Ann Woods's World
by Tom Gogola, Editor, New Haven Advocate

I came across Bolt Risk while vacationing in the Adirondack mountains . Some old friends of mine are friends with the poet Marge Piercy who, with her husband Ira Wood, run the Wellfleet-based book imprint LeapFrog Press. I was trying to plow through Herman Hesse's The Glass Bead Game, but when my friend Jeff presented me with Wood's novel, I bailed on Hesse . I read it in one sitting, by candlelight in my mountain lean-to.

Bolt Risk is that kind of book --turn the page, and there's another snippet of literate, visceral, foul-mouthed bildungsroman. The novel tells the story of a young woman and her obsessive relationship with a rocker dude and her involuntarily trip to a mental institution (a plotline that gives the book its title). It's rough stuff all over. It slaps Bridget Jones silly.

The author, 35, lives in Provincetown and works for a weekly paper in that gay-friendly seaside town. She says that the book does follow, to an extent, the arc of her own life. "Most of it is kind of true," she says. "A lot of it is exaggerated." Her influences are almost exclusively male and run the rough-trade gamut from Burroughs to Hubert Selby, Harry Crews to Hemingway.

"I hate the whole idea of being grouped with women at all," Wood says. "I hate chick stuff. I love those guys that I love -- Selby, Burroughs and nobody is writing like them anymore. So I wrote a book to write like them . . . . I prefer the guys who live tough, drink tough, have stories to tell. Bolt Risk is about a life like that, and while she's a girl, that's no excuse."

An Excerpt from Bolt Risk:

It was all over the news. "Guitarist Adam Bennett, formerly of the hard rock band Z, was seriously injured this morning when the red BMW he was a passenger in careened into Pike Place Market in downtown Seattle . Both he and the vehicle's unidentified female driver were removed using the jaws of life and rushed to the hospital. No one else was injured in the accident, which happened at approximately 2:30 this morning."

The accident scene flashed across the screen. The car had been transformed into twisted metal. Rotting fish were scattered across the roof, across the hood. The head of a buffalo fish stuck out of the broken windshield: gutted twice, what a terrible fate. The camera panned the ground, focusing on a bent California license plate, some tuna, an immobile pile of giant crabs. Then it zoomed in on a single motorcycle boot. Adam's scuffed motorcycle boot. It was still laced up tight.

"The Pike Place Fish Market was badly damaged and the entire building will remain closed until police finish their investigation. Speed and alcohol are thought to be factors in the crash." The anchor- woman smiled.

When I saw that, I knew it was over. But nothing can end before it begins.

It was two years ago and I had just finished college. I moved to Los Angeles to work for this actress as a personal assistant. I'd book her hotel rooms, I'd drive her to the Playboy Mansion . I'd carry her bags, I'd pack and unpack her makeup and wardrobe. I'd make her calls and answer her calls. And, because she came from Hollywood royalty, her phone rang a lot.

Violet Scott was born into this famous family. Both her mother and father were movie stars in the '50s, and she spent her childhood around all the big-time celebritieseveryone from Marilyn Monroe to Jack Nicholson. She wanted to be famous too, and started starring in movies right after finishing school. Violet wasn't that good of an actress, though, so she mostly ended up in horror films.

Now, decades later, she'd moved on to action movies. The movies she made weren't great and Violet was aware enough to be quietly embarrassed that she wasn't that good of an actressbut she kept at it anyhow. She knew that most people couldn't tell good acting from mediocre acting anyway. Violet made money, became famous enough in her own right, and picked up a bunch of boys because of the movie choices she made. I had to respect that.

But I think that fucking as many men as possible was Violet's real goal, probably because she had to compete with her mother, who was a total sexpot. One of the first jobs she had me do was Rolodex all of her men. Young, old. Broke, rich. She had so many that she kept what she called a "bachelorette pad," a Studio City bungalow actually, that kept her husband from knowing about all her boy action. He probably had his own boyfriends anyway.

But mostly I just hung out on the set of her action movie, Defying Death . None of the actors were alone. All of them had someone carrying their shit, fawning over them. A paid butt-wiper, that's what I was. That's what we all were. We personal assistants would follow our actors around and listen to them bitch and moan and gossip about everyone. It was a pretty good job actually.

One day Violet and I were sitting around in her trailer, waiting for her to be called to the set, when she got a call from her agent. Playboy wanted her to spread for a spread. Violet was pretty big into feminist bullshit, and while she was cool with being naked in films, she wasn't sure Playboy was the way to go. But she was almost forty and figured if she was going to pose, it'd have to be soon. Violet wondered aloud how many extra boys she'd get out of it. Probably a lot, she figured. And going to the Playboy Mansion was always fun. She couldn't decide what to do.

