Adam Gnade

BY ADAM GNADE

It was a cruise ship alright. Tall as a building and wide and white and slow. Jeremy and I sat in the smoking lounge by the big windows drinking lime juice and gin from little glass bottles and celebrating our luck.

“That bartender, she likes me, doesn’t she?” he said.

The north sea passed below us, gray and stormy and silent through the windows.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think she’s one of those girls who’re friendly to everybody and half the people they’re friendly to think they’re flirty when they’re not. I don’t care. Look at us. We’re here. We’re headed to Holland. We made it.”

“It was the gods,” said Jeremy, nodding at me and running a hand through his bushy hair. “We appealed to the gods and now we’re here.” He lit a cigarette and hunched over the small round metal table on his bar stool. Outside and 100 yards below our deck, the water passed by, dark, ruffled. “The gods.”

“It was the Catholic Church.”

“Oh, oh yeah. The Catholics. We’re Catholics now.”

Earlier, huddled against the wind and falling snow, miles away from the Harwich seaport, our train late, it looked as though we were going to miss the ferry ship to Amsterdam. We’d only London three hours before but our money was already gone. I had what was in my pockets, which was not a lot. Jeremy had next to nothing, but he had plans.

“Alright God,” said Jeremy, staring at the sky, his arms extended, palms held to heaven. “If you get us on this fucking boat James and I will be Catholics.”

“You sure?” I said, pulling my parka around me, my breath steaming out in front of my face. “Catholics? Really? Aren’t you… you’re an atheist, right?”

He ignored me. “God, just get us on that fucking boat to Holland and get us out of England. I give up. I’m fucking done. God, just get us on the fucking boat and I’ll be good forever. Get us across the water and get us to Holland and I’ll believe in you. Get us to Holland and get us out of this snow. You know what to do, God. Don’t fuck this up. We’ll be Catholics, God, and we’ll be good Catholics.”

All around us was low, flat, snow-covered English countryside. I stood near the train tracks and turned a circle, my boots squeaking in the snow. Gray over black. Ice over fields. The pine trees disappearing under a layer of white.

“Snow’s getting worse.”

“Don’t tell me that,” said Jeremy. “You know who to talk to.”

“Seriously, Jeremy. Let’s just call the trainlines. Maybe we can… maybe we should try and find someone to give us a ride to the harbor. There’s gotta be a farmhouse around here, right?”

“You know who to talk to.”

“Fuck,” I said, zipping my parka up to my neck. “This is ridiculous.”

“Don’t tell me.”

“This is bullshit.

“C’mon, James.”

Really? Really? Is this how we’re handling this now? Fuckin’ a. We never should’ve left Crouch End.”

“You know what to do.”

“Okay God,” I said begrudgingly, “just get us on that fucking boat.”

Doing some short writing about a summer I spent in Virginia and dug up these photos. Summer 2008. Muggy, lightning bugs at dusk, thunderstorms every day at four. Spent most of the time walking through the woods and swimming at the secret river beach I discovered and writing the first chapters of the book I’m editing now. The story is in this novella but here’s what it looked like… the woods, the tree over the tidal marsh, and the train yard.

Today, January 5th, is the internationally recognized holiday, Adventure Day. Started by one Jessie Duke, pictured below, the premise of Adventure Day is pretty self-explanatory. Get out there and do something. Throw yourself to the fuckin’ wind. Get in trouble. Break the law. Close the front door behind you and get in your car or on a plane or climb on your bike and live. Adventure Day is the day you tell yourself, I’m sick to death of being boring. I want to live a life that would make a good movie—a movie I would want to watch. The next step is yours.

