Last week, it was my pleasure to have a long conversation with one of my oldest friends, Billy McCall, on the very first episode of Behind The Zines Podcast. We chatted about my “career” of zines and DIY publishing over the last 25+ years.
Zine review of Make All Our Dreams Come True by Billy McCall over on the Behind the Zines Distro etsy page.
“Krystle’s zines are as raw and real as they come, and this one here is another example an author just laying it all out for the world to see. She bares her soul, she bleeds onto the pages, willing to tell her life story as authentically as anyone can. That’s easy to do when things have gone well, but not so easy when recalling past trauma, of which she has plenty.
This emotional perzine tells about her struggles of moving from Chicago to Milwaukee. Troubles at work, troubles with landlords, and, worst of all, troubles with her husband. All of this happened years ago, but the stories of heartache were real enough to cause me to feel legitimately angry at someone I never met. “He did WHAT!? Man, fuck that guy!” Krystle manages to write about tough times without romanticizing or exaggerating them. A lot of authors almost make it seem fun to be broke, fun to be addicted, fun to be out of work, but Krystle doesn’t do that. She handles every difficult situation with a proud Midwestern determination and somehow manages to keep moving, keep fighting. This is what real life looks like.”
The nice kids at Maudlin House were kind enough to let me tag along at this year’s Printer’s Row Lit Fest. Dmitry made me a sign, I sold some stuff, and met several lovely folks just trying to hustle their writing too. A kind fella named Burton Raabe liked my Weirdo Du Jour zine so much he emailed me this poem he had written about a 24-hour diner in Peoria:
Clark’s Cafe
I found an old matchbook from the 70s.
Clark’s Cafe
“We Never Close”
It was true, there were three shifts per day
all year long, all over town.
If you weren’t workin’
There was sumpin’ wrong.
Some worked 16 hours in two shops.
Workers were paid overtime plus holiday pay.
Unions made sure.
Clark’s was open on Thanksgiving, Christmas,
Easter, all holidays.
They had chili, chicken fried steak,
Burgers, fries, breakfast anytime.
And coffee.
Workers going and coming.
Third shift welders from Kentucky
with soft Appalachian speech.
Blacks from Arkansas
laughing, ordering eggs,
sausage and grits.
And coffee.
Cops at midnight,
off their shift.
Kandy, Brandy, Porsha
(not their real names)
getting eggs and sausage.
Ladies of the night.
We were all ladies and men
of the nights.
No longer selling my items in brick and mortar shops. Finally! I have a secure online store where you can snag copies of my zines, friendly user interface for the online shopaholics. There’s also Behind The Zines Distro, as well.
Rare live appearance August 31st in Lawrence, Kansas. I’ll be tabling at Paper Plains zine festival.
Temporarily closing my Etsy storefront in favor of selling my zines on this website this September.
“We Should Close”
88-page long, quarter sized zine about working in a record store. Complete with silly good times and tales of weirdo collectors of vinyl. Comes with its own playlist on YouTube or Spotify. Only $3!
It’ll be available soon, and I’m STILL sorting out an online store-front. So if you want a copy right away, shoot me an email. weirdodujour@ proton.me
“Make All Our Dreams Come True: 3 Years in Milwaukee”
A 2-buck chucklefuck. Written and assembled in under 5 days, this quarter size zine is 40 pages long. A bitter stream-of-consciousness-like rant about the foibles of moving to Milwaukee from Chicago. Highlighting memories of jobs, apartments, and neighborhoods with a slowly imploding marriage in the background. I wrote this in a flashflood of memories that wouldn’t recede in hopes of being able to finally let some stuff go so I could move on.
I’m sorting out an online store-front at the moment so if you’re wanting a copy right away, shoot me an email. weirdodujour@ proton.me
My mug and a mention of Weirdo Du Jour appear in Dave Hoekstra’s article about Feed, over on Block Club. Of course, I had to rope Dmitry Samarov into this, too.
After a couple rye & sodas, I had the pleasure of yapping about my life of art and zines with Dmitry Samarov on hu u no. If you’re interested in listening to a variety of silly voices and over the top swearing, this is for you.
A few weeks prior, I appeared on Let’s Take a Moment with Billy McCall and Liz Mason to talk about the zine, Secret Picnic Spot.
