21 Short Dog Stories

By Vincent Quatroche

The stories collected in this book represent interpretations of the individual perspective spanning over 35 years. While somewhat biographical in places, like almost all alleged fiction is based upon, I will resist the wholesale codification that this work can be dismissed as trivial, contrived or confessional. What happens to us here on earth channels the prism of the collective through the sharp iris focus of the singular. We do share our elemental nature of humanity (well, some more than others), but of all the things we want to believe, love, fear or cling to this one truth is to my way of thinking unmistakable . Somewhere beyond philosophic negotiation or sophist negation the simple truth is you are born alone with nothing and will exit in exactly the same state at the end of the line. Any discussion of a supposed imagined afterlife is a matter for faith or conviction to either reassure or terrify. However any departure point for that debate might begin I believe with this perspective; If memory constitutes the soul then that soul must constitute memory. The soul could be defined a pure memory. If we take anything of personal identity away from this existence, would it not be every thought, action, dream or nightmare we experienced in a lifetime? If consciousness endures beyond the grave, we will inhabit our own memory for infinity. Perhaps a much more sobering thought than the traditional constructs of a heaven or a hell.

In part the writer performs the act of expression out of a deep personal compulsion and necessity. When the voice of the Stream of Consciousness is obsessed in reliving a past event, reordering present reality or projecting a possible future so loud and clear there must be a release to attempt to restore some tentative truce with sanity.

So the recording and retelling of experience commences attempting to make some sense, to make peace with the holocaust of confusion, fear and pain that seems to rage on a daily basis over the course of a lifetime unabated. So where does that leave joy, beauty, love and fulfillment to fit into all of this? Well of course it must, but unfortunately I believe it merely escapes, leaks or somehow perseveres to force itself as a counterbalance to the dark other. And of course there absolutely must be a Court Jester There has to be. Lacking a sense of humor and appreciation of irony or the absorb, the perspective is twisted in a mask of madness and bitterness which drains the color from the mind, heart and soul into a small, gray, hard core of desolation. Then, our existence in this flesh is reduced to merely a life sentence. Doing time in the skin where upon death swings open the cell door.

They stories are my humble attempt at obtaining time off for either good or bad behavior, but above all?

An early release


Vincent Quatroche
May 2011

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 12, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462870639

Vincent Quatroche

Coughed up somewhere in the Terrible Now the public at large and critics agree that probably Vincent Quatroche doesnt really exist other than a rather speculative wild fiction were limited attention spans stare into electronic 3.2 inch plastic rectangles. Embracing both encroaching age and perpetual obscurity is every beat poets dream without either the benefit of reasonable perspective or rationale behavior. Career Educator and Poet Vincent Quatroche refuses to just get lost. A truly disturbing afterthought he insists in sticking around like duct tape. While insolence as persistence is hardly a virtue, he will seldom read you the same poem twice, unless you are asking for it. Originally from Long island he is currently languishing in over-State NY teaching at regional colleges. He is a published author of numerous creative projects, including Books, CDs & Videos. His poetry has been distributed and pulverized into the Cyber Void throughout the United States and abroad.

Book preview

Copyright © 2011 by Vincent Quatroche.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2011907468

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4628-7062-2

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4628-7061-5

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4628-7063-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

1-888-795-4274

www.Xlibris.com

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98629

Contents

ESSAY

Don’t Try

FICTION

Your Ad Here

Itch

Frosty

The Heckler

Take the Q10

O’Toole’s Daughter

Food Riot

The Do-Over

On Our Last Vacation

WORK

Larry

Joey’s Boys.

Red’s Birthday

No Pussy 2

How to Manage

MEMORY

Rouses

A Good Story

Around Midnight

Whatever Happened to Frank Meyers?

Beat Trinity

The Saddest Thing

The Place Holders

Dedication

To the Memory of my Father

Vincent J Quatroche Sr.

10/7/1921—4/24/2011

There are lots of places to go:

Guaranteed headaches at every club,

Plush-and-golden cinemas that always show

How cunningly the heroine and hero rub.

Put on your hat, put on your gloves.

But there isn’t any love, there isn’t any love

There are endless things we could do:

Walk around the block, watch the skaters whirl,

Promenade the park or see the newest zoo,

plan for a future in a sensible world.

The water boils on the stove,

But there isn’t any love, there isn’t any love.

Our best friends lived in the house next door.

went to call on them the other day,

But they hadn’t left an address or word before

They packed their bags and moved away.

We could call on the people on the floor above.

But there wouldn’t be any love, there wouldn’t be any love.

It didn’t use to be like this at all.

You wanted lots of money and I got it all somehow.

Once it was Summer. Here it’s almost Fall.

It isn’t any season now.

There are seasons in the future to be thinking of,

But there won’t be any love, there won’t be any love.

