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

Cool Zone Media. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Cool Zone Media book Club, the only podcast where you don't have to do the reading because I do it for you. And today we are finishing our breezy, beachy summer read that's not actually very breezy, and it's only beachy in the fact that it's about San Diego.

But it's a cool book and I really like it, and I hope you do too. You probably like it, all right, You're on episode four out of four. You've made it to the end. We're reading Locust House by Adam Gannatti. It's a novella that was published in twenty sixteen by Pioneer Press and you can buy a copy for your aging punk friend from Bread and Roses Distro.

Last week we found our main characters, James and Francis, partners who are young, drunk and full of punk, and they're at the last show at Locust House before everyone gets evicted. You've also got this character, a guy named Tyler who's a straight laced med student from nine to five Monday through Friday, but into hardcore the rest of the time. And there's also this asshole named Ted. We don't really know too much about besides that, he's drunk and annoying. And there's Agnes, who just got back from her uncle's funeral, who is the closest she ever had to a parent, with a side quest to visit her dickbag of a boyfriend. And there's the whole San Diego punk scene writhing with angst and potential energy. And there's

the cops who are about to bust up this party, and Agnes is probably pregnant, so let's finish it up. James is well, I'm narrating, but James is the character that's narrating. It's complicated. I believe in you. And also here's a fun fact. I don't remember what voices I did last time, so they might be the same and they might be different. Locust House by Adam Gannatti, Part four.

I lost Frankie and Tyler in the crowd and ended up alone in the house. I remember walking through the various rooms and it was like they were circus funhouse rooms, each its own realm. The rooms were packed so tight you'd have to climb over people just to get to see the bands. Ratty punk kids with bullet belts and patched up black denim, older scene, kids in perfect Levi's jackets and tight jeans and high soul creepers. A famous artist from La very tall, vampiric and all black and sunglasses in the corner talking to a couple of girls and trying to play at low key. Lots of cool Mexican goths with greased up hair, Cleopatra eyeliner and a million tattoos. Lots of people were drunk, lots of people

making out. Upstairs. There were so many kids in the main room and the bands played that the floor felt soft, like it was going to give way at any second. The halls were just as crowded, people shoving to get through, kids writing on walls, broke glass everywhere. I remember Cedric and Omar from at the Drive In playing some kind of deep, heavy, weird improvisational dub under the name De Facto on the first floor. The room was very dark and people were jammed in like cigarettes in a pack, pressed up against each other, too close to move. Moving units played downstairs too. It was dance music as punk and punk as dance music in the most spectacular way, the scuzziest of new wave, the catchiest too. You could

tell they wanted to be there, wanted to be doing exactly what they were doing, and that was a fine thing to see. The Blood Brothers set was manic and shaky. They were doing a lot of songs off March on Electric Children, and they the songs, I mean, were as frantic as they were heavy. It was so loud. Not all of it made sense, but that was beside the point.

It felt right and anyway, disorder and correctness are not mutually exclusive. Like a lot of people will say, Francis seeing the Locust play was always pretty fucking amazing. Of all the bands in our scene, their lyrics were the most political. They were anti cop anti authoritarian. I don't think a lot of people got that at the time because most of the bands in our scene weren't very political.

In contrast to other scenes happening at the time, San Diego Kids were more about pushing the boundaries of art and music and fashion, and that was good too. Something I've learned these past few years is you need to have art with your activism, and activism with your art. It's essential. If you don't find a little pleasure to offset the strain of fighting for a better world, you burn out. These days. Most of my friends are either radicals or journalists who cover activists stories. They're believers, their staunch and they get up every morning without much sleep, and they do battle. But they're strained and they're overwhelmed, almost across the board. You see it in their eyes.

They're hurt, they're tired. I try to tell them we need to be more like people our age from Paris in the nineteen twenties, you know, active, informed, but still down to party, still into art for enjoyment's sake. Sometimes they take my advice for a minute, but it never sticks. I don't even take my advice most of the time.