So anyway, Violet gave me her credit card and sent me down to a bookstore in West Hollywood that carried a ton of women's literature. She handed me a list of feminist books and told me to buy them all.

There I was, standing in the women's section searching for titles, feeling like a dick, when this feminist started talking to me about some chick book club. I accidentally gagged. It was my own faulther talking to me, I mean. I was, in fact, holding Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women for Christ's sake.

"Here's a flyer. You'll really love our women's group," she said, passed me one and scratched her bare leg with the remaining pile. I took the pink triangular paper and shoved it inside Backlash . Violet could deal with it, this feminist rant was her deal.

And she did. The books did their job. Maybe the flyer, which she kept and used as a bookmark. It took her a little while to read through everything. Then, after being silent for a couple days, Violet announced that she most certainly wouldn't, couldn't pose for Playboy . That feminist guilt won out in the end. Damn.

A couple days later Violet left to perform in some Hollywood retrospective show which, oddly, was shot in New York Citythe kind that had stars like Liza Minnelli and Carrie Fisher singing and dancing in front of television camerasand asked me to watch her pad. It sounded like a good plan. That was until I spent the afternoon there. Her answering machine clicked on about every half hour, some horny star-struck boy leaving Violet a message, but that was all the noise there was.

By nightfall I needed to silence the silence so I headed out to a death metal show. It was probably Death or Carcass, one of those bands where I was, inevitably, the only chick in attendance. I sat at the bar and downed a couple whiskeys. A couple of minutes later this guy Bob fell down on a stool beside mine and started telling me about his own thrash band, Z. Of course he'd put me on the guest list if I'd show the following night. Their dressing room was always well-stocked with liquor, he said. Well, hell. Why not? I told him sure I'd show.

Of course I got there kind of late. I swallowed a couple prescription diet pills I happened upon in Violet's medicine cabinet and a couple hours sped away from me. It turned out all right, though. Some big hairy guy gave me his stool at the bar, which was level with the stage. It was perfect. I could see, I could drink. The second band had just removed its equipment and the guitar tech was tuning down a white custom Les Paul. By the time I downed my third drink, Z hit the stage.

I fell in love with Adam the second the lights came up. He was raging on the Les Paul and had this long strawberry-blond hair he'd swing back every once in awhile to avoid guitar-string entanglement. Every time he'd flip his hair I'd focus on those angry blue eyes. He ripped through the music, tore at his strings. I just kept drinking and when the set ended I couldn't bring myself to climb the spiral staircase to the dressing room, I wanted to fuck him so bad. It felt dangerous. I could be controlled by that, which was something I never wanted. No way.

The next day, after jerking off didn't take my mind off that angry guitarist, I called Bob. "He isn't home," the gruff voice said. "Who's this?"

"You don't know me. Bob invited me to the show last night and I just wanted to tell him it rocked."

"Yeah. This is the guitarist. Adam. Wanna meet for a drink?" Somehow I knew it was him. Somehow I wasn't surprised that he wanted to go out for a drink. It seemed naturally surreal.

A half-hour later I entered this dive bar. Nicknames, misspelled profanity, phone numbers and crude pornography covered the walls. Adam was sitting at a table with a beer. I ordered two shots of Jack Daniels, sat down across from him and slid him a glass. He downed his. He was perfect. I ordered up two more, doubled them this time.

"This shit's good for your brain," he said, and knocked back the second drink. "I used to have this job looking after retards at this institution and in came this one guy who had a picket blow through his brain in some tornado. Stuck in his head. All the way through. Coulda built him right into the fence. It happened in a trailer park or somethin'. The tornado ripped the place apart. He ended up fine though. His wife said he was a mean son of a bitch, beat the shit out of her all the time. After that happened, he was as nice as could be."

"I love how no one has any idea how the brain and the mind are connected," I said, and then felt like a jerk. I couldn't help it. Experimental psychology was my favorite subject at my pretentious Vermont college. I spent three years with one professor reading every original writing in psychology, creating my own experiments and writing my own theories. I loved Freud's Ego and the Id , Jung's theory of the collective unconscious, existentialism. I read Titchener, Wundt, Hull , Watson, Skinner and Rogers . For my senior thesis I wrote a paper that, in my mind, successfully disproved Freud's theory of the unconscious system. I then presented my own theory of the selective mind. They were really the same thing anyway. It was fun.