Restock on Weirdo Du Jour, Ornery Cuss, and Cathode Ray Mission 1-3 over on etsy. But of course, if you just email me about purchasing a copy, you can get it a lot cheaper. weirdodujour@proton.me
A handful of years ago, I was working the morning shift as a kitchen grunt in a little roadside eatery. That’s where I learned about the underbelly deals that are part of the restaurant business. Work would start at 4am, and it would be the lead cook, myself on prep, and a dishwasher. The three of us making dick jokes and banging pots and pans together like cymbal monkeys before the sun rose and all the deliveries would arrive. The restaurant owner would roll in around 10, look over receipts, and have a meltdown about the prices, especially in the slow season. Restaurant depot, linens, bread, produce…it would hit the fan. Holler and a’shout about hemorrhaging money, and sometimes in the most frenzied tantrums, equipment would get tossed around the kitchen. One time, a knife was chucked at my head for accepting a pallet of eggs that had increased in price by a dollar. All the knives were dull because we hadn’t sent them out for a sharpening service to save a buck after the holidays. Yet it was thrown with enough force to stick in the wall, a foot from my face. The cook rushed me out the door. Sending me down the street for a pack of cigarettes to calm things down and clear the kitchen out without my safety being on the line.
Linen prices always go up in the winter because of rugs catching the slush from foot traffic, so our rag consumption had to go down. Somehow, the cook had figured out a deal with our linen delivery guy. Talked the fella into fudging some numbers and hooking us up with a couple extra bags of rags and aprons in exchange for 6 Vicodin. The cook was pretty run down physically, as a cook in their late 50’s is bound to be, and the VA would over prescribe painkillers. A means of shutting up old vets with aches and pains. So our cook developed a habit of using his surplus of opioids to negotiate deals with certain individuals that lived on the seamy side of life. The linen guy was what you’d consider “squirrelly.” Lanky with a pocked complexion and 5-mile stare that’s associated with long periods of incarceration. I had made a point not to find myself alone in the dining room with him. He’d get so excited about his exchanges with the cook and sometimes ask for cigarettes, too. Often, I wondered if he was eating his handful of pills and cruising the streets in his linen van, higher than a kite.
Then there was the bakery delivery. Bread prices went up at the beginning of every year. Same company. Same practice. The delivery driver on our route was a pudgy man with crooked teeth. He had a wife and grown kids and just so happened to have a little crush on the cook. I watched the two of them flirt endlessly, twice a week for months and months. When the owner hit the ceiling about bread prices one January, the bread truck started coming more often. But not always with bread for our restaurant. The delivery man would pull into the back alley, shut his lights off, and just sit there. The cook would take his apron off and tell me to go up front and keep an eye on things while he’d disappear out the back door with no coat on. Sometimes, the dishwasher and I would stand at the back door and watch him stroll through the snow and get into the truck, where he’d stay from 20 minutes to half an hour. After a bit, he’d come back inside with a dreamy grin on his face and light up a cigarette inside the kitchen. He’d lean like a smitten school girl on the prep table, puffing away on his menthol 100 with a certain glow to his face.
“He’s bringing an extra rack of rye bread next week. I want to run a Reuben special on the weekend.”
When an actual bread delivery would happen, the driver and the cook would make eyes at one another, giggle, and once I watched the cook pinch the driver’s butt. Up until that point, I didn’t really know what was going on as I was young and simple, just starting my kitchen sentence. Once I figured it out and asked the cook about it, he told me to keep my mouth shut because it was the one thing sparing me from being a human butcher block when the knives started flying.
I took note of his warning and never said anything about his deals of pills and sex, until now… with this story.
It’s damn funny what the river of life will float your way when you stop fighting the current. I’ve been reconnecting with good folks and reminiscing about those who have passed on. 2025 marks 10 years since my very first “chef” left this world, and I think of him often. In honor of the late great “Salver” I decided to share a short story from Weirdo Du Jour #2 (which is now forever out of print-sorry). RIP chef.
“Little Pizza Shop of Horrors” is how a close friend jokingly referred to my life after confiding in them about 3 sudden deaths connected to the restaurant where I was employed. Sounds like the start of a horror movie, but that’s the whole reason the position was available. The kitchen manager had an aneurysm, and a week later, I was hired. This was an ongoing theme in my “career”. Much too often, I have walked into a kitchen in mourning and right into the private narrative of strangers. I’ve caught peers and supervisors crying in the walk‐in, catered funeral repasses, and had catatonic bodies removed by paramedics from ‘customers‐only’ washrooms. In time, I learned to disassociate just enough to get through the shift, but it never gets any easier. Life (and death) isn’t that romantic when you’re hosing raw meat out of floor drains.
It takes some grit, a strong back, and an ego.
At the very first restaurant I worked at, my trainer’s mother had died a few hours before my first shift. She glided on through her day until the fire department showed up on a wellness check for the little old man next door. He lived alone in a studio apartment above the laundromat and tavern. When we saw his remains carried away in an ominous bundle down the back porch, the trainer fell to pieces in my arms. Hysterically sobbing until she was led away by friends and somebody gave her a ride home. The head cook, Salver, cheerfully chewed bubble gum and hollered to me from the back door, “Whats wrong, shoog?”
