Barflies - Brian Alan Ellis, author and founder of House of Vlad

Lillian's Music Store, Gainesville, FL

Kyle:

I was driving north with my girlfriend, her mom, and the dogs toward Lillian’s Music Store in Gainesville to meet the author and publisher Brian Alan Ellis for some beer. The sky was big and blue with a striking grey sheen, a distinctly Floridian combination I’d been puzzling over since getting here. I cranked up the Tom Petty on the stereo and hollered, “Shit!”

Then I whispered, “It’s October. I hope there’s some Halloween decorations at this bar.”

When we arrived in town I hopped out of the car, said goodbye to the family, and stormed into Lillian’s, which had zero Halloween decorations, just a ballroom of black chairs placed at black tables that each had their own crystal ashtray at the center. In the corner of the bar, as if someone had forgotten it, was a vintage popcorn machine.

I needed a beer, bad.

The night before I drank six IPAs and watched the original Wolf Man, then spent an indeterminate amount of time with a stream of whiskey neats studying videos of Brian Alan Ellis on YouTube. CJ was sleeping next to me, shuddering from her own private nightmares.

I watched Ellis playing with his former band the Ex-Boogeymen, licking guitar strings, throwing himself all over beat-up stages doused in neon red, a real punk. I studied other videos of him hosting some sort of turbo wrestling festival, wielding a microphone while surrounded by a gang of super-jacked, orange, and sweaty bodybuilders.

Before blacking out, I remember squinting at the screen, wondering who was this man, and why? What were these queer Floridian subcultures he inhabited that I couldn’t understand? And how did this jolly reveler compare to the ultra-dark myopic poet who appeared in his books?

This man lives multiple lives! I determined, then was off to the races, lost in some desolate and pessimistic recesses of my mind.

When I first read Ellis, I was struck by the way his sly ethos got into my brain and caused me to start thinking in the peculiar pattern of his sentences. This was a man who had an almost Baudelairean approach to observing a days-old chicken nugget stuck to his carpet. A man who wrote of weeping alone at bars so sweetly and deeply that he made you feel seen and depressed at the same exact time. When I read Ellis I felt haunted, which is the best compliment I can think to give anyone.

I was inside Lillian’s, where Brian had suggested we go and had described as “this shit hole where Harry Crews used to drink.”

The place was ill-occupied except for a couple of crust punks whispering to each other at the bar and on a bench, removed from everything, a lonely idiot with a gin and tonic, scrolling his phone—which was plugged into the wall, the cord hanging, curled and limp—like it would give him the answer, like it would say, “Yes, son, you are the man. Go kill ‘em all.”

I scanned the damned ballroom again, and imagined the surly ghosts of old bars dwellers sitting there, put-out by my presence, staring at me like a regular asshole. Actually, I knew this was really happening.

Then I ordered a Big Nose IPA by Swamp Head, a Gainesville Brewery, and just as it arrived Brian appeared too, wearing a black blazer with a Pride pin on it, and carrying a satchel. He came over and we shook hands and hugged.

There must be new pages in that satchel, I thought as we sat down at a table, and I said, “Brian, great to meet ya,” then cheered his well tequila with my Tellamore DEW, before asking, “Workin’ on a new new book?” and he said, “No, I don’t write anymore,” then cackled.

“I’m focused on the final releases of House of Vlad,” he explained, before adding ominously, “I’m ending it all soon.”

Then his face lit up again as he told me he had books coming out through 2028 and after that was going to close the press. He said he wanted to publish 50 books and then call it. The books would remain in print afterwards, but he needed to reset.

“So you see,” he said, picking up my pair of Pit Viper sunglasses I had placed on the table and putting them on, “I’m focused on reaching the end. Maybe I’ll write something new after. Maybe not.”

It was then I understood that Brian was a genius, and like all geniuses who are not narcissists exhibited a certain indifference to his art. This indeed was the way of the man who infamously *winked* in his work. Brian took off my Pit Vipers and happily retrieved a cigarette from his pack of Lucky Strikes.

“I can’t believe you can smoke in here,” I said, spying a shadow figure forming and watching us from behind the old popcorn machine. “And you’re smoking Lucky Strikes.”

“Oh yeah,” he said. “Plus, they have the little crush.”

Soon we were chain-smoking Brian’s cigarettes and several rounds deep—beers and shooters; I sipped on the hard stuff, but Brian shot ‘um back like an actual outlaw—and I was feeding the jukebox a mix of punk and country tunes every time I went to piss. Brian was sticking to Miller Lights, but I admitted, “When it comes to beer I can’t drink anything but IPAs. Years ago with Scott Laudati I got the taste of these things and I can’t go back.”

“I can’t do ‘um,” he said. “Maybe it’s the high alcohol content. If I was slugging those like I’m slugging these”—he did a gesture of collapsing sideways, and I briefly had a vision of myself, last night, watching my drinking companion on YouTube, barely conscious, a vigil of crushed IPAs on the floor beside me.

“I understand,” I said, tentatively.

Right off the basin I liked Brian. He seemed like someone who understood that it’s quite likely that life is just one big joke, so why not laugh about it? Why not have a few drinks with a stranger at Lillian’s and see if it feels good?

At the same, the more I looked at him, his face shrouded behind a lilting plume of smoke, I understood I would never truly know what he looked like.

In fact, I explained to him that Christoph at CLASH and I had had multiple conversations about the Brian in indie lit, but my editor was talking about Brian Allen Carr, while I was talking about Ellis. Brian told me this happened so often that when people approached him at writerly functions thinking he was Carr, Brian pretended he was.

“It breaks up the monotony of it all,” Brian told me, wistfully. Brian had a way of making everything wistful, simple, and cosmically elaborate. He was an actor just like me.

