Alan Asnen's Blog, page 4

Being an excerpt from my new book that certain readers might want to skip Part Three

NOTE: While everyone is, of course, free to read, these particular excerpts are, essentially, footnotes provided for readers of my books and are there to make sense of what they are reading AS THEY READ. So, they may not make as much sense to those who are not reading at the time...

But first, I must provide a warning of sorts. I am a great believer in the idea that all people are born with the capacity to express some talent and through this talent achieve “success.” Further that this success can be manifested in the most positive manner, by which I mean it can provide a lifelong fulfillment for said person and those the person cares about without manifesting any negatives in the form of physical, economic or spiritual damage to other lifeforms.
Now, I fully realize that such a belief, while shared by some, fully flies in the face of beliefs held by many others. Those who hold to a conviction that in order to achieve success in this life one has to play a certain zero-sum game; that in order to win, someone or something else must lose. Such people have had their say in various ways throughout recorded history, and one only need to look at the results. If you cannot see the results for some reason, I urge you to study the matter elsewhere. But I do not endeavor to discuss the zero-sum game further.
So, what have I achieved lately? What “success” have I seen? Let’s tote up on the boards: I allowed one of the greatest terrorists of all history to elude my grasp and go on to the Capitol of our great Nation, turning it into a pile of turds; then I afforded him the opportunity to commit suicide behind my back; then I lost a client’s dearly beloved pet; that while blowing up a fake factory and not capturing the evil meanie behind it, but killing the meaningless moron who helped him; then allowing one of the great criminal masterminds alive to escape after finally being the only one—apparently ever—to track him down, much by accident.
Therefore: my talent?
No, this about that. I shall tell you a story. A story which on its face may seem to feed into this nagging current conception among many that life sucks and then you die. However, I would beg those who feel this way to hang on a bit longer, not so much because the story has a happy ending but because I would like it to be understood that the ending may provide a certain level of inspiration despite whatever minor sadnesses may be encountered along the way. And anyway I want you to get to the end of my story.
When people give advice about success, they often introduce themselves by using well-worn homilies such as “success comes about through 10 percent inspiration and 90 percent perspiration.” Such things always have a tremendous amount of truth to them. Like the caveman thing hitting women over the head. This story hopefully will provide the same amount of truth. This story is going to be about something a bit more ephemeral, however. It is about luck, and we’ll often hear people talk about luck, saying success has a bit to do with luck, saying that it requires being in the right place at the right time, for example, or being prepared when the time or opportunity arises. Unfortunately, there are other factors involved in being lucky when it comes to success.
There is a famous song by the Police and people sometimes forget how intellectual the Police were. This song was influenced by the work of the Twentieth century philosopher and psychologist Carl Jung who investigated theories of coincidence and chance, matters we could call synchronicity. You may have heard me mention this before. Although scientists have yet to completely debunk Jung’s theories, they have gone a long way to replace them with theories of “chaos.” Yet unexplained coincidence, luck, synchronicity and chance remain inevitably and indelibly large parts of our lives. Throughout the course of our actual lives as we live them. Science may be science in the classroom and laboratory, but life is life. Lived experience is never what it seems to be in the lab. Luck doesn’t always exist in the lab, but it does exist in reality. And it does seem to have something to do with these matters of chance, synchronicity and coincidence.
Anyone born with any kind or amount of talent, has it. Luck. The talent will be raw. And has to be developed. Success on the basis of this talent will require “timing,” which is a form of luck. Also, the learning of basic skills that allow the expression of the talent to the public. Be it violin playing or plumbing.
Take successful screenwriting. The successful screenwriter most often does not write a successful screenplay. At least not at first and not for a long, long time. He or she writes a closetful and after years of having the right people read this closetful of screenplays, having them passed around, reader to reader, someone says, finally, “I remember that one, can I see it again?” One thing leads to another, and, “I don’t know if I like that one, but I like that person’s writing. Does he have anything else?” Then someone takes a look in that closet. Etcetera. But even that screenplay doesn’t necessarily get produced, nor do any of the others in that closet. Some do get passed around, though, and you get picked up by an agent, and the agent finds you a nice gig helping to fix a bad script somewhere. Are you getting the drift here? But she also starts marketing your talents, talking you up at parties and at meetings about other films and writers when she has the opportunity among her stable of fifty or so other screenwriters. At parties and meetings. Etcetera. Until one day, out of that closet, a screenplay is finally optioned. Not produced. Never produced. (You can find out more about how to become a successful screenwriter someplace else...). See what I’m saying?
But that is the genuine, fulfilling road to success in most places, for most talents. No Academy Award. Not tons of credit. Just steady work. Certainly not some hokum story about things falling into the lap. A closet filled with scripts and something happening because of timing. Coincidence, Luck, Chance, Synchronicity. Rent paid. Food on the table.
You had the talent, otherwise you would never have produced those scripts, or that one memorable enough that someone finally said, “Hey!” Do you have any idea at all how many scripts go around Hollywood for anyone to remember any one script?
So, that’s what it takes to achieve success as a scriptwriter in Hollywood. Don’t take my word for it. It’s not my story. And there are innumerable success stories like that in all fields. But just imagine, for all those successes how many tens of thousands of failures. Why? Of those tens of thousands, consider how many of them have talent. And how many don’t. Perhaps how many of them have a closetful of scripts. Some of them memorable. What is the difference.?
Now, hear this: I have talent. I know this. I’ve known it since I was a small child, so I didn’t even have to guess. And I’ve had luck. Maybe you’ve heard. Here’s the unfortunate part and this happens to so many people. The luck and the talent did not meet in a synchronistic manner. In other words, they weren’t in the same place at the same time. My biggest stroke of luck came when I was fourteen, practically a juvenile delinquent, lying about almost everything, essentially a runaway. Talented though. Lucky as anything. My talent didn’t run out. My luck didn’t. But my lies got me in trouble, and I burned out before my luck did.
But I started straightening out. I got back on my feet just before my luck burned out.
Now, Terpil, he says it wasn’t luck. Not so much.
So. Coincidence? Luck? Talent? Some “invisible hand”?
This sort of thing happens to many people, as I said. Too raw a talent at too wrong a time. Too big headed. Too many lies. But whose lies? Too big a lifestyle. Too little work. Too little attention.
The luck goes out the window.
I had no idea what I was doing. I could lie about my age, say I was eighteen instead of fourteen, but I could not lie about the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing. Talent only carries you so far. Sooner or later the fact that you don’t know what you are doing will stop you. Even though I cleaned up my act, even though I began to learn about what I was doing, my luck ran out before my talent began to catch up. I had been trying to resynchronize ever since. No pun intended here but no luck.
As Rod Stewart once said, you gotta move when you’re in that groove cause you don’t wanna disappear into that wall. Everybody suffers but only the people who enjoy that suffering sit around wallowing in it.
According to the late Don Cherry, the great jazz trombonist, style is something that ultimately stifles creativity. And if style is all you’ve got, or if that’s all you are relying on...
People sometimes tell stories about pickup lines. How good theirs are. The problem with pickup lines, standard ones, is that they represent style, regardless of who is using them or why. The people who are using them are losing their creativity and, in this instance, that creativity is causing a loss of passion. In a relationship, even one that lasts one night, the absence of passion, even the perceived lack of passion, is going to result in failure. No creative act likes failure. No one likes failure. Failure isn’t necessarily a bad thing if you know how to use it but sooner or later your creativity wants to see some success. So, if you follow Cherry’s logic you need to break away from style.
Allow me to move on to another example and here, as opposed to the question of pickup lines, where I know I will probably receive some support, here I know I will probably receive some hate mail. But I will take it as it comes. En garde.
Writing, and in particular literary writing, and in very particular the writing of poetry, is one of the most challenging fields, learning how to write poetry well, well enough to stand out among the millions who do so, requires an understanding and mastery of the traditional forms. In this case Cherry’s use of the word “style” equates roughly to the word “forms.” In this sense it is exactly as we refer to the forms in painting, music, sculpture, etc., although there are broader meanings, as well.
Over the centuries poets—some great, some not so much—have developed many forms—some relatively simple like the couplet, some relatively complex like the sestina. Learning how to master these forms is the best tool for the student of poetry, when their hearts desire is to break free of them, to become creative. These styles are classic. To free yourself of the classic forms is to become creative and modern. This is a natural progression. It is in many senses expected of a poet. If you go to art school, you are taught to master the fundamentals. You may wish to be an abstract expressionist, but you must first learn to paint the face of a dog so than anyone can recognize it as such. To learn to be a poet you much first learn to write a successful couplet and sestina, for example, so that a reader may recognize and enjoy them as such. For example.
