Howling and Tumbling

It was supposed to be a calm night.

            I’ve been sick.  I’ve had An Illness, which basically means I thought it was strep and it turned out to be a viral infection, which is a scary term for a bad cold.  I prefer the scary term because when you tell someone you have a cold, they’re all, “Have some orange juice, brah, you’ll be aight in the morning.”  (Everyone I know is in blink-182.) 

            But here’s all the context: we’re coming at the tail end of a month and a half during which Shawn pulled a tendon in his hand and has been unable to do most of the at-home stuff, so I’ve had to do both of our chores – cooking, dishes, all the laundry.  Because I didn’t want him to get bored with Kev’s Delicious Meatloaf every single night, I jumped back into my more culinary habits, trying to give him somewhat exotic meals every night.  (Part of this is that he finally relented and watched Ratatouille, the film that made me want to learn to cook, and liked it.)  At the same time, a friend of mine got West Nile Virus and I had to travel back and forth to the facility that was taking care of him (about three hours each day) and bring him stuff from home and do a little shopping for him, all without the benefit of a car.  Toss in the fact that I direct or produce four different shows, was working to finish my novel, and I was still trying to have my normal routine (all the gym workouts and writing and appearing on other shows and cycling everywhere and so much writing, guys, so much).  It was a bad cold – severe, some might say – but it was also just exhaustion. 

            The Sunday night things got really bad, I stared down at the lid of a pan I needed to wash and I literally could not lift my hands.  I just stared at it, zoning in, and I could not move my hands anymore.  That was when I collapsed on the couch and barely moved for a week and a half.  It was cool.  I took a lot of ~Quil products and watched Svengoolie and healed.

            In increments, I’ve been rebuilding my life.  Monday, I hosted my first show since I got sick.  Yesterday, I stayed out all day to work on editing My Agent of Chaos.  Today, I went back to the gym.  But last night was supposed to be the real reward for recovering well: a Gaslight Anthem show with my buddy Rich.  I’d seen Gaslight Anthem a year before with another friend who hadn’t liked the show as much as I did (too loud for him), so I was eager to rock out a little with a guy who got it.  However, life intervened, as life likes to do, and Rich couldn’t make it.  While the thought of not rocking with him saddened me, I kind of relished the idea of going solo.  I half-heartedly offered tickets to the folks in my comedy group, and when they all demurred, I headed out to the House of Blues alone.

            I wandered onto the floor with my Red Bull and everything I own stuffed into my jeans pockets as the opening band, TwoPointEight, was doing their thing.  Loud and melodic, not my thing, but I nodded along.  I knew Against Me! was going next and I didn’t know what to expect.  They were harder rock than I’m used to in my Springsteen/DBT/Blitzen Trapper bubble, weren’t they?  All I knew is that the lead singer used to be a dude and now she’s not (and the conversations from the brodudes around me about the subject were vastly illuminating.  Every single one referred to her as “her,” and the basic consensus was, “they still fucking rock, why do I care?”  I love 2014.)  Then they took the stage.  My first thought was, “Wow, hot guitarist.”  My second thought was, “Oh, there’s a mosh pit right in front of me OMG right in front of me.”

Hot Guitarist

            The songs poured on; some connected with me, some didn’t, but here I am dealing with a whole new paradigm in my life.  Here’s my ignorant suburban take on mosh pits until last night: they’re an outlet for young male aggression who need to rage against everything to feel alive.  And, okay, maybe that was some of it there and maybe that’s the total reality elsewhere, but there were all sorts in this crowd.  Men, women, some androgynous folks, older, younger, and all of them knew all the words and screamed along.  Aggression?  Sure.  But not … aimless aggression.  The crowd slammed into each other to the left, to the right, got pushed back, rushed forward, fell back. 

            I found my hands pressed against the sweaty back of a bearded hipster and when I pushed him away into the pit, I wasn’t doing it to keep him away.  I was volleying him back into the experience he was having.  I was part of that experience.  Nobody was angry.  Nobody was violent.  Men and women rose from the ground and floated above our heads on the strength of our hands and surfed to the stage, where security caught them and sent them back to the pit. 

