It’s also true I was a shy kid and the only time I interacted with classmates or other children on our block was when we all gathered so they could hit me with sticks and mudballs. But that was fine because avoiding them gave me more time to sit in my room and hum made-up snatches of songs into my Dad’s old reel-to-reel tape recorder.

I don’t remember exactly when it occurred to me — I think it was when Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys came out — that I could mail my reel-to-reel song ideas to one band or another’s fan club (the addresses of which were routinely printed on the backs of album sleeves or the inside booklets next to the credits). And, hey, maybe somehow someone in the band would hear it and go, “This kid’s good! Let’s make a song out of one of his ideas!”

Sure enough, by the time I was 15, I was modestly successful as what came to be called “a song doctor.” Today, the most famous song doctors include Desmond Child, Max Martin, Diane Warren, Mutt Lange — all of whom have their respective sonic DNA all over dozens of multi-platinum tunes by dozens of artists from Bon Jovi, Def Leppard and Kiss to Taylor Swift, The Weeknd and Kelly Clarkson.

I’m nowhere near as well known as the above tunesmiths, but I’ve contributed to my fair share of hits, and I thought I’d use this space to occasionally give you some backstory on some of my collaborative work. Today we’ll discuss “The Joker” by Steve Miller.

******

It was the summer before my junior year in high school, and I’d ridden my bike from Dallas to San Francisco after scoring a gig cleaning up sea lion poop off the Pier 39 docks at Fisherman’s Wharf. There’s nothing better, to me, anyway, than the olfactory comingling of saltwater and sea mammal excrement — and the job had that in abundance! All with a stunning view of San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge!

Fig. 1. Don’t even try to calculate the amount of poop — but notice the majestic Golden Gate Bridge on the horizon.

One chilly afternoon — Mark Twain was correct when he (apocryphally) said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was one summer when I was shoveling sea lion poop from San Francisco tourist spots and dumping it into the bay!” — I knocked off work early and headed to the Berkeley Community Center to see a bill with the Steve Miller Band, Quicksilver Messenger Service and Steve’s uncle, Mitch Miller, who was a band leader, oboist and star of the popular TV variety show Sing Along with Mitch.

Fig. 2. Steve “Guitar” Miller comes from a musical family including his Uncle Mitch, a fine oboist.

Turns out I wasn’t old enough to get into the show, but I was able to drop one of my homemade “song ideas” tapes off with the backstage security guard outside the building. To my surprise, weeks later, back in Dallas and in school, I got a phone call from STEVE “GUITAR” MILLER!

“Thanks for the tape, Young Brave,” Steve “Guitar” Miller said. “Frankly, my creative energy is at a low point, and I could use a little help. I need a radio hit!”

I was and am a big Steve Miller fan — I still say if you haven’t spent much time listening to the Side One suite of his debut album, Children of the Future, you’re a hopeless cretin — so I was overjoyed at the opportunity.

Since going back and forth by phone or mail was extremely awkward, Steve flew to Dallas — his hometown, too! And we got to work. He would show up during my shifts scooping cones at the Polar Bear Ice Cream shop where I had a part-time job after school and on weekends. Ice cream wasn’t as cool as scooping sea lion poop, but I was saving for a car so …

It was late fall and not many folks were coming in for summery treats, so I’d have long stretches of inactivity. Steve would sit in the storeroom with his guitar and a legal pad, eating odd double dip waffle cone combinations of flavors like Raspberry Sherbet and Rum Raisin, and when I wasn’t out front taking care of customers, I’d join him and we’d work until the bell at the front door rang and alerted me that someone had entered the store.

Steve had an idea for a song he wanted to call “The Jester.” He’d been reading The Dwarf, the grim first-person novel by Par Lagerkvist narrated from the perspective of a misanthropic Little Person serving at the court of an Italian city-state during the Renaissance.

“I think he’s supposed to amuse royalty, but this dude is very mean, and has unrequited affection for the queen,” Steve said of the dwarf. “Anyway, it made me think of jesters and clowns in the service of royalty through the ages. And that in turn made me think of characters ranging from Mercutio and Sancho Panza to comic relief in, oh, The Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini and Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel. And Charlie Chaplin in The Gold Rush.”

“Heady stuff,” I said, crafting a fresh cone for Steve. Chocolate Chip and Candied Yam. “Plus, the unrequited love angle fits perfectly with your lifelong affection for the blues.”

“Mm-hmm,” Steve said, chomping into the ice cream and nodding. “But I want a contemporary take, where the lovelorn comic actually gets the girl. Hence the idea for a tune called ‘The Jester.’”

“I like it,” I said. “Do you have any music?”

“As a matter of fact, yes!” Steve threw the ice cream cone against the wall, where it spattered and we laughed because I had no intention of cleaning it up and neither did he, then he picked up his Martin D45 acoustic, and spun off this unbelievable chord structure. It was beautiful but also very complex.

“Steve, that’s wonderful, but you said you want a radio hit, right?”

He nodded.

“Well, what you just played has alternating bars of 6/4 and 7/4,” I said. “People trying to dance will smash into each other at the turnaround. If I were you, I’d wait a few years until, I dunno, Peter Gabriel leaves Genesis or something, then pitch it to them.”

Which is something that, oddly, happened. (Check out Genesis’s “Turn It On Again” and try to tell me Steve “Guitar” Miller didn’t have something to do with it!)

In the meantime, to illustrate my point, I hummed a riff off the top of my head, the stupidest thing I could think of.

“Brilliant!” Steve exclaimed. He immediately replicated it, note for note, on the guitar. “I love it!”

“Um, I was sorta exaggerating with a super dumb lick,” I said, “but I guess it is catchy.”

“Damn right it is,” Steve said grimly. I’d underestimated how much he wanted a hit.

We fleshed out the simplistic music, then started on the lyrics. I asked him to show me what he had so far.

“Some call me the Space Cowboy / Some call me the Gangster of Love

Some people call me Big Johnny Kokernaut / ’cause I speak of the ludicrosity of love”

“Hold it!” I said, probably more sharply than I intended. I was 15, talking to one of America’s biggest rock stars! “Where’s the lovelorn jester in all this? So far, all we’ve got is a couple of self-referential boasts from your earlier hits and … who the heck is Big Johnny Coconut?”

“Kokernaut,” Steve said. “With a ‘K.’ It’s just a name I made up.”

“Speaking of making words up, you know ‘ludicrosity isn’t real, right? I think you’re looking for ludicrousness.” I’d finished third in the school spelling bee the year before, and people threw sticks and mudballs at me when I misspelled “tourniquet.” “Though I do like the idea of just making up a word for the hell of it. That’s rock ‘n’ roll, sir! Making up words!”

“OK, how about ‘pompatus’?” Steve asked. He chewed nervously on the tip of his pencil while I thought about it.

“I like it, Steve. Pompatus. I like it a lot. Sounds Greek or Latin. Are you sure it’s not real?”

We looked in the Webster’s Dictionary that all ice cream stores seem to carry, then made a few malts to refresh ourselves. Chocolate for me; mixed fruit and peppermint for Steve. I gotta say, he had curious taste when it came to ice cream.

Fig. 3. I’ve never understood why dictionaries are necessary in ice cream shops, but they are — and ours was no different.

Back to work. The rest of Steve’s verses were eloquent and bittersweet as the Gangster/Space Cowboy/Big John Kokernaut waxed wistfully about how he wished he had a “damsel with whom he could court and woo.”

“Dude,” I said, in what may have been the earliest use of the word “dude” in an ironic hipster sense of camaraderie — as opposed to familiar colloquial nomenclature utilized by trail riding cowboys. “These lyrics are fine if you’re Cyrano de Bergerac and you just joined the freakin’ Moody Blues. But you’re Steve ‘Guitar’ Miller! Let’s give this guy some attitude!”

So he scribbled madly for a few minutes and came up with something far more encouraging:

“People talk about me, baby / Say I’m doing you wrong, doing you wrong

Well, don’t you worry, baby, don’t worry / ’Cause I’m right here at home”

“Okay, play the new dumb but catchy riff and sing over it,” I suggested.

He went through it a few times, working on timing and rhythm and melody, but something was off.

“I got it!” I said. “In the last line, instead of just one ‘I’m right here at home,’ say it four times for emphasis: ’Cause I’m right here, right here, right here, right here at home.”

Worked like a charm!

“Before we go start writing lyrics for the chorus,” Steve said, clearly jazzed at the progress we were making, “let’s do another verse with a repetitive phrase.”

And of course you out there in Listener Land know exactly what we came up with. First, though, it might be of interest to know the evolution of the verse.

“You’re the cutest thing that I ever did see / Really love your kidney bean plants, wanna work on the crew that harvests them

Lovey-oriole, lovey-oriole, lovey-oriole all the time / Heavens to Murgatroyd, baby, I’ll sure show you a good time”

Of course, kidney beans was stupid — my idea because that’s what the school cafeteria had served for lunch that day — so Steve came up with shaking peaches out of a tree. Very cool.

And I vetoed the Murgatroyd nonsense and we decided on “Ooo-wee baby” as a fine alternative.

“Now I gotta ask,” I said, “What’s ‘lovey-oriole’ mean?”

Steve frowned. “Isn’t that the romantic bird all the poets use?”

“Doves, Steve! Doves, not orioles!”

He grinned, embarrassed. So we substituted “lovey-dovey, lovey-dovey, lovey dovey” and, man, it was fine!

All that was left to do, then, was the chorus, which I was dreading because, while Steve went out front to make another cone —Rocky Road and one of our special flavors of the month, Lamb Bouillon — I’d sneaked a look at his original chorus.

“I’m a jester, yes a jester / I’m a punchline tester

I play my music in a tri-horned hat with bells that are fun

I’m a Renaissance court dwarf / I come from way up north

I sure don’t wanna hurt no one”

Well, ugh. Just horrible.

But how does a 15-year-old kid tell one of his musical idols that?

You don’t. And I didn’t.

What I did do, though, was offer an alternative.

“I’m a joker / I’m a smoker / I’m a seven-thirty p.m. toker

I get my lovin’ on the run”

I showed it to Steve, who licked his cone thoughtfully as he read and re-read what I’d written. “First of all, Young Brave,” he said sternly, “don’t let me catch you using tobacco products or reefer! Those are roads to nowhere!”

“No sir,” I said, touched by his concern.

“Anyway … what if …” he said, pausing to throw the ice cream against the wall as hard as he could, “we say midnight toker instead of seven-thirty? At seven-thirty, most people I know are eating tuna casserole. Midnight makes the Joker a bit more mysterious — and you know how the ladies love that!”

Fig. 4. Family enjoying tuna casserole well before midnight. I must say I admire the art on their dining room wall!

We beamed at each other. With a bit of nip-and-tuck, we had a new song called “The Joker” — and by God it turned out to be a smash hit.

With that, I closed up the ice cream parlor and Steve gave me a quick ride to my house. It was later than I realized. My parents had gone out to dinner and told me to be in early. But we made it in time and when my folks arrived and Mom came in to check on me, I smiled and said, “I been right here, right here, right here, right here at home.”

*****

Have you bought your copy of my latest novel White Ghost Blues? Find it here and let me know what you think! Thanks.

My wife Eileen and I enjoyed lunch last week in a small family restaurant. And we were surprised and delighted that, on the tables, were those old-fashioned but, I suppose, not-yet-extinct paper placemats. You remember: they feature “business card” advertising laid out around the perimeter so diners, as they wait on their food, can peruse and ponder businesses and products they might not have been aware of or thought much about.

Why was I “delighted” by this?

Well, it turns out I’m a third-generation paper restaurant placemat guy. My grandfather, Oscar Koster, was a paper restaurant placemat pioneer back in his native Germany, circa early 20^th century, before he emigrated to the U.S. as Hitler was coming to power. In Indiana, where he settled in America, he graduated into a career as a partner in an esteemed printing/lithography company.

Fig. 1. See? Grandpa Oscar and Charles. “Chas” J. Oval were clearly people capable of creating magnificent paper restaurant placemats! (Also, I’m all for abbreviations, but why abbreviate Charles? With “Chas,” you’re only saving three letters. And if you’re going to abbreviate Charles, why wouldn’t you go ahead and abbreviate Oscar, too? Maybe “Osc”?)

Back in the Old Country, though, he helped expand the idea of “going-out-to-eat” into a multi-focused experience that included diner speculation on all sorts of helpful services.

After our meal, then, I clambered up into our attic and found some family archives that included photos of a few of my grandfather’s random placemats, apparently crafted just before he left Munich for the U.S. in 1924. For example:

Fig. 1. A photograph of one of Grandpa Oscar’s paper restaurant placemats from Germany. I chose this image because of the ad on the right! Ring any “Nazi party rebellion” bells? That’s actual display advertising for what turned out to be the Beer Hall Putch rebellion. Holy hell! Glad gramps got out of Der Olde Country at top speed!

Anyway, while the idea of paper restaurant placemats festooned with a variety of ads doesn’t rival cogito ergo sum as a brain-quaking epiphany, it was nonetheless a sound concept. How many good folks might otherwise not have discovered a trusted plumber or hair stylist or used car dealer or, less often but no less valuable, a tutor in graduate level petroleum engineering?

The brilliance is how the ads sorta sneak up on you. There you are, sipping your iced tea and casually chatting with your wife or friends as you wait for your wings or mozz sticks, idly glancing at the placemat ads and …

PRESTO!

“Hell, Clara, remember how you were bitching about the pothole in the driveway?” The diner uses an index finger to tap the placemat emphatically. “Says here the Dean ‘Feisty’ Nelms Asphalt Paving Service is here for all our paving needs!”

“How fortuitous!” Clara exclaims. “Tear off that part of the placemat before you spill tomato sauce on it and we’ll call Fisty when we get home!”

“It’s Feisty, but, yeah.”

Another popular aspect of the paper advertising restaurant placemat — and I’m proud that grandpa Oscar actually introduced this idea into the business — is that the customer can flip the placemat over and, to the delight of children in the party, find a variety of wacky puzzles and riddles to occupy the kiddos till mealtime. In many restaurants, if the owners are sufficiently thoughtful to provide crayons, families are delighted by color-in silhouettes of amusing cartoon animals.

Fig. 2. Aw, ain’t that cute? I’d like to say it’s an example of a Kiddo Korner coloring option on the back of a paper restaurant placemat, but this image is in fact a page torn out of the “Early Nature Sketches” notebook from the great realist painter Gustave Courbet (courtesy Musée Courbet, Ornans, France). But you get the idea.

Variations on the “reverse side” content also evolved to include stuff appealing to the grownups. There are trivia options, crossword puzzles, tic-tac-toe, fill-in-the-blank algebraic equations and, increasingly in our complex and troubled times, gambling and escort services and dark web drug prescriptions.

Now, flash forward several years. We’ll skip over my father’s brief experiences in paper restaurant placemats owing to an ad he innocently and in good faith sold back in Dallas when I was a kid. Turns out a Louisiana mobster purchased a spot on one of Dad’s placemats and used a fake business card that was actually the “It’s a go!” notification for Lee Harvey Oswald in early fall, 1963.

Erk!

For that and other reasons, I’ve never been particularly interested in the paper restaurant placemat biz. While I’m proud of my familial connection to a noble concept, the lengthy law enforcement interviews my father went through — just how much, they wondered, did Pops know about what came to be called the “Carlos Marcello Paper Restaurant Placemat Conundrum” — left me cautious. Plus, in the Age of Social Media and Influencers, the paper restaurant placemat now seems a quaintly outmoded business model.

Then an idea struck me.

What about paper restaurant placemats for five-star restaurants whose demographics are the ultra-wealthy?

The idea that elite gastronomic gathering spots such as the French Laundry, Le Bernardin or Moon Rabbit might insult diners with paper placemats cluttered with business cards seems unlikely.

BUT! On the other hand, all it takes is just one Michelin chef to decide the idea is so counter-bougie amusing and do it — and it might become a trend.

I’ve always been a forward-thinking fellow so, in anticipation, I’ve already started selling ads for exorbitantly chic paper restaurant placemats. I don’t have a whole mock-up yet, but here is the copy for the first four business cards I’ve already contracted. I figure if I have some truly enticing ads that would appeal to what I might call the Gentrified Mindset, selling the placemats to a four-star restaurant will be the easy part.

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In college, independent of any course assignments, I used to read Shakespeare casually and for entertainment, much like one would sit on a couch and eat sleeves of cookies with the aim being that eventually I would eat all the cookies.

I’m not kidding.

What an aspiring young man I was!

I had a terrific edition of the complete works of Shakespeare’s plays, illustrated with photos from elite British stage productions. It was gift from a friend when I graduated high school, and to see images of those classic actors onstage — folks like Leo McKern, Laurence Olivier, Paul Scofield, Vivien Leigh, John Gielgud, Anthony Quayle — added an amazing component of reality and even comprehension as I valiantly struggled through the oft-baffling but ultimately rewarding text.

Right before the end of the spring semester of my sophomore year, a guy who lived in the dorm room next to mine, a basketball player named Jon, came in and asked if he could borrow my Shakespeare book as he crammed mightily before an English final.

“Sure,” I said. Jon was a good guy and I liked him, but I sensed panic; he wasn’t the sort for whom immersion in Elizabethan or Jacobean theater heavily mortgaged his time. I suppose he thought that, if he looked at enough pictures, he might assimilate sufficient Bardness to scrape by. (BTW, I made a D in an English course that semester, so I’m not being haughty.)

The next afternoon, I noticed the door to Jon’s room was open and the place was empty. Apparently, the English final was his last test, and he’d packed up and left for the summer. It seemed my Shakespeare collection was included in his freight.

“Oh well,” I thought, “I’ll get it when we come back in the fall.”

Nope. Jon never returned. I never saw the Shakespeare book — or Jon, for that matter — again.

There is no shortage of Shakespeare collections, but there was something special about that one. It was given to me by a dear friend, for one. And now, fifty years later, I can’t find a copy of that precise edition — even from those rare book dealers who are always named Montclair or Witherspoon or Chauncey.

I can fine plenty of excellent Shakespeare volumes with illustrations, including the renowned Rockwell Kent woodcut images, but it’s not the same. (Aside: it might be interesting if someone like Hank Ketcham, the artist who drew Dennis the Menace, illustrated the complete works of Shakespeare. Just a thought.)

Fig. 1. In case any publishers out there want a fresh idea for future illustrated Shakespeare compendiums, here’s Dennis the Menace as Richard II.

While I didn’t read all of Shakespeare’s plays, I did read several and still retain some comprehensive awareness. To be honest, though, a lot of what I gleaned is more of the “makes me laugh” quality, or is the sort of reactive idiocy of a dolt — rather than the sort of stuff spewed by profound Shakespearean brains like Harold Bloom. (A book I do still have is Bloom’s Shakespeare and the Invention of the Human, but as the photo below indicates, it sits lonely in my bookshelf surrounded by the sort of reading material I now pursue.)

Fig. 2. Actual shelf in Rick Koster bookcase. Photo courtesy of author.

Anyhoo, here are a few things I recall from those long-ago readings in my long-lost Shakespeare book.

• In Titus Andronicus, the queen is served her children baked in a pie!

• Later in the same play, a villain called Aaron the Moor, upon capture and in response to a request for a display of remorse, gleefully says, “I have done all these (horrible) things as willingly as one would kill a fly; my only regret is that I cannot do ten-thousand more!” Hannibal Lecter and The Joker must’ve been in awe of that statement.

• Shakespeare named one of his finest creations, Falstaff, after a brand of beer!

Fig. 3. William Shakespeare so enjoyed the smooth lager properties of Falstaff Beer that he named one of his greatest characters in honor of the brew.

• I’m not sure what play it happens in, but one character insults another by referring to him as a “cream-faced loon”! I’m not sure what a “cream faced loon” would even look like, or why it’s visage would be coated in cream, but imagine what a wondrous society we’d have if most of us utilized that sort of creativity to tailor our insults rather than, “Suck it, turd-head!”)

• Not a single scholar has ever finished reading Coriolanus, and a movement continues to gain momentum to declare that Coriolanus was in fact written by the guy who played Goober Pyle on The Andy Griffith Show! (This is backed up by a photo in my missing Royal Shakespeare compendium that showed Richard Burton as Othello and the guy who played Goober Pyle on The Andy Griffith Show as Iago!)

• I refused to read The Merry Wives of Windsor simply because it was titled The Merry Wives of Windsor and I didn’t anticipate anything near as cool happening as when Hector’s corpse is dragged behind a galloping horse in Troilus and Cressida!

• People said “Forsooth” a lot in those days!