Now take, for example, perhaps one of the most challenging and complex forms of poetry ever devised by a poet, the haiku. People misunderstand this form. And that, as they say, is an understatement. They see, they think, an implicit simplicity, but it is one derived from tremendous time and effort. Most people who write haiku only take a few minutes, which is why they are not haiku, but mere random thoughts, literally words filled in by counting syllables on a page.
The same could be said for much poetry. Personally, I would rather read any amount of badly constructed free verse instead of any single poorly written haiku any longer because as someone who has taught poetry, I’ve had a bellyful.
Again. Style kills creativity.
It is something of a conundrum then. One cannot live without style but at a certain point one has to jettison it. We have to understand what style is. We have to use it for ourselves, use that packet of it given to us until it is completely drained dry and then jettison it completely, and then move on.
Do some poets return to these same forms? Of course, all the time, it is an exercise, it is a sort of melancholy, it is a variation upon the work they normally do. Sometimes it is a type of honorarium, sometimes it is a passing on to their readers a type of lesson that, yes, it is possible to still do this. But for the most part, no, they are done with it. They have moved on. Today’s poets do this because those forms are done for them. They are experimenting with new forms, creating new forms.
The same is true in music. This is what Don Cherry was doing, hunting for new forms, learning new forms not just in western music, which is why he traveled the world, living with people around the world in Asia, in Africa, in Europe, learning their forms, incorporating their forms into his music, into his western music to create new forms. The plastic artists do the same, the good ones, and yes they all do return somehow to the old forms as a reminder, a touchstone, a lesson, a memorial, as a kind of melancholy, as an honorarium. But they push on because they are past it.
So, the question always remains, you must look at yourself: am I beyond this? Have I mastered this? before pushing on. Do you care? Do you want to be that good? You don’t have to be. You don’t have to be a Sharon Olds, a Nikki Giovanni, a Don Cherry, a Rauschenberg. You don’t have to be a Sean Penn or a Beyonce or a Bill Gates or a Barak Obama. You don’t even have to be noticed. You can spend your life being other things and have this stuff in your journal, hanging on your bathroom wall, recorded in some corner of your computer, something for your kids to listen to years later. Nothing wrong with that. Depends upon your priorities, always. But you always have to check yourself and ask what your priorities are.
Before you ask other people to take their time to look at your work. Before you send out your pickup line.
And there is a reason for this. And everyone in every field from plumbing to astrophysics ultimately goes through the same cycle, asking themselves the same questions if they have anything going for them, any grit, any guts, any real talent. It’s that bubble thing again, you see. Remember that. It becomes important. Somewhere. Maybe even here.
There is the potential for success, that success is always possible even though failure may be inevitable, or to put it another way, like at the mundane level, it is always a matter of achieving failure despite the potential for successes, or vice versa. Have I mentioned success?
We have had access to an astonishing work in this early part of the 21st century which has now, after six volumes, finally closed, Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle, a semi-autobiographical novel running in excess of 3000 pages. A lengthy, detailed minutiae of life with extended philosophical and historical errata. We are indebted to this work, even though it may not be the most significant literary work. It is an astounding thing, has had or will have an astounding impact upon us. And even though it may not be singular in what it does, or what it has done, in combination of its effects it may well be singular. It drives home many of the most important elements of what has taken place in the 20th century, what has come to impact us now at the beginning of the 21st. For Western Civilization at least, perhaps for men, mostly, for Europeans, mostly (and possibly for those of us in America as a predominantly European culture) and for those of us who read and think upon such matters.
Specifically, when it comes to this matter of failure it has some great significance. This idea of struggle is at its core. Critics immediately began wondering why Knausgaard chose such a title. After all, it is the title of Hitler’s only known written work, and in the final volume Karl Ove does finally deal with the question of Hitler. No surprises, no revelations. He comes back to the old questions about the corporal. What would have happened if Hitler had succeeded as an artist? How would the world have been different? And why did Hitler become what he was? What creates people like Hitler?
The answer: Failure.
Hitler was not an entirely untalented artist, he was, shall we say, unlucky, out of synch. He had his problems as a human being. When he confronted failure and rejection, as we all do, then was thrust into one of the bloodiest battles of war, at a time when war exploded upon a community of Germans and Austrians who saw war as a way of compensating for life as they knew it; then confronted the defeat, the failure of that community, channeling his personality disorders and his personal failures, the product of his parents’ failures in the streets of the crumbling Weimar Republic, Hitler became Hitler. Had the Vienna Art Academy accepted him, things would have been different. Perhaps. We’ll never know.
But failure is inevitable for everyone. It is the nominal position of life. I spend day upon day opening up magazines reading, usually book reviews and other reviews, about millennials writing about other millennials who are publishing books—a success story, mind you, for which I am sometimes greatly envious—books about the failures of millennials. They win all sorts of awards for these things. An irony, you see, which I hope is educating them in some fashion about irony at least. For it does nothing to educate them about failure as I see it. While I sit here ruminating about my failures and theirs, knowing that failure is merely a fact of life. Certainly, the times the millennials have been brought into, like Hitler’s time, are such that failure is more likely. This is a misfortune for them and for us all.
Our great leader was a horrible, consistent failure. Just like Hitler. Which is not to compare them otherwise! And look at where that brought him. People, at least a significant percentage, enough to get him into the White House, admired him for his failures, apparently. Those and his lies. A shining example of what can be accomplished despite the odds.
The great Renaissance philosopher Vico told us about his Wheel. Sometimes it turns for the worst. And we are going through the worst of times. They will not get better soon. It is a matter of percentages. I read articles about how to perform better in meetings and at work. How to succeed better. It sends me chills. I should be reading more about how to fail better. So should you. More failure is coming. How to make life with parents, siblings and others more comfortable. Communal living, living with less. Living in the rough. Certainly not how to get along in meetings. There will be fewer meetings in a business setting. This I can assure you when there are fewer businesses. There will be fewer businesses in the coming years, in the next generation and the next after that.
It would be nice, perhaps if people were to write more about unionizing, today, for that would make working conditions better. Perhaps not more successful, but the failures will be better. The times they are changing, right under your feet, and faster than you might be seeing. Perhaps faster than the polar ice caps are melting. My father worked the counter in a Brooklyn deli and belonged to a union. It made his life better. He still didn’t like working the counter. More people working in offices today will be happy to get a job working a counter tomorrow. They might also be happy if that job were unionized, still. Someone should be writing about that. Someone might be. That could be a success. Short term, but success.
Does this mean we should not strive? Of course not. But it does mean we should remember always to draw a line between our Romantic notions and the realization of possibility. Possibility and probability. There will inevitably be the Michelangelos and the Dickens among us, famous in their own time. But there, too, will always be the Kafkas and the Van Goghs. People who will fail in life but were recognized after. Is this the type of success you wish to achieve? If so, have good friends and relatives to help carry your program through after you are gone. That’s a good Romantic dream.
Other dreams exist as well. Believe you are born with great talent that can be actualized in your lifetime. Believe in some great holy spirit that has imbued you. Believe in some mystical guidance that will lead you on some holy path towards X. Believe in anything. You might as well believe.
Napoleon Hill, the great master of “success” thinking, tells us confidence is all it takes in the end. He sold a lot of books that way. He had a lot of confidence. Pretty much created the entire self-help field. And the entire “confidence” field, too. That was pretty successful! And how did that work out for us?
Or simply be pragmatic. Pragmatism works just as well, perhaps even better for many. But, yes, whatever you do, follow through, make the effort, believe in whatever you actually DO, and believe in the possibility that you can DO something to accomplish something, whatever it might be, regardless of how you may define success. Even if it doesn’t turn into “success” as you have been taught to define it but is some reasonable facsimile of something that is not total failure, something that leaves you, and others more importantly, to the brink of annihilation and beyond.
Because that is what the absence of success truly is, and it is the absence of success that you wish to avoid, not failure. Failure is okay. Failure is normal. The constant absence of success, this constant drumbeat in your head of “you can’t you can’t you can’t” or “you won’t you won’t you won’t” has to not be present. It will be there from time to time. We all have our doubts. Those without doubts belong in an institution. If we had a better country, we would have some kindly institutions free of charge that put decent people to work rather than sickening pharmaceuticals which merely made rich people richer.