Not unhappy.

            Then Gaslight Anthem took the stage.  This is a band I’ve carried inside me for a long while.  The song “Bring It On” captured me five years ago and I fell into the album it came from, American Slang, when I was in between real jobs and needed an anchor.  Then Kelly the Wonder Tattooist played their first album for me while he inked my Steampunk Dr Pepper onto my arm and everything took hold.  Their new album, Get Hurt, arrived a few months ago.  Some of the songs stubbornly remained out of my grasp, but some of them drifted into the hollow parts of me and took root.  And the title, Jesus.  Could any other title demand as much attention from the raging angst inside me than Get Hurt?  (Okay, Darkness on the Edge of Town.  But that’s not fair.) 

            They started with a song called “Stay Vicious,” and I don’t know what happened.  I threw myself into the pit, shoulder to thumping shoulder with the dudes and ladies moshing as if their lives depended on it.  In seconds, my shirt was soaked through with sweat, my hair was plastered to my skull, and I was screaming, screaming these words that I’d learned so recently and was desperate to shout into a space big enough to hold them.  Tubby bearded guys and skinny bearded hipsters bashed me from all sides.  Was it erotic?  Sure it was erotic, and I had the goofy teenager grin to prove it most of the night.  But erotic glances the surface of what this was: camaraderie fueled by pure adrenaline and rock and roll. 

Daddy's first mosh pit.

            At one point, a hole opened up, and a dude in a Hold Steady shirt rushed in, glancing at me and this skinny guy I’d been pressed against for three songs; Hold Steady was smiling maniacally and jabbing his index fingers at his feet.  Never have I been in this situation but instinctually I knew what that motion meant.  Up.  I got his left foot.  The skinny guy got his right.  Two tall girls behind him got his back.  And up he went, screaming.  I was screaming. 

            Right before the band launched into “Howl,” euphoria whipped through me like a goddamned hurricane.  I shouted, “I’m fucking forty,” even though I’m not quite.  This androgynous college kid in front of me stared at me for a second, then clapped me on the shoulder and said, “Yeah you fuckin’ are!  Wooooo!”  And then up the kid went, because that’s how it is when you’re happy and healthy and things are finally kicking ass again. 

Howl.

            Usually when I take in a show, I pray for one song I can’t live without.  Lately for DBT, it’s been “Natural Light.”  For Bruce, for whatever reason, it’s “I’m Goin’ Down.”  For this show, all I wanted to hear was “Selected Poems” from the new record.  The harder edge of the night seemed to go against it, but right there, mid-set, Brian Fallon took to the microphone and sang those first words: “Honey bee, she say I got too much sympathy…” And then the chorus:

And all I seemed to find is that everything has chains.
And all this life just feels like a series of dreams.
Selected poems and lovers I can't begin to name.
And all in all I find that nothing stays the same.

            Maybe, but sometimes you figure out how to break those chains.  I was shoved to the front and security poured water in my mouth and I threw my hands up, because Lorde is wrong, I’m not getting kinda tired of that.  Sweat-drenched and half-crazy, I was young, I was new, and I was ready to howl. 

I Ran a Women’s Comedy Festival and No One Noticed

By Kevin Quigley

            Women aren’t funny. 

            That’s the perception, much diminished but still prevalent, in this world of comedy.  Women can’t be funny.  The entire gender of women is incapable of humor.  A few might have a glimmer of comedy in them, but they can’t (and shouldn’t) headline a show.  If you want to put a bunch of them in a show together (and Jesus, why would you?), you’d better specify that this is a special “Women’s Night,” and strap yourself in for a bunch of mediocre jokes about dieting and boyfriend troubles. 

            Now, look.  Are women’s comedy nights necessary?  Absolutely, just as festivals championing women in comedy are necessary.  I just wish they weren’t.    