Your friend,

-Adam Gnade

ADAM GNADE & YOUTHMOVIES “IT’S FIVE O’CLOCK IN AMERICA AND EVERYONE’S SLEEPWALKING” FROM THE HONEY SLIDES EP (TRY HARDER RECORDS)

It took me a while before I figured out how to give writing and music equal time without losing my shit. What it came down to is I had to combine them and immerse each in the other and then work on both as hard as I possibly could. Because of that I have to do two projects at once if I’m going to do anything. One writing. One music. And both connected. Which can be a strain. It can also be totally natural, like when me and Youthmovies wrote and recorded this one together in the studio in Oxfordshire. Came outta nowhere, music, lyrics, and then it was done. Right now I’m doing the edits on this new book (which won’t be out for a year or two) and writing a new record. The book has been natural, and a pleasure to write, but the record is giving me hell. I want the kind of ease I had with this song but it’s not coming.

Which is why it gives me hope when I read things like this, my friend Bart Schaneman’s bit on struggle, identity, and fear…

The world likes to see a man who is striving for something, as much or more as they want him to succeed. It’s the struggle that’s interesting, not the result. And there are some who would like to destroy a man for trying. We find ourselves in our selves. But identity is always shifting, always eluding our grasp, always inches beyond our reach. Some people find it in what they once were, yet even then they are changing, growing farther away in time from that person, and that too is a shift in identity. We seem to place value on self-awareness, self-knowledge. We like those that aren’t afraid of the world, that somehow seem to know their place in it. But I’ve never met anyone truly, thoroughly unafraid of the world.

If you’re not keeping tabs on Bart’s writing website, you’re missing out. He’s doing good things, things you can relate to and carry with you while you fight. And he’s a good dude to be around. Here’s a picture of him hanging out in front of a damn red wall…

BY ADAM GNADE

In the bar Jeremy and I sat across from each other at a table by the fireplace. Outside it had begun to rain. It was a slow, gray, listless rain, nothing more than a drizzling mist over the cobblestones and archways and rooftops.

A man rode by the window on a bicycle and looked in at us as he passed. The room was dark. Thick greased glass. Heavy maroon-black wood. Salted pork hanging in hocks above the bar. It was an old place, a strong, solid place that smelled of riding leather and coiled rope and smoked meat.

“So how much?” I said quietly.

Jeremy moved the coins across the boards of the tabletop with a finger, bringing them from one side of the table (uncounted, unsorted) to the other (counted, sorted). The fireplace flashed and made them gold and then fell low again. “Eighteen euro,” he said, frowning.

“To last… “

“To last until we leave.”

“Leave Spain or leave Europe?”

“Europe.”

The waiter, a large, balding, gorilla of a Spaniard, came in from the kitchen and set a tapas dish on the tabletop between us. He grunted something friendly in Spanish and walked away.

Eighteen euro to last a week. Goddamn it, goddamn it, goddamn it, I thought, but I kept it to myself. “Aceitunas,” I said cheerfully, “Olives.” I picked one of the green olives out of the brine and placed it in my mouth but didn’t swallow. I held it in my cheek and let its shape tell me it was a real thing, let the salt and brine and garlic core become a flavor and let the flavor become food. We hadn’t eaten much since Berlin, more than a week now. It was just an olive, but anything was something and I held onto the feeling of it for as long as I could.

“So, eighteen euro… “

“Eighteen,” I said, chewing the olive slow and then swallowing it. Now the something was nothing and it didn’t make much of a difference. “So I guess what we should do is have one more drink, which will get us another dish of… what’s next in the round?”

“The crackers we had with the first drink. Rounds of four. This will be drink five. Back to crackers.”

“Back to crackers. So, the plan is we get another drink, get another free plate of tapas, and then we pay for what we’ve had, save the rest of the money for something tomorrow and then hopefully the airline to Portugal will feed us.”

“Hopefully.” Jeremy’s face darkened. He leaned forward in his seat and pulled his green army parka around him. “I’m sorry I fucked this up so bad,” he muttered. He stared at the coins on the table but his mind was elsewhere.

“You didn’t fuck it up. It was Paris. Paris fucked it up. Anyway, the plan,” I continued, changing the subject, “we’ll have a euro a day to spend in Portugal. Hopefully Manuel will get my call and we can stay with him in Ericeira. If not, we’re kind of… we’d have to stay in Lisbon and sleep in the airport all week and get what we can for the euro a day.” Oscar was right, I told myself, but didn’t say aloud, we’ll be burning our clothes in the street to stay warm and eating Kendal Mint Cake.