Being an excerpt from my new book that certain readers might want to skip Part Two

NOTE: While everyone is, of course, free to read, these particular excerpts are, essentially, footnotes provided for readers of my books and are there to make sense of what they are reading AS THEY READ. So, they may not make as much sense to those who are not reading at the time...

At age fourteen, I had walked into the offices of The World Ontological Organ with my Music and Art high school friend, Danny, looking for supplies for our literary magazine, Neuk, walked out, told Danny to wait a second, then went back asking for a summer job because I had been running away from home by tiny steps for five years. A rare double major at M&A, painting and violin, and with high hopes, now I had thought to make my escape by one large leap, and I felt ready for that big break.
Danny became part of my past. I hardly remember what he looks like today. I was a rocket and he was a spectator.
How did I get that job? Understand, I hadn’t lied to do it. That came after. No, this was another in a sequence of little miracles in my life, wonderful happenstances following me around as though I had a fairy godmother blessing me continuously.
And today I am worthless. Where is Danny? I don’t know. He might be dead. But I speculate he is a success somewhere and happy. He was shy and sweet and morose, but I’ll bet he grew out of the worst parts of that. Growing into himself. Having found his true nature and discovered his bliss, just like Joseph Campbell said he should. And I walked out on him that way a dad walks out to get a pack of smokes. Wanting to be somewhere else. Someone else.
To get what? Here it was. Philip and I were tasked with cleaning up the large, dark back room after paste-up night, and Benny, the editor, his father, had a visitor along the empty corridors in the front offices.
I had been up most of the night, working and learning what I could about the graphics side while doing my grunt chores of running to Ratner’s for coffee and donuts, sweeping up the drops and dregs along the floors and glass tables of the cartoonists and paste-up artists, and keeping the rubber cement bottles full. Benny sent me out to buy coffee for his guest. When I came back the visitor had gone to the bathroom.
Benny pulled me down by my shoulder and said, in his no-longer-thick-at-all Czech-Israeli accent by-way-of-London, “When this guy leaves I want you and Philip to follow him.”
“Why?”
“Do what the fuck I am telling you, wiseass. Follow him and you will learn something. Maybe. Stay about a block behind him. Follow him and watch.” He let loose, and I bounced up.
I walked out of his office, returned to the back room and continued to help Philip clean, relaying his father’s instruction. He stopped working, gave me that stupid, concave smile, that choked up, chortled, hunched over, coughing laugh, making that bony, inherited frame twist at an odd angle. You would watch, as with his father, standing there, wondering when he would fall over. Fourteen and he had smoked enough cigarettes and weed to develop this cough. Like his father at forty-two. Unlike me, Philip had no goals except to get high and have as good a time as possible. And get laid. Finally.
We sat up front at an empty secretary’s desk, in the hushed mood of post-pasteup day, playing with paper clips and rubber bands until Raymond, the visitor who wore a dirt-darkened, copper-toned London Fog raincoat, with a huge, dark stain on the back, on this sweltering, garbage-stinking, New York City August day, left Benny’s editor’s office. We were deadpan when he exited down the stairwell, then leapt up to run after him on this, our journey of Sentimental Education.
He started up Second Avenue. He was a moderately trim man, a bit heavier than Benny’s rather bony frame, with slicked back, curly hair like Benny, middle-aged and thinning on the pate like Benny, gold-rimmed glasses like Benny, but not sun-shaded like Philly’s old man. Somewhat handsome like Benny, less because his cheekbones sagged a bit more and he was not as swarthy, with thicker features. He kept his hands in the pockets of that London Fog, whipping around him on the windier corners. He didn’t walk too quickly down the street. Occasionally he would shift from side to side, not because an object or anyone was blocking his path, although there were plenty of people on the steaming sidewalk in the late afternoon.
Philip asked me, “What are we looking for?”
Were we looking for something? “Your guess. Benny said follow him, we follow him.”
We turned west on Saint Mark’s Place, around the newsstand at Jem’s Spa, and Raymond’s gait never changed. The crowd thickened momentarily, he weaved through it, and now the weaving became more intentional, his head turned once in a while. Here and there his head dipped in and I was certain I saw him speak.
“Did he say something?” I asked.
“To who?”
“That girl.”
“Which one?”
“The blonde.”
“The one in the jeans or the one in the miniskirt?”
“The one in the miniskirt.”
Philip shrugged.
By the time we’d reached Broadway he’d done this four times with four women of various varieties and, although slowing down, never stopped walking, never missed a beat, turning his head, talking. He crossed the street and, in front of the Union, he dipped in to a girl, brown ponytail, maybe mid-twenties, mostly nice-looking but homely, carrying two notebooks close to her chest. She replied, and he stopped. We stopped. He spoke to her again. She spoke to him. They turned away together. We followed. They kept walking until they reached an alley and turned into it. We hesitated. I knew that alley and I knew it was shallow, narrow. It turned into another dead-end. I couldn’t see how far they’d walked into it.
I pulled on Philip’s shirt. “Hang up here. I can’t see.”
“Let’s keep walking,” Philip said. “Dad said we should follow.”
“Let’s wait. I don’t know if we should. Philly, this is stupid.”
“Dad said we should follow.” We shared a quick laugh. We walked, reached the head of the alley and looked in. Raymond had the girl pinned. Her legs were up in the air. The two of them were throbbing on the wall like tree ear fungus in a stiff breeze. We pulled back.
“I don’t fucking believe it,” Philip said. “I don’t fucking believe it.”
We walked back half a block and waited. Fresh in our minds the incident with Chico a few weeks before. Benny had told us to follow him, too. We'd squeezed into the doorway of the B&H Dairy Restaurant, and staying there, in itself, had been quite a task. Chico, our staff cartoonist, had walked out to the corner of Saint Mark’s and Second, stood there eating an ice cream cone he’d bought at Jem’s Spa, sticking it out to the young women who walked by, and saying something. Ultimately, he walked off with one to his pad. Later we were told the few skimpy details of that monologue, a "secret" Benny knew, when we returned to the office.
“Is it us?” I asked Philip. “Is this some… Is there some… There must be some… There are words… They are saying something. There are…. There must be something beside the words. There has to be.” Philip looked at me. His mouth was open and there was an expectation in his eyes, assuming I possessed a secret he didn’t, the initial steps to an unknown code I had begun to break. He waited for me to speak more coherently than in the past, to explain it to. I will never forget that look because Philip was my closest friend and while he didn’t have the ugliest face I’ve ever seen, he had one of the strangest noses ever. It sticks out. Poor Philip. Not bad otherwise, though. And he would have his way with women, later. Although, poor Philip.
“I have got to know this secret,” he said.
“But whatever it is, Philly, following him around won’t help.”
“So, fuck, is that it?”
I felt badly for him. Another urgency pressed upon me. “No, let’s wait and see what happens next. Benny told us to follow him. Perhaps...” I knew it wasn’t true, but, perhaps.
No more than four or five minutes passed. Raymond and his paramour came out of the alley that led from the alley. They didn’t shake hands and parted ways.
“Fuck me,” came hissing from Philip’s general direction.
Raymond continued to head west on 8th Street. The dipping continued, weaving through the pedestrians, bobbing his head in and out, saying magical words to women in an attempt to have sex with them, and, yes, before he hit Sixth Avenue, he claimed a second encounter and discovered another secluded spot for his rendezvous. Clearly he knew all these locations by heart. And Benny knew this pattern, which was why he presumed upon us to follow Raymond and, what? Learn by his example? Be amused by this exhibition? What was the profound lesson in this? A cautionary tale? Some larger message? How did Benny discover the detail of this habit? Had Raymond shared this guilty secret? Had Benny himself followed Raymond? Horrors, had he joined his friend once?
We followed Raymond further on into Greenwich Village, meandering through the growing crowds. Businesses let their workers out for the evening. More people began groping their way into the district for music and drugs, familiarity and comradery. Raymond was nodding to women young, middle aged, now a few older women, the nighttime perusers and shoppers. It appeared his appetites, ever sated, were growing larger.
By the time he reached the old village, around Hudson Street, he became attached to an older woman, slender, silver gray, but genuinely attractive. We waited, resting outdoors at the coffee shop owned by Philip’s godfather, John. We marveled at Raymond’s staying power, the fact that while he did not last long in each individual instance he was able apparently to recuperate rather quickly. Raymond continued his trek west towards the river. There, at the river itself, he had his final conquest—for our consumption—a chubby young man.
Dusk fell, and we were tired and unhappy. We had been on this journey too long. It was hot and darkly humid. The other end of the streets past where the district closed, where the monotonous hummings of the West Side Highway could be heard and the river smells began to fill the air in the heat were too much for me. The East Village beckoned, with its welcoming pierogi and where we could be done with the night. We were not dressed to walk through the West Village at night, handsome young boys with long curly hair in tight, flashy day clothes. I wore what turned out to be see-thru white jeans when sweaty damp in the shady light of lampposts, and a sheer red shirt with a large white star print, open almost to the waist. And a white satin bandana. Philip wore buckskin pants and a leather vest with no shirt. We drew whistles down every lane until we crossed back to the east side of Broadway and the comfort of drunks in doorways.
