few years ago and learned that he’d passed away. RIP.

I did a lot of speed in the Navy and one night at Fiesta Island in San Diego I had my mind ripped to pieces when I walked along the beach and Metallica’s “Ride the Lightning” was blasting out of several cars and pick-up trucks at the same time. Just as the music would fade as I passed one vehicle it would pick up again as I approached the next. I marveled at how the drivers had perfectly synchronized their tapes to play the album. Amazing! A few weeks later, one of my shipmates suggested the song had been playing on the radio, which makes a lot more sense.

The Navy is where I got my musical education and while I couldn’t resist the pull of punk rock I also learned to appreciate Goth, hip-hop, and metal. I listened to a lot of Megadeth, Mercyful Fate, and M.O.D. (Yikes.) The record that made the deepest impression was Nuclear Assault’s Game Over. I’d decided that Metallica’s Master of Puppets was weak and I craved something heavier. Nuclear Assault delivered the goods.

After the Navy, I moved back to Virginia to go to college at Radford University, a cultural backwater then and now. There wasn’t much of a live music scene except for a local hardcore band called Cock Ring. I mostly listened to the punk rock tapes I brought back from California. One weekend I drove up to DC to see Nuclear Assault at the 9:30 Club. I was kind of hoping I’d bump into Steve Richmond but he wasn’t there.

In Virginia it was hard to ignore the madness that was GWAR, a sci-fi heavy metal art project dreamt up by some students at the University of Richmond and led by Dave Brockie (RIP). Words don’t do GWAR justice. Pictures are a pose. Sounds are insufficient. There is only blood. Lots and lots of fake blood.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe and see you next week. Remember, you save 10% when you buy Make It Stop at Bookshop.org when you use promo code MAKEITSTOP.