My Absolutely True Alice's Restaurant Story

I grew up with Arlo Guthrie's "Alice's Restaurant Massacree." I knew the song. I knew the movie. I knew about Alice and Ray living in the old church and Arlo getting himself into trouble because of a large quantity of garbage.

This becomes relevant.

I met Jenny at Castaways, a dive bar in Rockford that my brother and I owned. She came in with a group of women who were organizing the Rockford Rage Roller Derby, and I believe she was something like the fifth woman to join the league. Castaways became their unofficial headquarters for a while, and Jenny was one of the people who started turning up regularly.

I didn't know it then, but our orbits were on a collision course for the next fourteen years.

After Castaways closed its doors, I was between lives. Jenny had done some posters for the Rage, and I remembered liking them, so one day I contacted her on MySpace.

This was when contacting someone on MySpace was a perfectly reasonable thing for an adult to do.

I told her I was working on a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z and asked if she might be interested in illustrating it. "Working on" is probably generous. I had an idea for a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z, which is not exactly the same thing as having a children's book called Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Less than a week later, Jenny sent me an illustration for the first poem.

"A is for Asparagus."

It was perfect.

This presented me with an immediate problem because now I actually had to write the book.

So I did.

Jenny and I began spending more time together, and eventually I learned that she and her husband Dan lived in an old Lutheran church in Pecatonica, Illinois.

The first time I walked into the place, I knew immediately that I had entered Alice's Restaurant.

Not metaphorically. I mean there was the church.

It still had its stained-glass windows. It still had a stage at the front where sermons, performances, announcements and whatever else Lutheran congregations do from stages had once emanated. The building was enormous, but Jenny and Dan essentially lived in only two areas of it. Most of the rest of the building was still just this cavernous old church surrounding the relatively small portion where two people were actually conducting their lives.

And I had seen this movie.

I knew where this kind of thing could lead.

At first the similarities were amusing. Arlo had Alice and Ray living in a church. I had Jenny and Dan living in a church. There were artists and unconventional people involved. There was a general feeling that ordinary residential architecture had somehow been rejected as insufficient for the situation.

Then I learned another little detail.

Arlo Guthrie and Alice Brock had written a children's book together, Mooses Come Walking.

Jenny and I were writing a children's book together.

Now, I am willing to tolerate a certain amount of coincidence from the universe. You have to. Otherwise you start becoming the kind of person who finds messages intended specifically for you in the license plates of passing automobiles.

So I let that one go.

Eventually Jenny invited me over to mow the lawn.

This is one of those sentences that doesn't sound particularly important when you say it, but in retrospect there aren't that many people in your life whose lawn you begin mowing at an abandoned Lutheran church.

Shortly after Jenny and I had become very close, Dan, who had been the city manager of Pecatonica, got a job in the oil industry in Houston. They were moving to Texas, and they were moving fast.

So fast, in fact, that they hired me to clean out the church.

This is where anyone familiar with "Alice's Restaurant" should begin experiencing some concern on my behalf.

There was a lot of stuff in that church.

Some of it had apparently been sitting in the basement for decades. There were books. There was paperwork. There was glassware. There were assorted objects whose usefulness had expired so long ago that nobody was quite sure what their usefulness had originally been. Much of it was already moldy and unpleasant before I ever touched it.

I hauled it out.

And hauled it out.

And hauled it out.

Eventually I had everything that needed to go outside, bagged and ready for the city to collect.

Jenny and Dan were headed for Houston. The church was cleaned out. My work was finished.

Except it wasn't.

Because a thunderstorm came through.

The rain soaked the garbage.

Now, garbage that has been sitting in the basement of an old Lutheran church for several decades is not improved by the addition of water. Nobody has ever opened a bag containing moldy paperwork, old books and miscellaneous church debris, poured several gallons of rainwater into it and said, "There. Much better."

The city of Pecatonica took one look at the situation and declined to take the garbage.

It would have to be rebagged.

And this was the moment when the universe stopped being subtle.

I had grown up listening to "Alice's Restaurant." I knew exactly what happened when Arlo Guthrie had to get rid of the garbage from Alice's church. I had been aware of the parallels from the first time I walked into Jenny's church.

But up until this point, they had been cute.

