CZM Book Club: Locust House, by Adam Gnade (Part One of Four)

For our longer summer read, Margaret reads you a novella about punk houses and identity and growing up written by a master of the medium

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Cool Zone Media book Club book Club, book Club Club
book Club. Hello and welcome to the Cool Zone Media
book Club, the only book club where you don't have
to do the reading because I do it for you.
I'm Margaret kilj that's the eye and the eye statements

(00:24):
I make because this introduction is written in first person,
just the grammatical tons of that. And this week we
are starting another four parter, a summer beach read for
everyone anywhere near a beach, whether it's an ocean or
a lake or a creek. We're doing a four parter,
but a punk rock summer beach read, because this is

(00:47):
one of the most punk rock stories we'll ever tell you,
because it's literally about punk rockers. We did one last year,
we did Hermetica by Alan Lee aka Peter Gelderloose, and
it was nice to be able to save up the
episodes for a road trip or a long hike or something.
So we're going to do it again, and we're going
to read another novella this year. I'll be reading Locust

(01:09):
House by Adam Ganatti. And okay, spoiler alert, there's not
actually locusts in this that's the name of a house.
That's why it's called Locust House. This is the name
of a house. This novella nominally focuses on a punk
house called Locust House and the people around it, but
mostly it's a reflection on what it means to live

(01:31):
in a place and how we hold on to what
we believe when the world tries to file down your edges.
It's set in the San Diego punk scene, where Ganati
lived for a while. And I like this book a lot.
I picked this book with Hazel's help because I read
it on my own for my own enjoyment. I went

(01:51):
to see Adam speak a while ago, sometime last year,
and I kind of bought his entire collection of books
because I was so impressed by what I saw when
I saw him give a reading. And I picked up
this one because I had an intriguing title, and I
sat down and I read it and I didn't get
back up until I finished it, which was a while later,

(02:12):
as you all will discover, because it was really good
and it made me think a lot of things. It
made me feel a lot of things, And maybe you
too will feel some things when I read you this story.
Maybe you won't. Maybe you have a different kind of
connection to two thousand and two era punk scenes than
I do. Most people have a different connection to those things.

(02:34):
But two thousand and two is when I became a punk.
I didn't like punk in high school. All the punks
in my high school there was only one, and he
was right wing, and he was concerned I was going
left wing. So he put headphones on me and he
was like, Magpie. I'm gonna pretend that was always my name, Magpie.
You got to listen to this. And the lyrics of
this right wing punk song were down on your knees

(02:56):
with a gun to your head. You're better off dead
than fucking read. And that's not the punk that I
cared about at all. And I didn't like punk because
that guy was a jerk. And I hope he's recovered
from that particular version of punk rock, which is a
very small portion of punk rock, especially by that time,

(03:17):
as we've talked about a bunch on different shows. You know,
in the eighties and nineties, punk's did a really good
job of removing the right wing threat from within, if
only everyone else had listened to their methodology. Anyway, in
two thousand and two, I just covered punk rock and
it changed my life and I spent a lot of
time in Baltimore punk houses, rip to Food Not Bomb's House,

(03:39):
and Love Not Bomb's House, where I would go watch
shows in the basement and see amazing bands saying about
fighting Nazis. This is about San Diego, California, two thousand
and two, and just as a heads up for everyone
listening to this, this one does contain, especially Part one,
contained some serious misogyny and some sexual assault. And I

(04:04):
believe that the author has written it in a way
that is earned and a way that is worth including
in the story because that is a story that so
many of us have experienced. And to deny that in
our writing complicates certain kinds of writing. Not saying we
should put in every style of writing, but I think
that it seems like it does belong in this piece.

(04:25):
But just as a heads up where you're listening without
further ado. Locust House by Adam Gannatti, Chapter one, The
Adventures of Agnes mccanty Looking back, Agnes mccanty would come
to see March twenty ninth, two thousand and two as

(04:45):
a day broken into three stages. One standing at the
grave site of Michael the Bear, two a view of
the sea from atop the roller coaster, then sex with
Stephen Boone in the back room of the Halloween Store. Three,
the final night on East Street, and how much she bled,

(05:07):
and how she felt like an arm held out a
speeding car window. The first standing at the grave site
of Michael the Bear in Sherman Heights, his bronze and
black Keller Holland casket like a train car, eye level
for a girl of five foot one, blocking out the
sun which glared around it, golden but soft, dusk coming.

