The Monthly Rag

The Ink Stain appeared in this volatile stretch of time, our first real run-in with direct competition. The history of this zine and its creator forms a rather craggy peak through my own past, going as far back as middle school, where I picked on the younger writer for simply being lower on the social totem pole. It’s not something I’m proud of, you can guess, but that’s junior high for you (possibly the ugliest thing anyone can have to live through). It was now three years later, and the tall Freshman he’d become was newly inducted into The Timberwolf Howl, much like I had been at his age. We crossed paths in the hall a lot, both of us making eye contact, acknowledging our identities and smiling out of uncomfortable tension. I used to be him, I would think. I wondered if I should warn him of the false promises of the school paper and try to offer him a spot on ours, just out of decency and perhaps from my own guilt for having been a cock to him all that time ago. One day I finally just went up and talked to him. He knew who I was and he knew about The Rag, and we talked about writing, and music, and movies, and he seemed a generally likable fellow. We appeared to be on eye level about a lot of things, and I felt this strange fatherly sort of thing kicking in. Perhaps I could be some sort of a positive influence to the boy.

His article in The Howl not long after our encounter I really didn’t see coming. Basically, he retold our story from their perspective (or atleast, how it was told to him), which you can imagine took some liberties and had an entirely different outlook on the situation. Good old head counsel advisor had used the poor underling as a vocal piece for his own wrath at us, and it read like a big FUCK YOU, RAG in that oily between-the-lines politically correct kind of way. Perhaps it was his revenge after all these years of waiting. Bygones being bygones, I left him to his opinion and his happy existence on the other side. But then the guy starts writing Memo and sending us letters advertising his own zine, yet untitled, that was planning on making its debut shortly. It called for all “creative young adults” of the coast to send in writing and poetry and whatever else to be published in a free speech for all printed rebel yell. Hadn’t he just slammed us for doing the same thing? Still, I printed his ad…to this day I’m not entirely sure why. Back to that middle school guilt, I guess. And then it exploded right in my face when word got to me that The Howl was actually going to help this approved child prodigy pay for and put his dream together.

Meanwhile, from our six-hundred and fifty dollar a month dwelling on Cypress street, Summer and I ran the production end of the paper, now heading steadily toward its second anniversary. Marco had glued together a basic computer that I was able to take home and use for writing, and after the columns were all saved to disk, I’d head up to Memo to print them out on the laserwriter and begin the layouts. When the text was all the way I wanted (or rather, the best I could get it before time ran out), I would bring them back with me, leave them with Summer for an evening, and let him put together his comic and fill in all the white gaps with clipart. It had become something of a reliable system. Matt and Joe were our regular contributing writers, with various submissions from readers and occasional help-us-outs from our scattered friends Bee-Jay Joyer, Ben Tuke, Kingsley Robson, MyQ Attanasio, and Jayme Ridge. Jayme, in fact, was Summer’s girlfriend, so she was at our house most of the time as it was. On top of all this, we were in the middle of attempting to shoot our first movie, a perfectly awful genre thing called Backwoods Slasher (and then later Backwoods Massacre), which took up the rest of everyone’s free time. There were ups and downs, laughs and tears. One story in particular that I love to share is the time I was returning home from Safeway, hands full of groceries, only to be accosted at my front door by our elderly apartment neighbor. She was a kind lady named Dorothy who kept her tv up loud because of hearing issues, which suited us fine because it allowed us to blast our strange hybrid of rock, metal and r&b, and nobody lost any sleep. Dorothy was like everyone’s grandmother should be–nurturing and sweet. I locked myself out of the house in the pouring rain once, not long after I had moved in, and the dear woman brought me inside her own warm abode to use the phone and fill me up with home-baked cookies. Now there she was, all excited and waving arms. “You boys are on the radio!”, she says, swinging a Rag around that I had given her some ways back. Undeniably curious, I got the lock undone, and we both wandered in to find Summer, who looked up from drawing as I dropped all the bags on the floor.

“Dude, we’re on the radio.” I said, reaching for the tuner dial. “Which channel?”

