Storytellersunplugged

Wayne Allen Sallee

November 28th 2007

I’ve been giving a lot of interviews lately, though none really touch on anything I am promoting. Upagianstthewall (on Phil Nutman’s website), and Doorways magazine. Dark Scribe ran an interview, but it was mostly about my witnessing John Wayne Gacy’s execution and my correspondence with him in the early 90s. (One of my albatrosses, along with being remembered for “Rapid Transit, my first dad-blasted story). But David Bainbridge asked some pretty decent questions of me for Doorways, ending with talking about my day job. I mentioned being 48, making ten bucks an hour with no health insurance, then adding that that is this century’s American Dream: simply having a job.

I created a character called The American Dream, he appeared in stories back when I was of a different frame of mind. He wore a heating pad for a cape, had wrist braces as gloves, an invisible sidekick named Blind Justice. A utility belt of plastic baggies filled with pain meds and sinus sprays. But he served his purpose, I got to write stories with Evan Shustak (his real name) as my alter ego, he could handle his daily pain, if only with insanity, the sphincter-shrinking thoughts of craziness I was constantly fretting about in the 90s. Of course, I’m on the bipolar meds now. But I wrote the craziest things when he was involved and it helped me cope. Through the winters, mostly. Hard to believe a time when there were the harsh keystrokes on a manual typewriter. And no spell-check, I should have had stock in Liquid Paper. I wonder how many people put themselves into their characters, the loners like Marv in SIN CITY, Travis McGee, or Superman. I was always partial to thinking that I would continue to act as noble as Steve Carella in Ed McBain’s 87th Precinct series, as I went further into adulthood, maybe looking for voices of reason in a world I found increasingly tough to continue living through. I wanted to be the guy who maybe only got tension headaches from an unsolved murder. The American Dream stories were the only ones I wrote at the time that weren’t not narratives, though I cheated at times by having Evan write in his diary, much as I wrote my stories on the buses and el trains. As I said, his stories were fairly silly, to hide my real life.

But I’m nearing the Half Century Man mark, and I keep reading about a better breed of bastard more and more, from molesting priests to wife-killers to models who try to commit suicide by ramming another person’s car at 87 MPH. People who get away with things, so I decided I needed another alter ego. I have a series of stories centered around a serial killer named Jimmy Dvorak, Every Mother’s Son. All the stories involve people who really needed to be dead to be dead, dead and gone. See, as an adult I have to watch my blood pressure, and I can get relief from those “little maniacs,” as Richard Chwedyk calls them, by giving them justice in my stories. There’s been a story in the news from downstate Illinois about a woman who made up a fake name on MySpace to lead a 14 year old girl with low self-esteem on and then taunting her enough that the girl hung herself in her bedroom closet. I read that article online on Thanksgiving Day and I couldn’t get it out of my head. Of course, the woman, a neighbor in the family’s same subdivision, can’t be convicted. Not even for a hate crime. Its the kind of bullying that would make other students go Columbine or VA Tech if they were male and the name calling was happening face to face and not by a cowardly woman hiding behind a fake male identity.

Its time for me to send Every Mother’s Son on the road again. And to be brutally honest, in this one case, because it involves someone who was my niece and godchild’s age, I’d really like to go down to O’Fallon myself. I don’t think it would be hard to get a neighbor to point a finger in the right direction. Its a small town, plus the subdivision was mentioned in the article. I read the Act of Contrition every day now because of moments like this. Its better than it being Proactive Contrition, where I expect to be absolved of crimes after the fact. I had wanted to do a riff on Lovecraft and write a story called “The Colour Off of MySpace,” but I don’t think I can do that now.

And I want to get people to believe that I am SIMPLY a writer, a writer of all things, but, thanks to “Rapid Transit” and my Freddy Krueger story and all the stuff that made me get noticed Back In The Day, well, if someone backed me into a corner and asked me why I was a horror writer, I’d ask them to pay attention to the crap going on around them, and gently push the MySpace newspaper article across the dinette as they sipped their green tea and ate their wheat crackers.

Thanks again for your time.

Your chattel,

Wayne Allen Sallee

Burbank, Illinois