Beautiful Piece  is a gritty noir novel set during a Chicago heat wave. In carefully crafted prose with a distinct urban flavor rich in metaphor and wordplay, this gritty psychological tale will appeal to readers of noir and experimental fiction

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One day I was sitting with the Vet and explained: You see the problem with guns as I see it is.

You need a gun? he asked me.

No no. Quite the contrary. I avoid guns like the plague. It’ my theory guns only attract guns. Shooting begets shooting. Do you see what I’m saying?

Whatever. You need me to collect you a gun, I’ll collect you a gun. Just let me know.

I don’t want a gun, I tell him. I avoid guns like the plague. I wouldn’t own a gun even if you collected one for me.

Whatever, says the Vet. Just let me know. You need it, I’ll get it. How about that?

Fine, I say. That sounds fine.

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During a deadly Chicago heat wave that’s claiming hundreds of lives, Robert, who’s stuck in his apartment alone, fears he’s going to be the next victim. In the apartment above him lives a shell-shocked Vietnam veteran who talks obsessively about the corpses of his war experience while alternately listening to Die Meistersinger and Madama Butterfly. 

One day, Robert ventures forth into the searing heat to gas up his car. Immediately he encounters enigmatic Lucy who is trying to escape her brutal fiancé, Matthew Gliss. On a whim, Lucy invites Robert to her apartment where she shows him her mysterious tattoo and tells him of her dangerous life with Matthew Gliss. She warns Robert that if Matthew ever catches them together he should run, not walk, because Matthew won’t think twice of killing him. 

So begins the risky, short-lived relationship that leads to a chilling climax. Each of Robert’s increasingly hallucinatory recollections of what happened during the heat wave leads him to profoundly question his own culpability. 

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“A terrific novel. Absorbing and fast paced. The interplay of plot, style, and theory invites the reader to engage at multiple levels.”—Sandra Gustafson


“A fascinating, compelling read. Its taut, lean prose, its noir-like plot, and most of all, its rich, darkly detailed characters absorbed me fully.”—Jacqueline Goldsby

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Excerpts:

I had no intention of intruding on this guy’s woman. I no more wanted to take her than I wanted to rob a bank. But the vault was open so to speak, and there was money on the table, and no one was watching, so why not rob the bank? I needed the cash anyway and it was a perfectly simple thing to do. So when she said, Want to come home with me? I thought, Why the hell not? I can rob that bank. No one’s looking. It would be easy as pie.

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I was talking to the Vet.

What if I should die suddenly in the middle of the night, as it were? Alone, as it were! Who would discover me? I have been living alone so long, people have stopped checking in on me to see how I’m doing.

He understood.

I understand, he said.

Let’s make a pact, I said, and so we made a pact between us to check in on each other regularly. He would knock on my door once in a while if he hadn’t heard from me or I would knock on his door once in a while if I hadn’t heard from him.

Let’s not wait until we smell the corpse on this one.

That would be ignominious, he said, and the Vet actually used that word: ‘ignominious.’ It was a lovely word, really, and I agreed with him.

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What would you do if you-believing your fiancée to be faithful-discovered her one day in bed with another guy?

Why is my fiancée doing something behind my back that I don’t know about?

It’s a theoretical question is all, I tell him.

Cut it with the bullshit. Is she doing something behind my back that I don’t know about?

No, but she’s doing something behind her back. Who are all these dwarfs tattooed to your back?

Do you really want to know the answer?

I suppose not.

Then be careful what you ask for-you just might get it.

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We always fall asleep smoking one more cigarette in bed. Just one more, I’ll say, or she’ll say, and with lights out in the room, one more, and we’ll light one more cigarette, sharing it in the dark, watching the ember glow, and when we’re done, we’ll carefully nub it out, reaching with our hands to find the ashtray in the dark.

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I’ve been engaged to Matthew fourteen months now, she said, in her way. No wedding date is in sight, she continued, in her way. I don’t know how long we’ve been together. Forever, I suppose. But do me a favor. If he ever walks through those doors and sees you here with me, get out as soon as possible. Run, don’t walk, and hide. If you give him a chance to catch you he will probably most likely also want to kill you.

