Gulf Coast Stories

by John Aalborg

Overview

John Aalborg's distinctive and poignant short story collection illuminates the volatility of the human character in six different shades of good and evil. Literary pulp fiction!
"Morton's Fork Crossing" — Bull Schaffner, Aalborg's signature, wannabe private investigator, finds himself in a community of backwater Florida misfits. While working to locate a stolen 18-wheeler he falls in love with the missing driver's girlfriend only to discover that his choices for the future are typically limited.
"Giorgio Possum" — An old man misses the young wife he treated badly.
"Passion's Perch" — Young love powered by imagination, a classic American car, and parental guidance fueled by alcohol.
"Furby Mountain Florida" — On the day after he receives seriously bad news, a truck driver is invited to ride along with a garbage hauler who wants to take the man's mind off his troubles and see life in a different way. A hungry little Furby does his sweet part.
"Exile" — The quest by a 14-year-old illegal and his sister to solve the mystery surrounding the middle-aged American who is trying to befriend them.
"Bible School Tattoo" — A seasoned tattoo artist and his beautiful but atheist nurse/wife ink a Christian girl.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940011304415
Publisher:	John Aalborg
Publication date:	05/13/2011
Sold by:	Smashwords
Format:	eBook
File size:	187 KB

About the Author

Snap bio updated by Cheater: John Aalborg is an old unaccountable, traveling, card-carrying member of the working class who can write. Thanks to the invention of the portable laptop, he has been able to type his hard-boiled, originally handwritten crime (and other) novels into digital form. Bleep-Free Press is currently working to get his page-turners into print and e-book form, and eventually into the public eye.. Along with internationally published "over the road" articles (including NEWSWEEK and COSMOPOLITAN), which he did, he says, out of desperation, Aalborg wrote the Axel McKay radio-play series aired coast-to-coast on the WLAC Nashville network, numerous magazine publications of trucking experiences in foreign countries, and for 4 years wrote a monthly road column with me: "Don't Ask Us!" by Mo'hammer and Cheater. Never boring and often controversial, Aalborg's pithy and morally suspect characters, both male and female, bring the reader to places rarely seen. Aalborg has been able to elude punishment, jail, and notoriety for his entire life despite a long list of bizarre occupations, including a well-lived 3 years in the black market trade in Europe, when in Germany he was eventually deported back to the USA (his iconic, antique, Mercedes roadster confiscated). Soon after, with a young family in Miami, one of his less risky employments was writing under the pen-name Stephan Aalborg back when racy books and magazines were censored in the USA - "girlie books" - banned unless each edition contained new "literary content". When the courts ended this requirement the bottom dropped out of that writing market, and Aalborg ascended into psychedelic drugs while still writing on the side. During this time he wrote the beautiful and gamy novel : "ALL MEAT - A Redneck Meets LSD-25". This accurate counter-culture drama, featuring a page-turning dysfunctional family in 1970, was released just last year. The typewritten manuscript was misplaced and lost - as only a "head" can do - for 40 years. Around 1980 John began moving away from Miami, "The Magic City", to his present, undisclosed hidey-hole, where years later a dangerously-younger new girlfriend, me, prodded him to do something with the novels and essays which had been piling up on legal pads and in boxes in his RV. This, and with major encouragement from an Australian writer and editor, finally resulted in John allowing us to get his longer work into print while attempting to keep his whereabouts a secret. "I could stay invisible in Miami," he likes to say. Aalborg's history is a story-book in itself, much provided by job skills and experiences unrelated to each other. Like ten years as a state-licensed locksmith in Miami-Dade, where many of his less ethical assignments were for law enforcement; five years as an EMT for a backwoods hospital and ambulance crew; many more years driving OTR flatbeds (interstate) for long-haul trucking companies; and turning down that work during slow winter seasons. Keeping warm but barely making a living at times, Aalborg worked graveyard shifts at Florida fuel-stops on exits off I-10, where he packed a gun and took care of his own law enforcement. In other words, Aalborg can take the reader into worlds the average person would love to get an exciting and often scary look at, but preferably at a distance and in the comfort of an armchair. Update: Since retiring from driving big trucks, Aalborg has kept buried his social life as well but now writes full-time. He does his best to keep his location and contact numbers secret and has pulled himself from Facebook and the like. His next crime novel, however, will be out in a big paperback in early Spring 2016 (if I still have any influence) and serialized as an e-Book in 2 book-length parts here at Smashwords and other e-book retailers, the first part free or close to it. -- Update by Cheater, Bleep-Free Press, 16.December.2015