By: Jack Terricloth
Published by Gunner Records, 2007
84 pages
ISBN- 978-3-00-021799-9 
Eminently readable, fast-paced prose stories that chronicle a world of glamorous and rampant drug use, addicts, outcasts and punks prowling cities in the aftermath of failed revolutions, “The Collected Cloth” is the book the cool kids wanted to write in high school.
The book is actually two books collected into one, hence the title. The first section, “Bakshish,” is a short story consisting of 43 pages and 13 ‘chapters’ that read more like episodes, polaroid pictures rather than fully-developed sections. The narrative itself, however, is developed, as are the characters. The story centers around Simon Grapelli, a young bartender eking out a living in an unnamed post-revolutionary city. When he is hired as an unwilling informant for the secret police, he finds his pockets fattened with cash enough to support the copious drug intake of both himself and his girlfriend Mary-Anne, as well as to pay for the tailored suits he’s always longed for but has never been able to afford.
The story is an interesting mix of high and low culture: Tailored suits and rotgut wine, drug addicted secret policemen, friendship, romance and betrayal, all told in a clean prose style reminiscent of Bukowski at his best, but with more class, or at least better clothes. The only real disappointment is the story’s end. It seems as if Terricloth becomes bored with his narrator, or simply doesn’t know how to pull out gracefully. The result is a final two pages of gloss that deadens the narrative and fails to bring the story to an effective conclusion. The second half of the book is a collection of thirteen very short stories, entitled “Cloth, Dam, Sorrow and Trouble,” a title taken from the names of the main characters. The stories are loosely linked by a single narrator and characters who disappear and reappear throughout the course of the stories. Due to this loose thread woven throughout the collection, and despite the fact that they stand on their own, the stories read like the skeleton of a novel or novella.
If “Bakshish” is the story of Simon Grapelli, a drug-addicted dandy, “Cloth, Dam, Sorrow and Trouble,” is a collection of narratives told by Cloth, the younger outcast that Grapelli might have been before he moved to the city and got cool. As a whole, the collection is the fractured narrative of a young punk rocker from New Jersey trying to maintain his individuality and make it to thirty without being arrested for harboring escaped cons, stabbed by a Vietnamese roller-skate gang, eaten by bears, or beaten to a bloody pulp by ex-Marines, all of which almost happen over the course of these thirteen tough, comic tales.
The prose is for the most part simple and straightforward. The narrator communicates directly with his reader, always turning aside to face him: “If you can believe this I had gotten involved in a mutually destructive relationship with a lady state trooper I had met while getting Sorrow’s motorcycle out of the impound lot.” (“Even the Most Avoidable Trouble”) The result is an overall clarity, as if the distance between narrator and reader has been shortened. Characters, especially the narrator, appear actual and vivid. And though the book is marred by a handful of typographical errors, this does little to detract from the sheer fun of reading it.
Entertaining, humorous and honest, “The Collected Cloth” is a laudable first effort by a young writer with a talent for black humor, detail and fast-paced narrative.
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