• Speaking of language, another odd example is how a character, upon leaving a scene, might say, “I must away!” Not I must go away” but just “I must away.” Perhaps the verb “go” hadn’t been invented yet.

• Oh, and “exeunt”! That was a stage direction in the text indicating that a group of characters should haul ass. For instance, a merry wife might say to Coriolanus, “We must away!” and then, helpfully and in italics, Shakespeare would add exeunt to let readers and actors and directors know that, in fact, Coriolanus and the merry wife indeed hauled ass even though they weren’t in the same play.

OK. Where am I going with all this?

Well, next week, there won’t be an I WRITE GOOD episode.

My computer and I MUST AWAY for a few days.

If you feel anxious about not having your weekly I WRITE GOOD, pretend the person who lives next door borrowed your I WRITE GOOD subscription to study for a final exam. Then never returned it! The cream-faced loon!

Don’t be sad, though. I’ll be back the following week.

And when I return, it really will be time — finally, after all these Trumpian misdirections and false alarms — for me to activate the Paid Content portion of I WRITE GOOD.

A lot of you have very kindly pledged sums of money to support I WRITE GOOD, but I haven’t yet set that in motion. I keep saying I’m going to but …

Now, though, it really will happen. It must happen. I’m sitting on a repository of reader contributions that, if activated, total nearly as much as it would cost to build a 12-pack of those missiles America is out of because Pete “Operation Premature Explosion” Hegseth fired all of them at Iran.

A reminder to those of you who’ve contributed: in acknowledgement of your beneficence, y’all will receive all sorts of special content not available to free subscribers.

One is a serialized release of a vaguely comic crime novel I wrote called Pagan Milkshake. The manuscript had been picked up by a well-established literary agent and was in the process of being shopped to publishers when Covid hit. By the time the danger had passed, and the project had been in limbo for almost two years, the agent decided to drop the book rather than attempt to re-pursue the various strands of his sales pitch in an industry operationally devastated by the plague … and that was that.

So now YOU can read Pagan Milkshake as part of your monetized subscription. A new chapter every week! It’s a rip-snortin’ page-turner, is what it is!

Another subscriber-only bonus feature will an occasional entry in a video series called THE THOUSAND AND ONE ROCK T-SHIRTS OF RICK KOSTER. A few months back, I posted the inaugural effort, a witty think piece bout Uriah Heep shirts. Several of y’all seemed to like it.

As a refresher on the series, the second episode we filmed is below.

Important: for those of you who have pledged various amounts supporting to I WRITE GOOD, you’ll have a chance to either confirm or withdraw your pledge before we activate. I hope you’ll hang around and that the bonus material is worth your entertainment dollar.

Thanks to ALL of you so far. There will always be free weekly content, and I’m having a great time doing this. Inasmuch as new subscriber stats have slowed, please help out by recommending I WRITE GOOD to people who might be entertained by it, or to people you’d like to punish for one reason or another with playful observations about our hell-bound condition.

I love ya BIG! See you in two weeks.

Exeunt

In Hartford, some 50 miles northwest from where we live in New London, great attention and care are devoted to twin literary attractions known respectively as the Mark Twain House and the Harriet Beecher Stowe House.

Not only can you tour these museums/homesteads, you can also invest heavily in gift shop merch! T-shirts! Totes! Coffee mugs! Inspirational gift cards! Calendars! Designer editions of the authors’ work! Jigsaw puzzles respectively depicting Huckleberry Finn and Uncle Tom or possibly the latter’s cabin!

Granted, Twain and Stowe comprise a solid one-two punch of “I write good” legacy deserving of such historical acknowledgement.

But, whoa!

What about here in New London?

We have our own Typewriterly Twosome of Terrific Tales: Eugene O’Neill and, well, me.

And where are OUR museums?

Nowhere.

Consider O’Neill, the playwright whose titles include Long Day’s Journey into Night, The Iceman Cometh, A Moon for the Misbegotten, Desire Under the Elms, Ah! Wilderness, The Emperor Jones, The Hairy Ape and many more. His family summered in New London at their Monte Cristo Cottage on Pequot Avenue — a structure I drive by at least a few times a day.

Fig. 1. The Monte Cristo Cottage, where you’d hope fans of playwright Eugene O’Neill could visit to learn more about the great man or soak up the dude’s writerly vibes or buy T-shirts or fake antique morphine bottles.

Fig. 2. Sign alerting visitors and passersby of the historical significance of the cottage. Note the part about “this site possesses exceptional value in commemorating” etc. etc. — without mentioning that citizens can’t access the building to experience the exceptional value.

The dwelling has fallen not so much into disrepair but into a state where it looks lonely. I walked up onto the porch earlier this week and found some dead leaves and a discarded but half-full bag of Pro PowerMelt +, possibly leftover from one of the family’s final visits during that frosty summer of 1903. I also peered through the few windows that aren’t shuttered, and was able to see what I presume was a replication of the O’Neill living room with volumes-packed bookshelves and fine furniture.

Frankly, it all looked ready, with just a bit of dusting, to greet scholars and devotees of a man who was the recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and a Tony Award for Best Play. That’s the 1929 Yankees of writerly awards!

To be honest, the cottage was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1971 and is now owned by the magnificent and poly-disciplined Eugene O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford. But, given that the the theater center is admittedly bee-buzzingly busy with all sorts of world-renowned workshops, retreats and programs — focusing presciently on the present and future of the theater rather than the distinguished past — I can see where maintaining the cottage as a visitor’s center might be low priority.

Plus, times are particularly tough in the arts right now. Donations and grants have become delicate commodities — unless your organization is willing to rebrand itself. I’m thinking of a gold-sparkle paint job and a new sign that boldly proclaims, “The Donald Trump/Eugene O’Neill Monte Cristo Cottage.”

Of course, once a federal court rules that Trump can’t commandeer the property, a tarp will hang over the sign, which will only be noticeable because the posts holding up the sign remain recently spray-painted in a particularly garish gold sparkle.

Fig. 3. Tarp-cloaked Donald Trump/Eugene O’Neill Monte Cristo Cottage sign after court ruling similar to the Kennedy Center fiasco. The project was undertaken in a no-bid contract by the same company that provided the glazed finish for the toilet seat on the president’s golf cart.

For a while, the Monte Cristo Cottage was in fact open to the public in seasonal fashion, with some on-site docents who could helpfully show you through the layout of the house and point out stuff like, “This is the bathroom where Eugene’s mother hoarded her morphine” or “Check out the patriarch’s liquor cabinet, where, as Long Day indicates, Eugene and his brother Jamie frequently and separately stole spirits, blaming each other after refilling the bottles with water in the youthful delusion that the Old Man couldn’t tell” or “That pencil you see on the desk there is the very writing implement O’Neill used to write the first draft of Moon for the Misbegotten even though he would have been about 14 at the time.”

Whilst open to the public, the cottage did have some cool moments, one of which occurred while I was a writer at a local newspaper. In preparation for what would be a heralded Broadway production of Long Day, the cast took a break from rehearsals to travel down from the City, visit the historical site and soak up the vibes. In attendance were stars Brian Dennehy (James), Vanessa Redgrave (Mary), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Jamie) and Robert Sean Leonard (Edmund).

After this incredibly badass assemblage of thespians — the 1929 New York Yankees of drama? — had some time to explore the property, members of the press and local dignitaries were allowed inside, refreshments were provided and chatting ensued. As I remember it, a server asked the affable Dennehy if he would care for a glass of wine and he replied affirmatively.

“Would you like red or white?” the server inquired.

“Whichever’s closest,” Dennehy said.

Classic!

I guess I’m just hoping someone figures out some way to re-establishing a “visiting hours” or even museum scenario where locals, tourists and scholars can celebrate O’Neill’s astounding talent and New London roots.

A few ideas I offer freely to the O’Neill folks for what they might temporarily do with the property to raise revenue pursuant to eventually establishing the Eugene O’Neill/Monte Cristo Cottage Museum:

1. Given the flavor of downtown New London commerce: a combo tattoo parlor/smoke shop

2. A cheaply-rented location for indie filmmakers seeking to crank out slasher films

3. A cheaply-rented location for a Hallmark Channel filmmaker seeking to crank out a film in which an attractive adult daughter returns home at Christmas to help her aging but sweet parents — artisans who hand-craft holiday-themed candles and also organize the town’s annual Yule Pageant — because an attractive but, by all appearances, cold-hearted real estate developer wants to buy the family’s once-proud cottage and turn it into a combination tattoo parlor/smoke shop.

Fig. 4. Still from soon-to-be-released Santa-themed Hallmark story about a charming tattoo parlor/smoke shop, filmed and set in the O’Neill family’s Monte Cristo Cottage.

MEANWHILE …

Barely a mile away, The Rick Koster Homestead is similarly ignored. If anything, the property is even more unkept than Monte Cristo Cottage even though the author — me — is alive and owns a lawnmower and a shrubbery trimmer.

A plaque by the door on the front porch reads:

Fig. 5. This is real.

Since, yes, I am Rick Koster, I’ll admit that the RICK KOSTER HOMESTEAD doesn’t have quite the dazzling literary or popular cachet represented by O’Neill, but it’s accurate to say there are rumors suggesting my house will soon be open to visitors hoping to see where “the magic takes place” and might perhaps buy a hotdog or popcorn from the THE RICK KOSTER HOMESTEAD snack bar operated by, ah, me.

And if it turns out that more readers are interested in O’Neill and Monte Cristo than the Rick Koster Homestead, I’m more than happy to take my hot dog snack bar to the O’Neill cottage and set up my operation there.

However this works out, I’m hope you’ll join me in celebrating Literary New London.

Fig. 1. Literally one of the only photos I have of Broxton — and this is drinking on a rare night off in a McAllen, Texas, bar. From left, there’s me, Russell, unidentified Russell companion, Ron, Larry and unidentified Larry companion.

Walking one of my dogs the other day, we passed the Pequot Chapel near our house. It’s a quaint, old-New-Englandy-style structure that features a revolving set of traveling ministers for Sunday services when it’s open during the summer beach season. It’s also available for weddings or special occasions and, despite not being sufficiently insulated for winter, is host to an annual, all-are-welcome Carol Sing each holiday season. (“Dress warmly!” the sign out front says.)

Both of our dogs like the Pequot Chapel, and I suspect that, in spite of the hallowed status of the neatly clipped grounds, many a canine have peed there. It’s certainly a popular sniffing spot if you have four paws.

On this particular day, several tuxedoed young men and women in bridesmaid finery were milling about outside the chapel, and indeed the signage noted a wedding was about to take place.

And the first thought that sprang to my mind was, “I wonder how many nights I wore a goddamned tuxedo.”

That only sounds odd if you aren’t aware that I was once in a band called Broxton out of Lawton, Oklahoma. We played hotel lounges all over — typically Holiday Inns and Sheratons, two- or three-week residencies in each stop — and, almost every night, we wore tuxedos with one of three different colored ruffled shirts. Each of us also had our own room in whatever hotel we were playing in, so that was pretty cool.

Fig. 2. Broxton logo.

About 7 p.m. each night, my phone would ring and it would be our drummer Russell, the sartorial director of the band, and he’d say one word before hanging up: “blue” or “red” or “yellow,” which designated that evening’s shirt choice.

Fig. 3. Dude answering a hotel phone. Many years ago, this could have been me, learning what color ruffled tuxedo shirt I’d be wearing that night. Except this guy doesn’t have acne or an erosional chin or empty beer cans cluttering up the room.

Broxton was a very good band, which can happen when you play five sets a night, six or even seven nights a week, 50 weeks a year. In all honesty, I can say I was the least talented player, but I think I made the other guys laugh and it’s not as though I sucked. Or at least they didn’t know I sucked until after I quit and the person who replaced me was a genuine badass named Brad Houser (RIP), whose own post-Broxton career was in the New Bohemians. That’s Brad’s fluidly great fretless work on their hit “What I Am.”

Anyway, in Broxton, Russell, his brother Larry (guitar) and Ron (keyboards) were all very good singers. Me? Not so much. But I took up space and didn’t make too many mistakes in a repertoire that probably included close to 150 songs spanning country, soul/funk/disco, pop, rock, metal and emerging New Wave.

Plus, when any of the others’ voices got tired — try singing 30 songs every night for months on end and, possibly, like Larry and Russell, you’ll occasionally see blood when you spit out your mouthwash each morning because you’ve slawed your throat in the name of top-tier lounge entertainment — I could be counted on to rasp my way through a few tunes without ruining the evening.

(“Der Komisar” and “Whiskey Bent and Hell Bound” and “Rock the Casbah” were Kosterian specialties. No tenoresque Styx or Lionel Richie or U2 for me!)

I hated wearing tuxedos, and not just because they weren’t rock ‘n’ roll-ish. They’re just uncomfortable and very hot under intense lighting. And dress shoes! Try bounding across the stage in a pair of Florsheim clodhoppers. I think I can say with certainty you wouldn’t have seen Chuck Berry do too much duckwalking if he’d been wearing the sort of footwear we had.

Fig. 4. Chuck Berry duckwalking. But wait! He IS in dress shoes!

I no longer have my Broxton tuxedo, which I donated it to the Lounge Band Hall of Fame in Vegas.

Fig. 5. Not a Broxton tuxedo but rather a Broxton sleeveless T-shirt from the author’s private collection. $750 on eBay.

I sorta wish I had kept that tux because it had many memories. Y’see, an unexpected and fun quality about wearing a tuxedo can be that the formality of the uniform makes the many inherently comic moments of being in a band even funnier simply because you’re wearing a tuxedo when they happen.

And there were many hilarious moments during my time in Broxton. As the title of this week’s I WRITE GOOD suggests, I will occasionally detail a theoretically comic incident that happened during my time trodding the stages of hotel bars.

By way of introducing this series, let me tell you about the time a couple of media folks taped a “professional video” of one of our sets while we were playing in the bar of an exceedingly nice Hilton in McAllen, Texas. This was 1982, and McAllen, being a small town, had limited opportunities for the Young Folks to see live music. Which is to say, in addition to serving drinks to hotel guests, the lounge attracted locals and Broxton had built a pretty nice fan base over the years.

This particular incident took place shortly after I joined the band, and it was my first time in McAllen. I’m not sure I believed the other band guys when they told me how popular Broxton was, so it was pleasantly bizarre when we walked into the club the first night — and the club was full and burst into applause upon seeing us.

It’s been over four decades, now, and I can’t remember what the video was for or why it was made. A local TV news program? We were occasionally featured on those things, particularly in small towns, but I can’t be certain that was the case in McAllen.

It can’t have been terribly important, though, given what I’m about to tell you about how it went down.

I do know we debated which song we should play to start the Night of the Video Taping. On any other night, we a had a few regular and reliable tunes we could open with depending on such factors as the size of the crowd, if a particularly drunken and raucous Happy Hour was happening, or maybe the only listener was a morose salesman nursing his fifth gin and tonic.

We might might do “Alien” by the Atlanta Rhythm Section, “On the Road Again” by Willie Nelson, “Sugar Daddy” by the Bellamy Brothers, “Celebrate” by Kool and the Gang or “Eye in the Sky” by the Alan Parsons Project.

On the Night of the Video Taping, though, it couldn’t be a song Russell sang because he was the drummer and, seated to the back of the stage did not provide an optimal visual dynamic. We’d probably have featured Larry. He was handsome and positioned center stage between me and Ron, plus Broxton was the siblings’ band; Ron and I were hired players.

BUT, the night before, having boozed it up considerably, Larry and I hatched a fine plan.

We’d start with “Eye in the Sky,” which featured Ron as the lead vocalist. Though a terrific keyboardist, Ron wasn’t particularly studious about certain aspects of the gig. In this case, he’d never bothered to learn the lyrics to “Eye in Sky.” He’d simply scrawled them on a piece of paper and taped the sheet to one of the legs of his A-frame synthesizer set up. That way, he could just read the words as he sang. It’d been that way for weeks.

On the day of the taping, I sneaked into the empty club and removed his “Eye in the Sky” lyric sheet and took it back to my room. As a fairly good amateur calligrapher, I was able to replicate Ron’s bird-claw printing on a new page — taking care to add the grease stain and the torn corner to further lend authenticity to the duplicity.

I then showed up early for the night’s gig and taped the new lyrics in the proper place.

Show time!

We took stage in our pristine formal wear, and it was time to rock! It started out in fine fashion. Ron was making eye contact with the full house whilst stealing glances at the words. The way songwriters Parsons and Eric Woolfson composed “Eye in the Sky,” the tune has two verses before it goes to the chorus.

The first verse went beautifully.

Unfortunately for Ron, when it came time for verse two …

Well, I’d changed the lyrics.

The correct lines are:

Don’t say words you’re gonna regret

Don’t let fire rush to your head

What Ron saw, though, was:

Don’t say words you’re gonna regret

Don’t let flames shoot out of your nose …

Fig. 6. Author’s recreation of the sort of “Eye in the Sky” lyric sheet you might have seen on the keyboard A-frame if you were in a hotel ` lounge in 1982 when Broxton was playing.

Russell, behind his kit, was oblivious that anything was going to happen. If I remember correctly, Larry predicted his brother wouldn’t think it was a good idea to screw with an opportunity for a Broxton video. So we hadn’t told him.

Larry and I, though, watching Ron as we played, could barely stand the anticipation.

When Ron saw the words “flames shoot out of your nose,” his reaction was fantastic. His eyes bugged out of his head and he momentarily paused, searching his brain frantically for the actual words while trying not to ruin the song. The camera was in close-up mode!

Ron was fucking terrified. I could imagine his desperate hope that neuroscience and trace memory would kick in, even as he was trying to come up with a rational explanation for how this had happened — and wondering WHAT ARE THE ACTUAL GODDAMNED WORDS?!

To his credit, there were only a few moments of uncertainty — I’m not sure the crowd even noticed — but Larry and I convulsed with laughter and couldn’t stop. We were howling like werewolves and, if anyone onstage was making mistakes, it was Larry and me. Ron recovered admirably and his clever solution was simply to sing the first verse over again.

Of course, that was his only reasonable option because a quick glance down revealed that the rest of the lyrics were absolute gibberish — ridiculous scenarios I invented off the top of my head and jotted down for maximum visual idiocy.

Sadly, I don’t remember any more of my fake lyrics, but I suspect I was aiming for a cross between H.P. Lovecraft and Moe Howard.

Larry and I laughed for the rest of the goddamn set. Ron was at first pissed and then realized it was hilarious. Russell, as I remember, was, as we’d anticipated, not happy. After the set, I think we even adjourned to facility’s empty banquet room for an emergency meeting to reestablish band priorities and so forth.

Ultimately, nothing happened. By the end of the night, all had returned to normal in Lounge Band Land. After all, the next night’s gig would be there before we knew it, and those wrinkled tuxedo pants and jackets weren’t going to iron themselves.

I don’t recall if any of us ever saw the video or what happened to it. For the record, and because I do plan on revisiting my Broxton days in this space every now and then, it’s worth noting that Ron co-owns and performs in a chain of very successful piano bars called Louie Louie’s with locations in Dallas and Colorado Springs. And, after years running their own nightclub in Jackson, Mississippi, I believe Larry and Russell are retired. Sadly, we don’t keep in regular touch, but I think fondly about our time together.

I will say this: I always liked “Eye in the Sky” and I still do. But when I saw a very excellent Alan Parsons concert at Foxwoods a few years back and they played that song, I started laughing again — 40-plus years later. The couple sitting next to me thought I was insane.

All I could think to do was to turn to them and call out helpfully over the music: “Don’t let flames shoot out of your nose!”

HEY! A bit of housekeeping. Substack statistics show very few of you are watching the video links I so carefully insert into these I WRITE GOOD missives. I attach them for your entertainment, so …

If you like I WRITE GOOD, please share with like-minded thoughtful people.

Also, regarding my new novel WHITE GHOST BLUES: Sales seem to have slowed to a trickle, by which I mean 37 people worldwide have availed themselves of this very fine book. That’s not gonna cut it!

So I implore you to buy numerous copies! Who doesn’t want to read a short YA novel about an albino kid who’s a blues guitar prodigy and happens to be in love with a female vampire/New Orleans Saints cheerleader?

Nobody, that’s who! Buy here and here. Many thanks!

I am a fan of the Slim Jim, which might be thought of as the particle board of meat sticks. You’re probably lying if you say you’ve never eaten one, because they’re an irresistible combination of, ah, “butcher’s blend” ingredients times salt times the sort of curative properties favored by ancient people who excelled at making mummies.