I watched the last of the firetrucks pull away and turned back to Salver, bewildered by it all. I must have had a stupid look on my face because he snorted at me.
“Well, the Reaper’s gotta eat too, hun! Now c’mon!” Beckoning me back inside so he could finish showing me around my new job.
Unfortunate circumstances and behavioral problems had made me unemployable for most normal jobs, so I fit in well at this diner among other troubled beautiful mutants. The restaurant was part of the first wave of gentrification to the area. A wasteland of boarded up buildings and vacant lots where evidence would be ditched out car windows and swallowed by weeds. Every employee had a sad and beautiful back story, and this eatery was a second or third chance for most. The head cook decided to take me under his wing and show me the ropes of the kitchen. He told me that no matter where I went in this life, I could always get a job cooking somewhere, and that was his gift to me.
He himself was a walking country song. Salver had changed his name in the 80’s to a word that referred to servants in noble households that sampled food to ensure it wasn’t poisoned. He was a terrifying mouse of a man with a witch’s cackle. Drayton Sawyer with a crew cut and barbed wire tattooed across his face and skull. A runaway gigolo, Army veteran junkie that went to meetings, attended a Buddhist church, and dated craigslisters exclusively.
He scared the shit out of me.
Some time would pass before he admitted that he saw some of himself in me, right when I started notably fucking up my life outside of the restaurant.
That scared the shit out of me.
And just maybe… cooking would give me some direction like it had for him in the horror story of his life.
That very first morning under Salver’s bony wing, it was still dark out, and the city was as silent as a graveyard. I pulled my bike into the alley in my pre‐coffee hangover, unlocked the gate, and walked in the back door. Salver had his back to me and stood in front of the sink as I came in. He didn’t acknowledge me at first, so I took a step closer and looked over his shoulder. A tattooed smile appeared from under the ball cap, but it was forced. He was drowning something that had gotten stuck in a glue trap overnight. A suffering mass of twitches and squeaks as its fur was further embedded in glue. Salver mumbled a prayer to himself and finally said out loud, “It ain’t a bad way to go… it’s warm and quiet. We could all be so lucky.”
For my first task, Salver had me make the collard greens from start to finish. He barked instructions harshly as I tripped over myself twice, just washing the damn leaves and soaking through my apron. I shook with fear as if my life depended on it, unlocking childhood traumas of disappointing my dad. He set me up on an old wooden crate, leaning over a stock pot and trimming the greens. When I had finally found a steady rhythm, Salver gave me a little history on the neighborhood…
He told me that long before the printing factory behind us had been built, there was a branch of train tracks running up from Chicago’s modern train yard belt. Our restaurant had originally been a little chop suey joint, and the gandy dancers would come in off the railroad for lunch. The little old Chinese man that ran Chow’s Chop Suey was known to feed all guests of his restaurant, regardless of their ability to pay. He never turned away beggars or train hoppers… But not all of them were jolly Woody Guthries singing songs about running away from the wife and kids. Some were criminals on the lam, some ran from demons, and some couldn’t run fast enough.
But one dark morning, it’s believed that Chow opened his back door to Death itself and was never seen again. Some say he became the Sunday special. Others claim he ended up in pieces in Cleveland as a gift to Eliot Ness. Salver concluded his tale by giving thanks to “Ghost Chow” who looked over us in the kitchen, ensuring we didn’t burn any food. I hung off every scratchy word of his story, nervously swallowing in my anticipatory trance just as the jukebox kicked on in the dining room. An adrenaline fueled jump scare as Buddy Holly well‐a’hell‐a’helled his way into “Rave On”.
Nerves properly set on edge, I chopped myself good on a dull knife and spurted blood across all my prep. After patching myself up and scrubbing everything down, I started again on the collards. Salver bellowed as I burned myself and dropped utensils, rushing to keep up with his directions. He cackled at my misery and called it the proper seasoning for soul food.
“That means you put your foot in it, shoog!”
“What?!” I cried over the roar of the ventilation hood, sweating in a sulphury haze.
“You put your foot in it!”
I stared at him for a moment, making sure I had heard correctly as he made rushing gestures to “go on”. Setting down the heavy pot, I grabbed the prep table for balance and began to raise my combat booted foot above the collard greens. Yep. Literally attempting to put my foot in it with all of my scared rabbit naivety. Salver stopped me from actually doing it while laughing like a gurgling drain. He’d give me hell about it at the worst possible times and most embarrassing moments as the years crawled on, dragging me deeper into the horror show that is kitchen life.
Wherever you are now, chef…I hope it’s warm and quiet.