(05:30):
Agnes thought of the man who lay inside, Michael the Bear,
her father's uncle, an irishman raised in England, though forty
years in the States, Pacific Grove ten years, Watsonville twelve,
then San Diego eighteen. Before that, a pub cook in
Coventry two years, then an RAF pilot in the Second

(05:52):
World War twenty six months. Michael the Bear, the man
who cared for Agnes after her mother passed away breastcancer.
Her and her father went to jail for his brother
in law's murder. Michael the Bear stepped in, selfless, noble,
loyal to Agnes, forever loyal, his defining characteristic. What else

(06:15):
He was strong but wouldn't stoop to violence, which he
told Agnes was unbecoming, as was backbiting, complaining self pity, selfishness.
He was classy, she decided, yes, whatever classy meant he
was that this had nothing to do with money, which
he had, but rather an overriding trait of his upbringing,

(06:36):
his generation, and his content of character. Michael the Bear
was a man who liked people, who quietly loved anyone
fighting to do a good thing. Whatever it was, the
goal mattered less than the path there. The final objective
itself was unimportant her secondary. Agnes stood at the grave

(06:57):
site next to her cousins, who smelt like cigarettes and shampoo,
and thought of his face, dark, dignified, high forehead, crows
feet around the eyes, his hair swept back in a
mane like a lion's. A voice like Liam Neeson's, deep
and slow and resonant with bass, a calm voice, husky

(07:17):
on the w's in soft vowels, telling her she was
a good woman, that she had grown up well, that
he missed her around the house but understood her absence.
The day he died, Agnes found the body. The door
was locked, but she had a key, and she stopped
in on the way to ban Practice the day the
wildfire swept over East County. The night before, she had

(07:41):
dreamt of skulls of sheep washing up on the beach,
though huge whale size rolling in the surf. It was
a dry day, and it was hot, and you could
smell smoke and ash in the air from the blaze.
Somewhere down the street. A dog barked yipped. As she
unlocked the front door, Agnes heard the sound of the

(08:02):
breeze in the eucalyptus. She pulled the door shut behind her.
The front room was quiet and still, and there were
dust motes moving in the light of the side yard window.
She called his name. The mouth of the hallway was dark,
a black rectangle, open, featureless. She stepped into it and

(08:23):
called out to him again as she walked down the hall.
In the bedroom, Michael the Bear was under the big
denim quilt. He no, not he, she thought. His body
it was facing the wall, a giant six foot four
even at his age, a flattened mountain or a cinder cone. Motionless.

(08:44):
His body was still in a way that the living
never are. The room was cold. She dropped to her knees.
Michael the Bear was eighty two and it was coming.
Her cousin Mary Lynne sat on the car ride to
the cemetery. But it would never happen today, some other day,
perhaps not today. Today would be fine. He would be

(09:05):
here today anyway. Why say goodbye to the living? Why
sum up your time with someone when their time is
not come. Humming Bird was his name for her, Riding
on his big shoulders at the del Mar Fair, age four,
talking in her high piping voice, tiny hands too tight
around his neck, but he didn't mind. He loved her

(09:27):
with a burning pride, a strong, tremendous, substantial love. She
couldn't hurt him, No one could. He was a stone,
a castle wall, a locked drawbridge, but a drawbridge that
would open if she or anyone worth while asked. He
was tough without being hard, and that was the thing
that made her feel safest. Over the years. Michael the

(09:50):
Bear told Agnes some variation of the following in his
slow rolling, measured tone, humming Bird. If you can grow
up tough without becoming mean or bitter or sour or cynical,
you'll do just fine. He said things like, remember, Hummingbird.
Life is about finding as much happiness as you can

(10:11):
without hurting anyone in the process. You won't find the
meaning of life.

