"We took lunch at a fast food place here in the San Fernando Valley. My colleague was sporting his usual short-sleeve dress shirt, bluejeans faded at the knees, black shoes with low-to-moderate heels to them. Casually formal . . . and each piece specially manufactured to fit.

He wears a silver beard cropped close to the face and parts his hair neatly to the left. One gets the feeling, in his company, that here is a man bolstered by years of easy living. He's in his late forties, as far as I can tell, and has never married. He was certainly in a fine fettle on the day we lunched. My probing remarks were met head-on with a variety of shopworn wisecracks, sin fucking falta.

I'd brought along an old worksheet of brain teasers to the occasion. After finishing my meal I extracted the worksheet from the back pocket of my shorts. He grew silent at the unfolding of the sheet. Except for the ordered movement of his arms he sat very still÷already mentally challenged (I gathered) by whatever words were printed on that page.

It's just the way he is.

You gotta hear this one brain teaser, I told him.

I started reading from it:

A cigarette fiend in Zion City was out of cigarettes÷and you can't buy cigarettes in Zion City. Desperately,

I read,

desperately he hunted through his hotel room, where he had been illegally smoking, and collected a total of thirty-six dead butss, too short to be smokeable.

He dropped a french fry. It landed in the breast pocket of his shirt, half-dangling on the cuff.

His right hand, the fingers of which are thick as lines of sausage one sees hanging in the windows of the carcineras, raised slowly to get it.

It was recovered with some difficulty and I picked up where I'd left off:

By experiment, however, he found that, with newspaper and ingenuity, he could make a more or less satisfactory cigarette out of every six butts. So he made and smoked as many cigarettes as he possibly could, at the rate of six butts per.

I adjusted the angle of my cap so I could see his face.

How many did he smoke?

At once he replied: Six.

Six? How do you figure?

Well, he said, you figure you make one smoke out of every six butts. Six into thirty-six is six.

It's that easy?

Is that the answer? he asked.

I don't know, I didn't try to figure it out myself.

You don't have the answers?

No.

Unless this is some kind of trick question, you figure there's thirty-six butts, right?

He looked at me fixedly while unwrapping another double cheeseburger. A small blob of ketchup hung in the whiskers of his beard, right beside his mouth.

Right, I said.

And you make a smoke out of every six butts. So if you make one cigarette out of every six butts, and there's thirty-six butts, that's six cigarettes. But, you know, I don't know if this is some kind of trick question.

That was another thing about him: He wasn't a big fan of trick questions.

A little girl wearing a dress watched him intently while her mother cleared their table. She couldn't take her eyes off him.

He had balled up his wrappers and napkins and was searching for any food he may have missed. He lifted his tray and looked under it.

Nothing.

They left.

We looked out the picture window. The mother and daughter were walking out to a white Chief Cherokee. It was a record-breaking hot summer day in the Valley.

My colleague patted his shirt pocket and produced a crumpled pack of cigarettes.

Mmmm, he said, still looking out the window. Not bad.

Pause.

The mom's not too bad either.

We dumped our trays and left."

"You have a nice knack for the odd, the edgy, the absurd, the alienated, which indicates to me that you are a deeply troubled individual who should seek counseling, mostly in bars and strip joints. Yes, Mike, I feel your pain. I also feel the need to get up and take a leak."

Mike Daily's sensibility is seriously skewed. It allows him to swing from Jack Kerouac, Leonard Cohen, Kenneth Patchen, and proto-Surrealist misanthrope LautrŽamont to Beat Happening, Jethro Tull, "Fantasy Island", and tenth-rate Italian gladiator films, with only giant elliptical potholes in place of continuity between his wildly disparate reference points. Daily's novel "Valley" reads like a travelogue into the space between the ellipses, or into every dense and erratic mechanism and quirk (of which there are plenty, thank you very much) of its author's mind.

It's an epic of fragmentation and disjointed thought processes, cutting in fits from genre to genre (screenplay, poetry, journalism, even college science lecture), with deliberately unrelenting commentary in the form of writing in the margins, footnotes, snapshots, bludgeoning headline-size type, and illustrations bleeding off the page.

Quite often the form of the book jumps from genre to genre turning the author Mike Daily into a young Dr. Frankenstein, concocting his own literary monster-a pastiche of journal entries, newspaper clippings, poetry, and screenplay scenes that when stitched together create the basis of "Valley."

