Drink For The Thirst To Come Part 31

Perverse as I am, though, I sign up. Being with the beer and vodka helped. I sit. Some read. My name is called. I go to the lectern. The a.s.sembly calls out, "On your mark! Get set!! READ LIKE A MOTHERf.u.c.kER!!!" Tradition.

It is not that I motormouth the tale, I keep it brisk. I begin quickly because near the end I know there's a moment when I need a long beat of dead air to give what follows some weight. I establish a pace quick enough to make even a short pause seem like a deathwatch. Later beats lend themselves to breathless rushing and there, indeed, I read like a motherf.u.c.ker.

I speak the tale's final word, "G.o.dd.a.m.n..." as the timekeeper puts his hand on my shoulder. I am in, out and under five by less than a second.

Others read. The judges retire. We drink and cuss. They return.

I do not take third place, which I halfway hoped for. There had been some really good writer/readers. I do not take second. I'm done, I think. I do take first. The world is turvy, topsy-wise. We've fallen into another version of the Big All.

The prize? Bragging rights, basically. But I am pleased and honored so here I am bragging. I read like a motherf.u.c.ker.

Since then, the story has been podcast in Great Britain by the StarShipSofa. It won the StarShip's "Best Short Fiction" award for 2009 and was published in StarShipSofa Stories, Volume 2, in 2010. Now it's here. I hope you enjoyed it.

JERSEY, 1950-SOMETHING: SO MANY TINY MOUTHS.

My first-hand knowledge about the Jersey Pine Barrens is 40 years out of date. Let me go back even further, to Pennsylvania, 1950-something. Summers, Dad, Mom, cousins and I would hop into the old man's green-over-cream '53 Bel Air hardtop and point the grille toward pre-Trump Atlantic City. We'd make the Delaware crossing into Jersey on the Chester-Bridgeport Ferry and two hours later a half-dozen layers of winter skin would have blistered to a sweaty peel and Steel Pier salt-water taffy would have yanked that year's fillings out of our heads.

Before we became beach-blanket brisket though, we had to cross Jersey. I spent those 60-plus non-air conditioned miles in the Chevy's back seat meditating on undertow or skewering a bare foot on the tail of summer's first horseshoe crab. Being thus occupied it wasn't until years later I noticed that most of trans-Jersey was trees.

Later still, I learned those 60-some-odd miles, the whole of central Jersey in fact, was a geopolitical ent.i.ty called the Pine Barrens. As explained by my elder and savvier cousin Fred, the Barrens was dark and scary woods inhabited by inbred six-fingered folk who lived in caves, prayed to odd and grubby G.o.ds, made their own gas from pig s.h.i.t, and ate lost travelers. They called themselves "Pineys."

Much later, I made a now-long-gone doc.u.mentary film about the region called ...Where the Sun Never Shines. In making it, I found Pineys, sadly, to be garden-variety Americans. Your personal demons can inform whatever image that concept conjures. The Pineys I met were independent-minded and didn't care to be fussed-over about where they live or what they do. They do a lot for themselves, things most of us gave up doing a generation or more ago (That, about pig s.h.i.t and gas? It's true). Their world is deep forest and truck-wide sand trails; it is small streams and cedar swamps, abandoned bogs and the smell of decay and sphagnum moss. The tales they tell outsiders are curious and spooky. Of course.

Navigating the Barrens was tricky. Now we'd use our iPhones. Then we felt our way among the trees by dashboard compa.s.s, odometer and Geodetic Survey maps. Place names still dot those maps: Ong's Hat, Batsto, Hog Wallow. All that lived in those invisible towns was stillness, a sense of the once-was and never-will-be hung in those clearings and shallow hollows that once were lived-in places. An outsider who arrived at one of those named abandonments, who stood at a five-trail wideness in the forest and turned his eyes four-ways into that old, old darkness around, most likely felt the lurk of the strange behind and ahead. I'm sure of it.

Despite squatting at the concrete heart of the Megalopolis, there are economic, political, and social reasons why the Barrens remains green, relatively human-free, and unimproved. These reasons are not part of this tale's fetchings.

Point is, I liked the area. I admired the people and, despite the arrogance of youth, I learned a little about them.

Another thing I learned: it's a hard place to get right. My film never caught it. Later, I set a story, Veterans, in the Barrens. Later still, having sold two screenplays, I adapted Veterans for film. Veterans, the Movie, remains unproduced. Worse, in Dreamland terms, it remains unsold.

One supremely good writer I know set a much admired story in the Pines. He missed it. One of the best episodes of The Sopranos was set there. The show's city-bred wiseguys were money-on as strangers in a strange land, but that episode, The Barrens, shot in a generic woodland with no spirit of the Pines, lost the chill of the place.

When I was asked to submit to an anthology of tales on a theme of fang and talon, the Pines entered my head. I guess I wanted another shot at getting it right.

Okay, thought I, the salient features of the Barrens are trees and sand. Trees with claws? A cliche. Sand with teeth? Well...

