Title: Emeryville War
Author: Wild Bill Blackolive
[$5, postpaid in US. HUGE SALE!]
Here’s a $5 ZINEBOOK! Zines are cheap…so are ZINEBOOKS! Check it out! Pulp is back! The new pulp is here! …Yet another title in the ULA PRESS zinebook series!
Wild Bill is a folk writer like we haven’t seen before. He writes in a seemingly unpolished folk style but actually it’s very polished. There’s a real voice. One you haven’t seen til now. It’s like a more real version of a voice that has hints in it of Twain, Faulkner, Melville, the Bible, Kerouac, Castenada and Cormac McCarthy. And it’ll crack ya up.
FROM THE BACK COVER:
If you liked “Confederacy of Dunces,” you’ll really like this. Only, it’s real. An amazing memoir of life on the fringe of Berkeley in the 1980’s. A hilarious look at neighbors, cops and city officials from an even wilder observer: Wild Bill, who lives in a backyard in his broke-down car with his barbells and a litter of pitbulls.
AN EXCERPT…
In Emeryville Millie owns a house next door to the odd Arbunckle family. Kevin, the youngest, mid twenties, is on SSI. A couple of times he came over and asked for a cigarette, change for a cup of coffee, or if we had any weed. The first time or so, I gave him change, but being his nature the innocence it is, and I a curious man, I began making him quick cups of coffee expresso type with my old tin single cup maker. He would hum like a cub scout — du be, du be, da da — while I fixed it. He often leaves his mug—he does not want to be seen returning with it. His mother does not want him associating with the neighbors. Kevin told me he goes out early to sell plasma and later be telling his mother he had been doing a day’s work. Kevin says it took three tries to get SSI, til he had put on a good enough act.
On the other side of the Arbuncles lives Millie’s more familiar neighbor, Andre Carpauix, from Belgium, living in the U.S. since coming here as an exchange student in 1962. I met Andre the day he was pillaged by the city of Emeryville and Millie happened to be here. Andre, an inventor, who teaches auto mechanics, and does freelance work, was out working and Emeryville launched their assault in the early day. For years the city had been threatening to abate, remove Andre’s boxcar in his back yard, filled with Andre’s tools, expensive equipment, and inventions. “Oh,” said Millie. “They are going to move Andre’s boxcar!” I had not heard of Andre nor noticed the boxcar. I was in my room, stoned on acid and my problems. “Oh, they’re bringing in the police! Oh, Andre will be mad!”
AUTHOR BIO:
Wild Bill has been an outlaw folk writer since a youth in the ’60s, with no connections, except for praise from William Burroughs. His style combines the classic, the comic, and the cosmic. He has published a word-of-mouth underground zeen, “The Last Laugh” for decades. He has a GED, has never held a real job, but has been a bouncer, boxer, bodyguard and art school model. He presently cares for his elderly mother and an assortment of pit bulldogs in Port Aransas, Texas, on the Gulf, near the border.
