Schmooze II

Wednesday, February 3

I drove to Jackson, Michigan, for Schmooze II.

I met David Crowbar Nestle, Blaster Al Ackerman,

and John M. Bennett, Simeon Stylites, Feh! Press,

and Roger Jackson, who drove over from Ann Arbor.

Blaster Al lived in Baltimore and John M. Bennett lived

in Ohio. They rode up together. Stylites published

Blaster: A Blaster Al Ackerman Anthology,

that contained his afterword to Forty, “Jack Saunders Revisited.”

Crowbar, Popular Reality, had published Forty. Bennett published

Lost and Found Times. He and I had been publishing in the same

little magazines for 25 years. Jackson published miscellanea on

Henry Miller. He commissioned several chapbooks from me,

one from me and Bern Porter, in which we measured dicks.

I was 3” and he was 8¼. He said 8½, but he exaggerated.

Besides, what does it matter? The whale with his six foot penis,

in repose. Crowbar played a video of a play Sleaze Steele wrote

from a Blaster Al short story, I, The Stallion. I asked Swarthy “Turk”

Sellers to break my arm so I could kiss my elbow and restore magic to

the world. E. J. Barnes wrote a comic book of the story. So it was

a short story, a comic book, a play, and a video of the play, and us, watching.

Us, laughing. Ron Bonds, Illuminet Press, had sent Crowbar a copy of Jim Keith’s

Black Helicopters Over America. Later, I had a post office box next to his

in Norcross, Georgia, and he recognized me from my picture on the cover of Forty,

which Crowbar had sent him. Small world. Bonds and Keith both died young,

in mysterious circumstances. Probably a coincidence. Probably not

The Octopus. Danny Casolaro. Probably not the military-industrial complex.

Aiee, The Phantom.

On the way home I stopped at the Museum of Army Aviation,

at Fort Rucker, Alabama. They had lots of helicopters, but none

of them was black. Maybe they are apocryphal, like flying saucers.

Or the Ling Master, with one eye-hole in his sheet

and purple wine-stains down the front.