Origin Story: The After-Life Story Of Pork Knuckles Malone

In discussing my new book, The After-Life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone, a few people have asked, “Where did you get the idea for such a weird book?” The germ of the idea started with this flyer for a Big Eyes show by Twin Cities artist Claire Monet:

I liked the image of a ham sitting in front of a wall of old televisions, watching them. In my head though, I saw the ham with antlers stuck into it instead of branches, probably a subconscious tribute to the geek helmet worn by Rev. Norb, the singer of legendary Green Bay punk band Boris the Sprinkler. My ham didn’t have eyes either. Instead, it had a pair of pineapple rings wedged between the antlers that kind of looked like eyes. I describe my interpretation of this image in chapter 12 of the book, which I’ve been reading live.

Of course, an image isn’t a story. I knew the ham was malicious, but maybe it wasn’t always that way. Maybe it was once a sweet little pig that liked to run through cornfields with a little farm kid. Maybe it was killed by a misguided father. Maybe a road trip ensued that was filled with slime-spewing insanity, mainly because I really love slime-spewing insanity. The rest of the weird book unfolded from there, pulling further inspiration from punk and the years that I lived in Green Bay. I kind of like how it turned out.

Have you read it yet? If you like weird fiction, it’s available on Amazon for a pittance.

Tour Diary: Spring 2013

To spread the word about my new bizarro book, The After-Life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone, I hit the road for a mini reading tour. Jeff Arndt from Mommy Sez No came with and brought his guitar to play some tunes. My buddy Nick Hammer came along to keep things rowdy.

Day 1: Friday, April 19th

When I planned this tour, I didn’t expect that I would have to contend with a snowstorm at the end of April. But when I got in my rented car – really just a stack of aluminum cans on wheels – at 7:30, a half a foot of white goodness had already dropped. We drove through a sampler of Wisconsin weather: snow, sleet, rain, hail, sun, wind, deer corpses, poop-filled porta potties. I insisted on listening to Iron Maiden’s Powerslave on repeat most of the drive. When nobody argued against it, I knew I was with true road warriors.

Friday night’s shindig took place at the KnockBox Cafe, a sweet Chicago coffee shop that reminded me of a kindergarten classroom. The perfect place for half a dozen bizarro authors to converge. As the hyper-caffeinated crowd bounced back and forth between bright blue and green walls, host Kristin Ryan kicked off the evening with the funniest jokes about murderers, stepdads and Thin Lizzy ever created. Then:

• Andrea de Fonseca shaved a balloon and said something about a vagina in space.
• KaCee Hudson told a tale of the tribulations of customer service in a waxing salon.
• Michael Kazepis read a piece from his new chapbook, Wizened Youth.
• I yelled something about child abuse that scared at least one person in the crowd.
• Justin Grimbol wore a wig and made me laugh so hard I farted.
• Michael Allen Rose and Dahlia Fatale taught everyone about the tumultuous relationship between chickens and eggs.

Jeff Arndt played theme songs from bizarro books and acoustic versions of Mommy Sez No tunes. By the time it was over, the shattered eggs, spilled shaving cream and peanut butter, and exploded brains of crowd members coated the cafe.

Then we all went and ate tacos at a restaurant that smelled like sewage and the waitress bullied me into buying pineapple juice.

Day 2: Saturday, April 20th

I had tried to get a gig in Madison, but Madison is not ready for bizarro books. Instead, Nick and Jeff and I wandered around Chicago, fighting our way through record collectors, spice mongers and other unsavory types, with Slurpees in hand. Closed out the night at the Empty Bottle at the Wax Idols show.

Day 3: Sunday, April 21st

Ran into Mike Ditka at the Walgreens in downtown Chicago. He was wobbling in to get a prescription, presumably for de-wobbling meds. I tackled him and yelled, “This one’s for Green Bay!” Actually, I didn’t do that. I bought some juice and we hit the road for Milwaukee.