The editors pa.s.sed on So Many Tiny Mouths. They were right to do so. That version focused on the tourists from Philly. I guess I was still sitting in the back seat of Dad's Chevy. I read the story in a few public venues. A friend asked to buy more or less this version for an online prozine he was publishing, so there it was. Most recently, Great Britain's StarShipSofa.com podcast a recording I made of the story.

So here it is, re-thought, in ink, on public paper for the first time. I hope I got the Pines right. I wouldn't bet on it, though. As I said, it was 40 years ago and the Barrens is an elusive place.

By the way, Earl Sooey, the coot through whose eye we watch the world end: He's fiction, coincidence. Really.

LIFE ON THE RIVER: JEREMY TAKES HIS TEXT FROM THE LIVES OF THE SPIDERS.

My writer's group, Chicago's Twilight Tales, used to throw an annual Mardi Gras party at the Red Lion Pub. One year the chairman of the group asked some of the regulars to read something set in New Orleans. Having been asked, I wrote this tale.

Jeremy suggested himself to me because vampires and "walk-ins" seem to be a part of the atmosphere of New Orleans. Understand, I've never been there. Always wanted to go but the several times I've planned trips, the plans became undone, the most recent undoing courtesy of Hurricane Katrina.

I do know something about river travel, though.

One dark and drunken night after my return from the Air Force, a buddy and I decided that we had never had an adventure. Exciting things, yes, had happened to us, but nothing ever of our own volition. We decided it would be just swell to go down the Mississippi River on a raft. Okay, a small boat, no cabin, nothing fancy. We'd start at the Golden Triangle in Pittsburgh where the Ohio begins. We'd ride the Ohio for its full 981 miles, pick up the Mississippi at Cairo, Illinois, then slide down to the Big Easy. Simple.

We bought a 14-foot sky blue jon boat, a shallow flat bottomed thing with blunt prow and stern. When fully loaded with outboard motor, fuel, camping supplies, clothing, food, and us, about three inches of freeboard remained.

Research begun and concluded the same drunken night the urge took us told us that the Ohio trucked along at a comfortable several miles an hour. We had visions. Huck and Jim would drift through sunny days and starry nights of the soul. Gentle water would lap our gunnels as froggies courted along the sh.o.r.e. Friendly tow-barges would wave to us as they slipped by. Our little putt-putt motor would be used only when a quick hurry was required to take us here or there along the way.

Currents are funny. Their substance is deep. After our put-in below the triangle, we found our expected downstream flow toward the Gulf of Mexico was more of a generalized upstream drift toward Pittsburgh. Even near-swamped, our little flat-bottomed boat reached barely 11 inches below the surface. The consequence was, we skimmed the river, skewing, sliding here and there more at the whim of breeze than current. Heavy rowing or the engine was necessary simply to keep us heading west and south.

The first tow-boat scared the bejeezus out of us. Out of morning mist there came a quarter mile of diesel-pushed steel, bellowing, two barges wide. The blind monster threw an eight foot high bow wave that spread across the river like a green rolling mountain. Imagine the view from a blue aluminum hole a bare three inches above the surface.

Less than five miles from our put-in we went to sh.o.r.e, set up camp, reappraised this volitional adventure.

To say "sh.o.r.e" is to idealize the land along the Ohio west of Pittsburgh. Conjure a slurry of mud and cinders capped with a six-inch mat of oil and other industrial effluvia spread along a sumac-crowded railroad right-of-way. We camped, rethought, regrouped, slept, and to our credit (or disgrace) continued the adventure the next morning. It was a cold night. I didn't mention: this was October, heading into November. We did not dare build a fire the night before for fear of igniting the river or the land or both.

We never got to New Orleans, nor to the Mississippi. We did make Kentucky. We had many adventures and were jailed only once and that in Bellaire, Ohio for attempting to enter a VFW Post while wet. That's a long story. We did not join a drinking companion we met in West Virginia as he headed out to find his girl, who had started dating a biker gang while he was in the Nam. He had a loaded .45 in his belt and dynamite in his truck and invited us along to watch. That also is a long story, which I will someday tell.

The spiders are real. They happened d.a.m.n-near as written.

A TALE FROM THE RED LION: CORDWELL'S BOOK There is so much true and accurate in this story that I almost need not tell you any more. John Cordwell is gone now but he lived and his story as written here is mostly as it was lived. He was among those who made a habit of escaping from the Germans during that Second unpleasantness with the Hun. John was a character in the film The Great Escape. There are doc.u.mentary films about him and the other POWs who made that audacious escape. Escapes, actually. The reality is more remarkable and more improbable than that shown in the theatrical film.

"Cordwell's Book" came about because a bunch of us were drinking in the upstairs room of the Red Lion Pub in Chicago one night. Eventually the talk came around to the idea of doing an anthology of stories centered on the Lion and written by writers who hung out there. "Like us," someone said. "Tales from the Red Lion," someone suggested, "like Spider Robinson's Callahan's Cross-Time Saloon but different, see?"

Seemed like a good idea.

As mentioned, I'd fallen into the place during my first week in Chicago. I was a theater guy from the east and the Lion was a place where theater folk hung. John Cordwell was a bigger-than-us-all presence in the bar and I was shy around him. I liked him and the place and was learning to like that time of my life.

