RICH AND I fumble putting singles into
Brian Panowich’s G-string.
“No, dude. Lincolns only,” Panowich
says, lording over me at the edge of the stage. I snap the George Washington in
the thin strip of waistband material hard enough to leave a welt. It looks at
home with all the other welts he already has. Part of Panowich’s stage presence,
his flair, is to taunt the men as he catwalks round, snapping that thing. Grubbing
for bills.
It’s been a rough night, but it’s paid
well. Which is good, because ol’ Ryan here needs a new hip after what Brian did
to me last week.
“Hey, have you seen Joe and Tom?”
Panowich asks, kneeling down. All the dudes at the stage cheer and Panowich
smiles, does his signature no-pants-hand-stand for them. Everybody rants. Everybody
raves. Something wet hits me on the cheek. I ignore it, much to my chagrin.
“No,” I say, stub out a smoke.
Rich leans in. “Last I saw, they were still
doing touch-and-goes over at that Supple
Hands joint you took me to.”
That was hours ago.
“All right,” Panowich says as he drops
back down, collects bills scattered along the runway. “If you guys want, meet
me in the Celebrity Room. Text Joe and Tom or whatever. They’re supposed to do
a triple-decker with me later.”
Last triple-decker I was involved in
threw out my back for a month. I’ve been sober since 2003 but that was enough
to drive me to get thirsty again.
Rich and I stand up; walk through the throngs
of salivating, skeezy customers and over to the dude at the velvet rope. Rich
has a hard time keeping a straight line. Whatever that orange pill was he took
over at The Supple Hands has him
teetering and bleary-eyed. That’s not good, considering the gun he has tucked
in his belt.
The dude is dressed like all the
bouncers here: khakis, polo, ‘roided out muscles. I’m sure somewhere in there
is a barbed wire tattoo and dreams of being in the WWE. At the velvet rope I
lean in, say, “Brian Panowich has reserved us the Celebrity Room.” The dude
stares. Doesn’t move. He’s probably sick of hearing the sounds coming out of
that place.
“So let us in.” I say. Still staring.
Nothing.
Rich clears his throat. That vein
throbs in his forehead, the one that says he’s getting ready to go drill
sergeant on someone’s ass. His vent pops, he pulls out his iron, stuffs it in
the guy’s face. “The only kind of velvet I tolerate has an Elvis painted on
it.”
The dude gawks. I would as well if I
had eighteen pounds of blue steel itching up my nostril. I’m surprised the dude
don’t piss his drawers. Maybe he don’t speak no English. I hold up a hand.
“What my friend means is the rope needs to move and we need to go inside. He
hates velvet. Please understand he’s whacked out of his mind right now, so some
of the things he says don’t translate well.”
The dude relents, unsnaps the damn
thing and we blow on past. Rich shoves the iron down his pants again just as
Panowich shrugs on a robe and starts walking our way, his tittie tassels
jiggling with each step. The only problem is, Rich, still fired up from almost
killing that guy, he shoves the gun too hard.
Fires it. In his pants.
“Holy shit Ryan! Some dude done
blasted off my jimmy!” Rich shouts, pulls the gun back out. Never sees the
blood spray on his own damn barrel. Just turns around, holding the gun in one
hand. He then yanks out a second gun—one I never knew he had—and goes apeshit.
Screaming like a banshee. The DJ shits his pants. Music cuts like it were a bad
record. Lights come up, bodies rain down.
The all-male, all-nude, all-inclusive
joint Brian Panowich single-handedly put on the map turns into a hot zone
straight out of Afghanistan. Bullets everywhere. Fire. Dead bodies. Rich
running around fucking the place up like no one will believe, even after they
see it on tomorrow morning’s news.
And through all of it, Panowich easily
strolls up to me with that Southern swagger of his. Dudes getting shot in the
back, their guts bursting out through their belly in one big wash of intestine
and goo. He sidesteps his manager—well,
the upper half of his manager, still feebly reaching out for Brian with one
crimson-soaked hand—and takes me by the arm. Gently. Puffs his cigarette.
“Let’s go into the room and do this interview,”
he says as Rich stumbles around, massacring employees and patrons alike as a
red blossom fills the crotch of his pants and sends two thick runners down his
legs.
To the soundtrack of people screaming
like animals run over in the road and Rich hooting and hollering, I ask my
first question.