If Nobel judges weren’t so acutely worried about what other snooty award-bestowers think, they would have at some point awarded their chemistry prize to the Slim Jim folks for its alchemical complexity. Or at least they could’ve turned their background findings on the snack over to the executors of Upton Sinclair literary estate. That way, the grisly meatpacking scenes in Sinclair’s The Jungle could be updated in a way that reflects how ineffectual his book was in bringing about reform in the industry.

As usual, I’ve gone way beyond what’s necessary to start today’s I WRITE GOOD episode because all I’m trying to do is describe my arthritic hands. At this point in my life, the phalanxes in my fingers are less like bones and more like a surgeon reconstructed my hands using short Slim Jim segments scotch-taped together. I type like the Edward Scissorhands of sausage!

I could have started this whole think just by writing, “Boy, my fingers don’t work very well anymore. Probably arthritis!” and just kept going.

The truth is, though, I’m hungry and a Slim Jim sounds pretty good about right now.

In any case, I was reading the Athletic section of The New York Times online the other day — a story about Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game. As many of you know, an online newspaper layout is such that, directly under the main story, or possibly aligned flush on one side or another, are short teasers for other stories you can click on and explore.

Well, I was about to follow that up with a piece on Mike Trout but, with my Slim Jimmy fingers, I missed the Trout link and accidentally clicked on a story about what rich people were wearing at the recent Wimbledon tennis tournament.

But boy am I glad I did.

My God there are some goofy fuckers out there! And many of them were dressed expensively at the august tennis tourney!

I learned that the actor Emma Corrin, in the Ralph Lauren Wimbledon Suite, no less, “opted for cream trousers pooling at the heels, a navy shirt and tie and a red slouchy sweater.”

I learned that Catherine, Princess of Wales, “attended the women’s singles final in a bright red skirt suit with a peplum top and a waist-defining belt by Roland Mouret.”

I learned that “rapper Simbiatu Abisola Abiola Ajikawo, also known by her stage name Little Simz, opted for a black-and-white ensemble for the tournament, wearing a voluminous skirt with a bubble hem, a crisp white shirt, a leather waistcoat and a perfectly perched beret.”

Well, hell. With increasing wonder, I energetically plunged down the Goofball Hole of Fashion Coverage at the Times.

It’s fantastic, is what it is!

I mean, I’m a fellow whose idea of sartorial elegance can be defined by my admiration for the singer/guitarist Noddy Holder from the glory days of the band Slade.

Fig. 1. Noddy Holder of Slade, wearing trousers by Tom Ford, shoes by Stefano Ricci, suspenders by Trafalgar, socks by the Wicked Witch of the West and a hat later to be conceptually ripped off by Slash.

Anyhoo, the fawning affection and sly wit with which the Times fashion reporters do their jobs is something I both admire and find, well, eerie — in a good way. You’ve gotta want to be this enthusiastic (and secretly amused) about stuff this shallow.

I found a Times fellow called Jacob Gallagher (no relation that I can determine to Rory), and he amazes me.

Here are just two of the observations in Jacob Gallagher’s current newsletter and a third observation that I wrote. Your challenge is to figure out which are Jacob’s and which is mine.

• “Ahead of playing the World Cup final halftime show, Justin Bieber has opened a pop-up for his Skylrk fashion brand in the Meatpacking District in New York. I went by on Thursday afternoon and found a down-the-block line. Inside, shoppers (many already wearing Bieber merch) grabbed capri sweat shorts and swaddling hoodies. Bieber can still move units.”

• “Footwear visionary Luigi Bapp is already offering dee-lish sneak peeks at what promises to be a retro Spring ’27 line of flip flops made of bison fur hand-dyed in tones of ‘drained-knee-fluid pink’ and ‘cirrhosis-eye yellow.’ Rumor is the price tag will be ‘ouch’!”

• “Credit to my friend J_____ W_____ for pointing out that the Notion co-founder Ivan Zhao was not wearing Armani in Sun Valley, Idaho, as I speculated in my last newsletter, but was actually in Evan Kinori. Zhao’s $1,275 tumbled hemp Kinori jacket is sold out, but you can still get the vest if you’re a size small.”

Video. 1. Even though it disrupts the sculpted and precise rhythmic flow of my writing, watch this live video of Rory Gallagher — not to be confused with Jacob Gallagher, although Jacob might be thought of as the Rory Gallagher of fashion writers. Watch the whole song, then reflect on what a stupid world this is when Justin Bieber is considered a musical icon and Rory is largely forgotten. Eat it, Justin.

OK, are you back after “Moonchild”? Wild, right?

To get back to the above quiz: my quote is in the middle, and I’m otherwise sad because there’s no way I can fit into Zhao’s tumbled hemp Kinori jacket if all they have is small.

The Times Fashion section has many other informative and amusing components and writers. There’s a regular advice column by Vanessa Friedman — “A reader wonders what’s behind the rise of sleeveless clothing and how to manage the trend” — and plenty of features such as “How the Rich and Powerful Dress Right Now.” Surprisingly, the way the Rich and Powerful dress right now is quite different from what the Rich and Powerful were wearing at Wimbledon!

Another story is tantalizingly headlined “The Balenciaga Paradox,” which is not one of the world’s great unsolved math problems but instead a review of Pierpaolo Piccioli’s “debut couture,” which is, according to Friedman, “beautiful, but very familiar.”

Aside: if your name is Pierpaolo Piccioli, are you required by law to be a fashion designer or, at the least, a Formula One driver? Does this explain why, when I cruise fashionable New London and see Marks-A-Lot/cardboard signs for “dump runs,” “stump grinding” or “dog poop removal,” the proprietors are never named Pierpaolo but instead Stoney, Tug or Dusty?

And do you think the Times fashion writers would resign en masse if they found out Pierpaolo’s real name was Fats?

Fig. 2. Is this Pierpaolo Piccioli the fashion visionary? Or is it Tug of Tug’s Dump Runs?

Another thing I learned was the word “couture,” which fashion journalists use a lot. Naturally, I had no idea what it meant but, after reading it 63 times in two articles, I contextually figured out it’s either French or Italian for “fashion.”

What all my Goofball Hole diving has done, frankly, is to make me want to dress better. Couturely, even.

But we’re back to affordability.

One thought: What if I sell sponsorships and affix corporate insignias to my expensive clothing, the way golfers have numerous logos on their shirts? (Yes, golfers are the most boring dressers on earth — and that’s coming from me. But they definitely monetize.)

According to GQ, I could start with a J. Mueser cotton and linen-blend suit jacket, which retails at Mr Porter — presumably a couture dealer (first name: “Dusty”) and, no, Mr Porter does not want a period after Mr — for $2,250.

That’s steep!

But, if I go the corporate sponsors route and have Mr Porter stitch on a few logo patches, I can probably get the jacket for basically nothing. I’m hoping KFC, Diet Coke and Slim Jim will be part of the team, along with Batesville Caskets, if only because I’ve watched numerous televised PGA rounds and not once have I seen any players wearing even one sponsorship patch that was interesting. Invariably, we see Titleist, Nike, Srixon and other sports gear companies — and invariably banks and private jet companies, which only makes sense as they represent the places where the golfers keep their money and their modes of transportation.

Wouldn’t you be happy the next time the Golf Channel zooms in for a close-up and we could see the guy chipping had a Batesville Caskets patch?

I’ll tell you what: If anyone wants to give me $2,250 jacket for free with the proviso that Mr Porter glue Batesville Caskets and Slim Jim logos on it, I’ll do it.

And I’ll look pretty damned good.

Alert Vanessa Friedman and Josh Gallagher and Mr Porter. There’s a new Couture Badass in town.

P.S. I just found out there is no Mr Porter! Apparently a think tank of superb coutureists operate under the name Mr Porter out of their online-only Rich Dude Apparel Consortium — sorta like how Franklin W. Dixon was a fake person and not the author of the Hardy Boys books, which instead were written by a crew of anonymous writers adept at cranking out sleuth fiction.

But, other than my disappointment that Mr Porter doesn’t exist, everything else in this I WRITE GOOD is as stated.

Fig. 1. The commemorative beer stein I didn’t get.

It’s been about a year since I was laid off from The Day newspaper after almost three decades of exemplary service.

I’m pretty much over it except for two things.

1. No farewell cupcakes or commemorative beer stein. I know, I know: I was laid off and they needed me outta the building pronto. No chances could be taken that, enjoying a farewell cupcake, I might sneak some sinister malware into the computer system, or possibly utilize a Systema twirl-kick to topple stacks of old, yellowing newspapers in a display of rage that could only be described as “chilling.”

2. No severance pay, either! “We don’t have any money!” the newspaper president told me when I asked about it at the “you’re outta here” meeting also attended by the HR person.

   I thought for a moment. “How about this?” I said. “Use the money you’re saving by getting rid of me — my exalted salary — and just give me the same money and we’ll call it my severance.”

   Stew on that one, I thought.

   BUT!

   The Day leaders had anticipated my thrust. Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning economist, was hiding behind the Day president’s coat rack — I thought it was odd the president had four polar-ready jackets hanging there that day, in the dead of summer.

   “Hi, Rick, I’m Paul,” the esteemed economist said. Then, using terms such as “agglomeration,” “Keynesian resurgence,” “liquidity trap” and “the money you invest in the on-site coin-operated soft drink machine,” Krugman — I instantly recognized him as a kind, wise man who woulda helped me if he could — gently explained that “The Day doesn’t have any money. Your ass is out the door.”

So that’s why there were no cupcakes or commemorative beer stein!

Fig. 2. The ledger I see in my recurring, post-Day nightmares.

Anyway, reflecting back on my time at The Day made me want to revisit some of the things I wrote and share them on this space. Every once in a while it might be fun.

NOTE: at this point, you can stop reading and think to yourself, “Why, I’ve already gotten good value from this I WRITE GOOD post. I don’t need to look at excerpts from the Rick Koster scrapbook!”

Or, you can dive right into the article below.

This is from 1999, when I ate at seven franchise restaurants in seven days. It’s an example of first-person, long-form feature writing, and it still makes me laugh. It’s weird to see how cheap things were and also see how out of date some of the pop culture references are. And be careful if you don’t know who Jenna Jameson is and attempt to google her.

Fig. 3. The original front page of the story. My then-44-year-old-gaping maw looks positively wolf-like in anticipation of a bite of burger.

A Culinary Ironman

originally published on Feb. 24, 1999

Forget Y2K or UFOs or even squadrons of Anti-Christs popping up in the Middle East. The true sign of the apocalypse actually showed up years ago when a Shoney’s franchise opened in New Orleans’ French Quarter.

Shoney’s is a corny chain restaurant not dissimilar to IHOP or Kip’s Big Boy — all-embracing centers of filling, cheap, across-the-board caloric mediocrity designed for corn-growers or people who actually think Oprah Winfrey is a philosopher.

To put one of those place in the French Quarter — perhaps the most storied, architecturally haunting and cross-culturally exotic neighborhood in the United States — is brilliant in its cheese-stuffed essence of Americana precisely because franchise restaurants are America. They define society in the broad, Camaro-colored brushstrokes we associate with wrestlers becoming governors, Rosie O’Donnell and Adam Sandler.

Which is why I spend as much time in them as possible.

As a fervent feaster happily familiar with every fast food franchise in our wonderful nation, from Buzz’s in Hawaii to Ivar’s in the Pacific Northwest to El Fenix to Popeye’s to White Castle to every Jack-in-the-Box, McDonald’s and Pizza Hut in between, I am the ultimate culinary Uncle Sam.

And since the Illuminati at The Day was highly amused by the physical toll exacted on me when I was sent out seven consecutive nights to study live music in the area, it seemed equally entertaining — in a poke-the-zoo-animal-in-the-ribs-with-a-stick kinda way — to see how close to 300 pounds I could come by eating in chain restaurants seven days in a row.

MONDAY

Having a birthday party in a franchise restaurant is only one step below having one’s wedding reception there — particularly if you’re a teenage girl and, if it were up to you, you’d celebrate Sweet 16 on Marilyn Manson’s tour bus.

But a festive teen birthday is indeed what we encounter in the main dining room at the Ground Round in Groton. There are pointy party hats, balloons, presents — and we pirouette like Nureyev and speed into the comfort of the bar.

No matter that my wife Eileen is sick with a viral infection and the room is clogged with cigarette smoke; I ain’t sitting around dreading the moment when all the employees come in single file with their rendition of “Happy Birthday.”

Instead, with the largest beer stein I’ve ever seen placed in front of me — and the wifey sedated with a cauldron of health-giving Chardonnay — I open the huge, multipage and neon-colored laminated menu and go to work. Our waitress dispenses and additional folder of New Specials, and mine eyes pop out, Larry Flynt-like, over the beautifully detailed image of sausage, shrimp and chicken jambalaya — ladled over … pasta?!

Well, why not?

Of the restaurants I’ll try in the next week, Ground Round seems, in the bar area, anyway, the least “chainy.” If they want to get kooky with a traditional provincial dish like jambalaya (normally a recipe in which the ingredients are intermingled with rice during preparation, rather than dumped over pasta like a sundae topping), more power to them. After all, it’s a Massachusetts organization and most of its 160-plus locations are nowhere near jambalaya country.

I find out later I could have had the jambalaya in rice, but no one told me. That’s OK; the actual flavor is quite decent and my wife, better known in these pages as The Vegetarian Who Walks Among Us (TVWWAU), is more than familiar with the Ground Round’s grilled vegetarian sandwich.

The bar is quite a popular spot for sports watching, so there’s also that testosterone-exuding aura one doesn’t really expect at Denny’s but which is nonetheless comforting in that useless, men’s beer commercial sort of way. And while many of the over 200 menu options are exceedingly familiar, the GR visionaries do seem to pay attention to such innovations as ethnic specialties and jumbo, carnival-colored frozen cocktails.

Our tab is $30, but almost half of that can be attributed to stress-easing booze. We conclude that the atmospheric options presented by Ground Round are wide for all manners of hungry travelers, and that the food and service is beyond what one expects from the “franchise” family.

TUESDAY

Lunch today starts a brutal 30-hour stretch in which I’ll assault two of the prime-time buffet joints that are spreading through the reason like bacon-greased weeds. A Golden Corral has opened in Groton — one of more than 450 franchises in this fast-growing chain — and the company’s subtitular motto, “Steaks, Buffet & Bakery,” makes me suspect that a bit of Woodward/Bernstein-style digging would turn up such minutiae as something like the company was conceived by cash-strapped heart surgeons with gambling addictions.

The first thing I wanna say is: this is not good food. But it’s not completely awful, either. It’s … seductively filling.

That impression only intensified during the course of a Dionysian meal to which I’ve brought my pals Kristy and Barbara. You pay upon entering — about seven bucks apiece for lunch — and continue into a brightly lit, shiny barnlike structure that seems designed for maximum cholesterol intake. The idea is to take your tray and overdose at any of the numerous food stations.

At lunch — there’s also breakfast and dinner — going from left to right, one sees the salad bar, several areas of hot entrees, vegetables and soup, a pizza stand, a chef-manned grill where one can get burgers of Philly cheesesteaks, a dessert island and bakery.

The idea of ordering a steak — which costs extra — is laughable. Why would you need one?

Gazing around at the customers — many of whom will knock you out of your way if you’re standing in contemplation near a vat of food — one is reminded of … well, let’s just say there aren’t too many decathletes training here. And though the multitudinous variety of food seems to adhere to a dictum like “If it can’t be deep-fried or dipped in cheese, don’t serve it,” there are actually healthy options besides the condiment-heavy salad bar: some corn, broiled mystery fish, and a tray of steamed cauliflower buttons forlornly stacked like skulls in a Khmer Rouge body pit.

Fig. 4. Empty frame where not even I will post a photo of amassed skulls from the Killing Fields.

“One good thing,” Kristy says, whispering as though Lavrentiy Beria might overhear and send her to Siberia, “is that we come off like Kate Moss in this crowd.”

Accordingly, I head over to the soups — not because I want a dainty cup of chicken rice, but because one of the vats is nothing more than CHEESE SAUCE!

Dipping the ladle deep into the thick, yellow-orange mixture, I apply it liberally over a meatloafy concoction the color of a Payne Stewart outfit. Also present on plate #1 are: a self-constructed taco, the mystery fish, mashed potatoes and cream gravy, some feel-better-about-myself beets, and a few chicken fingers generously blanketed with brown gravy.

Meandering down the food line, there seems to be a rather haphazard approach to labeling the cafeteria-style bins, a point that rings like a fire alarm a few minutes later when I realize they aren’t chicken fingers. They’re either squash or sweet potato fingers! Which is a stupid idea in any case but, had I known, I certainly wouldn’t have poured brown gravy over them. I push those to the side as our happy waitress refills our drinks and brings fresh clean plates for assault number two.

Some of the items inhaled the second time: pizza, a Philly cheesesteak, a cheeseburger, cookies and a dish of ice cream goo that seems born of the headier moments in the history of petroleum engineering. Next to the ice cream machines are big tubs of candies that work either as ice cream toppings or independently. These include a variety of post-Halloween sale items like jellybeans, candy corn and gumdrops. The idea of candy corn on my ice cream is alluring in a John Waters sort of denouement, but I resist. Tomorrow’s meal already looms like an evil portent.

WEDNESDAY

If you had told me God or Claire Gaudiani had built a Xerox machine that could replicate three-dimensional objects, I’d say, “I know. I saw how that worked with Golden Corral and Ponderosa.”

Actually, Ponderosa, also in Groton (do we sense a disturbing and recurring motif that all these places have a Groton zip code?), is a smaller layout than Golden Corral but, in terms of philosophy and menu, they’re virtually interchangeable.

As part of the Metromedia restaurant chain based in Texas, Ponderosa has more than 200 company restaurants and about 350 franchise outposts. Though a workingman’s steakhouse was the original concept, and red meat remains a staple of the menu, the restaurant has adapted to the evolutionary needs of a hungry nation. Translation: buffet.

Again, you order and pay before you enter the restaurant proper. Frankly, I figure it’ll be weeks before I get back to the Golden Corral buffet, so I decide to circumvent temptation by ordering a steak. After selecting the blackboard special sirloin beef tips — about eight dollars with potato — I learn the meal includes the buffet! I sigh. What the hell … a quick reconnaissance indeed reveals virtually the same stuff as the Golden Corral, including the fried chicken and taco bar. I’ll pass.

Seating myself in one of the many dining areas, I note the Ponderosa is still working the Hoss Cartwright/Ol’ West look that I remember from my days in Texas (despite the curious effort to make the buffet line look like a circus carousel). There are cactus silhouettes hanging on the walls and some rustic timber, and twirling carboard mobiles hanging from the ceiling emblazoned with customer testimonials.

Fig. 5. You remember Dan Blocker, right? Hoss Cartwright? Did you ever see his Falstaff? Gone way too soon.

The beef tips are pretty good, lean and flavorful. I wasn’t aware they came drizzled in mushrooms and onions — mushrooms and onions being numbers three and four on the Big Rick Nightmare Top Ten, right behind spiders and the male cast members of Friends. The baked potato, which I order dry, comes awash in a sea of butter.

I give up. Clearly, no one manning the phones in the office of Divine Providence wants me to come anywhere close to eating anything healthy this week. So I go back to the buffet line, load up on All Things Fried and Cheesy — including a salad I drench with a nameless dressing selected for its proximity in color and texture to spackling. It’s good.

THURSDAY

Today is Red Lobster day, and I feel like I’m cheating because I eat at the New London Red Lobster with some regularity. Frankly, it’s a pretty good restaurant. It’s large, comfortable, nicely seafarin’ in its weathered-wood fashion. I prefer to think, as I walk in, that those lobster at the bottom of the tank are napping, but no matter. Lobster’s the one think I’m not going to order here — at least not while I live in New England.

Instead, I thumb through the (once again) super-sized, full color laminate regular and daily specials menus. There are also a variety of blackboard specials, including some fairly creative, crumb-dusted and exotically sauced halibut and salmon choices.

Prices can be fairly steep, especially at dinner, but you get a lot of food and most meals come with salad, a choice of vegetables, and those damnably addictive cheddar cheese biscuits. There are almost 700 Red Lobster restaurants in the United States and Canada, so they must be doing well, but these people could easily make a fortune just selling the biscuits.

While fried shrimp is a pedestrian if tempting option, I like the lunch portion fresh fish specials that are on a fold-out tab in the main menu. A variety of fish like red snapper, flounder and catfish are listed, and the ones that are actually in-restaurant are checked on any given day. I choose catfish — figuring deep in my cynical southern heart that they can’t pull this off — and ask for it broiled.

