|
 In
Portland, there's nothing better than a soft kiss in the
car with rain beating down on the windshield. Millions of
those moments under Oregon's gray sky, with enough storms
blowing off the Pacific for a permanent carnival of Dionysian
splendor. Hot Rain, that's what I've always called those
love-drenched nights in cars. Like any straight guy living
in Portland, Jim Goad will happily remember the warm, dreamy
lips of a girl in heat floating across his front seat. But
it wasn't Hot Rain for Goad while driving on a Portland
street the early morning of May 29, 1998. His left hand
was on the steering wheel while his right fist smashed into
a woman's face. The payback: Two years and five months in
the Oregon State Penitentiary. Goad completed his sentence
in October. Anne Ryan's face was the lethal battleground
for Jim Goad. He hit her repeatedly for about ten minutes,
and, by his own admission, only stopped "when her face was
so smashed-up I realized that if I kept hitting her I would
end up killing her." Goad and Ryan spent about a year together
in a love/hate relationship--love spiraling downward into
frantic desire punctuated by fighting & fucking. "Sex
was best between us after a few blows," Goad spilled over
my cell phone shortly before he was released from prison.
Readers wishing a blow-by-blow
account of what sparked the raging fire between Goad and
Ryan can check out their respective web sites: jimgoad.com
and shadyladysky@tripod.com. This excursion seeks to explore
the darkness (which some call criminal) in Jim Goad's published
work, not the criminal darkness in his heart that rainy
night. 
Exotic is opening its
pages to paroled felons who can write as well (or better)
as fight. Goad will be contributing to Exotic when
he's not busy attending anger-management classes or pissing
in a cup. Although he is now a free man, over the next three
years he must satisfy the demands of his probation officer--a
woman who might prefer sending Goad back to prison, rather
that rehabilitate Exotic's foulest new contributor.
But then, she wouldn't be the only one. A brief history
of Goad reveals that 'notorious' is an understatement in
describing his writing and publishing career.
About ten years ago Goad was
one of many who jumped into the rich new territory on the
cultural fringes: fanzines. Goad's zine, ANSWER Me!,
catapulted him into the limelight. He busted out of the
zine clutter into the Mainstream. I say this with caution,
because over the last couple of decades the line between
the alternative culture and the mainstream has become blurred
to the point where it is almost meaningless. However, in
one respect a distinction remains clear: Mainstream cultural
productions are audience-friendly; those on the edges do
their best to antagonize a mass audience.
Cult zines, though still around,
had their "15 minutes" in the early nineties. At that time,
close to ten thousand zines were in circulation, according
to Factsheet 5, a defunct publication which reviewed
zines and other outrageous cultural outcries. These hastily
produced broadsides might be handwritten, or typed up and
stapled together, or polished desktop wonders. In this murky
world, news not fit to print was gleefully celebrated. Sold
mainly by subscription or tucked away deep in the back racks
of funky bookstores, these freewheeling publications got
little publicity no matter how raunchy their content. In
this subculture of pamphleteers, ANSWER Me! and a
handful of others were the exceptions.
Seth Friedman, the editor
of Factsheet 5, hailed ANSWER Me! as "the
greatest fanzine on the planet." A critic at The San
Francisco Bay-Guardian called it "the most eloquent
document of equal opportunity hatred, outre journalism,
and precision rage I've ever seen." The Village Voice
thought it "desperately plumbs a predictable litany of
topics and transgressions looking for new taboos to break,
seeking fresh blood for the audidact." Details judged
it "probably the hottest fanzine in America." What made
it hot was Goad's scorched-earth pen, attacking all that
is sacred and hooting in dark comic relief at all that
is vile. ANSWER Me! debuted on Halloween of 1991,
published by Goad along with his ex-wife, Debbie, who
died last July after a long battle with cancer while he
was imprisoned.
Issue #1 included interviews
with author Iceberg Slim (Pimp: The Story of My Life),
Public Enemy, and early porn film maker Russ Meyer, along
with a send-up of losers attending 12-Step support programs.
