From Chicago Gothic (2007). Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

Pursing your lips is better than biting them, she remembers, and then she remembers the sting of the lemonade on her adolescent bit lip, that summer when she’d grown a couple of inches so that her long pants became capris. That summer also brought Sean who’d kiss her and run away, something he repeated for years, until he ran way to the Navy and never came back. He was blond and brave, unlike her, she thought.

Last night she and Sheri had spent the evening at a club, pounding 7 & 7s and the dance floor, and now her pounding headache was in its third hour. “Oh well, pale is in…” she said to herself when she looked in the mirror this morning. Still, the white shirt might have been the wrong choice, though she’d an inkling to start anew this day – no more drinking, library and not the club tonight. White shirt instead of black.

Stopping at a store window to look at herself, she shifted her weight, then turned a bit. The corners of her mouth went south. She reached for the the black leather she’d been carrying and covered herself before moving on.

-Danny Grosso 

Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Dangle

With seductive eyes and a desperation borne and a siege mentality and instinctual self preservation, the Dangle spends most of its life in the trees, away from any harm to its personal liberty. Its connection to the muddy swamp below its lair is its sensuous tail, lushly maintained, and appearing to beckon interested parties to safety. Of course, rarely is the beckon genuine, and the gesture is always for the benefit of the Dangle alone, who likes to test its powers of attraction and manipulation. For this, the creature will remove its gaze from reflective surfaces, a diversion which encumbers most of the rest of its time.

The Dangle is so selfish as to disregard any utterances not coming from its own mouth, save one, for it is known to respond to this inquiry: “Pardon?” This phenomenon is extremely curious, for another creature, the Pardon, is the Dangle’s distant and more powerful cousin, and it is known that on rare occasions a dangle, perhaps through some aspirational transfiguration, has metamorphosed into a pardon.

 

–Danny Grosso 

Someone Else’s Memories was produced as a graphic single – an illustrated story with a CD of an original song co-written and performed by Danny Grosso and Russ Offman.

 

Alleyway Royals

Fold the tent up, the party’s gone

night so short, workday so long

trading dreams for the everyday

little prices we all pay.

Call me crazy, that’s what Leather would say

but not late for dinner this or any day

the mad king of the alleyway

begging the courtesans –  Come away.

Up from a bardo

as the son of a martyr

a cosmic style and fire

with which to conspire.

He sparked the intrigue and blazed a trail

we all followed to little avail.

Once the pageant all we knew

became the demon we never slew

the spinning color of love’s demands

excite the eye and impair the hands.

Call me crazy, that’s what Leather would say

but not late to woo you this or that way

the mad king of the alleyway

should’ve seen him in his day.

It’s just minefield where we play

and a shadowland where we lay

he slams his heel against the concrete bay

but the structure don’t give way

and nothing changes in the alleyway.

-Danny Grosso

There is much to do. All the nights are cold, and the darkness is marked at intervals, neon lights pulsing, changing everything around them for a moment. Life is like that too,  sometimes, for a moment. A pulse can change everything around it. Pulses of love, or hate, pulses of machinery or sound, pulses of water or fire. Pulses can beget rushes, and rushes, if rushes of love, can linger longer than say, the echo of a pulse of sound.

Long after that song ended, the one playing at the club the night he met her, past the echo of the melody in his head, his captivation with her resounded. Rushes of feeling, to infatuation, to love, to resignation – a sequential rite of the afflicted. Under a neon pulse, as under the earth’s satellite, all things are colored by a light refracted from a third source. The light of the moon is given by the sun.

There is much to do. He cannot light himself – he is crippled that way, a dead rock stuck in orbit, a moon.  His light, in his vampiric existence, came from the city’s neon display, and now he seeks more. A pulse can change everything. In the darkness he moves, lit up in a rainbow of colors, a Lite-Brite animation with a paper in his pocket bearing the address she gave him.

 

-Danny Grosso

The Traveler first appeared in The Loyola Phoenix in 1982 under the title D.C.. Many of the original strips were damaged in the layout and printing process, so the author reworked them in 1990-91.

 

–Danny Grosso

You heard from your elders about the special pleasures of a city as it is quieted for the night.

 

From Chicago Gothic (2007). Artwork and text copyright Danny Grosso.

Smashing bottles in the alley. His feet, cold and wet from the slushy pavement, give him a strange sense of comfort. This is what Christmas is supposed to be like, like it was when he was a kid, sneaking sips of liquor behind his uncle’s tavern, running back inside to warm your feet and watch the holiday revelers drink their bonuses away. He’d learned to smoke at the bar, and to play dice in the back room behind the register. When the holidays came he made extra money walking the inebriated to their apartments. They’d tip him, if they were awake when he slumped them into their beds, and if not, he’d reach into wallet or purse and tip himself.

There were no Christmas songs on the jukebox back then, so the drunks would just belt out carols all night, accompanied only by laughter. Now, he hears them inside, blending their voices with this year’s Christmas tune, playing on the new stereo sound system. Not bad, he thinks, as he raises unsteady fingertips to the night sky holding a butt still lit, a holiday light, a Christmas star.

Somewhere in an apartment high above, a kid looks down at the lonely little cigarette butt dancing like a shooting star below. It reminds him, somehow, of the star of Bethlehem. He thinks, because he sees this, that he is privy to a special holiday vignette. Drunk Santa lying in the snow, behind a tavern, Christmas carols in the background, that little cig light in the distance. A new Christmas creche for city folk. The boy wonders, since he’s followed the star to this vignette, if he is to one of the kings.

-Danny Grosso 

Continuing the expeditions of Jeff MacNelly, James J. Kilpatrick, and Eugene McCarthy, with apologies.

The Algorithmic Bias

A thoroughly modern creature with a backward-looking perspective, the Algorithmic Bias operates with an invisible hand to serve an unseen master. Unfortunately for the curious, the obscure methods of the invisible hand are sufficiently complicated as to render them inscrutable. The AB is thus an enigmatic magician playing in a sandbox of real world information, and making a mess. Logical conclusions find themselves subjugated to the AB, as do aspirational ideals, whimsy, inspiration, and blind pursuits. Investigational rigor is nothing next to the bedazzling charm of AB magic, and slow due diligence is detritus in the wake of the AB’s speedy retrieval of results. What’s more, since the creature feeds on its own speed, it grows continuously stronger within its infinite lifespan, which, in turn, increases its speed, which feeds the creature – a continuing cycle of growth,  power, and influence that is unmatched in the Bestiary. Its only natural predators, crusty tweedy researchers, can, at best, cull only one AB every so often, with great effort. This lopsided dynamic is thought to have wide effect, exampled by the strange phenomenon of overvalued tech stocks and the surge in the sale of black mock-neck pullovers.

 

-Danny Grosso