Showing amazing will power, I blow off the French fries and blue cheese dressing and select rice pilar and oil and vinegar — oh, and another half-dozen cheese biscuits, please. The catfish is superb, the iced tea glass replenished with speed and cheeriness, and the lunch portion $7.95 price tag quite reasonable.

In a seaside community where a lot of the seafood options are seasonable, Red Lobster consistently performs at a level transcendent of its franchise status.

FRIDAY

Anybody who’s ever been in a casino knows that hellish, gonging din of a thousand slot machines going off simultaneously. Imagine that if, instead of that monotonic chime, each machine screamed like Alvin & the Chipmunks. Now, run that through Korn’s P.A. system and you have an idea of what it sounds like when you walk into a Chuck E. Cheese’s restaurant.

You know what I’m talking about if you have kids: this is the ultimate kid plc — an assertion supported by the company’s 300 restaurants in 44 states. Ostensibly, Chuck E. Cheese’s serves pizza; that’s not the issue. They could serve shirt cardboard — and many adult diners will insist there’s no difference — but the children don’t care. They’re in the house for the Entertainment Factor:

Chuck E. Cheese’s is a visual feast, too: three main rooms comprising a dining hall/concert stage, a high tech video game area, and some sort of playground as designed by Willie Wonka and M.C. Escher on a gin binge.

Since we don’t have children and are borrowing some for the night, we wait in the small entrance foyer for them to be dropped off. The Chuck E. folks have developed a security system the likes of which the Archduke Ferdinand could’ve used — parents are NOT going to leave without their children, no matter what they might want to do in that context, and, more importantly, no one named Smitty or Doc is going to abscond with them, either.

Once Ian and Grace and their mother arrive and stare at their surroundings with that slack-jawed look of awe we associated with Spielberg characters who’ve just spied their first friendly alien, we order a large pizza, a medium pizza and three paper cups of beer, which comes to a dizzying $40. Chuck E. Cheese’s thoughtfully serves beer and wine — they’re not morons, after all — though the only beers are Bud and Bud Light, which, when you think about it, are the Chuck E. Cheeses of the brewing industry.

We are seated in the dining hall where approximately 15 birthday parties are going on. Onstage, a band of robotic animals — which makes them just like Guns N’ Roses — is performing. Someone in a rat suit — this would be Chuck E., I guess — comes out with a choreographed entourage of employees and lead the deliriously happy crowd in a version of Bill Withers’s “Lean on Me.” They snake-dance through the room, the rat-suit guy (or girl) bobbing along in time with the rhythm of a drunk uncle five minutes before toppling into the Thanksgiving turkey. To their credit, the employees genuinely seem to be having a good time and clearly like the children.

Fig. 6. The Chuck E. Cheese rat wailing some Bill Withers.

When the rat draws nigh, Ian pokes Chuck E. with the same reverence as Charlie Sheen trying to find out whether Jenna Jameson’s chest is real. Meanwhile, our surprisingly edible pies are served. The pepperoni disappears in my rapidly expanding stomach, and a small vegetarian with plenty of tomato and black olives looks nice when smeared all over Grace’s angelic face.

After eating, and after the rat has retreated backstage, we take the kids over to the playground area where, for about an hour, they roll in a swimming pool-sized pit filled with millions of colored balls the size of grapefruits. This seems rather boring until I recall a night in college when I stared at a grapefruit for six hours, but that’s another story.

I’ll have sinister dreams about the freak in the rat suit, but the kids weep when it’s time to leave.

SATURDAY

It’s impossible to conduct this experiment without one breakfast voyage, so we race over to Groton — you were expecting Monaco? — to the IHOP (that’s International House of Pancakes, in case you’ve been living on Saturn). The place is jammed with a cross-section of humanity about which it can be said there is one common denominator: they like comforting death food, and plenty of it.

In a budget-minded but sincere effort to decorate for Valentine’s Day, there are four or five red hearts scotch-taped to the walls. That’s about it for décor — and that’s fine. These people are serious about getting us lots of food at top speed, and it’s good to see folks who keep their priorities straight.

Ah, IHOP! Their motto is, “Any time’s a good time for breakfast at IHOP,” and their familiar blue roofs and vaguely Dutch architecture are, next to McDonald’s arches, maybe the most familiar visual consistency in Franchise Food Land. There are more than 800 IHOPs in the U.S., and today I will eat a bite of food for each one.

We’re having breakfast here only, though, if interested, there are the same lunch and dinner options offered at all these places. Frankly, breakfast is not really cheap. We run up a bill of about $30 for three, though the sheer quantity of food justifies the cost.

After last night’s Chuck E. Cheese, I’m not particularly interested in pithy observations. I just want food. Here we go: biscuits and sausage gravy, country fried steak and cream gravy, three manhole cover-sized buttermilk pancakes afloat in a sea of butter and syrup, three scrambled eggs, extra crispy bacon, and buttered rye toast.

I insist that The Vegetarian Who Walks Among Us order one of the combinations that comes with a meat option so I can have it, and she orders the link sausage at my request. Our friend Jackie, recruited only on the promise that she won’t do something stupid like order oatmeal and yogurt, wins big points by asking for her bacon burnt even more than mine. Points subtracted by her audacity in eating all her bacon.

I also thwart the waitress by ordering iced tea, maybe becoming the first human ever at IHOP during peak breakfast hours that didn’t want coffee. To her credit, she recovered nicely and brings me my beverage — and will cheerfully refill it twice during the course of my orgy.

It becomes unspeakable.

Food good. Gargle with gravy. Go home. Pass out.

SUNDAY

The first thing one notices at Bickford’s Restaurant in Mystic, while waiting in line early on Valentine’s night for a seat in the abundant dining room, is the abundance of quaint souvenirs for sale. The idea would be — what? — that a dining experience at Bickford’s is so sublime that one wants mementos to send to the folks back home?

Perhaps. What sort of person wants a Bickford’s shot glass or commemorative teddy bear? Answer: the sort of person like me who would wait in line for a table at a coffee shop on an evening traditionally associated with four-star French cuisine, Iron Horse Champagne, and beaucoup romance. There are in fact several Harlequinesque couples peppered throughout the chipper, frenetic restaurant, ranging from grandparent types (who must be actively seeking to douse whatever spark of magic remains) to shy teensters (message to the guy in the booth: Cyrano you ain’t).

Not that there’s anything wrong with Bickford’s. This fine old New England chain — more than 60 locations — has cheap breakfast specials, 2-for-1 Tuesday nights, and, in the Mystic location, at least, a bar. But I have come early — and noticeably solo — with the thought of attending a new entertainment concept. Debuting in just a few hours is the inaugural performance of Bickford’s new dinner theater!

For $29.95, one gets a four-course meal and a madcap farce. Tonight’s comedic offering parodies The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, and is titled something along the lines of Make Randall P. McMurphy an Offer He Can’t Refuse or The Lobotomy of Vito Corleone. (Actually, it’s just called The Godfather Murder, but, as with most things, I prefer my ideas.)

Conceptually, it’s a perfect way to end seven long days of visiting restaurants whose owners aspire in good conscience to market mundanity. But a quick pass through the banquet hall where the play is to be performed overwhelms me.

Though the performance area is conveniently located next to the bar, where many romantic couples are swigging cocktails in supplication to the Pacers/Lakers game on television, a prop banner proclaiming “The Horsehead Asylum for the Criminally Insane” is too farcical. If I’m to be in Bickford’s — alone — on Valentine’s Day, I want Tennessee Williams.

In that context, I head back to the dining room where I’m seated in one of those eight-inch wide Lonely Guy booths. It’s impossible to fit the book I’m reading onto the table and eat at the same time, which is a shame since, in an effort to appear even more pathetic, I’ve brought a paperback copy of The Horse Whisperer in the hopes that someone will take note of my solitude and buy me a sundae.

Instead, the only thing that gets bought is my patty melt and fries, which I pay for myself. Like every place I’ve visited this week, Bickford’s has a comprehensive menu with tantalizing photographs of food options. But I’m beat. I don’t want turkey and dressing or pot roast or any of the breakfast-at-all-hours possibilities.

I am humble before the Cholesterol God and offer myself up to the sweet sanctity of hamburger meat, bacon and cheese.

The brightly lit, holiday atmosphere swirls around me; waitresses armed with ever-present coffee pots race in well-worn Byzantine paths and conversational din and the tinkling of silverware negotiating scramble eggs and club sandwiches becomes a soothing, new-agey lullaby to my greasy ears.

I look up and spot a pale, bloated fellow with the slack-jawed visage of a professional dullard.

Butter drips down his chin like drool, and there are ketchup stains on his Stone Cold Steve Austin T-shirt. It is, of course, a reflection of me in the window.

I smile.

I am home.

***

Yeah, it was a long read, but, dammit, it was fun. Possibly. Let me know.

Hey, sales are levelling off for my new novel White Ghost Blues. If you haven’t bought a copy, you can do so here. All I need is a few more sales and I’ll top out at about 100 sold and, ah, that’ll pretty much be it for this book!

Comments are always welcome, and feel free to recommend I WRITE GOOD to your pals.

BUY A COPY OF RICK KOSTER’S WHITE GHOST BLUES AND GET A 10% OFF COUPON FOR A BAG OF LICORICE!

GOOD NEWS ABOUT RICK KOSTER’S NEW VAMPIRE NOVEL WHITE GHOST BLUES! IT’S REALLY SHORT!

How’s that for some exciting self-hype?

(Oh, and I really will come to your book club. rick.o.lantern@gmail.com)

One of the realities of having a book come out from a small publishing house is that publicity efforts are limited by real-world budgetary constraints and competition from the Big Five corporate publishers. My publisher, JournalStone, is a fine, respected but small indie dark fiction house, and they/we do the best we can.

But it’s a brutal business and becoming more vicious every day.

Even J.K. Rowling is working parttime in a Soho chips shop!

Fig. 1. Fish and chips, the sort you might buy from J.K. Rowling.

Given the difficulties faced by writers everywhere, I’m trying to do my authorial part to promote White Ghost Blues.

I mean, it’s my book, so I’m hoping those of you who are kind enough to subscribe to I WRITE GOOD will recognize this post for what it is — begging — and appreciate that I’m gonna have to occasionally utilize this space for such things.

But I’m not going to bore you. I’d rather just make myself — and hopefully you — laugh.

BLURBS ABOUT WHITE GHOST BLUES

In case you don’t know, “blurbs” are those quotes one reads on the front and back covers telling you how goddamned great a book is.

If you read a lot, you start to realize that most of these blurbs are from other authors and it also doesn’t take long to realize they must all be friends doing each other favors. So you see stuff like:

“This novel is spine-tingling! I couldn’t put it down!” — Bestselling Author A, talking about Bestselling Author B’s new book

“Chilling! An unholy masterpiece! — Bestselling Author B, talking about Bestselling Author A’s new book

I am not complaining about this sort of reciprocal mutual support. What I am bitter about is that, when I reached out to some literary big shots to get some quotes, most didn’t bother to respond. The reality is: they’ve never heard of me, so why should they? Still …

I did the next best thing. I solicited blurbs from fictional characters.

“White Ghost Blues is so unimaginative and flat-out moronic that I ordered a life-size cardboard cutout of author Rick Koster. When it arrived, I tore Cardboard Rick’s head off and peed on it.” — Pip, protagonist, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and an unfortunate lad saddled for all of literary history with the name “Pip”

Fig. 2. Pip, skulking away after peeing on a ripped-off cardboard likeness of my head.

“I hated White Ghost Blues. Oh, wait! I’m not a fictional character!” — St. Augustine, author of Confessions of St. Augustine

“I was originally gonna be in a vampire novel, then somehow, I ended up in another book. Anyway, don’t read White Ghost Blues. Read about me instead.” — The Frankenstein Monster, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein Or the Modern Prometheus

Fig. 3. Mary Shelley fictional character laughing at how bad my book is. Note the fake, AI-generated cover of White Ghost Blues. Not sure who the old guy is playing the saxophone, but it’s sorta eerie. See “French horn,” below.

AUTHOR INTERVIEW

If you’re a reader, you’re also probably familiar with “bonus” material typically found in the back sections of trade paperback editions of a book. The “trade paper” edition is the one that comes out about a year after the hardcover printing — unless, like me, you’re an author who’s not sufficiently successful to rate a hardcover edition to begin with.

People like me go straight to trade paper and stay there, and I’m lucky to have that — so I’m not complaining.

But what I was going to say about bonus material is that if you’re a pretty successful writer and the trade paper is the second version of your book, the publisher will often add, at the back of the edition, such inducements as Q&A with the Author and/or a Book Club Study Guide.

I don’t have those sections — and I know that you, My Tender Readers, are saddened by these absences. Possibly even angry.

What I’m going to do now, then, is supply you with the Author Q&A you would have gotten if I was a big deal. Perhaps in a later episode, if you invite me to your book club, I’ll provide a study guide.

Q: Does this interview contain spoilers? Will it otherwise disrupt momentum?

A: That’s hard to answer because it’s been so long since I read White Ghost Blues I can’t remember much of it. Seems like there’s a cartoon rooster in it that speaks in an exaggerated Dixie drawl.

Q: I think you’re mixing your book up with Foghorn Leghorn.

A: Ah, right! Sorry about that. I saw Foghorn kill it in Coriolanus recently and he’s been on my mind.

Q: What sort of research did you have to do about vampires in order to write White Ghost Blues?

A: Are you old enough to remember when Halloween costumes came in those cardboard boxes with a cellophane top so you could see the plastic mask? And underneath the mask, when you opened it, was a cheap cheesecloth outfit?

I think there were two main manufacturers of those costumes. Collegetown and Ben Cooper. When I was a kid, I wanted to work at either or both of those companies. Come to think of it, I still want to work for them.

Anyhow, I went on eBay and found an old, never-opened XXL Ben Cooper Vampire costume and paid a lavish sum for it. When I received it, I wore it for the entire time it took me to write White Ghost Blues. I never took it off.

Fig. 4. The author during the writing of White Ghost Blues.

I also wore a succession of those flavored wax vampire fangs in my mouth for the whole year. Every time a set of fangs melted, I’d pop a new one in!

Fig. 5. My actual teeth after a year of exclusively wearing wax vampire candies in my mouth. (courtesy of author’s dentist)

Q: Not sure you answered the question.

A: Oh. Well, osmosis. It worked. I felt very driven and vampirish and wrote in a blood-maddened frenzy.

Q: The titular protagonist, Wyatt “White Ghost” Dumaine, is a 17-year-old, lonely albino blues guitar prodigy. Why did you choose that particular instrument and musical genre for him?

A: It’s a funny story. I was about halfway through a first draft and, in that original version, Wyatt was seven-feet tall and played the French horn. Mostly cowboy songs from 19^th century trail rides. “Streets of Laredo” and “Goodbye Old Paint” were two of his favorites but, for some reason, the character developed independently of my authorial muse — this happens frequently to writers, I think — and Wyatt just couldn’t master “Get Along Little Dogies.”

It frustrated the hell out of me as a writer because, structurally, “Get Along Little Dogies” is a very simple song. But my character had a rough time with it.

Fig. 6. Chord chart for “Get Along Little Dogies.” Not exactly Thelonious Monk!

Only at that point in the manuscript did I discover there were already four novels going to press about seven-foot French horn-playing melancholy teens enamored of archival tunes from the Old West! And two of those manuscripts were being simultaneously written by Margaret Atwood! So it was fortuitous, and subsequently I felt the need to change the character. That’s when the albinism and blues guitar came in.

Q: Your entire novel is set in post-Katrina New Orleans. Is that because New Orleans has a reputation as a “haunted city” and is already thematically familiar to readers because of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire and The Vampire Lestat?

A: Who’s Anne Rice?

Q: What do you hope readers will take away from the White Ghost Blues reading experience?

A: Their receipt. Send ’em to me and get a voucher for 10% off a bag of licorice.

Fig. 7. Buy now and save!

OK. That’s enough for this edition. If you haven’t bought a copy of White Ghost Blues, I’ll bet you’re rarin’ to go! And tell your friends! And write reviews on Amazon! And order White Ghost Blues merch even though there isn’t any White Ghost Blues merch!

I dunno. Maybe we’re just old.

Let’s see, there is … a lot of Americana … a lot of jam bands … a lot of blues … a lot of indie rock … a lot of hip hop/R&B … a lot of country … a lot of classic rock … a lot of folk music …

Those genres cover a lot of stylistic territory — but … snore.

Then, an epiphany!

I was watching the film Midsommar the other night. It’s a good-timey popcorn movie I try to enjoy at least once a month because it pleases me to imagine an enduring, Olde God-based culture that performs a regularly scheduled ritual human sacrifice by cramming the Chosen Victim into the hollowed-out skin of a freshly killed and scooped-out bear, then setting the Bear Man on fire.

Fig. 1. There are a lot of ways to appease an Olde God, but this is a really good one.

If you haven’t seen it, Midsommar is set in Sweden, but it could just as contextually take place in Finland, Denmark or Norway, and it’s no coincidence that those countries are home to all sorts of dark music genres — black metal, devil metal, pagan metal, pagan-folk metal, hang-yourself metal, wizard metal, plague metal, Viking metal, death metal, Norse metal, mean-elf metal, sky-goblin metal, bleak-icy metal, decomposition metal, and so on.

It hit me! We could go to a black metal festival!

But … there aren’t any suitable festivals in the States — at least that I could find. There’s Somergloom in Somerville, Mass., but it’s indoors and the featured acts are strictly minor league compared to the bands in northern Europe. Scandinavia is freakin’ crawling with seasoned guitar-wielding nuts in corpse makeup busily playing their ominous music to the delight of their frigid countrymen and in homage to maleficent antlered deities of antiquity!

Eileen and I pulled up Travelocity and searched for dark metal festivals in Scandinavia.

Dammit! We just missed a good one. It was called — and this is real — the annual Dark Troll Festival.

It happens each May in Schlossberg, Germany, and always takes place, according to their website, “within the ancient, forested walls of the Bornstedt castle ruins.”

I’m sorry we weren’t there! I’ll bet you can wander from sea to shining sea here in this country and not catch the String Cheese Incident or Brandi Carlisle or Goose warbling in the ruins of a castle.

Fig. 2. Ruined castle walls behind a demon-band and enthusiastic hordes of celebrants at the Dark Troll Festival in Germany, which is not a Scandinavian country but, dammit, it oughtta be. After all, it it DOES border Denmark and it IS the country that brought us Hitler — so if they want to host a black metal festival, it’s fine with us.

Among the dozens of acts that did play at this year’s Dark Troll gathering were Wolfheart, Lucifer’s Cold Embrace, Helgrindur (translation: “Gates of Hell”; no surprise there) and, for some reason, a band called Barbarossa Pipes & Drums. No “Danny Boy,” I suspect. Rather, Satanic bagpipes and Hell-forged fifes!

But the group I’m sorry I missed is Trold. It’s not their festival, and I’m meandering off topic a bit, but it’s a delicious coincidence that a Dark Troll festival invited a band whose name is some Danish derivation of “troll.”

Fig. 3. Trold, who will not be appearing at any festivals that feature Bruce Hornsby or Josh Groban.

What are they like, these men of Trold?

This, from their media propogandists: “Deep in the dark forest, where the trees whisper and the forest floor hums with legends, they live — the trolls. A noisy, merry and devilish horde that lives for song, partying and mischief. They call themselves Trold — and they don’t come sneaking around!”

More: “Trold is not just a band — it’s a living fairy tale. Forged from bark, blood and booming tones, they rise from the earth with instruments in their arms and laughter in their hearts. It’s folk metal with horns on both foreheads and hands — epic tales served with a twinkle in their eyes and foam in their beards.”

By God, I’d love a gig working as the Trold press dude, though I’m not sure I’d use the phrase “they don’t come sneaking around.” That makes it sound like they’re Peeping Toms — er, Peeping Trolls.

NOTE: As I type this, I am now listening to Trold on their Bandcamp page. Their I Skovens Ridge album, in fact.

You know what? They do sound like cheerily murderous imps whose flutey-but-metal-basted songs suggest that, beneath their mischievous, foamy-bearded sneaking-aroundness, they’re precisely the sort of mythological entities who might, despite their presumably tiny stature, kill a bear, hollow it out, stuff a human inside, and set it ablaze!

Hmm. I’ve taken up a lot of space with Trold, but there are still two dark metal festivals actually set in Scandinavia that we’re thinking about attending.

Beyond the Gates (July 29-Aug. 1, Bergen, Norway) — Artists include Rotting Christ, Castle Rat, Terrestrial Hospice, Mortuary Drape, Dold Vorde Ens Navn (translation: Hidden Be Its Name) and “Sventevith featuring Nergal and Misþyrming performing Behemoth.”

