Westley Heine’s Cloud Watching in the Inferno
A review by Ryan Mathews
I’ve long held that age is what happens to the rest of us since the best of us don’t make it this far. That’s not to say that the rest of us don’t have a lot to say. It’s just that time compromises us all, shapes us in ways we often don’t recognize until it’s too late, leaving us to sit alone in the abandoned church of our own soul trying to mouth a forgotten prayer.
Wait!
That’s not how I wanted to start this review. I wanted to begin by saying how I lack objectivity on this one. I like Westley Heine. I like his writing. I like his digital friendship from afar. He’s done me some solids and I never forget a friend or – to be transparently honest – an enemy for that matter. It’s a street thing; a lesson you learn in the streets I was born in and that Westley sought out as a young art student.
Those streets eat the young, and art, and teach you lessons no student really wants to learn. They are a mirror, a funhouse installation that reveals your truth to you in their uniquely distorted reflection. You find yourself there, but only after you’ve lost yourself first. It’s a terrible price to pay, even for art.
Cloud Watching in the Inferno, published this year by Roadside Press, is an encomium to the pitch black darkness and the brilliant light of the poet’s heart – less midlife crisis than midlife pause.
From the poignant ache of “I See You” the collection’s lead poem to the road weary revelations of the should-have-been-abandoned-years-ago Route 66 motel in Shamrock, Texas where Heine dances naked in the mirror with his middle-aged self in “About the Author: Reverse Route 66 that closes it Cloud Watching in the Inferno shows us an artist constantly reassessing himself and his world.
I suspect many readers/reviewers/Heine supporters and critics will focus their attention on “My Old Lady” – as in an older woman he has sex with, not as in, “She’s my old lady.” It’s a story of “strangers with benefits” that takes a penultimate sentimental twist before it ends. The “Old Lady’s” name was Ona. I’ve read and reread it trying to discern if Heine is playing with readers a bit. In Lithuanian – perhaps the “language he doesn’t recognize” – Ona means “gift” or “favor.” Did he chose the name on purpose or was it just some surreal serendipity? Maybe it just was her name.
That’s part of the beauty of Heine’s writing, that little bit of humor that so often peeks out from just behind the obvious – the hidden real story behind the story.
The backslashes that run through all of “Kids These Days” the story that may/may not be about Ricky Foyle who is/isn’t a time traveler stuck/not stuck on/in the streets of Hollywood get a bit/lot much but they lead/led to a prototypical Heine observation about/not about life, “That’s the only place you can’t go. You can’t go back. You can’t go home,” so it was worth it (no backslash not) in the end.
There’s a certain self-conscious surrealism to works like “Zen in Hell” a six page poem – seven if you count the brilliant illustration by Anthony Christopher – with images and language that dances off the page which I liked better every time I reread it.
It doesn’t take a reread to fall in love with “Shadow Boxing In Uptown” which recounts the author’s experience as an unpaid intern on a boxing magazine that folds after its first issue.
Every writer I know has been somewhere like this – working for free and justifying it as experience, or a showcase, or a door opener, or paying your dues, or whatever excuse you make to yourself for getting ripped off by somebody who dangles the possibility of getting into print like a dime bag waved in the face of a dope sick junkie. Writers and dope fiends have a lot in common, not the least of which is a blind belief that the next “one” –fix or byline – will be the one that takes you to that permanent nirvana you secretly know doesn’t exist.
For me, the last two pages of “Shadow Boxing” – and the last paragraph in particular – are worth the price of the book. Sticking with the metaphor of the boxing ring the story ends on a classic Heineism:
“No matter who you are, life will beat the shit out of you eventually. Everyone gets their bell rung in the end. It’s just some old timers flinch. Some lean in and absorb the punch. We all get a little punch-drunk with time. We all get a little batty round after round. Meanwhile the bell keeps ringing.”
In a less deft hand this could come off as Bukowski or John Fante-lite, but there is that underpinning of self-deprecating truth and hard-learned wisdom that saves “Shadow Boxing” and raises it up. Hell yes! That bell keeps ringing and, for reasons noble and venial and sometimes both at once, we all keep answering it until that we are counted out for the last time.
Heine’s penchant for poetic surrealistic imagery is once again in full display in “Bullfight at the Supermarket. His tone and style change a bit in “Shot of Mercy”, a short story set in the hill country of post-World War I Tennessee about a man, his dog, and freedom. A storyline that seems predictable takes a radical turn, becomes predictable again, and turns again. Heine is out of his contextual comfort zone here, away from the underbelly of contemporary urban society but his meta-themes are perfectly at home.
“Shot of Mercy” Is followed by a series of poems ranging from the reportorial (“Booster”) to the surreal (“A Skylight For Hades”), the confessional (“Wanker” with its great line, “I betrayed her with my own memories”), to the playfully profane (“I Found Jesus”).
Heine wields irony like a rapier. In “You’re Lite” a temporarily on the wagon writer does his civic and human duty by hopping off the wagon so a neighborhood garbage picker can go back to harvesting his empty beer bottles.
More poems follow.
“Purgatory Diary” takes readers back to surreal parable land and “Uptown Eddie” takes them back to street fever dreams. Uptown Eddie reminded me of “Elevator Eddie” a character out of my own bartending past. The fact they shared a name is coincidence. The fact their behavior was identical stopped me in my tracks and told me maybe we – and our stories – aren’t so unique after all.
The dystopian prose aura of “Easy Street” gives way to the dystopian poetry of “The Pterodactyl Cult”, followed in turn by “The Sphinx of Silverton” – a short story about a cowboy names Lex and a hooker named Cora that takes such a twist at the end that needs to be experienced firsthand.
A few last pieces of prose/poems/prose poems follow before we reach “About the Author”.
“Omega Generation” delivers more surrealism. “The Grind” has a feel much like the earlier “Booster” and “The Devil is Getting Old” – the anthology’s final poem tells the tale of an aging, tired Satan. It ends on a quintessentially Heine note, “Free at last, alone in the void/The devil just wants to go home.”
Not so fast O Prince of Darkness! If you had read “Kids These Days” you would know, “That’s the only place you can’t go. You can’t go back. You can’t go home”.
“Cloud Watching In the Inferno” is both an excellent summation of where Westley Heine has been as a writer and a glimpse into where he might be going next. There’s a point where good writers stop writing about the truth and start sharing their truth and Heine is clearly there.
It’s a scary place. You can get pretty far these days – and least in the self-styled underground – by filling up pages with junkies, whores, mad people, and denizens of dark bars with even darker hearts.
It takes a good writer to get past all that and bring us beauty, make us smile and cringe by turns, and tell us not just what can be seen, but what they see. And, by that measure, Westley Heine is a great writer and “Cloud Watching In the Inferno” is a great book.
Ryan Mathews is a futurist, artist, poet, and essayist. His work on Beat Generation and associated writers have appeared in Beat Scene. He is a regular and frequent contributor to Beatdom. He has published and been anthologized by Edie Kerouac Parker, Jack Kerouac’s first wife who included his poetry in her volume Save The Frescoes That Are Uswhich was released at The Naropa Institute as part of the 25th anniversary on the publication of On The Road. His most recent work appears in Ten Times A Poet, a Gregory Corso anthology edited by Leon Horton and Michele McDannold. He has appeared (as more-or-less himself) in three films by the independent French documentary filmmaker Florent Tillon and co-founded The Peoples Arts Festival, the largest totally free multi-arts festival in the state of Michigan which ran for almost a decade. He has also published three nonfiction business titles including the best-selling The Myth of Excellence.