Sunday night’s show was in the newly remodeled back room of Milwaukee’s Sugar Maple, one of the premier craft beer bars in the country. We all felt pretty fancy, except for Jeff, who had to skip the show because he was barfing. I read some pig shit. Justin Grimbol compared his dick to a maypole around which his muse danced. Michael Allen Rose and Dahlia Fatale lit fires while discussing pornography. The crowd was riveted (bewildered).

Day 4: Monday, April 22nd

After the show and dinner, I arrived at my crash spot to find Jeff in very rough shape. I took him to the ER so they could revivify him. The revivification process took about five hours. While I lounged in the waiting room and thinking about bizarro fiction, I monitored the comings and goings of a deranged Michael Jackson fan (“Do you like Michael! I love Michael! I don’t want to be lonely.”), an ER nurse who rode around in a wheelchair playing bumper cars with empty chairs, and a variety of other weirdos. Mostly though, I just watched Law and Order and a movie with Meryl Streep and decided that she’s pretty cute.

Then Jeff got better, Nick met up with us and we drove home triumphant. Sleep is for fools!

Music Reviews From Razorcake #73

Razorcake #73 is out now. Did you know that, along with all the columns and interviews and reviews, each issue includes a bunch of punk rock comics by the likes of Mitch Clem and Ben Snakepit? It’s true. What more could you ask for?

I suppose you could ask for a handful of record reviews by yours truly. You can read some of them in print or all of them online:

• DESPISE: Desolate: 7”
• HELLBASTARD/DRESDEN: Split: LP
• PORN STARS OF HORROR: From Love Letters to the Morgue: CD
• SHAME, THE: The World is Ours: 7”
• WARTORN: Domestic Terrorist: 7”
• WILSON ST. PUB & SLUTHOUSE BAND: Pirates of the West Bench: CD

Pretty crust-heavy this time around, huh?

Interview: Bizarro Author Gabino Iglesias

Gutmouth by Gabino Iglesias debuted last fall as part of the Eraserhead Press New Bizarro Author Series. There is so much bizarro in its 84 pages it will make your head spin. The man with the mouth on his stomach and the three-boobed, amputee stripper are just the tip of the iceberg. This is the first of many mini interviews I will be conducting on my site with bizarro authors and creative-types who I respect.

If your gut could talk to you, what would it say?

My gut would probably spend all day asking for a combination of Guinness, bizarro books, and barbecue. I´m convinced it would sound like Tony Montana.

You do a lot of critical writing, book reviews and whatnot. How does that writing inform your bizarro fiction?

I try to keep my fiction separate from all the other writing I do (i.e. academic, reviews, op-eds, etc.). Fiction is actually a salve for me, a way to forget all that other stuff and hopefully create something much more interesting. That being said, I love writing about books and sharing that love with others.

Gutmouth notably features a three-boobed, amputee stripper. What is the strangest thing you’ve ever seen a stripper do?

A few years ago I worked at a tattoo shop. A stripper everyone called Butterfly was a regular customer. She has a giant butterfly between her breasts. In any case, we went to watch her dance one night and she made my glasses disappear. After dancing for a while, she pulled them out and gave them back. I washed them before putting them back on, so no worries.

Arm wrestling. You vs. William S. Burroughs. Who wins?

I’d totally win based on strength. However, that wiry dude’s usually packing heat, so I’d play it safe and let him win. Plus, you know, he’s William Fucking Burroughs.

Inspirations: William S. Burroughs

I basically went from reading comic books to reading William S. Burroughs. Like many people my age, I discovered Burroughs through less-than-literary sources:

I quickly became obsessed and created my first bizarro book, a cutup hodgepodge of nonsense featuring a Dr. Benway-esque character named Dr. Lamplighter. Strangely, it was sex-free. I was just entering high school at the time, so I was a bit afraid of sexuality still. So instead of having scenes of strangulation jerk-off time travel, I wrote about exploding squirrels. There were a lot of exploding squirrels in this book.

