The first of six editions of Beat the Dust in 2010 is devoted to the work of our fifth Featured Writer, the novelist and poet, Tony O’Neill. The other four were Mark SaFranko, Adelle Stripe, Steve Finbow and Dan Fante. As always, we’ve got some exclusives for you, including stories from O’Neill’s 2009 collection, Notre Dame Du Vide, originally published in French by 13e Note Editions, a new poem, an early film review, and Tony reading an extract from his forthcoming novel, Sick City, to be published by Harper Perennial in the summer. In addition, Dan Fante has kindly interviewed Tony exclusively for this issue of Beat the Dust. Finally, dotted throughout the issue are Tony’s favourite youtube videos.
Dan Fante began his writing career in his mid-forties after many years as a drunk. “I went to a Christmas party in 1964 and sobered up sometime in the first week of January 1986,” says Fante. He writes poetry, plays, short stories and novels, his most recent being the latest in the Bruno Dante series, 86'd, which came out on Harper Perennial in 2009. Read it, it’s worth it for the superglue incident alone…
Submission Date:
15 Jan 2010
Category:
Interview
In Chap-book
Title:
Dan Fante interviews Tony O’Neill
Excerpt:
DF: Franz Kafka once wrote: "A good novel should have the same effect as a blow to the head." What is your goal as an author? What is your message to the reader?
TO: My goal is always to make the reader feel something. A lot of stuff bothers me about literature and the scene right now – a lot of the new stuff coming out is all tricks, and no soul. I suppose I write for the people who don’t want their books to be perfumed and sweet, and aren’t afraid to get some dirt under their fingernails...
Tony O'Neill on Untitled Poem, 2000: “This poem is an early one, written sometime in 2000 when I was at the height of some drug-induced madness. I would often get very productive when I was injecting crystal meth, and start grand projects - a series of paintings (I found a bunch of canvases in a dumpster in Hollywood, and shoplifted a set of oil paints), a novel, poems, and a screenplay based on the life of Joe Meek (for that story, you can read not quite joe meekhere – it’s the second story down). Of course, I never finished anything. This poem is one of the few to survive that I still like. I found it in a bloodstained notebook that somehow made it back from LA to London. I put it in my book, songs from the shooting gallery.”
Submission Date:
15 Jan 2010
Category:
Poetry
In Chap-book
Title:
Untitled Poem, 2000
Excerpt:
Hollywood You are a dirty whore I love you Lets get married
Lets get fucked up, lost, Take me down the worst parts Of Sunset Lets score crack at Donuts Unlimited Lets get bleeding tattoos Of the Virgin Mary
Tony on Don’t Look In The Basement: “Some of my earliest writing was movie reviews, for fanzines. I started doing this again on the Guardian's movie blog, but I really hate most blogs. I’m beginning to hate the internet. The internet depresses me because people depress me. On the internet everybody has an opinion. Some people think it’s funny to laugh at all the idiotic comments people leave on youtube, or on news sites, but for me it just makes me sad. Sometimes not being aware of how utterly fucking stupid most people really are, is a good thing. With the internet, people seemingly can’t wait to reveal what idiotic shit suckers they are. Anyway, this is a movie review I wrote a long time ago (maybe around the time I was writing digging the vein). Can’t remember who or where I wrote it for, but I don’t think it was ever published.”
Submission Date:
15 Jan 2010
Category:
Review
In Chap-book
Title:
Don’t Look In The Basement
Excerpt:
In the 1970’s there was a definite trend towards exploitation movies warning us not to do stuff. “Don’t Answer the Phone!” the posters screamed, “Don’t Go Near The Park” they warned. “Don’t Torture A Duckling,” they confusingly advised. Some were good, some bad, most were just plain strange. One of my favorite movies to emerge from this trend was “Don’t Look In The Basement”...
