Tender as Hellfire Read online

  MORE PRAISE FOR JOE MENO

  “The power is in the writing. Mr. Meno is a superb craftsman.”

  —Hubert Selby, Jr.

  for Hairstyles of the Damned

  A selection of the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program

  “Captures both the sweetness and sting of adolescence with unflinching honesty.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “Joe Meno writes with the energy, honesty, and emotional impact of the best punk rock. From the opening sentence to the very last word, Hairstyles of the Damned held me in his grip.”

  —Jim DeRogatis, pop music critic, Chicago Sun-Times

  “The most authentic young voice since J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield … A darn good book.”

  —Daily Southtown

  “Sensitive, well-observed, often laugh-out-loud funny … You won’t regret a moment of the journey.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Meno gives his proverbial coming-of-age tale a punk-rock edge, as seventeen-year-old Chicagoan Brian Oswald tries to land his first girlfriend … Meno ably explores Brian’s emotional uncertainty and his poignant youthful search for meaning … His gabby, heartfelt, and utterly believable take on adolescence strikes a winning chord.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Meno is a romantic at heart. Not the greeting card kind, or the Harlequin paperback version, but the type who thinks, deep down, that things matter, that art can change lives.”

  —Elgin Courier News

  “Funny and charming and sad and real. The adults are sparingly yet poignantly drawn, especially the fathers, who slip through without saying much but make a profound impression.”

  —Chicago Journal

  “A funny, hard-rocking first-person tale of teenage angst and discovery.”

  —Booklist

  “Underneath his angst, Brian, the narrator of Hairstyles of the Damned, possesses a disarming sense of compassion which allows him to worm his way into the reader’s heart. It is this simple contradiction that makes Meno’s portrait of adolesence so convincing: He has dug up and displayed for us the secret paradox of the teenage years, the desire to belong pitted against the need for individuality—a constant clash of hate and love.”

  —NewPages.com

  “Joe Meno knows Chicago’s south side the way Jane Goodall knew chimps and apes—which is to say, he really knows it. He also knows about the early ’90s, punk rock, and awkward adolescence. Best of all, he knows the value of entertainment. Hairstyles of the Damned is proof positive.”

  —John McNally, author of The Book of Ralph

  “Filled with references to dozens of bands and mix-tape set lists, the book’s heart and soul is driven by a teenager’s life-changing discovery of punk’s social and political message … Meno’s alter ego, Brian Oswald, is a modern-day Holden Caulfield … It’s a funny, sweet, and, at times, hard-hitting story with a punk vibe.”

  —Mary Houlihan, Chicago Sun-Times

  “Meno’s language is rhythmic and honest, expressing things proper English never could. And you’ve got to hand it to the author, who pulled off a very good trick: The book is punk rock. It’s not just about punk rock; it embodies the idea of punk—it’s pissed off at authority, it won’t groom itself properly, and it irritates. Yet its rebellious spirit is inspiring and right on the mark.”

  —SF Weekly

  “This book is hella good. Joe Meno manages to sink into the teenage-outcast experience, challenge segregation, and provide step-by-step instructions on dyeing hair pink in this realistic account of finding your identity. After reading Hairstyles of the Damned, I’m glad I’m not in high school anymore.”

  —Amy Schroeder, Venus magazine

  “Hairstyles of the Damned is observational comedy of the best kind, each glittering small detail offering up a wave of memories for anyone alive in the latter part of the previous century. Did you imagine you had forgotten the smell of arcades, the allure of muscle cars, the dress codes and emotional rebellions, the cringing horror of adolescence? Beware: Joe Meno can make you remember.”

  —HipMama.com

  “What makes Hairstyles of the Damned compelling is Meno’s ability to create the rhythm of teen-speak without pandering, and his ability to infuse the story with pop-culture references. A good read for those wanting to remember their youthful mischief.”

  —Tablet

  “Meno’s recounting of first concerts, first loves, and the first tragedies of adolescence are awesomely paired with the heavy backbeat of late-’80s subculture. The contagious foot tapping that is symptomatic of a good record is the same energy that drives you as you follow Meno’s narrative.”

  FresnoFamous.com

  for The Boy Detective Fails

  “This is postmodern fiction with a head and a heart, addressing such depressing issues as suicide, death, loneliness, failure, anomie, and guilt with compassion, humor, and even whimsy. Meno’s best work yet; highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal (starred review)

  “Comedic, imaginative, empathic, atmospheric, archetypal, and surpassingly sweet, Meno’s finely calibrated fantasy investigates the precincts of grief, our longing to combat chaos with reason, and the menace and magic concealed within everyday life.”

  —Booklist (starred review)

  “Mood is everything here, and Meno tunes it like a master … a full-tilt collision of wish-fulfillment and unrequited desires that’s thrilling, yet almost unbearably sad.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “A delicate blend of whimsy and edginess. Meno packs his novel with delightful subtext.”

  —Entertainment Weekly

  “A radiantly creative masterpiece … Meno’s imaginative genius spins heartache into hope within this fanciful growing-up tale that glows like no other.”