Speaker 2 (10:16):
But you look.

Speaker 1 (10:17):
If you're any good, and I know you are, what
you will find is truths like that, true ways to live.
That is one of mine and it could be yours
as well. Enjoy life violently, but never be violent. Violence
is the tool of cowards. Agnes loved Michael the Bear
with a fierceness she would not begin to understand until

(10:39):
she was a parent herself. It was the true animal,
fierceness of a blind cub and a den of the small,
protected by the strong. Now that he was gone, gone
entirely and unavailable to her, nothing she could do would
allow her to speak to him again, which is what
she wanted more than anything say goodbye, than to ask

(11:01):
him where he was. She couldn't imagine him to be
so far gone as to be nowhere as to not exist.
His body that was nothing. Where was he? Where was
the big, honest, courageous, tireless spirit that was Michael the Bear?
A good thing like that doesn't die. And do you
know what, dear reader, You know what else doesn't die?

(11:24):
The relentless spirit of capitalism that fills me with the
holy sweetness of the products and services that support this podcast,
And I am reborn in their glory and in my
eternal devotion to the ads. I throw, and I throw
twice an episode approximately evenly spaced ads. And we're back

(12:00):
and now safe in heaven with God, said the preacher.
He didn't know Michael the Bear. He was hired from
Saint Matthew's by the Sea, A hired man Martin Schrader,
He called him. Who is Martin Schrader? Michael Schroder? Was
Michael the Bear? There is no Martin Schrader, No, not here,
not lying in there, mister Schrader, a good man in

(12:23):
God's providence after a long, fine life, droning, enjoying a
long pause and the sound of his own voice, but
disinterested in the meaning. Agnes smelled rum on his breath
on the walk across the lawn. The smell of the
flowers was sickening. She wanted nothing more than to set
fire to the pile of them and push the preacher

(12:44):
down into the blaze. She wanted to burn him to
cinders for giving Michael the Bear an improper send off,
stump on his skull till it smashed flat. And his
brains burst out like cold pork gravy, pull his spine
from his body and beat the ground with it. Beat
the ground and mourn Michael the Bear. Mourn him with
blood speckling, her arms, missing the air. Agnes felt like

(13:08):
a monster. She wanted to scream. She wanted to let
loose her rage until the whole world shook. Agnes couldn't
be kind like Michael the Bear. Not now. She wanted violence.
She wanted to be violence. The next few hours are
remembered in a gauzy flash of images. They were as follows,

(13:31):
cresting the hill of the Giant Dipper roller coaster in
Belmont Park with her cousins Daniella and Mary Lynne. After
the funeral, a redheaded boy her age sitting in the
coaster car next to her, who smelled like old pasta
floating in a pot of water. He held the metal
bar in front of him and looked seasick as they
rose up the track. Earlier, on the car ride back

(13:53):
from the cemetery, the green blur of Balboa Park flashing by.
We have to kill an hour, said Mary Lynne. Driving.
She wore big sunglasses with white plastic frames, and her
dyed blonde hair moved around her face in the breeze.
Daniella leaned in from the back seat, cigarette breath, Hop
boxy out of the Toyota and ride the roller coaster. Hells, yeah,

(14:16):
let's do it, Agnes. Huh, Agnes, you want to get
stoned and ride the dipper? It doesn't matter? And it
didn't or did it? She sat in the beach parking
lot while her cousins laughed and passed the pipe from
the front seat to the back. Did it matter? What mattered?
It didn't matter. Then, after the clacking ascent up the

(14:40):
roller coaster track and before the plunge downwards, there was
a view of the sea, silvery and wind chopped, cold, vast,
rolling with long lines of swell. It never ends, thought Agnes.
Next the drop down and her hair blowing straight back in,
the tightening of her stomach muscles as her cousin screamed happily,

(15:00):
arms held up. They took the turn hard, the wheels rattling,
jostling on the track, the wind in her face, gritting
her jaw strained, nauseous. Next, ditching her cousins at the
amusement park in the dark of the arcade, Agnes walked
down Mission Boulevard alone, with the evening traffic all around
and the wind whipping her hair into her eyes. Storefronts,