I know it would be healthy for me to slow down for a second and get drunk and go dancing, or just chill the fuck out and read a novel or something. But in the end, the pull of my work makes recreation feel self indulgent. I know how that sounds, I do, but yeah, I don't like feeling frivolous, or that I'm wasting my time on things without meaning. Looking back, I feel like that party was a thousand years in the past. The me that was there is the me that's here now. But it's not been easy I've been trying as hard as I can, but some days I feel like a sinking ship. It's been a rough couple years, James.

After the band's played, I wandered back to the front of the house, excited and in love with the world, in love with everyone I saw, and all the possibilities of being alive and willing to take risks, try bold things. As I walked through the house alone, I looked at everyone and I loved them all. Who were they? All those kids, drunk, sober, laughing, bickering, smoking, hooking up, arguing.

I wanted to be everyone's friend all at once, to take each one aside and say, look, here we are. We're together for this one great thing. Why don't we all know each other? Who are we in this place? And most of us strangers? I'm a nice person. Life is lonely. Let's be friends. My eyes were filled with tears.

I was happy and drunk, and I wanted so much. Outside the house, kids were getting violent. Someone had pushed a couch off the second story balcony, and somebody else tossed a handful of firecrackers into the yard, and a few people got hurt. I walked down the porch steps to see Frankie holding a white T shirt to our sweet neighbor Jessica Colvin's face. She Jessica, was sitting up against the white picket fence and blood was soaking through the shirt. By then, the cops had begun to arrive and they were out front questioning Omar and Cedric from de Facto next to their van. And that seemed like the funniest thing in the world. I stood on the porch and snapped a picture with my disposable Kodak box camera.

It felt like an important moment, was it. Who knows what's important and what's not. At the time, I thought to myself, things are happening right now, and we're alive, and the world is funny and okay, and we can do whatever we want. The world that's happening now is a world we can change and control. We can make this world whatever we want it to be. We can rebuild the world in our image if we work together, and we can crush the very foundations of the old order.

It's a good feeling to have that kind of confidence and optimism at least once in your life. I've had it since, but never that idyllic. Never that sure, But do you know what else will give you an unfiltered and whole feeling. That's right, it's the products and services that support this podcast, with the exception of sports gameplay.

Don't do that and reback, Tyler. Fuck the police forever, Francis. What was it? Eight ten squad cars? So many for just a house party. It was asinine. We were having so much fun, dancing to the bands, going crazy in the pit, drinking wine and everyone laughing, meeting new people, talking to strangers, cheering after each song like we were at a gladiator arena. As soon as the cops got there, it was like a bucket of ice water thrown in our faces. James, even those hundreds of billions of cops didn't bring me down. Maybe I was too drunk, but I didn't feel all bloozy until the walk home, Francis.

The thing about James is he is always very hard to find after a party, Tyler. San Diego cops are the ugliest cops you'll ever see, which is funny because there's a city with a lot of attractive people. San Diego cops looked like giant, dickish war hoogs of mirrored sunglasses and mustaches. People call cops pigs, but San Diego cops really do look like pigs. I used to have fantasies of just going out and killing a bunch of cops, killing off the entire San Diego police force as a service to humanity. I mean, of course i'd never do it, but if I did, I don't think i'd ever feel bad. James, I might have puked on someone's mailbox. Half on purpose, no, totally on purpose. It was so gross funny though, Francis.

After I found James and Tyler, we stood on the sidewalk and James and I tried to talk Tyler into not driving home. We told him he always had a place on our couch, and he told us he knew that it was something he knew he could always count on. But he left anyway. James hugged Tyler, I hugged Tyler, and he left. I was kind of mad, to be honest, Tyler.

Frankie called out to me as I was walking down the sidewalk, and she was like, Tyler, you're totally going home to study, aren't you admit it? I turned around and shrugged and played it off. She was right, I had a test on Monday. James Tyler would always go home after parties or shows and study the hardest fucking subjects.