            A couple short stories: I’ve run a few sketch comedy groups, and I’ve always featured women in the mix.  It never occurred to me not to.  One time we had this sketch that was written for men, featuring the President of the USA and his chief of staff.  On our second or third run, I thought it would be neat to give the roles to two women in the group.  We changed the main roles to women and changed the genders in the script, but essentially left it exactly the same.  The actors asked me how they should play it.  “Should we be, like, total dudes, or should we be really girly?”  For them, it was a binary choice.  I was baffled.  Here were two people who were handed the roles of two of the most powerful people in the world and their only choices were to play them as dudebros or as coquettish ladies who just wanted to eat bon bons and gossip. 

            Was it internalized sexism that made them think those were the only ways to play those characters?  The comedy world in macro dictating what they could do in micro?  Was it the fact that I was directing them, and I’m a man, and men expect women to be funny in very specific, hellishly outdated ways?  I don’t know.  All I knew was that my group had to focus its energy in making all characters as interesting and funny as all the other characters, regardless of gender.

            My other story: I run a comedy night at a venue called Johnny D’s Uptown, in Davis Square.  Every Monday night, it’s something different.  Standup, storytelling, sketch, weird night.  My friend Josh Poirier brings in his British-style panel show, Interesting Points, in, and he and Sean Clarke do an improvised standup show called Tight Five.  It’s great, it’s eclectic, we get a lot of funny people on the show.  One time, after a One Microphone standup show, a comedian came up to me and told me how refreshing it was to see three women on the roster when there were eight people total. 

            “Refreshing?” I asked.

            “Well, yeah.  Normally when I do standup nights, they know they have to have one woman on, for diversity.  If I don’t get on that show, I have to find another show to do.  It’s rare to see two women on a standup night.”

            I stood there gape-mouthed.  This is 2014.  How is that even possible?  It reminded me of an interview Sarah McLachlan gave in the early 1990s, when radio wouldn’t play her and Madonna in the same hour, so as not to saturate the radio waves with female voices.    

            In April, I hatched a scheme.  As I said above, women’s comedy nights and women’s comedy festivals are necessary … but I wanted to imagine a world after that.  I wanted to time travel to a future in which a comedy night – even a whole comedy month – could be an entire roster of female voices and it wasn’t a big deal.  That’s what every revolutionary idea ends up being, right?  No big deal. 

            August was going to be no big deal, except that every performer, every host, every comedic voice was going to be a woman.  There was a standup night, a Tight Five night, a panel show, and a storytelling night.  All women.  And I didn’t let anyone in on what I was doing. 

            The whole thing was part experiment, part hubris, and part a very genuine desire to feature as many funny women as possible.  The hubris part came from the fact that my little comedy show had finally started garnering some real audiences weekly, and I was certain the venue would just keep pulling people in.  I promoted the shows like I would promote any Johnny D’s show, with a Facebook event page clearly listing all the comics … so if you were really terrified of seeing an all-woman show, you could make sure and avoid it.  And what happened?

            People showed up.  Women.  Men.  Friends of the comics, people off the street.  No one demanded his or her money back.  No one walked out when they found out that it was all women.  Some weeks were more popular than others – a couple wildly popular ones, excitingly.  And on stage?  Stories about losing time on mushrooms.  Standup about weirdly racist bus rides.  Anecdotes about Weekend at Bernie’s 2.  And, yeah, some jokes about dating and periods and dieting.  Because all that’s funny.

            A single gender isn’t a single voice.  People lead individual lives and have individual responses to those lives.  They have unique points of view and they have weird ways of looking at stuff and then they bring that to the stage and other people connect to that.  These are elementary facts.  Why does saying this seem like I’m trying to make a statement about something so damn obvious? 