Tony on The Cure Is The Curse: “It’s no secret that I spent some time in the methadone clinics in LA, which were a pretty rough place. It did inspire quite a bit of writing though, including a long section in digging the vein and this poem. Having been a methadone patient in both LA and London, I can definitely say that things were much more humane in London. That said, it’s kind of like the choice between a kick in the balls and a kick in the teeth. This poem featured originally in songs from the shooting gallery.”
Submission Date:
15 Jan 2010
Category:
Poetry
In Chap-book
Title:
The Cure Is The Curse
Excerpt:
the old Chinese points to his down-turned mouth and you say ahhhhh after swallowing: they own your balls they own your soul and now they own your spit...
Tony on How Maria Lost Her Tooth: “This one is one of those weird stories that came out of nowhere. I always watch the people who dress up in goofy costumes outside Mann’s Chinese Theater and wonder what goes on in their private lives. I recall once seeing a dwarf dressed in a Chucky (Child’s Play) costume cursing out a tourist who tried to pick him up without asking permission first. The tourist kicked the dwarf and ran away, leaving Chucky laid out on the sidewalk.”
Submission Date:
15 Jan 2010
Category:
Short story
In Chap-book
Title:
How Maria Lost Her Tooth
Excerpt:
At four o'clock Charlie Chaplin walked into The Frolic Room, on Hollywood Boulevard. He pushed the door open, bathing the startled afternoon drinkers in vicious white light. They screwed up their faces and blinked with eyes long used to beer light and cathode hum, then looked away until the door fell shut again. Chaplain adjusted to the gloom and sucked in the cool, stale air. His shirt was undone at the collar, the bow tie hanging askew, crushed hat in his hand, and his tattered jacket slung over his arm. His white face was melting away at the forehead, patches of pink dissolving through the pallor, the exposed neck and throat a different hue than the face...
Tony on Finisterre: “This poem originally appeared in Remark, a really beautiful poetry book. It was printed in an edition of 125, which came out 3 or so years ago and was guest edited by Brian McGettrick, who is a really great poet in his own right.”
Submission Date:
15 Jan 2010
Category:
Poetry
In Chap-book
Title:
Finisterre
Excerpt:
today feels like the dread realization at the end of every detoxification: I am clean, but the world is still a daily holocaust...
Tony on Park Avenue Motel Aria: “One thing I love about NYC is reading the gothic sounding accounts of violence in the newspapers. "Child stabbed multiple times, set alight in dumpster" - headlines like that. This poem was inspired by a murder in a sleazy motel called the Park Avenue Motel that happened a few years ago. A guy picked up a drunk girl on the street, took her back to the motel, and then in front of his girlfriend, he raped and murdered her. The girlfriend watched the whole thing, and helped to dispose of the body. Like everybody I guess I'm fascinated by human beings' capacity for cold blooded violence, and this poem was my way of wondering exactly what was going through people’s minds at the time.”
Submission Date:
15 Jan 2010
Category:
Poetry
In Chap-book
Title:
Park Avenue Motel Aria
Excerpt:
I told him don’t be bringing no bitches back here. But, he don’t listen
don’t be fucking that skinny bitch on this bed don’t be playing me like that. But he don’t listen...
Tony on Loving The Dead: “I wrote a whole series of stories set in various drug rehabs in LA, and they are collected in Notre Dame Du Vide, published by the French publishing house, 13e Note Editions. This is one of them.”
Submission Date:
14 Jan 2010
Category:
Short story
In Chap-book
Title:
Loving The Dead
Excerpt:
Word around the place was that Mercedes had died and come back, and now she believed she was immortal. I never heard it from her own lips, we spoke less than twenty words in the time I knew her, but I had the sense that not only did she believe this but that it was also true. She was beautiful in the way that only those possessed by immortality can be. I do mean, “Possessed by immortality”. One cannot possess immortality, nuh-huh, it happens the other way around. For thirty days, while my roommates snored, I silently conjured her face as I manipulated myself into orgasm. When I came I wept sometimes because I knew I could never have her. I was a mere mortal, bound by flesh and blood, and therefore superfluous to her needs...