No one else in the world understands Tyler. Sometimes I would go home after a party and I'd be out of my head on speed or ecstasy, usually dropping Joey Carr off first, who would be just as destroyed, and I'd go do my homework and listen to Boussy Debussy in organic chemistry and cocaine. It was some surreal shit.

The raven was right never more, James. I remember driving around with Tyler and Joey Carr and both of them were doing lines at every stoplight like a couple of idiots, and Tyler had Wagner or some dumb bombastic crap blasting out of his speakers. It was horrible. I hated that shit. Those two were on a whole different wavelength Tyler. After I said good by to James and Frankie, I walked to my car and saw two people having sacks in the back seat of a jeep. You could see the souls of the girl's sneakers pressed up against the glass and the back of the guy lurching against her. The jeep was rocking side to side. Someone else walking down the sidewalk. There were a lot of us said Yo, get a room of fuckers, and everyone laughed. Driving home,

I was so high the lights of the Sea World Tower were blurring, like a three hundred foot tall flashlight on the skyline. Remember watching it move and thinking it's gonna fall. It's gonna fall, and crushed poor Shamoo. Mint didn't James. I was very drunk. When Frankie and I walked home. She had her arm around me and held me up and we didn't say much. There was a gravity to the silence. We were both mixed up inside, and it would be days before we talked about it.

Francis years later, thinking back on it, the hardest thing for me was watching everyone leave. For a few hours, it felt like we were all in this thing together and there was some kind of greater commonality between us. But we left. We left in pairs, were alone. We left drunk, high, sober, happy, sad, afraid, laughing, But we left while the cops were inside breaking up the party, and Tyler was who knows where, and James was up the block. I remember standing on the porch alone with everyone coming out of the house behind me, just filing right out of the place as they were told to Where were they going. They were going home to parties, to tj to sleep it off, to eat, to fuck each other, to get more beer. I saw a very

drunk ted Boon staggering down E Street toward twenty fourth, walking in the street light, all yellow gold around him, then into the shadows below the trees. At some point he put his hands on the trunk of a tree and vomited for a very long time. After that, he walked on and at the end of the block. By then he was barely there in the fog. I saw him open the passenger side back seat door of his car and climb in. It was the last time I saw him. I watched a couple teenage boys walk past, holding hands, rubbing up against each other, pulling at each other's clothes, talking quietly. I'd seen them hook up earlier, and now they were headed off to make out or have sex. They were very much in love, or at

least lust, and you could tell how much they wanted each other. It was sweet. I was envious. Coming out of the house, there were groups of drunken girls and fucked up eighties cocaine, business women attire or stupidly tight low rise jeans and torn up shirts. Younger girls, older ones, but whoever, they were together a pack, a gang. They walked past me, groups of them talking and laughing, and then they filed down the street to smoke on the sidewalker, piled into cars, or kept walking until the fox swallowed them up. Guys from the bands who played earlier walked past, holding guitar cases or carrying amps. A young girl the Chelsea haircut, thick blonde bangs, a long strand down each cheek like sideburns shaved in the back, walked down the

steps with a huge watermelon in her arms. I heard people talk as they walked past me. Let's go get fucking burritos, Go go as sick. Huh dude, Fuck those whack ass East County kids in a pit at Reagan Youth. What time do you think Lapasta closes? Did you really hook up with Susan Newell? You, sir, are a god.

I am way too stoned for this many cops. Jeff and Shanna totally made out in the alley. Finally, right, I have school tomorrow. I'm so hungry. I want to cry, my feet hurt. I hope we don't get a ticket. Taylor's band is hell a lame, but I'd totally bone him. I have to call my mom. Where did we even park?

I'm as sleepy as a little baby frog. My bike better still be there or I'll kill the world. We should get pizza. How much is a taxi? Watching them all leave was a heavy thing to see. It was an army retreating, leaving the front and going back to the world, already concerned with the next thing. Where are they now these days? I don't see anyone from that time, not even James unless he visits a lot of them.