White Collar Ballad

-Weldon Kees

Forward

The stories collected in this book represent interpretations of the individual perspective spanning over 35 years. While somewhat biographical in places, like almost all alleged fiction is based upon, I will resist the wholesale codification that this work can be dismissed as trivial, contrived or confessional. What happens to us here on earth channels the prism of the collective through the sharp iris focus of the singular. We do share our elemental nature of humanity (well, some more than others), but of all the things we want to believe, love, fear or cling to this one truth is to my way of thinking unmistakable. Somewhere beyond philosophic negotiation or sophist negation the simple truth is you are born alone with nothing and will exit in exactly the same state at the end of the line. Any discussion of a supposed imagined afterlife is a matter for faith or conviction to either reassure or terrify. However any departure point for that debate might begin I believe with this perspective; If memory constitutes the soul then that soul must constitute memory. The soul could be defined a pure memory. If we take anything of personal identity away from this existence, would it not be every thought, action, dream or nightmare we experienced in a lifetime? If consciousness endures beyond the grave, we will inhabit our own memory for infinity. Perhaps a much more sobering thought than the traditional constructs of a heaven or a hell.

In part the writer performs the act of expression out of a deep personal compulsion and necessity. When the voice of the Stream of Consciousness is obsessed in reliving a past event, reordering present reality or projecting a possible future so loud and clear there must be a release to attempt to restore some tentative truce with sanity.

So the recording and retelling of experience commences attempting to make some sense, to make peace with the holocaust of confusion, fear and pain that seems to rage on a daily basis over the course of a lifetime unabated. So where does that leave joy, beauty, love and fulfillment to fit into all of this? Well of course it must, but unfortunately I believe it merely escapes, leaks or somehow perseveres to force itself as a counterbalance to the dark other. And of course there absolutely must be a Court Jester in all this. There has to be. Lacking a sense of humor and appreciation of irony or the absurd, the perspective is twisted in a mask of madness and bitterness which drains the color from the mind, heart and soul into a small, gray, hard core of desolation. Then, our existence in this flesh is reduced to merely a life sentence. Doing time in the skin where upon death swings open the cell door.

These stories are my humble attempt at obtaining time off for either good or bad behavior, but above all?

An early release . . . .

Vincent Quatroche

May 2011

ESSAY

Don’t Try

These are the words that appear on the gravestone of Charles Bukowski, plot number 875 at the Ocean View section of Green Hills Memorial Park in Rancho Palos Verdes right outside San Pedro California. Bukowski was laid to rest there after his death from leukemia in 1994. The sentiment is taken from one his poems and speaks volumes about the man and his disposition towards his art excerpted below:

So you want to be a writer

if it doesn’t come bursting out of you

in spite of everything,

don’t do it.

unless it comes unasked out of your

heart and your mind and your mouth

and your gut,

don’t do it.

if you have to sit for hours

staring at your computer screen

or hunched over your

typewriter

searching for words,

don’t do it.

if you’re doing it for money or

fame,

don’t do it.

if you’re doing it because you want

women in your bed,

don’t do it.

if you have to sit there and

rewrite it again and again,

don’t do it.

if it’s hard work just thinking about doing it,

don’t do it.

if you’re trying to write like somebody

else,

forget about it…

So you Want to be a Writer.—Charles Bukowski

Charles Bukowski labored most of his life as an obscure author. He developed his own uniquely individualist voice. The result was a brutal, blunt bleeding-slice-of-life prose that reflected the general conditions he endured for the majority of his time on earth. He managed to maintain both his sense of humor and compassion towards the human condition, and it was struggle he never abandoned. From an abusive childhood during the Depression of the 30s to decades of drifting, drinking and hard living Bukowski wrote. And wrote and wrote. The sheer volume of his creative output is very impressive. Thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories, six novels and eventually ending up with over 60 books in print. Publication of Posthumous work has only recently run dry in the last few years.

Initially he was only occasionally published in small presses as he strung together a series of menial low paying jobs, with his longest of stint employment was working for the post office in Los Angeles in 1958 (which was the subject of his novel Post Office 1971) for about ten years. It was the last steady employment he would endure until he decided to write full time and starve. Recognition and compensation for his work only really started after he turned fifty. Then like some bazaar pie-in-the sky poet fantasy, the money and fame kicked in as an improbable retirement plan for beat writers. The last twenty years of his life were rewarding and comfortable and must have been so satisfying to a man who knew such down and out times for so long. Truly Bukowski beat the odds. His long shot horse finally came in.