(15:24):
surf shops, beach bars, grains of sand under her shoes
on the sidewalk, traffic lights in the dust. Next, asking
her boyfriend Stephen for a ride home at his uncle
Carl's Halloween store. I'm sorry to ask, but no, it's
cool that works. Come back here, a sick here, Just

(15:44):
come on. Stephen took her hand and they walked past
the walls of masks, ghoulish faces, hairy mouths, open cut
out holes for eyes, screaming silently, devil beards, worms and maggots,
nestling in wounds, bloody teeth, fanged rubbery howling without sound,
horrible mouths, and into the back room. While Big Marcos

(16:06):
the New Hire sat at the register reading a comic book.
There was gray light, a fading light through the windows,
and Big Marcus crowning down at the book, turning the
pages with a soft, fat hand. The spider Man swung
through the city after the Green Goblin, casting his webs
left and right. Next in the back room, Stephen shoving

(16:27):
her forward against the counting desk on her belly, her
skirt pulled up to her waist, her panties to her ankles,
and pushing up inside her before she was ready. Slower,
she said out Stephen's slow down. I'm trying take your time, slower, Steven, No,
not yet. No, it was over fast. One hand on

(16:48):
her waist, gripping her nails, digging into her flesh, the
other clawing her right breast until it hurt her hips,
smacking against her, and he came into Agnes like a
dish soap bottle squeezed into a tub of warm water,
he told Big Marcus with a laugh, while Agnes cleaned
up in the bathroom. Agnes, she's a mess, but she's
a hot little fuck, he said, check it. Take my keys,

(17:09):
drive her home. If you want a fuck her, you
totally can. I bet you'd at least suck your dick.
My brother Ted's in town. The three of us should
get her drunk and try and run a train on
that little bitch. Big Marcus, overwhelmed and upset by the proposition,
took a smoke break before driving Agnes home. The next day,
he would quit Stephen's uncle's Halloween store and apply, unsuccessfully
at the Claremont Party City before landing his dream job

(17:31):
at the Carl Strauss Brewery by the Freeway. Eight years later,
he would add Stephen on Facebook and send him the
following message, Dude, that's shit you said about your girlfriend
and I was having sex with her. That was so
not okay. I've been thinking about that for years and
I had to get it out. That was a shitty,
evil thing to say. The message received no reply, and

(17:53):
Big Marcus was promptly unfriended. But do you know what,
dear reader, Do you know we'll never unfriend you? And
what is never a gross and evil imposition eternally on
our minds. It is the sacred and holy sacrament of advertisements.
We are bound to the product and tethered by the services.
Amen and rebec On the drive back to Golden Hill,

(18:29):
Big Marcus humming along with the car stereo, while Agnes
sat in the passenger seat and felt small and used
up and unimportant. To clear her mind, she thought of
Michael de Bear's favorite things to cook one once a
week lasagna with Italian sausage later as a substitution, butternut squash,
ravioli with brown butter sage, and shaved parmesan when she

(18:51):
quit eating meat for both side of garlic bread, a
spinach and cabbage salad with halved red grapes, calamata olives,
marinated artichoke carts, and goat cheese later baked tofu two.
On the rare chilly nights in the winter, they would
sit around the small kitchen table and eat thick split

(19:12):
piece soup cooked with carrots and bacon, and later liquid
smoke or bacos. On the side, sour dough bread, the
serving of the bread butter and a squeeze of lemon
A result of Michael the Bear's four years at working
at Bozi's nineteen seventy six nineteen eighty, a seafood restaurant
on Clare Mount Mesa Boulevard three. On summer days when

(19:34):
it was too hot to move, he made gaspacho with
a pitcher of strawberry lemonade. For dessert, peach ice cream
garnished with a sprig of mint. Michael the Bear maintained
what he called a victory garden, and with San Diego's
long growing season, a good portion of each meal came
from what he grew. She saw him standing at the
kitchen counter at the old North Park House, slicing lemons

