Pilot Light — An Interview with William Ashbless
An Interview with William Ashbless — an excerpt from the exclusive interview to appear in the limited edition of Pilot Light:
Publisher’s Note:
What follows is a fragmentary interview of William Ashbless conducted recently by cub reporter Bill Wylie in Long Beach, California. The interview was never completed—our present text was mostly transcribed from a digital recording, and we’ve made every effort to reproduce meaningful vocalizations and nuances even when the recording was slightly unclear. (We note this because, in his annotations to the text of “Pilot Light” and in his comments afterward, Mr. Ashbless was slightly critical of the transcription of the manuscript, which, frankly, was stained with years of spilled liquids and foodstuffs, not to mention the problem of the poet’s notoriously quirky handwriting, which can appear downright schizophrenic at times.) Suffice it to say that what you read here is our best attempt at a verbatim reproduction.
Now a small bit of recent history:
Subsequent to the “interview” (according to reporter Bill Wylie) William Ashbless asked to borrow forty dollars “for gas money down to Dago” which Mr. Wylie assumed meant the city of San Diego, a hundred miles to the south, very near the Mexican border. “It was all the money I had at the time,” Wylie told the editors at Subterranean Press, “but Mr. Ashbless told me that he had to pay a visit to his ‘poor old mother,’ and under those sad circumstances I was happy to lend it to him.” (Ashbless’s “poor old mother”—if the poet is telling the truth about his own great age—must be upward of 280 years old. And nowhere is there any mention of Ashbless having family in San Diego.)
Ashbless has since disappeared, and, according to Ida Sessions of Hawaiian Gardens (who may have been inebriated when we first contacted her) the poet had moved out of his temporary quarters in her garage two days before this interview was conducted, after cautioning her, bafflingly, to be on the lookout for “a small man with a face like a road apple.” Ashbless, she said, seemed to be in a state of some agitation. “You’d do me a favor,” he allegedly told her, handing her a five-dollar bill and the corner of newspaper page with a phone number on it, “to let me know if he comes around.”
She reports that Ashbless drove off toward the west in an old pickup truck with a two-by-four bumper decorated with painted palm trees on either side of the word “Kahuna.” Our follow-up phone call found Ms. Sessions somewhat more articulate but apparently terrified. She now denied that Ashbless had said anything about road apples, but might have used the word “apple-john” instead, although neither of the two terms seemed to make good sense to her. To our minds, whether the small man’s face had the appearance of a road apple or an apple-john, the result is equally problematic.
That second phone call was abruptly terminated, and the following day there was a brief article in the Press Telegram about a garage fire in Hawaiian Gardens that was, as usual, blamed on faulty wiring. No one, thank God, was injured. The address was that of the home of Ida Sessions…
The telephone number on the slip of newspaper turned out to be the payphone at Egg Heaven out in Long Beach, where Ashbless had been briefly employed washing dishes, although he gave notice, the manager tells us, on the day of the Hawaiian Gardens fire and hadn’t been seen since. We were apparently the third party to inquire about Ashbless in two days’ time. The first was our reporter friend Bill Wylie and the second was, according to our contact at Egg Heaven, “a small man with dead-white hair who looked like a goddamn mummy. You wouldn’t call him a midget,” said our contact, “at least not to his face.”
Mr. Wylie, hoping to finish the interrupted interview and recover his forty dollars, walked from Egg Heaven up to Ashbless’s Long Beach apartment on Ximeno Street, but found that the apartment is not only locked, but the doors and windows are screwed shut. Further inquiries led him to Mr. Blaylock’s house in the city of Orange, where Blaylock and Powers were holding a yard sale. “They sold me a bale of what they told me was alpaca fur for fifty bucks,” Wylie told Subterranean Press, evidently irritated. “They said it was worth five hundred dollars at the Old Weaver Craft House in La Mirada.” The “alpaca fur” turned out to be a bale of shredded newspaper packed in hair from some kind of white dog.
It’s possible that we give these events more elaboration here than they’re worth. It’s hard to tell. But in the interest of truth, which is always our highest priority, we’ll reveal that there is no “Old Weaver Craft House” in La Mirada. Powers and Blaylock aren’t available for comment, and neither, of course, is Ashbless. We paid Mr. Wylie ninety dollars as a flat fee for this “interview,” so aside from gas money and a large helping of frustration, he broke even.
We’re reminded of Hemingway’s assertion, that freelance reporting is a hard dollar under any circumstances. Sometimes, apparently, it’s no kind of dollar at all…
And now we give you our careful transcription of the only known interview of William Ashbless, fragmentary though it is, conducted at Joe Jost’s bar on Anaheim Street in August of the year 2007.
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The rest of the interview — not to be missed, or, frankly, understood — will appear in the signed limited edition of Pilot Light.