Plucking Around for the Week of June 20th
Hell, Hoagies, Wildmen, Wildfires, Kittens, Blind Man at the Bendix, and Enemas for Breakfast
I could just stop there. The news is an unmitigated hellscape, from police escorting the Proud Boys—a terrorist group whose leaders are charged with sedition during the January 6th coup attempt—to disrupt an LGBTQ children’s reading at a library, to the Supreme Court gutting the 4th Amendment, a lower court declaring that boycotts are not protected speech, and largest wildfire in the Pinelands in 20 years blazing in my favorite stomping grounds.
But I got to pet a doggo! That helps.
And I ate this magnificent sandwich:
This thing of utter beauty is a vodka sauce chicken parm with fried mozzarella squares on a house-made garlic parmesan pretzel bun, from Peter & Sons sandwiches in Glassboro. You may think I speak hyperbole, but the pretzel was crunchy outside and soft within; the sauce did not soak the breading, which remained crisp, and all the flavors were evident without any overpowering the whole glorious melange. It was a masterpiece. What led me here? Lauren said that Austin doesn’t make good sandwiches, and she likes Wawa. Now, there’s nothing wrong with a Wawa hoagie—how I absolutely love living in South Jersey where I can say hoagie1, instead of hero or sub—but an Italian from Wawa does not showcase what the sandwich capital of the world, New Jersey, can do with a hoagie roll and a relish for overkill.
We invented the “Fat sandwich” on the Rutgers University Grease Trucks, which were so delicious, and so monopolized student income that New Brunswick banned them because the local businesses could not compete. There are competitors everywhere now, and if you haven’t had a hoagie with chicken tenders, jalapeño poppers, and macaroni and cheese, you should live a little. If that’s revolting to you, maybe something like Fiore’s of Hoboken, some fresh house-made mozzarella cheese sprinkled with olive oil, roasted peppers, a little arugula, and balsamic glaze, maybe a slice of fried eggplant cutlet, will satisfy. Now I’m hungry. Better change the subject before I go make a crazy sandwich…
Writer stuff:
I will be attending NeCon 40, the NorthEast Writers Conference in Lowell, MA, this July! My story “Item 214: a Curiosity,” will appear in the commemorative anthology edited by horror maven Bracken MacLeod (of the Clan MacLeod) and I will be visiting with my artist pal Kim Parkhurst to sign books, talk paranormal entities, and enjoy ourselves. NeCon is a horror fiction con, and as these things go, the darker the subject matter the cooler and more chill the event. Murder Mystery cons are pretty relaxed and friendly, but NeCon is the most laid-back, clique-free con that I’ve ever attended. From the writers to the people who run the show, everyone is friendly. It’s like they are waiting for you to drop your guard so you can be sacrificed to the elder gods. And my story “Blue Canaries” will appear in the next issue of Vautrin, the best literary and grit fiction journal going. Check them out.
Back to your regularly scheduled hellscape…
So, some dingleberry started an illegal campfire in Wharton State Forest, and nearly 14,000 acres have burned. Fires in the Pines are part of the cycle of renewal, but this was a big one, with smoke improving the smell of Philadelphia and beyond. We were lucky it was in an uninhabited area and that the Forest Fire Service (initials FFS, for fuck’s sake) got it under control in a matter of days. I’m going to stay away from Wharton until they give the high sign.
I recently read two great books, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and The Road to Wellville by T.C. Boyle. The Morrison book is short and powerful and almost experimental, but easy to read and understand, following three Black children in a 1941 household and then expanding to show us where every stunted adult met with what made them so. I wanted more of Claudia, the original narrator, but every character was brilliantly realized and it was sort of like Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio in that regard.
The Road to Wellville is an epic saga of how breakfast food conquered the American colon, thanks to Dr. Harvey J. Kellogg, who believed in abstaining from sex and alcohol, a vegetarian diet focused on roughage, and five enemas a day, to mimic the freely defecating and healthy lives of monkeys in the trees. And Boyle doesn’t even touch on Kellogg’s embrace of eugenics, or how he burned children’s clitorises with acid or performed circumcision without anesthesia to stop masturbation! It would be much less funny with those details added, but the book is hilarious, and should be taught in history classes to help explain why Americans eat Grape Nuts and believe in any batshit medical claim like toxic cleansing, intermittent fasting, and paleo.
That’s the first book by T.C. Boyle that I’ve read, and it won’t be the last. The movie adaptation of The Road to Wellville stars Matthew Broderick, Bridget Fonda, John Cusack, and Anthony Hopkins, and is lesser than the book but also delightful. It focuses more on sex, but it’s still very funny and there is a lot of nudity. Did I mention that Bridget Fonda’s in it? And Matthew Broderick?
