The Bus: Cosmic Ejaculations of the Daily mind in Transit Steve Abee Phony Lid Books, 2001 192 pp. $14.00 Available at Amazon.

When a poem connects with a group of people, it can enchant them so much as to shape them and redefine the way they think. Just as memories of solemn faces in filmed funerals beat a child into tears when they're placed in a real one, "The Howl" has made its audience of young, aspiring hipsters convinced it's "too square" to walk on level ground, see a drunk for a drunk, and a sensible person for a desirable one. It also blinds Abee, an apparent critic of movie imitators (98-100) and mainstream culture, from modeling himself into a poster child for the overindulgent Ginsberg fan.

Let's introduce Steve Abee. He is a writer of the new oral movement, an LA teacher by day and a modernizer of the Beat tradition by choice. Where Kerouac, a top personality and bottom-level prose writer, spun off "The Howl" to dehumanize minorities into glorified exotica and subject his characters to an excess of unearned, unbelievable epiphanies, Abee is a top Ginsberg impersonator ("I have felt the breath of angels in the pools of orange streetlights."(62)). His own glorifications and exaggerations do not hide his talent, but he remains, nonetheless, an impersonator. Once you get into his prose, it's not surprising to find "the sun nod(s)" like Jimmy Baldwin's jazz musicians, but it's impressive that Abee reworks such romanticisms (where the sun "says nothing, just falls down on these heads, nodding" (18)) into lines that are aural, near-fuckable pleasures.

Abee's first novel contains the smartly paced, arrow-quick ramblings of a man (named Steve Abee) who catalogs everything he sees on a bus, and everything these sights take him back to: past events, favorite anecdotes, rants, the trademarks of beloved writers, and a car that's waiting for him at the auto shop. Abee's writing is patchy but easy on the ear, and definitely not composed on the fly. Whereas Kerouac seemed to think that words would just naturally enter another's conscience when read, Abee realizes the craft his art must have to work effectively.

From the very beginning of the book, Abee repeats words and phrases to help dictate the rapid speed at which he wants you to read the text, which allows the mood and swagger from his dark alley nouns to sink into your consciousness like the music from a Tom Waits song. Abee aims, and mostly succeeds, at rolling his words around each page's floor "like empty cans", so that they move through The Bus like "rattling planetary vocabularies". For his narrating guide on this tour of LA, "language is the garbage talking, the pools of sweat, the streams of blood that have attached themselves to my own veins" (20). When Abee takes this approach as machine-gunning rattler of gutter dreams, his attitude can be infectious, it can be tiresome, and, at times when he repeats the word "really" for effect, it can be a silly pleasure.

The Bus is about language, not plot, and is more a poem than a novel. Each chapter utilizes Abee's strength as a performer of poetry, where all the stops become, in essence, new tunes within which he can riff. Its content is focused mostly on sex, drugs and rock posing, and would work more effectively if its 183 pages were cut to half as many. While the factual parts of the book (geographical locations of stores and street corners where the author's memories reside) make some stops of the fictional bus seem obligatory, all of the chapters' prosed-up parade of "list" exercises routinely sound the same and give off the same vibe. Instead of making each block of memories physically distinct, Abee makes the entire city sound like a dead guy's boner. Whether he waxes about beatniks ("Your skin lectured by the sun, finger to lips, bohemian beach riff-raff, your shacks and sea castles are gone" (175)) or Pico Blvd. ("We floated down Pico, past all all the queen dandelion blue walls of embryos coming unglued from the freeway lily wind" (63)), Abee ends up at the same state of exaltation. Pico is "the ragged palm tree whispering in tall-headed rows", and beatniks are "sparring with Groucho and losing all for poetry", becoming the "windows" of Abee's soul". It cannot be denied that these monologues sound nice, but shouldn't even "cosmic ejaculations", as Abee defines his style, do more than look pretty ("Speaking a mile a minute, real soft, gum stain rain" (70))? Shouldn't his literary sperm possess some substance behind the gloss, and give birth to more than Puff-N-Stuff crackheads?