While I was working on it, I walked into school one day to find a bunch of kids mobbing a squirrel that had accidentally gotten inside. They were rabid, zombie-like. They killed it in their attempt to catch it in their coats. As a naive young author of bizarro fiction, I took this as a sign that I needed to write about squirrels. Lots of squirrels. Fuck.

I wrote a squirrel-free piece of bizarro fiction called “Freak Tension,” which later appeared in thoroughly revised form in the debut issue of my zine. My high school English teacher got really excited about it. She pulled me aside after class and said it was the best thing she had ever read in her years as a teacher. I felt so proud. Then I told her I was inspired by William S. Burroughs. She had no idea who he was. Baffled, I decided that compliments on my writing didn’t mean shit from ignoramuses like her.

Although the Burroughs influence is much less overt in my writing these days, I still like the idea of including almost standalone bits in larger pieces, such as the Nazi fly bit in The After-Life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone. Now I suddenly have an idea for a story about a squirrel.

New Book: The After-Life Story Of Pork Knuckles Malone

This year will see the release of my first two books! Both are with publishers I am really psyched to be working with. The first one is out now: The After-Life Story of Pork Knuckles Malone from Bizarro Pulp Press. Here’s the cover:

Back cover blurb:

What’s a farm boy to do when his pet pig becomes an evil, decaying hunk of ham with slime-spewing psychic powers?

After Daryl Malone absconds to Green Bay with the remains of his pet, Pork Knuckles, strange things start to happen. Why is everyone around him so hungry for ham? And why is green ooze pouring from their orifices? When he finds the answer to these questions, he’s forced to choose between his best buddy and a family that has only existed on the periphery of his life. That choice will send him and the ones he loves barreling nonstop through a labyrinth of cannibal hippies, Nazi flies, rabid drag queens, brawling grizzlies and punk rock muck fests.

Now available in both print and eBook formats!

Why I Write Weird Stories

Inspired by author Darci Schummer’s post about why she writes sad stories, I started thinking about why I write weird stories. I sometimes say, “That’s just what comes out,” but there’s more to it than that.

First grade. Mrs. O’Connell’s classroom. So many kids staring at me. Maybe they wanted to be friends. Maybe they were staring at my awesome Star Wars hat, the one my parents had bought for me special for my return to school after a long absence. I was so proud of that hat. So proud.

But that’s not what they were staring at. They were staring at the bandages around my shaved head and the scars peeking out. They were staring at my eyes. They were staring because I looked different. And they were thinking of names to call me, names that scarred much deeper than the cuts from my surgeries. Didn’t they know that I just wanted someone to play with?

That was okay though, because I could create worlds filled with stuff like time-traveling fuzz monsters and glow-in-the-dark dinosaurs, stuff that I could understand, because I sure the fuck couldn’t understand why everyone was so mean to me when I wasn’t mean to them. Not only could I understand what went on in the worlds I created, I could control it.

And I did find friends, kids who just wanted to bike and skate and listen to metal, at least until middle school and high school, when they decided that being cool did matter. So they disappeared, and I kept writing, and the writing got weirder, and sometimes the only thing that kept me alive was diving into these worlds I scribbled out. I sure didn’t want those worlds to look like the real world. Fuck the real world. Monsters and spaceships kept me safe.

And they still do. A couple weeks ago, I smiled at a woman – not lasciviously, just the way that I smile at people and hope I always smile at people – and she called me a name. And I’m still that kid in Mrs. O’Connell’s classroom and I still need a place to go because I can sometimes see that the people looking at me don’t always have friendship in mind even though I always do and I keep having people who I thought would stick with me leave me alone and was it my fault? I don’t understand.

But I always understand what happens in the worlds I write. Maybe you’ll understand too or maybe you’ll get freaked out by stories about professional small animal inside-outers, but at least you won’t be thinking about whatever bullshit the real world dealt you today, right?