            My big takeaways from this whole month: people don’t seem to care if it’s all women on stage, so long as they’re laughing … which is kind of the point of any comedy night.  If the venue has a reputation for quality comedy (and mine seems to have gotten there) people will show up to laugh.  And – this is the big one – tokenism is not the way to go.  I didn’t do this so I could wipe my hands on my jeans and say, “Well, that takes care of the whole girls aren’t funny problem.  I’ve proven my point; let’s bring on only chubby white guys from now on!”  I book, produce, and host a night of comedy in Boston; shouldn’t my entire goal be to feature the best out there, every week?

            I ran a women’s comedy festival for a month and no one noticed, and that’s great … but next week, there are three or four women on the standup roster and my Comic Meritus this winter is a hilarious person who has a vagina.  We’ve skipped all the bullshit about how things should be and just made them how things are.  See you at the comedy show. 

            

The Path to Panic

Between 1999 and 2009, I wrote seventeen novels.  Seventeen novels in a decade.  No matter how you look at it, that’s pretty impressive.  And it’s not like all of those books were tiny little tossed off manuscripts, either.  I did a few for NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month, in which the goal is to write a 50,000 word novel in one month.  I’ve completed that task three times, but only one novel was completely finished in that time; the others were completed long after NaNo was over.)  Most took between four and eight months to write, with the exception of what is still my magnum opus, The Legend of Jenny McCabe, which took nine months and topped out at just over 1,000 pages. 

            I’m not just dicking around here.

            Between 2009 and 2013, I wrote no novels.  Oh, don’t get me wrong.  I kept busy.  In 2009, I lost my job and slipped into a profound depression for a little while.  What saved me was an offer to work on a nonfiction book about Stephen King, called The Illustrated Stephen King Movie Trivia Book.  Research and writing absorbed me; four months later, I emerged with a whole bunch of pages and a deeply thorough knowledge of the Children of the Corn films.

            More nonfiction books followed: I worked on a series of chapbooks about Stephen King – 80-page works that focused on specific facets of King’s career.  In 2010, I compiled those into a single volume, along with all my critical reviews of King’s books.  The result, A Good Story and Good Words, is awaiting publication.  I also wrote Stephen King Limited in a chapbook two-pack; I’ve since expanded that, and publication looks to be imminent. 

            I’ve also gotten a short story published in a real-life anthology.  Compiled my own anthology of short stories (This Terrestrial Hell, out in paperback soon).  Got a couple of volumes of poetry published (Foggy at Night in the City and Surf’s Up, both available as ebooks).  And tried, really hard, to write new novels.

            And failed. 

            It’s not easy, writing a book.  It takes time, will, energy, and drive.  And caffeine.  It also takes the ability to know you’re writing a first draft, and that while things like theme and tone and character and motivation are important, they can always be tightened up in second and third drafts.  Still, it’s work.  It’s hard work, and you advance incrementally, like working out.  Even on those days you somehow churn out 7,000 words, that’s only about twenty-five pages in a book that should contain hundreds. 

            I’m not sure what happened to those two books I tried to write in those “dead” years.  American Storm was intended as another of my multi-character explorations of people my age living in Boston; largely plotless and reliant on situation.  Most of my books are like that.  Tangerine was positioned as a new horror novel about a writer possessed by the ghost of a dead writer from the 1940s, and the havoc he creates.  That one had a plot, but I never fleshed it out entirely past the second part, and my characters were just a little too similar to those in Stephen King’s Duma Key, and I gave up halfway through.

            Both of those ideas are still viable, by the way.  I’m still interested in going back and writing them.  But they need massive tweaks to get them to where I want to get them, so they remain in the future.

            What else did I do in the dead years?  I edited.  I had two rules when I started writing: a book needed to be at least 40,000 words (about 165 pages) to be considered a novel, and I would Never Look Back.  That meant when I finished one book, I would put it aside, wait two weeks, then start on another.  No second draft.  No third draft.  No polish.  I never edited my books.  I never thought it was necessary, because I’d go through and edit while I was writing it, so my first draft was super clean.  The 40,000 word rule still stands (though I’ve never written a book fewer than 52k words), but oh my God, what hubris on that editing thing. 

