Category: Bad Guts

John Kelso Wrote a Column about Me

7/30/2017

I am very sorry to hear of the death this week of Austin newspaper columnist John Kelso. As his former colleague Michael Corcoran said, “He loved his job and so he was better at it than he had to be.”

Kelso was the model for the character Wes Leonard in my story “Bad Guts” and my novel That Demon Life. When he interviewed me for the column below, he said that he approved. He even said That Demon Life was funny--as nice a thing as has ever been said.

Writer's Book Came Together Between Cab Fares

By John Kelso
Sunday, November 15, 2009

Lowell Mick White may be the only author to ever write a 182-page novel while driving a cab.

OK, so he wasn't really driving the cab around Austin while he was writing "That Demon Life", a book full of colorful, sketchy and disreputable characters you probably wouldn't want running your Brownie scout meeting. While writing, he was parked between fares.

"I sat there with my clipboard and a cheap notebook I got at H-E-B, and I'd write," said White, who, from 1998 to 2002, spent time driving around Austin in a Yellow Cab putting his book together. "I'd find a place to park and I'd write 'til I got a call and I'd pick a passenger up. Yeah, I did it old-school with a pen."

Macs are for sissies.

This guy is no slouch with the words. He was the recipient of a Dobie Paisano Fellowship, which includes a six-month residency at J. Frank Dobie's former Hill Country Ranch and a payment of $1,200 to write out in the country.

But most of the book was composed in the cab, on Austin streets. White says you can tell from looking at the structure of the book when the passengers climbed in.

"You might have noticed those little short subchapters. That's where I got passengers in the cabs."

This is one of those deals where life imitates art, or steam imitates steam.

"They sat naked on the mussed bed eating greasy chicken and drinking warm beer, and Richard felt like nothing in his life — nothing, nothing, nothing, ever — tasted better," it says on page 35. "He was just so damn happy."

Then, in real cab life, White remembers the time the drunken wealthy attorney got in the back of his cab and did a strip tease as he was giving her a ride home. He didn't say if he had tinted windows.

"Her friends didn't want her to drive and they put her in the cab, and I was taking her home and she was taking her clothes off," White recalled. "And when I got her home she didn't have her (house) keys, so I was taking her back to the party. I had no place else to take her. But her daughter showed up" and let her in the house.

It's not easy writing a book in a cab. Your cab is your office. White recalls the four slobs who got in the cab and messed everything up.

"I worried a lot of the time that I might lose whatever notebook I was working in, or that it might get damaged," wrote White, who is working on his Ph.D. in English at Texas A&M. "I remember once on Fourth Street some older drunk guys got into my cab, four of them, three in back, one in front, and the guy who sat up front plopped his fat middle-aged butt down on my notebook before I could move it. I totally lost my temper — started cursing, yelling, kicked them all out before I even started the meter."

It's a fun book. There's a little round judge named Cantu, who has the hots for a chick named Giselle, who has a gigantic bird tattoo on her back. There's Paige, who will nail every male that breathes. There's a defense attorney named Linda, who hates her job and thinks all the criminals should be lined up and shot.

White appreciates his characters and loves Linda. He says at a book signing recently when a reader came down on Linda, it made him kind of mad.

"This guy said, 'I didn't like Linda very well; she's not a very moral character.' I said, 'I lived with Linda in the cab for years, she's a very moral character. I like her.' "

Hey, at least she didn't throw up in the back seat of his cab, like some of his real customers.

I can't find a link to the column on the American-Statesman website. The story "Bad Guts" is included in Long Time Ago Good. And of course you need to read That Demon Life.

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Flat Tires

3/18/2017

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I’ve had more flat tires than anyone I know. There are probably several reasons—mainly, I guess, because I’ve driven many miles over the years. I was formerly a professional driver, a cab driver, and tires would go out on a fairly regular basis in the cabs I drove. Also, for a while I lived across the street from the facility where the Austin laundry chain Kwik-Wash repaired their washing machines, and the street and alley were littered with little machine screws, and it seemed like every month or so I had to pull those damn things from my tires. And also—in my impoverished youth I drove a lot on lousy cheap used or recapped tires.

The worst flat I ever had was in June, 1994. It was the day OJ Simpson went missing. I was driving north on I-35 to attend a writing workshop at the University of Iowa when my right front tire blew out. Man, that sucked. It was about 105 miserable degrees that day, and I-35 was as usual scary busy and I had to crawl around on the hot gravel changing that tire worried that some fool was going to smash into my pickup on the shoulder…though eventually I got the tire changed and I made it to a motel room in time to see OJ’s low-speed chase.

Flat tires make appearances in my writing, of course. Here, in the story, “Bad Guts.”

“Why don’t you just change the tire?”
“Can’t,” Wes said. “I’m driving on the spare—it’s the spare that’s flat.” That stupid fucking donut spare. He’d been driving on it for six months….

Anyway—boom boom boom. Flat tires have always been a part of my life.

So I wasn’t too surprised when I looked at my car the other day and saw this:

Yes, that tire is flat. Unfortunate, right? But—I know what to do. Change the tire!

But then I was faced with--this:

Yeah, the spare was flat, too.

Luckily the guy across the street heard me cursing at the Tire Gods and came over with his portable air pump, and we got some air in the spare and I got back on the road.

But—it could have been worse!

Yeah—three flat tires at once. May, 1983. A personal record!

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Out of Context Excerpt 7

2/28/2015

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The list/rant/whatever from the story "Bad Guts," in the collection Long Time Ago Good.