Tony on Las Vegas Man: “This poem is based upon my last trip to Vegas. I've only been there twice. The first time I got married to a girl I had known for less than a week. The second time was two years later, and I was divorced from her and heavily strung out. I thought that if I drove to Vegas, where I didn’t have any dope connections, I would somehow be able to quit. I took a bag of magic mushrooms with me. When the withdrawals started I was in a room at the MGM Grand, a hotel which had a Wizard of Oz theme. I ate the bag of magic mushrooms and my brain almost melted. Lesson: heroin withdrawals + magic mushroom = instant terror. The result was me stalking the streets of Vegas half out of my mind trying to score dope. I ended up fleeing Vegas so I could get to downtown LA and my dope connections before I lost my mind. This poem is inspired by that trip.”
Submission Date:
14 Jan 2010
Category:
Poetry
In Chap-book
Title:
Las Vegas Man
Excerpt:
a dead coyote on the road a massacre of red and browns turned inside out by a speeding Dodge fleeing to the city limits...
Tony on The Heart Is A Small Amputated Thing: “Here is another story from the collection Notre Dame Du Vide published by my French publisher, 13e Note Editions, who’ve also published my novel Down And Out On Murder Mile.”
Submission Date:
14 Jan 2010
Category:
Short story
In Chap-book
Title:
The Heart Is A Small Amputated Thing
Excerpt:
Carl was in the backseat, tearing open one of the black balloons with his teeth. He had the spoon balanced on his knees. He poured some Evian into the spoon and dropped a nugget of dope into the water. Nicole had the radio on. It was an 80’s flashback weekend again. Every weekend in LA seemed to be an 80’s flashback weekend. Rodney Bingeheimer started to play “Dead Man’s Party” by Oingo Boingo and Carl yelled, “Turn that shit off, you’re gonna kill my high"...
Tony on An Honest Day’s Work: “This is a new poem about an off-the-books job I took when I first moved to New York.”
Submission Date:
14 Jan 2010
Category:
Poetry
In Chap-book
Title:
An Honest Day’s Work
Excerpt:
on a roof in Brooklyn the wind is trying to blast us over the edge breaking us on ice covered rocks and debris below. I am working with a drunk German chewing on garlic gloves to disguise the smell of stale booze and a kid missing 3 fingers, all of us trying to put a wrought iron fence around the perimeter...
Sick City blurb: Two hapless drug addicts meet in rehab and concoct a get-rich-quick scheme that could only make sense to a couple of dope fiends. Their picaresque journey through LA has them bumping into a delightful plenty of grotesque characters: Dr. Mike, the Tony Robbins/Dr. Drew type Recovery Guru, whose self-help empire of luxury rehab centers, reality TV show, and best selling books could be tumbled by his secret obsession with Champagne, not the drink but a stunning transvestite; Trina, the stripper who has to give blow jobs for drugs because she's tapped her bank account for a "business expense" boob job; Spider, a former childhood sitcom star now stealing suitcases from the LAX carousels to see what he can pawn for drugs; Stevie Rox, the bloated movie mogul who orders (too loudly) the most expensive wines at Musso & Frank's; Rupert DeWald, the wealthy jingo writer who discreetly uses some of his wealth to acquire trinkets like Napoleon's penis for his "collection”; Pat, the sociopath dealer/killer who adds a delightfully dark tension, always lingering in the narrative's shadows, to an otherwise often blackly-humorous tale.
Submission Date:
14 Jan 2010
Category:
Audio Recording
In Chap-book
Title:
Sick City
Excerpt:
Tony O’Neill reads an exclusive extract from Sick City, to be published in July this year by Harper Perennial. It’s the first chapter of the novel. The music in the background is an obscure Primal Scream track, Badlands.To listen, click the play button
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