Most of them, I think, were sucked into the great pneumatic tube that takes you from your hopeful, idealistic youth into the dull drags of adulthood. They go mainstream. They have mainstream jobs, mainstream sex, mainstream relationships, mainstream families, mainstream tastes, which isn't bad, but it's not what I wanted back then, and it's not what I want now. So they disappear.

They drop out into a bland, safe, lifeless normalcy, or they don't make it. Kids die, or they burn out. They stay in the scene, but they stagnate and age badly and never make good on the promises of their youth. They waste the wonderful things inside them, or they kill themselves, or do I have a fucking overdose like poor Marlon Garfield on the floor of a Burger king bathroom. When I do see someone from the past, someone has let go of what they were. They look old. They look tired and swollen and bloated, like a blurry yearbook photo of themselves. All those fresh faces and confidence, all those dreams they failed or stalled or changed. The ones that didn't change, the ones that stuck it out have had

it harder. They still have their ideals. They've kept touring and making records or writing books or going to shows. But life isn't easy on those who resist letting it bend them. A lot of them are doing even better than back then. Those are the ones who look like warriors, wounded but still standing. Those who still burn inside like a nuclear goddamn blast, and live for their dreams and feel it on a daily fucking basis. They may not look as fresh faced, but they look strong. They look savage and beautiful and pure and they shine with a different kind of light. I still want to see a better world, and I want to have that kind of community I thought I had in those days, But at least lately life has shown me a lonelier road. I

hope it's not like this forever, because for now my ideals are just as strong, but my hope is fading. Did I make the right choice? Am I making enough of a difference to warrant the strain I've placed on myself? Would my life have been better had I stuck it out in San Diego, found another job after the magazine went down, rolled with the punches, changed as life wanted me to change. Who would I be? What would I be?

Fall is here and to day I'm taking the bus to pick my boys up from pre school. As soon as there is sleep to night, I'll get back to work. Right now, I'm researching local factory farms with water pollution violations as possible sights for my partner's drone investigations. Doesn't pay, but it's the right thing to do, and I'll work on it until morning, setting everything else aside for it.

Sometimes it's like dropping stones into a deep well where you don't get the satisfaction of hearing them hit the water. Other days it's better, but I would be lying if I said it hasn't been the former more than the ladder for a while. Now it can be thankless and frustrating. Still I work, I fight, I believe. Like yesterday and the day before, I'll sit and type at my laptop by the window while the boys sleep in their room in this big rented house that's not mine, in this city where I know no one, And when the dawn comes, I'll stop, make more coffee and start the day. But dear listener, much like a pot of coffee, here's an abrupt and artificial ad transition to jolt you back a week, just as you were falling asleep. And we're back, James.

Things have changed so much for me since then. Only thing is I hardly ever see Frankie and Tyler anymore. Sometimes on holidays, birthdays if one of us is passing through the other city. I never thought life would turn out like this, which is not to say I'm upset. I miss them every day. I miss them, but I like how I'm living. The life I have isn't easy.

Money is always a problem, and like the old song goes the Future's got me worried such awful thoughts. But I'm doing exactly what I want to be doing, and that makes me feel pretty okay. I mean not okay in the fair at a midlan sense, but okay is in secure and happy and excited about what I have going.

I'm in love. It's new love, the kind of love that can make you feel like you're truly in the right place. And I'm doing exactly what I hoped I would be doing back in the days of the party. It's happening, not exactly as I hoped it would happen, because the world is a different place, but it's happening nonetheless.

Still there are things I miss. I miss the feeling of being in a room where everyone is losing their shit to a band that sounds like nothing else. When I remember most from that night was the upstairs room and how good the music felt. It was so loud you could barely hear it, but you could feel it. You felt it in the center of your stomach and in your muscles and deep inside your chest. The pit was far too big for such a small room, so many people in that tiny space throwing themselves left and right in the middle of it all, this pale, brown haired girl caught up in the crowd, push eyes closed, blood smeared around her mouth and down her neck, screaming and punching and kicking like her life depended on it.