“I can’t believe this,” he said, still looking down, idly scratching the tabletop with his thumbnail. “James, I don’t know, I think the gods are against us. I think… this is how my life has been these past few… I think I should become a criminal. There’s good money to be made in crime” (he was joking but there was more desperation than humor behind the joke). “I give up. I give… I don’t know what to do. There’s nothing. There’s nothing I can do,” he leaned back and put his hands up. “James, I’m throwing my cards down. What’s the point even trying? I’m an international fugitive. I’m worse than a terrorist. I might as well hijack the plane back from Portugal and crash it into something. They’re going to… as soon as I get to New York, if I get to New York, I’m done. They’ll get me. If it’s not the landlords and bill collectors it’s the cops. If it’s not the cops it’s… “

“Or,” I said, cutting him off, “or… or we could spend the rest of the money on another bottle of wine, which will give us free rounds of tapas until we’re done drinking and then… and then we worry about money tomorrow. Something will happen. We’ll figure something out.”

Jeremy’s eyes flickered to life and he leaned back in his chair, crossed his arms, and smiled at me. It was a child’s smile. A sweet, sad child suddenly told a good thing.

“I was going to suggest it,” he said, wagging a finger at me, “but I didn’t want to be the one who said it.”

“Well, I said it. What’s ‘One more bottle of red wine’ in Spanish? Un mas botela de vino tinto? Un mas? Or Uno mas? I can never remember.”

“The second I think. No, it’s Un. Un mas.” He was grinning big now and the sadness was gone. He pulled a cigarette out of his pack of Lucky Strikes, tapped its end on the table and put it to his lips. “Jeremy and James! The conquering American GIs!” he announced happily. “The conquering GIs have returned! Damn you, Poseidon. Damn you, Zeus. Damn you, damn you, damn you. Damn all of you. We’re the real gods. How do you say, King Kong ain’t got nothin’ on me in Spanish again? El gran mono negro … something something tienes… tiene nada… something. I don’t remember. Damn you… to all the gods. Je suis acteur célèbre et je suis perdu! Je suis Clooney. Damn you, damn you, damn you. We’re amazing. Damn you. Damn you.” He was boasting again and it felt good to hear him boast.

I got up and walked to the counter and ordered another bottle.

Nice shot by the good Megan McIsaac of a house party/noise jam at my old place in Portland. This is Mia Ferm playing organ at our Dia De Los Muertos bash. Says Megan,

“renee, my brother, and myself ventured to a friends house for dia de los muertos, which is also renee’s birthday. from noon until midnight a collective of friends and strangers spent those twelve hours making drone music on various instruments while surrounded by candles, shrines, and memorabilia. the experience we shared was morbidly beautiful and spiritual, which is how i feel the day of the dead should always be.”

Megan’s photos are, as always, the real thing. She hasn’t been in Portland long but she’s already nailed the vibe—all the pines and rain and raggedy kids on porches, the old cars and street musicians and sunlit cafes. She almost makes me miss the place. Go here to see more of her photos.

BY ADAM GNADE

On the last day of December, you go out walking by yourself and hear the snow crunch under your boots and see the fog hang over the valley and the skeletons of trees lining the creek. Now the house is quiet and you’re the only one awake. This is what you wanted, James, you tell yourself. This is the world you’ve been looking for. Try and get your head straight to write. When you got here you felt like an escaped prisoner, liberated, enthused, but now this is your life and you need to make it work. “When the measure of your work/is the measure of your worth/then you better make it work.” Man, you liked that song a lot and you believed it with conviction. (At one point Ethan thought that line was yours. How proud you were. Those are binder lines, you decided; the lines kids write on their school binders. You’ve been after that ever since.)

