Adam Gnade

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.)