(19:57):
in the late afternoon light, saying, Agnes, every one must
know how to grow their own food. When you cut
yourself off from that, you shut the door on something
older than history, something important and deep to our character.
Agnes thought of his meals and his happiness, and how
serious he was as he prepared them. She stared out

(20:18):
the window at the growing dark the sun set behind
the car like a wall of fire consuming the earth.
Don't fucking cry, she told herself, not in front of him.
Stopped at a traffic light. Across from the Nuaveo Cristo Church,
she saw a wedding party push open the big doors
and come out from the gold lit square of the
hall and down the steps, the bride in front holding

(20:39):
up her dress to walk. She imagined Michael the Bear
giving her away at her own wedding. How proud he
would be, and how stirred his big heart as he
answered the words, who gives this woman away? That would
be me. It was night now, and the bride's gown
was so white it was nearly blue, like snow, glowing
against her dark skin, and all the black suits and

(21:01):
dresses in gray stone around her. They made a left
at the light. Isn't it kind of late in the
day for a wedding, She asked Big Marcos, who drove
with one hand on the wheel, the other on his
right thigh, tapping along to the radio. He shrugged, he
didn't know. The singer on the radio was singing that
if he could find that Haina and that Sancho that

(21:21):
she'd found, he would pop a cap in Sancho and
smack her down. And Agnes wanted to die. For the
first time in her life, she wanted to die. Big
Marcos dropped Agnes off at the studio apartment in Golden Hill,
which sat between two Victorians in the shade of a
grapefruit tree, a street lined with cars, the yellow lighted

(21:42):
windows blinking on in the darkness. Walking up the brick
path under the trees, she heard mariachi music from the
line of pink apartments across the street. Fuzzy barely there,
she could smell onions and garlic frying in butter, and
a voice was yelling something distant, then laughter, followed by
frantic noise on the TV, the war or a riot.

(22:04):
Sleep Walking, she opened the door, shut it behind her
and dropped her keys on the carpet. She stepped across
the bare twin sides mattress on the floor, and over
her guitar and four track machine and a pile of
tapes and cables as she pulled off her clothes. Then
three steps to the tiny bathroom. The person in the
mirror pale skin, freckles across her nose, soft brown hair

(22:27):
swept over her forehead and tucked behind her left ear,
longer on the sides than the back, falling into pin
curls around her chin. The face was unsmiling and had empty,
slate gray eyes. She was wrung out, she decided, wrung
out in so much older than twenty two. She ran
her hands across her bare shoulders, a new mole on

(22:48):
the rise of her collarbone, the tattoo of a one
winged locust on her chest above her left breast. Agnes
cupped her breasts in her hands and looked down at them,
her bright pink nipples poking out from between her face.
She shook her head. She saw the bath map below
her feet orange, new but starting to wear. Stephen's cumb

(23:08):
was dried on the inside of a right thigh, Her
toenails were painted baby blue. She knew she was pregnant. Somehow,
she knew. She thought of his cock inside her, and
the sour smell of his body, and her stomach went
tight again, as it had on the roller coaster, bending
down to turn the cold water knob, then the hot
hot to burn her flesh until she was able to forget.

(23:31):
In middle school, she was called the pale whale. It
was before I lost my baby fat, she told her
coworker Melanie Crenshaw fourteen years later in the dead center
of the country Overland Park, Kansas, while they sat in
the living room of Melanie's new white townhouse, drinking Chardonnay
with a plate of untouched ritz crackers and sweet pickles.

(23:52):
You were fat. I don't believe that it wasn't fat.
I was a kid. It was the only time in
my life I had tits, but I looked awful. In
high school, my first boyfriend, Travis Brotis, called me the
pale Princess. He meant it as a compliment, but ugh,
I hated it. I hated being the pale Princess even
worse than the pale whale. That's why I called the

(24:13):
band pale of shit. What Agnes. Oh my god, girl,
I didn't know you played music. Was it any good?
I can't imagine you in a band, Agnes, the little
secretary in a band, like what, it doesn't matter. What
did it sound like? It doesn't matter. Come on, it's dumb.
It was. It was a hardcore band. I played guitar

(24:36):
and screamed. I screamed and played guitar. It was so
dumb hardcore? Is that like punk? Get out? No way?
You were so not in a punk band. I was, yeah,
pale of shit, raising her hands above her head and
shaking them woohoo, laughing than not. It was during college.