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So she says to me: He has a Glock 10mm automatic is what he calls it. It’s fearsome. I’ve seen him fire it at abandoned cars and the damage it did to the steel was incredible.

To which I say, Odd, a gun. I wouldn’t own a gun even if I could.

Good, she says. I hate guns.

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The smell in her place wasn’t fetid like I thought it might be. Though sometime thereafter the smell did become fetid—and when it became fetid I said to myself: This is a bad omen. Maybe I shouldn’t be here. When it became fetid I said to myself—I distinctly remember saying—What am I doing here?

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And what are you doing to effect immortality? I asked him.

            Showing you how to operate this gun, I suppose, he says to me, taking aim at the beer can and missing again. You see how you do it. The gun breaks down, really very easily. I wish I had this thing when I needed it. Now it’s just good for plinking. But a beautiful piece of mechanicals nonetheless.

           He says it again, breaking the gun down very slowly for me to observe and learn. Beautiful piece of mechanicals, he says breaking the gun down. Never had anything like this when I needed it. So light. So beautiful. The guns I used always jamming. Look at this. These things never jam, he says, taking it apart, putting it back together. So simple. Loading a case of rounds and unloading them into the side of a car. Plink. Plink. Plink. Plink.

             I ask him again: What are you doing to effect immortality?

            Nothing, he says loading another case, squeezing off a half dozen rounds, plink plink plink . . . Not a damned thing and it’s killing me.

FORSOOTH, I HAVE FELT THE BITTER WINDS

(some thoughts on writing the book)

I wrote Beautiful Piece in a noisy household of young children during a busy life. I wrote it in bits and snatches of time: five minutes here, seven minutes there, at all times of day and night.

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I was in my pajamas, three am, sweating in the heat, writing at full blast. I wrote in the morning while the coffee was going. If I put water on to boil for pasta at dinner time, I’d write until the pasta became al dente. If I had a moment while cleaning up the dishes before putting the kids to bed, I’d write some more. Just put every bit of stolen time to use, and you’ll finish this thing.

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I think of Beautiful Piece as a story of un-employed working-class outsiders told in high Modernist style. I love putting bruises and tattoos on Modernism, and the obsessive iterations of Modernism into a Chicago neighborhood bar filled with demotic utterance.

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I listened to the Ramones continuously while I wrote Beautiful Piece. My ambition was to make Beautiful Piece as unrelenting as the “KKK Took My Baby Away” as beautiful as “I Wanna Be Sedated”.

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I worked in a Southside tavern for five years at a time when people smoked in bars. I worked there because I was broke and because I was curious.

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On the one hand bartending can be enormously tedious and boring. The same regulars showing up at their appointed place at the bar at the appointed hour going back again and again to the stories they tell of themselves when they last lived on the outside.

Let me tell you a story when I was in the Merchant Marines.

You were in the Merchant Marines?

Yeah. Back in the seventies I was. . .

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On the other hand, working in a bar can be fascinating: the change at a bar is so slow and glacial—and yet it’s there. Change is happening if you keep your eye out. One day a guy who has been coming to the bar every day for years stops showing up. Why? This is the guy who shows up at the bar on all the major holidays, in any type of inclement weather. He is fastidiously regular. Why suddenly did he stop coming? Illness? Death? Did he move away? Will his absence be noticed?

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One day he shows up same time as usual at his spot on the bar. He sits there as if he never left. I was in Mexico for a month, what of it? Here try this one on for size. He hands you a bottle of mescal with a hairless caterpillar curled in fetal position at the bottom.

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There you’ll be just like you’ve always been: getting drunk after hours, only this time on mescal.

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It’s interesting listening to people talk late at night after a full day of binge drinking. At this point their words are unintelligible, slurred and broken. What is heard though are the cadences of one drunk voice rising in a tone of anger, lost a moment later in a mumbled trail of confusion, then picked up again somewhere else this time filled with shock and curiosity. What I’m still here? The other voice, meanwhile, is singing back, cadenced, equally unintelligible—saying, in its way, yes. Yes. I get it. I absolutely get what you’re saying. I know. The beauty.

