Trip Sitting: Six Months Into Hallucinations
Hamish Kavanagh's debut collection has been out for six months today. Read more about acquiring, designing, and publishing the book; an author interview excerpt, special offers, and more...
I. Intro
II. Review
III. Free Story (Street Earnings by Hamish Kavanagh)
IV. Sale
V. Ebook
VI. Interview Excerpt
Six MONTHS?
HALLUCINATIONS by Hamish Kavanagh
Six months old…
Seems like just yesterday it was yay-big. Just a little baby in my inbox, like I’m the fire department at three a.m. It’s okay, I asked for them. These home-needing manuscripts to be brought here—to be dropped in that swiveling metal drawer like an overdue library book.
clang
This manuscript klunged into my inbox before its publication date last November, obviously—way back in the summer, I believe. I was sick, still kind of early in a whirlwind of health issues, but boy I read Hallucinations the first time, and it had me hallucinatin’, ya heard me? I had a lot of time to sit with it.
Sit with it, I did.
Hamish pitched it to me in a way that spoke of the experiences and perceptions of a wide range of character realities and identities, whether social, economic, cultural, etc., and this thread weaved through them—this hallucinatory sort of feeling as if you’re moving through the stories just outside of perception. Not in so many words, but that was the vibe I got going into it.
BUT FIRST
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Anyway, I think I was halfway through the collection when I reached out to Hamish with an acceptance. He’d been on a pretty wild trek through Europe and God-knows-where, and through odd-hour emails (I wasn’t sleeping, and Hamish was bouncing timezones), we rolled through editing and cover design (which ended up hilarious; I’m colorblind as a dog…long story. I might show samples), and just about the time he was hitting back home in New Zealand, we hit publish on this freshly scrubbed and polished, full-blown, ready for the wild book that we’d nursed for months. This one was special.
The stories simmer a bit. Some require a second reading. This isn’t horror, thriller, action and adventure, etc. This is literary fiction; it’s about characters, and it’s about excavation of an emotion, an experience, a concept. Lots of them involve characters pushed to the edges of society, but many involve the completely normal and mundane who could be your cubicle buddy.
I want to tell you about my experience, but I’d rather just share it.
My Favorite Story:
Street Earnings
a short story by Hamish Kavanagh
The First Visit
He came to me on a Sunday. Fidgeting like all the others but moving much slower. Short of breath, but not because he’d recently been running at a rapid rate. In fact, it’s unlikely he had reached a full sprint in at least a decade and a half by the time he ran into me.
I ushered him behind the kebab shop container bin and I worked hard to look him in the eye, not out of respect, but as a MET litmus test. Not even my seasoned clients would raise their eyes from beneath the hoodie. But a pig on incognito? It must be standard briefing protocol to drill them into looking as comfortable as they can around us ne’er-do-wells. Those plainclothes Feds always make a point to shake your hand, dive into small talk and slap you with evangelist-grade eye contact. I suppose their logic is sound: copping dope is the natural habitat of vermin like us, no?
His eyes stayed on the limp cabbage in the drain grate. I sniffed in a sharp drag of the wood-fire smoke that marked this time of year. For all my musings about naïve lawmen, sometimes the other extreme can be just as clear a signal of a boy-in-blue. The types who give away nothing; playing the stoic junk-head. But this grey-skinned geriatric looked like he was seeing his own used-by date in that browning leaf, so I told him my price list.
“A gram of that fentanyl, please.” He placed his order like a Friday fish n’ chips run.
I snorted. Shit ain’t this always the way? The first-timers have me playing the pharmaceutical ethics game without even knowing it.
“Brother, a bag that big will send you straight under chapel soil.”
This picked up his Churchill jowls for the first time. “If only I could pray for such mercy,” he said.
Well that did it. Hippocratic Oath on the line now. I shook my head. “My friend, I’ll give you a quarter gram.” He almost jumped out of his baby blue cardigan when I draped an arm around his shoulder. “Is your wife into knitting? Got any thimbles lyin’ around?”
His head dropped, but his back and shoulders tensed up with wiry muscle I never would have guessed was there.
“Betty’s gone, but I kept her things how she liked them.” He finally looked me in the eye, “Boy, are you here to make a sale today or is it a home-knit Christmas jumper you’re angling for?”
I tightened my arm around him. Smart-arsed druggies are nothing new. But I realised too late that this old bastard had probably seen action in at least one world war and by virtue, was probably more dangerous at close quarters than any of the dirty bastards I deal with on a day-to-day. Bruno Fossfar, Marlow the grouch? Forget it, not even the most depraved of the tweakers who shuffle their way behind the Shish on South Street back dumpster section to hassle me for a fix on tick has ever seen violence like this geezer. I could feel it in his shoulders. I could hear it in his voice. Who knows what type of human rights breaches this pensioner had been on the wrong side of in his time?
