JIM GOAD INTERVIEW November 1999 Interviewed by David Nolte

--- This interview was conducted by David Nolte (Fatal Visions contributor and co-editor (with Mannheim Jerkoff) of film zine Crimson Celluloid) through the mail in the early part of November 1999. It will feature in an upcoming issue of Crimson Celluloid. This sharp little film zine is highly recommended – sample issues may be obtained by sending an Australian $1 stamp (or IRC) to David Nolte PO Box 352 Plympton SA 5038 Australia. ---

Jim Goad himself can be contacted at the following address…

• Envelopes with stamps;

• Magazines, books (only directly from the publisher) or newspapers. You can photocopy pages from these and send him up to 10 pages (double sided) at a time;

• Packages of any kind.

David Nolte: For the uninitiated, can you fill us in on the circumstances that led you to being in prison?

Jim Goad: For a solid year, my mind had been saturated with death.
Debbie, the only person I’d ever loved, was wasting away with cancer.
I ran away from Debbie into the arms of a psychotic ex-stripper who’d been institutionalised four times.
As I began pulling away from the stripper, she started stalking, assaulting and threatening to kill me – most of her death threats have been tape recorded for posterity.
I permitted her to do it because I wasn’t certain I wanted to live.
During our final day together, she attacked me on a public bus, punching me about thirty times in the face and biting my elbow so hard it left a permanent scar.
Later that night, I tell her it’s over and drive her from my apartment building to hers. As I pull up in front of her building, I say, "I’m going to get a girlfriend who isn’t so fucking crazy – so just go". Instead of leaving, she screams "No!" and lunges at my face, scratching my cheek. As I restrain her arms, she tries kicking me with her shoes. "You’re never going to get rid of me!" she howls, her eyes wide and foam flying from her mouth. "I’m going to write tons of shit about you! People will be laughing at you! It’ll be like Carrie!" we both notice a black gentleman approaching the car. She ceases trying to hit me. I let go of her arms. The black man asks us if everything is OK. We both say yes. I watch him enter the apartment building. As I’m turning my head back to face her, she clocks me in the nose with her fist. I again grab her arms, and as we’re rocking back and forth, I catch a glimpse of myself in the rear view mirror. There’s a scratch on my cheek and blood dripping from my nose.

At the sight of my own blood, something primeval erupts from within me. I realise I want to live, after all.

I pull away from her building and smash her ugly fucking skull in with my fist. She had threatened to kill me so many times, I decided to show her the difference between a wannabe terrorist and a real one.

She initially had two chances to leave the car. Instead of leaving, she attacked me both times. Ten minutes later and five miles away, she was glad to leave the car. Believe that.

In case anyone was wondering, I don’t feel the least bit sorry about it. The Draconian punishment I’ve been handed goes far beyond the biblical admonition of ‘an eye for an eye’. If I’m going to pay for the crime so heavily, I might as well savour sweet memories of it. I might as well fondly recall the sound of her squealing for her life and the sight of her blood spraying through the air like slow motion photography of a sneeze.

Women who hit like boys should expect to get hit back like boys. Isn’t that what equality’s all about?

Nolte: As an outsider, I found it remarkable and disconcerting that Answer Me! Was used against you in court. What was your take on this whole episode? It must have taken on an almost surreal feel. Did it make you feel a kinship with people such as Peter Sotos and Mike Diana?

Goad: Since I accepted a plea bargain, I never went to trial, so Answer Me! Wasn’t used against me in this matter.

But the prosecutor intended to use passages from Answer Me! #2, #3 and #4 against me at trial. He even blew up the layout to "Let’s Hear It For Violence Against Women!" onto giant posterboard for maximum shock value. He was trying to argue that the essay – which was intended as a joke, despite the unfortunate dovetailing with my personal life – proved premeditation on my part. What I did to Ann Ryan was quick and instinctual, not premeditated.

Prosecutors aren’t known for their senses of humour, nor their literary acumen. They are evangelical ideologues beset with a blind, choking sense of self-righteousness. Their main job is to use symbolic gesture to sate the public’s appetite for blood vengeance.

The prosecutor was fully aware of how much publicity he could get by going after me. If my prosecution had anything to do with justice, then the City of Portland would have charged Ann Ryan with some of her violent crimes, including an axe handle attack on a woman I’d slept with. Police had investigated several of her crimes, and there was more evidence against her in many instances than there was against me in my case, but she was never charged.