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Sometimes while tending the bar a person will be sitting at the corner of the bar. You turn your eye away for a moment and when you turn back he’s gone. Where did he go? How did he disappear so suddenly? And then you hear it: BOOM! He fell backwards off his stool and you caught him missing between the moment he disappeared and the moment he hit the ground. There’s a great clattering of tables and chairs and bottles and that’s when you know what happened. You run around the bar to make sure he’s okay.

Are you okay?

Yeah, I’m okay, he says, waving you away as if you were a bug, then reaching out with his hand. Just help me up.

He’s a big guy. Hard to lift. You pull him up, steady him. He’s a bleeding mess and yet he’s right back at the bar.

Gimme a drink, will ya.

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I used to write poetry on slips of paper when we were slow. I was in search of my own cadence. I’d scribble poems down when no one was looking then I’d go back to serving beer. I’d stuff the slips of paper in my pocket and bring them home with me to be trod under foot and finally tossed in the garbage. However, I won’t forget writing this:

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Forsooth, I have felt the bitter winds blow against my cheeks and I have marched a fortnight across red hot sands to the gates of Eldorado and I have seen its men with their women in silks and I have seen naked children at their hips and they stood in the shadows of doorways singing long remembered songs of the sea. . .

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No one ever told me a story in a bar that I remember except this one: Jimmy, the eighty five year old bar owner and the paterfamilias of all the patrons who walked into the bar was a Budweiser drinker. Only he refused to sell Bud. He had a Budweiser sign above the bar, and a carved wooden hand with the middle finger up and all the others down signifying: Fuck you, to Budweiser. When I asked Jimmy why he didn’t serve Budweiser he told me the following story. He smoked Swisher Sweets and sipped brandy. He said, I served Budweiser for years. It was a staple of the place. Unlike the other beer distributors who occasionally gave me a keg for free or cut me a deal, the Bud distributor always charged me full price. When I asked him—Hey, why don’t you cut me a deal once in a while? he told me: Everybody drinks Budweiser so you don’t have a choice but sell it and I don’t need to cut you a deal. From that moment on, Jimmy told me, I vowed never to sell Budweiser again.

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Jimmy told also how Budweiser came to regret the bad blood with the bar. They even arranged for Harry Carey to come out and make a peace offering to Jimmy. Jimmy was thrilled that Harry Carey was coming for a visit. He even went out and bought a six pack of Budweiser that he kept in the cooler. When Harry Carey walked through the door, they sat down. They talked about it. Jimmy opened two Buds. They drank. When Harry asked if Jimmy would reconsider, Jimmy pointed to the wooden hand above the bar with the middle finger saluting and said: Never, but I’m glad you’re here, Harry, and I do like Budweiser. It’s what I drink when I’m not working.

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The profane wooden hand and the Budweiser sign are still there. Harry Carey and Jimmy Wilson aren’t. Budweiser still isn’t sold at the bar.

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I sent my book to agents and east coast publishers. I never even got a pro forma rejection letter. It was as if I had just hurled my manuscript over the cliff and into the sea. There I’d wait by my mail box listening for the splash when it hit the water below. There was never even a splash.

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Although one agent, who was representing a friend, was kind enough to read the first twenty five pages and tell me: the voice is inimitable, only it doesn’t develop fast enough. No New York house will ever pick it up.

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I sent it off to countless independent presses. I enrolled it in a number of writer competitions each of which required a $25.00 fee. The results were the same as if I had sent them to a New York house. Only, the independents were polite enough to send along a “We’re sorry…” letter.

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I once sent Beautiful Piece to a publisher open to experimental writing. They sent it out to three readers. One praised it, which gave me courage. Two declined it on the argument it wasn’t experimental enough for them. They recommended I send it instead to a New York trade house where it would surely be picked up.

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If you’re reading this book: thank the gods of the slush pile. That’s where this book was found. I should say, thank a courageous publisher who picked it out of a slush pile, dusted it off after its long journey, steadied it, and made it presentable to the world.

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And to you, Dear Reader, may Beautiful Piece find you in good health and happiness. Cheers and thanks for reading.