Now I was being sent back to a church to deal with a municipal garbage problem.

There are billions of people on Earth. Most of them will live their entire lives without having this experience.

I drove back to Pecatonica.

I bought industrial garbage bags.

And I spent about half a day taking decades worth of rain-soaked, moldy Lutheran garbage and putting it into new bags so the city would agree to haul it away.

No police officers arrived.

I was not arrested.

There were no aerial photographs.

There were no twenty-seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows.

Nobody asked me whether I had rehabilitated myself.

I just rebagged the garbage.

Eventually the city took it away.

As far as I know, this leaves Arlo Guthrie and me as two of the very few people in American history who have found themselves involved in a complicated garbage-disposal situation arising from an old church occupied by unconventional people, with the added coincidence that both situations somehow involved children's books.

Arlo got a song and a movie out of his.

I got Atrocious Poems A to Z.

Jenny spent the next two years in Houston. When she returned, we began our life together. So unlike the movie, this wasn't the end of anything. It was the beginning.

But before any of that could happen, the garbage had to be picked up.

And apparently, if you live in an old church, there's only one kind of person you should call when that happens.

Arlo Guthrie wasn't available. 

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Unfinished Business: The Story of Atrocious Poems A To Z

In Gestalt Psychology there is a clinical term called "unfinished business." Unfinished business is defined as the unexpressed feelings that are associated with distinct memories and fantasies. These feelings may be resentment, rage, hatred, pain, anxiety, grief , guilt, and abandonment that are not fully experienced in awareness, linger in the background, and are carried into the present life and cause preoccupations, compulsive behaviors, wariness, and other self- defeating behaviors. Unfinished business will persist until the person faces and deals with these denied or alienated feelings.

For me one source of unfinished business was always the children's book we were tasked with writing and illustrating in my fifth grade class at Mary Morgan Grade School in Byron, Illinois. One would think someone who later went on to become a writer and publisher out of love for the written and printed word would have been excited about such a project, but I was not. I do not know what all-important things I did to distract myself the weeks before the book came due, but two days from the deadline I had almost nothing written. Having almost no ideas at the time that didn't revolve around playing baseball or watching monster movies, I decided to do what I thought was easiest and most rudimentary concept: an A To Z book. Just fill in the empty spaces with whatever nonsense came to mind, right?

I set off to work, and a couple days later had finished my first book, The Monster Dictionary. Complete with illustrations that I put about as much effort into as the poems. And it showed. So much so that after being generous and giving me a B grade, my teacher penned this note, and this is where the Unfinished Business began...


"B. Not colored. Excellent ideas! if you would have put more effort into this project; the school could have sent this idea on to the Library of Congress."

I leave her misapplication of the semicolon in for historic authenticity.

Being lazy and unambitious is something I've always been good at, and it's never bothered me too much, but something about that note kept coming back to haunt me. It wasn't so much that I hadn't made an effort, it was more that I did eventually become a writer, and a publisher, and I felt like I owed it to myself to give this project the effort it deserved. 

The poems I felt like I could do on my own, but I needed an illustrator. By this time I was forty years old and the General Manager of a dive bar underneath a bridge in Rockford, Illinois called Castaways. A bar where three women had formed a roller derby league called the Rockford Rage in the bathroom one night. The paperwork to join the league was signed right there at the bar, and one of the earliest skaters to join is now my creative partner and real life mate Jenny Mathews, who is one of the finest illustrators in America.

I asked her if she'd be interested in collaborating on a children's book titled Atrocities From A To Z about things that kid hated. She said yes, and I sent her the first poem from the book, aptly titled "A."

A few weeks later she sent back this illustration.

It was perfect.

Then she moved to Texas.

Then we wrote a book titled The Toughskin Rhinoceros Wrangler Company long distance and Atrocities From A To Z was put on the backburner.

Then she came back from Texas and we became a couple. And a scant eight years later, almost forty years after I began it, Atrocious Poems A To Z went to the printer last week. 

Is the business finished now? Can I call up and tell Fritz Perls in the afterlife that we're good?

Maybe.