Now you need to move forward without distraction. Push away all extraneous thought until you see the story. Find the ticket for that world you’re making and then find the bus station and get there. But some mornings it’s slow. You tell yourself that: It’s slow. I’m slow. No, IT’S slow. It’s not me. It’s a separate thing. I’ll get there but it’s me who needs to do the pushing.

You tell yourself you’re missing out, that back home in Portland the New Year’s Eve party is busting out, delirious, alive, flush-faced, drunk on its own promise. That’s okay. I need to work more than I need parties. Parties… you forget parties by the time the next one comes around. I don’t need parties or the people who go to them. I don’t need anything. “I am a rock/I am an island,” goes that song you always hated. But sometimes you were honest and you knew it was about you and that made you nervous. You saw yourself becoming that thing that doesn’t feel, that writes and thinks and reads and is alone and cold as death and touches nothing and loves no one. Find the bus ticket. Find the station. Go…

To celebrate the new year (and fucking decade), this is my December to December as best as I can remember. Thanks for all the good times and thanks to everyone who fed me or put me up for the night or gave me money to play songs. Two thousand nine? I think I liked it a lot more than I figured I would. Fuck shit up but stay alive tonight, alright? I love you guys.

-AG

Dec 2008—England, Scotland, Holland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, New Jersey, Oregon (Portland)
Jan-June—Portland
July-August—Portland, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, New York, New Jersey, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Ohio, West Virginia
August-September—Portland, Washington, LA, San Diego, Mexico
October—Portland
November—Portland, LA, Sacramento, Weed, Eugene, Salem, San Diego, Mexico
December 2009—Portland, San Diego, LA, Sacramento, Weed, Salem, Eugene, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, Kansas, Missouri

Well, fuck. I guess it’s official so I can finally say it… my tour-mates, recording pals, and longtime brothers-in-arms and best friends Youthmovies have called it a day. Everyone’s going on to other (good) things but that doesn’t take away the sting. It was a great ride, friends.

I love you guys.

Your pal,

-Adam Gnade

The big blond one with the white baseball cap hit me square on the jaw and I went down. As I lay on the ground he and his friend kicked me and the kicks didn’t do much but when they began to stomp on my chest I knew the fight had changed.

After they left me, I lay in the grass under the moon and had a conversation with myself. Broken nose? No. Teeth? Nothing loose. Good. Jaw? Fine. Arms, legs. Fine. Ribs? Yeah, they did the ribs. The ribs again...

The first time I fractured my ribs I was on tour in England. How they were busted isn’t important but the pain built all week and by Bristol it was bad. We had left the venue and were at the after-party when the combination of booze and pain and no sleep joined forces and a panic attack came on. As it got worse, I was sure I was fucked. I knew without a doubt that my cracked ribs were poking into my organs and that it was only a matter of time before one of them burst and filled my body cavity with bacteria and toxins and bile. Then, naturally, death, and a bad one.

This, of course, was the panic attack talking but that didn’t matter. I made the fatal mistake of believing the voice. Of course I’m dying. Of course my organs are popping like water balloons and poisoning my bloodstream. Of course. Now it seems silly. At the time it was dead serious.

In the ambulance, they put me on oxygen and my panic attack passed but the pain didn’t. At the hospital I was taken to a room where they ran X-rays and blood tests and gave me an EKG. Beyond that, everything was blurry. I was in the warm, loose, post-panic attack haze, my mind still a jumble of paranoia cycles and memory holes and wormy logic. I knew I wasn’t having a panic attack anymore and I knew I wasn’t going to die but that was all I was sure of.

Three hours later the diagnosis came and I tried to listen to the doctor as he gave it to me. His voice faded in and out, “… full set of fractured ribs, left side… they’ll heal on their own but it will be slow… a year, year and a half … very gradual… try not to exert yourself… try not to cough, sneeze, lift anything heavy, run, walk fast, bend over quickly, sleep in unnatural positions or breathe harder than usual.”

Walking back to the waiting room, a nurse stopped me. Tall. Middle-aged. Swirls of gray and black hair pulled up into a bun. She had the face of a cop, the bulldog jowls, authority and poise.