I didn’t see the point of this long excursion. I felt one realization creeping up on me. I had been sleeping around—as in sleeping sleeping—at the WOO office, at Benny’s, at Tony and Bonnie’s, saving up money. Chico didn’t have sex on the street. Time to find my own apartment. But Benny wasn’t sending me an eviction notice. Was there a message in all this or was it another of Benny’s “here-kid-grow-up” tricks? Later, when I realized he was teaching us how to follow and observe, as he had been taught when a young reporter, I wondered if he was also trying to extend a lesson on morality or one about Debordian lived experience. He asked us later what happened, knowing. He laughed his laugh, coughing it up while smoking a joint and several Negritos over coffee.
I did, later, ask about Raymond and he told me he’d been kicked out of the State Department some years before on a morals charge. We never discovered what Raymond had been saying to those “conquests.”
I never understood Benny was also teaching me how to be a detective until I became one. I let the knowledge sleep for a while. You know, that big sleep.
But the idea of investigation built into me by other means. I was greatly affected by reading The New Yorker when I was young. From the cartoons to the Florsheim shoe ads, each week I was inspired by one tidbit after another to become a writer, more inspiration than I received from anything else in my environment. Don’t mistake me. I love writers of books. I have a problem with books themselves. It was the contemporariness of magazines, and The New Yorker especially, the fact that it wasn’t a book. I love books, but, frankly, I prefer to collect them rather than read them. This has been my problem for a long time with books, that they are too removed from the moment. Much like rich people. Magazines are more in the moment. Daily newspapers, although more in the moment, the quality of their writing is dreadful, overall. The internet is worse.
A greater difficulty developed. Because I was young and naïve the magazine writers themselves became for me people who were inspired and were themselves inspirational. When I began meeting them, and by the time I was fourteen I met them frequently, they took on a genuine aura between gold and sepia. They existed in an atmosphere of sainthood, drifting through the world at a different pace, and when they spoke I never heard their words because they came to me through a kind of fourth dimensional telecommunication, a veiled mind reading, not that I was a special receptor, but that it seemed such writers, when you were in their presence, sent out these messages and you were blessed to receive them. I hadn’t begun taking psychedelic drugs, yet, so that could not account for the sensation. This feeling, if it could be thought of as a mere feeling, intensified for me regarding the female writers I met. I wanted very much to possess them, a sensation I did not experience with male writers. Thankfully. For me, I mean. No disrespect meant to those of you of different persuasions. But I wanted yet more to be like them, a presence of mind that superseded the sexual.
Strong metaphysical impressions may be transparent, brief, or emotional. They linger, however. Reverberate. Come back to you. Over and over. Unheimlich…
Charles, the first to hire me at WOO, had been a self-taught, self-directed painter for many years. Harry a poet of minor renown and a teacher at City University. They introduced me to Benny, the editor in chief, because he too would have me working. Benny, an emigre from war, a participant in war, and formerly a reporter for the Associated Press in England. They all knew anyone who was anyone in the art and political underground, locally and elsewhere. And there was not a corrupt sinew between them. For a fleeting time they were my idols.
Benny had me under his wings. Yes, I said wings. He constantly weighed me down to the ground with a ton of bricks. Sweeping floors, cleaning bathrooms, running constantly to fetch coffee or once a week to the Diamond District to buy his favorite tobaccos at Sherman’s.
I performed my duties like a saint. Part-time or not, since it was summer I spent most of my days there. The staff believed I was an eighteen-year old college freshman at City, interning for Harry, mostly, because I told this lie to anyone who would listen, and it seemed they were listening when they weren’t. And I told it because I wanted to learn from them every aspect of the business.
When I arrived, Blade was copy boy. I didn’t want Blade’s job. I felt it was beneath me and complained about it while I was helping Phil to clean the toilets. I wanted to be a pasteup artist, one of the people who put the newspaper together, proudly watching those cardboard sheets piled carefully in a big box and sent off with an agent to a printing plant in New Jersey—connected to the Mafia; most East Coast printers were; the distributors, too—then waiting, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes for half a day, for a stack of papers to come back, all fresh and smelly to wet our fingers on the ink, turning the pages and smiling.
Instead I was called into Benny’s office one day and he told me to run uptown to retrieve copy because Blade hadn’t shown up. That was the day I became Copy Boy, or had that work tacked on to my runner and janitorial duties. Blade was canned. Poor Blade. Nobody knew what happened to Blade. He just never showed up. But, without that moment, there never would have been Claudia. And without Claudia, I would never have followed my path, probably...
Being copy boy was an addition to my duties, not a replacement. A shifting, thankfully. The summer progressed, others were hired, the paper continued to grow. For a few months, while I learned new skills, and after I stopped sweeping floors and being the runner for coffee and donuts, Benny, Harry or Charles would send me hustling, scurrying, running around the city in all kinds of weather to pick up writer’s stories, their views, wherever they were in their turrets, their shacks, their apartments or houses around the city. I would walk, run, hop on busses, take subways, scoot on ferries. Swaddle myself on chilly days, huff and puff on the hot ones. Enduring spouses and pets and saying yes to invitations. Being a fine boy when I shouldn’t. Because the invitations were few and inviting. But once you start hearing them, if you are a fine boy, they begin to—and this wasn’t a word at the time—network.
Then you end up at a Warhol party and it smacks you in the kisser. You’ve spent a lot of time splashing in puddles. You stop splashing for a moment, you stand facing your image, lulled by all the ripples and impressions, you see your reflection. What’s happening to you? You’ve made a turn, an advancement, you’ve changed from that to this, by stretches you gained new qualities, abilities. No longer the hobbit or hooligan. Do you want to be this person? Because, if you step in this new direction you will move beyond integrating that new being into the old you, you will become that different person and not the old you, taking on…responsibility. Oh, no…maturing! Do you have a choice any longer? Time to drop away the cask of the old you with all the remnants, jettison each piece of the ancient uniform, the shell you carried with you. Reenter the world naked, new, dumb. Assuming you weren’t dumb before.
Oh. And you’ve met the love of your life, sonny boy. How about that?
This rainbow is colorful and that one is dull. Time of day, change in the weather or perspective. The pot of gold at the end isn’t always what you’d expect. Trains don’t always have a terminal point and clouds don’t always have a silver lining. Maximally consequential concerns can become little more than seat cushions upon the Great Chair of one’s life, suffering the vitals of wind and rain and wearing thin over the years. Today I live deep in the wild and wooly West, far from my native homes, homies. But once I was a Copy Boy. There I began a journey. Writer, rebel, raconteur and whatever the fuck I am today. Reminiscent of an old Sam Fuller movie, I suppose. Up hills and down hills. Especially hilly in-house years in old San Francisco before Prop 13 when the great insanity started.
But there was the day of the Claudia Dreifus Pygmalion reversal. I don’t know if she assumed I was being cute, or if that was important. But it sticks in my memory. Her response to my standing there, frozen stiff in front of her, in front of her statuesque present, was the epitome of charm and patience, smiling softly, bowing her head, turning away on one foot. The Olympia which I renamed Claudia for my own purposes. Ideal and portable typewriter. Thankfully, unlike most of the other writers I’ve met over the years, Claudia was a decent human being. Perfect, no. Who is? I never managed to move in her circles and know her too closely. Even today. I headed into the fast down lane and she, decent, rode in a steady straight line to a point in the middle lane. A trick I wouldn’t learn for a long while. Because I would begin to hang out with writers. And other artists, most of whom are necessarily insane, in their outward behaviors and in some instances all the way. But there has been and always will be that touchstone Claudia moment and there were to be several more, writers and others I’d meet who possessed integrity and who made an impression.
Reminds you of that reflection in the puddle when you had a chance to stop splashing. Catch your wind, maybe you’ve fallen down, accidentally seen your reflection and say, Oh, gosh, is that what I look like, or better, you remember, Claudia, where have I transgressed? Yes, a few Copy Boys run the way of Blade, into a ditch. A few boogie on to Woodward and Bernstein status. Or Faulkner or Flaubert. You never know. That’s life. That’s what people say…
Tony and Chico did a lot of teaching. They hired another copy boy and I moved into the paste-up spot and started to do more writing.
When he was younger, Chico had an aversion to insecure people. I was raised through rigid regimentation to be insecure. Insecurity rose in me like sap in the spring, and I had to fight it off. For a while I sat on top of a ladder in the WOO reception area. It drove the secretaries crazy at times. Worse when I climbed down from that ladder and gave them “massages.” Hey. They asked. I never forced. Chico would see me there, shake his head and walk by.
Benny and Charles sent me to Chico to learn paste-up. Not exactly his favorite moment. I was like a fly on him, hunched over the light table. He taught me the rudiments of the darkroom. I knew about art, but Chico taught me how to scrounge for it, be instinctual, rummaging through old books and magazines for “found” pieces. I knew what collage was, but he taught me how to create it. I was in art school, but while I learned the “rules,” everyone at WOO taught me how to break them. The best and worst kind of education simultaneously.