Adam wasn't like the rest of Los Angeles , he picked right up on it. "How about Frances Farmer. That fucked her up real bad, that ice pick lobotomy."

"Frontal lobe damage is no good. It sounds like it could be a Nazi experiment. I'm sure those fucking Nazis fried a lot of brains. Freakish," I said, then thought of Dachau . "Have you ever been to a concentration camp?"

I couldn't shut the fuck up. I didn't want to talk about Dachau . I didn't even want to think about Dachau . It was my fault we went there to begin with. I was eleven when I forced my father to take us there while visiting Munich . Munich kind of freaked me out anyway, because it was where my father's scary white German South African girlfriend lived. I told him I'd go only if he brought us to Dachau . I wanted him to see what he was getting himself into with that chick.

And then, once inside the barbed fence, I could hardly move. I could hardly breathe. I felt like I belonged there. I was never more terrified. Of the experiments, of the gas chamber disguised as a shower room. I walked into that building. I could see it all. Mothers and children, shaved heads, marching into the brausebad , thinking they were going to have a shower. Standing under fake showerheads, shaking, waiting for water, greeted by poison instead. Mothers gripping children, screams inhaling death.

But the worst thing was the crematorium. I couldn't force myself to step inside. I felt like I had just taken a knife to the gut, standing in that doorway. The ovens were huge. The doors were open. Several bodies were shoved in at a time. Cooked to incineration. I could see myself in there, cooking. I told Adam all of this. I was numb and sick. I needed several more drinks.

"Wow." He sounded surprised. "No. I've never been there but I need to go. It's for a song I'm writing that compares the foreign policy of the U.S. to Nazi Germany's."

Shit. A real conversation in L.A. How the hell often does that happen?

After a few more rounds we went back to his apartment. He hadn't signed to a major label yet and it was a typical Hollywood musician's pad replete with overflowing ashtrays, empty beer bottles and dried vomit embedded in the carpet. The kitchen sink was piled with dirty, crusty, stinking dishes. Layers of dust, dirt and ash covered everything. Not bad. It felt like home to me.

Bob came in and nodded to me as if he expected I'd be there. They both picked up their guitars and jammed for awhile. I lit a joint, leaned back and closed my eyes. They switched off playing lead on some song that sounded vaguely familiar. When Bob finally left we went into Adam's room and fucked. It was like his guitar playingwild, aggressive, raw.

When I called him two days later, he got arrogant on me.

"I knew you'd call. Girls always call after they fuck me." I could hear him smoking on the other end.

"Yeah, well, whatever."

"So are you coming over?"

I was there in an hour.

Meeting Adam may have started it, but I should have let him go long before that night Kathleen staggered into the club. White dots bounced off the disco ball and zigzagged across her face and body. Her neon chickenpox reflected against the mirrored walls like a prism. It threw me off; Kathleen never came to work unscheduled.

I finished the song on my knees, my ass in the air, cunt in some faceless face. When the music stopped I slapped my ass twice. Hard and loud, the snaps echoed through the club. The patrons snapped to attention. Kathleen laughed. I picked up the crumpled, sweaty dollars scattered along the stage floor and tugged on my gold camisole and matching thong. I staggered down three steps in three-inch heels without glaring at the eyes that filled the heads lining the stage.

When I reached Kathleen I could tell she was jittery, fucked up. "Hey, baby," she grinned, teeth clenched. I figured it was speed. I hoped to hell she saved some. That she was here meant something was going to happen. I was going to need something more than bourbon.

"Thought you'd want to see Adam heard his band's playing some surprise deal at the Whiskey-a-Go-Go a big hush-hush-hush and so everyone's going so you have to go you know let's go do a line." I slapped Kathleen's hand away when she tried to grab my ass. She had to know by now that there was no way I was consciously going to fuck her. Her nose sniffed involuntarily and her veiny eyes shook. Her bony corpse shuddered when she coughed. She looked really happy tonight.

Ah, shit, I thought. Adam at the Whiskey. Kathleen sped behind me into the dressing room, jabbering on and on. I couldn't pay attention. My brain was screaming at itself. How could you love someone you hated. How could you fuck somebody you loved. It only caused problems. There were always problems. Adam's problem with my job, my problem with his. Adam's problem with my personality, my problem with his. Hatred, but nothing concrete.

