by Brian Hodge
The one cousin who was a pro golfer said yet again on how he'd be dipped in stir-fried rice and butter beans if he were going to be a pallbearer at one more funeral.
My other married cousin, the one who is lifetime military and had to take a jump flight in from Aberdeen, looked at me and asked if I'd been putting any more stories down on paper. I smiled and said, you know, I'm still writing things, same old stuff. Left it at that.
The pad this was originally written on was in the jacket pocket of my trench coat. Just then, Avery Shannon walked in and told us how to line up by the casket, how to place it in the hearse for the short ride to Grove Hill Cemetery.
Shelbyville:
February 8, 1995
Author's Endnotes
Where the Bodies Are Buried and How They Got There
"Wilhelmina" was partially written in the Oak Park, Illinois home of H.E. Fassl. I would want to hope that the dead child's floral benefactor has found some serenity in her days.
"Defining the Commonplace Slivers" was written in the course of an hour, after I learned of Ray Rexer's death. He had been a cop in Bay City, Michigan in his "real" life, and reviewed books for the Overlook Connection for several years. I was attending Kathe Koja's wedding in Royal Oak, Michigan the weekend he was shotgunned while investigating a domestic disturbance. I knew that he had started writing fiction on his own, and the thing that haunts me most is that the last time I saw Ray was at the autograph table in Nashville, at the 1st World Horror Convention. He left saying that he couldn't wait to read my first novel and review it for Dave Hinchberger's magazine. I've never missed someone I hardly knew more.
"Rapid Transit" was written as my final paper in James Sloan's workshop at the University of Illinois in May of 1982. I sent it to Grue after seeing an ad at the back of Twilight Zone asking to read things "considered extreme." My most-reprinted story, I owe much to Peggy Nadramia and Karl Edward Wagner (late editor of Year's Best Horror) because they found faults in the storytelling, but knew I would continue writing with the proper support.
"Take the 'A' Train" was something I wrote on the Amtrak Lake Shore Express, riding back to Chicago from Manhattan. I had trimmed RT somewhat, and used this material to further speculate on Cassady's character. I had gotten much feedback that readers felt he was projecting himself as a witness to Quita McLean's murder.
"Bleeding Between the Lines" came about after I discovered a story by the late Robert Bloch, in which he lampoons his first-ever story sale by being interviewed by a psychiatrist.
"Girly-Girl" has never seen print. This is the kind of story that I mulled over for years; the real-life Girly-Girl was a puppy, and my involvement in its fate actually happened. All the rest is the product of the incident skewering my subconscious.
"The Pink Twist Inn" was a story I wrote simply because of the premise. Speck's old haunts are now occupied by an overly-lit building with stereo speakers blasting teenage death songs. In the time since this was first published, Planet Hollywood, the celebrity-owned franchise, opened across Ontario Street.
"The Touch" found its beginnings in the mysterious cover-up of the death of a strip joint patron in Lyons, Illinois, of which Fallon Ridge is based upon. I wrote about the bar — now closed, it had been Michael's Magic Touch on First Avenue and Mannheim Road —again in "Girly-Girl”, and for years have been playing with the idea of a novella entitled Killing Time, which takes place at the bar the night before Ted Bundy was executed. "The Touch" is also mentioned in an essay I wrote about my days working with a pre-bloat Elvis impersonator, "Only the Dead Know Graceland."
"Skull Carpenters" is seeing print here for the first time. Each of the cops described appear in my first two novels. Would that I was in possession of a less-crippled body, this might have been the prologue to another novel.
"Rail Rider" was written after Mark Rainey dropped me off at the elevated stop, one day before he and wife Peggy left Des Plaines for North Carolina. I forced myself to find substance during my wait for the train. The girl and the bowling team were there. Maybe the guy with the knife was, too. It's been so long...
"Bumpy Face" gestated around the title being a nickname for the short bottle of Seagram's. I knew I could make it into something worse. Joe Lansdale would be so proud. But don't tell him that my initial thought was of involving the young girl with a talkative lawn gnome. I am not making this up, okay?