“No kidding,” Wes said. He looked at the neon beer sign hanging behind Jillian—a rainbow trout leaping for a mayfly—and felt sad. Like weeping, almost. There would be no cool water in Pflugerville—no fame, no fun. Just heat and hog guts, chitterlings or chitlins, menudo or hog maws, or whatever that stuff was, and who wanted to write about any of it? In the 23 years the newspaper had been running his column he had written about barbecue (chicken, sausage, ribs, brisket), country music, tractor pulls, pro wrestling (he had a fondness for old school wrestlers like Ivan Putski and Mad Dog Vachon), ice cream, fraternity hijinks, sorority snootiness, the color orange, rodeo, Juneteenth, Confederate Heroes Day, the NAACP, the Ku Klux Klan, beer (local beer, imported beer, cold beer, the meaning of beer), homosexuals, lesbians, zoophiles, necrophiles, Aggies, airports (airports in general, the old airport, the new airport, funding for the new airport, the land scandal surrounding the place that almost became the new airport, and why the old airport was better), light bulbs: incandescent versus florescent, thunder, lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, ice storms, floods, droughts, cold, heat, rock’n’roll, nose rings, nipple rings, navel rings (he wrote a penis ring story, too, but the editor said it didn’t belong in a decent family newspaper), motorcycles, skateboards, in-line skates, pogo sticks, dogs, cats, parrots, grackles, ostriches, golden-cheeked warblers, fire ants, millipedes, cockroaches, mosquitoes, blind salamanders, tooth spiders, carp, trout, bass, catfish, bats, mice, rats, raccoons, possums, lions, tigers, bears (grizzly bears, black bears, and teddy bears), old cars, new cars, art cars, pickup trucks, and diesel mechanics. He had attended the Budafest, the Wurstfest, the New Highway Fest, the International Barbecue Fest, the Aquafest, the Cedar Chopper Fest, the Sorghumfest, the Pecanfest, the Cotton Pickin’ Fest, the Very Best Fest, the Locust Fest, the Big Ol’ Bull Fest, the Chiggerfest, and the Crappiefest, along with Catfish Days, Frontier Days, Cicada Days, Buffalo Days, Pioneer Days, Prickly Pear Days, Crazy Daze, the Rattlesnake Roundup, the Chilympiad, the White Bass Run, the Mesquite Burn, the Skunk Wallow, and Spamorama. He had been to dozens of county fairs and stock shows—dozens. Three times a week for 23 years he’d written about colorful, folksy stuff—all kinds of colorful, folksy stuff—and he was popular, and he won awards, and people actually read his column.

But colorful and folksy was getting harder and harder to find: the city had changed, was changing. There were big-assed skyscrapers downtown now, and tech millionaires cruising around in Maserattis, and waves of immigrants from California and Mexico—and everywhere else on the planet, seemingly—had changed the texture of the town. Colorful and folksy, real colorful and folksy, was getting hard to find. Wes tried a few times to write about the new city he was seeing all around him—he wrote about the gentrification of the east side, about inappropriately huge mansions in old neighborhoods, about traffic and traffic and traffic, about air and water pollution, about the loss of friendly old bars and restaurants, and the snootiness of new bars and restaurants—he wrote columns about the new city, and nobody liked them. They were downers. They sounded like the carpings of a cranky old man. Nobody wanted to read that. People wanted colorful and folksy—at least from him, they wanted colorful and folksy. He went back to recycling old topics. In the end all it got him was a gig as the celebrity judge at the Greater Southwest Chitlins Cookoff and Jamboree.

“We’ve got the seventeenth-largest city in America,” Wes said, “and there’s going to be all these people running around worrying about hog guts.”

“That’s what makes Austin fun,” Jillian said. “It’s weird.”

“It’s all a big lie,” Wes said. “And I’m a big liar.”

“Poor Wes,” Jillian said again. “You’re just feeling sorry for yourself.”

“If you were me, you’d feel sorry for me, too.”

“No, I probably wouldn’t,” Jillian said.

Wes just stared at her.

“Really—I wouldn’t.”

“You’re part of the problem,” Wes said. He took a sip of beer and looked at the television. Some rich bastard was putting. He said, “This is going to be the worst day of my life. The very worst day."

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A Project: Single Story Ebooks

9/7/2014

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Like any writer or educator, I occasionally have to send off samples of my writing—to apply for a job, or a fellowship, or whatever. Sometimes someone just wants to see a sample of your work. I usually just send along a PDF of a published story, or an excerpt from one of my novels.

But a month or so ago, I was fixing to send out a writing sample, and it occurred to me to make it better than a plain PDF—to make it sort of like a little standalone ebook. And then, not just send them out as a sample to whatever lucky person was asking to see my work, but to make them publicly available.

And—so I did.

Below are the first two Single Story Ebooks. Each one has two versions of a single story in it, an early version, and a later, revised, published version, along with a short essay about the writing of the story. I’ll probably have a few more over the next couple of months. They're available on Kindle….

From experience I know that hard travel makes people cranky and prone to make bad decisions, and crankiness and inept decision-making can increase when people are tired and forced into physical if not emotional intimacy. So, writing: imagine a tired and cranky man and woman. Give the woman a legitimate complaint. Make the man unaware/uncaring of her complaint. Stick them in a truck in the middle of the Yukon and see what happens...

Deep Eddy, available on Amazon Kindle....

The story grew out of a prompt that novelist W.P. Kinsella gave me in a writing workshop many years ago—a title, “Bad Guts.” In developing a story to go with the title I tried to imagine a morally exhausted man who does not want to go to work—and how, when he does finally go to work, everything falls apart. This story contains beer and clowns and heat and chitlins—a extraordinarily odd and volatile combination….

Bad Guts, available on Amazon Kindle....

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Ordinary Horrors

John Kelso Wrote a Column about Me

Writer's Book Came Together Between Cab Fares

Flat Tires

Out of Context Excerpt 7

A Project: Single Story Ebooks

Lowell Mick White

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