You knew there was something deeper going on, There was an important thing at the center of it all. She had some kind of horror in her, and she was there to force it out. She was there to heal, but in a powerful and scary and violent kind of way. I'll never forget the way she moved through the room, and how the room bent out of her way and moved around her. Epilogue, Agnes as bodies knocked against hers, and people fell down and were pulled back up again, as she was soaked in the sweat of everyone else and they in hers. Agnes shut her eyes and let the music hid her, like holding your arm out a car window to feel the air push back. She thought of the wind and her face on the roller coaster, and she thought of the time she rode on the

back of Stephen's motorcycle. He took her up into the hills above Old Town to see the Spanish Mission, and she held on to him, and felt the air as a physical thing, an angry force, a strong hand, and a door slammed, a magnet's pull, or a jet taking off, or the churning swell of the sea. Agnes was thrown to the side and held back up, shoved forward and stopped by the damp wall of a body. Blind, she felt the music and the people around her as she was knocked this way in that, grabbed by the waist, elbowed in the lip, blood, she thought, as a wave of pain throbbed from her teeth to the back of her neck. She could taste blood. Then another elbow caught her in the stomach, the wind knocked out of her.

She punched back, sightless and it didn't connect, and fell forward and was pulled into a standing position again. And her eyes opened, and she saw the dim lights of the room and the people moving around her, and the band, vicious but elegant. She raised her face to the ceiling and spit out blood and saw it break into a spray of droplets in the yellow light. Agnes shut her eyes again and was thrown to one side, then the other, and the world broke in on itself like a clap, like two hands coming together, and she spun wild circles, kicking, punching, laughing, laughing as she cried for Michael to bear loyal and true and dignified, and for Stephen, weak and mean in his uncle's store, and for Big Marcos, who didn't know

what time the weddings were, and for her parents and everyone's parents, and for everyone everywhere. The crowd pushed, Agnes pushed back the end. That's the end of Locust House by Adam Gannatti, and Hazel, who helps him with the script, says this about it. I really love this ending. I think Adam does a fabulous job pulling all the threads back together that he's been so carefully weaving. And the way that he describes being a young punk feeling like you're on the brink of something is so vivid and real.

The prose shines just like Adam's characters, savage and beautiful and pure. I'll be honest. When Margaret first sent me this book, I was pretty put off by the violence in the first part of the book, even as someone who enjoys a really good and gross story. But I'm glad I held on that last image of Agnes pouring out all her fury and hurt into the pit. She was there to heal, but in a scary and powerful and violent of way. Is such a resinous line. What Agnes goes through is a relatable kind of violence to so many of us, unfortunately. And I love how Adam ends this book that is in so many ways about growing up and moving on with this character who refuses to lose her edge. She's on the precipice of adulthood,

she's just lost her father figure, considering parenting herself, and here instead we get this moment of rebirth of ferocity and wildness. It's incredible, well done, Adam. What do I have to say? Well, I'm Tierri, but you all are used to that because a lot of books make me cry, especially when I read them out loud for some reason.

But yeah, the two things that really drew me to the book. I also like, Hazel, like, thanks you all for trusting us to make it through part one, right, Like I tend not to write sexual violence in my own writing, but it's something that I have experienced, and that so many people I know, the fucking almost every woman I know and a lot of the men I know, have experienced. You know, and I think that Adam makes it worth it narratively because of that experience. That's saying like, yeah, I had an everyday horror happened to me, this thing that will like change me and sit with me the rest of my life and fuck with all my relationships forever. Right, But it's so every day, like every day like one word as an adjective, you know. And yet the Catharsis

is too right, because this is a book about everyday magic. This is describing a single punk show, a house show that like, bad stuff happens, that people get hurt, the couch just pushed off the thing, there's fireworks whatever, right, And it's this like everyday magic. I think all the time about well, the world that lives right underneath this world that we all experience and we all pretend we don't experience. And ecstatic dancing part of that. I grew up mashing, right. I grew up going to punk shows a lot like this one. And we say I grew up Actually I didn't as a young teen. But when I became an anarchist and started going to like basement punk shows, that's where I found this. I didn't find