Zines are usually 4 to 16 pages, but Goad's came in at
a thick 132. Few published their rough trade on a regular
schedule, preferring to crank them out when the zinesters
get around to it. Goad's had a schedule: once a year.
Each print run was about 10,000 copies and they all sold
out.
After the first ANSWER
Me!, #2 was anxiously awaited and it did not disappoint.
In addition to interviews with Geto Boys, Nazi punk David
Duke and Satanist Anton LaVey, a good chunk was given
over to mini-biographies of serial killers. "Greater love
hath no man than to snuff out another's life," runs the
intro to "Night of a Hundred Mass Murdering/Serial-Killing
Stars." Along the same lurid lines, #3 devoted many of
its pages to 100 famous suicides, including the
"combustive pageantry" of
Vietnamese monks during the war, a man who threw himself
under a steamroller and another dude who sent the twirling
steel tip of a power drill into his brain. (The first
three have been
compiled into a book which can be ordered off
his website.) 
But many consider his last
zine, published in 1994, the most notorious of all--the
rape issue. The cover sums it up nicely: It's an illustration
of a waitress with a black eye, a bandage on her nose
and a name tag on her blouse which says, "Hi! I asked
for it." Inside is a story by a child molester, a harrowing
account by Stephen "Donny the Punk" Donaldson about
the brutal rapes he suffered in prison, a report by
Debbie Goad on her close call with rape when she was
eight years old, a teen-style magazine interview with
serial killer Richard Ramirez, and a fold-out board
game with Predator and Prey cards. 
The wild impulses, gruesome
black-and-white photographs of mutilated bodies and
spasms of gut-wrenching prose running through ANSWER
Me! add up to a satirical take on hate literature,
but it is satire driven over a cliff. In the airy abstract,
no doubt one can find humor in rape, murder and suicide.
But when it crashes down around you or one of your friends,
it's not so funny.
And so it did for Goad.
Shortly after he started
seeing Ryan, his wife Debbie was diagnosed with cancer.
Watching her die while initially hiding the fact he
was seeing another woman drove him into suicidal despair,
he said. But isn't this like kicking somebody and feeling
despair because you scuffed your boot? The fateful explosion
of violence against Ryan can, in part, be traced back
to another source. In the rape issue of his zine, Goad
wrote a story about the beatings he experienced from
his mother and father. I'm not trying to excuse his
behavior toward Ryan because of the shit that rained
down on him as a child, but isn't there a connection
here? 
What I find most intriguing
in Goad's writings is an obsession with blood-on-the-carpet
violence in the '91 to '94 zines transformed into a
more sophisticated rendering of class violence in The
Redneck Manifesto, published by Simon and Schuster
in 1997. Instead of a drill bit plunged into the brain,
we get a careful study of the redneck, the "only cardboard
figure left standing in our ethnic shooting gallery."
This book is both a serious study of white-trash culture
and a hysterical send-up on homo-hatin', pig-fuckin',
chip-tossin', daughter-gropin' slugs which includes,
for those of us who grew up in the Rose City, a wonderful
sketch of crank girls on Lombard Street in St. Johns,
along with a scathing critique of Portland's upwardly-groovy
lily-white sensibility exposed as ice-cream-parlor vomit.
But the violence penned-out
in Goad's head couldn't stop the rage in his heart.
Many male writers, including Goad, have said if they
hadn't channeled their violent impulses into streams
of words, they would have become serial killers. But
usually this is said in Alpha Mailer (sic) jest; few
have grown up with parents who abused them. Had Goad
not started writing when he was young, he would have
been a prime candidate for a long stretch in juvie followed
by a career in crime. I believe his writings on rape,
murder and suicide were quite natural given his background.
Now that he's out of the slammer, let's hope some stripper
treats him to some Hot Rain, not emotional pain. Because
who knows what darkness lurks in the heart of a convicted
writer?
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