It is Daily's trade as an editor that allows him the insight of scrutinizing the mundane, turning a bland, everyday occurence into a profound revelation. By the book's end you're bound to realize that,yes, we are all crazy in our own special way.

Mike Daily edited and published the poetry anthology Stovepiper: Book One, which appeared in early '95. He founded one of the most popular freestyle bike riding teams on the east coast in '85, and for the past several years has worked as Editor for international BMX magazines based in California. He currently lives in the San Fernando Valley. Valley is his first book.

It is the summer of 1986 in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden and I'm sitting in the stands with my mini-recorder, relaxing, taking in the big bike stunt contest. I am a reporter- BMX journalist-from the famous magazine in Southern California. He is a disheveled, 17 year-old, 20" bike riding, zine maker. A mop-top teenager climbing the steps straight for me, hand extended, xeroxed magazine in it.

That was my initial meeting with Mike Daily, though I already knew him-he'd been sending me barrages of his bulging zine, "Aggro Rag," from his home town of York, Pennsylvania, for a year or so. He was prolific, to say the least... persistent, if I might elaborate. Daily's "Aggro Rag" was a mini-mag on the vanguard of BMX zines; irreverent, humorous and detailed in both content and layout-loaded with the minutiae of kids breathing exclusively from the thin air microcosm that was BMX freestyle.

It is now 12 years later and I'm waiting for Mike. He's late. We're supposed to be making the last corrections on his book before relinquishing it to a big printing machine. It's been a long road getting to this point and he's prolonging my anxiety. You see, I'm not only his editor, art director and publisher, but his friend-a grueling combination when mixed with author, Mike Daily, whose own experiences as an editor and publisher have helped create a micro-managing perfectionist who sweats over every bit of punctuation.But as I sit waiting, I've already excused him for being late and neurotic because he's created a remarkable work amidst a very crowded life; while employed full-time as the managing editor of a well-known American BMX mag, he also completed a writing degree. Any remaining space Mike managed to fill with the publication of a slick poetry anthology, "Stovepiper; Book One," and the completion of this first novel, "Valley."

The book itself is a fictionalized chunk of Daily's life in the frankly ordinary San Fernando valley-you could call it a thinly-veiled autobiography, one that was honestly recorded on hours of micro-cassettes and in miles of chaotic scribblings throughout a dozen spiral notebooks, before reaching the end-result as a perfect-bound, 224 page book. "Valley" is a humorous narrative that darts in and out of literary styles following main character, writer/student, Mick O'Grady, as he ambles through his days in a sort of pot haze attempting to make sense of the numerous mysteries unraveling before him-from the odd-ball people he meets and associates with (a giant poet, drunken ex-linebacker, lost master journalist, wired meth-head, etc.), to the margin scribblings, receipts and photos he haps upon in used books. With "Valley" Daily has switched from chronicling the world of BMX, to creating a practically itemized account of everything around him-the mundane included. At one point, O'Grady notes that a vending machine in the lobby has no "Q" button on it. Not 26, but 25 letters. Lost in his wonderment after buying the drink, he forgets it on top of the machine...

Like Mike (or Mick) himself, this book is not normal, but, it is indeed, well. Pick it up and it seems ordinary enough... flip through it, on the other hand, and you will do a double take. The mixing of styles from chapter to chapter make it look more like the hodgepodge of an anthology, but the narrative is continuous. Mike sees the characteristics of "Valley" with a modern eye;

"It's like sampling. [pause] It's a lot like sampling." All those pieces of Mick's oddly focused life come together to create a congruous work-it is a novel. One reviewer called Daily "a young Frankenstein, concocting his own literary monster [by using] a pastiche of journal entries, newspaper clippings, poetry and screenplay scenes."

Good one.

* * *

Another week has passed. "Valley" is on the big printing machine in Mattoon, Illinois. Black ink on white paper. 1,500 copies due in a week. It's done. I will miss Mike Daily's letters detailing his worries, his copy changes... He wrote this just before the completion;

"Are your temples pounding because of me?"

Nope. I feel pretty good, Mike.

And you?

-Andy Jenkins
From Lodown Magazine (Germany), 12/98.

Head home.