But there's one last order of business I feel like needs to be finished, and that is the business. I'd like to encourage you to order a copy of Atrocious Poems A To Z. In the poems I've tried to address issues that sometimes can seem trivial to adults, but cause great anxiety for children, like vegetables, inoculations, sharing, monsters under the bed, floors made of lava etc. I have tried to be light-hearted in the poems and provide a jumping off point to discuss some of these anxiety-producing situations. Also, it was important to me to try and incorporate some lessons on literary form, theme, and devices. 

Of course the best part of the book are the remarkable illustrations by Jenny Mathews. I think we've made a really fun and interesting book and I'd like to encourage you to order your copy now.

And, yes, I will be sending a copy to the Library of Congress

                                               
                                                                        

Update: Oh, here's the part I forgot to say: my book ended up on the walls of a major American museum. 

Photograph by the great Ryan Davis

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Taking Responsibility For Misery In Rockford, Illinois

For all actions there is an equal and opposite reaction. One of the laws of physics. Maybe. I'm not a physicist, but I'm certain I've heard that somewhere before. The poet John Keats had a similar concept for dealing with the negative. He called it negative capability, and the general gist of that is creation involves what you do with the empty, negative spaces the Universe offers you. You can see them as empty, dark places, or as opportunities to create something where nothing existed before. To do this one needs to ignore the boundaries and boxes we too often feel we're confined by. Blow up the paradigm. 

It's almost never in this life you're given a perfectly operating widget factory with no defects and all you're asked to do is sit in your office and press a button when you want coffee. No. No one ever hands you the keys to the New York Yankees and a blank check and says "just win." If you want to succeed at anything more than likely you'll do it from humble beginnings, without much help from anyone else, and often you'll encounter criticism and challenges from those who say either it can't be done, or it shouldn't be done.

That said, this blog is about Rockford, Illinois, and the Misery Loves Company of The Rockford Area Convention and Visitors Bureau.

No, actually this blog is about me. Someone I knew once gave me a St. Jude medallion because with the amount of hopeless and forsaken causes I champion they thought I needed all the help I could get. One time at Castaways, the bar my brother and I owned, we were literally working under three inches of water because of flooding, and I lost that medallion. A few weeks later it flooded again, and St. Jude popped up from the abyss I thought it had disappeared into. 

What's the point? None, really, I just detect an resemblance between the advertising campaign I designed for Castaways, a bar that had been largely forsaken and left for dead under a bridge, and the RACVB's campaign Misery Loves Company. Here's one of the radio spots I wrote.

When I wrote that spot I had been given what seemed like an impossible task. To get people to come to a dive bar under a bridge with a tradition of being seedy, unpleasant, and crowded with unfriendly drunks. Did my campaign work? Well, no, because it was impossible, but I can say 7 years later that location has been revitalized and made relevant again. I was charged with reversing a negative image and making it into a positive.

It's not easy to change public perception. Especially a deeply ingrained, negative public perception. I can understand what the RACVB was thinking when they devised the Misery Loves Company Campaign, but I don't think it works. Because words have meanings. And your audience tends to tune you out these days before you get to your punchline. If I say "Bill Clinton is a terrible womanizer and the best President we've had in recent history," what most people will remember is that I just admitted, or asserted, that Bill Clinton is a womanizer. Everyone who already believes that is going to use that to re-affirm what they already believed, and almost everyone else is going to be checking their Twitter before you finish with your message. 

Another reason I find the campaign to be a mistake is that the RACVB is trying to assume the role of the underdog, or the put upon little guy fighting the big machine, but these are the people who comprise the machine. At least the local machine. They don't understand the true struggle of people who are oppressed, forsaken, or marginalized by the prevailing system. they ARE the ones who messed it up in the first place, now they want to make a joke as if they're clever. And it rings as dull as a bell of lead. A better tack, in my opinion, would be to accept their large role in creating the very conditions they now want to lampoon, apologize, then promise to do better. Sure, humor can be part of that, but if my surgeon cuts off the wrong leg the last thing I want to hear from him/her is a joke. If you want to do comedy, hit one of the open mic comedy nights here in Rockford.

It's an added insult to an injury for which you were largely responsible.

This community needs Sully Sullenberger, not the Italian Cruise ship captain who needed to be ordered back on the boat by authorities. 