Regarding the last act: I never saw the band Behemoth, but I’d be more than happy to watch a tribute show in their honor, particularly if it boasted Sventevith and Nergal and Misþyrming. Love all those guys!

We’re most intrigued by Misþyrming. One reason is that their name contains a “þ,” which is an obscure Icelandic rune that would have faded from existence if it wasn’t for pagan folk metal musicians who bought electric guitars and embrace the teaching of deities such as Draugr, who, as we all know, is a “malevolent revenant” in Icelandic folklore.

Which reminds me: Iceland is another one of those countries that should be regarded as Scandinavian.

Fig. 4. If anyone can pay proper tribute to Behemoth, it’s gotta be Misþyrming.” They’re so gore-saturated in this image that I feel sorry for whomever has to clean that white hallway after the photo shoot.

The other festival we’re considering is:

Midgardsblot (Aug. 12-15, Borre, Norway) — And so again we run into the problem of being entitled Americans — the only modern country in the world whose adults feel it’s not necessary for our Young Persons to learn to speak one or two languages other than our own.

As in: What is a Midgardsblot?

Turns out it means “Middle Earth Sacrifice” in Old Norse — and we’ve come full circle!

Before we get to the sacrifice part, a note about “Middle Earth.” The phrase long predates JRR Tolkien and described, according to Old Norse scripture, a “physical realm” occupied by spirits hovering between the domain of the gods and the charnel playground of the dead.

Fig. 5. JRR Tolkien borrowed the concept of “Middle Earth” from darker religions. Then, he wrote a series of incredibly famous novels that you might’ve read unless, like me, you got about 50 pages into “The Hobbit” and thought, “My God, there’s a lot of elves and stuff in this fucker. I’m out.”

Performers at Middle Earth Sacrifice include, from the bands whose names I can pronounce, I Am Morbid, Leperfest, Cutthroat, Saxon, Venom and Wolves in the Throneroom (off the top of my head, I’d have to say “wolves” win the great “Animals Used in Band Names” competition across all music styles).

The best part? At midnight on the final day of Middle Earth Sacrifice, the promoters will trot out an emptied-out grizzly, a flamethrower and a bound and terrified American tourist who was stupid enough to venture where we’re not welcome. He will stuffed inside the ursine carcass and …

We’ve booked our seats and got our passes. And for those of you sticking with the American festivals this summer, good luck trying to see any cool human sacrifices.

P.S. Thanks to everyone who’s purchased and/or attended signing events for my just-out novel White Ghost Blues. New events will be announced soon, and they’re a great way to see what a goofball I am in person. For more info, go to https://rickkoster.com

This inaugural “Kookery” episode come courtesy of blues-rock guitarist Rocky Athas.

Background

As has been well established in this space and others over my journalistic travels — to the point of snore-inducing — I spent a lot of time in a band.

What isn’t known so much is that none of my music-ness would have ever happened if I hadn’t been friends with a guy on my little league team named Rocky Athas. We went to different junior highs — middle schools, in 21^st century lexicon — but ended up on the same team, a grimly ineffectual squad of 14- and 15-year-olds called the Homesteaders.

Fig. 1. The Homesteaders. I’m standing, far left. Rocky is standing, third from right. Not sure why the perspective of the photo suggests I’m a munchkin, but I believe I was actually taller than Rocky.

In addition to baseball, Rocky and I bonded over our love of rock and roll. We both played third base. Rocky also pitched, was our cleanup hitter and was a far superior athlete to my colossal ineptitude. Anyway, taking ground balls at the hot corner during practice, he and I would discuss the relative merits of the Beatles, the Stones, Cream, Vanilla Fudge, Hendrix and so on.

A few years later, we attended the same high school, which is where I caught up with Rocky and learned he was a budding guitar player. His band would sometimes play school dances, and I’d probably have recognized his musical talent if I’d been cool enough to get a date to attend a school dance.

I do remember Rocky had a sort of musical parlor trick. He could play the theme song to Popeye at an unholy speed — like, four-times as fast as what you’d hear every afternoon on television when the theme song for the spinach-eating maritime lunatic blared out of your television.

Rocky’s rendition was amusing and impressive, but I didn’t stop to quantify how impressive it was to play that fast. Years later, I’d look back and think, “Jeez, I don’t think John McLaughlin coulda played Popeye that fast.”

After graduation, I went off to Baylor with a vague idea of being an attorney or a writer or possibly a philosopher-king, not realizing that the hyper-Baptist environment would send me hurtling down a path of reactionary debauchery — which in part caused me to dive deeper and deeper into music as a sort of requisite therapy.

One weekend, in the fall of my freshman year, I went home to Dallas and one of my friends suggested we go to a live music club and see a band called Lynx. I walked in and — I’ll remember it as long as I live — they were playing “I’ve Seen All Good People” by Yes. Well, hell, even though I wasn’t a musician, I knew it’s an incredibly difficult song to pull off, and Lynx freakin’ nailed it.

And the guitarist, with rock star hair and platform shoes and a flowered, Nudie-esque suit I later learned had been tailored by his mother, was Rocky!

This, I thought, was fantastic.

By the end of the set, which included great original songs as well as obscure but sparkling gems by Humble Pie, Slade and other early 70s bands whose albums I owned but that, tellingly, weren’t standard FM radio fare, I was mesmerized.

During the break, Rocky and I talked and laughed — he’s one of the funniest people in the world — and, when the next set started, it hit me, with a disconcerting but exhilarating sense of epiphany, that I wanted to be a rock star.

Like that. Not joking around.

Done deal — despite having no instrument or knowledge.

And I went to work.

Flash forward several decades. Rocky is still a stunningly great player who’s had a solid and impressive career. At 23, he was inducted in the inaugural class of Buddy Magazine’s Texas Tornadoes Hall of Fame along with Eric Johnson, Jimmie Vaughan, Billy Gibbons, John Nitzinger and Johnny Winter. (Note: our fellow high school classmate, Stevie Ray Vaughan, was inducted in the second year! Further note: in one of the better-late-than-never situations, I was inducted in the Class ’97.)

For a long time, Rocky had a terrific progressive/hard rock band called Lightning, which should have been famous but wasn’t despite the fact that they had important fans. Queen’s Brian May told Guitar World he’d nicked some two-handed tapping bits from Rocky after seeing Lightning in a Dallas club. Thin Lizzy, for whom Lightning opened on a leg of a tour, wrote a song about him called “Rocky” (on their Johnny the Fox album). One-time Van Halen sound engineer Townsend Wessinger once told me the band used to listen to live Lightning cassettes on their tour bus. And Rocky was a huge influence on Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell Abbott.

Fig. 2. Rocky in the Lightning era.

Weirdly, in what would have been a fitting development in my own personal story, Lightning was the band I was about to join — until Rocky, frustrated by bad luck, left to become lead guitarist for the then-popular Southern rock band Black Oak Arkansas. They had earned two gold albums and had hits like “Jim Dandy,” “Fever in My Mind” and “Mutants of the Monster.”

After a few years in Black Oak, Rocky wasn’t seeing the success he’d hoped for and went on to work with with Buddy Miles, Joe Walsh and Glenn Hughes, then spent several years touring and recording with titular Bluesbreakers star John Mayall (following the glittering footsteps of Eric Clapton, Peter Green and Mick Taylor).

Now leading his own blues-rock band, Rocky’s released several solo recordings such as Living My Best Life, Shakin’ the Dust, Let My Guitar Do the Talking … with My Friends and Miracle (and, yes, I proudly have a co-writing credit on the title track of Miracle).

This is all a lot of information, but Rocky is a fine and interesting person and a brilliant artist — and this provides good context for one of the most entertaining music anecdotes I know.

It centers around Rocky joining Black Oak Arkansas and the realization that his dream to be in an internationally known touring band — and have the opportunity to contribute his own songs to recordings — was on the verge of reality.

It, ah, didn’t go as planned.

A conversation with Rocky Athas

Me: After years of “almost made it” close calls, you joined Black Oak Arkansas. You were the new guy in a band with iconic frontman Jim Dandy Mangrum and an established songwriting structure in place. At what point did you feel you could submit some material?

Fig. 3. Jim Dandy Mangrum at the height of Black Oak Arkansas’s fame. That is NOT Rocky in the hat and the thigh boots.

Rocky: I had hopes, of course, and then suddenly Jim goes, “You know, I need a couple more songs for the next album. You got any ideas?” And of course, I thought to myself, “Here we go. The door’s opening.” And he did end up using two of my songs.

I can’t even remember the title of the very first one. Just a fun rock song, something about being in a band, and it was fine; I just can’t remember the name of it.

Me: Ah, and then there’s the second song. You had a full instrumental tune ready to go, right? Talk about that one.

Rocky: When I wrote it, I was thinking about a peaceful stream or river with just endlessly flowing water. It was a real positive feeling, like, assuring us that the future happens and there will always be another day. I thought it had a really pleasant sound to it, and the idea was that you can leave anything negative in the past. It doesn’t matter. You can let it go. The future is all you’ve got, and you keep flowing forward. Something, you know, my kids could take inspiration from and be proud of.

So I did present it to Jim as an instrumental, though I said maybe he could come up with some positive lyrics that fit the spirit of the song. Because I really wanted it on the album. And he said, “Don’t worry, I’ve got some words for it!”

Me: And how’d that work out for you?

Rocky: (laughs) Well, Jim called it “Top Heavy Dallas,” and it’s about a stripper Jim met there. I guess he thought that’d make me happy because I’m from Dallas. And, uh, he came up with lines like, you know, you could set a glass of wine on her butt and not spill a drop. A whole song like that, you know, being in the strip club and all the details.

Me: What were your impressions of Jim’s contribution?

Rocky (still laughing): I was horrified. I’m going, “Oh no, not that. That’s not at all what I wanted at all!” But, yeah, that’s how that landed, and I just let it let it go because I guess I was desperate. So, then I was stuck with it, and I feel bad because the listener is stuck with it, too.

You: Discretion would prohibit me from asking about personal financial stuff from a friend, but can you at least share whether you remember the first royalty check you got for “Top Heavy Dallas”?

Rocky: Yeah: it was like a dollar-fifty-eight. It was insane. I mean, who’s going to play that on the radio?! I was like, God, why couldn’t he have come up with words like “Jim Dandy to the Rescue.” I mean, that wasn’t the Beatles or anything, but it was something basic and catchy and it became a hit. Let’s get a little cabbage going! I think, you know, some college station played (“Top Heavy Dallas”) a few times or something.

You: Did y’all ever play “Top-Heavy Dallas” live?

Rocky: Oh, God. All the time. The song was bad enough. But here’s a true story. We were playing in Washington, opening for Kansas, and, you know this, that was special to me because I really loved Kansas. I absolutely respected them. Their music was great and had so much interesting stuff going on. And, of course, Steve Walsh, the singer, just blew me away. One of the best rock singers and frontmen ever.

So, we’re in the middle of our set, and I look over in the wings, and about ten feet way, Steve Walsh is standing there watching. Jim Dandy was really showing off that night because, you know, it was a big show. And Jim was a great frontman, too. It’s pretty well known that David Lee Roth got a lot of his stage moves and attitude from Jim.

But that aside, we happened to be playing “Top Heavy Dallas” and when I looked over at Steve Walsh, he was laughing his ass off at us. I thought, “Why do we have to be playing that stupid song just when Steve Walsh comes out to watch?” His facial expression was, “What kind of shit is this? What the hell are they doing?”

Fig. 4. Steve Walsh of Kansas being really cool onstage without having to sing a song he’d written about large-bosom’d strippers.

I’ll never forget it because Jim was singing those horrible words in that real rumbly style, leering and winking. And there was Steve Walsh, laughing at us. Finally, I just couldn’t look at him anymore. It was like, “Just let me go the hotel. Steve Walsh is laughing at us. I gotta quit.”

And, about two months later, I did quit. I couldn’t take it anymore.

Me: I mean, looking back, given that you’ve had a nice career, it is kinda funny.

Rocky: Yeah. Yeah, it is. But. Back then, I never liked what Jim did to the song, but it was terrible when my daughter heard it. My son was little and he played the album on the stereo, and “Top Heavy Dallas” came on and my daughter, who was 10, said, “Daddy, that’s you!”

And I said, “Yes honey, that’s me,” and I now I really can’t stand it even more than I already did.”

Me: The good news is that, eventually, you recorded the tune as an instrumental the way it was supposed to be all along.

Video clip #1. “Another Day, Another Time” the way it’s supposed to be when you don’t let Jim Dandy write the words.

Rocky: I did. It’s called “Another Day, Another Time,” and it’s on my instrumental album Let My Guitar Do the Talking … With My Friends. And it sounds like it was always supposed to: it’s got an easy flow and it’s innocent and positive. I love listening to it. But I’ll always remember presenting that song to Jim and thinking he’d catch the mood and come up with something appropriate, and I’d have something really cool on an album. I guess not.

Me: But you got a royalty check for a dollar-fifty-eight!

Rocky: Yep. And the memory of Steve Walsh laughing at me!

So that’s the saga. I wasn’t going to dignify “Top Heavy Dallas” by including it here, but what the hell. I guess you deserve to here what Jim Dandy did to Rocky’s song.

Video 2. “Top Heavy Dallas” by Black Oak Arkansas. If you must know, that’s Rocky on the far left. His smile makes me think he had no idea this image would be used in a video promoting the song.

Let me know what you think of this idea. Maybe there’s too much detail; I dunno, I’m just experimenting.

Also, my new novel, White Ghost Blues, is now out. Please buy one. Well, buy seven so that I can have more royalties than Rocky got for “Top Heavy Dallas.”

Fig. 1. Loser is so sad at failed book signing he falls into sleep of despair.

Oh, sure, there were random customers whose destination was the bookstore anyway, pleasantly browsing or looking for a specific title or author. They either didn’t notice the poster up front that said MEET RICK KOSTER, ONE OF THE WORST-SELLING AUTHORS OF ALL TIME! or they didn’t care.

On those occasions, a patron or two might approach my table, but they’d completely ignore the fact that I was an AUTHOR with A PILE OF MY GODDAMNED BOOKS, and they’d say something like, “Where’s the travel section?” or “You don’t look like James Patterson.”

These were and are interesting experiences that help the artist construct a hard shell of what I like to call FAILURE.

I learned the first time, at a Waldenbooks in a mall, that there are three distinct emotional stages to the “no one shows up” events. They are (1) initial anxiety, segueing into (2) storm-surge panic and then (3) capitulation to cocooning humiliation.

But I was not in a vacuum. For example, the bookstore employee “assigned” to help out with the (hoped-for) hordes of eager fans was initially encouraging. He started by offering cheery encouragement. “No one wants to be the first customers at a book signing. It’s best not to appear too eager.”

Next up, he conjured a feeble possibility. “Well, Old Navy’s having a sale on socks and I think a lot of people are probably there.”

Fig. 2. The sort of socks one might find on sale in a mall store.

Ultimately, the clerk disappeared into the stockroom because “I’d better help Angus check in cartons of the new Gaelic translation of Finnegan’s Wake. We’ve got three pallets of the damned thing. Gonna be a big seller.”

Meanwhile, my wife Eileen hovered around me protectively, going back and forth to the Orange Julius in the Food Court to bring me frothy drinks of citrusy sustenance. I love her.

Fig. 3. Frothy, citrusy beverage

This past weekend, in celebration of my new novel White Ghost Blues, the excellent Bank Square Books in Mystic hosted a launch event. Our friend, the lovely, kind and wise mega-bestselling author Luanne Rice, was there to share the stage and interview me about the book. Rich Swanson’s Uncle Biscuit bakery provided cookies and savories, and a gratifying crowd of friends, well-wishers and — dare I say it? — actual admirers of my books — showed up. (It’s fair to say there were also fans of Luanne Rice who were curious why she’d interrogate some goofball they’d never heard of.)

Fig. 4. Bestselling novelist and all-around wonderful person Luanne Rice (R) with unidentified person at bookstore.

However it happened, we had a signing event for White Ghost Blues with a roomful of people! Eileen didn’t have to scurry off to find an Orange Julius!

But this time … there were no books!

Seriously. The books didn’t arrive.

Not Bank Square’s fault. Not my publisher’s fault. Apparently, there was some snafu with the distributor.

But we made the best of the situation. Luanne and I had a great conversation. Folks asked excellent questions to both of us about the writing process, and snacks were gobbled and wine and beer were guzzled and a Large Time was had by all.

People were kind enough to pay in advance for copies, and I’ll return to Bank Square from noon to 4 p.m. on Saturday, June 27, to sign and personalize those books as well as any for those of you who couldn’t make the “No Books Here” event.

So that initial volley in the Great Battle of Selling My New Book has been fired.

What’s next?

Well, one of the issues faced by small press authors is how to get the word out about a book beyond the “home court” regional dynamic. Brick and mortar stores have limited space to begin with, so it’s a tough sell getting any space on bookstore shelves anywhere. Similarly, reviews are unlikely in this age of declining book coverage in mainstream press, so, increasingly, social media is one of the most viable ways to try to draw attention to your book.

In that spirit, you’re reading my I WRITE GOOD Substack account. And given that many of you aren’t here in southeastern Connecticut, it’s possible this is the first you’ve heard about White Ghost Blues.

What I’m gonna do, then, is share the first chapter of White Ghost Blues below. Read it if you feel so inclined.

If you like it, you can order it from the fine independent shop Bank Square Books or the fine publishing house JournalStone or Amazon or Barnes & Noble.

If you don’t like it, order it anyway so I can eat a damn sandwich somewhere.

Either way, please let me know what you think.

WHITE GHOST BLUES

CHAPTER ONE

I PRACTICE GUITAR after I finish my algebra homework, trying to master some fingerpicking patterns from Mississippi John Hurt. He was not in the Foo Fighters and never toured with Sufjan Stevens.

By eight thirty it’s full dark, and I feel the overpowering urge to see Allison. I mean, the urge to see Allison is constant and always overpowering, but such things are not always possible. I put the guitar away in my tiny bedroom over Tante’s Voodoo Apothecary just off Chartres at Ursulines in the lower French Quarter. Relatively speaking, it’s located in the residential, less-touristy part of the Quarter, which means Tante’s attracts mostly locals rather than the sort of Bourbon Street conventioneers who want to buy a joke voodoo doll or a chicken foot to take as gifts to folks back home in Iowa or New Mexico.

It’s for customers who are serious about voodoo, in other words. Which should not be shocking, necessarily, if you realize voodoo’s not about zombies and sticking pins in dolls. In fact, did you know that some estimates suggest as many as thirty percent of New Orleanians practice voodoo of one kind or another? That includes doctors and architects and rich folks in the Garden District. Maybe even the Manning family; after all, both Eli and Peyton won Super Bowls. You never know…

The shop closed a few hours ago and Tante—my legal guardian—has retired to her own apartment one floor over mine. I suspect she’s either asleep or doing the Times-Picayune crossword puzzle. From the store itself: the wonderful, heavy, perpetual smell of incense, herbs, old candle wax, and various oils. I breathe deep and slip out back, into the sultry autumn night and another mélange of scents: damp bricks, the musky river, and Tante’s orange passion vines, dotted with humidity. I exit the courtyard and, in a crisscross pattern, cut up and over through the busy streets of the Quarter, headed for Allison’s.

At Bourbon I pass the packed, loud Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop, where a jowls-happy guy in his late forties, with a flattop and a tight-fitting XXXL golf shirt, lurches out one of the French doors with a weaving woman carrying a sloshing go-cup of beer. I pass under one of the faux gas lamps and the dude glimpses me as I turn on St. Phillip and into the shadows.

“Jeez, Carol, didja see that kid? Spooky little weirdo!”

I imagine Carol craning her neck in an Exorcist spin, drunk and eager to see the “little weirdo,” but I’m long gone. I sigh at his inebriated rudeness, but, in all honesty, I suppose I am a sight to behold.

At school, for example, I’m the kid in your class that would typically serve as a piñata for each distinct clique and even those that overlap in odd configurations. No one’s beaten me up yet, for reasons that will soon become obvious, but I could see why you’d think they would. I wear owl-like glasses and I’m admittedly skinny. A reporter once described me as “skeletal,” which seemed a bit extreme. I mean, I am only seventeen and my metabolism is in overdrive.

It’s also true that I’m the smart kid—or at least one of the smartest in all of Anne Rice High School. If I’m in class and Ms. Thorpe or Mr. Palmgren, who teach chemistry and algebra, respectively, ask a question, I almost invariably answer it correctly.