Okay, I know this part, I thought. Let the hammer fall…

“Wait,” she said, looking down at her clipboard. “I believe we haven’t taken your name.”

“Uh, Adam.” It was a gamble. Act confused. Give your first name. Nothing to trace. I hadn’t filled out any paperwork yet. I’d been wheeled in, worked on, and excused. They hadn’t so much as looked at my passport.

“Alright, Adam. Hope you heal well.”

“Oh, okay, thanks. That’s all?”

“That’s all. Enjoy the rest of your stay in England.”

A few days later the promoter of that night’s show drove me to his house where his friends made me supper.

There was an American girl there. She had been living in the UK long enough to adopt a vaguely British tone but she was still American and she had a nice face and it felt good to talk to someone from home. We sat around the kitchen table and ate penne pasta with tomato sauce.

“Yeah, just like that,” I said. “They asked me my name and I left. I didn’t even give my last name. No paperwork. No questions. Didn’t pay a cent.” I took a forkful of pasta and shoved it in my mouth.

“Back home you would’ve paid … wow, I don’t even remember.”

“For the ambulance ride and hospital visit? Ten, fifteen thousand?”

“Totally. God. Have you seen Sicko?” she asked.

“Sicko?

“The new Michael Moore.”

“No.”

“I cried,” she said. “I watched it twice at the cinema and cried both times. You’d think a country would … I don’t know, at least try to keep its people in good shape. Sick people, sick country. It’s bad business. You wouldn’t do that if you were managing a sports team. You’d want everyone healthy so you could win.” She tore the end off a baguette and mopped up the rest of the sauce from her plate. “Money, pharmaceutical companies… it’s such… it’s a rich man’s game.”

We sat in silence finishing our food.

The promoter came in the room with a bottle of red wine and set it in front of us.

“Hiya! Y’alright?” he asked cheerfully.

“I’m good,” I said. “Thank you for dinner. It was really good.”

“Wine?”

“Please.”

The girl turned to him. “We were talking about Sicko.”

“Oh, fuck, man. I like visiting America but I couldn’t imagine living there. I’d be terrified to do anything,” he said as he struggled with the cork.

“Here, let me,” the girl said and he handed her the bottle. “I still remember how it was when I lived there,” she said as she pulled out the cork and set the opener aside. “You can’t live in fear but it’s always in the back of your mind. Like, what if I just took the wrong step.”

“Does anyone you know in America have health insurance?” the guy asked, sitting down across from me.

“None of my friends,” I said. The girl poured three coffee mugs of wine. I took mine and drank half of it and my face went warm. “Yeah, nobody.”

“That’s fucking crazy, man,” the guy said. “Health care isn’t even something we think about here. I mean I’m well chuffed with NHS but we don’t think about it. It just is.”

“My new plan,” I started to say, and then cleared my throat, “my new plan after what happened in Bristol is if I get hurt in America my friends will put me on a plane, send me to London Heathrow and I’ll take the first cab to the ER. The plane ticket would be expensive of course but I’d save thousands in hospital bills. Literally, you pay out your ass in America. And that’s even if they let you in. Unless it’s an emergency, sometimes they won’t even look at you in the US without coverage.”

“What happens to people in America without health insurance when they get, y’know, really sick?” the guy asked.

“We die.”

”Naw, mate. Really… ” he said.

”We die.”

The girl got up and carried her plate to the sink. She ran the tap water but she didn’t rinse the plate. She held it in her hands and the water ran and she stared out the window. She looked back at us and then turned away again. Her shoulders began to shake and I knew she was crying.

—Adam Gnade

It’s been snowing for three days and there’s no sign of it letting up. Getting to town is not an option. Yesterday I shoveled the driveway, which is something I’ve never done, but the snow is coming fast and you can’t see the path I cut. It’s funny how your concerns change. Things like “getting to town” and shoveling snow were never an issue in Portland. Not that any of this is a problem. More time to hunker down and work. Finishing an essay today. Another short story needs editing and after that I’m sending it off to a magazine. This is the set up that works best for me. Isolation and WORK. And the snow continues to fall.