***
Define
noir for the masses, please.
Noir is the other side of things. It’s
the shit that happens in the negative space. Take anything bright and shiny, or
mundane and ordinary, and turn over the stone, all the ugly dealings happening
in the dirt underneath, in the shadows, is what noir is about to me. That’s the
thing that keeps people interested whether they want to admit it or not. People
love stories about fuck-ups fucking up. Look at all the great antagonists in
pulp and crime stories through the years, Sam Spade, Joe Gillis, Jake Gittes, Marv and Dwight from
Sin City, they’re all fuck-ups. Even the cool ones, the guys with the razor
sharp lingo and the smokin’ hot dames, they still spend most of their time
dodging the shit storm they brought down on themselves, and the rest of the
time trying to un-fuck their lives.
Who doesn’t want to read about
somebody living under a bigger mountain of shit luck then we are? It makes our
lives feel a little better by comparison and if the poor fuck we’re reading
about comes out on top instead of catching a bullet in the brain-pan, than it
even puts a little light at the end of the tunnel. So, you see what I did
there? Noir is a warm and fuzzy, hope-inspiring genre (up your collective asses,
Lit-Fic social club).
You used to be a professional musician. Walk us through that evolution, how it came to be that you settled down as a family man, a writer, a fire fighter/EMT.
I grew up a comic book geek in the
90’s, foil covers, Force-Works, The Death of Superman, Batman
Forever trading cards, the whole shebang. And although Matt Wagner’s Grendel, and Frank
Miller’s Sin City blew my world apart and went on to shape the
kind of writer I’d be, my deep swooning love for that shit practically
guaranteed I’d never get laid.
In my high school you have two kinds
of guys: football guys and guitar guys. It was clear from my comic book
fixation that football was never going to be my thing, so I grew my hair long
and picked up my Dad’s guitar. I knew I still wanted to be the next Frank
Miller, but the rock ‘n roll thing was my cover to impress chicks. Turns
out I got pretty good at it and I spent the next damn near 15 years playing
that same guitar and reading my Wednesday stash in the back of the van between
shithole clubs. It was a good way for a single young man to see the world but
when my daughters came along, being in a van with three sweaty dudes and a
glove box full of crystal meth for 250 days a year stopped being so attractive.
I packed it up, moved back to Georgia.
After all that time being the center
of attention and running my own life, I knew I just couldn’t buy some slacks
and report to some dickhead with a time clock so the next career move was
obvious.
I needed to become The Batman.
I had the playboy part down but the
problem was I wasn’t a billionaire. Hell, I wasn’t even a thousandaire. The
Fire Service offered the next best thing. I got my own big red Batmobile tricked out with all kinds
of gadgets, a Batcave, A mask
and a uniform. I even have a utility belt, and every third day I get to combat
the evil that men do. Fucking rules.
Giving up the music was/is really
fucking tough though, and I needed another creative outlet or I was going to
explode. So, I picked up where I left off when I was a young man and put the
pen back onto the page. That first short story I wrote (Theo and Fat
Terry, you can find here
for free) was the physical equivalent to the last 20 minutes of a Bukkake
video. The release felt so good, I knew I would be doing this forever.
The family man part is easy. My wife
is so goddamn hot, I just do whatever she wants.
Dude, tell me about the bukkake stuff. I can't get enough. Where does your stuff come from? I remember you saying you wrote lyrics that told stories, so this is a natural extension. Are the stories similar?
Most of the stuff I’ve written so far
is based on shit that has happened to me, and then I just let the story spin
out of control and start to lie my ass off. Just this past year I have really
immersed myself in the world of online flash fiction. I tend to be long winded
with my shit, so flash fiction was a massive challenge for me. I discovered Shotgun
Honey and read and read and read for days. It was like being in a school
taught by some of the most badass teachers around. I put the second draft of my
novel on hold to try my hand at it.
Flash fiction is the closest format to
songwriting. You find your hook (normally the gut punch at the end) and build a
simple structure around it. You want people to leave your show singing your
songs, just like you want people who read your stories to carry them around in
their heads forever. John Rector’s
Folded Blue on SH is
a perfect example of that. It would have been the lead single off his record if
you get my meaning.