Back in ’95, when the District Attorney of Billingham, Washington, took a pair of newsstand owners to trial for selling Answer Me! #4, it was truly surreal to see layouts from my magazine blasted onto a white wall with an overhead projector. "Basically, it tells you how to rape everyone", the DA told the jury. It’s always unsettling when a stranger seems certain of your intentions and motivations, when they couldn’t be further from the truth. This sense of anguish is heavily compounded when the stranger in question has the power to destroy your life.

Nolte: Your one-time lesser half, Debbie, has proven to have no strength of character by actively kicking you while you were down. What kind of things has she been up to?

Goad: The girl has cancer and might be dead by the time this is published, so I hesitate to get as tacky about our breakup as she’s been.

I really don’t want anyone to know that I’d rewritten all of her Answer Me! articles so that they’d be more readable, and that when reviewers would quote passages as evidence of what a good writer she was, they were usually quoting my words. I didn’t want anyone to know that I did 95% of the work on Answer Me! while giving her equal billing. I didn’t want anyone to know that her IQ is only 86.

I haven’t spoken with her in nearly a year, but according to several reliable sources, she’s now a born again Christian who has repented of all the "evil" she’d sown through Answer Me! She has also been granted the startling ability to contact dead spirits through a Ouija board.

It’s all very depressing, and much of her loopy behaviour of late might be attributed to chemotherapy and deathbed desperation.

I have a clean conscience that I tried to end it peacefully with her. She was a bitter, unhappy person long before she met me, but if it gives her some comfort to blame me for all her problems, I have no reason to object. She was never adept at taking the merest responsibility for her own unhappiness.

Nolte: Rumour has it that psycho whore Ann Ryan and New Age ninny Debbie have formed some sort of anti-Jim Goad coalition. Comment?

Goad: It’s starting to dawn on me that perhaps I don’t make very good decisions when it comes to romance.

What to make of their tag team vaginal lynch mob? Their jilted lover version of Revenge Of The Nerds? Their sequel to Of Mice And Men, with an all-lesbian cast?

Frankly, I’m flattered at the energy and attention which they continue to invest in me. I realise, as well as they do, that the intensity of their vindictiveness serves to mask the humiliating fact that I rejected both of them romantically. Their stereotypically female sense of vengeful overkill – which is far out of proportion to anything I’ve ever witnessed in males – makes me feel that there was a certain wisdom a few millennia ago when us boys overthrew the Goddess cults and blamed Eve for everything. As a convict here said regarding women, "Anything that bleeds once a month, for a week, and doesn’t die, just has to be evil!".

When I pounded in Ann’s skull, I did it with class. But those girls just have no class about anything. Both girls wilfully dabbled in darkness, then went screaming for the light after a few black eyes. They both expressed loud throated loathing for all that society represents, then scurried and hid within the flock when the going got a little rough out on the fringes. Both of them eagerly played a game of misanthropic musical chairs with me; now they’re acting as if they never played the game when I wound up the only one without a chair.

Jesus can have ‘em. But I can’t help feeling that after a few weeks, Jesus would be backhanding ‘em, too.

As it stands, they’re facing much harsher sentences than I am – they are forced to remain Debbie and Ann for life, without the possibility of parole.

You don’t need to get revenge against two pieces of shit. You just scrape them off your boot and keep walking.

Nolte: I hope that you aren’t doing too hard a time there. What can you tell us about the prison?

Goad: This is a tidy little minimum security joint with four army barracks-style dormitories (no cells) containing a total of 400 inmates.

The racial breakdown is about 65% Caucasian, 15% Mexican, 10% Black, 5% Native American, and the occasional lapsed Asian or Jew.

There’s a paucity of what might be considered radical thinkers or potential revolutionaries here. Most guys are normal, only three notches lower. Most of them are borderline retardos who, when they aren’t rhapsodising about robbing convenience stores or shooting meth, read the Bible and show me pictures of their kids.

In keeping with the spirit of the PC Reichstag known as Oregon, tobacco and pornography are forbidden. I’m surprised the menu down at Chow Hall isn’t entirely vegan.

Oregon has perfected the prison business – and as the State’s biggest industry, it is a business – to the point where it’s almost antiseptic. Even Oregon’s maximum security joints are tame compared to prisons in other States. This is truly one of the safest places I’ve ever been. No razor fights or anal rape. No homosexual activity or illicit drugs. No prison gangs. I’ve only seen two fistfights in nine months here, which is probably a much lower quotient than if you’d grabbed a hundred law-abiding males off the streets and placed them in the same dormitory for nine months. I almost feel as if I’m being cheated out of the true prison experience, although I’m not complaining.

