The Forbidden Dance
Category: Music
Piano Pug
The Return of the Tall Fiddler
Heavy Petting
Hack wrote this after watching his cover artist Jonny M.’s pug Boris effortlessly pick up women by playing sad songs on a local dive bar’s tinny piano. After his set, Boris would take one of them to a table in a dark table and have them scratch him behind the ears until their fingers cramped.
The Return of the Grumpy Old Bastard
Hack wrote the first “Grumpy Old Bastard” earnestly about his efforts to teach the teenagers in his neighborhood some manners, and only claimed he meant it to be funny when everyone told him it was when it was when they read it in in proofs. For this sequel, he tried to make it funny and the thing fell right on its face.
The Grump Old Bastard
Hack had intended this to be the story of how he had heroically fought down some young thugs in his neighborhood but when everyone read the proofs, they congratulated him on writing a hilarious book about a mean-spirited old bastard who was constantly harassing innocent teens. He quietly changed the title from “The Hero of the Neighborhood” to “The Grumpy Old Bastard” and pretended that was what he had meant all along.
The Party
This is the only Hack Werker novel where Hack appears on the cover. He was depressed about the social distancing required by the coronavirus pandemic so he asked his cover artist Jonny M. to depict him for the first and last time. It relives an actual incident where he was talking to his friend, world famous dominatrix Snow Mercy, at a party when he began diddling himself. Hack swears he doesn’t remember what happened after that but he woke up in an alley with his backside so bruised that it looked like two rotten avocados and Snow Mercy had to have hand surgery shortly afterwards.
The Show Must Go On
Hack’s friend Eddie Frierson (see Mayonnaise is Nonsense) is an actor famous for a one-man show he performs about 16th century baseball player Christy Mathewson. When Frierson snubbed his nose at the coronavirus scare and performed the play in Los Angeles, Hack wrote this novel in tribute.
The Tall Fiddler
This Jonny M. adventure was based on the exploits of Jonny’s buddy James “Tree” Cleveland, an accomplished fiddler whose serenades to the ladies got him more poon tang than Hack got in his wildest dreams.Hack got so excited after finishing it that he took his kazoo to a nearby girl’s Catholic school and played old Tony Bennett songs on the physical education field until he was dragged off by police.
Rock Stars
This was inspired by an evening when Hack’s cover artist Jonny M. and his pug Boris went to a karaoke bar and the women in the audience stormed the stage and sexually ravaged them after they performed a duet of the Paul McCartney/Michael Jackson hit “The Dog-Gone Girl is Mine.”