The
first thing I read of yours was on Shotgun Honey here. Loved it. I read on someone's blog
(which I can't find now to save my life) it was one of the best things she'd
read in 2012 up to that point. Know about this? If you don't sorry to tease you
with that dead end but it's true. I read that. You followed it up with another
story, Ceiling Fan In My Spoon, here. It made a huge impression. Now
you're winning contests and building a resume. What's next?
Other than Tracking down Joe Clifford and talking about the
fine art of Batman and drugs? I finished the first draft of my first novel, A
Warm Machine, that I’m calling Superhero Noir. It’s a cross
between The Rocketeer and Death Wish. It’s a culmination of
everything I love. The plan is to buckle down on that and begin pimping it out
next year. In the meantime, my story Sixteen
Down from Evolved
Publishing’s Evolution Vol. 2
just came out and is available here. That book is the first physical published
story of mine I ever held in my hand. I still have a hard-on from that.
Other stuff I have out there or coming soon are, Tales for the Toilet (short stories to be consumed on the shitter...) from Crowded Quarantine Press. It features my weird western short, Firewater. It can be found here. I also have stories in two anthologies from Pill Hill Press coming later this year, Use Enough Gun that introduces my on-going Urban Fantasy character Harmon Brown. Think Shaft meets The Yeti (I fucking LOVE making shit up!). The other one is called Nuke The Fridge in the Psycho Cinema collection. Joe Clifford just accepted my story Coming Down The Mountain for The Flash Fiction Offensive. And finally, My Wife Dawn...And The Dead will be one half of a split-book I'm co-writing with some guy named Ryan Sayles. You might have heard of him. It will be our unique take on the zombie apocalypse.
Other stuff I have out there or coming soon are, Tales for the Toilet (short stories to be consumed on the shitter...) from Crowded Quarantine Press. It features my weird western short, Firewater. It can be found here. I also have stories in two anthologies from Pill Hill Press coming later this year, Use Enough Gun that introduces my on-going Urban Fantasy character Harmon Brown. Think Shaft meets The Yeti (I fucking LOVE making shit up!). The other one is called Nuke The Fridge in the Psycho Cinema collection. Joe Clifford just accepted my story Coming Down The Mountain for The Flash Fiction Offensive. And finally, My Wife Dawn...And The Dead will be one half of a split-book I'm co-writing with some guy named Ryan Sayles. You might have heard of him. It will be our unique take on the zombie apocalypse.
The thing I’ve got my head into now is a mixed
media idea that will be kicking off with a story over at SH that debuts
on October 22nd. It’s called If I Ever Get Off This Mountain.
It’s part one of two companion pieces that tell a story from two different
sides of the same event. It’s an experiment in tone that turns the classic good
guy/bad guy theme on its ass.
Anyway, the cool part is, in addition
to the stories, I’m in the process of recording two songs, one theme per side,
and putting all of it together along with printable art as one big single
downloadable package under the title, The Ballad Of Bull Mountain: Told in stories, pictures, and
songs. I’m still trying to figure out all the logistics involved in
packaging and selling a multi-media project, but I think I’m on to something.
If I know one thing
about you, it's that Batman is huge in your life. What's your impression of the
Christian Bale trilogy? How has that character affected your writing? What
about his settings, tone, antagonists, etc?
As asinine as it may sound, I don’t think I would even be a
writer without the influence of the Batman. For those that know, that mythos is
largely, if not solely, the product of a hopeless addict named Bill Finger. A drug addled genius who
died penniless. That says a lot about the desperation and inner
fucked-uppedness that when into The Bat’s creation. Batman is Noir. Period. In
fact DC released an Elseworlds story called Batman: Noir and I thought it was a
little redundant. He fits the mold perfectly. Here you got a guy who has
everything, money, fame, beauty, the perfect life, but because of his broken
psyche and his Obsessive/Compulsive disorder he spends his life covered in the
worse kind of horrid shit he can get into. Most of it caused by his own hand.
He’s brilliant and cool as ice but doomed to the darkness forever. That concept
permeates EVERYTHING I write.
As far as Nolan’s
trilogy is concerned, I could go on and on about how it’s the single greatest
trio of crime movies ever made since The Godfather (because they are)
but that’s been said already. I’ll tell you this though, Nolan’s films are the first to really
respect the writers of the book throughout the years, Denny O’Neil, Frank Miller, Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon, etc., more
so than anything that’s come before. Most pay homage to the TV show, which was
conceived as a parody.