"Blind and Blue" was written in Nashville on the backs of my business cards while I was in a bar. First thinking that "blue" might refer to a drowning victim, I asked the esteemed J. Hunter Daves how far away the Cumberland River was. Evidently I was looking too enthusiastic because he thought I was contemplating suicide. He, Dave Conover, and Ed Mather watched me hawkishly the rest of the night.
"Orient Are" is new to this collection. Odds are I needn't be waiting on an HWA theme anthology to send this one to. I had a ball finally writing it, though, after much prodding by Norman Partridge. The first notes went into a commonplace book I wrote notes in during the spring of 1991. To be honest, if I had written the story back then all the way through, it would have bit.
"Choirs" hasn't seen print either, but it was originally bought by Pat LoBrutto and Joe Lansdale for their anthology The Second Coming. Didn't even come out the first time. When the deal with the publisher fell through, Joe wrote me back saying "this one's yours again."
"Another Face of Celandine" is, as the title suggests, a different story told about the main character in my novella Lover Doll. A different version of these events can also be found in the pages of my first novel, The Holy Terror, coincidentally the section that I was writing the day I was hit by the car, 18 March 1989, and my writing arm was destroyed.
"The Land of the Free" is based on my real world milieu, as is "Skull Carpenters." For awhile it looked as if it would appear in a Polish anthology, Brave New Horror, but that fell through.
"Every Mother's Son" was actually the second story written about James Dvorak, the previous being the first. I sold it in England, but it has never seen print here.
"Matchmaker" has never seen print. I wrote it on the bus one Saturday afternoon because I knew it would be wrong to simply get up and kill the punks who were mocking the other passengers. John Pelan thinks this could be lengthened into a novel. Perhaps if enough people were to write him and request he pay me, as H. E. Fassl loves to say, "a big bag of money," well then, maybe I will.
"Family Fiction" came about during a trip to Shelbyville to celebrate my cousin Danny's 29th birthday, while I was hearing people talk about a brutal murder in New Albany, Indiana. I again use the cops from my novels.
"Don's Last Minute" is the name of a bar on Sixty-Third Street, "The Broadway of the South Side." I took it to mean something else altogether.
"With the Wound Still Wet" is based on events that actually occurred after I was interviewed for the Southwest News-Herald. The photograph which accompanied the article, taken at St. Mary's Cemetery three blocks behind my place, appears on the back cover of The Holy Terror. The next photos on Chris Loudon's roll of film were of the car wreck detailed in the story.
"Things We Do At Night" started out as a title. I'll let the readers decide how much of it is true, how much is embellished, and how much is flat out fiction. It is new to this collection and brings everyone out there literally to the present day, as I have written no fiction at all since.
I'd like to thank both my agent, Stanislaus Tal, John Pelan of Silver Salamander Press, and their lovely wives Donna and Kathy (respectively), for allowing this book to happen. Others who need to be mentioned are Jim and Dolores Sallee, Guy and Debbie Marvros, Florence Lassa, Cel and Tony Plichta, and Dorothy Melone. Also, the people in Chicago who try their best to keep me sewed up, Yvonne Navarro, Jeffrey Osier, Erick Seker, T. Diane & Brian Slatton, Harry Fassl, Diane Gallardo, Don Vanderslice, Lynn Gauger, Andy Erath, and H. Andrew Lynch. And to Ben Adams, Tina Jens, Bill Zielinski, and the staff of The Red Lion Inn!
I also want t
o thank Sean and Jessica Doolittle, Ed Gorman, Brian Hodge, Beth and Roger Massie, Joan Vander Putten, Peggy Nadramia, Peter Gilmore, Dolly Nickel, Rick Lieder, Kathe Koja, Kathleen Jurgens, Roger Gerberding, Alan Clark, Norman and Anne Partridge, Joe. R. Lansdale, Sid and Christine Williams, Michael Arnzen, Wayne Edwards, Richard Levesque, Mark and Peggy Rainey, Dave and Joe Wilson, Lisa Lepovetsky, Barb and Charlie Lawson, and Kurt and Amy Wimberger. If any of these names mean anything to you, imagine how important they are to me.
