Adam Gnade

ADAM GNADE “PROVIDENCE” FROM FARMHOUSES TO TOUR VANS (RARE TRACKS COLLECTION, PUNCH DRUNK PRESS.) This one is about what happens after the end of the world. I wrote it sitting in a motel pool in Texas, after listening to Peter and the Wolf’s great “The Fall” nine times a day for a few months on tour. It comes from the rare tracks CD my label put out a while back. The CD has new cover art. Here’s what it looks like.

It was a bare mattress on the floor. The mattress was light blue like all mattresses are and it looked brand-new and the springs bounced you when you shifted your weight. For a while we sat and talked and then we wrote a song together that started off sarcastic and angry but ended up sad and earnest. I played the singing saw, a musical saw. The sound it made was like whale song—high and deep at the same time, warbling, mournful—and you sat cross-legged facing me and played an orange acoustic guitar with nylon strings.

Eva, you sang in Russian. Your voice was low and soft and husky and you said the lyrics were about a man from your village whose wife was killed by wolves on the shore of the mill-pond and how in the night when he gets up for a drink of water he can hear her boots crunching through the snow; how she’s walking endlessly through the woods looking for him but she can’t see him because he’s alive and he can’t see her because she’s dead. She can only hear the sound of his bare feet on the linoleum (and only at night) and he can only hear her boots in the snow (and only at night). That’s all they have left and, as time passes, the nights when they can hear each other are becoming less and less frequent and they know that soon those nights will cease forever and they will have truly lost each other.

The chorus of the song is them singing back and forth. Where are you? I can hear you but I can’t see you. Why aren’t you here with me?

In the final verse it’s revealed that the man is dead too, that he hung himself in the kitchen after she drowned, and that their souls have been hunting each other for nearly seven years. The last line tells how at the end of those seven years they will both be gone—passed on to the next world, and separately. The wife to heaven because she lead a good life. The husband to hell because he took his.

(Excerpt from The Heat and The Hot Earth by Adam Gnade)

Well, I did it. The whole hand-written section of the manuscript is typed in. It’s big, and looking at it all I can tell the hardest work is ahead of me. By June 5th I want to have a printed manuscript I can let people like Bart and Rich and Dukes and Mears read and then I’m going to see about getting it published. Between now and then there’s a lot of rewriting ahead, a lot of adding and a lot of cutting. I’m covering more than two decades of story with this one and all the characters I’ve written before will be connected and filled in. It’s going to take WORK but I think I’m ready for it. Four months to the day …. I think I can do this.

-Adam

The downside to handwriting your stuff is at some point you need to type it in if you want it to become a book. That was today. Nine and a half hours straight typing from my notebooks. 

The upside is you can drink wine while typing because, unlike drunk writing, which doesn’t work, red wine plus typing equals a-ok.

Back to it. 

Oh, and the wine is Spanish—as always—Marques de Caceres, a good cheap crianza Rioja.

Saturday night on the bookwork. I’m okay with that.

The end is in sight, or like Richard Hell said, “Fuck rock ‘n’ roll, I’d rather read a book.

-Adam Gnade

Take a new way home from work. You can afford to get lost for a while; your apartment’s empty, no one’s waiting there for you. Leave the freeway that wraps around the malls and head up into the hills by the old Spanish mission, the jungle of trees beside the road, the palms and eucalyptus and walls of ferns. Catch a glimpse of the sea so faded by sunlight it’s nearly aluminum. Then trees again. The winding road. Sun splashing through your windshield. And the bay below you, the shore in coves like puzzle pieces. Then the mission, the white walls and arches and bell shapes. Your head plays back a song they taught you when your elementary school class visited the mission for Old Town Week. Singing and walking with your backpack on in the group lead by a college volunteer, walking across the grass lawns below the mission, singing, Long ago we baked adobe bricks! Sunshine drying did the trick! Pounded apples! Grinded corn! Partied on fiesta’s morn! (And on the bus ride back to Pacific Beach your friends turned it into sucked adobe dicks and farted on fiesta’s morn.)

Drive down the hill and across town and around the golf course until all the houses are turquoise and pink in Mexican neighborhoods. Iron wrought gates and fences around them choked with honeysuckle vine. Lawns of yellow-green crabgrass. Churches. The tamale cart. A black family outside a car lot with ropes of colorful flags flapping in the breeze. Chicken shack diners. The seafood restaurant with a pirate’s name.

You think about the rowboat but you push it away.

Drive past the preschool with its Spanish tile fountain, past junkyards and warehouses, around closed down factories at the harbor and over the railroad tracks.

The rowboat.

No.

Tomorrow you work. The next day is yours. Sunday is yours too and then you work five more.

Finally lost.

Where the hell’s Juarez Street?

Did you come down Limon Street to get here?

Nacogdoches Avenue?

The rowboat.