When music critics praise a pop album for being ten songs and twenty minutes long, it's often because twenty minutes is the precise length most people can appreciate, let alone stomach, the thrill of walking on air. Eventually, reality always sets in: the thrill of first kisses, or first snorts of coke, cannot be repeated every time you dot an "i" or say the word "pussy". Steve Abee is a good writer, but a dubious chronicler of human behavior. There is a healthy chunk of the book's middle section devoted to man's middle section, and it's hard to reconcile certain events (man in drag confronts him in porn store with propositions) with the married Abee's replay of them ("Queen hustlers would come by and check me out, see if I wanted them to suck my cock or if I wanted some ass. Really nice too. These guys would say, 'Hi, can I help you?' Or, 'Can I suck your cock?' 'No, no, that's cool,' I say. I never get mad. Why would I get mad?" (104)). If a fat naked man approaches you in the bathroom, it might well become an amusing anecdote in your autobiography -- but wouldn't the actual experience be a drag if your idea of Heaven is not a bathhouse? As Abee compares the sun to a heroin addict and means it as a compliment, perhaps he is sincere -- but this jury doesn't buy it.

When such perverse, false-sounding behavior (for example, who would make the first thing they say to a mother of a recently dead friend, "I heard about Matt. It was drugs, right?" (48)) conjoin with his over-the-top moments on the pulpit ("What have our beliefs won for us, where have they taken us? To genocide? To destruction so massive no soul could contain you or forgive you? Better then to believe nothing, to just walk into the dark and not want anything but tits..." (100)), Abee risks losing the patience of readers. No matter how well his prose can project a "Walk on the Wild Side" vibe, he seems old enough (and his readers should be old enough) to demand more than superficial struts.

Abee's sentences, at this stage in his career, do not give birth to a bona fide human being. His narrator is a character who's all surface pleasures, swinging rhythms and nice-sounding sensations -- one who's formed from the dead body parts of his literary heroes' bodies of work. When he echoes Bukowski, or physically puts him in the book ("Bukowski walks to the laundromat, a paper sack of clothes, a beer, and an orange in his bag" (77)), Abee imitates Bukowski's masturbatory Hemingway fantasies, not the times Bukowski could paint his ugly face of a life, blackhead by blackhead (as in Ham on Rye). While it's arguably impossible to take anything good from Kerouac the artist, Abee attaches his prose to many of Kerouac's most distressing qualities too: there's the deification of the unseemly, and the way neither of these writers ever describes an event without the sentences feigning ecstasy. The singer Beck is right when he calls Abee "a love-powered bullhorn blasting down from the altitudes" (front cover praise), but I view this as criticism, not exaltation. All aspects of life should not be described through a bullhorn, and Abee should not treat a solitary reader the same way he treats some person who goes to his poetry readings. Melodrama only works in a "live" setting, when an audience is too drunk or inattentive to catch subtleties.

When The Bus hits its targets (notably your veins and eyes), the wordplay gives your mind a bit of a tingle. Abee is particularly skilled at using his cosmic ejaculations ("I was part of his bullshit, I found out later that he had a chemical imbalance, he took a lot of acid, smoked a lot of shit, but to me it was that boulevard of speed that got him walking on water that wasn't there" (48)) to reinforce the poetry ("In his life, his own life, there was nothing there, no people, no home, no him. His body knew no ground" (47)) that came before. However, there are some major, almost unforgiveable lapses in which his sentences become utter poppycock, possessing no grain of reality, or embodiment of truth. This man of the street goes too far in his descriptions of lunacy ("...pouring dish soap and tap water and any other crap he could find into a container and methodically lighting a candle over it and dripping the wax into the mess then blowing bubbles into it" (45)), and it takes only a few of these moments to make him feel like a fraud.

If you're a music fan who wants writers to treat literature like an extended remix of a pop song that glorifies the dark side, doing the nasty, and sympathizing with any lamebrained, doomsday philosophy that a teenager might spout, Abee is primed to please. If you can say an "Amen" without giggling, after reading "Fuck me and this sad world of lies" (108), Abee is primed to please. The rest of us will have to wait for the teacher in him to tell the writer in him that the truth hurts far better than hyperbole, and that imitation, no matter how occasionally beautiful, is still a far cry from a howl.

-- Theodore Defosse