And it often looked like that just would never happen. From being arrested in July of 1944 by FBI agents while living in Philadelphia (where it is reported he had to hock his typewriter) on suspicion of draft evasion and held for seventeen days in Moyamensing Prison before being released after a psychological exam classified him as 4F to having a Hollywood Movie (he wrote the script) entitled Barfly (1987) starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway about three days in his life when he was 29. Though Rourke’s portrayal of Bukowski has its charm, it was highly stylized and while Hank did indeed have a reputation as a brawler during that period, this was a man who as he matured preferred classical music and his cats in later years to fights in alleys or barrooms.

I was recommended to write this piece by a friend who kindly referred to me as a Bukowski scholar. Let’s clear that up right here. I’m not. In fact I’m not scholarly about much of anything. (Except maybe Miller High Life in bowling alley tall boy bottles.) If you want the real deal on Charles (or Hank as his friends called him) go to the internet and insert his name in any search engine and stand back. Page after page will appear with everything you ever wanted to know about this writer. In fact at the conclusion here I’ll list a few sites for your reference/further reading you could find helpful. You might prefer to learn about him in a style of format and content presented much more comprehensively than I will offer here. I have no desire to rewrite Wikipedia. If that sort of standard bio and commentary represents literary legitimacy to you, better go to the pros. But take it from me; I think a lot of it would have made Bukowski laugh or puke. I would highly recommend two semi-autobiographical novels written by Bukowski about his life and times, Factotum (1975) and Ham on Rye (1982)

Curious about this who this guy was and what he had to say? I believe you go straight to the text. The Artist’s work itself. While commentary, reflection or even (god help us) analysis are useful, it’s simply not what he was all about. One thing is clear. It is my contention that the reason interest in Bukowski’s work still persists 15 year after his death is because he wrote in a voice that spoke to and touched people. All kinds of people. And very often about stuff that hurt the most or they were ashamed to admit about themselves, including their most secret fears or guilty pleasures.

He left most of the academics cold. You can read some particularly snotty dismissals of both him and his body of work. There was always this stick up the ass distain that the real scholars (sic) tried to heap on Charles. Consider;

He (Bukowski) bears the same relation to poetry as Zane Grey does to fiction or Ayn Rand to philosophy—a highly colored, morally uncomplicated cartoon of the real thing.

-Adam Kirsch New Yorker Review

Dismissals of that sort never really stuck anyway. But he was well aware of it and had no trouble firing back. Consider these quotes:

An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.

Great art is horseshit, buy tacos.

When a writer is swayed with his fame and his fortune, you can float him down the river with the turds.

—C B

Getting the idea here?

Hank’s life started off hard and went down hill from there. His old man was a bitter tough old kraut who kicked his ass (and his mother’s) on a regular basis. He pitched Bukowski’s things out in the front yard after discovering his writing as a teenager. Bukowski was disfigured around this time with an extreme case of acne vulgaris. He never fit in. Anywhere. At School. In society. He was a loner. Who by his own admission didn’t mind his estrangement that much at all.

"I’ve never been lonely. I’ve been in a room—I’ve felt suicidal. I’ve been depressed. I’ve felt awful-awful beyond all—but I never felt that one other person could enter that room and cure what was bothering me . . . . or that any number of people could enter that room. In other words, loneliness is something I’ve never been bothered with because I’ve always had this terrible itch for solitude. It’s being at a party, or at a stadium full of people cheering for something, that I might feel loneliness. I’ll quote Ibsen, The strongest men are the most alone. I’ve never thought, Well, some beautiful blonde will come in here and give me a fuck-job, rub my balls, and I’ll feel good. No, that won’t help. You know the typical crowd, Wow, it’s Friday night, what are you going to do? Just sit there? Well, yeah. Because there’s nothing out there. It’s stupidity. Stupid people mingling with stupid people. Let them stupidify themselves. I’ve never been bothered with the need to rush out into the night. I hid in bars, because I didn’t want to hide in factories. That’s all. Sorry for all the millions, but I’ve never been lonely. I like myself. I’m the best form of entertainment I have. Let’s drink more wine!"—C B

My first introduction to Bukowski’s work was in my teens, when I ran across a used copy of a dog-eared paperback in the book rack of a Salvation Army entitled, Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions and General Tales of Ordinary Madness. I remember staring at the photo on the cover. There was this close up black and white picture of the ugliest, most disfigured face I had ever seen. I bought it for seventy five cents. Sat down later in the day and read it from cover to cover. I was astounded. There was more honesty, beauty and truth contained inside than I had ever read before. Hank told it as it was. The bad stuff, the good stuff and all points in between of everyday existence recorded as a matter of fact. His stories and characters were so real to me. I still recall pouring over page after page, shaking my head in disbelief. I knew these people, understood their lives and related to the pain and sadness, the despair of the common soul counterbalanced with such a sharp insightful sense of humor. Throughout my twenties (which were my time on the road) everywhere I went I sought out another book by Charles. I was living a rough life back then, often broke and in strange places with few friends