Despite the relative safety, there’s a constant unbearable intensity mostly owing to the fact that I can’t leave.

Nolte: An associate said, when he first heard of your divorce and going to jail, "It’s another Chocolate Impulse scam". Strange reaction, eh?

Goad: The events in my personal life over the past five years…

• an obscenity trial;
• a man who shoots at the White House and quotes my writing;
• a trio of British kids who kill themselves, one of whom sends me her life’s savings;
• Debbie’s cancer and our divorce;
• a year of live-action topless comic terror with Ann Ryan;
• and now prison;

… have been so insane, I’m not surprised that people have a hard time believing any of it.

In a sense, going to prison and then emerging stronger than ever is a way of faking my own death.

I’d say I’m one step ahead of the game if people don’t know what to believe about me at any given moment. If you’ve confused them, you’ve conquered them.

Nolte: What do you say to the people in the zine world, especially those targeted by the Chocolate Impulse scam, that you’ve got what you deserved? Just the bitter ramblings of those jealous of your literary ability, methinks.

Goad: To be fair, I don’t think my detractors feel I have any literary ability. But since most of them have never been able to sell five copies of their zines, I’d speculate that at least some of them are jealous of the level of attention I draw.

It must infuriate them that they’re on the streets and still can’t get the attention I get while locked in a box. Deep down, I think my critics are painfully aware of their perpetually subordinate role relative to me in the literary food chain. There’s a reason they’re talking about me and I’m not talking about them: I’m more interesting than they are.

Nothing they could ever say about me could ever drag me down to their level. They drown in their own irrelevance. I just scratch my head, and they all fall to the ground like flakes of dead skin.

What do I say to them? Nothing. Most of them are so far beneath me, I don’t waste a passing thought on them. I do, however, receive a tremendous amount of energy from being hated, so if they don’t want to strengthen me, they should stop it.

It’s fine with me if they enjoy the idea of my suffering, although that’s hypocritical of those who hate me because I published a magazine that revelled in human suffering. I’d suggest that many of these types are displaying a sort of sublimated sadism that they’re probably not in touch with. It’s also hypocritical of the same people who complained that I was a non-violent, voyeuristic poseur to turn around and complain that I’m actually violent. And it’s hypocritical for those ersatz anti-authoritarian types who rail against the "pig" system to suddenly love the system when one of their pet taboos, such as domestic violence, had been crossed.

This whole idea of someone objectively "deserving" punishment for their actions is an antiquated, pseudo-biblical concept and almost entirely foreign to me.

But on my own subjective playing field, the only person who got what they deserved was Ann Ryan: twenty six stitches and a broken nose.

Nolte: Being the inspirational writer you are, I imagine that the prison experience is, if nothing else, great literary fodder. Has it helped your creative juices to flow freely?

Goad: All of my writing is rooted in tension and conflict, and this situation has provided a rich harvest of those ingredients. It’s not as if I needed to get more intense, but since that’s been the end result of incarceration, I might as well exploit it. I’ll take the shit I’ve been handed and turn it into fertiliser.

Prison is a very extreme sort of writer’s retreat. It has been an emotional crucible which has burned out everything that had previously been half-assed about me. It has left a big blood clot in my brain that needs to be lanced and spilled onto paper. My prose has become much more suffocating, relentless, and emotive than ever before. I’ve pared down a bit of my prior overwrought descriptiveness in favour of a punishing sense of rhythm. I now take short, choppy paragraphs and stack them one atop the other with the thudding force of an army rolling over its opponent.

Nolte: Aside from writing, what else do you do to pass the time?

Goad: I walk the yard and hang with the peckerwoods, who impart their unique brand of transgressive wisdom.

I lift weights daily, which helps to expunge a lot of the tension.

I obsessively count the remaining days until I’m released. As of this writing, I’ve served 509 days and have 368 to go.

My prison job, for which I’m awarded an astonishingly handsome $48 monthly, is to give out rain gear to work crews in the morning and fetch it when they return in the afternoon.

Since I’m writing a premature auto-obituary, I spend a lot of time ruminating about my life’s events.

Mostly, though, I write. And write. And rewrite. And edit. And polish it. And perfect it.

If they allowed us to masturbate, I’d probably do a lot of that.