Paste up, the writing, our advertising, the basic cleaning of the bathroom in those earlier years was done with the least amount of discipline, what I needed the most and was trying to run away from constantly. The examples set for me on paste-up nights kept me convinced for more than a decade that I could survive without ever having to answer to The Man, without ever having to keep a journal or a notebook or wake up on time. Without ever having to go back home. Before working that night we all smoked grass or dropped acid, and we created this beautiful rag read by 2 million people around the country. The optimal mind blow for me.
We’d start early, five or six in the evening, and not finish until four or five the next morning, when the printer’s agent would fall through the doorway to pick up the finished pages. For years, a trip in itself, because the printer’s agent had been this stock-broker-type Irishman, nose-drunk, friend to all, but he showed up with dope for Benny or Charles from God-knows-where, probably a Mob connection. I stayed back waiting for breakfast with Benny and whomever he was meeting with at Ratner’s, or a fancier locale, and with Some Impressive People. Or catching the subway with him uptown on my way to school. When I went to school. By then Robin had gone.
When “The Prince” joined the staff he and Chico worked paste-up side by side and mumbled to each other, giggling all night long. It was fascinating to watch, and I did, with envy over the male bonding because they were both my ideal of cool. The Prince stayed with me for a while on 7th Street because he was in the middle of a divorce. He had a string of women and drugs flowing into the apartment, and that was how I managed to gather a closeness with Chico, for the first short time. How I started to get high and have random sex regularly. When the three of us were together, at his place on 11th Street or at mine, he would tell us stories about his years with the motorcycle gang or other anecdotes about his days back in Buffalo. He showed us physical shtick, fighting tricks. I was amazed, big and strong looking as he was, The Prince was so untalented in this arena. Chico practically gave us combat training in his living room.
I started drinking to mimic John and my brother when I was nine. Smoking, too. Like my father. Menthols and Dewar’s. In milk. The Dewar’s. A growing boy needs it. The milk. Not a lot. The Dewar’s. You couldn’t sneak too much in that house. People noticed. I stopped after I left home, since none was available. After all, I wasn’t an alcoholic. I was mimicking my brother’s behavior. But then I accidentally fell in with the “right crowd” at the right time. I wanted to fill in the big hole after Robin left that second time. And people kept coming up to me saying, “Try this,” and I did.
My father left home when he was nine, went to work at odd jobs until he joined the Army. Menthols and Dewar’s. That’s why he was gracious, if that’s the right word, about my leaving when I did. My mother threw half a fit. “He’ll be back with his hand out in a week,” my father said.
The time with Dan Zimmer was mostly about hobnobbing with wild members of the Mellon family, then the Gould’s, not my strain, goodness knows. Philip, Benny’s son, started flirting with another rich girl, someone from Shaker Heights, neither a Mellon nor a Gould, and all of us were involved with heroin, which happened to be trendy at the time, lucky me. There were rich people all over the place. We were also trendy. So I ran into them everywhere.
I hated needles so I didn’t use them. Dr. Schwiener, the “Jew doc” as my father called him, but who my mother insisted on, chased me around the room once with a twelve-inch syringe when I was six, then nailed me with another right in my ass while his seven-year-old daughter was standing in the doorway, watching. He was laughing out loud both times. One or the other ruined me on needles for about forty years.
I did occasional work for Dan Zimmer, who tried, if you can call it that, to network all the underground papers, as if we were starting the Associated Press or something. It was an effort encumbered most of the time by his stiffening, if you can call it that, habit of heroin use. Have I mentioned heroin? One evening, after a morbid amount of typing and phone calls, on my part, he invited me to an informal gathering.
“You’re a Gould, they’re Goulds, you should be friendly.”
“We’re not from the same stock, Dan, I guarantee it.”
“What difference? You’ll like them. You’ve hobnobbed with the rich before.”
Was it Francis Scott Key who said the rich are not like us? I guess not. The rich don’t work like the rest of us, don’t sleep or eat or vacation or gamble or have sex like the rest of us. And doing drugs would not be an exception. It isn’t. Two basic elements make using drugs problematic among the 99 percent: the acquisition of them—including the cost—but in most instances the terror involved, the paranoia about being caught, the fear of jail. The rich have no problems with either concern because their drugs are acquired for them by a safe intermediary and, in those rare instances when they may be arrested it’s like a ride at an amusement park, the trip to the police station and the process of being booked. Having to be finger-printed and talking on the phone to their lawyer. Oh, mercy, what a waste of a dime. I don’t know why they use drugs. High society’s unlimited capacity for indifference would seem to trim back the necessity for escape. Yet escape they do. Taking drugs with rich people is almost like having sex with a rubber doll. I guess people are into that. Apparently not all the rich, but, who knows…
Anyway, there I sat, wobbly, watching the trembling leaves of the Jay Gould family tree shooting up, five males, a couple of females and myself in the room with good ol’ Dan, while I took tiny toots of that nice off-white powder up my mixed-race schnoz, as I had been, off and off in the Music and Art cafeteria when I bothered to go there, where they had an ample supply, M&A located within one of New York City’s biggest heroin marketplaces. This was a polite Upper East Side crowd, not your nodding off downtown or ghetto scuz, and before long some of them were having sex with each other. I started to worry. I mean sex? Okay, but you make your own personal choices and you do it in private.
Walking the streets with a heroin buzz, even a moderate one, is not a distinctively comfortable option. In the event you don’t know. Clearly, and sadly, this was to be the case that evening, and in the dippy dark. The fact of it being a nice neighborhood—Sutton Place is rather nice—had little ameliorative effect. Once high on heroin little has additional ameliorative effect. “Don’t leave,” I heard a furtive whisper, but I didn’t care to respond, and I had no idea what creature the voice emanated from. No offense. Not my thing. But I don’t think it was Dan. Why would he miss me?
Don’t judge. Observe and avoid. If and when and to whatever extent you can. The 59th Street Bridge shone pretty that night and the park bench inviting. You could hardly smell the stink. Or know whence it came from. Up, down. East, west, north, south. Outside. Inside. At least I couldn’t. I sat for a while until I was certain not to be drooling any longer then walked downtown. Arrived at the Zum Zum on Lexington and 45th street.
And that would someday be a nice place to catch some...something. And meet several someones.
When we were bouncing ideas off each other at WOO, especially on covers, which we did a lot in 1967-69, we were remarkably simpatico at times. We were the first weekly to hit the stands with a cover on the USS Pueblo being captured by North Korea—not Time, not Newsweek—and it was my cover, but Chico hand-lettered one of the headlines for me in the wee hours of the morning when I couldn’t find the right one by scrounging for tchotchkes. That was the night he discovered I was sixteen. It didn’t sit comfortably with him, but it had been a long night, and it was normal not to see each other for days after. That was the period when Zimmer’s heroin crew became a substantial influence over us. Chico didn’t stop working with me, but it further strained on our relationship, one more reason for him to keep his distance, to question why he should be dealing with me outside the office. A “jail-bait” concern, added to his other sensitivities about me.
Tony was different. He and Bonnie had known about my age almost from the beginning and had adopted me as their kid brother. They contained the strangest verisimilitude to my parents, the way they sat and laughed. Tony did exactly what my father did, but he was the “right” to my father’s “wrong,” the “good” to my father’s “bad.”
As Harry and Charles spent more time on outside work, Tony took on more responsibilities in house. Finally, Charles found himself marrying a rich woman who stole him off to Taos, and that would be the last we ever saw of him. Tony took over.
I at dinner Tony and Bonnie’s apartment on 11th Street most nights. I’d helped him build his studio, helped him rebuild their apartment into a model that stood out in that ratty neighborhood. And I babysat when they wanted out.
Tony the builder and woodworker, like my father, on the side. But he was better than my father. Instead of criticizing me for what I couldn’t do, on the spot, calling me incompetent at the first misstep and yelling at me to disappear, he demanded better work of me. It was boy scout quality, building the manliness, getting the work done, team spirit. I was glad to do it, and in retrospect those were my best times, when I was most disciplined in the best sense, when I delivered my best work on the job, both in graphics and in writing, which I was ever a pipsqueak at. I wouldn’t develop any decent writing talent until much, much later. He was the same with all the staff, his gift. While we were giddily stoned, he could merrily crack the whip, everyone laughing in front of their light tables. “Avast! To work, mateys!”
In more than a vague sense, most of us were boy scouts who had reached a fork in the road and found ourselves in a place where we could do our alternative National Service or post-doctoral studies. Or, in my case, a conscientious merit badge. Tony was a perfect example and played scout master with Chico who could never be the boy scout but tried, regarding his potential “conflicts,” perhaps come to terms with his former gang life and inching away from it to a great extent. They did have a lot in common, those two, and they knew it. They looked alike in their bulky, hulking way.
That was my high point, my boy scout period. Or was it? Did I do my most or least damage then?
Then either a badge of honor or a never-ending ramification that the entire staff ended up on Nixon’s hate list. His hit-list. All of us with an FBI file, a Secret Service file, a CIA file, a Lord-knows-what file that lives on to this day. Fame. What a burden.
All right, I know what you’re saying. What am I doing spending all this time bragging about these people? Some of them are famous and maybe I’m name dropping. That’s not what it’s about.