this at like radio punk shows other people did. That's great, that's fine, good for you. I found this here. I found this in this scene three thousand miles away but the same year, you know, And it's ecstatic dancing. Like sometimes you just need to be part of the world and lose yourself to it. And that's violent, right, But I still like a washing thing where you don't kick or punch, where it's more like shoving and people fall and stuff like that personally, but like that's the kind of thing that we shouldn't lose and that I think every culture has some version of ecstatic dancing, and whenever we try to strip it out of our lives, we find ways to put it back. You know. There's so much more I have to say about it. I love

the way that Adam talks about when Francis is like, I'm an activist now and the people who are still doing it are beautiful and ragged. Yeah, I don't know, that's how I feel. So like this is a book for me. I hope you all enjoyed it too, But I like, I read this book and one sitting one night, you know, and the two main images I left with were the two images from this part being like well, I guess I'm musa stay up all night finding ways to fuck factory farms. And also just like Agnes, the crowd pushed, Agnes pushed back. Adam, the author of the book, we asked him what he had to say about this book, and he told us quote, it came out of a very painful part of life, the worst year of my life, and it happened fast and was over fast. The most

I remember is Justin Pearson, who runs three one g as Jesse, my publisher now through Bretton Rose's pre Us, also my longtime best friend. If their two companies could release something together, it was decided I would do a book, and I wrote it in a week, and I don't remember anything about the process. I've read it once since then, and that was years ago. I will say I've been very involved in making its audio prequel and sequel. All the books and recordings are connected, but these even more so.

Locust House is the first in a set of three books about Agnes mccanty. The prequel to Locust House is called Life is the Meat Grinder that Sucks in All Things, and the sequel is called Voicemails from the Great Satan. You can find audio of both stories on band camp and also Adam said quote there's also a two hundred page chapter about her I wrote in a very long, ongoing book that I've always been working on and will be called Panorama, but don't release until I'm dead book.

So yeah, that's Locust House. Thanks for coming with us on our beach reads. But don't worry, We're soon I have to do more beach trees because we all know. Soon there's only going to be two seasons. There's going to be Summer, which will last from about August September till May, and then Hellmouth, which will be what it used to be called summer, so much time we get spent on the beach. Marder Kildoy strikes again. Okay, Adam Gannatti, here's a bio. 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 aimed at creating a personal history of life as I knew it when I lived. Gannatti's work is published and issued by Brett

and Roses Press three to one g Hello America Stereo Cassette and the Numero Group. Ganatti intends his books to be seen as one long, interconnected novel in the way of Proust's autobiographical writing. The recorded album should be considered a vast hours long soundtrack, running parallel with the stories in the books, continuing plotlines and further explaining the characters as they navigate a lifetime. Recent works have inclcluded 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 of Tomorrow, issued on cassette twenty twenty one and lathe Cut CD twenty twenty six. On September twenty sixth, twenty twenty six, The Numeral Group will reissue Gannatti's two thousand and five debut Talking Songs record, Run, Hide, Retreat, Surrender on twelve inch final On October of twenty twenty six.

His fourteenth book, Wild Horse Shit, will be released by 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 Tanoxie and a half an hour outside Kansas City, Missouri. And Yeah, I'm murder Kiljoy. You can find me on my other show, Koope Booted Cool Stuff.

I also write a bunch of fiction. You've probably heard it on the show, or if not, you can go back and listen to it on this show. My most recent book is called The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice, and it's maybe a similar in tone, only it has demons in it. I don't know how else to describe it. We will be back next week with more short fiction and some surprises in the pot. Until then, in the words of doctor Tyler Bonaghan, fuck the police, forever and ever Amen. It Could Happen Here is a production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website Coolzonemedia dot com, or check us out on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can now find sources for It Could

Happen Here listed directly in episode descriptions, Thanks for listening,

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

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