I remember sitting in
the theater with my Dad watching the first Tim Burton Batman, leaning over and saying, “This sucks.”
My Dad agreed and we both left disappointed. Directors that think they can
second-guess the fans that made the source material popular enough to make a
movie in the first place make me fucking crazy. I’d love to show Tim Burton my version of Noir with an
aluminum bat in a back ally somewhere. Nolan
not only gave the fans a movie to call their own but also made it very clear
that writing a superhero comic is on par with every literary profession out
there.
What theme song would play as you walk
into a room? Would you compose a theme song for me?
Anything by Waylon
Jennings would do for me, but for you Ryan? Nothing I write could ever
be better than the band of demons you currently have following you around
belting out a grind-core version of I’ll Tumble 4 Ya. That shit is
awesome. By the way, back in the day I got a chance to open for Slayer on the Jagermeister Tour (we were both sponsored by them) and those
guys get off stage, take their spikes and leather off, and put on glasses and Duckhead
shorts. Fucking hilarious to watch. Some of the nicest guys around.
If there was one
Brian Panowich story the world could read, what is it? Why?
Published? I would say Ceiling Fan In My Spoon. I tapped into something there. It’s
the only thing I have out there right now I wouldn’t want to revise. I
constantly wish I could edit or improve my stories after the fact, but that one
still breaks my heart to read. I’m pretty proud of it.
Unpublished? I absolutely cannot fucking wait to introduce
the world to Will Parsons and Emmett Cobb from A Warm Machine. It's about a
fireman (of course) that finds something in a house fire that gives him
ridiculous power, but it also puts a target on his forehead for some surly
motherfuckers. He's not that bright and ends up having his entire life burnt to
the ground, but armed with some inside knowledge and help from his dope fiend
uncle, the hunt begins for a little payback. It’s the story I’ve been waiting
to tell since I was that geek reading old crime comics in the back of The
Augusta Book Exchange, knowing full well this is what I wanted to do with my
life.
What
parts of Brian wind up in your stuff?
Damn near everything. The main
character in A Warm Machine
is a fireman, and the second lead is an ex-doper musician. I was able to use
those two huge chucks of my life experience to create two separate characters.
I also blend in the character traits and mannerisms of folks I meet or spend
time with to sweeten the pot. I tend to be a callous ass sometimes, so if my
characters were carbon copies of me, I wouldn't have any likable protagonists.
I met John Mellencamp once at a show my band was playing and I asked
him for some advice on songwriting. He told me to ALWAYS write what you know.
Never try to fake it because the fans will know. If you write a song about drug
addiction without having some kind of connection to it, all the people
struggling with that problem will know it and know your full of shit. They
won't support you, and your work will be dismissed by the people you’re trying
to reach. I think the same principle applies to writing. So yeah, it's
fair to say most of me ends up in what I write.
Where does your grit come from?
As a writer, I'm blessed to have two
very extreme environments to cull from. My past, out on the road I met and saw
a ton of surly folks doing surly things. Hell, I was one of them. I spent most
of my time in the world that exists in the wee hours and dark corners of bars,
pubs, and generally sleazy joints. I absorbed all of that. My present day job
as a Firefighter/ EMT-I shows me some of the most heinous and brutal things
that happen every day. This stuff happens in every city, everywhere, but no one
cooped up 9 to 5 in an office somewhere is prone to see it. The terrible shit
people hear about on the news while they eat dinner, I have my hands in every
third day. It changes you. A lot of the people that do this kind of work
get desensitized to it over time, but I don't want that to happen. So I write
about it. It's a coping mechanism.
If you and I were to get married, what would our children look like?
The women of the world would rejoice
because there would be entirely too much sexy in them genes…too bad, they would
most likely be serial killers.
***
And that’s Brian Panowich. I loved the
twist to his Shotgun Honey story Services
Rendered and from there I started seeing him everywhere. It just made sense
to pair up with him for a zombie apocalypse thing.
Nest week—Tom Pitts, of The Flash Fiction Offensive fame. The
dude has one crazy story to tell, a brand new novella out called Piggyback through Snubnose Press,
and-gasp!-he also was a former
rocker. Where could he go wrong? Oh wait, he’s Canadian. That’s where he goes
wrong.