            In my fallow time, I decided to look at books I’d written in the past and try to make them publication-ready.  I turned to Kickstarter for that.  My first Kickstarter project, I’m On Fire, was a book I wrote in 1999 and needed a complete overhaul.  I basically kept all the characters and most of the motivations and rewrote everything else.  When that turned out successful, I turned to Kickstarter again with my book Roller Disco Saturday Night, which started off as a NaNoWriMo novel but didn’t end that way (for that reason, the first half was written very fast and the second half was written very slowly, and it read that way).  All the main characters were interesting, sort of, but my main main character lacked agency and motivation.  Which sucked, because I’ve made a little cottage industry about casting high school girls as my main characters, and usually they’re cooler than that.  Kickstarter allowed me to rewrite Roller Disco from the ground up and give Ruth Geary a reason to be, and I will be forever grateful for that. 

            When I finished Roller Disco, I decided to try my hand at something new.  Something small.  A novella I called My Agent of Chaos.  It was going to be a roommate-from-hell scenario, short and punchy and nasty.  It turned out to be a little more interesting than that, with a main character who can’t remember his past – a detriment when the past comes back to meet him.  It’s about love and sex and memory and while it’s not perfect, it brought me back to writing longform fiction (145,000 words, about 600 pages) for the first time in four years.  It wasn’t an easy book to write.  Sometimes it was like dragging words out of me with a chain and a winch.  But it came.  It happened.   

            In those dead years, I tried to start the fifth book in my Wayne Corbin crime novel series three or four times.  The title Panic Town came to me in 2010, actually, and I knew it was going to be about a book that my main guy had to find.  I also knew I had to deal with the events of the last book, in which a number of tragedies occurred.  The other issue was that the last Wayne Corbin book was written in 2004, a decade ago.  I wanted the events of this book to occur fairly soon after that.  Because of the time jump in real life, I decided to adhere to the Robert B. Parker/ Spenser way of time, in which time does pass and characters do grow older, but not at the same rate as the author or the outside world.  For example, the second book in the series, The Color of Blood and Rust, was written in 2000, and I talk all about how AOL is a big deal.  In Panic Town, they’re all using iPhones, and it’s not a big deal.  There are ten years between books, but for Wayne Corbin, only seven months have passed.  That’s the magic of fiction. 

            Here’s the magic of reality: I was twenty-four when I first launched into the world of Wayne Corbin.  I’m knocking on forty’s door right now, and while it took me a few days to get the rhythm of Wayne’s world, I took to it with aplomb.  Kickstarter likely had something to do with that.  The way Kickstarter has worked for me is as a book advance, which a traditional publisher will do to give the writer time and space to work on his novel until the next one.  In his most popular days, Stephen King would often get tens of millions for a three or four contract.  I got about $4,000 to spend four months writing Panic Town, and I worked like a mad bastard earning that money. 

            But it was also that I fell in love with writing fiction again, exploring worlds I created and making them live.  I sent out the book yesterday and I’m waiting to hear back from my readers.  I hope they love reading it as much as I loved writing it.

            The what-now: I have a score of poems to write for people who donated $75 or more.  I am going to start editing My Agent of Chaos; it really needs a second draft.  And working on an outline for the NaNoWriMo novel I’m tackling for November, what aims to be a short, bittersweet novel called Things Have Changed.  If I can finish it, it will be my twentieth novel.  Twentieth.  Wow.

            Okay, thank you for reading. It’s time for me to get to work.

Flying Over Water

I’ve never been rich. I mean, there was that one time we lived with one of my Mom’s boyfriends for a year and I went to a fancy school where you rinsed with fluoride before the Pledge of Allegiance and you didn’t have to say, “under God,” if you didn’t want to. But that was seventh grade and now I’m in my late thirties and I don’t have rich stuff.