One summer evening, I saw a remarkable production of one of Shakespeare's plays on the roof garden-it was not The Tempest-and met a swath of good people as a result. There was great talent there and then.

That's the core of the story.

I learned of John's wartime experiences from John and, after John's death, heard more from his son, Colin, who is a great barman and who told the stories almost as well as had his father. I kept the facts and mixed them with a bit of implausible froth and fairy tale-telling and published Cordwell's Book in Tales from the Red Lion. I revised it for a second edition of Tales... and I fussed with it for this effort.

Those who know about such things say the Red Lion Pub is one of the most haunted spots in Chicago. I know people who have had experiences. I have not, not preternatural ones anyway.

At this writing, the Lion is a sheer hulk. Unavoidable decay and expensive repair estimates forced Colin to close the building. The notion was to raze it and build a new Red Lion on the spot. Then came the crash.

At this writing, the sh.e.l.l remains. And the memories. The memories, bless them. Bless them all, they're alive.

DYING'S EASY. HORROR'S HARD: THE LAST SCOOT AT SKIDOO'S TAP This is more about me as a writer than about where The Last Scoot... came from. Where the story came from is simple. My wife suggested it.

"Look at this!" A well-known book dangled from her fingertips. "Write a vampire book," said as though asking me for the last time to take out the trash.

Now, I have friends who have written vampire stories and were very happy with their lives.

I said, "Sure," then, perversely, I wrote this.

Here's a life-rule: Nothing will be what you expect. Nothing real, neither will vampire, zombie, man-wolf, or any creature of the night be a thing you'll recognize. They will come from the literal dark, blindside you, and do things you cannot imagine.

I believe that a writer of the strange has a responsibility to that truth and to the creatures that support him.

The vampires of Skidoo's Tap inhabit a grubby part of creation. They drink not blood but life itself. They take not what we hold dear, but that which we are happy to forget. They take pain, the drear of life. In return, they offer paradise, a heaven of non-being.

The trap of course is that pain and tedium are the artists of the beautiful. The dreary slog through life provides the contrast that allows us to see, touch, feel, smell the wonders of it all.

From where did Skidoo's Tap come?

When Tycelia made her suggestion I was working on a novel. Not horror, not exactly fantasy, the story is set in small-town pre-JFK America and deals with a band of kids who set out to grab death by the tail and toss him.

The vampire story began in the same town. My town. Railroads did run through it. There is-was-a Skidoo's taproom there. It wasn't called Skidoo's but it was as described. When I was 12, my genteel gang of non-Ender hooligans did weekly scoots into the joint. We ran screaming in, around the electric eye pole and out the OUT door. Doing so we caught whiffs of beery, smoky, s.e.x-charged conditioned air then hooted all the way to our theater on the far side of our yards. There was a subway viaduct. We also had a gathering place in the cemetery.

That's it.

I started there. I'd gotten about 16 thousand words into the thing before I realized what I was writing. Inefficient way to work, I know, but I do love to hang out in those grubby places of the mind. When I found where I was heading, I went back and fussed. The story went from 16 thousand to just over 9 thousand.

This is one of those stories that I wrote and never tried to sell. Sorry, Tycelia. I know vampire stories can make big money right now but that's dependent on people actually liking the d.a.m.n vamps, finding them cute, s.e.xy!

So there. The stories are yours and you now know, more or less, where they came from.

A final word. I don't plan for the most part. I begin, typically, with a notion and a person, an image, a face. When I have at least a person in my head, I begin writing. Most of the time I've no idea where the path is or through what country we'll travel. For example: I was walking in the neighborhood today. I saw a sign in a store I've pa.s.sed many times. "WANT TO LEARN MORE ABOUT ROBOTS?" I was returning from a visit to my doctor. I wondered, what if a robot stopped in because...

Well, because.

See, my process might be summarized best by the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi: "Respond to every call that excites your spirit."

I hope you've been excited. Now excuse me, I have the call.

The shop was in a dark part of town on a narrow, unclean street...

About the Author.

Award-winning writer and narrator Lawrence Santoro began writing and reading dark tales at age five.

In 2001 his novella "G.o.d Screamed and Screamed, Then I Ate Him" was nominated for a Bram Stoker Award. In 2002, his adaptation and audio production of Gene Wolfe's "The Tree Is My Hat," was also Stoker nominated. In 2003, his Stoker-recommended "Catching" received Honorable Mention in Ellen Datlow's 17th Annual "Year's Best Fantasy and Horror" anthology. In 2004, "So Many Tiny Mouths" was cited in the anthology's 18th edition. In the 20th, his novella "At Angels Sixteen," from the anthology A DARK AND DEADLY VALLEY, was similarly honored. Larry's first novel, "Just North of Nowhere," was published in 2007.

He lives in Chicago and is working on two new novels, "Griffon and the Sky Warriors," and "Mississippi Traveler, or Sam Clemens Tries the Water."

Stop by Larry's blog, At Home in Bluffton, at: http://blufftoninthedriftless.blogspot.com/.

and his audio website, Santoro Reads, at: http://www.santororeads.com.

and you can find him on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/lawrence.santoro.

end.