  PopMatters.com

  “The search for truth, love, and redemption is surprising and absorbing. Swaddled in melancholy and gentle humor, it builds in power as the clues pile up.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “An easy to read sometimes dark tale with a perfect ending. On a scale of 1 to 5, I give it a 4.8.”

  —Futures Mystery Anthology Magazine

  “At the bottom of this Pandora’s box of mirthful absurdity, there’s heartbreak and longing, eerie beauty and hope.”

  —Philadelphia Weekly

  “Verbally delectable.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Marinated in mood, richly crafted and devoid of irony, Meno’s newest novel is imbued with both the hopeful and the romantic.”

  —Time Out Chicago

  “Moving, elegant prose.”

  —Washington Post Express

  “Surreal, mysterious, and dreamlike.”

  —NewCity Chicago

  “You know that friend of yours who keeps trying to get you to read his half written novel about his quarter-life crisis? Do yourself a favor and read Joe Meno’s version of turning thirty instead.”

  —The L Magazine

  “It’s Encyclopedia Brown without the milk and cookies.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times

  for How the Hula Girl Sings

  “An intimate book, wrapped up in the bent logic and lame emotional politics of folks tied by memory and old-school loathings … The novel succeeds because Meno gives Luce Lemay the struggling soul of a poet looking to bend anguish into possibility … offering what Raymond Carver used to call ‘glimpses’ of what else might be, flashes of another, more comforting brand of reality.”

  —NewCity Chicago

  “Meno’s poetic and visceral style perfectly captures the seedy locale, and he finds the sadness behind violence and the anger behind revenge. Fans of hard-boiled pulp fiction
will particularly enjoy this novel.”

  —Booklist

  “For such grim subject matter, the author moves the story along at a surprisingly fast and easy pace, never succumbing to the overkill that American gothic tales are often prone to, seeming to take his inspiration equally from the stories of Jim Thompson and the lyrics of Nick Cave.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Meno has a poet’s feel for small-town details, life in the joint, and the trials an ex-con faces, and he’s a natural storyteller with a talent for characterization. A likable winner …”

  —Publishers Weekly

  JOE MENO is the author of one story collection and four novels, including How the Hula Girl Sing and the best-sellers The Boy Detective Fails and Hairstyles of the Damned which was selected for the Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Program and has been translated into German, Italian, Turkish, and Russian. Meno is the winner of a Nelson Algren Literary Award and is currently a professor of creative writing at Columbia College Chicago. He lives in Chicago.

  This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  Originally published in hardcover by St. Martin’s Press

  ©1999, 2007 Joe Meno

  eISBN-13: 978-1-617-75008-3

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-30-9

  ISBN-10: 1-933354-30-5

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2006936534

  All rights reserved

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  for my old man

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  acknowledgments

  tenderloin

  kiss of soft gravel

  the sounds of midnight

  dark eye of a dog

  the devil in his place

  the birthday surprise

  the dollar-eighty-nine story

  the king of the tango

  the devil lives in texas

  the star of silver is just plain lousy

  the glass eye

  hell’s fire has arrived

  acknowledgments

  Thanks to Koren, who makes everything possible, Charles Everitt, Dana Albarella, C. Michael Curtis, Johnny Temple, Johanna Ingalls, Akashic Books, Dan Sinker, my friends and family, and the Columbia College Fiction Writing Department.

  tenderloin

  They split us up at the end of summer.

  Now most people will call you a liar if you tell them a truth they don’t want to hear, but I know me and I know my brother, and looking back, before our bare-legged Val left town all covered in blue bruises or Shilo got shot in the neck or the deputy just disappeared, before my brother lit a black match to all his hatred, before any of that, they decided to split us up, and I guess that’s where the trouble really began.

  “This place is hell. This place is shit.”

  Pill, my brother, nodded his head, agreeing with himself as he lit the match. There was that sharp striking sound of the match-head against the thin strip of flint, snappppp, then a big blossom of fire crinkling down along the match’s spine. He held the flame to the end of his Marlboro and inhaled, taking a drag that crept out of the side of his mouth in a quick spurt.

  We spent that first morning before the first day of school in that lousy new town smoking in the dirt, taking drags on my older brother’s stolen cigarettes. We sat right behind our new mobile home, hiding in its square shadow, the trailer shining silver from its aluminum siding, refusing to sit level on its concrete blocks. Pill tapped another square out of the pack and handed it to me, then struck the flame from the match cover and lit the cigarette’s tip jutting from the end of my lip.

  “This place sucks,” I grunted, coughing up smoke through my nose.

  I was ten: which was how old I was four years ago, when all of this happened. Pill-Bug had just turned thirteen. I’m a year older now then he was at the time, which seems awful funny to me. As I think on it now, in that moment there wasn’t anything better than sitting in the dusty gravel beside him, sharing a cool smoking square, not because he was especially talkative or insightful or anything like that, but he would always share what he had just stolen or show you a new wrestling move or tell you about an unfamiliar dirty word or two. My brother had on his blue stocking cap, half pulled down over his eyes, past the black scab where one eyebrow should have been. It was a wound he got lighting our neighbor’s hedge on fire the day before we left Duluth.