-Adam

Got to Kansas a few days ago. The trip took longer than planned after the Greyhound crashed on the I-84 in the middle of the night and sent us off into the ditch, where we sank in the mud and ice and were trapped in the bus for a few hours. After the paramedics cut the front of the bus off with the Jaws of Life, we were waylaid in an all-night diner for a couple hours (where the news interviewed me) and then in a freezing Greyhound station until morning. The sunrise was an explosion…

It’s my last night in Portland, Oregon and right now the words in my head, the words that sum up where I’m at, are from my favorite Castanets song, the one where Ray sings, “it’s a long and difficult dance but I think that maybe it’s still good/even though we all dance sometimes to a song that we don’t love like we should.” Life could be easy and it could be just what we want, but it’s not.

To be perfectly honest, I’m afraid of what lies ahead. It’s new wilderness to me. All chances taken and no sure bets. Portland was easy. This won’t be easy. But if I can do it right, and if I can stay honest, it will be all I’ve ever dreamed of—the real life, the big good one I’ve wanted since I started wanting things. Now, I’m sure you know what it is to want things but I don’t think a lot of us know about getting. Some people will tell you life is just one chain of humiliation and loss and disappointment. I believed that once, and I believed it HEAVY, but I now believe in the power of saying “fuck it” and pushing on until you get what you want.

So, see you around, Portland. Sometimes it was awful and sometimes it was great but it’s never been dull.

Your friend,

-Adam Gnade

1. Last night I had a dream about the reading Andrew and I did at Oxford last year when my book first came out. Instead of being in St. Edmund’s Hall, which is where it was in real life, it was outside in one of the University’s open spaces, the grass blindingly green, bright emerald-green, the sun baking through my parka. Andrew was going out on tour with Foals after the reading and I was flying home to America. Knowing how much I hate goodbyes, he told me, “It’s alright, we’re still up with horses.” (Decode that one if you will.) At the end of the dream he turned into a tiny dog and ran off through a dog door and then exploded as he raced across the lawn toward the street. I woke up and it was so cold in the bearcave I could see my breath.

2. Jawbreaker.

3. Two nights ago Bart and I were sitting around the table talking about Cormac McCarthy, which is something we do a lot. He’d seen the movie. I hadn’t. There was a Wall Street Journal article with a rare interview and there was a copy of Blood Meridian and some back story talk about its origin in Sam Chamberlain’s memoirs. And I let it slip. Just like that. Something about my driver’s license expiring at midnight. He caught it, and then we were at the bar doing birthday shots. And then we were at the other bar and there was a naked girl on stage with a black-dyed mullet and armpit hair and sleeve tattoos slow-stepping around the pole. At some point I threw myself into the bushes outside.

I woke up on Bart’s couch the next morning in my jeans and cowboy boots. When the hangover came it came like a truck running over my head. But here’s where things got good: I slept it off. Slept right through my hangover. Which is something I’ve never done. This was my body’s birthday gift to me. It was as if my body was saying, “Thanks for all the service. Thanks for being patient while the last couple years ran you through the meatgrinder and smashed all your hope and made you hate all the things you once loved. Here’s your present. It’s small but you’ll appreciate it. Sleep it off. Happy birthday, asshole.”

“PALACES” BY ADAM GNADE FROM THE HELLO AMERICA! SPLIT

In the ambient dead-space before “Palaces” begins, you can hear an arguement the mics picked up while we were recording the string bells. From what I can make out, one of two guys is shouting, “Fuck! Fuck! I’ll fucking kill her!” while the other is saying something along the lines of, “Let’s go! C’mon! Let’s go!” And then the banjo comes on. We didn’t hear what we’d picked up until we mixed the record so I guess whatever happened happened. It begins just a few seconds into the track. See if you can figure out what they’re saying.

-Adam