Nolte: Answer Me! was certainly unique in the publishing world; nothing like it had ever been seen before. Looking back, is there anything you’d change?

Goad: Maybe what was unique about it was that I’d never seen any other zines when I produced the first issue – I was merely a frustrated writer working in a print shop who decided to make use of the equipment at hand. So it was organic, in a sense – I just wanted a forum for the sort of writing which the editors I’d dealt with found objectionable. They always deleted my favourite lines, so I decided to publish something that was a distillation of everything that wound up on the cutting room floor.

In 1991, hardly anyone was unashamed of simultaneously being white, male and angry. So Answer Me! filled a neglected market niche.

I think each issue got progressively better. The first issue was the weakest, and I’d probably snip out the two contributors’ pieces from it. Most of the interviews in the first three issues seem lightweight and fannish, so I’d probably take out those, too. The layout in the earlier issues often seems uninspired, but I was playing it by ear.

The fifth issue was going to focus on race, but I’ve put the name Answer Me! to bed. I will, however, work on a racial encyclopaedia when I’m released that will recall Answer Me! ’s tabloid-style layout and sense of outrage. I’ll also produce some websites that will make Answer Me! look tame.

Nolte: You really should be congratulated on the Redneck Manifesto. Are you happy with how that came out and the impact it had?

Goad: Did it even make an impact? I must have missed it. Even though The Redneck Manifesto was released by a major publisher, the Answer Me! anthology sold twice as many copies. Simon and Shuster had no idea how to market it, so they didn’t market it at all.

I was thoroughly shafted by the publicity department, but my editor was great to me. He didn’t edit a word. One proofreader objected to my depiction of Spike Lee as an "ebony midget", but the phrase remained. The only thing that irked me editorially was the stupid subtitle they used for the hardcover version over my objections ("America’s Scapegoats: How We Got That Way And Why We’re Not Going To Take It Anymore").

Sure, I was happy with the book itself. I don’t allow any of my writing to be released unless I’m satisfied with it. Although The Redneck Manifesto was less ferocious than Answer Me!, it was probably the most cohesively radical thing I’ve ever written. I would think the book might have some resonance for Australians since, like America, your little island was founded on the forced labour of Britain’s throwaways.

I think part of the reason my personal life unravelled so rapidly over the past couple of years was because mild mainstream success left me feeling empty, and I wanted to return to the emotional and literary hinterlands.

Nolte: Which writers inspire you?

Goad: When I was younger I really liked Tom Wolfe and Hunter S Thompson, and I’m still trying to shake their influence.

Regarding the classics, I’m partial to Dickens, Dostoevsky, Kafka, Machiavelli, and the Hindu Upanishads.

Norman Mailer and H L Mencken are two of my favourite essayists.

On the Negro side of the aisle, I’m fond of Leroi Jones, Eldridge Cleaver, and, naturally, Iceberg Slim.

My friends Peter Sotos and Adam Parfrey are two of the most gifted writers currently publishing, and both have had an influence on me. There’s also a guy in Michigan named Jeff Rassoul who publishes a zine called The J Man Times and is one of zinedom’s best writers.

Probably my favourite read of the past five years was The Unabomber Manifesto. Kaczynski ’s clinical dissection of leftist masochism was devastating.

Nolte: What can you tell us about Shit Magnet?

Goad: Shit Magnet is a full-length forensic investigation into why so much shit flies my way. It examines what happens when two worlds – Jim Goad and Planet Earth – collide. It is less an autobiography than a comprehensive statement of philosophy using real life vignettes as illustration.

It’ll feature chapters on violence, depression, sociopathy, obsessions, and death; the fun and fury of the Answer Me! years, including all the scandals which reverberated in it’s wake; the glories and challenges of prison life; whether or not I’m evil; and my tips on love and romance.

It is tentatively scheduled to be published by Feral House in the fall of 2000 to coincide with my release from prison.

Prior to that, an excerpt from it will be included in the sequel to Apocalypse Culture. The piece is called "Roadkill", which is a narrative of what went through my mind while I was pummelling Ms Ryan. Another excerpt, this one on obscenity, will be published early in 2000 as part of an expanded reprint of Answer Me! #4.

Shit Magnet will attempt to explain why, despite all the calamities that have befallen me, I’d rather be a ‘shit magnet’ than a pity sponge. It will also explore why I’m so hated, when I actually find myself quite loveable. And, of course, I’ll argue why it’s the world, not me, that should apologise.

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