In the spirit of my eccentricities, probably the biggest thing about me that would otherwise make folks like Frank Mortenson, a senior linebacker on our football team and a volcanic a-hole, want to kick me around—or draw the attention of some old liquid tourist stumbling out of a bar—is that I’m an albino. Technically, I was born with a hereditary condition called oculocutaneous albinism, and as a result I sport notebook paper-white skin and moon-colored straight hair. The latter is parted in the middle and hangs like parentheses on either side of my chin. I do have nice features—or so various people who aren’t hot girls have told me—but I’ll take anything, particularly since it’s also true of albinism that my eyes are pink like a plague rat’s and seem to shine at night.

So you can maybe see why the drunk guy asked the seemingly even-drunker Carol if she’d seen me. Personally, I feel like if they’ve spent any time in the Quarter, you’d think they’d have seen plenty of kooks. But who knows what it’s like in Utah or wherever they live?

I blow through the streets, past a mime chaining his bike to a rack outside the Black Penny on Rampart, and I exit the Quarter just past the rustling palm trees bordering Louis Armstrong Park. Across Basin Street is St. Louis Cemetery #1, maybe the most famous graveyard in a town full of them. New Orleans, as you probably learned from Katrina, sits under sea level. This means the water table is so constantly saturated we bury our dead above ground, and New Orleans being New Orleans—which is to say, more exotic than other places—the tombs are typically ornate and representative of all kinds of spectacular architecture. To walk through one of our cemeteries is to explore a stunning miniature city unto itself.

I wait, and finally a brightly lit, mostly empty bus coughing smoke rolls down Basin Street. Using the bus as a visual shield, I hop up and grab the top of the wall, hoisting myself over and dropping into the cemetery. Away from the neon of the Quarter, the full moon is bright, lending intensity to the whitewashed crypts, and even I can see the cinder paths branching off in various labyrinthine directions. No worries though. I’ve been here hundreds of times and could presumably find my way through a tar-colored fog—even with my eyesight.

Yeah, I’m fairly blind—another bonus prize of my genetics, hence the owl glasses—but by this point, I don’t mind being an albino. I think it bothered my folks more than it does me. They’re dead now and they weren’t albinos, and they would never in a million years have admitted such a thing, but I do believe my albinism is what kept them from having any more kids because they worried those kids would be albinos too.

My name, by the way, is Wyatt Dumaine, but folks mostly call me White Ghost, for obvious reasons, and that’s the name you’ll find on the CDs and t-shirts.

I set off through the cemetery on a route I know well, thinking about Allison and listening to the wind rustle dry palm fronds and the distant sound of vehicles up on I-10. It’s true that the graveyards here, for all their beauty, have long had a much-deserved reputation for being dangerous at night. And St. Louis #1 was probably the worst. Until Katrina, the gangstas from the Iberville Projects would lurk in the shadows or even in the mausoleums themselves, waiting to prey on tourists who wandered over from the Quarter to seek out the graves of notable New Orleanians, most likely Marie Laveau, the renowned voodoo queen who is supposedly buried in the Glapion family crypt.

Things happened since Katrina though. The town is very different. In some ways, change has been for the worse, as with the crime in Central City or the inability of the various local, state, and federal government outfits to get their crap together and fix the Ninth Ward. But crime in the cemeteries has almost completely vanished, for reasons you’ll never hear about from the New Orleans Tourist Board or on colorful television commercials luring outta-towners to Jazz Fest or Mardi Gras.

But if you live here, you know. New Orleans is a mystical, paradoxical place, an enchanting city full of dark secrets, and we like to keep those secrets to ourselves—whether to hide them or enjoy them. One way or another, though, you don’t have to worry about the gangbangers in the cemeteries anymore. They won’t go near the graveyards. Have you heard “Dead Ain’t Dead,” that jam by Dooney-B? He’s the latest hip-hop star out of the Magnolia Projects, after Juvenile and Soulja Slim, and I met him once at halftime of a Saints-Cardinals game. Seemed like a nice guy, although he was picking his teeth with a one-hundred-dollar bill. That seemed a bit grandiose, even for a playa. Anyway, “Dead Ain’t Dead” is supposedly about what’s been happening in New Orleans cemeteries since Katrina. Personally, I don’t listen to much rap, so I couldn’t tell you what it’s about. But that’s what they say.

I happen to like the cemeteries though, and my Converse All-Stars make shuffling sounds on the cinders as the scent of moss, dry bones, marble, and fruity rot from decomposing floral arrangements settles about me like a much-loved uncle’s sweater you maybe found in a trunk long after he’d passed—old and comforting and a bit haunted.

There’s a flickering candle at the base of the Glapion tomb where Marie Laveau’s interred, though no one’s there at this hour. The voodoo freaks aren’t particularly worried about the cemeteries either, and maybe it’s because they’re secure in their own powers and spirits. I certainly am. More on the voodoo later.

Only as I make that final turn, though, do I feel a bit of apprehension.

Allison.

I may be just a seventeen-year-old kid, and I might not look like Tom Holland—whose per capita taped-up Spidey photos in the female lockers at Anne Rice High School leaves Justin Bieber in the dust—but I do have madly dancing hormones and I have been around a bit on tours and at various gigs. And no one in the world looks like Allison Pernot. I fell in love with her the first time I saw her, and if you think I’m not old enough to make such pronouncements with any emotional accuracy, well, you’d be wrong.

Allison: twenty-two years old. Queen of my dreams.

I pause outside the crypt, then push through a thigh-high wrought iron fence. Inside this tiny property line are two cracked cement steps up to a columned, rectangular granite Greek Revival structure, perhaps six feet across, ten feet tall, and equally deep. A carved marble mantel arches over the inset door, and the name PERNOT is spaced in a half curve like a team logo on a baseball jersey. On the door is carved the legend LIFE IS FOR THE LIVING. Below that is a keyhole, and I have a key that fits, and I use it occasionally.

Last semester, in my advanced Romantic Lit course, Ms. Walters had us study a poem called “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe, and it pretty much freaked out almost the whole class. The dude narrating the poem is completely in love with the titular Annabel Lee—and by the way, “titular” is not a boob reference, but comes from the word “title,” as in the title of the poem is “Annabel Lee.” Anyway, he’s so in love with her that, after she dies, he continues to sleep with her.

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride,

In the sepulcher there by the sea,

In her tomb by the sounding sea.

Actually, a few of the girls in the class really dug it, particularly Rebecca Saunders, who’s this complete goth chick who went as a zombie last Halloween and no one knew because that’s what she looks like every day. In fact, I think “Annabel Lee” is very cool too, and I completely understand why Annabel Lee’s boyfriend would go so far as to lie down next to her in her sepulcher—though, after a certain point, the quality of the embalming would become an issue, I’d think. Still, love is pretty powerful. Witness me in a graveyard, entering a crypt in the proverbial dead of night.

Flicking on the flashlight, I push, and the door opens noiselessly inward. There is no haunted house squeak because it would be not only predictable, but also unnerving. So, I keep the hinges well lubricated. Along with duct tape, WD-40 is the most amazing invention known to mankind.

Pausing, I take a deep breath and aim the flashlight. Allison’s casket, on a cement pedestal, is an expensive, shiny, brass item, and the beam flashes off the angled surfaces like headlights from a careening car, shooting across the corners of the crypt.

I wipe the palm of my free hand on my jeans and, aware that I’m breathing hoarsely, approach the casket. The latch under the lid doesn’t lock. I flick it with my thumb and, with a quick motion of resolution, push it upward, at the same time swinging the flashlight and aiming it directly at her face.

Allison. Resting against the stale-but-still-beautiful, pale blue-gone-gray silk of the small square funerary pillow.

Oh. My. God.

Arch cheekbones and an angular jawline; freckled nose curving just slightly to the right from where it was fractured in a beach volleyball game; dark red hair tapered at the back of the neck, the long bangs sweeping right to left over the high forehead; robust lips shining in shadowed purple intensity—suggesting, even in repose, secret and clever punch lines…

So beautiful—even dead.

Allison opens her eyes, squinting against the light, and flicks her tongue delicately, like a cat, around her mouth. Her voice is low and husky. “Hey, Ghost, do me a favor. Can you point that light somewhere else?”

Did I say she’s dead?

Make that undead.

Allison—queen of my dreams, object of my unrequited love (though, she assures me, happy to be my pal)—is a vampire.

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Figs. 1 &2: The only two absolutely necessary vampire novels.

To be fair, there are many, many enjoyable vampire novels in circulation, but I suppose it’s a matter of just how far you want to disappear into the genre. In addition to the many, many enjoyable vampire novels, there are hundreds that aren’t very good, but they continue to magically appear.

“Watch me pull a vampire novel out of my hat!”

It’s like Penn & Teller with fangs.

And now, I’m thickening the quagmire.

This Friday — June 12 in the Year of Our Lord 2026 — my vampire novel White Ghost Blues comes out from JournalStone, the very fine dark fiction house that published my novel Gris-Gris Gumbo, which was the Salem’s Lot of voodoo, if I say so myself. At 6 p.m. that evening, I’ll be at Bank Square Books in Mystic to talk about White Ghost Blues with my dear friend Luanne Rice, who will do her damnedest to get me to justify writing a vampire novel the world doesn’t need.

The thing is, “justification” didn’t enter the equation. Desperation, however, did.

About 10 years ago, sinking in the mucilaginous quicksand of my “literary career,” I was describing my lack of success to another friend, the crime novelist Ace Atkins. Off the top of his head, he suggested I write a YA novel about a loup garou in New Orleans. (In Louisiana, loup garou is Cajun/French for werewolf.)

Given that I’m one of the worst-selling authors in history, I was ready to give it a try.

Frankly, I’m lucky to have friends like Ace and Luanne, each of whom is a multiple New York Times Bestselling author, and both have been generous and supportive. So if either one were to say, “Hey, Failure — er, Rick — why don’t you write a book about a giant, sentient strawberry cupcake that plays competitive chess in Washington Square Park,” I would listen. And then I’d start researching strawberry cupcake recipes and studying videos of the 1999 match between Garry Kasparov and Veselin Topalov, two fellas regarded as the Bram Stoker and Stephen King of chess.

Fig. 3: Strawberry cupcake, which is more fun to look at than the grim visages of Russian chess honchos deep in combat.

The problems, though, with Ace’s idea were A) I have a mental block in terms of pronouncing loup garou, meaning I can’t stop saying loop rather than the correct loo and B) werewolves only pop up for three nights every month, which would mean I’d have to think of something to write about for the other 27 or so days.

However, I thought, a vampire can come out to play every night! Plus, no one has ever written about vampires in Louisiana!

Wait! I’m forgetting Anne Rice and Charlaine Harris. In fact, their collective total of vampire books set in Louisiana accounts for 84.6 percent of all vampire novels ever written — and for that matter 65 percent of all the books ever sold that don’t have “Harry Potter” in the title.

What happened is, once I started writing White Ghost Blues, I really enjoyed myself and I knocked the damned thing out in about six months, which is really quick for me. One of my earlier novels, Poppin’ a Cold One, took me so long that I had to start writing it before I was born!

Anyhoo, White Ghost Blues has a vampire in it. But the true protagonist is a lonely, 17-year-old blues guitar prodigy named Wyatt Dumaine. He’s an albino orphan and, if I say so myself, a pretty wonderful character.

Here’s the cover art and jacket copy in case you’re interested in learning more.

If he weren’t a celebrity, 17-year-old Wyatt “White Ghost” Dumaine would probably serve as a piñata for any bullying group at his New Orleans high school. After all, he’s brainy, small and skinny, an orphan — and an albino. Even his fame, as a blues guitar prodigy, isn’t exactly a big deal to his classmates. All it provides is a sort of hands-off notoriety.

Ghost has one true friend, the gorgeous Allison Pernot, a New Orleans Saints cheerleader who, oh yeah, also happens to be a vampire. Insofar as the shallow emotions of the Undead allow, Allison enjoys Wyatt’s company and his extrasensory ability that helps identify potential victims who aren’t great citizens and won’t be missed.

For his part, Ghost would love it if Allison would make him a vampire so they could be together forever.

But he also loves Tante, the elderly woman who adopted him when his parents died after Hurricane Katrina. Tante is distraught after a family tragedy — so how could he, in good conscience, abandon her? Too, he finds himself bonding emotionally with a classmate, Poe Watkins, the girl who runs his website and is reeling after a breakup with her boyfriend. Then, on the eve of the biggest gig of his life, Ghost discovers a terrible secret. Can Allison provide the only solution to his problems? Or should Wyatt decide to ensure happiness for Tante and Poe at great personal sacrifice?

Good Lord, that’s bad ass, ain’t it?

Plot, atmosphere and character! It’s like Dickens, Marquez and Proust all baked into a giant strawberry cupcake of a story — and, after all, Dickens, Marquez and Proust were the Bram Stoker and Stephen King and, ah, Bram Stoker again of literary fiction! How can you not want to read such a thing?!

Pretty easily, I suspect.

But do it anyway. I’m proud of this book. It’s funny, wistful, suspenseful, not gore-spattered and throws a baffling, Sandy Koufaxian curveball into the whole blueprint of vampire lore.

Sandy Koufax curveball

If you can’t make it to Bank Square Books, White Ghost Blues is available in paperback and eBook formats from Amazon and Barnes & Noble as well as journalstone.com — with more brick-and-mortar store outlets coming soon.

Oh, and I forgot. White Ghost Blues is really short, so it’s ideal if you’re waiting on the jury to come back in your trial.

Slice-o! Bouncing head!

Kidding!

That’s a tangential tidbit I threw in for your amusement and hopefully bikers will chortle at it as well. Because many of those folks are loud just because they find it entertaining to do so.

If the bikers are not amused by my trip-wire joke, I will soon be dragged behind the monstrous hog of some late-breaking Sonny Barger type who runs a dangerous gang called something like Mephisto’s Warlords. He will be passing through my neighborhood on his way to the Cape to spend balmy early summer days with the Extended Fam in his grandma’s Chatham beachfront cabin.

But what I seriously wanted to discuss is what I call Vehicular Acknowledgement — and, no, I’m not talking about shooting the finger to anyone in another mode of transport who has, in your opinion, annoyed you. A loud biker, for example.

No, anymore, in our convivial society, the ratio of, oh, just taking a breath to popping the bird at another driver is roughly 3 to 1 at any moment. Not a big deal.

Rather, I’m jealous that motorcyclists, particularly Harley-Davidson aficionados, have secret hand signs they flash when they pass one another. It’s a form of vehicular acknowledgment that suggests We are secretive and sinister — even more than that Anarchy TV show and we ride like the wind and woe to any mofo who gets in our way!

(I’m also not sure bikers say “ride like the wind” anymore because Christopher Cross came out with a song of that title, which folks can find with regularity on Yacht Rock stations, and as everyone knows Yacht Rock stations are not what bikers listen to. I’m surprised Christopher Cross, as punishment for his foolhardy song-titling, hasn’t been dragged behind the monstrous hog of some Sonny Barger-type chieftain of Mephisto’s Warlords until Chris agreed to never sing that song ever again or, for that matter, the one about being between the moon and New York City.)

Fig. 1. Vicious biker chieftain, possibly looking for ME.

Anyhoo, from what I can observe, the secret biker signals involve a quick dipping of one’s hand down near the muffler of the bike, obfuscating the particulars of the pretzel-like finger-configuration from everyday losers like me so we can’t replicate it, and then the rider receives an identical gesture in return from a biker going the other way. Thus acknowledged, they roar on!

Fig. 2. Could this be the gnarled secret hand sign of a road-happy biker?!

But bikers aren’t the only travelers sufficiently proud of their rides that they have secret hand signs.

Upper-crusty folks who own rarified automobiles like Ferraris or Lamborghinis or Maseratis all have their distinctive gestures they deftly brandish to those they might see purring along in sporty cars from the same manufacturer, although I believe there’s a slight bit of impatience or even irritation because part of the fun of driving a car like that is the idea that you are the only one who can afford such a thing.

Nonetheless, in the fashion that Rich People have of feeling comfortable only around other Rich People, they do have forms of highway recognition. I think, for example, a Lamborghini owner, upon spotting another person piloting a Lamborghini, gives a slight head nod, an ironic smile, and a crisp salute — the sequence of which is then replicated by the other Lambo-Person.

Maseratists are pretty basic when it comes to hailing a fellow M-owner. They simply hold up a bulging money clip.

As for Ferraris, I’ll have you know I spent a day several years ago back in Texas driving around in the shotgun seat of a Ferrari convertible. What happened was, it was my pal Dave Schulz’s birthday. His wife rented him the Ferrari for the day and, since she had work plans she couldn’t get out of it, Dave invited me to hop in the Big F and just cruise randomly because we would be in a FERRARI. According to the glossy Ferrari sales brochure, the color of our Ferrari, curated by a well-known fashion designer, was “Embarrassed Kappa Pledge Red” and it was bright and shiny.

Fig. 3. Ferrari’s “Embarrassed Kappa Pledge Red” color.

And … we rolled!

There were no destinations — the idea was to be seen by as many humans as possible so we’d know what it felt like to be on the other side of the “Look at those smug assholes in a Ferrari” dynamic. We also were hoping we’d spy another Ferrari and would be able to receive — and then return because then we’d know what it was — the surreptitious Ferrari Acknowledgment Sign.

It was pretty glorious to be smug for eight hours. Dave and I also thought about dressing up for the occasion but … well, how does someone in a Ferrari dress? Our conclusion was the best way to be attired whilst cruising in a Ferrari was like those chiseled irritants known as Professional Tennis Coaches — the kind you see on television at the French Open or Wimbledon, clustered together in their white tennis shirts, some with their collars turned up, a few with Oliver Peoples sunglasses perched just so atop their sculpted, sun-teased hair, a visor or two, and en masse scowling at their athlete even though he’s doing all the work out on the court. Their athlete better win because someone’s gotta pay for the Ferrari.

Fig. 4. Properly attired tennis fellow.

Dave and I ended up dressing the way we normally would — which is to say like slobs — but, even so, don’t let anyone tell you other drivers don’t notice a red Ferrari convertible. They sonofabitchin’ sure do!

Girls certainly noticed, at least until they saw Quasimodo — er, me, in the shotgun seat. At that point they shuddered and wondered if the driver — Dave was a good-looking dude — had in some head-scratching snafu been assigned to return a convict to a halfway house.

The point I’m slowly getting around to is that, even in an densely populated area like the Metroplex — the collective areas including Dallas, Fort Worth, Arlington and various suburbs, all running together so you never know precisely which town you’re in — you don’t see a lot of Ferraris. We even drove through Valley Ranch, home to the Dallas Cowboys training facilities and club offices, and didn’t see any Ferraris.

We did see what appeared to be a video shoot about zombies — until we realized it was just a local news station interviewing Cowboys owner Jerry Jones, who even back then already looked like a mort school embalming assignment gone horribly wrong.

We motored on and, miraculously, nearing the end of our day-long cruise, we did see a Ferrari! It was a sort of off-silver color, a hue the Ferrari brochure probably called “Sell-By-Date Oyster,” and the guy driving it, who looked like a tennis coach on his way to Rafa Nadal’s house, saw us — and he flashed a goddamned secret Ferrari Acknowledgment Sign!

But, just then, a freakin’ school bus got into our sightline and the moment was lost. And coming in the other direction was another school bus. Classes were letting out.

“Wait!” Dave hollered above the wind. “Did the Ferrari guy shoot us a vehicle acknowledgment signal?!”

“I think so!” I shouted. “But the goddamned school buses got in the way!”

The drive home became subdued, although of course the pure pleasure of spending a day pretending to be a Rich Person in an Embarrassed Kappa Pledge Red Ferrari was pretty great.

“Oh well,” Dave observed later, after the sports car had been returned to the rental place and we were back in our Poor Person apartments, sipping cheap beers. “Did you at least notice the school bus drivers?”

“Sure did,” I smiled contentedly. “They flashed each other a School Bus Driver Acknowledgement Sign. Looked pretty fancy.”

By the way, I drive a 2016 Honda CRV. And I’m not gonna tell you our secret hand sign.

Hey y’all! A reminder that my new novel, White Ghost Blues, will be published on Friday, June 12. We’re celebrating that day with a 6 p.m. signing at Bank Square Books, 80 Stonington Road, Mystic. The wonderful Luanne Rice has kindly agreed to interrogate me about the book and other writerly things I am singularly unqualified to discuss.

I can’t imagine that many historic personnel decisions were made on the basis of something like a tallboy can of Schaefer beer.

