A car crash is the most American way to leave this planet, isn’t it? The freedom of the open road and the promise of auto manufacturing fracturing into shards of metal and glass, airbags blowing into bone, skidding tires squealing before the crunch. And…welcome to the car smash! Certainly, I’m not the only one who sees our fatal national pastime clearly. It’s hard to overstate the still-astonishing extremity of the image of Lana Del Rey, lying limp in her lover’s arms with her jean jacket torn open and blood pouring down her face and chest. This Pietà-like image stands before a car blowing roiling flames at the tail end of her “Born to Die” music video. Lana knows this is everything an American death should be: a horrid, overblown spectacle in an attempt to reach, as the Good Doctor Hunter S. Thompson speaks of, “the Edge.” Of course, Lana—and the rest of us—owe it all to James Dean for permanently lodging car crashes into the American soul, barreling down the California highway in his silver Spyder—with fellow icons Jayne Mansfield and Grace Kelly trailing behind on this one-way road.
No, I’m not just being a ghoul yet again. Or getting off like those revved-up collision creeps in David Cronenberg’s Crash. I’ve had car crashes on the brain ever since reading Alex Osman’s first poetry collection Scandals, recently released by Filthy Loot. Crashes litter Scandals like shorn tire rubber on the side of the highway, starting with “FISTFUL OF FARMAPRAM” in which a woman who doesn’t understand the name Leadbelly finally gets it after she “waited for metal/And flesh/To collide/And create the new Leadbelly.” James Dean makes an apparitional appearance in “CHOLAME,” titled for the location of Dean’s roadside memorial. Haunted by “the engine of a James Dean/dream,” the narrator gawks at “the day of the amputation.” Osman makes us, the readers, as much of a voyeur as the narrator, looky-looing at the gruesome scenes of “Second-degree asphalt scarring” and “Chain-link skin graft souvenirs.” Not all of the imagery is so grody. While I don’t want to ruin the delightfully morbid payoff of “UNCLE GARY’S IN PRISON AGAIN,” I’ll just note it rivals the famous flash fiction, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn,” in effective and emotive (in this case, cackling) simplicity. Hell, even the book’s post-script cites: “the flaws, the open sores, the scandals, the car crashes.”
As his late-coming manifesto attests, Alex Osman, like John Waters before him, celebrates everything bad about America and Scandals reads as a darkly funny but genuine love letter to America’s drug-zonked, meth-cooked, cavity-mouthed, microwave meals-fed, “PHD in Dollar Tree” underbelly. Osman announces this trash vision immediately with a poem entitled “THIS TRAILER WILL COLLAPSE AND FERTILIZE THE EARTH.” But more than a one-off ode to the mobile home circle of life, Osman’s poems inhabit a born-to-be-cheap country of lawn gnomes, fireworks blowing off fingers, “Hand-me-down knick knacks from porno geeks,” lava lamps shattered on the sidewalk, broken air conditioning units, dates paid for by stolen quarters from vending machines, Slayer T-shirts at funerals, plastic-covered couches, toilets flushed by ghosts, hair washed in bathroom sinks, and, most importantly, the tackiest backyard amenity, the above-ground swimming pool.
Perhaps it’s because the above-ground swimming pool probes at my own childhood memories of splashing around a friend’s 4-foot-deep, grass and dead bee-bobbing, backyard chlorine pond all summer long, but Osman’s depiction of trash Americana is done without snide judgment or dismissal. Instead, though his poems are surreally macabre with occasional bodies floating in those above-ground swimming pools, they also contain a heavy dose of nostalgia. Some of this comes from Osman’s almost universally dated, mostly late 20th-century pop culture references, from a poem called “CONEHEADS 2” to a kid in “VOLANTE” wearing his “dead father’s/sunglasses after he saw Terminator 2,” to the blood-stained crime scene of WWF’s Brutus “The Barber” Beefcake stabbing the original swishy camp Joker, Cesar Romero, in “BULL DOSE.” Though Osman dashes these old-school references throughout the poems, none employs them as prominently—and provocatively—as “GOLD TOOTH IN A KNUCKLE SANDWICH.” This poem is a furious rant of pre-fist fight insults wrapped up in ancient TV shows such as “Looking like a cocaine dealer on Starsky & Hutch,” “Looking like a hitman on the Love Boat,” and “Looking like he wipes his ass with Fonzi’s leather jacket.” And with a contemporary tell, a nod to Amazon (“Looking like he sucker-punched ALF and shipped/his ass off to Coney Island in an Amazon box”), the poem reads like a barroom brawl sparked by someone who hasn’t turned on a TV—or streaming service—in decades.
