From Baltimore Saints & Haints: "John of The Bulletproof Donut Shop"

As rough as Baltimore can still be - my house was just robbed in broad daylight and the burglars came back the next day to steal our car - it's still a peaceful paradise compared to the '80s and early '90s.

Here is a little tale for Thanksgiving of those bygone days, "John of the Bulletproof Donut Shop", taken from Baltimore Saints & Haints: A Secret History of the Underground, 1984 through 2014, Found in The Desk Drawer of a Dust Mote Hope everyone has a great, peaceful Thanksgiving with family and friends. Or protesting the Ferguson ruling.

John of The Bulletproof Donut Shop

John of the Bulletproof Donut Shop tattooed the word “DEATH” on his left forearm in huge block letters. He made industrial sized pasta dinners that would feed our entire circle of friends and drank rare Scotch that had titles like “Artair’s Bog” and “Adamina’s Mound” and tasted like Big Al’s feet.

When John entered the darkness it was thicker than in the chamber of Heathcliff’s wife. He was found out on a high ledge in a shared warehouse space by a friend and roommate. In the ‘80s and ‘90s in Baltimore many people were out on the ledge when not dodging random violence or medicating themselves with booze and drugs to the point of near death for fear of random violence.

John also had a devilish grin and he would emphasize a joke or a startling fact by having you stare into his eyes. Normally that would be annoying, but with him you’d look into his eyes and you would indeed see it.

He wrote a story called “The Bulletproof Donut Shop” that I published in the second issue of my magazine, The Shattered Wig Review. It was about when he first came to Baltimore and was looking for the familiar solace of a warm coffee and a sweet donut, but found only buzzing doors and blank-faced counter people hidden behind impenetrable voice-muffling shields.

It was a quiet, effective portrayal of how low modern life can get and it caused that issue of my magazine to be the bestseller of its tiny history. I was traveling cross country when it was reviewed in the Herculean zine roundup Factsheet 5 and when I called the bookstore I worked at a co-worker gave me startled reports at the number of orders coming in. Back then orders meant checks or hidden cash in addressed envelopes, sometimes with handwritten messages.

John left Baltimore in the haze of the early ‘90s and even his closest friends stopped hearing from him. In the early Oughts he called an old housemate sounding frantic and said “that something big was about to happen”.

Something big did happen. Then many more. Most of them almost too sad for the human heart to bear.

Mattress In an Alley, Raft Upon The Sea Coming Soon

I am extremely proud to announce that noble and rugged Fell Swoop Press in New Orleans, run by poet Joel Dailey, is putting out a new chapbook of mine - Mattress In an Alley, Raft Upon The Sea -  very shortly unless Joel comes to his senses.

Here is an interview with poet and publisher Dailey in Harriet magazine:



Fell Swoop! An Interview with Joel Dailey, Destroyer of American Literature : Harriet Staff : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation


Mattress In an Alley, Raft Upon The Sea will be a 20 page chap chock full of new soaring absurdo-miserablism.

Before Work

With each question, the doctor's voice
drops to a wispier whisper.
Soon you'll be curled together motionless
on that perfectly stiff paper covered recliner,
forgotten to all but the clicking tick hands of clocks.
There are already two crisp gowns in the room.
The little blood pressure station wheeled in perky
 is like R2-D2 in its robot pal appearance - bright\
 new light industrial rubber and chrome and
padding and gauges.  A thermometer attached
 that only needed six or seven
seconds of your time to let you know
 your factory was not overheating.
With your finger in that pressure
clasp you are the Toscanini of pointers
or perhaps a starter superhero.
 The vibe at the desk is mellow, man.
This is not where the shit goes down, this is
where we find out if you can take the shit
coming down.  You're ready.  Promise.

Shattered Wig Review 28 Sneak Preview #1

For those not yet clued in: Blaster Al Ackerman is a legendary word conjurer, mail artist, neoist, recluse, imbiber and former Texan. He also is one of the best read people I know and he has an encyclopedic memory of books and their details despite his heroic, shamanistic consumption of various spirits throughout his adventurous life.

He is the author of The Blaster Al Ackerman Omnibus, I Taught My Dog to Shoot a Gun, Corn & Smoke (on Shattered Wig) and many others. Ever since he moved to Baltimore in the early '90s he's been the backbone of Shattered Wig Night and the Shattered Wig Review. So I figured it would be appropriate to start stirring up some interest in the upcoming new issue of Shattered Wig with a new short short by Dr. Ackerman.

Who Can Know It?

A good many years ago I found myself stopping by Bert's Transport Cafe, in the seedy Islington section of London, to see my brother Padua, who was dying. Padua died that very night out behind Bert's cistern. I was on my hands and knees watching closely. Padua died with a look of horror on his face--and why not? Who wouldn't take it hard when the time came to see the cruel gray flames licking ever nearer and feel the hell-breath of eternity and smell something tiny and rotten fixing to mumble in yr ear for ever and ever. I couldn't blame Padua for taking it hard.

To make matters worse, while my brother was breathing his last so was his good pal Chief Constable Wilson, whose body lay not ten feet away, twisted grotesquely on the ground beside the cistern. The Chief-Constable's death was the result of a virulent strain of gleet--and so was my brother's. Even stranger was the fact that both men looked as though they had been struck down by some unknown power. Their eyes, now closed forever, had had in life only one story to tell, the tale of two little boys shooting dung-tipped arrows through the wash hanging on the Pelunsky's line next door. They had been bad boys, and as adults they were both little better than animals. Worse than animals, a lot of people said, remembering episodes of white slavery, dope-running, dognapping, common buggery and mopery with intent to loiter. Fair amount of reckless driving too.

Needless to say, when my sister Susan told me all this, I couldn't stop crying. I loved my brother. I loved Chief-Constable Wilson too. For that matter, I loved Woody Alonzo, the so-called "Human Fly of Islington". I also loved the "Maida Vale Sports Club Boys", that large gang of sordid little gangsters trained by Woody Alonzo to scale walls and break into apartments. When I heard that Woody and the Maidas had all perished that same night under the steps of the New Hope Baptist Church, less than three blocks from where my brother and Chief-Constable Wilson lay, and that the cause of death had reportedly come from over-sporting on Buzz Bomb Fluid, a popular prison opiate made from fermented potato peels, melted soap, velcro, and raisins...well, when I heard about this tragedy I cried even harder.

It was around this time that Tosser Stitt the cut-rate Islington mortician showed up. I was still out back on my hands and knees and when Tosser saw me he shook his head and spoke in his familiar froggy whisper, "Looks to me like there might be more to this mass burial party tonight than meets the eye, eh, Clamhead?"

I could only blow my nose and nod.

No question about it--something was definitely in the air that night.

A little later a journalist friend phoned Bert's with the news that President Kennedy had been shot.

--Blaster Al Ackerman