You and Nicole found the rowboat down at the foot of Santa Clara. It was on the bayshore at low ride with two oars, a coil of gray rope, and a jug of water inside. There was a wallet but the wallet was empty, a salt-stained fold of black snakeskin, worn down to the leather in the middle. You poured the water out into the water and stuck the wallet in your pocket and then you tied the rope to the cleat on the nose of the rowboat and cuffed up your jeans. You and Nicole walking the rowboat through the shallows, leading it back to the foot of your street. You loved the rowboat. It was yours. I have a boat, you told yourself.

This was near the end.

You traced the course of events after she left.

It was the week she and David Horowitz first started … the week they first started.

You decided it would be romantic to take the rowboat onto the water.

You would row in the back and Nicole would sit in the front and do her homework.

You’d get to a good spot out past the noise of the bayshore and tie up to a buoy and rest. You could bring some sodas, make some sandwiches.

So you left the rowboat on the sand and walked back to your aunt and uncle’s and she got her backpack and you changed into swim trunks and a t-shirt. You made a peanut butter and banana sandwich for her and a tomato sandwich for you. You sliced up an orange and put it in a Ziplock bag. From the fridge, two sodas, a Dr. Pepper for you, a Mt. Dew for Nicole.

At first it was easy. You sat in the back and she sat in the front, in the bow. The sun sparkling on the water in patches so bright you couldn’t see. The jellyfish below the boat (you leaning over the side, gripping the rail and staring at them billowing through the water, rising and falling. Nicole lighting a cigarette and ashing into the water.) It was easy and it was perfect. The sounds of gulls and the smell of the bay; the oars through the water and the wake from boats hitting the bow with a hollow clunk. But then the wind came up and you couldn’t row straight. The oars would turn in your hands and come out of the water. Instead of forward you were pushed backward and to the side. You tried to row to the shore but the boat went in circles. And then she was yelling. Calling you so many names. Pulling out all the old fights. The time you got drunk at David Baylor’s on New Year’s and she had to watch over you while you puked in your sleep. The time you forgot to pick her up from work or the time you didn’t call when you went away for Christmas. And then you were useless. You couldn’t row and you couldn’t argue and you weren’t a man. And then you were in the front, looking down at the water and she was rowing to shore. She was angry and when she was angry she was sure of herself. She rowed straight to the shore and you left the rowboat there.

Drive.

Keep driving.

(Excerpt from the out-of-print novella California by Adam Gnade, published in late 2011 by Double Suns.)

For those of you who asked, here’s a video of one of my songs.

1 Beautiful day on the farm. Seventy degrees in the middle of a Midwest winter? Insane.

2 Off to buy wine in a few hours. Somethin’ like: You write books, books turn into money, money turns into wine. It’s almost biblical.

3 Here’s what life looks like right now on the farm…

This was pretty exciting for me. ALARM Press interviewed me this week about bookwriting, independent publishing, and novellas. Here’s the story: http://alarmpress.com/41823/blog/columns/zine-scene-adam-gnades-hey-hey-lonesome-and-the-heat-and-the-hot-earth/

Last night I sat on the floor of the Microcosm Publishing offices in the next town from me and blasted the Sisterland cassette and printed up some split zines with writing by me and Bart Schaneman. It’s called They Will Stand on You and Spit and I’m pretty happy with it. If you want one, go here to order. They’re free but you have to pay a bit to cover postage and the amount paypal takes out. Oh, and feel free to get one, copy it yourself, and spread them around the world. I’m okay with that.

-Adam

“It was a long time ago.” I kneel on the carpet next to Maggie and take the photo and stare at Allysia—15 years old, pale skin and bare shoulders, flat chested, her green formal dress, cranberry-hair parted down the middle and pinned to the sides with yellow plastic barrettes. I try to remember her—sitting on the boardwalk at night under the street light pretending I was drunk so I could get away with trying to kiss her. And her looking up at me and how beautiful her eyes were. And kissing her and it was our first kiss, my first-ever kiss (not hers), the thing I’d waited for for so long. I see her terrible baggy jeans, her flannel shirts with the cuffs over her hands, her retarded brother Maury with his gentle, cow-eyed stare. “Sistuh!” he would say. “Sistuh, bring me hugs!” Sweet kind little Maury. Gone four years now. Four years under the ground in the Sherman cemetery. Their mom a year later. Breast cancer. It all happened so fast.

I remember the smell of her room. The horrible sour cheese and dog poop smell of her sneakers the day I picked her up from school in the rain. The ripe tomato smell of sweat. The salt-chlorine smell of her on my fingers the first time I put my hand down her pants.

I hear Allysia’s mother cooking dinner in their kitchen, greasy vegetable soup, a steaming clattering pot, her little sister sitting at the kitchen table doing homework, small and longhaired, singing along with a car advertisement on the TV—Mossy Nissan, Mossy Nissan, Mossy Nissan moves youuuu.

I see Allysia sitting on the edge of her tiny bed, fully dressed again, tying the laces of her shoes after we’d fooled around for hours, hours of kissing and at the end just down to her panties and socks and nothing else, her bra off finally after weeks of dreaming of it and then the sadness and a shock to see her back in clothes and knowing I had to leave. The singer on the radio singing, Oh my life it’s changin’ every day, every possible way. I see her clunky pink phone and answering machine next to the bed covered in cartoon cat stickers and I see her drawings of angels on the walls, her school books in a colorful stack by the door—some of them with covers made from brown grocery bags. One of them with my name and hers in Crayola marker—curled together with green marker ivy.

