first published in misfit magazine, Editor Alan Catlin
Danny Shot, Night Bird Flying, Roadside Press, distributed by Magical Jeep also available on Amazon, 2025, 130 pages $17
I might as well get this out of the way up front, if I had to create a list of the top ten small press mags since I stared publishing in the 70s, Danny Shot’s Long Shot would be on it. Wormwood will always be number one because the incomparable editor Marvin Malone. We should aspire to and try to be half the editor he was. After that, well there was some great ones and Long Shot had it all going especially around the time of 9-11 when everything was turning to shit in a major way. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying, they published me several times, so if that suggests I have a conflict of interest, well, so be it. I do my best to be subjective.
So, okay, I loved this book beginning with the whacko cover girl with the lightning bolt underarm hair, holding down the fort by a café table covered in empty Bud cans cigarette butts, an almost empty cheap bottle of Vodka; the usual detritus of a night of hard drinking. We later meet the cover girl as Cinful Cindy, gonzo pal of his lost love Carla, the subject of the longest story in the book, “What a Wonderful World.”
I confess I have a thing about Night Bird Flying, the title of the book, which conjures up memories of Allison Steele the night DJ on WNEW FM in the late 60s early 70s who is a minor background character in “What a Wonderful World”. I can still hear Allison’s tag line,
The flutter of wings, the shadow across the moon, the sounds of the night, as the Nightbird spreads her wings and soars, above the earth, into another level of comprehension, where we exist only to feel. Come, fly with me, Alison Steele, the Nightbird, at WNEW-FM, until dawn.
Those of us who came of age in those halcyon years, later recalled the sixties were largely overrated (especially if you were military draft eligible or about to be). The thing about the 60’s really was “the only truly great stuff that came out of that era were sports (especially New York sports) and the music.” And when you think of the music, you think of prog rock, smoking doobies, and Allison Steele. She was like the Maltese Falcon. She was the stuff dreams were made of.
Danny Shot gets this.
Early stories in his collection take place in Dumont, NJ where he grew up. I have a personal connection with Dumont as back I the late 60s my Summer job was working in a soft ice cream/ Italian Ice stand on Sunrise Highway on the Island in Lynbrook NY. Kitty corner to the stand was a triangular point behind the Esso station that had, for one summer, a sculptor renting the property. It was my bright idea to commission a concrete ice cream cone for a Christmas Present for our beloved boss, Don “Bonehead” Wilson and to deliver it as a surprise staff gift to his home in Dumont NJ. And we did, somehow managing to transport it across the Verrazano Narrows bridge along with three adults in a Nash Rambler. Do you know how much a four-foot high, custom-made concrete ice cream cone weighs? I don’t know precisely, but a lot covers it. So, if you ever drove by a house in Dumont in the late 60s that had a giant concrete cone on the porch, it was all my fault.
Growing up in Dumont was a lot like growing up on Long Island, as I did, around the same time as many of these stories. I am a few years older than Danny and the drugs weren’t quite as prevalent as they were in his day (though they would be soon). By mid-60s, if you knew a guy, who knew a guy, who knew someone else….and there were rumors of heroin around, but not that anyone actually saw any. Of course, in a couple of years, guys from the National Honor Society were getting busted in their dorm rooms. I can relate to all of the experiences the young narrator tells us to the point you wonder what is fiction and what is memoir. The opening story hooked me right in, “Ich bin ein New Yorker.” He then proceeds to outline all the ways he is not, geographically anyway, actually a New Yorker but, in fact, a Jersey boy and everyone from New York knows: People from Jersey suffer from New Yorker envy.
Personally, I grew up in the shadow of New York and the first thing I wanted to do, once I was old enough, was to get the hell out. But that’s just me. My dislike and disdain only grew after years of working Upstate, N.Y., working with the spawn of the City’s elite. They all seem to think because their dad works in finance and is a white-collar criminal, or he works for the mob and is an actual criminal, they are beyond special. All the rest of the people in the world, are service workers who don’t count, because my dad can buy their dads and everything they thought of owning. Whatever. I used to love telling them your credit is no good here. But I digress.
There is no question the final piece, “Death of a Poet,” is fact or fiction. It is clearly a memoir piece and it burns a hole in your heart. This essay/memoir is an absolutely shattering piece about the last days of Neo Beat poet Andy Claussen and his partner Pamela Twinning. I read with both of those guys a couple of times. I saw Andy read elsewhere and that was an experience that is rarely duplicated as few poets could outshine Claussen on stage. I can’t say I knew Andy or Pamela well, but having read both the books Shot speaks of in this essay, their final publications, I feel close to them in spirit.
The essay tells the story backwards in twenty short sections beginning with Andy near the end of his steep decline, asking if he is dying. Clearly, he was, but the real genius of the piece is the traveling backwards in lives well-lived, to the beginning of his and Pamela’s decline. All stories end the same but it is the getting there, the telling of it, that makes the story special. Shot has created one of the most completing tribute essays to fellow writers I have ever read.
On the negative side, Shot includes a throwaway, a male fantasy piece, that I can only compare with Phillip Roth’s unfortunate Kafka the stand-up comedian pastiche, The Breast. Shot’s is called “The Big Dick.” Enough said. It is especially jarring as it comes directly after the Bob Dylanesque, “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” evoking long story about his lost love, “What a Wonderful World.” That story feels so real it has to be true even if it isn’t. Ever love madly, truly, deeply? This is the story for you, then, and while it is doomed from the outset, it doesn’t feel either sentimental or maudlin; a rare achievement. “The Big Dick.” Well, The Breast wasn’t funny either.
—Alan Catlin