I understand the idea behind this campaign. Hell, it's almost identical to the one I tried to use to turn around a business with a long history of mismanagement, but in my campaign I wasn't saying my business sucked, I was saying it didn't suck. I didn't allow the listeners first contact with my product to be an admission of failure. After an admission like that your punchline is irrelevant. You already told us what you thought about your own city. 

Words have meanings. Here's another example from Rockford, Illinois.

Now this is just an unfortunate and careless thing to let people you're trying to convert see. True, I'm hypersensitive to the juxtaposition of language and images, being a poet, and I did see this banner about a million more times than your average Rockford citizen, but until you stop doing things like this you're going to be mocked. 

An old cliche says that all publicity is good publicity, even when it's bad, but mockery is never good. be defiant, yes, and people might take up for you because you're fighting back in the face of hopeless odds, but be a smartass when you're trying to evade responsibility and people will skewer you. And that's how this campaign feels to me and a lot of the creative types I know who actually work in this city trying to create and just doing our best to get by.

Maybe your campaign will be successful. I'd have preferred to see something like what the American auto industry had to do when they fessed up to making crappy cars and getting outworked and outdesigned by the Japanese for a long time, but the difference makers in this town don't seem interested in shouldering the blame for anything. The ship went down. You were at the helm. Apologize and start looking outside the myopic cadre of cohorts who seem to be exercising too much influence and using too little judgement to be trusted in the future.

Scrap this ill-conceived campaign, apologize, accept responsibility, then have a real meeting with the creative types of Rockford. The types of people out there populating the art scene, the music scene, opening stores and restaurants, small businesses of every type. You've ignored them for too long, and your tone deafness has led to this heaping on of criticism from the national media. The national media has no bone to pick with Rockford. They couldn't care any less. They're just reporting facts. And John Keats would advise you to use that assessment as a motivation to change the paradigm, flip the script, and make Shinola out of this mountain of shit.

2026 Update: what I could never say about this blog is my friend Andrew made a website shortly after this documenting all the real misery going on in Rockford, from the homelessness to the urban blight, and the weasel cocksucker who designed this moronic campaign came to his job at a news station and leaned on his bosses to either make him take the website down or fire him. He took the website down. But it was a weasel cocksucker move and par for the course for the corrupt Chamber of Commerce types we have here who still ignore all forms of real misery but their own while stuffing their pockets from the public coffer. 

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Roller Girl (Tiny Drawing Poem)

In 2005 the paperwork to start the Rockford Rage flat track roller derby league was signed in the ladies room of  Castaways, the dive bar my brother and I owned at the time. For the first year while the league was going through the growing pains of learning how to find a venue for the bouts, recruit fresh meats and dot the i's and cross the t's or filing the legal and financial paperwork needed to field a professional sports league, Castaways was the home of the Rockford Rage. It was every bit of drama and chaos you would expect. And almost no one thought it would work. Until 1,500 people showed up to see one of the first bouts.


One of the early challenges of women's flat track roller derby was overcoming the stereotypes that it was the same roller derby people had seen in old footage, or the glamorized, phony version that had been shown on television only a year previously. This was flat track roller derby, and these women were really hitting and blocking and elbowing each other. For the first few weeks they practiced on an asphalt parking lot. These women were tough. And great athletes. They broke legs and fingers and arms and came back to play again


Anyway, this isn't meant to be an exhaustive history of women's flat track roller derby in Rockford, Illinois, just a short backdrop to this Tiny Drawing Poem. My co-creator happens to have been one of those original Roller Girls. This is her drawing and the poem I set to it. The font is AR Delaney. It seemed to convey the boldness apropriate for such a subject.

Women's Flat Track Roller Derby
Whole you're here why not check out our feminist webcomic Single Zombie Female

Jenny is going to have an art show displaying all the roller derby posters she has created for The Rockford Rage as part of our Zombie Logic Press design team.

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Dog Day Afternoon At Castaways

So, another crazy day at Castaways. Chased down a dine and dasher with my brother and held him down until the police arrived. Basic stuff. A whole lot of people showed up for the new DJ, DJ Regg. Busy day.

But my favorite part of the day was when I got this food order with a kid's cheeseburger. Donna, the server, informed me the burger was for a dog. So, I think to myself that's pretty cool. I've cooked for all kinds of people why not a dog.