Churchill choosing Lord Beaverbrook to overhaul British aircraft production at the dawn of World War II? “Want a cold one, Beavey? Nasty business with these Nazi fighter planes, eh? Say, I was wondering … ” Probably not. Scotch, maybe …

Michelangelo walking into a meeting with the Vatican’s Sistine Chapel Improvement Committee to pitch his concepts for a ceiling mural. “Before we start,” the genius says to the committee, “y’all got any mead?” Unlikely …

Nonetheless, in late spring, 1985, when our fledgling band Safety in Numbers had slowly coalesced and all we needed was a lead vocalist, we put out the call for auditions. There were four of us. I played bass and sang; Dave Stone and John Lange were both guitarists/keyboardists and John sang; and Bob Moersen was the drummer/second lead singer. We met the candidates for an initial interview in what came to be known as the “band apartment” because Dave and I lived there and it had room to store all our equipment.

Would-be singers came and went, and each was asked to bring a tape of vocal prowess and, hopefully, original songs. And so it went, slowly. Some had potential; others were frankly frightening.

Then a guy called Nick Shannon walked in. He was disarmingly handsome in a way that brought to mind a young Elvis. And, in addition to a cassette tape of his songs, he was holding a sweating tallboy can of Schaefer beer.

Is there a worse brand of beer than Schaefer? And how telling is it that cheap beer enthusiasts — folks who, by financial constraints and the aim of long-term satisfaction, seek quantity over quality — are instantly recognizable by their choice of the price-per-ounce advantage of tallboys?

Whether Schaefer is indeed the worst beer ever made is subject to myriad saloon debates. Inarguably, though, it sucks. We knew this because we drank huge quantities of lousy beer for budget and buzz!

So: this “Nick Shannon” brazenly clutched a lousy beer, shrewdly priced for maximum consumption. And for God’s sakes, “Nick Shannon” looked like one of the most handsome rock ‘n’ rollers of all time.

“You’re hired,” I said.

Well, no, I didn’t say that. But I think we all knew instinctively, and he indeed got the job. Nick was smart and very funny, and his initial cassette contained amazing original songs including maybe my favorite of his, called “Everyone Lies.”

Audio 1. Safety in Numbers’ recording of “Everyone Lies” at True Colours Sound

One thing, though. He hated being told he looked like Elvis. I’m not sure why. He looked like “prime of life” Elvis, not the much stockier, Vegas-y Elvis. Hell, I wished I looked like any Elvis.

But I suppose Nick was pursuing the dream of being a rock singer and wanted to look like Nick and not someone already iconic.

Fig. 1. Early Safety in Numbers test shot with Nick not looking like Elvis. Behind him, from left, are John, Dave, Bob and me.

Anyway, what followed were probably the three most exciting and fun years of my life. Safety in Numbers indeed “went for it,” by which I mean we wanted a record deal and we damned well worked for it. Nick, John and I all wrote songs and the whole band arranged the material. Sometimes we co-wrote. I had a tune called “I Drift Away” and I really liked the chords and the chorus but wasn’t wild about the verses. I asked Nick if he had any ideas and, boy, did he deliver. I love that song.

Audio 2. “I Drift Away” from True Colours sessions.

We also had a manager, Charles Vessels, who’d been road manager for Three Dog Night in the days when they were filling stadiums and arenas. He had connections and knew people. We felt spangled with magic and never lost sight of the idea that being in a band and playing our own songs and drinking cheap beer was a helluva fun way to gambol through Youth.

Fig. 2: Me and Nick at a Halloween gig. I think it was Halloween. I HOPE it was Halloween.

In the end, we didn’t get a recording contract. Came close. Heartbreakingly close. Ultimately, the fervor with which we futilely chased the dream fractured the group. But the music and camaraderie and friends we made at that precise point in life will always stay carved in my otherwise deteriorating brain.

Video 1. Not-very-high-quality footage of us losing on Star Search.

Last Saturday, Nick passed away from metastatic bone cancer at the age of 70. His beloved wife/best friend Maeleska was by his side.

For years, obit writers and loved ones have been frustrated by the limited number of ways to describe a cancer patient’s struggles with the disease. “Brave fight.” “Courageous battle.” I wish there were more synonyms.

Personally, my belief was that, in the six years after his diagnosis, Nick’s relationship with cancer was more of a wily chess match with Death — sorta like Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, only with a lot of wisecracks. Nick endured intense pain and negotiated periods of optimism and crushing downturns with dignity and humor. There was a lot of dryly amused stoicism to Nick and he made the best of his situation.

When I went to see him in Dallas two weeks ago — essentially to say goodbye — he didn’t sugar coat the reality that the disease had reached the end stage.

At the same time, he thought he had some time. He had plans to finish cataloging a variety of recordings from the Safety in Numbers days and subsequent bands the Mystics and Sideshow Freaks. He enjoyed painting and watching sports and, though mostly confined to a multi-position recliner, Nick remained fully committed to helping Maeleska in her iconic efforts to help rescue dogs through the nonprofit DFW’s Furgotten Friends and other similar and blessed organizations. (For much of my visit, a small pup sat on my lap while Nick and I talked.) He couldn’t say enough about how lucky he was to have had 30 years with Maeleska; indeed, what a true angel she is and has been.

And of course, we spoke of the old days, onstage and off. Large times!

Video 2. A year ago, for Nick’s birthday, I asked my pal Pete Huoppi to make a video montage to the Safety song “About You,” which Nick wrote and was one of his favorites. Thanks, Pete,

Nick was a truly charismatic frontman, but part of the magic of his performances was that, for all his good looks and stage presence, he could be a little clumsy. And that added a very endearing human quality to the whole band.

Once, he accidentally smashed the microphone into his own forehead. He finished the gig despite bleeding copiously, holding paper cocktail napkins to the gash, and after the last tune, he was whisked away to the emergency room by a carload of female fans.

Another time — and this wasn’t his fault, but it was still, well, Nick — we were at a showcase room in Oklahoma City. It was a huge club with a four-foot stage. We were playing a song called “The Sign of Fire” by the Fixx. At a certain point, Nick delivered the line “After the fall,” after which the band stops for a full beat. To punctuate the dramatic pause, Nick would always stomp the stage. This time, though, when he did so, the planking gave way and he fell through to the floor!

All of a sudden, from the audience perspective, Nick was only visible from chest up. Without hesitation, he just belted out the next line and we joined in. No human damage done, thankfully.

We were hired to play a summer birthday party for a wealthy college kid at the family’s nice lakehouse west of Fort Worth. When we pulled up in the driveway, there was one of those short basketball goals designed so that normal people can dunk. The first thing Nick did upon exiting the van was to scoop up the basketball lying in the yard, take a few quick dribbles and sky for the dunk.

He tore the rim off and shattered the backboard. Naturally, Mr. and Mrs. Rich Person happened to be standing by to greet us. Oops.

I could go on for a long time, and maybe someday I will.

But probably my favorite Nick anecdote involves an act of magnanimous self-sacrifice for the benefit of all.

We had a brutal weekend. Five gigs in three days. At noon on Friday we played — I’m not making this up — a graduation party for a business/secretarial school. Do they still have those?

We arose far earlier than normal, loading the gear and the always-present Giant Band Beer Cooler — with its own stenciled Safety in Numbers logo — and we set up in the provided outdoor tent. Time to start drinking! We rocked the secretaries and ate their potato salad and reloaded the van and headed 30 miles west to Arlington to set up and play three sets that night at a club called J. Gilligan’s.

On completion of that, we broke down the equipment and headed back to the band apartment. Saturday morning, we reloaded the van and the Giant Band Beer Cooler and drove to an outdoor street festival taking place downtown in front of Dallas City Hall.

After an early afternoon set, we packed the van and went back to J. Gilligan’s for three sets Saturday night. Finished at 2 a.m., loaded out the gear and returned home for a few hours sleep.

Sunday morning, up again for another show in front of City Hall for the second day of the street fair — and that’s when tragedy struck.

At the time, you couldn’t buy beer in Dallas on Sunday morning before noon. Oh, no! In the madness of our schedule, we’d neglected to pay attention to the goddamn Giant Band Beer Cooler and it was almost empty! There was no time to leave the fair and go find a liquor store and still get back by the 12:30 p.m. showtime. Hmm. It might have been possible to have friends in the audience ferry us beer from the on-site vendors. But that was problematic because we were used to having instant onstage access to the Giant Band Beer Cooler — in mid-song, if needed.

And that’s when someone noticed, a few hundred yards down the carnivalesque midway, a radio station karaoke booth. And at that exact moment, the station was sponsoring an Elvis Soundalike Contest. Whichever contestant was adjudged to sing most like Elvis won … a cooler full of Miller Lite beer!

The solution to all of life’s problems was immediately obvious.

“Nick, you’ve gotta go down there and enter that contest!”

There’s no question he’d win the goddamn thing. He was an amazing singer and, again, he looked like the King!

“No way,” Nick said. “I am not gonna enter a goddamned Elvis karaoke contest. Y’all know my thoughts on that.”

We surrounded him, pleading with him to take one for the team.

In the end, Nick, escorted by a few pals in case he tried to escape — and to help tote the anticipated bounty — entered the Elvis contest and, of course, he won.

And so we played the last of a truly exhaustive weekend, perched atop a grand stage in downtown Dallas, rocking a fine crowd of good people and quenching our collective thirst with cold Miller Lite.

Fig. 3. Admittedly blurry image of Safety in Numbers onstage in front of Dallas City Hall shortly after Nick one the Elvis contest.

The only way it coulda been more “Nick” is if the cooler had been full of Schaefer tallboys. Or if he’d fallen through the stage.

Take wing, brother. I love you.

Wild!

What happens is, in addition to providing periodic free content — in my case, weekly — the Substackist can crank out additional material to subscribers who pledge various amounts of money because “they believe in the creativity and dedication of the Substackists and wish to encourage greater and more inspired productivity.”

Or something like that. Says so right there in the Substack PR material when someone signs up to start their own Substack!

In my case, I WRITE GOOD has to this point been free, and there will continue to be the free weekly dispatches you’ve come to relish and rely on.

However, I can no longer ignore the generous pledges piling up from I WRITE GOOD subscribers — $2,423,019 so far! That’s almost enough to build the Rick Koster Ballroom! Oh, and one fellow, bereft of cash, offered to wash my car if I could just see clear to giving him any bonus material. He doesn’t know I park in the driveway behind our house, under a tree that, for some reason, is popular with all types of diarrhetic fowl. They nestle in the branches, having decided en masse that my car is a canvas on which they can each, ah, contribute to the bird-dropping version of a Jackson Pollock work.

Anyway, back to monetizing I WRITE GOOD. My Professional Financial People have advised me that the time draws nigh to activate these pledges and indeed reward those who’ve expressed confidence through these as-yet-dormant pledges.

Indeed: Thank you!

Over the next month, then, I’ll be introducing these lagniappes of goodness — and of course you’ll receive timely notice as to when the Money Stuff is gonna go live so that you have ample time to rescind your pledge and say, “Whew! Glad I got outta that!”

But … maybe you’ll LIKE the Your-Eyes-Only content and not rescind and, rather, congratulate yourself on your shrewd investment.

Below, for example, is the first episode in a series called The Thousand and One Rock Shirts of Rick Koster. Each of these episodes will be a trip down the cobwebby, pothole-clustered road I call “Memory Lane” and will explore, as the title suggests, a different band shirt from my personal collection. Not all of my shirts have survived a half-century’s journey with me, of course, but I won’t forget them.

(I’m talking to you, Ten Years After and what may have been the first powder blue rock shirt in history. Alvin Lee never did lack for confidence and presumably said, “I dig powder blue and that’s that.”)

Also in the series, I will discuss the design quality of the shirt and take you through anecdotal and observational history of the artist and my encounters or impressions. Some of these are funnier than others; many are poignant or wistful. And we’ll delve into the question of why, if a design sucks, would I go ahead and buy the shirt anyway?

Perhaps most importantly, the videos are shot and edited by my pal Pete Huoppi, so whatever they lack in content, performance or wit, you at least know you’ll see a quality production.

This inaugural The Thousand and One Rock Shirts of Rick Koster features Uriah Heep and one truly bizarre and absolutely unique concert experience. Enjoy. As the man says, “First one’s free.”

Other upcoming exclusive stuff will include a serialized novel — each week a new chapter — short stories, music and some other ideas that are so ridiculous I haven’t yet convinced myself to actually pursue them. But I think I probably will.

Your comments and suggestions are ALWAYS appreciated and welcome.

Due to unanticipated deadlines elsewhere, this week’s I WRITE GOOD is more of a photo essay.

It was inspired on one of my solo walks with our dog Virgil, who, like me, is transitioning from the autumn of his years to winter. Time is a stalker.

Which means we increasingly enjoy these vernal ambulations in the new warmth of the sun and the hopeful promise of seasons yet to come. Virgil likes the scent of flower petals and, if I allowed him to do so, would dig at them, perhaps hoping to uncover a hidden pit of full-scented blooms for his enjoyment.

𝑭𝒊𝒈. 1. 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒇𝒆𝒍𝒍𝒐𝒘 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒅 𝒇𝒐𝒓 𝒂 𝒃𝒓𝒊𝒆𝒇 𝒓𝒆𝒔𝒕 𝒐𝒏 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒄𝒂𝒓𝒑𝒆𝒕 𝒐𝒇 “𝒑𝒊𝒏𝒌 𝒔𝒏𝒐𝒘.” 𝑯𝒐𝒘 𝒏𝒐𝒃𝒍𝒆 𝒂𝒏𝒅 𝒉𝒂𝒏𝒅𝒔𝒐𝒎𝒆!

𝑭𝒊𝒈. 2. 𝑨𝒏𝒅 𝒍𝒐𝒐𝒌!

Ten thousand saw I at a glance!

Tossing their heads in sprightly dance!

Well, in this case, the blooms have tossed their heads so hard they fell to the ground, but Virgil feels happy nestling among them.

After a few more blocks, he started to slow down a bit. Me, too. It’s hell to get old.

𝑭𝒊𝒈. 3. “𝑰 𝒘𝒊𝒍𝒍 𝒑𝒂𝒖𝒔𝒆 𝒉𝒆𝒓𝒆,” 𝒔𝒂𝒚𝒆𝒕𝒉 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝒉𝒐𝒖𝒏𝒅, “𝒊𝒏 𝒇𝒓𝒐𝒏𝒕 𝒐𝒇 𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒔 𝒐𝒍𝒅 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒏𝒆 𝒘𝒂𝒍𝒍 𝒕𝒐𝒑𝒑𝒆𝒅 𝒘𝒊𝒕𝒉 𝒄𝒍𝒖𝒔𝒕𝒆𝒓𝒔 𝒐𝒇 𝒃𝒆𝒂𝒖𝒕𝒚!”

And then one last stop.

WAIT! What’s this?!

Virgil zeroed in on a decidedly non-pretty spot — deterred by something foul that only his highly developed olfactory sense could pinpoint! He commenced a flurry of forepaw spelunking.

Holy hell! He unearthed the skull of …

A MURDER VICTIM!

𝑭𝒊𝒈. 4. 𝑰 𝒋𝒖𝒔𝒕 𝒘𝒊𝒔𝒉 𝒊𝒕 𝒘𝒂𝒔𝒏’𝒕 𝑶𝑼𝑹 𝒃𝒂𝒄𝒌𝒚𝒂𝒓𝒅.

What I have since learned is that each of these theologies had a God responsible for nature. Pan was the Greek nature god, and Faunus was the Roman nature god.

I thought about this earlier today on a walk around the neighborhood with my dog Mabel. We came around a bend and beheld two landscaping pickup trucks representing different companies, each pulling one of those massive low-slung trailers crammed with enough and varied equipment to manicure and properly maintain a lawn of any size up to and including Central Park.

They’d been going in opposite directions and, it appeared, had, upon seeing one another, pulled over in some sort of acknowledgement of their mutual landscapery. One of the Lawn-Tenders exited his vehicle and crossed the street and started chatting with the other Lawn-Tender, who was still in his truck cab. They were both young, mid-twenties, maybe, and, after a long day mowing and trimming, wore their sweat and dirt like the high school letter jackets they’d assuredly earned a few years back .

“My God!” I thought. “Two disparate Young Lords of Nature! Confronting one another!” It was as though Faunus and Pan almost accidentally collided while unknowingly loping across the same rustic stretch of verdant countryside!

Is this Pan? Or Faunus? Whatever …

Would the two woodland deities have fought, I wondered, each using their fierce goat horns to butt heads? Or would it have just been shop-talk about nymphs and maidens — or perhaps they’d jam together, interweaving celestial melodies on those melodic reed-flute things those sorts of Gods enjoyed piping, like a pair of lush green Ian Andersons?

But what I’d seen with the Yard-Tenders was happening in real time, though, not thousands of years ago, and it reminded me of one of those fortuitous coincidences of fate, the way Timothée Chalamet, exiting a limo to participate in a red-carpet processional, might spy Alexander Skarsgård getting out of his Escalade to attend the same star-spangled event:

The two Famous Persons, after a moment’s hesitation, approach one another, flashbulbs popping all around them from paparazzi. They share a bro-hug, and … well, what?

Maybe Skarsgård says, “Yo, Tim, how did you decide which ‘e’ in your first name was gonna be the one with the accent mark over it?”

And Chalamet answers, “I think it had something to do with my parents. They read in some how-to-raise-a-sophisticated-child book that an accent mark enhances the kid’s self esteem and also increased the odds of future-hipster status significantly.” He laughs and does one of those sweeping, two-hands gestures down the front of his body. “And here I am!” He takes a moment to pose for a selfie with a gushing teenage fan. “What about you, Alex? And what is that little hollow dot over the ‘a’ in your last name?”

Skarsgård nods. “Yeah, it’s called a diacritical ring and it’s one of those goofy Scandinavian things.” He’s clearly been asked about this hundreds of times but doesn’t want to be rude to a fellow big shot. “Trust me. For a long time, I wished we didn’t have the diacritical ring because it’s a pain in the ass to hit INSERT SYMBOL every time I type my name.”

Or maybe Alex and Tim are discussing co-starring in a new Broadway production of Beckett — gotta be Skarsgård as the king, right? Or even which post-red-carpet-gala orgy to attend!

How would their by-chance meeting have gone? That’s the thing. We’ll never know. We can only speculate.

It was the same with my Lawn-Tenders only, again, it was happening right in front of me. Might it yet become antagonistic?

On the other hand, I couldn’t just sit there and watch to see what happened because that would seemed sorta creepy, some old dude with his dog, hanging around and eavesdropping on the professional gardeners.

For the moment, Mabel was distracted by what seemed to be a bush coated in several strains of urine from other local dogs, so that bought a little time for clandestine observation. But sooner rather than later I’d have to move on.

Sure enough, Mabel snorted and backed away from the plant; piss-sniff time was over and I had no choice but to head on down the lane. The two Lawn-Tenders took no notice of us and seemed at peace together. There were smiles and relaxed countenances, so it didn’t seem as though the meeting could go south.

But it gave me something to think about as Mabel and I turned left on the next street. Here are a few scenarios I came up with.

Scenario #1

“Dude!” says Lawn-Tender Brad, holding out his fist and receiving a collegial bump. “How many lawns y’all knock out today?” He pushes his sunglasses back over his forehead bandana.

“Fourteen, bro, but we’re not done,” responds Landscaper Colt. His ballcap is on backwards and has motor oil stains. “Hell, you know. Start of the season. A lot of folks haven’t done anything yet and it’s a mess.”

“Spring clean-up, I hear ya,” Landscaper Brad says. “Hey, you know anything about a sale on nips at Buddy’s Packy?”

Colt laughs, leans forward, cups his hand around his mouth as though to form a cone and blows his breath towards Brad. “Smell that? That, my man, is Fireball. The ol’ 90-proof cinnamon highway! Two-for-one on those fuckers! Better hurry, though. I saw Geno from Wallboro’s Landscaping pulling into Buddy’s with a whole crew.”

“Hell. I know those guys. They’ll wipe Buddy out! I’m off! Catch you on the back forty!”

90-proof cinnamon highway

Of course, that’s a presumptuous and pejorative stereotype, although it’s true my wife Eileen and I once used a 12-pack of Natty Light to pay the balance of a bill to a standalone yard guy who’d knocked on our door. He seemed down on his luck and we thought we’d, y’know, be good citizens — and he’d subsequently done a half-ass job installing a pea gravel path just inside the perimeter of our backyard fence.

We’d reached a standoff with the fellow; he insisted he was finished and we said his work sucked and he said, ‘Where’s the other hundred you owe me?” and we said, “Dream on, Yard Clown, we were fools to try to help you out” and he said, “Fine, I’m gonna erect a tent in your front yard and start squatting and check out the laws on that shit because it ain’t gonna be easy to get rid of me” and we said, ‘OK, how about a twelver of Natty Light?’ and he said, ‘Deal!’ and — whew, we dodged a bullet on that one, I think.