“Brother, this ain’t an intervention, ‘cause I sure as hell ain’t the angel you’ve been lookin’ for,” I said. “But I can tell you now, if I sell you a gram of F, you ain’t comin’ back for repeat business.” I stared down the alley where a stray tomcat had crouched to lap up water from a rusted gutter pipe. I reached into my waxed jacket and pulled out a small clear bag. “Take this. Don’t rack up a line any bigger than the head of a thimble.”
He handled it with the familiarity of a smoker manipulating rolling papers.
I pointed to it. “That’s Ket cut with enough F to send you to see your wife in twelve seconds, but not enough to stop you from coming back to buy another bag. Sound like a deal?”
He agreed and he paid up front and I felt like I’d done some good.
The Second Visit
“Ernie, tell me. How did you know to come find me down here?” I leaned against painted brick where some kids had painted a mural I swear blows well clear of anything Banksy came up with before he popped his clogs, and I watched my only well-dressed client tuck his second purchase away into a thick wallet I didn’t doubt was made of genuine Venetian leather.
“Oh, my liaison? He asked me to be discreet…” Ernie paused to weigh up these loyalties with a depth of thought I didn’t even apply when considering whether I should drop out of college or not.
“But I suppose it can’t hurt to share his name given how well this has all gone,” he said this with a wink and I realised he was right. Whatever limp cabbage low point had brought him to me seemed relieved by my cocktail of K and F. His body language, his language language, everything one stranger can pick up about another stranger from a first impression dialled up nineteen degrees for the better since I last saw this old codger.
He grinned as he explained. “Well I got talkin’ to Waldrick MrCowen down at the veteran’s bar a few weeks back.”
Veteran! I knew it.
“Waldrick’s reputation as a rake around town preceded him, but he’d heard about Betsy’s passing and offered to buy me a pint, so I saw no good in telling him no. Well—”
I scanned my mental Rolodex for a Waldrick. Couldn’t be Wally the Swampbird he was talkin’ about, and this old timer definitely couldn’t be talkin’ about Dricky Dribble. Shit no, I think we’d see a continent-sized mushroom cloud if two characters as dissonant as Ernie and Dribble came within shouting distance of each other.
“Well—,” Earnie repeated. “Waldrick and I got talking about grief and after one too many night caps he took me aback with how perceptive he was in regard to Betsy. I’d told him I watched an entire battalion fall under Messerschmitt fire during my last tour and I’d had absolutely no trouble performing my duties for the Parisian milkmaid who waited to console me upon my return that very evening. Yet after Betsy’s death, I couldn’t face a sermon without curdled thoughts of God’s pettiness striking me bitter in my chapel pew.”
I fiddled with the baggies in my jacket pocket hoping Bruno Fossfar didn’t stumble in and step all over the heart puddle this old man had just spilled out for me.
“Waldrick listened in close, took a beat then told me: ‘Go down to the Turkish spot off Kingsland Road. Speak to a man named Merl and he’ll sort you out.’”
The first proper smile I’ve let creep over me since, shit—maybe since I started working around the ends, rolled itself out for Ernie and left me blushing.
“So the gear I sold you was good?”
“By Jove, it was fantastic, young man!”
“You’ll come back next week, yea?”
Ernie nodded then left, and I felt a warmth that didn’t belong anywhere near Shish on South Street.
The Third Visit
The third time I saw Ernie, it wasn’t the same guy. Though every encounter I’d had with him to that point was a breath of fresh air compared to my other clients, he’d always dragged a weight around behind him. It figures. A guy from his world doesn’t come down these ends for no reason. But that third time?
He was a poppy petal on the breeze. Tip toes, as dapper as always, comb in top pocket, aftershave classing up my alleyway in ways that risked tearing right through its stratified veneer and sending us all into full blown class consciousness.
“The usual, my friend,” he said.
“You right, Ernie?”
He nodded. Dentures reflecting my face in their polish.
“Good gear then?”
He nodded again and seemed ready to leave it at that, but then he caught my eye and took a turn.
I didn’t like that. When a client starts looking at you. I mean, really lookin’ at you. You’ve either given them far too much or given them a reason to feel shortchanged.
He removed his hat and said. “You know my friend, the first night I came here, I was lookin’ for a way out.”
“You and everyone else.”
He shook his head. “No, I mean all the way out.”
