Punk Blood by Jay Marvin

Black Ice/FC2, 86 pp., $16

ISBN: 1-57366-047-7

By Tim W. Brown

Punk Blood, a novella by writer and radio personality Jay Marvin, takes the reader on a

wild ride filled with murderous violence. The book begins in a car on a freeway east of Los

Angeles. The driver, Marvin Cohen, is escaping from a bank robbery in which he killed four

people. Cranked up on crystal meth, he rampages through the Mojave desert where he kills state

cops, motel desk clerks, and other drivers to steal their cars and abet his getaway to Mexico.

Detective Lou Bills of the L.A.P.D. begins following the trail of bodies left in Cohen’s

crime spree. His only lead is Gloria, a phone sex worker whom Cohen calls nightly, not for phone

sex but to gloat about the day’s killings and to pontificate about the close relationship between

sex and death. While hanging out with Gloria waiting to trace Cohen’s calls in hopes of locating

him, Bills falls in love with her.

Meantime, in New York City, an unnamed junkie hit man is hatching plans to kill a senator.

Complicating his mission is a waitress he meets. She is the first sympathetic soul he has ever

encountered, and they quickly fall in love. He soon confronts a dilemma, however. They have

discussed his career, and he must decide whether to run away with her when his contract is

finished or kill her for knowing too much. The three storylines eventually converge and result in a

surprise ending which renders a harsh judgment on contemporary American culture.

Not for the squeamish, Punk Blood contains extremely graphic violence. The author has

often professed admiration for filmmaker Quentin Tarentino. In his depiction of naked brutality,

Marvin surpasses Tarentino, who looks like a director of G-rated Disney movies by comparison.

Yet Punk Blood is not merely an exercise in nihilism. Each storyline reflects the vicissitudes of

morality. Detective Bills’ moral sense slips as he becomes more deeply involved in the manhunt.

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Conversely, the junkie assassin’s moral sense improves as he discovers the redemptive power of

love. A pathological criminal, Cohen continually mocks the very idea of morality.

Marvin’s rabid, rapid-fire prose is written without paragraphing or punctuation. Normally

an annoying gimmick, this technique works well in Punk Blood, injecting an urgency into the

narrative that suggests the meth amphetamine experience. The writing propels the reader through

the action and does not allow the heart to pause.

One serious problem with the book is something largely beyond the author’s control.

FC2/Black Ice, the publisher of Punk Blood, does Marvin a major disservice in its careless

packaging of the book. The complete lack of copy editing is nothing short of egregious. Evidence

of editorial disregard abounds: “their” found in places where “they’re” is meant, “its” in place of

“it’s,” “to” in place of “too,” etc. It’s common in the chapbooks and zines of the underground

literary scene from which Marvin hails to find such misspellings, but the presence of these

mistakes in an edition published by a venerable university press is inexcusable.

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Interview with Jay Marvin
by Tim W. Brown

TWB: Tell me a little about when you first began to write. How old were you? What was
going on in your life? Why did you turn to writing?
JM: I never wrote a thing until I was 32. It was a short story titled “The Rag Picker,” and you
can still see the story on-line at the Sign Of The Times web site. At that time it came out in print
when Sign Of The Times was a print magazine only, and was later chosen for SOT’s best of
anthology. Then I wrote nothing until around the time of the Gulf War. I had the poet/author
Ishmael Reed on my show, and I said to him off the air, “Hey, I used to write!” He said, “You
have a lot of pent-up emotion. Why not sit down and write me a poem about Blacks and Jews,
and I’ll publish it in my magazine Konch.” So I did, and never stopped.
TWB: You’ve made no secret of your past bouts with depression. Was writing a way to deal
with that?
JM: No. And sometimes it would lead to it! No, just kidding. Yes, I would get a huge high off
of it when I would sit down and do five pages. But I never used it as a way to deal with my
depression.
TWB: Who are your literary influences?
JM: Oh, I loved Nelson Algren, Jim Thompson, Raymond Chandler, Edward Bunker, and
then late in life I found Claude Simon, who won the 1985 Nobel Prize for literature for the book
Conducting Bodies. That book changed my whole writing life. Funny, the book is not even in
print in this country. I went to Paris to meet him back in 1996. After reading that book, nothing
look as good to me. Oh, and James Ellroy’s White Jazz.
TWB: Tell me a little bit about Claude Simon, who is a writer I’m sorry to say I’m not familiar
with.
JM: He’s a French writer who won the Nobel Prize for literature. He is part of the Nouveau-
Roman movement of the 50’s and 60’s. Conducting Bodies is a novel that looks at the world
through a camera-like eye, and has shifting points of view. It has no characters at all. It would be
like if you looked at a painting and every little thing in that painting came alive. The book is like
being on acid. It showed me there are many ways to write a novel, not just one.
TWB: Who outside of the literary world influenced you?