If that seems like one hell of an absurd image, Osman’s poems are full of them: a spare bedroom covered in slaughtered chicken shit like Azealia Banks’s closet in “CHICKEN SHIT CALAMITY”; going on the nod “in the balcony at a matinee of/Jesus Christ Superstar” in “JOB”; a woman drenched in stallion blood asking a whole lot of questions about motel rooms in “IT’S NOT ALL SO TRAGIC”; nicotine cravings so extreme that a man is lighting a cig with a magnifying glass in “FOR THE LOVE OF TAR”; punching out all eight eyes of a spider in “UNTITLED4.WAV”; and, perhaps my most cherished image of them all, scraps of an abandoned wig lying on the pavement after a street takeover in “L.T. THE LEPRECHAUN OF TEXAS.” In addition to poetry, Osman is also a musician and has spoken about the lyrical intentions of his electro/noise/industrial/insta-headache A Need To Be Shot, some of which, like the songs “My Insurance is a Greasy Gun” and “Stomach Full of Needles” off his new album, relate directly to Scandals. As he told Discipline Mag:
“Many of my favorite musicians are also writers, which I always admired. Their work feels photographic, like they’re trying to paint a picture in your head. I think of ‘Nick the Stripper’ by The Birthday Party, with Nick Cave describing the character and his actions, while the music and those horns almost provide a soundtrack to his reading. I’m kinda trying to do the same thing, find the intersection between literature, music, and visuals.”
This makes complete sense—Osman succeeds in painting many mental pictures in Scandals and more often than not, they’re hideous to the eye. For instance, certain poems such as “VOLANTE,” “100 PROOF,” and “THE TIMES OF SKIM MILK” read like deranged, fucked-up children’s stories. Rather than seeing Spot run or Billy meeting Sally (or whatever), young Abby kills her dog with a hunting knife brought to school by Richie, Cody wants to impale a weepy classmate with a Toy Story pencil, and an unnamed child sells soda “Over the creek where his mom drowned kittens.” Oh, yeah, there’s a stabbing in that poem too, over “a meth dispute.” In Scandals, the rampant bonkers misbehavior derives from adults and children alike, which reminds me of the berserk American scams in Drew Buxton’s short story collection So Much Heart.
Unlike So Much Heart, though, the characters that run through Osman’s collection don’t seem to have all that much ambition, even misplaced ambition. Unless you count inventive weapon choices. Nihilism, apathy, and social rot rule as each of us is “living within the confines/Of skin tags and cuticles and cavities” as Osman writes in “BLANKS.” There is a resonance here too with Jordan Sullivan’s hilariously misanthropic literary shitposting in Booze, Bullshit & Buttfucking, especially Osman’s concluding line, “And I don’t give a single shit about anything” in “WE NEVER GREW UP TO BE COWBOYS.” But rather than the U.S.A. as a scrawled bathroom stall populated with celebrities, politicians, and conspiracies like Sullivan, Osman portrays regular ole Americans on a death drive—sometimes quite literally with all those car accidents—to nowhere, shoving their heads in microwaves, wanting to be “Eradicated like a crippling virus,” or blasting a gun “at the moon.”
And while any edgelord can do doomed end-of-an-empire decay, Osman excels at viscerally nailing both its realism and ridiculousness. Case in point: “GRANDMA AND GRANDPA,” which is not just my favorite poem in the collection but just may be my favorite poem period. “GRANDMA AND GRANDPA” is a laundry list of evocative scents, smells, and sights at Meemaw and Pawpaw’s place, from “Unsolved Mysteries” to, naturally, “Above-ground swimming pools.” You can just hear the Cops theme song blaring (“Bad boy! Bad boy! Whatcha gonna dooo?”) over the din of parakeets squawking while inhaling the baked-in musky stale stench of “Marlboro golds,” “Old wigs,” and a variety of pills. It’s an (anti-)idyllic family portrait of trash America, watching people kick the shit out of each other on Springer, paging through a ratty copy of Playboy, and stealing Ma’s Vicodin. And that alone is enough for me to furiously lobby for Osman to be named OUR next Poet Laureate.