Eyes who’d seen far more of the twentieth century than the twenty-first, returned to the drain grate as he spoke.
“When Betsy died, I didn’t see any choice but to follow her. But here’s the cinch: I’d dodged too many bullets on the battlefield to let one strike me down by my own trigger finger and I wasn’t going to swing from the rafters like the camp guards we closed in on in ‘45. I figured, if I was going to kick over the caution signs and walk past them, I may as well strike a match against the last moments I had left!”
He lingered there, in that limbo between memory and ambition, forgetting I was with him by the look of it. Then he shook his head and really forgot about me.
“I’m eighty-one years old. I’ve lived a life and seen the world. But until I met you, my friend, I only saw it from the driver’s seat. After taking your medical compound, I was able to open the door of this automobile we call life and climb out. I was then able to walk around the bonnet, kick at the tires and see everywhere the paint job needed touching up. Your little bag of opportunity let me notice a slightly misaligned axle and pull out the dipstick to assess the oil situation. It let me see that sub-par machinery that I’d been using to drive through life with and diagnose all the minor adjustments that might have made things easier.” Ernie wiped his brow and sighed. “When it all wore off, I was free to think about Betsy not through the lens of Ernest Arthur Winstone, but as a nonpartial member of the human race and see my situation as I would for a close friend or lover. I’d encountered death. Tragic, no doubt, but no more tragic than the multitude of children who never see their first day of school, no more tragic than the countless lives I relinquished under my trigger finger during the war. Your little bag of life let me see lambs grow, have their tails docked, turn into rams, breed with a paddock of ewes, take an unfortunate fall down a bluffside gorse patch, emerge unhurt though scratched two shades of rouge. I saw those scratches fail to heal, attract flies which spawned maggots which dug deep into flesh till the prematurely aging sheep grew heavy in the eyes, till its farmer took notice and applied chemicals too late till the animal lost the spirit to bite at its itching hind quarters and eventually lay down and magpies took its eyes and its wool rotted over ribs that punctured tanned hide and revealed the maggots becoming flies who would twist and rise to find another target for their cycle.”
All at once, Ernie was both animated and deflated.
“Betsy was here for a time and I was lucky to know her. Merl, I’m a catholic man so I hold out hope that I’ll see her again, but equally, if I don’t, I know I’ve enjoyed more time under the warm light of love than most men get and can be content with that. Presuming any greater entitlement for what God owes me is to give myself over to the fifth deadly sin.”
I handed Earnie his pre-mixed bag and felt strange about taking his money.
The Fourth Visit
On Ernie’s fourth visit, Ernie didn’t come. A kid dressed like a nineties raver mixed with southern hemisphere tank top trash arrived in his place.
I made eye contact. The kid dropped his eyes. But that’s how all of them are these days, isn’t it? Bet if we’d talked through a phone screen he’d be eyeing me up and all over.
While his head was down, I glimpsed his oversized, three-quarter jeans, camo shirt, mullet and moustache, all of them soaked in overthinking and no thinking at all.
“Where’s Ernie?”
“You mean Master Winstone? He’s up at the Hedley Mansions with the others.”
“The others?”
The kid pulled down the brim of his hat that advertised a local mechanic shop where he’d almost certainly never used the services. “You gonna sell me the gear or not, friend?”
I stared at him.
He made a tantrum sound. “Master Winstone is special, alright? We do favours for him here and there. You’ve met him. You must know that.”
I nodded. He was right. Ernie was special. Furthermore, he showed me that what I was doing was special—or at least might be, if I tried. This moussaka-scented Groundhog Day didn’t have to end with every client dying on a dime or worse, thinning out till there was more thin left than life. If I tried, maybe, sure it was a big maybe, but maybe, some good could come out of my time in this place.
I sold him Ernie’s usual but the usual sensation didn’t follow. All warming thoughts of Ernie were undercut by something else. I glanced down at the drain grate. No limp cabbage today.
The Visit That Wasn’t
No Ernie after visit four, no surrogate Ernie either. The part of me that touched the part of Ernie that touched those young minds up at Hedley Mansions wants to think he found new purpose in his malleable followers and kicked the K to F concoction that I used to whip up for him. But my time behind Shish on South Street tells me better. I’ve been around too many junkies to be so naive.
I wrapped my idea of Ernie up in a type of hope that he didn’t earn. That’s on me. What’s that old adage about knowledge obtained via a shortcut?
You might call this sad, but remember the lamb become ram become corpse become parable?
Betsy died and took her widow with her. I’m no widow.
The hope I gave Ernie might have been false, but I did him some good for some time and in turn he let me see something that was hidden before. Before Ernie, it was all entropy for me. After Ernie, I saw something different. Call that hope if you like, I call it earned.