You’d think, given my semi-frequent trips, that I must have some money socked away. Not really. For about 5 months last year, I worked a second job that paid me … like ludicrous amounts of money. Money that they really shouldn’t have been paying me. Even they eventually realized that and dropped me unceremoniously one day, saying, “We cannot afford to pay you this much money. We can’t.” I was riled then but months removed, I get it. I mean, it was paying me almost three times as much as my actual real job. I was lucky. Everyone had a good Christmas and I paid for literally all my 2014 Disney trips in advance.

But even without psycho second job, that’s how I manage my trips. My “vices” are Disney and Drive-By Truckers trips and Starbucks. That’s pretty much it. And Disney sounds expensive, but it’s one of those things where you can pay incrementally and it’s spread out so much that it’s not that bad. Case in point: I’m going to France next year. And yes, I’m seeing Paris and the Louvre and all the cultural stuff, but we all know I’m going there to see Disneyland Paris. I’m going next April. I’ve been paying for it since this summer. Slowly. Incrementally. Because that’s how you win the race.

I told you all that to tell you this: last year, I went on my first cruise ship. A Disney cruise ship: the Disney Dream. My friend Jeff lured me onboard with promises of a whole new Disney experience, and onboard karaoke, and it being warm in November, and the novelty of three different restaurants with the serving staff following us the whole time. I realized today that I never really talked about the cruise, which I really should have (and which I probably will, at some point), but the biggest change for me on the Kev and Jeff Cruise Extravaganza is that it was the first time I’ve ever really relaxed on vacation. You guys know me. I’m not one to chill. My entire life is one long Type A initiative to get things done. That includes my vacations. I have moments of calming down, but I like to plan! and experience! and make the most of every second! Usually that works out for me. Occasionally I forget to have food and go bonkers and my friends have to get me in the shade and give me peanuts so I stop being so dizzy. Those moments are rare(ish).

But the cruise … I mean, look, like I said, I’m not rich. Not even close. But because Disney lets me pay for stuff over time, I get to have these rich guy experiences. I climbed aboard a big boat, and it took me to remote islands and only like one or two times was I terrified that actual literal sea monsters were going to rise from the depths and wrap their tentacles around my stateroom and drag us down. (Also, at one point, Jeff and I journeyed to the front of the ship at night, and it was dark for miles in all directions, and Jeff said, “Can you imagine that this is the last thing the people on the Titanic saw? Just black water and then nothing.” Then I punched Jeff.)

During our time on the ship, Jeff and I were together almost constantly … and it turned out pretty awesome. Jeff and I have gone on buddy trips before and it’s always been awesome, but people rarely get to see me actually relaxed. Because of that, and because this was a first for both of us, and because when you look out on the placid Atlantic at night and the stars are bright above and so close, and everything in every direction is a beautiful mystery … well, it was a profound experience for me, and one I was so happy to be sharing with someone I like so much.

So when it came time for my traditional birthday tattoo, and Jeff was going to be around for it, it didn’t take me long to figure out what I wanted. I mean, sure, it’s a corporate logo, but who says logos can’t be beautiful? There was simplicity in the design, and if there’s a connecting thread in my tattoos, it’s that pop iconography is vital and important to me.

Besides which, it was going to be the last one I got from my rocktastic artist John, who was giving up the Boston life to go back to his native Michigan, just as Kelly the Wonder Tattooist had left to return to Texas years before. The folks at Chameleon just trade me on – my next guy is a man named Joe and I want nothing more for Christmas than my first ink with him. But John, who had done some of my most intricate art (Hardy/Arbuckle) and some of my most important (Dream Baby Dream) was moving on; an icon for a ship seemed apt.

It didn’t hurt, much. It didn’t take long. And it didn’t cost much. But tattoos tie you to two experiences – what the ink is about, and how the ink happens. Forever, this one little logo represents my amazing experience on the Disney Dream with one of my best friends, and my farewell to a great artist who put so much of his talent on my skin.

I set sail again next week. I can’t wait to get on board, and show this thing off.