Crad Kilodney for President

The handwritten letter I receive from the legendary curmudgeon Crad Kilodney is bundled carefully with a bunch of logic puzzles and some maps of stocks I might care to invest in. The author of Blood-Sucking Monkeys From North Tonawanda and Simple Stories for Idiots among a whole lot of others, Kilodney is something of a cult figure for Toronto. Up until the mid-nineties, he was a permanent fixture on the streets, rain or shine, hawking his own books. Though he studied astronomy and earned a Bachelor of Science, he wanted to be a writer. So he did what few would-be writers do: he wrote. The man wrote over 30 books, and he hand-sold them personally on the streets. Oh, and once he lived in the same apartment building as Madonna when she was majoring in dance studies at the University of Michigan.

Kilodney’s public mythos is something of a cantankerous, angry, half-starved writer, and the titles of his self-published works only further that reputation. Works like Lightning Struck my Dick, Bang Heads Here, Suffering Bastards, and Terminal Ward make Bukowski and Hemingway look like cheerleaders. Though literati snobs point out that Kilodney published very little outside of his own press, Charnel House, do-it-yourselfers everywhere hail him as Lord of the Underdogs. Kilodney’s dour perspective on the Canadian small press’s waste of paper and supplication of government money is well known. Though he retired in 1995, he occasionally cracks his caustic whip in pieces for his own web site, Dead Man Talking, at www.cradkilodney.net. I asked him if giving up writing has made him less depressed.

“It wasn’t writing that depressed me,” Kilodney says. “It was this city full of awful people. Retiring has definitely improved my emotional state because I don’t have to go out on the street any more and deal with hostility and bullshit.” At least the man isn’t starving anymore. Investing in mining stocks has treated him to some easy money. “Girl, if only you knew…” he says when I ask how much.

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“I came back to the earth plane to be a writer because I didn’t get to be one in my previous life. If you don’t believe in reincarnation, too bad. I’m going to tell it as I know it, even if I can’t prove it. I lived before, roughly from 1900 to the 1940s. I was a rich idler with vain literary pretensions. I loved books but never had the literary career I wanted. I died rather young, from some sort of accident. When my soul went to the spiritual plane…I was unhappy because I had not done anything in my life to be remembered by. So I asked to come back. The deal was that I would have a literary career that would be unique in human history, but for this privilege, I could expect to pay a high price. All of this has happened. Writing never made my miserable….In public, I’m afraid I am rather cantankerous. I feel that I’m constantly surrounded by idiots and freaks. No, I don’t see a chance at happiness. Not everyone gets to be happy.”

I know that writers are a funny breed- I’m intimately acquainted with the heady delusions that seem to follow us, the disappointment and frustration and the poverty that most writers experience at least for awhile. Perhaps Kilodney’s whole career was a kind of performance art about writers, a parody of the desperate interplay between the publishing industry and the jokers who write for it. He was something of a prankster, after all, pushing buttons no one else was brave enough to. I recall getting flack in university literature for failing to find any grandeur in a few of Irving Layton’s dirty old poems. Guess I wasn’t the only one.

“There were two hoaxes I did…the first one was aimed at the CBC Radio Literary Competition. I sent in stories by seven different famous dead authors, disguised as the work of unknown writers. All seven were screened out by the preliminary readers. The following year I sent a manuscript of poems by Irving Layton- disguised as the work of an ex-Ugandan army officer- to 26 different publishers, including McClelland and Stewart, Layton’s principal publisher. The only two who caught on were two of the smallest literary presses. Editors are stupid. There are no formal qualifications to be an editor. Look at J.K. Rowling’s experiences with Harry Potter. It was rejected by all the big London publishers.”

Kilodney also suffered the indignity of being issued a ticket for vending his own books without a permit. “This led to a protracted legal battle with Metro,” he says. “We were in the court of appeal, and Metro wanted to drop the whole thing and I wouldn’t drop it…I had no fear of those bastards, and I made sure they knew it. In the end, the case was moot because the law was scrapped by someone else’s case.”

Kilodney also “ran” for President of the United States in 2000. “What America needs is a President who is a mean son of a bitch, and I’m it. Therefore, I am asking American voters to write in the name ‘Crad Kilodney’ on their ballots in November.” He cited his perspectives on several pressing issues. “Immigration will be based on physical beauty. What’s the point of letting in a lot of short, brown, ugly people who look like toads when there are millions of hot Russian and East European babes eager to emigrate to the West?” was one example. As a candidate, he also had some stellar ideas on solving homelessness and poverty. Poverty is relative. “If you say the poverty line is $10,000 a year for one person, you have so many poor people. If you lower it to $1,000 a year, you have a lot less. Anyway, the fact that they’re still alive means they’re getting money from somewhere, so forget about it.”

There was also the stint at Rustler magazine, where Crad “would write crackpot letters and sign them with the names of real people.”

The guy will indeed go down in history as a bitter rabble-rouser, and maybe that’s just as it should be. Kilodney seems certain that he came to live his fate, and that that is what he did. I hope his work garners at least some of the attention that his persona has: now here is a man who never ran out of titles or out of wry observations about the weirdoes that surround him. The sheer tenacity to live your fate so fully only to do a 360, disappear from the streets, and show up in a suit and tie in the stock world, is something I can only admire.

I would say Crad’s got the last laugh, but in my final analysis, I ‘m not sure he was really laughing at anyone in particular at all, just doing his thing in the world. So I ask him if he thinks he is a good writer, if he feels he was successful.

“My writing is what is is, and my life is what it is. I came back to be a writer, and I had a literary career. Posterity passes judgement, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Hey, I know who’s getting my vote in the next election!

www.cradkilodney.net

Try www.abebooks.com to source Crad’s books.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
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