Ironically I was walking through a cemetery a few weeks ago when I looked at my phone and saw Greg Johnson’s piece about Jim Goad’s death. The Redneck Manifesto still ranks as one of my favorite books, somewhere in my personal canon alongside Ed Abbey’s Desert Solitaire. Abbey actually appears in The Redneck Manifesto’s bibliography.
I won’t do a full rundown of Jim’s influence on culture. Greg’s piece and some others floating around do a good job of that. I did broach the subject briefly during an interview with Lomez a few years ago, but Jim’s legend is fairly well known already. Throughout the years, his work made its way into the hands of Tarantino, Cobain, Burroughs et al. Jim may have even inspired a Seinfeld episode, which provides a stranger Seinfeld story arc than Steve Bannon’s relationship with the show.
I liked Jim; in some ways he reminded me of my older brother, whose temperament is similar. We weren’t friends but we were “friendly acquaintances.” I’m not a subversive type, and I don’t think Jim knew what to do with the non-subversive types in his life. They were probably alien to him. I never followed any of his online feuds, and I think Jim probably courted those combative relationships more than friendships, to his detriment.
We originally met through a mutual female friend 24 years ago at — of all places — a canceled breast-cancer benefit in a dark alley in SE Portland. A pop-up charity concert had been planned at some bleak warehouse venue, and then canceled without notice. Jim and I were the only people who showed up. We stood in an empty alley talking about Exotic Magazine, which Jim was editing at the time, and how I was entertained by one of its writers, a former SHARP Jim had met in prison. (Jim’s relationship with other SHARPs wasn’t so amicable.)
I still vividly remember Jim reading from Apocalypse Culture II at Powell’s Bookstore in downtown Portland, 26 years ago. Jim was fresh out of prison. He was funny, confrontational and did not have the air of pretentiousness that some of his contemporaries in the world of transgressive literature seemed to have. He read from his ACII contribution, “Roadkill,” which is a disturbing piece describing the crime that put him in prison.
As time went on, I discovered that Jim and I had some strange crossover links between our lives. One being a roach-nest apartment building on East Burnside in Portland, which was the first place I ever rented in PDX, near Union Jack’s strip club. My “bay window” — a frosted, former storefront — faced the dirty street itself, where Portland’s Drugstore Cowboy aesthetics were on full display 24-7. There was no shortage of junkies occupying a nearby travel lodge that is now The Jupiter Hotel. The city was in its pre-Portlandia phase, a dirtier moment before its foodie/hipster era, which too has passed.
I left that apartment building as fast as I could but, through our mutual female friend, I learned that’s exactly where Jim had settled down. However, the strangest crossover between us involved Jim’s obscenity trial. Imagine my surprise when I learned (by reading Jim’s book Shit Magnet), that the Bellingham, WA prosecutor who charged him was the son of my grandparents’ long-time close friends, from an obscure corner of Upper Michigan, far removed from any cultural subversion on the West Coast. Life is very strange.
I’ve certainly met interesting people through Jim, including the son of a legendary ’60s rabble-rouser who, along with Allen Ginsberg, attempted to levitate the Pentagon one day in 1967. Par for the course in Jim’s orbit; the cast of characters was legion.
In 2013, while serving as editor for Gavin McInnis’s now-defunct webzine Street Carnage, Jim published two jokey pieces I had written. When the magazine folded, he sent an email to his writers, noting that none of us had ever annoyed him. A funny compliment. I think a deeply underrated quality of Jim’s was humor (see his appearance on Wally George’s UHF show below.)
Jim liked being a lone wolf, warring with libs all the time but also rejecting any association with right-wing movements. In fact, he seemed outright hostile to some newer incarnations of the online right. I think he considered them verbose eggheads, and he had contempt for online tradcaths. He wrote in a DM four years ago:
I can’t believe it’s 2022 and the New Right’s solution is, “Let’s go back to 33 AD.”
And now, Jim has passed away in Albuquerque, which happens to be my favorite American city, and the place I lived three years before I met Jim, which closes the strange crossover circuit between us once and for all.
Make of this what you will, since Jim’s curmudgeonly reputation is well-established, but the last time I communicated with him, he was doing me a small favor, unsolicited, regarding an event I was helping coordinate.
If anyone knows of a fund to support his son, please share.