Bikers and skinheads cavort in flickering arcades. When a friend convinced him to publish the journals he’d always kept, a stylist emerged. But it’s precisely that kid-”a septic teen living in a low rent duplex on aggravation place, sleeping on a third generation bed with high end zebra sheets,” as he describes himself in Wolves-who gave Morton a second life as a writer. Who am I to compete with them? I’m a 13-year-old fuck-up from Florida who’s sniffing glue in my room,” says Morton, laughing. In Tampa, books were around-Genet, Céline, Brautigan-but their world felt far away. In Wolves, “I’m basically talking about a person who’s dead,” Morton says, inked-on tears crowding his eyes. Shortly after, Morton landed in Philadelphia, where he remains. Then Florida again, Oregon, New York, L.A., Arizona. Morton left home while still in his teens and spent the next years bouncing around New York, where he had a “bad, bad run” with heroin. “When you’re in your late thirties and just starting to write,” says Morton, who has yet to hit 40, “you have to start somewhere.” Somewhere, in Morton’s case, was his own childhood: a tumultuous early go of it in Tampa, Florida, ground zero for “suburban, ’80s white rage.” His house was an unstable one at times, Morton and his mother would flee north to New York, where she was born.

Next came 23, a 2008 compilation of more of Morton’s hallucinatory, violent misadventures, accompanied by equally toxic contributions from others, among them Heartworm proprietor Wes Eisold and Howie Pyro, the man who saw Sid Vicious die. Marbled with toothless hookers, step-sibling incest, highway gunfights, and Fear and Loathing–type run-ins with Hawaiian-shirted undercover cops, the book depicted the bitter, sometimes hilarious wages of a decade’s worth of addiction. In 2007, a shadowy book appeared: Indestructible Wolves of the Apocalypse Junkyard, the first volume of Morton’s memoirs, issued by a small Philadelphia press, Heartworm, and passed like contraband up and down the East Coast. “That was one of the first three bands I ever listened to,” Morton says evenly from across the table in a dim East Village restaurant. His mother, drawn by the flyer, showed up to see a proto-metal band so heavy “they made cottage cheese out of thin air.” There, she met Morton’s “junked-out, chopper, Nazi father,” who came looking for a fight and ended up instead with a son. Where are the rich-girls-on-acid of yesteryear? Morton in NYC Daniel S.

Last days by brian evenson