Before I got an answer, the speakers crackled to life, and with them a heated debate among the community senior citizens about “that homosexual newspaper that was corrupting the local youth.” Let me give you some back story for this: about two weeks prior to this fiasco, our recent edition was on deadline to hit the presses. The routine that had been established was in check, and I had brought the layouts home like usual so that Summer could fill up his back page comic and then decorate around all the edges. He would usually take clipart from other magazines, specifically Thrasher, Heavy Metal (the adult comic, not the music one), Spin, Rolling Stone, and whatever else he could find laying around the coffee table. On this occasion, apparently, we were short on material to cannibalize.

“All I have is a Adam and Eve catalog.” he told me.

I was too tired to really care, since I’d been up forever finishing the columns, and I just said “well, whatever. It leaves at 7 a.m.–just do what you have to do.” And so he did. I got up bright and early, chugged back a Safeway select Grapefruit Soda (dear God, I can still remember that vile elixir wanting to revisit me over the Willits road) and knocked on my room mate’s door to get the pages. Sheepishly, the boy answers in his underwear, looking like he’d been asleep for about the last ten minutes, and slowly slips me his painfully-won accomplishment. It’s proper etiquette for an editor to give a once-over on the final draft, so I quickly spread them out in my hands to see if indeed things were kosher for release. I stoned over, stunned as I beheld what could have been described loosely as Fellini’s printed monthly. In every space was a sex-toy; giant black vibrators lined the underside of some poor writer’s perfected wordsmithing, a penis pump sat looking lonely smack dab below an ad for Napa Auto-Parts. I had to actually avert my eyes when I saw the blow-up farm animal.

“Dude?!”

“Dude…I told you.”

“Dude!”

It’s almost alarming the way teenagers can have whole emotive conversations with that single word.

A honk came from down in the parking lot, where Jef Fanning sat impatient in his truck, waiting for me to come down the stairs. But I was still standing there, polarized.

“Dude!!!” Honk! “Fuck!” Honk! HONK! HONK!

“Just fuck it–print it.”

What choice did I have? With a shrug and wayward glance, I slipped the sheets under my arms and grabbed the cash off the counter to head out the door. Now here we were, two weeks later, listening to a live talk show as they pondered what to do about our sodomy and filth. We tried to call in, as many listeners were already doing, and justifiably defend ourselves. At the very least, we could try to make it clear that our intentions were in no way orientated to preference, but simply that we’d been fresh out of decent clipart. The line was too busy to get through even once, of course, so all that could be done now was sit back and laugh.

I’m also quite fond of the time we were both selling ads at a new lingerie shop that had opened down on Franklin street. We spoke with the female co-owner, an attractive middle aged woman who ran the business with her husband, and since Summer was doing the talking at the moment, I went to quietly peruse the product lines. In the back of the store, they had a small section dedicated to X-rated paraphernalia, and with my foot (I don’t touch much in public, due to that lovely OCD, and items used specifically for vaginal and anal stimulation get the extra treatment). I start spinning the small revolving rack, reading labels. In a sheer moment of horror, a stud-lined ass intruder falls from its shelf, hits the floor, and rolls out of the packaging. There is a noticeable clatter, all eyes falling on me while I hop about trying to balance on my other foot. The thick rubber dick goes shaft over head across the floor and disappears into a dark corner, where I attempt to kick it out from until my cartoonist runs up earnestly and fishes it back with working opposable digits.

Yes, I too am still amazed we didn’t lose that particular business deal.

I could also share the anecdote about the time I went into Out of this World in Mendo, on usual route to collect fare for an ad they had already placed twice, only to be asked not-so-politely to leave the store and never come back again. Seems they hadn’t bothered to read the content both previous issues and assumed we were school sanctioned and related. The half page review of John Wayne Bobbet: Uncut must be what finally got someone to pay attention. Still, things was fairly normal in the free press world. Running a production, even at our scale of budget, made for quite a challenge. And the medium was suddenly growing; aside from Memo and The Rag and another one called The Outlook, Mr. Howl’s newly appointed editor-in-chief finally got his hot weather balloon off the ground. The Ink Stain materialized on news stands nearest us, looking kind of how we looked in our fist newsprint edition (to his credit though, cleaner and straighter) but reading like the bastard son of his beloved mothership. In other words, it was fairly bland, in my humble fucking opinion. But then again, I write about horror, hand washing, sex, and sticking one to the big man, so what do I know? We all existed and filled our space, and apart from our own flame-wars behind closed doors and among our own staffs, most of the competitive hostilities stayed fairly low key.

That is, until the letter incident screwed everything up in a heartbeat.

CONTINUE TO PART 9