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 JM: I love noir movies. I can watch them for hours. Also socialism—the work of Ché
Guevara, and Guy Debord. The music of Tom Russell and John Laurie.
TWB: What about film noir appeals to you? What are some of your favorite noir titles?
JM: I guess the fact that petty, punk criminals are outsiders always looking in. I’ve felt that
way most of my life. Titles? Things To Do In Denver When You’re Dead, LA Confidential,
Reservoir Dogs, King Of New York, Heat, Replacement Killers, Straight Time, and there are so
many more.
TWB: Besides being the author of hundreds of published poems and stories, and now a
novella, you have been a radio talk show host for many years. Does the radio work influence your
writing? How about the writing—does it influence your radio work?
JM: I try to keep them away from each other. Someone is always saying to me, “Why don’t
you write a book on radio?” I guess I never have because one is in another world from the other.
TWB: You live in two worlds, really, radio, which is a world of mass popularity, and
underground literature, which is a world of obscurity. How do you manage to keep these two
worlds separate? I’d begin to feel a little schizophrenic after awhile...
JM: It’s hard. Every once and a while I want to get on the air and talk about, say, Edward
Bunker or some great book I’m reading. But you can only go so far with that. Sometimes I feel
like it’s a tug of war.
TWB: I always found it interesting that you are totally uninhibited and outspoken on the
radio, yet you turn down opportunities to read your poetry in public. How do you explain this?
JM: I don’t know. I guess I just don’t have that big of an ego to do it. I think you have to
really think your stuff is good to do it. I guess there’s this little voice inside me that says “I’m not
really a writer, and if I read anything out loud, people will find this out.” I never went to any
school of higher learning, and almost didn’t make it out of high school. I’m a very bad speller too.
Maybe that has something to do with it.
TWB: You call your style of writing “punk noir.” What do you mean by this term?
JM: My stuff is stripped-down, in-your-face kind of prose and poetry. People love labels; I
chose one. The only other person who writes good, hard, dark stuff is Bill Shields. We both have
trouble getting into most mags because of it.
TWB: What accounts for this, do you think? Is it because literature pretends to be a polite art?
Is it because people would rather not be reminded of their dark sides?

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 JM: I don’t know. I think everyone wants to write like the fucking New Yorker and it’s so dull.
Oh, God, not that fucker John Updike again!
TWB: You often populate your poems and stories with society’s outcasts. What draws you to
these types of characters?
JM: I’m an outcast myself. I feel like I’m always on the outside looking in. I’ve always loved
petty criminals. The big boys bore me.
TWB: What do you love about petty criminals? Do you like how they live by their own rules?
Or that they live constantly on the edge?
JM: Yes. They’re always on the outside, and they have a world all their own with their own
language. I just dig the shit out of it.
TWB: Who do you mean by “the big boys”?
JM: All the Mob flicks and books. Enough with The Godfather already.
TWB: Tell me about the genesis of your new book Punk Blood. It’s like a cross between A
Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess and The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson. Where did
you get the idea for this book?
JM: I got it from reading Conducting Bodies by Claude Simon. After reading that book, I got
bored with the standard structure of the novel. So I sat down, and out it all came. The book is a
mixture of Jim Thompson and Claude Simon with a heavy dash of Jay Marvin tossed in.
TWB: What bores you about the standard novel structure?
JM: It’s always the same. Chapter one. Chapter two. You read enough of it and you can see
the bones sticking out. It doesn’t take any work to read it.
TWB: I can’t think of a character in all of literature that is so unrepentantly evil as Marvin
Cohen of Punk Blood. Where did he come from?
JM: Inside of me. I wanted to write something that would make people sick. He’s kind of an
anti-MFA, trees-and-flowers type person. My cop friends tell me I have got him down just right. I
don’t know what that says. I wanted to write a kind of fuck-you-to-the-world type of person.
TWB: Do you have any first-hand experience with petty criminals that you drew upon in
writing the book? (I’m not talking about rapist-murderers as extreme as Marvin Cohen.)
JM: I was one in high school. I used to strip cars with some other guys, and deal dope, and so
forth. Radio saved my ass.

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 TWB: On the surface, your work seems incredibly nihilistic. But I sense a moral undertone to
it. Once you get past the shock value in your writing, what message are you trying to impart?
What is the moral of your stories?
JM: That capitalism has no human face and needs one. That the media is out of control with
all kinds of shit in it just to make money. Look at what people say about Clinton! I don’t give a
shit what he’s done or how many lies or rules he breaks, how did the stock market do today???
How about all the crap on TV like all the violence? For example, that guy shoots himself on a
freeway overpass in LA and they run it live on TV! I mean, what’s that?
TWB: You’ve been called “the left-wing Rush Limbaugh.” Would you consider yourself a
card-carrying socialist?
JM: I was at one time. Now I think I’m kind of on the outside looking in. I don’t think the
Left or the Right has any answers. I’m always trying to figure things out and never will, I guess.
TWB: Normally, I find writing without paragraphing and punctuation annoying to read. But in
the case of Punk Blood, this technique works well in moving the action along. What made you
decide to write the book without paragraphing and punctuation? Have you received any criticism
for this choice?
JM: Oh, yeah lots of rejections both on this book and short stories that I’ve done the same
way. I left out the punctuation and paragraphing to give the reader a sense of words and images
rushing out all at once. Like being jacked up on meth.
TWB: After inhabiting the literary underground for a number of years, you have now
published a book with FC2/Black Ice, a university press. What about Punk Blood appealed to this
publisher, which normally publishes difficult avant garde literature?
JM: The fact that the book had a good story, and that it was so on the edge, I think. I thank
Ronald Sukenick and Curtis White for that.
TWB: What advice can you offer to aspiring poets and fiction writers?
JM: Do it your way, and never take no for an answer.
TWB: That’s good advice, especially the take no for an answer part. I do believe that
stubbornness is the writer’s greatest asset. What do you mean, do it your way?
JM: Do what your soul tells you to do and fuck everyone else. Does that sound right? Never
give up. It’s the best thing to have in life.
TWB: What are your future literary plans? Is there a book you’re working on? In what
magazines is your work scheduled to appear?

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 JM: I have two poems due out in an upcoming issue of The Pittsburgh Quarterly, and a book
of poems due out next year from View Books.
TWB: Wow, congrats, another book on the way. What’s the title? What kind of work is it?
JM: It’s poetry. No title yet.