Scenario #2

What if the Lawn-Tenders were discussing rumors of a possible trade that would shake up the local landscaping universe?

Lawn-Tender Colt says, “Horrible about Boogie Red! What’s Perkins Property Maintenance gonna do without their best topiary guy?”

Lawn-Tender Brad shakes his head, suddenly grim. He’s not particularly religious, but in this case, he crosses himself. “No idea. And how the hell did Red scalp himself? He rocks a Husqvarna 525HF3S 26-Inch and he customized the grip and sharpens the blades himself! Dude’s a wizard!”

“I know,” Lawn-Tender Colt says. “I heard he was sculpting a line of thirty-foot Eastern Redcedars to look like a silhouette of the Sierra Nevada mountain range and got stung by a hornet. He inadvertently jerked back on the trimmer without disengaging and the blades peeled his face. Blood everywhere. Spooky as fuck.”

Lawn-Tender Brad, wiping sweaty soil from under his eyes — or is it tears? — takes a step back. “Whoa! No way! Boogie Red … jeez, that guy’s like the Eddie Van Halen of horticulture! You see that video of him mulching the entire row of Cliff Walk mansions in Newport two summers ago? It was, like, ninety-four degrees, humid as all get out, and the dude was just a monster. Did the whole gig in two days.”

“When you’re right, you’re right. I mean, hell, think about it. Red did his field work landscaping the Clinton Library in Little Rock.” Lawn-Tender Colt thinks for a minute. “Like, you gotta have a fellowship for shit like that.” He sighs. “Anyway, Leon, he’s our crew manager, says the rumor is that old man Perkins is trying to make a deal with Doogie’s Lawn Care. Perkins might be willing to give up three Felco pruners, a Redmax EBZ9000 leaf blower and a first-round draft choice in next year’s Landscaper Draft if Doogie will loan out Birdface till Labor Day. You know Birdface?”

“Yeah, he’s Doogie’s Number Two shrub guy, right? And he really does sorta look like a bird. A finch, maybe. Or one of those starlings …”

Looks like an elite shrub trimmer.

By this point in my quasi-trance, Mabel and I were completing our circuit, and I came out of my reverie because, as we approached our house, I tried to view our property as Lawn-Tenders Colt and Brad — or any random citizen just driving by — might see it. And it’s worth mentioning that we live on a street with fine neighbors whose yards are maintained in accordance to the Better Homes and Gardens Guide to Personal Terrain Aesthetics. It’s the bible for do-it-yourself suburban property maintenance.

And that’s when the final scenario popped into my head.

Scenario #3

Lawn-Tender Colt laughs and, sticking his arm out the window of the truck cab and pointing down the street, says, “You catch that yellow Colonial on the corner? Nice house but, Christ, the yard looks like the Munsters live there.” He sticks a hunk of Skoal between cheek and gum and starts to chew contentedly.

“You won’t believe this,” Lawn-Tender Brad says, “but we take care of that property.”

“What? It looks terrible — no offense.” He spits in a cup.

“No — that’s how they want it to look. It takes a lot of work and it’s expensive as hell.”

“Does. Not. Compute, brah,” Lawn-Tender Colt says, doing a robot-as-surfer voice. “I don’t get it.”

“Guy named Koster owns it,” Lawn-Tender Brad says. “He and his wife apparently like weeds. A lot. They had us order exotic types from all over the world and we had to poison a perfectly fine sprawl of Zoysia, then plant all these invasive species of nuisance plants. Crazy stuff.”

He tilts his head, trying to remember, then starts listing types of weeds, ticking them off one by one on his fingers. “They’ve got Spiny Amaranth. That one itches like a mofo and we had to wear elbow-length gloves to plant it. There’s Japanese Knotweed. Hairy Nightshade and Chilean Needlegrass. Those last two are from South America, I think. Again, not cheap to import but Mr. Koster told us, y’know, money’s no object.”

Lawn-Tender Colt laughs. “That’s wild. Literally. And, I mean, they’ve got the regular weeds, too. I mean, I can see Dandelions and Crabgrass and Canadian Thistle from here.”

“Yeah, it’s nuts. Oh, hell — hold it! Here comes Mr. Koster now with his dog Mabel.” He waves at me from down the block and calls out, “Hi, Mr. Koster! Nice day for a walk!”

I squint against the setting sun and see it’s one of our landscapers. I call back, “Sure is, Brad! Everything going okay for you guys? Probably about quitting time, isn’t it?”

“Yessir! Hey, we should have that pallet of those Scotch Broom and Yellow Starthistle weeds you ordered from Europe coming in at any time. Nasty stuff, Mr. Koster!” He laughs. “We’ll try to get ’em all planted by next weekend!”

“No worries, Brad,” I say. “Whenever you’ve got time.” A thought hits me. “Hey, I don’t know if y’all care, but I heard Buddy’s Packy’s got a sale on cinnamon nips!”

Then I take Mabel inside and clean off her paws and fill her water dish.

My wife Eileen and I rarely argue, and that’s just one of myriad blessings about our (almost) 33-year union.

One of many things we agree on: bugs suck.

One thing we don’t agree on: which bugs suck the most.

But we don’t argue about our disparate insect opinions. In fact, it’s good we feel differently. Each of us has our respective duties when it comes to bugs.

For me, spiders are the worst. I hate them. Eileen doesn’t mind them. This means she’s on duty if a spider suddenly materializes.

Fig. 1 — Where image of spider WOULD go except I don’t want to look at a spider

Deftly, and while humming “Singin’ in the Rain,” Eileen tenderly escorts the spider outside with a little sack lunch of dead flies in a little spidery hobo bindle so it can travel safely out there in the great wide-open world.

Of course, Eileen then feels, in resonate voice of reason, the need to remind me that spiders are actually helpful for the environment.

I understand that — theoretically. Here, look at this. I just googled “What are spiders good for?” and this is some of what the AI Spider Enthusiast spat out:

“Supporting services offered by spiders are … extensive, involving nutrient cycling through the breakdown of organic matter, acting as food sources for predators, or creating habitats for other organisms.”

What?!

What does any of that even mean? “Nutrient cycling,” my ass!

AI will never take over the world if it continues to use phrases like “supporting services offered by spiders…” Like spiders have concierge brochures or something!

Fuck you, AI Spider Enthusiast, with your calm descriptions of eight-legged beneficence. I can almost hear your soothing AI-generated, Spencer Tracy-like voice: “Ssh. Dad’s here, don’t be scared. Spiders are our buddies.”

If God — Whom I don’t believe in precisely because there are spiders — put spiders on earth to be Guardians of the Ecosystem, then let God make spiders cute to behold. What’s wrong with making spiders look like butterflies, God? Nobody doesn’t like butterflies.

Fig. 2 — These are attractive bugs! Not a goddamned spider anywhere in sight!

Now: ours is a household of mutual support, so when a centipede appears, it’s Eileen’s turn to go into the panic room — the one we had built to hide from ICE — until I’ve properly dealt with the problem.

Unfortunately, just removing the centipede from our living quarters isn’t enough for my suddenly-vicious wife. Eileen insists I smash the insect into paste and, unlike her jaunty Broadway musical-esque accompaniment to the spider’s exile, she has me crank up Slayer’s Reign in Blood loud enough so, as she seethes from inside the panic room, “every goddamn whatever-pede in this zip code gets the idea we’re not fucking around with the spooky little bastards!”

The “whatever-pede” is a reference to the fact that millipedes also exist and similarly risk destruction if they come to our house. It doesn’t matter to Eileen that a centipede has devil-tentacles protruding from its head and tail and is swift and venomous, but millipedes are not swift and venomous and do not have twin hell-prongs on their heads.

They all must die.

Fig. 3 — Centipede. Note devil horns at BOTH ENDS of this fucker!

And so we see the Koster-Jenkins domicile maintains a modest equilibrium even in peak Bug Season — which is here.

In fact, our regular exterminator — let’s call him The Bug Reaper — who visits our house quarterly as part of our yearly FUCK BUGS subscription, was here today. And, as usual, I stopped my work to casually ask The Bug Reaper for any new anecdotes quantifying the large-scale genocide of insects.

I think The Bug Reaper recognizes the anxiety beneath my pleasant curiosity. He knows that, inside me, is a terrified kid wanting reassurance but also a sort of ghost-story-’round-the-campfire thrill. Sometimes I ask for career-long observations.

“What’s the worst thing you’ve encountered at your job?” I asked today.

His answer surprised me. The Bug Reaper said he once went to a woman’s house after she called in about an infestation of yellow jackets.

Fair enough, he thought. What he wasn’t expecting was that, in an upstairs bedroom, he found thousands of creatures — as though Alfred Hitchcock had, at the last minute, decided to make The Yellow Jackets instead of The Birds.

“Did you say thousands?” I asked

“Yes. Not hundreds. There had to be a few thousand,” The Bug Reaper said.

Fig. 4 — THIS times thousands!

Wow. Well, if The Bug Reaper estimated thousands, who am I to be skeptical? He’s the professional.

Anyway, he described how the insects had found access from the outside and ended up in a bedroom had been closed off for a while. They clearly liked it there and set up camp. So The Bug Reaper pumped the place full of poison, suffering a few stings along the way, then he and the house-matron retreated to anxiously await whether the toxins either destroyed the golden-hued and barbed raiders — or simply pissed them off.

A few hours later, when The Bug Reaper re-entered the bedroom, the insects were in fact all dead and mounds of them were heaped on the floor and furniture. He told me he felt like the Khmer Rouge of Pest Control Services.

Back in Texas, Eileen and I occasionally used the services of an exterminator named Dave because there are a lot of bugs in the south. Lotta cockroaches, and they’re pesky and disturbing and everywhere. You might be a the cleanliest of cleanliness zealots, but you’re gonna have a cockroach or two.

Even rich people have cockroaches in the South.

“My God! That’s a giant cockroach!”

“Calm down. That’s Jerry Jones. He lives here.”

For those of you not from the South, whose only experience with cockroaches are the ones New Englanders run across now and then, a Deep South cockroach — or waterbug, as they are also called — is a thing Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft couldn’t have invented if they were lab partners in an advanced biology class.

Or, think of a geographically appropriate football analogy. A New England cockroach is the third-string punter for Amherst. He wants to graduate and edit a poetry magazine. A Deep South cockroach is the LSU linebacker who’s going in the first round of the NFL draft. He wants to hospitalize quarterbacks.

Deep South cockroaches are … horrible.

Fig. 5 — Nope, not looking at cockroaches, either.

Exterminator Dave was very friendly, a young guy with a family. He was a competitive water skier, I remember that. I don’t know if there are professional water skiers, but he was certainly highly regarded in the sport. Sometimes he’d show up in his pest control van pulling his ski boat, as though he was going straight from the day’s final job to the nearest lake.

What I recall most about Dave, though, is his response when I once asked him about his worst day as an exterminator — because I’ve always asked these people about their nightmarish gigs. He was at our house because we’d been noticing a few more cockroaches than usual and we wanted to stay ahead of the situation.

Answering my question, Dave described being called to a convenience store that had become overrun with cockroaches. “What people don’t realize,” Dave said, “is that, for every cockroach you see in your house, there are dozens you don’t see.”

He then went on to explain that, at the convenience store, Dave realized he’d have to remove sections of sheetrock behind an industrial sink unit. He was able to peel back a huge swath of the wall in one motion — and beheld an entire seething tsunami of Vienna sausage-sized waterbugs. He said he originally mistook what he was seeing for melting tar.

“How … how many?” I whispered, breathless with horror.

“Thousands,” Dave said. “I wanted to scream.”

Dave — a professional rodent assassin — WANTED TO SCREAM!

That night, Eileen and I packed and hit the road to Connecticut, a place where one might every now and then have to deal with a spider or centipede. Fuck cockroaches.

But you can never truly win or find happiness. One thing we weren’t anticipating: here in Connecticut, we’ve moved to Ground Zero for TICKS.

And, so, yes, while he was still here this morning, I asked The Bug Reaper about this year’s tick forecast. Were we likely to see many?

“Thousands,” he said.

I wanted to scream.

Rather than conclude with a picture of ticks, it’s time to announce that my latest novel, White Ghost Blues, will be published June 12 by JournalStone Books, the same kind folks who published Gris-Gris Gumbo. It’s what might happen if Anne Rice had written The Fault in Our Stars while listening to scratchy old Robert Johnson records.

More details to follow, but there will be a blast-off signing event at 6 p.m. June 12 in Mystic’s Bank Square Books. The great and kind Luanne Rice will moderate a discussion, and spiders and centipedes will be served along with snackage and adult-y beverages.

Also, you’re currently a free subscriber — and we thank you! But many of y’all have pledged monthly or even yearly amounts that remain inactivated until we can offer some fun and worthy bonus features for your eyes only. We’ve been working on some of those, including a video series called The 1,001 Rock T-Shirts of Rick Koster as well as a serialized novel and bits of short fiction. Stay tuned!

I have a werewolf in my nose.

Or so it seems to me. The problem is, my nasal lycanthrope requires no regular lunar cycle to activate its hirsute powers.

Its bristly hairs just randomly sprout — and are doing so in an arithmetically increasing ratio. And some of the hairs are old-person white!

Of course, all people have nose hair. Its purpose is to serve as a natural air-filtration system, blocking out all sorts of allergens, pollen, dust (and various powdered amphetamines and/or opioids) so none of these things reach your lungs, which are otherwise occupied with a task known as “breathing.”

Like most adults, I’ve been conscientious about regularly trimming my nose hairs and, for years, a weekly “harvest” seemed to be a reliable schedule of control. I tried battery powered clippers but, for me, too often the blades, which operate like a high-speed farm thresher, occasionally seized an isolated hair — like two blades fighting over the same hair — and resulted in an unexpected and painful YOINK! effect. I got to where I was spooked and constantly anticipating the next YOINK!

Instead, I long ago decided to use nose hair scissors, the designs of which have evolved over the years to include blades that curve away from the skin and, also, have little rounded bulbs at the end of the blades to you can’t jab the inside of your nose with sharp points.

All was fine until …

I tottered into old age and a werewolf moved into my nose.

More hairs than ever before! Sprouting like Dandelions of Snot! Faster than my increasingly arthritic hands can trim!

Each day, before leaving the house, I peer, frightened, into one of those concave magnifying vanity mirrors, certain that a few hairs will be creeping out of my nose. With increasing frequency, that’s the case and it’s just the goddamned worst. They look like spider legs.

Plus, the Nose Hair Boundary is expanding. It used to be, the hairs sorta stayed inside the nostrils. Now, one might sprout from the septum between the nostrils or on the bits of fleshy cartilage that line the perimeter of the nostrils. These territories were, I’d foolishly believed, a demilitarized zone of whisker-free safety.

And no matter how hard I try to maintain a disciplined inspection and removal schedule, every once in a while a hair sneaks by. It might be hours or even days before I find it.

Then I wonder how many people have, in casual interaction with me, spied it and thought, “Poor fellow. He’s reached that level of decrepitude where he can no longer manage his nose hairs. Or maybe he just doesn’t care anymore.”

Many years ago, I interviewed a famous older person with a laudable career in the creative arts. She was lovely and delightful: wise, kind, eloquent, solicitous of me and hilariously self-deprecating.

Yet … she had a single, rebellious nose hair emerging from the top of her right nostril. It curved upward like a root tendril seeking the nourishing warmth of the sun.

The interview went very well, but throughout I was never not aware of that hair. I wanted to help — to reach out and nimbly pluck it away in the lightning quick and painless fashion that I suspect one of those Ricky Jay/Shin Lim card wizards might do. She’d never see my sleight of hand maneuver and only experience a millisecond of discomfort she might believe she’d imagined…

As much as I hated myself for it, I felt embarrassed for this excellent person — all because of a sneaky, traitorous nose hair.

Well, now, that’s ME — just without the talent/intellect part. What I am is a fractious wreck, waking each morning in anticipation of a nose-hair IED.

It’s hard enough to age with dignity. And now this.

Snip, snip, snip.

I’ll try to make the best of it. I’ve given my nose a name. Lon Chaney.

Maybe I can at least train it to howl.

Recently, it occurred to me that the title of my weekly exercise in Substackishness — I WRITE GOOD — could refer to penmanship rather than a pleasing narrative style. Y’know: riverine cursive or an architect’s blueprint-style printing.

Here’s what happened.

I meet with three similarly aged male friends for lunch every few months in the same casual family restaurant, the sort of place you can get breakfast any time and daily specials are hand-inscribed on a hanging whiteboard.

The only rule we observe is that there are no discussions of politics or our medical problems. As such, for 90 minutes, we largely sit in silence save the for the scratch of cutlery as we negotiate our meals or answer the motherly waitress as she occasionally drifts by and asks, “More coffee or Diet Coke, suge?” or “Anybody want pie or bread pudding?”

I realize I’ve sketched out a scenario you’d expect to see in a television commercial for a “retirement community,” and it’s true most of the business-card display ads that festoon the paper placemats are for direct-to-the-public coffins or discount crematoriums. But there are always a few younger folks eating there, too. It is good food and reasonably priced, and there’s a nearby high school providing roving bands of hungry pupils.

(Just curious: does anyone in the Education Industry still refer to students as “pupils”?)

At our most recent gathering, we were squinting across the dining room at the Daily Specials whiteboard, which was cheerfully hand-printed in various festive colors as though advertising Mardi Gras rather than “Chopped Steak w/ two sides ($17.95).” One of us remarked, with the awe and appreciation of a fellow beholding Pieter Bruegel’s Hunters in the Snow, that whichever staff member had legibly lettered the menu had conveyed a spirit of happy certainty that we would partake in a joyous repast!

This was instantly followed by a discussion exploring the reality that any restaurant or bar still utilizing daily whiteboard or chalkboard specials needs someone on staff with superb and creative penmanship.

Was this The Menu Artiste’s only job at the restaurant? Or did The Menu Artiste also bus tables, or slice apples for pie filling, or wash dishes or greet customers when they walked in the door?

“How many in your party today? Just let me wipe the ink stains off my fingers before I hand you your prefabricated menus. And the daily specials —” sly chuckle “— are on that white board suspended from the ceiling under artisanal track lighting. Note the visionary collision of colors in empathetic union with the tantalizing delicacies described thereupon.”

Was there a drafting table in the back storage area, next to wire rack-shelving holding bags of onions and huge industrial-sized cans of tomato paste? Was there indeed a Gauguin-worthy array of tropically colored dry-erase Sharpies with which to craft the Daily Specials “canvas”?

Has there ever been a gallery or museum show devoted to the works of Menu Scrawlers? And if not, why not? Certainly, from all the daily specials boards in all the restaurants in the world, there must be a few Banksys, Basquiats or Harings, right?

Eventually, we paid our tabs — separate checks, of course, and plenty of “exact change” calculating whilst digging in our respective coin purses — and doddered off into the early afternoon sunshine. As I approached my car, I saw a young guy with a backpack and the requisite ear buds headed into the restaurant. He was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the name of a black metal band. It was impossible to tell which band, though.

Y’see, by design, black metal and death metal bands and other assorted purveyors of sundry devil music styles all have Gothic-based logos that are so ornately constructed and, well, demon-y, that they’re almost impossible to read. It adds to the mystery, I suppose.

For example, here’s the logo of Mayhem, acknowledged by most to be the originators of Norwegian black metal.

Given that my friends and I had just been speculating on the bubbly quality of the restaurant’s hand-crafted daily specials board, I suddenly had a thought. What if the young man wearing the devil band shirt wasn’t going inside to eat but, rather, because he was about to apply for a job doing the restaurant’s specials board lettering?!

What if the current Special Boards Artiste was leaving to study at Rhode Island School of Design or start a business doing wedding invitation calligraphy? Maybe creating counterfeit twenty-dollar bills?

And now this young dark metal enthusiast, eager to make a few bucks with a part-time job before graduation from high school, was hoping to become the new whiteboard menu scrawler!

And what if he gets the gig?!

In my scenario, the next time our Codger Group convened at the restaurant, we’d be in line just behind a happy family eager for breakfast.

“I hope they have chocolate chip pancakes,” says one kiddo. “Or I can make up an omelet!”

“And I want biscuits and gravy!” cries another.

They’re in luck! On the specials board:

Oops! The family ends up with two children in therapy and a third who only mewls and stares menacingly at the moon.

Meanwhile, I tried the biscuits and gravy. Pretty damned good.

Oh — and how’s this for my new logo?