(24:57):
I had my own apartment, a car that never ran. Yeah, band,
I was in a band. I was twenty two, and
we broke up when I was god like twenty three
a year later. Maybe, wow, Ags, I can't imagine you
like that. What happened life growing up? I don't know.
Do you still listen to that kind of music? Sipping
her wine if you can call it that? No, not

(25:20):
at all, she said, lying, I'm not that kid anymore.
The shower steamed the glass until Agnes was an outline
in the mirror. She stepped into the stall and pulled
the curtain closed, the plastic rings clacking, Agnes shut her
eyes and let the water hit the back of her
head and run down her shoulder. And that's where we're

(25:42):
gonna leave it for this week. That's the end of
part one. I guess it's not separated into parts like
that exactly, but you know, we have to separate it
into parts because we make a podcast out of it.
What do I want to say about this piece? Well,
part one is the roughest of them. You made it
through the roughest of them. I fucking love Ganadi prose.
And there's a kind of honesty to this style of

(26:04):
prose that I find really fascinating. That to me comes
out of the sort of the Zene culture where people
write mostly personal zines, and people started basically writing in
a personal zine style of other people on writing fiction
that way, and it made me realize I do love
modern literary fiction that's like about people without any demons

(26:26):
in it, except, of course, the human demons. Yeah. I
don't know. I'll have more than I continue to want
to say about this as we go, But Adam Ganatti
for a little bio about him. Adam Gannatti's Writing is
released as a connected series of books and audio recordings
of writing with musical accompaniment, self described as talking songs

(26:46):
aimed at creating a personal history of life as I
knew it when I lived. Ganatti's work is published and
issued by Brett and Roses Press three to one g
Hello America Stereo Cassette and the Numer Group. Gannati intends
his books to be seen quote as one long, interconnected novel,
in the way of Proust's pronounce Prus's name Praus Prus

(27:08):
Praulst prosed Prust's autobiographical writing end quote, but obviously the aside,
and there was me having it aside about not knowing
how to pronounce that man's name. The recorded albums quote
should be considered a vast hour's long soundtrack, running parallel
with the stories in the books, continuing plot lines and
further explaining the characters as they navigate a lifetime. Recent

(27:30):
works have included the Home and Away Quartet, which is
comprised of the novels After Tonight Everything Will Be Different
twenty twenty two, The Internet Newspaper twenty twenty three, I
Wish to Say Lovely Things twenty twenty four, and Your
Friends Will Carry You Home twenty twenty five, and the
Talking Song's collection The World of Today and the World

(27:51):
of Tomorrow, issued on cassette in twenty twenty one and
Lathe Cut CD in twenty twenty six. On September twenty sixth,
twenty twenty sixth, this very year, Numero Group will reissue
Ganati's two thousand and five debut Talking Songs record Run, Hide, Retreat,
Surrender on twelve inch Final in October of twenty twenty six.
Is fourteenth book, Wild Horse Shit, will be released by

(28:14):
Brett and Roses Press in conjunction with Three to One
g Born in San Diego, California, Adam Gannatti now lives
on a six acre farm in rural Kansas, near the
towns of Lawrence and Tanoxi, in half an hour outside
Kansas City, Missouri. And I'm your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and
you can find my writing every week on my newsletter,
which is Margaret Kiljoy dot substock dot com. I have

(28:36):
a bunch of books to not nearly as many as
Adam Gannatti, but I guess my most recent one is
The Immoral Choir Holds Every Voice, which is like the
same only there's demons in it. I put demons in mine,
and I'll be back next week with more Locust House.
Until then, remember that the urge to destroy is also
a creative force. Fuck Ice free Palestine. Burn every single

(28:58):
prison of the ground, but only after get everyone out
of them. See you all soon.

Speaker 2 (29:07):
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