  In the shadow of that morning, Pill had his legs spread out in front of him, lying back against the concrete base of the trailer, staring at his dirty brown shoes. I had just finished buttoning up my brand-new school shirt, one of my brother’s old red-and-black flannels, which was long enough for me to half-tuck in my underwear. Nothing in those stolen cigarettes or dirty clothes gave us any idea that we might both be doomed, doomed past any of our years or any of the fairly illegal things we had already done.

  “Do you know what a girl’s pussy smells like?” Pill asked, staring up into the cool blue sky, taking a long drag that turned the length of the cigarette gray.

  I kind of shrugged my shoulders.

  “Well, yes or no?” he asked, leaning forward.

  “No. I guess not,” I mumbled.

  “It’s like being stung by an electric eel. It makes you want to fuck anything that moves.”

  I sucked my teeth in reply.

  “Get to school!” my mother shouted, shaking her fist, hollering from inside the godawful silver trailer.

  A trailer: back in Duluth, we’d had a whole house to ourselves. We even had our own rooms, but now we had to share a crummy bunk bed. My older brother got the top bunk after a short skirmish that ended up with him sitting on my neck. Also, there were shadows on our walls at night that looked like skulls. Also, there were dead mice everywhere, and even when we thought we had got rid of them all, we found some of their pink babies which we tried to feed but which died. Also, if you glanced in the bathroom mirror with the lights off, you could see ghosts standing behind you with bloody hands. Also, we discovered a stack of dirty Polaroids in a shoebox that had been left in one of the closets—they were mostly of different women lying topless in bed, which, of course, my brother kept for himself. Also, there were silverfish crawling all over the floor. Also, the nearest comic book and baseball card shop was forty-three miles away in a town called Aubrey. Also, nothing in this place was any damn good. My mother’s boyfriend, French, had gotten a supervisor’s position at the meat-packing plant in this town of Tenderloin and my mother packed us all up to move hundreds of miles into a lousy goddamn trailer and now we were all unhappy.

  “You better be going!” my mother shouted again, knocking the gray screen door open. My brother hoisted his book bag over his shoulder and I followed, kicking up dirt as we headed toward school.

  In Tenderloin they split me and my brother up good. Pill and I had been going to the same school ever since I’d been attending, but here they sent me to the elementary school and him to the high school, even though he had never really graduated eighth grade back in Duluth. He would have graduated, but he was on probation from a fistfight he’d gotten into. And then what happened was his homeroom teacher, Mrs. Henckel, this ghastly old hag who I’d say had it out for Pill-Bug, found near a dozen porno magazines and a single box of Marlboro cigarettes in his locker.

  They expelled him a week before graduation, no matter how much my mother pleaded, glad as hell to be rid of him, I bet.

  Three days: That’s all it took before Pill lit another kid’s house on fire. To be truthful, I didn’t think he’d last that long. Back in Duluth, he used to get in a fight almost every day with some fool or another. My brother, Pill, he liked to get in fi
stfights, don’t ask me why. In Tenderloin, he waited three days though before starting any trouble.

  It all began at lunchtime, or that’s what he told me. The high school was small enough so everyone had to eat all at once, together, in a big cafeteria painted red and white, the stupid school colors. The walls were decorated with these big paintings of a side of beef with little arms and legs, right with the school motto, Fightin’ Meat Packers. All of these dumb kids must have been going to school together since they were born. Maybe all of them were cousins. It was the same way it is now: all the big ugly football players with their own lunch table, and the cheerleaders with their own, and the snotty student council kids, and the big red-haired, red-lipped sluts with their own rectangle. In the corner was a round table with a broken leg where all the losers and faggots were sent to sit. Pill was no faggot, no way. He was so crazy about girls that he would have masturbated every hour on the hour if he could, but he was the new kid in school, so the only spot he could find was at the loser table in the corner. Sitting at the center of the table was this huge fat girl, Candy, no shit, her name was Candy, I’m not lying, and she filled up half one side of the table, her blob of a body kind of undulating and wavering above her three trays of food, which of course was mostly snack items and several helpings of sloppy joes, and which left deep orange stains all over her fat fingers and round chin. Then there was Kenny, who rode the short bus to school; he had grabbed a kite string off an electrical wire and gotten severe brain damage. He had to ride in an electric wheelchair and wear a protective helmet all the time. People didn’t like him because he used to try to run you down in the hall between classes, or sometimes, I guess, during football games, he’d ride around the track and no one would try to stop him. Beside him, there was some flitty kids and some real brainiac types who didn’t even bother eating lunch because they were so worried about studying and getting good grades and getting the hell out of that town. Then there was my brother, Pill, who didn’t fit anywhere there at all. He was short and dirty and mostly mean-looking. He had one eyebrow and a huge black scab in the other eyebrow’s place. He wore his dirty black drawers and a gray flannel jacket and his godawful blue stocking cap that no one could convince him to take off, because his hair was growing back from the fire and there was still a bald spot big as a fist right on the crown of his head.