Why should you care about it? Because I’m famous now and people want to know about famous people? No. Because life doesn’t suck. It’s weird. But it doesn’t suck. And one person’s life can teach you a lot about another. And again, why bother going through all of this? Now, when the trainwreck of this story, this bit of it, is just getting going?
And am I lying about any of this? No. I used to lie. Lying was like a Swiss Army Knife for me, but I don’t do it any longer. I don’t lie any more than your most honest person. The way normal people do. You occasionally lie to avoid violence. You buy misery with it, ultimately. Or the other way around, you buy violence to avoid misery. It’s a guessing game and a gamble or sometimes it’s a choice you make. You learn to make the choices. Or, if you’re exceptionally flawless, like truly honest people, it’s a gift. I didn’t lie by nature. If I were dishonest by nature, I’d surely be lying now. I was taught to lie. I was compelled to lie. Essentially, I was forced to lie. Not by the devil. More by circumstance. But more by the fact, at the time, that it seemed necessary, and unimportant. What difference did it make if I told this lie or that one, now or then, to this person or that person? In the end, no one would care. The lying was never excessive, mind you, and it was never fun. It was a burden for me, complicated by guilt, by the anxieties of being found out. Whenever I found it possible I told the truth. And I believed that was enough.
I searched forever. For a way to be completely honest. Just like I searched for decent parents. I’ve never stopped. That’s what it’s about. Not name dropping.
But the worst of it is that lying became a habit for me. I am a habitual person, with an addictive personality, you might say. I can control myself, but it takes an effort. I cannot allow myself to tell a lie here and there. If I do… It would be like eating an ice cream here and there or drinking a rum Collins here and there. I cannot handle it.
With exception for those dynamics determined by nature, human wrongs sit at the heart of what goes amiss, in every case. Some are your responsibility. Some, others. But everything that malfunctions has a starting point. Anyone, anyone with any sense, should be able to track it back to that point. Any malfunction, to any wrong at its starting point. You step into the flow of rivers that began with headwaters from ancient glaciers… And where do glaciers begin?
Where do they end and how?
I mean, do glaciers give a flying fuck who they hurt? They do what they do. For the longest time they don’t hurt anyone that anyone can tell. Then, BOOM, they kill all sorts of people. Don’t they? In the meantime, though, they run the straight and narrow, best they can. Straight and narrow. Best they can.
Like everything else. Everything. Unless they have some intention or natural inclination to do otherwise. Isn’t that funny? Where have we heard that before?
So. Tony was the managing editor, was about to become the publisher with Charles leaving and for some odd reason decided to make me managing editor. Why? That wonderful Pueblo cover.
Benny hated two female folk singers, both of whom he knew intimately, Judy Collins and Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary. He overlooked explaining the reasons in detail. It must have had to do with drugs, sex, money or a combination of the three. People are entertained, today, with little stories about the Bohemian lifestyle. They know very little of it.
Emigrating from Israel after the ’48 war and after recuperating from his war wounds, Benny had worked for the AP. Then he settled in to a storefront and apartment on top of The Gaslight in the Village where he made jewelry and ran a shop for many years. He partnered with a friend who built a small coffee import business a few blocks away and then opened a coffee shop with a roasting oven in the back. He lived there with his wife, a fashion model, his daughter, his sons, and they were babysat for by the performers downstairs, like young Bob Dylan, Judy Collins and Mary Travers, and others. The trouble must have had something to do with that back then. I guess. I’ll never know.
When Benny found out I played guitar, sang, wrote music, had a fledgling band back at M&A, and that I might be interested in pursuing a career in music on the side, he set me up with an audition at Epic Records. He was spurred entirely on by the fact that Judy Collins had a protégé, coincidentally–have I mentioned coincidence?—a classmate of mine at Music and Art, Janis Fink, whom Collins had stage-named Janis Ian. At the time he had a contact, Clive Davis, an up and coming A&R man at Epic Records. Needless to say, I didn’t impress this balding, faux hippie, but, for friendship’s sake, he gave my crew a shot and then gave me a solo audition. Both duds. And deservedly so. Benny was not deterred. He arranged for me to perform at various benefit concerts around the East Village. I ended up onstage with The Lovin’ Spoonful, John Hammond Jr., The Youngbloods, The Fugs, Peggy Florence and others. Janis herself once or twice. By the way, ice between us.
But when Dan Zimmer became cozy with Steve Paul, who owned a club uptown called “The Scene,” Benny notched me a gig as “house musician.” Another great turning of Vico’s Wheel. I was sixteen, turning seventeen, if you know what I mean, but, like many others, Steve Paul didn’t know it, and his arrangement had me performing from the time the door opened until the first act came on stage, a period of 30-60 minutes. For that my pay was all I could drink.
Um, speaking of lying, you do know that you can lie to yourself as well, right? And do any of you out there recall the name “Robin”?
Before that period, I rarely drank. The toying around I had done in mimic of my father and brother I had left behind in favor of greener pastures. But, starting then, I became a heavy drinker, for brief periods. Zimmer, The Prince, and Chico were regulars at “The Scene.” This at the time The Prince roomed with me on 7th Street because he was going through his divorce. Lots of nasty talk about his soon-to-be ex. Naturally, he travelled uptown with me, in style, by cab. I made more money in those days than I knew how to spend, and was never offended by spending it on others, like The Prince, who was experiencing hard times because of that divorce.
The Prince taught me how to drink in a proper, Lithuanian manner, after a few nights of my vomiting it up. We would defer to a Greek diner across the street from the club, for a meal first, applying a food base, often with Chico, with Zimmer or others, then taking a break for food between, and applying a layer of food after. I would end up facing the asphalt up north of Times Square in the middle of the night in any event, heaving, not having to pay a bill, not having any limits, and having The Prince there to hoist me into a cab and drag me up three flights of stairs in the middle of the night.
But I was sober enough in my “house” hour and, with tradition, the house musician was invited to sit in on the first song with the opening act. I was compensated then by playing a shabby rhythm guitar innocuously in the background with Stevie Winwood and Traffic, Edgar and Johnny Winters, and with Jimi Hendrix for a minute or two and a few others. Oh, yeah, I asked him. He didn’t remember Robin’s name or anything else about her.
The drinking, the heroin and rough living played out with my falling viciously ill by early that summer. The Prince had disappeared to white dustland somewhere. Tony or Bonnie had to stop in to keep me clean and eating, to supply me with groceries. There was talk of my moving back home, which I did end up doing for a brief period a few months later, having run out of money. That’s right, girls and boys, about a year after Robin had disappeared without a word following the Easter debacle, I became too sick from drugs and drink and not eating enough to pay for my rent-controlled apartment. Me, who took care of her. But I didn’t want to lose it that roach haven.
Ah, but having to find an illegal sublet for himself, Raymond, yes that Raymond, stepped in at Benny’s suggestion. Out of the mists of time, handily at a moment’s notice.
A few weeks into that sublet, I stopped by to pick up a few books and pieces of clothing I’d left behind. When the door opened, at the hand of a handsome young stranger, I saw Raymond stretched out on Lisa’s old couch in a pair of black panties pulled down across his thighs, half zonked, staring at her beautiful, Vesuvian murals, being catered to by another young, blonde, naked muscle boy. A month later, the place was robbed and cleaned out. Raymond, presumably with muscle boys in tow, evacuated and my lease etherized.
Those murals, those beautiful paintings which truly forewarned of death as much as those they had been inspired by, were immediately painted over.
Elton John. Grand Funk Railroad. Bowie. Led Zeppelin. All Things Must Pass. And they did. I went to see Led Zeppelin at a Madison Square Garden concert. By myself. Wore those same clothes I’d worn years before when Phil and I had wandered behind Raymond in search of some mystery. Did it simply to find out if I had overcome the bloat from all the drinking and could fit back into them, look decent again. Just barely managed. That was the measure I used. Time to come back into society. Back to school. Working at the Post Office.
If there had been some deep moral lesson to be discovered from the trails of Raymond, from all that passed during those days, I have never gleaned it.
Not until now, almost fifty years later.
Perhaps, somehow, I have absorbed it through osmosis.
Wear these thoughts like a leather friendship band, mon lecteur, especially if you have not lived so long, nor lived such a life. Should they ever happen to become wet allow them to tighten around you like the arms of two loving parents. But I know this: the world has never become a better place or worse. It is what it is.
And people are who they are. They can’t become anyone else, no matter how hard they try. No matter where they go. But... It’s never too late to grow up. Nor too late to realize the work is never done.
James Baldwin, of all folks, had this problem with writers being too pedantic about their moral lessons. Too much polemic, not enough metaphor he hinted. I get it. And, you might recall, Seneca reminds us that sometimes you just have to ram crap down people’s throats?
People are who they are. People do what they do. Don’t judge them. Don’t judge yourself. Have compassion. And as much as you can spare. We aren’t here long enough for anything else. We don’t have enough time to play games.
We no longer even have enough time to learn the rules. Rules? Who needs stinkin’ rules?
I’ll tell you who. A guy named Frank Terpil. So, why did I stop here to tell you all this?