This time, I hadn't heard from him in months. I'd half-figured he was dead. I pulled my Jane's Addiction CD out of the club's sound system and threw it on top of a scratched Beastie Boys disc. I zipped my make-up bag, wiped my cunt and ass with a baby wipe and individually sealed my costumes in storage-size Ziploc bags. Kathleen laid out a line, a line of some rocky-looking crystal meth. I pressed the face of her driver's license against it and then chopped at it with the edge. Little white shards glistened on the counter. Too much and you'd lose your nose. Too much and you'd lose your mind. I preferred coke. I preferred whiskey. I preferred morphine. I snorted the shit right up my right nostril. Kathleen sucked down a line and sneezed. She wasn't going down for days. Her apartment would be really clean. I was sorry I taught her about that shit.

It happened by accident. She lived in a studio right under mine in the dregs of Hollywood . A nasty fucking neighborhood. Whitley was right off Hollywood Boulevard , a side street that smelled just as much like piss and poverty as the main drag. On the corner was a check-cashing place where the rich got richer by cashing checks for well below what they were worth. Down the avenue stood a Motel 6 and a trash-strewn parking lot where no car parked because some junky would end up sitting in it to fix himself up, or steal it to get more. Our three-story dirty stucco apartment building stood three quarters of the way up the hill. A wrought-iron fire escape wove up the side, its ladder used more than the stairs because we were always locking ourselves out. Homeless people picked through the crumbs in our trash on the corner down below. We were the privileged.

When this sleazy old disc jockey invited me to dinner, I agreed to go. After all, Adam was on tour and you don't say no to a free meal. I made Kathleen come in a traditional Hollywood act of avoidance. It's happening when you see a rich old guy with or three or four chicks sitting around him and he pretends he's fucking them all. Some of the girls escape, others desperately fuck the old guy. I never could manage the latter. Not for a car, not for an apartment, not for money. Fucking morals.

I first met this DJ at a radio station he owned. Adam had some rock star interview lined up and made me come along. He hated publicity shit but I thought it was funny. The call-in questions clearly indicative of the plight of humanity: stupidity. ("When you write a song, what's more important, the music or the lyrics?" "How do you feel about other bands copying your sound?") So while Adam was managing to behave himself on the radio, this short round bug-eyed man started talking to me. Puffs of white whiskers shot out of both ears like smoke, making him look perpetually steamed about something. But he was nice enough. Then, later, I'd see him at the Rainbow and we'd chat. When one night he asked me to dinner, I said no but he convinced me with a bunch of Jack Daniels. Oh, well. Free booze, free meal. Bring a friend along.

Al's limo brought us to the Rainbow and we were immediately seated at a prime table. A rock star table. Without Adam. Adam, you fuck. He was probably fucking some chick at that moment. Some Texas chick. Wasn't he playing out in Dallas right about now? Who fucking cared.

Kathleen ordered double Jack Daniels all over the place. The room swam. It was horrible sitting at that table because I couldn't help but notice all the celebrities that walked by: Has-been movie stars and plastic actors, rocker boys with make-up and sprayed locks, chicks who had their tits sliced open like meat and stuffed with saline filled silicone pouches so they could crawl on cars in music videos and fuck rock stars, or prove their lack of talent on Baywatch and fuck rock stars. Hollywood 's the real silicone valley, man.

The more I drank the more pissy I became and I about had enough when some stupid rocker dude wouldn't go away.

"Hey baby, nice skirt. Nice legs. Stand up for me, baby. Stand up and spin around."

"Why don't you fucking spin around, you piece of meat," I flashed an empty rocks glass at the waitress, who nodded. Another was definitely needed.

"What? Why, baby, I was just saying how nice you look. What are you so angry for? Why would such a pretty girl be so angry?"

"I'm not fucking angry. I'm just not fucking stupid. Beat off."

Kathleen followed him over to the next table. Well, he did have a nice ass. He should have flashed it. Maybe I would have been nicer. Maybe I could've used him. It's bad reasoning though, because it's hard to get the bastards out of your apartment once you're done. Bringing home some meaningless fuck who won't leave before morning is a mistake; it always left me wide-eyed and paranoid with the clock ticking slowly in the background, getting louder and louder, not letting up, not letting me go down. Then in the dressing room at work the next day I always felt like complete shit and vowed that next time I acted like a slut it wouldn't be at my place.

A promise as relevant as those quitting-drinking vows made in college while puking into a dirty toilet. . .

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Bolt Risk
Available Now
CATEGORY: Fiction
PAGES: 154
TRIM: 5 x 7.5
ISBN: 0-9728984-6-8
PRICE: $14.95/ Trade Paperback Original