Quickly now, because Freddie's motioning that we're going straight into a commercial: special thanks to Bill Sheehan, for being the first person ever to buy a copy of The Holy Terror, way back when dinosaurs ruled the earth. To my mailman, Gerhard Vetter, for faithfully returning my rejection notices and deciphering my fellow writers' penmanship over the past decade. To my family in Kentucky, who have faith in my writing skills even when I do not. To the doctors who have kept my limbs working longer than anybody would have expected, particularly Arthur Rodriguez, Gerald Helwig and his staff, and especially Peter G. Drugas and his wife Cia. May they all know peace.
The survivors from my short fiction and novels will all appear again in other stories. Hell, the same goes for some of the people mentioned above.
Wayne Allen Sallee
Chicago, Illinois
11 March 1995
BLACK LEATHER REQUIRED
By David J. Schow
All of the characters in this book (with the exception of–I admit it–Cal Worthington) are probably fictitious. Therefore, any resemblance borne by any of them, or any parts of them, to actual persons of whom you may know, living, dead or otherwise, was invented by you, not me, and you're just going to have to learn to cope.
Contents
Introduction
The Shaft
Sedalia
A Week in the Unlife
Scoop Makes a Swirly
Kamikaze Butterflies
Beggar's Banquet, with Summer Sausage
Pitt Night at the Lewistone Boneyard
Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy
Life Partner
Last Call for the Sons of Shock
Where the Heart Was
Sand Sculpture
Bad Guy Hats
Perps
Introduction
I'll begin this introduction by acknowledging that at least ninety percent of you are already readers of David Schow; so you know, or think you know (David can surprise me, too) what you're in for.
That leaves a small percentage of new readers who have been persuaded to take up this collection for one reason or another, and have reached this point, and perhaps need further persuasion to continue (Schow? I've heard he can be awfully, umm, gross).
I won't lie to you. Some of these are tough stories, and David can dish it out, he can bring it to you, I mean the violence and gore, until you want to go down on your knees and mumble for mercy. He can be as hard on your stomach as the double-loops on the Ninja at Six Flags or Magic Mountain. (I read most of these stories in two sittings, while battling a case of the flu, stuffed to the gills with patent medicines, and reached a state of phantasmagorical unease that has long outlasted the illness). I don't recommend that you take this collection to a sickbed. But I'm willing to bet that, if you have an interest in adroit storytelling, you will finish your reading with both a sense of satisfaction and a feeling of discovery.
Good Lord, how this man can write!
Like a Gothic Absurdist, an urbanized Cormac McCarthy, but with a hip, mean sense of fun. Many of David's stories are death-centered, but never predictable. In these pages the afterlife (which is somewhere within screaming distance of Hollywood Boulevard) is a busy place. Death can be fixed–up to a point. There are as many Undead roaming around his livid landscapes as there are sentient humans, and most of them seem to be having a better time (that good gruesome gang in the funny and poignant Last Call for the Sons of Shock). The undead can be philosophical ("There is no place in the world I have not lived," says the Count in Last Call. "…I walk unharmed through fire-fight zones, through sectors of strife. You learn so much when you observe people at war. I've survived holocausts, conflagration, even a low-yield one-megaton test, once, just to see if I could do it. Sue me. I was high.") or loaded with attitude ("Good old Russ," pouts Simone, the dearly departed sexpot in Pitt Night at the Lewistone Boneyard. "The king of second-hand gratification.")
The dead also may be surprisingly useful to the living, in spite of a serious lack of mobility (See Life Partner, a story that creeps up on you–like JJ, who doesn't want that much out of life, just a perfect love and no back-talk.)
There is, in this fine collection, an example of Grand Guignol-cumvaudeville that I hope someday to see on the stage; a sort of Undead Our Town, with a resonance of tenderness and good cheer that is a measure of David's ever-expanding talent; and an outrageous, living color shoot-'em-up called Bad Guy Hats that left me in awe of the perpetrator–he punishes you, then he winks and punishes you some more. Friends, I do this work for a living, and I'm not easily impressed, but the can-you-top-this operatic exuberance David conjures with mere words is a cause for, not censorship, but celebration. His dialogue ricochets and zings; his eye for detail is phenomenal; his phrasing acute; his imagination supreme.