I see her and I feel nothing. I was so in love but she’s a ghost to me now. Someone I saw on TV and knew as a character. A face in the newspaper.

“I think she goes to art school in New Hampshire. Or Vermont,” I say. “Yeah, Vermont. Vermont. I barely remember her.”

“Oh, I don’t believe that,” Maggie says playfully. “She’s cute. She looks like a little field mouse. You guys look happy.”

“We were. I mean, for a while we were. You know how it is.”

(Excerpt from the out-of-print novella California by Adam Gnade, published in late 2011 by Double Suns.)

Ben Frank is just in from Chicago by way of South Carolina by way of Florida. He wears horn-rimmed glasses and an old dress suit with a paperback shoved in the side pocket. His leather dress shoes are giant, like clown shoes. One has laces, untied. One is wrapped with duct tape. Across the duct tape is the word PIZZA written in black marker. Ben Frank pulls his knees up under his chin, wraps his arms around his legs, and tells me how he spent the spring. Greyhound buses, crosscountry. San Diego to Louisville. Shoplifting his dinner in Salt Lake City, paranoid about Mormons. Chased by cops in Denver. Sending postcards to girls, postcards with pictures of the Mississippi River or Oklahoma oil fields or Kansas prairie. He talks about getting jumped by a bunch of drunk guys who thought he was gay. He tells me about superhuman kids across the country who shoplift all day and dig for food in the dumpster and drink wine by the bucket and give themselves tattoos with each others’ names. He tells me about the photocopied magazines they make, stories of their triumphs, their battles with society, their great American tragedies. It’s the old west all over again he says. The new old west. The frontier now that the frontier is a stripmall.

(Excerpt from the out-of-print novella California by Adam Gnade, published in late 2011 by Double Suns.)

Got a thousand new tumblr followers in the last couple days which is pretty cool. I don’t really know how tumblr works but I wanted to say hello and tell you what this page is all about. Adamgnade.com is where I post about my books and records project. Short version, I write a series of books and records that share characters and continue each others’ plot-lines. It’s not necessarily sequential but it’s definitely a connected universe. (For more about what I do, here’s what wikipedia says about it.) If you want to check out my records and books here’s the online store. Thanks for stopping by, for whatever reason you did. Oh, and if you ever want to get in touch you can email me at adamgnade@gmail.com

Love,

Adam Gnade

Last night the five of us went to town and I bought Finnegan’s Wake at the bookstore. (Had a choice between Neruda’s love poems, Lost Souls, and that. Thickness won out. When you’re writing a book as thick as a telephone directory it’s good to stay in the same realm.) Reading plan looks like: finish Karenina, get through the unget-through-able Joyce, then the field is open. Proust? Infinite Jest? Death in the Afternoon? Cervantes? I’d like to reread 2666 and take my time this round and let all the oil and blood seep in. Last time I read it was on a train across the country. Might be nice to hole up in bed with it and wait out the cold days. We’ll see.

Oh, and speaking of books, LG overheard the following conversation in the bookstore.

Little boy: Mom, buy me a book. I want a book!

Mom: I got you a book yesterday. Don’t you remember?

Boy: You didn’t buy me a book. I want a book!

Mom: Remember? I downloaded it to my Kindle.

Boy: That’s not a book!

Fuck yeah, kid, good work. (Just because people are getting stupider doesn’t mean you have to. Maybe that kid’ll be buying his own telephone book novels in 10 years. I’ve got hope.)

Today I plan to work on Youth is a Wolf Dark and Golden until it’s time for the evening farm work. Since Jan 5 I’ve written 100 pages (of that, maybe 50 usable.) Plan is to knock out the next half by Feb 5 and then add to the bones until June 5. I know that’s a little OCD but I like structure in the midst of formlessness. Number games keep me rolling and deadlines put on the heat when the only heat is what you bring with you.

Here’s to another day  at it…

After a good day on the road I started the final section of the new novel, Youth is a Wolf Dark and Golden. It’s moving fast. Did 20 pages and hope to do another 20 tomorrow. Initial estimate was 600 pages (begun in 2008, the day the first book came out, done in a year and change.) Now it looks like I’ll have a final draft at 800 by June. Wish me luck. This one’s going to be a BRICK. Four years of work…

Dear friends,

This is important: Tomorrow is international “Adventure Day,” a holiday started by one Jessie Duke (below), who co-owns Microcosm Publishing and runs the company that puts out my books and records. The idea’s simple: Get out there and do something that makes you feel alive. Get dangerous. Live out your fantasy. See something beautiful. Go somewhere new. Or, y’know, stay at home and drink yourself stupid and watch TV and look at videos on the internet and waste your life. YOUR CHOICE, but choose well. (On your death bed you will regret the adventures you missed out on.) So, tomorrow, January 5th, 2012, fucking ADVENTURE DAY. Do it.

-Adam Gnade