Donald Goines is a book that most people reading this website will be aware of. It’s out on Expat Press, a print that routinely puts out books by the kind of people I can no longer be. Smooth, suicidal twenty-somethings full of whippets and methamphetamine. I can’t be that person anymore because I am 37 and have a very strict vitamin routine. I’m also stone cold sober, something that none of the characters in Donald Goines are.

 

Calvin Westra wrote Family Annihilator, which I dug when I read it but forgot about pretty quickly. This isn’t a slight on the book, I just have a hard time remembering a lot of things that I read. I don’t think I’ll ever forget Donald Goines though.

 

Donald Goines exists in real life. Like the characters in the book, he got incredibly fucked up and still managed to make something beautiful. For him it was a series of inner-city crime novels. Blacksploitation. Pulp stuff. I haven’t read it. I assume as The Whitest Man Ever the books aren’t aimed at me. But the point is this. He existed. He loved drugs. He made art.

 

I can divert nicely here to tell you a little about the plot. The book is about a group of kids who give themselves cool bird names like Honduran Emerald and Kakapo. They love puppets and generally being weird little bastards. There’s reasons for this. This isn’t a book about puppetry. It’s a book about how drugs make things surreal. It’s about how drug addiction reduces you to an ever narrowing Ouroboros of bullshit details. A couple of weeks ago I tweeted to someone that when you quit drugs it feels like you can do anything, because when you are on drugs you feel like you are achieving so much – but really you are just lying in bed crying. That’s what Donald Goines is about. It’s about destruction.

 

These kids populate the book but it isn’t their story. The story belongs to Dunie, a girl who gets caught up in the lifestyle these kids choose to live. There’s a distinction here, and it’s an interesting one. I assume these males opted to exist like this. They commit crimes to fund their habits. Their lives revolve around drugs. Dunie, the female, comes into this shit-show because she tries to help one of the boys with their math. This act of kindness costs her everything and I think is pivotal to the way the book played out in my mind.

 

It seems trite bollocks to say that art is subjective. It’s the reason we have art in the first place. But I think people will take different things from Donald Goines. Phillip K. Dick fans will enjoy the almost Ubikian surrealism of everything becoming Donald Goines brand. In Ubik, the eponymous Spray is a metaphor for God. It’s everywhere – it’s the only way out. In Donald Goines, Donald Goines is everywhere. He lends his name to everything, from beer to video game consoles. Everything else is reduced to simple noun descriptors. You buy shoes at Shoes. You worship at Gods. Get arrested and you go to Bars.

 

There’s enough wanton savagery and heinous acts in this book to fill 100 more volumes, but it’s not there for shock value. There’s a sadness and surrealism to drug addiction that it’s difficult to express to someone unless they have been through it. But not everyone who reads Donald Goines is going to have spent years cutting themselves open and binding themselves together again with duct tape. So the violence, the obscenity, the scenes with Paracelsus, it’s all there to cater to the people who need to know what life is like when you don’t eat for four days straight because you spent your last dollar on meth. Drug addiction, and addiction in general, can be banded around like an in-joke. A badge of honor for those who have survived, and those who are proud to just be involved. There’s a romanticism that we attach to addiction, and Donald Goines makes no case for addiction being anything other than a way to ruin yourself again and again.

 

I spent 20 years addicted to hard drugs and alcohol. While I don’t remember a huge amount of those times, I do remember the way shops, people, feelings blurred into one. You went to the shop to buy cigarettes. The shop becomes synonymous with Cigarettes, because that’s why you go. There’s plenty on the shelves, but you don’t spend money on it. You ignore the Donald Goines brand Pasta Sauce because you can’t afford to eat. You can afford drugs and cigarettes. Therefore the shop becomes Cigarettes. It’s a lessening of the mind. It’s finding the one black and white spot in a world full of explosive color.

 

Calvin gives these kids weird names and weird hobbies because as readers we need to disassociate with them. They can’t be us. Even now, with more kids dying of fentanyl or addicted to opiates, we don’t want to admit to ourselves that drug addicts are just like us. They are rare birds, the kind you go to the zoo to watch for five minutes. They thrash against the wire mesh and we are glad that we are on the right side. We go home to our Donald Goines brand Burrito and the rare birds are a long way away.

 

This book is a five star, no doubt. It’s short, punchy, funny and incredibly sad. It’s also extremely clever. For me it represents a step up in the output of Expat, who have always been one of my favorite small presses. Props also to Sam Pink for the cover art, which fits perfectly with the book. There is a lot more to this book than I have covered here, but it’s time for me to take my Donald Goines Vitamin and start the day. You can buy Donald Goines here.