“Buzz Drainpipe vs. Roger Stanislav: The Typewriter & the Tommy Gun”

An excerpt from the never-completed memoir, “Crease and Desist”

Roger Stanislav was not a man who entered rooms so much as infested them. He smelled like money soaked in bathtub gin and cigars extinguished on pinkie rings. A bootlegging baron turned publishing mogul, Stanislav launched CREASE Magazine in 1951 after the feds shut down his Chicago rum tunnel. His idea of journalism was reprinting FBI transcripts and redacting the names with lipstick. He believed in capitalism the way some people believe in reincarnation—painfully, violently, and with a grudge.

Buzz Drainpipe, by contrast, was a chain-smoking poet with mustard on his jeans and a transistor radio permanently duct-taped to his belt. He filed his first piece for CREASE in '73—an unhinged, three-column tirade about the spiritual parallels between Vince Taylor and Dostoevsky. Stanislav hated it. Called it “dirtbag dadaism.” Buzz framed the rejection slip.

Still, the two were bound by necessity. Stanislav needed punk heat, and Buzz needed a paycheck that could afford coffee, typewriter ribbons, and the occasional out-of-court settlement.

Their relationship peaked—and combusted—over a now-infamous cover story:
“Sid Vicious, Saint of the Sewer,” in which Buzz claimed the Sex Pistols were “a CIA counter-noise psy-op designed to deflect the youth from Joy Division’s divine misery.” Stanislav edited the piece himself, slashing half the metaphors and inserting a full-page ad for Skoal.

Buzz retaliated by photocopying Stanislav’s personal letterhead and launching an underground zine called SEAM (“The rip inside CREASE”). It ran for three issues before Stanislav allegedly paid a gang of ex-gangsters and freelance editors to fill Buzz’s Olivetti with quick-dry cement.

By 1986, CREASE had gone glossy, Stanislav had gone senile, and Buzz had moved into a van parked behind a bowling alley in Brockton, typing reviews of VHS slashers and blues bootlegs. They never spoke again—except in Buzz’s sidebars, where he referred to Roger as “The Fedora’d Leech.”

And yet... Stanislav left Buzz one dollar in his will. Scribbled on the bill:
“Buy a clue.”

Buzz taped it to his mirror. And muttered every morning, “Bootlegger or not, the bastard had style.”