I also watched two excellent documentaries. The first is Incident at Oglala, about the shooting of two FBI agents on the Pine Ridge reservation and how Leonard Peltier was imprisoned for it, because our justice system will gladly convict the wrong person as long as the right sort of someone pays for the crime, so they can close the case and somehow sleep at night. It’s infuriating viewing. And Peltier is still rotting in prison.
More lighthearted is The Gleaners and I: Two Years Later, by Agnes Varda. As I mentioned earlier, I bought the complete set of her films from the Criterion Collection, and have been picking through them. I had already watched The Gleaners and I, about people who survive by picking the leftover vegetables and fruit from farms, and gathering other unwanted things. This was a “right” of the people until recently, and this “sequel” is a return to check on the people Varda met. Both are very empathic and kind films, and are good for the soul.
If you want to know more about what was stolen from the landless by the rich, and how a white nationalist made the phrase “the tragedy of the commons” a household phrase when in actuality, the overuse of shared goods is almost always performed by rapacious entrepreneurs and not people focused on subsistence, I recommend you read this incredible article by Eula Biss, “The Theft of the Commons.” The short version: You used to be able to survive and prosper by raising livestock and crops on communal land, until capitalists needed starving workers to labor cheaply in factories, so they stole the land and took away the livelihoods of generations of families and turned them into desperate laborers.
After that, you’ll need a soul cleanse, and I recommend “Bacon ‘n Laces,” a wonderful short film about the blind owner of the iconic Bendix Diner, which sits on a triangle in the middle of Route 17 in Hasbrouck Heights, New Jersey. It’ll make you want to drop by and order a pizza burger, or an ordered of fried mozzarella sticks. If I remember, they put a soupçon of anise in their marinara dipping sauce, which for some reason, works.
Oh, another movie I watched again recently, on my Ken Russell kick, was Altered States. Based on the novel by Paddy Chayefsky, it’s utterly nonsensical, bizarre, and perfect. Starring William Hurt as a scientist obsessed with using sensory deprivation tanks to return to the primal ancestry locked inside the human mind, he somehow reverts to a prehistoric wildman and goes on rampages, and wakes up butt naked in a zoo, much like David Naughton in An American Werewolf in London. He begins to devolve and melt into pure energy, and it’s up to his fellow scientist and spouse, played by Blair Brown, to save him. Rather like Russell’s In the Lair of the White Worm, this is an adaptation that somehow succeeds when the source material is difficult to film. Unlike his Gothic, which has some interesting scenes, but didn’t work for me. It was sort of a yawner, despite being about the weekend with Lord Byron where Mary Shelley was inspired to write Frankenstein, and Dr Polidori to write “The Vampyre,” the first modern vampire story. The film was boring, and Timothy Spall as Polidori was the best part. But Altered States certainly holds up. The last time I saw it was on HBO in 1981, and I’m holding out for a Criterion restoration.
And finally, because this month has been so awful, here is a heartwarming story and video about a Louisiana man who pulled over to save a kitten on the side of the road… and was mobbed by twelve more! And he rescued them all in his Honda.
You can see more videos on his Instagram. He’s also a competitive long-distance bolt-action shooter. People are not always what you expect.
Good news: the Senate passed a gun safety bill that expands background checks, empowers red flag laws, and closes domestic abuser loopholes, so violent people will have a more difficult time getting guns. (And let’s not argue about the efficacy of gun laws. I was a former NRA life member and I am still a gun owner; as a bare minimum, I want New Jersey’s strict firearms regulations as the law of the land. There’s a reason this densely populated state hasn’t had a mass shooting with more than 3 deaths since 1949, and it’s not our mental health).2
Oh, and if you want a helpful book on legally navigating an encounter with the police without blathering until you are arrested for something innocuous, which happens more often than you think, I recommend You Have the Right to Remain Innocent by James Duane. Trust me, my father (the Coco killer) was also a cop.3
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Just say it. Draw it out. Hoooooagie. It feels good, doesn’t it?
We are not immune, but for a state of 8 million people, we have had relatively few of these peculiarly American slaughters: John List murdered his family in 1971; the biggest is the “Walk of Death” 1949 spree killing by Howard Unruh. In Jersey City in 2019, three people were killed by two members of an anti-Semitic hate group armed with an AR-15.
Who was fired. For stealing. I’ll tell that one some other time.
I particularly needed and appreciated your Pluckery this week, Thomas. Thank you. And thank you for reminding me to replace my dvd of Altered States, as it skips.