Around we go…

“You know he’s looking at someone else right now. Look, he’s even waving to her.”

“It’s the camera, silly. He’s interested in the photo, not the photographer.”

**********

“I find the crowd here to be a tad droll. What say we go for a walk – there’s a moon out tonight and the view is spectacular from my terrace on the Inner Drive…”

**********

“Mr. Mister, the lady over there is asking if you would join her for a drink. She seems very discree… Hey! Put that camera down!”

“Don’t worry, Frankie, it’s fine. I’m shined up pretty tonight, that’s all. Whaddaya expect?”

**********

Silently, to her hopelessly conflicted self: “Don’t listen to him…don’t look at him…just don’t… “

“Say, pallie boy, we really need to get moving if we’re gonna meet that guy for that thing.”

**********

“I’ll just pose here for a bit – let him eat his heart out.”

“He’s at the other end of the table for a reason, sweetie – the place is full of his exes and he’s trying to save you from a drink in the face. Why don’t I bring you another cocktail and have the boys play your tune? Couple hours and this’ll all blow over.”

Singer (singing): …Aaand these feel…like someone else’s memories...

-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

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.