VOTM: What’s the most unusual experience you’ve had at a reading?
WENTZ: There was a café in Portland, Oregon I can’t remember the name of that I occasionally went to for open mics in the early 90’s. A lot of people read at these. Twenty, thirty, more, usually from where they sat. The mic would just get passed around. There was a street poet named Bad George, who was fairly popular and fairly insane, and Gus Van Sant put him in a movie or two. Bad George had one of those red and black, Michael Jackson “Thriller” video jackets. His poems I can’t remember so much, and he was usually very drunk. Anyway, one night the host announced that there was someone special coming up next, and the cook came tromping out of the kitchen in his long, dirty apron, eating an incredibly large carrot. The cook took the mic, sat up on a countertop, and went right into a long, improvised story that seemed to be about some sort of creature or person he once chased down a hill, captured, and then ate alive, bit by bit, with great emphasis on consuming the eyeballs. Through the entire monologue the cook was chomping this massive carrot, ala Bugs Bunny, and when he finished his story he handed the mic back to the host, and returned to the kitchen, still eating the carrot. Later I was taking a leak in the restroom, and the cook wandered in to take a leak and I told him I thought he did a good job, and he said thanks. He was done with the carrot then, and I never tried any of the food there.
Zack Wentz’s work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in New York Tyrant, Weird Tales, Black Clock, [PANK], decomP, Opium, NANO Fiction, Necessary Fiction, Mud Luscious, Nerve, 3: AM, Fiction International, Word Riot, elimae, Vestal Review, and elsewhere. His novel The Garbageman and the Prostitute was published by Chiasmus Press. He runs New Dead Families.