Brian said, “So you’re an actor, yeah? I can see it. You have a baby face, nice hairline.”

He began cackling again, a marvelous laugh, a laugh which may be the true bridge between the black shores of his writing—those devastated ashen beaches with the anorexic trees and colorless leaves that fall silently, toward nothing—and this bubbly personality at the bar.

“Yeah, I’m an actor,” I said, “which means I hate myself. Which means I have to try and look like I’m twenty-seven for at least twenty-five more years.”

Then I told Brian I had just acted in my first feature film, a big step, especially because it was a movie directed by a movie star, so one that people might actually see. It’s possible. I admitted that I was close friends with the movie star’s son and so this may have contributed to the opportunity.

“Ah.” Brian smiled slyly. “A little nepo-teece.”

*Wink*

Brian and I spent hours drinking and laughing. We talked about a lot of things and got through his entire pack of Lucky Strikes before he bought us a new one. There’s a lot for us to talk about still.

When we said our goodbyes, Brian conceded, “That was really fun. One day let’s do it again,” and I could detect a writer’s somberness in his eyes, always something slightly sad when two people depart from each other. Like the time my friend’s movie star parents made me nachos from a secret family recipe, and after eating the pumpkin seed nachos all afternoon, it was time to go, and my friend’s dad said, “Well, I’ll see ya around, Kyle,” or like when my brother once very plainly calculated, “You know I have some friends…I only see ‘um every couple of years…so that’s like…that’s like maybe 5 times I see them again.”

Life was tricky like that. Recently, I had been hearing whispers from the otherworld, feeling the imminence of my own demise. On the other hand, death actually took the pressure off. It was easier to let go when meeting new people and be open.

We were on the highway in the Bronco after leaving Gainesville, surrounded by swamps, chirping baby gators, and abandoned shit hole automobiles pockmarked with bullet holes. I asked CJ and her mom about their night and they told me they saw a guy fall off a scooter, crack open his face, his eye was hanging out of his head, and blood was ejaculating from the wound in rosy torrents like a Troma horror film. Some off duty medics walked by, but wouldn’t help him because they didn’t have any gloves. CJ and her mom were in shock, they explained, but I couldn’t process what they were telling me.

Instead, I frantically searched my jacket pocket for my pair of Pit Viper sunglasses. It seemed I had left them at the bar, but it felt like I had left behind more than just sunglasses. I had lost some precious token of my evening with a legend.

CJ said, “Well, a worthwhile sacrifice.”

And she was right. If the Pit Vipers had to go so that I could get completely wasted with a guy like Brian, that was fine. What’s important was that there was a communion between two people; well not really people, writers, we’re not all quite there. Nevertheless, all communions are sacred, I thought suddenly.

Which is why I must continue Barflies, I determined silently.

My foot kicked something. I reached for the floor.

The Pit Vipers!

I hadn’t lost them after all!

Brian:

I didn’t really know Kyle until he slid into my DMs, asking for me to partake in his gimmicky Substack column where he writes about meeting authors at bars (Bukowski much?), and I immediately agreed because I love silly gimmicks, so I offered to meet him at Lillian’s, which is a rundown bar in Gainesville that you can still smoke inside of, where author Harry Crews used to frequent when he taught at the University of Florida for several years, and where I took authors Sam Pink and Jereme Dean when I booked a reading for them in 2017 and we sat in a corner booth and put Ministry songs on the jukebox while I drank heavily and they got stoned and barely talked, where they have a vintage popcorn machine and a framed poster of a Tennessee Williams play that was produced in the early ’80s, after TW was super drunk and hooked on pills and blacklisted from Broadway, at the Hippodrome theater across the street where I most recently attended a screening of Taylor Swift’s The Eras Tour film, and I was immediately jealous of Kyle because he’s younger and more handsome and slightly less bitter and has more hair and more famous friends than me, and also has the innocent, driving enthusiasm for writing and literature that I lost years ago, and I thought, Slick motherfucker, when he immediately gifted me a used hardcover copy of The Mulching of America, a Harry Crews book I didn’t even know existed, after we hugged, ordered drinks and made pleasantries, and he was so chill and easy to talk to that I felt comfortable right away, even when he said he’d made me a character in his forthcoming memoir, The Problem Drinker, that my good friends Leza and Christoph of Clash Books are publishing, which is flattering as fuck but also somewhat creepy but it’s happened to me before, miraculously, and any publicity is good publicity, and the biggest drinking problem Kyle has, turns out, is the fact that he prefers IPAs (gross) over my much classier go-to—foamy, piss-tasting Miller Lite drafts—but we sat on rickety-ass chairs at a wobbly table for a few hours, chatting and chain-smoking my cigarettes (slick) though he agreed to pick up our tab so it wasn’t a big deal that he was bumming my smokes while we discussed music, film and hot literary gossip involving all the heavy hitters that I know who either love and/or resent me because the indie lit world thrives on gossip, love and/or resentment, and he mentioned something about Thomas Pynchon and existential loafing or something or other, I can’t remember, and he put all the Hank Williams on the jukebox (Senior, Junior and III) and also my least favorite song off of The Life of a Showgirl, “Father Figure,” slick motherfucker (again), which somehow became my favorite because we were properly buzzed by then and he convinced me because he’s a charming-ass actor who’s on the road now with his renowned horror author partner-wife, CJ Leede, a total sweetheart who took pictures of us in front of the cursed Lillian’s popcorn machine when she came to pick Kyle’s drunk ass up, having sadly lost their home in the Los Angeles fires, and Kyle is an amazing, wildly creative and deeply talented yet humble, all-self-knowing soul who wears Pit Viper shades and is reminiscent of a way better version of what I once was, the slick motherfucker. Ugh.