Being an excerpt from my new book that certain readers might want to skip Part One

NOTE: While everyone is, of course, free to read, these particular excerpts are, essentially, footnotes provided for readers of my books and are there to make sense of what they are reading AS THEY READ. So, they may not make as much sense to those who are not reading at the time...

Back in the old, bad days, police used to do this thing where, if they shot someone, they’d plant a gun, if they couldn’t find a gun, on the dead person, to make it look like they shot in self-defense. If nothing else, this made the paperwork easier. Then came all this exposure in the 1950s and 1960s about how they were planting guns, so most of that stopped. Most.
All the while, during that time and forward into the 1970s and 1980s, as American workers were losing their unions, thank you, Republicans everywhere, American police forces were gaining and strengthening their unions. And their unions were lawyering up. Often the lawyers were ex-cops, so, they knew the ropes, had some streetwise expertise. Every cop went through a sort of union training with these new, smartass lawyers. They were told: If you’re ever caught in a situation where you’ve shot someone, just tell whoever asks that you feared for your life, you shot in self-defense. Figure out a story to fit the situation, one that fits the motive. And stick to it.
“But what about a gun?” Some cop would ask, often some rookie.
“You don’t need a gun. Anything can look like a gun! A screwdriver, a wallet, a paper bag.”
Of course, speaking on behalf of the police, during the 1960s, 70s and 80s, there were dozens of people like Terpil selling guns cheaply off-market here and there. And real guns also look like guns.
Now comes that horrible part. Cops are going to deny this left and right, but it’s true. Some cops—and I emphasize some, a few—started carrying things that they could say looked like guns. Combs, hairbrushes, whatever. Just in case. Even plastic guns. So, we were back to the old, bad days again, but in a new way.
Sane people know that being a police officer is one of the most difficult jobs a human being can possibly handle in life (and this even before the war on drugs or 9/11). And bad things do happen. And thank goodness most of us—white people, and even most people of color on a good day—never spend time being affected by any of it on either side. But some people do, and some to a degree that isn’t at all pleasant, and not through any fault of their own.
But instead of them, just imagine it’s you.
Imagine that cop knocking on your door to say your daughter has been killed, shot in the head three times by another cop, in the dark, because he thought she was going to shoot him, but it turns out she was only brushing her hair. Yet, you know, you know, she never does that, never brushes her hair in public, doesn’t even carry a hairbrush. What do you do? You, nice white person who loves the police. And he’s so sorry it happened. He didn’t mean for it to happen. Just a terrible accident. And then there’s your daughter’s two kids… Well, nothing to be done about that, you see, because…he didn’t do anything wrong. Self-defense, because he thought his life was in danger. Therefore, the state is not responsible for compensation. He didn’t do anything wrong.
Period.
Tough. Isn’t it? Like I said. Horrible. But. There you go.
Ronald Reagan loved the police. He should have. We all should. He also talked about taking personal responsibility. A lot. Made a big deal about it. He should have. We all should. Funny, all Presidents love the police. They have to. The police have guns. And the police all talk about taking personal responsibility. But nobody listens. Least of all these certain policemen. And the Presidents. And certain others to whom we give guns.
Listen to this: Between July 1, 2012 and June 30, 2015, police in Great Britain fatally shot a total of three people. That’s three people in three years. Read that again, please.
Between January 1, 2015 and June 30, 2015, police in the United States fatally shot, on average, 2.6 people each day. Almost three people a day.
Training, training, training. You think? Or, perhaps, guns.
Why? Because everyone here has guns. Oh, you say, Second Amendment.
When I was growing up, this thing happened in a place called My Lai, a village in Vietnam. We were at war at the time. The government, our government, called it a war, at least. Our government had something of a sense of humor. If you want to call it that. Still does.
When the press found out about My Lai, and what happened there, they went what soldiers call “ape shit” about it. Frontpage headlines, photospreads in big magazines. So, the government made certain of two things. First, that this one guy, Lieutenant Calley, would be held responsible. This is what the military calls “the goat.” Second, that it would be made to seem like some kind of one-off incident. Like I said, a wonderful sense of humor. Like, “Hey folks, this sort of thing never happens...”
But this thing, this incident, this massacre of people and complete destruction of an entire village for no good reason, was not the responsibility of a single “goat,” not a “one-off” as it turned out, but simply one in a long and wide series of events guided by organized group-think. You know, what we call the “herd mentality.” And even though such things had occasionally occurred in wars previously, our wars and others’ wars, this was part of a new pattern of behavior in the American military. Apparently. We had a sense of group honor about war, or so we were told, and now we were losing it. And it became worse over time. This disillusion about the illusion of honor I mean.
Because we were losing this war. A war we had no business fighting in the first place. People, if you want to call them that, at the Pentagon, didn’t like losing that war. It left a bad taste in their mouths. Made them seem like...losers. Cost them lots of money, which they didn’t particularly care about, except that they lost the war in the end.
But the disillusion spread out like a sick amoeba as our veterans returned home, and as the public became more aware of what was going on “over there,” infecting every aspect of American life, each level of American society, and every Sacred Cow we possessed. It disrupted families and governments, schools and police departments, businesses and factories, unions, churches and museums. Within a decade of My Lai, hardly anything in America resembled itself any longer. The disillusion was complete.
And that’s why people turned to Ronald Reagan and his lies. To take us back to the “good old days” before My Lai.
As if he could.
He tried. Nancy tried. She said “no.” Like some old actress saying no could stop something. Nobody could. Because those good, gold old days didn’t really exist. But someone, lots of someones were hanging around, holdovers from the Vietnam era, especially in the Pentagon, waiting to make just the “right” changes to “correct” the problems.
It’s been hell ever since. It’s like trying to take the napalm off that running naked child in that famous photo. Physically impossible. Morally impossible. That’s what napalm does. You can’t stop it. You drop it from the sky and...oops. Thank you, Dow Chemical, you wonder of modern science and capitalism. You physical metaphor for the shitstorm we’ve been living through. The house has been burning down ever since.
The military tries to train people, but, as the saying goes, you cannot train people to be decent unless you train them to be decent. You can train them to be something else, though, if you try hard enough. Once more, mon lecteur, that wonderful difference between the exquisite metaphorical and the dynamic ramming down the throat. And after Vietnam, boy howdy, did they start ramming.
So, some of those Vietnam holdovers, like Donald Rumsfeld when he became Secretary of Defense for “Dubya,” changed the nature of our military, not wanting to lose another war, by dropping every metaphorical ounce of human and ideological decency from the military code. You cannot today wipe the indecency, the immorality from certain—not all, but so many—veterans’ behaviors, behaviors that have been taught to them by a military society that likes indecency, which then becomes pounded into them, usually, by a military that prefers them to become robotic and puts guns into their hands and tells them that people not like them are their enemy. Expect that kind of behavior from them, therefore, when they join our police forces at the local, state and federal level. Warriors they call themselves. Not soldiers any longer. Soldiers are now wimps.
Those vets then become our police officers and federal officials, like Border Patrol and TSA agents. And you don’t even have to have a gun or a fake gun any longer. You just have to “be in their way” now. Just stand there and if they don’t want you to be standing there you won’t be standing too much longer.