Dear David: keep bringing it to us. And for God's sake, stay dangerous.
–John Farris
Black Leather Required
in Dreams
the dead speak:
you have
but to listen
The Shaft
I made it to the rail just in time to watch Chiquita destroy an aluminum umbrella table, face-first, five stories below the balcony on which I stood. She missed the pool by a good ten feet. Until I saw her brains splatter all over the sun deck I hadn't realized she'd had any. Then the shit really started flying, and as Rosie says, when the shit starts flying you gotta be careful you don't inhale none.
That's how I wound up in this sleazoid dump right in the bowel of Chi-fucking-cago, the winner of the Cockroach Club's Tenement of the Year Award, pushing nose candy at high school dips and sweating out centuries waiting for a goddamn phone call from Rosie. That's how I wound up peering down a hole another five-story drop, easy–and thinking, Jesus, man, somebody could die down there.
I remember Rosie's reaction even clearer than Chiquita's swan dive. A textbook of cool in a shitstorm, that dude. He humped across the hotel suite on that bum leg of his, his face milk-white, and hustled me into the nearest vacant bedroom while the other party animals were still puzzling out what had gone down, I mean, besides Chiquita. I'd dared her to jump–but hey, it wasn't my fault; it was just the Peruvian flake being mischievous. Rosie made a hurried, whispered phone call. Then he crushed a fist-load of damp Franklin notes into my hand and told me my ass was bound for Chicago. Why? Because Chiquita was spread all over the poolside terrace on my dare, and she was Emilio's latest squiff, and Emilio would be jacked off enough about this little interruption in his sex life to have my bones broken in alphabetical order if he found me acting casual around the suite when he arrived. You know, nonchalant, a cold Chivas in one hand and a warm tit in the other, sucking up the comp snow and the beam-screen movies? Not cool. He'd bounce me out the window and I'd join Chiquita the way peanut butter joins jelly when you squish the bread together. And if I didn't tear ass out of there pronto, Rosie would help Emilio chuck me over the side, because that's the way the pecking order works. I understood. No hard feelings, huh kid? Splat.
Emilio's talent for making his rivals evaporate without even leaving ashes was legendary, and Rosie and I both knew he could probably perform the same trick on anybody who crossed him. I didn't want to find out how it was done. Luckily for me, Rosie had the whole scenario scoped out in seconds. He made his pitch superfast: "Listen, Cruz. I like you. You're a primo runner and I don't want to see you become history. I know this guy in Chi; you can go north and hole with him." Rosie was the only guy I'd ever heard
call Chicago Chi. He was kind of old-fashioned, but he dealt straight with me and I looked up to him, I guess. "I'll grease Emilio out," he told me. "Couple of months, no heat, I'll bring you back in. Emilio'll cool out once he gets a new bitch. But now you've got to get the fuck out of here, before the shit starts flying."
"Don't wanna inhale none," I said, and he returned a sad kind of grin. I knew he was pleased I'd picked up one of his pet expressions; it made him feel like my mentor. I try not to be a bad guy, you know what I mean?
I caught a cab and left my apartment phone ringing. It might be one of Emilio's bad boys, sniffing already. A few hours later I was freezing my cojones off at O'Hare Airport. For the record, O'Hare really sucks the canary. Baggage claim is in the next area code from where you debark. I had no bags to claim, but no idea where to wander. I'd never been a fugitive before.
I finally located Rosie's pal, Bauhaus, tucked inside a cherry-red Corvette that was sitting in the loading zone with the heater running. Man, that car must've had eighty coats of lacquer; it looked as though it had been dipped in blood-colored liquid glass. Bauhaus was large and fleshy-pale. He chuckled at my clothes. Big joke. "We need to procure you an overcoat, boy, if you're planning on staying in this distribution zone for a spell."