The End
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Who’s Hamish?
Six months in, and we have this interview we’ve been on-again-off-again-ing; here’s a peek at it. Find the rest in the upcoming, first and probably only issue of the Drek Death and Doom magazine/Press info-dump.
One of the things I wanted to squeeze out of Hamish was the absolute marrow of his musical influences. He’d sent me a comp list that paired well with the manuscript (both in reading, and advertising, in my opinion), and it was different—deeper on a level that requires appreciation.
Once upon a time…
Dylan B (DB): When we were working together, you listed music comps to go with Hallucinations and any promotions we did. How did you choose those songs, and does music play a big role in your writing practice?
Hamish K (HK): The song choices came downstream of the stories themselves. As a writer you make a thousand choices while plotting and reworking a story, but you have very little say in the ambient momentum that words pick up along the way.
While a couple of the songs I chose as comps for Hallucinations captured the general vibe of the collection, most of my song choices were references to specific stories and what I “hear” when I return to these stories.
I found myself including songs with a lot of heavy bass guitar as comps. Songs like Straight Jacket Fitting and Real Thing capture the sleazy mental space that marks many of the characters in Hallucinations.
To me that dirty consciousness is a fingerprint of this collection, characters who are grounded enough to know better, yet step off the edge all the same, whether by choice or externalities that they don’t have the tools to overcome…—
later…
(HK):—…or an off-kilter time signature shift, force you to realise you had no idea where this train was headed at any point no matter how much it felt like you were in the driver’s seat.
That’s writing, that’s music, that's existence as far as I can tell.
(DB): Interestingly enough, I feel like this also captures quite well actual drug intoxication, which several of your stories display the intoxicated or metaphorically intoxicated experience quite well. You’ve threaded two forms of entertainment with in-body experience. Have you always connected musically with writing, or has this been a sort of process discovery which spurred on more creativity, gave you more ammunition, improved your process?
(HK): The music/writing connection has always been there on some level, but has definitely become a more conscious thing lately as I’ve focussed more on my prose style and the sound of the words. I didn’t read much poetry growing up, but always appreciated a good turn of phrase in songs. Lately I’ve been paying closer attention to my own taste as a reader/listener and trying to notice when a particular line in a novel or a song lights me up. I’ve been forcing myself to pause in these moments (or underline them to come back to later) to dissect what is going on to produce that effect. I (deliberately) don’t have this down to a science, but it usually comes back to rhythm and the sound of the syllables rather than any clever insight found in the content of the words.
(DB): Expand on that process a bit. Once you identify that effect, what does analysis and dissection look like? And how do you try to implement it in a satisfactory way?
(HK): When it comes to applying these observations—I definitely have a tendency to “catch” pet techniques which will show up everywhere in my work when I first start applying them, but I write every day so it doesn’t take long for these to integrate or filter their way out of my style once the shine has worn off.
That tends to be my approach towards developing my style and technique in general. I do all my theory in separate sessions to my standard writing practice i.e. I rarely write a story specifically designed to practice a given technique. I do the learning or dissecting on its own then when I go back to whatever I’m working on at the time, a part of my mind inevitably tracks and inserts a version of what I’ve just learned.
(DB): Speaking more broadly—you recently returned home to New Zealand from a significant amount of time abroad. Continuing with process, what challenges or advantages did travelling present?
(HK): Having spent so much time travelling, I learned to carve out a sacred space for my writing first thing in the morning. It doesn’t matter how early you’ve got to get up for a flight - set the alarm 45 minutes earlier than that, drink a coffee and you’ll at least have enough energy to get your session in. Whatever comes after doesn’t matter because you got the writing in.
And I find all the above echoes across life in general…—
To be continued…
Find the rest of the interview with Hamish in the first issue of Margins, the magazine coming this Summer.
What Now?
Six months in, and Hamish is still truckin’ along. Still writing, pushing stories out here, for free, for all of you on a consistent basis.
Right now, in order to get all of our beautiful authors’ books into the hands of the wonderful readers who would enjoy them, I’m offering up this sale.
My stock is low again, so right now, the number of this special deal is extremely limited; however, I’ve already placed an order for more books, so the stock should be full replenished shortly.
Right now, I think we have FIVE available of this deal:
NEW BUNDLE OFFER
Not Sure Where to Start with Nascent Night Press? — Try all three of our 2025 releases for only $30 (a $51.89 value, normally)!
Thanks for hanging out and learning a bit about Hamish. Look forward to more fiction, more deals, and more opportunities coming up soon!
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