The burger goes out.

A few minutes later I decide I'd like to meet the dog so I go out to the deck and as soon as I get out the door this dog leaves his people and runs up to me. I give him a few rubs and scratches and he goes back and sits down. It was as if he knew I was the one who cooked him the burger and he was coming over to thank me.

He is my favorite customer so far.

Would you like fries with that, buddy?

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Eros and Thanatos At Castaways

I was at the community college this week. Hadn't been there in fifteen years but aside from a few renovations it's all the same. It was the end of the semester but there were still kids straggling around. Many of them were in a hurry but I didn't see much stress in their faces. I imagined they were discussing the age-old dilemnas: free will or determination, relativism or absolutism, Absolut or Smirnoff, all that shit.

In Hindu mythology there are gods that preside over creation and destruction, Visnu and Siva. Neither one is considered good for creating or bad for destroying: they just do it. It's how cycles end and the universe is constantly restored. Freud has a similar concept: eros and thanatos. The competing drives in human nature to create and destroy. So, what the fuck is this poindexter going on about? Well, these concepts have just been pushed to the forefront in my life lately. In very blatant fashion.

Many of you may know I am the General Manager of Castaways. My duties include promotion but they also include being head of security. These are often antagonistic assignments. I try to get as many people in the door as possible but as soon as they get in the door I have to be responsible for them. Once I open the door virtually anyone can walk through and without a good reason I can't ask them to leave. Long way around my point I guess. But in any night I have different groups of people. Blue collar workers, media types, intellectuals, badasses, scumbags, whatever. Often it will be the case people don't like each other. But one growing realization has come to me and it's starting to annoy the fuck out of me:

One of groups of people my bar attracts are idle wealthy. Nouveau riche. The sense of entitlement these people feel astounds me. They literally feel when they enter MY bar that they own the place. That we should cancel all previous plans and cater to them. But for six months a year they do not support my business. It's every other group I listed that keeps me going.

Worst of all they seem to find the other educated, intellectuals the most distasteful. This gave me pause to think. Why? Why wouldn't they go after the blue collar people and scumbags? Then it occurred to me: Visnu and Siva, eros and thanatos. Most of the wealth these people have is inherited. I'm not sure they are really educated at all. They seem to spend all their time looking for thrills and trying to stay occupied. The answer is simple: they are destruction. They are waste. They are decay. The intellectuals and educated types annoy them because they actually spend their time trying to CREATE something, trying to come up with new ideas and ways to make things better. They don't need to find endless ways to distract themselves from the inevitable reality that their lives are a waste and even though they have wealth they didn't earn it and don't contribute to society.

Even though I have been required repeatedly in my life to exert some sort of dominance over situations and at times even act physically I don't respect or appreciate violence or the gratuitous use of it. An incident that occurred Saturday set in motion a chain of events that wore me out and nearly destroyed my enthusiasm for my job altogether. A group of aforementioned people acted childishly and put property and peoples health in danger. The amount of energy it took to solve the problem with no major incident took a toll. There is no way to describe horrible violence or the feeling that goes along with it to people who have not seen it.
I will most likely delete this blog because I realize I have no private life.

I now have no creative life.

I will not allow anyone to take what little connection I have to the creative forces of this world away from me.

Castaways is and will remain a place where people can express all kinds of ideas and gather without threat of violence or intimidation. Anyone who sees it differently will be getting a visit from Siva presently.

Castaways On the Rock.

2026 Update.... I just wanted to go back to the first entry in this blog and see what it was about. Castaways. A dive bar under a bridge we owned for three years. Where Rockford Rage Roller Derby was formed and had it's home that first year. Where Zombie Night showed movies people still talk about. Where I met many of the people who are still important to me twenty years after this was posted. Where I met many of the people who who were important to me but now are no longer part of my life. I have been archiving my literary career and other aspects of my life lately, and one thing I can say is despite some of the heartbreak, it certainly didn't suck....

Ahhh, I see what happened. This was actually a My Space blog I migrated to Blogger. That's why it is dated several years before I even started this blog. Oh Boise. My Space. It's all almost over. What a trip. 

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