ABOUT THOSE RECIPES

I (finally) had an email from (I hope) a reader who complained (somewhat) about the fact that I didn’t actually have what she thought were supposed to be what I had called “recipes” (which was what she expected to find, apparently, like they appear on index cards or something...) in my books.

What do I look like, The Galloping Gourmet? (Actually, I look more like Miss Marple, but that’s something else...)

Yes, darlings, I have recipes in my books, just as promised, and there are at least two that I recall in the first one (which I assume is the one this nice lady read by virtue of what she referenced). But, just like Frank Gould, I don’t sit around measuring things out and telling people how long to cook in the books themselves! Really now! He’s a great cook but not a sous chef. And neither am I.

On the other hand if you want something like that, I’m always available to send you actual recipes if you ask. Well, sort of. I mean I actually cook the things Frank cooks, but most of them by the seat of my pants. Or from memory after years of having learned them from others, master chefs.

So, yes, I can send you “real” recipes if you’d like. More than happy to. But you would probably have to do a bit of deciphering to figure them out. A tiny bit of mystery-solving on your own, as it were. Not too much, but more than you might have to do from a regular cookbook, that’s for dang certain.

And, over time I will probably be working in some more complicated items that I really have written down because my memory isn’t that great. So I will be able to simply transpose. But, no, I’m probably never going to reprint the recipes ounce by ounce, minute by minute into the books.

You want them? Come and get them. You know where I am.

ON THE SUBJECT OF GENRE...AGAIN

Perhaps all you do is read one type of mystery. Well, these books of mine possibly aren’t going to be your cuppa tea. Or chai.

But, on the off chance that you do read other things once in a while (there are other things, you know) you might not mind the fact that something other than the ordinary formula you expect from X-genre or X-sub-genre is taking place.

You might not like mine still. That’s okay, too. Not your flask of latte. Do they serve latte in flasks? Put your name on it and everything? Now, there’s a new form! Or is that foam? No, that’s cappuccino, isn’t it?

Where was I? On the subject of genre...

Arguably, since my books deal so much with the question of coincidence, and coincidence in itself deals so much with the matter of fantasy, sort of, on one level at least—particularly the way I use it, the funny, non-fantasy kind of way—you could say the only genre I haven’t used so far (but I probably will cross over into inevitably, writing about theoretical particle physics or something) are science fiction and the western (who knows?).

Do I cross over into multiple genres in order to capture a wider audience? No. I do it because I cannot control my ideas and probably wouldn’t even if I could. Indeed, all this crossover probably costs me audience. Most readers, like most people, are fairly traditional and conservative in their tastes. They like things pat and dry (no offense if your name is Pat and you happen to like it wet…). They like the idioms and clichés that are specific to particular genres and sub-genres.

Many readers give up on writers who stray from well-trod patterns rather than being excited by experimentation and exploration, experiencing the thrill of new territories. They find excitement dull. Not challenging, but boring. The effort is tedious. Were it a train off the rails they would not find it so.

But they are not the engineers, are they? They are passengers and this “off the rails” is a kind of death. Not THAT kind but another kind. One does not read for strain, but for comfort.

I’m not here to criticize. I understand. Reading can be a mind-numbing pleasure. There’s no reason to scold people for this. Blessings upon them for this, indeed. But reading may also do more for some. There are those of us who can turn to reading for more.

Now, as I have often said, I am not writing Moby Dick. There is a middle ground, however. I am simply playing a different sort of game, experimenting with words and ideas within a genre. Serious literature, no. Well, not THAT serious. Serious experiment within a genre, yes. There rests the difference. I hope people can understand and respect this. And I hope people will take the time to see that it isn’t too much of a strain.

So far there has been no negative criticism of my book I cannot tolerate, and I am curious as to why. If I were more persnickety, which, honestly, I am, I would be negative about some things. It isn’t as if I were going to come over to your house and punch you in the face. I don’t even know who you are. Well, actually, I do know where one of you lives but you’re a sweetie.

One thing people tend not to like is the mixing of genres. In the fantasy/scifi genre they call it “genre bending.” Some people like it, but most don’t. My books certainly do mix genres a lot. If I didn’t like this, I’d certainly complain about it.

People who read mysteries not only have this genre they love, and read faithfully and voraciously, they also have very well-loved sub- genres. I am for the most part subverting them as an experiment. Outrageously and intentionally. Not as a joke. For a purpose. To an extent, at least, when I say intentionally, doing so at least somewhat without fault.

For example, when you design a cover there is only so much you can do. It is the number one advertising point. But it can be very misleading. My poor friend Blake designed the first one as best he could, not having read the book or understanding the complexity of this genre mix. He did a wonderful job considering all these handicaps. But the victim was the reader.

Perhaps. So if some reader is somewhat misled by the cover they might be angry, spending X dollars assuming it was a dark mystery/thriller that turned out to contain all this comedy and romance, philosophy, pet advice and whatnot. It certainly was not the fault of this commercial artist.

It wasn’t my fault either. I think. But I can imagine that complaint.

Then some said they couldn’t figure anything out and gave up reading after a few pages, which is fine. After all, as wise a reader as Doris Lessing said that’s exactly what you should do with any book and mine are no exception. She said hers were no exception and she won the Nobel Prize. But many such readers said they went back to it, took the time and voila discovered that doing so paid off. Others said it was still like being on an acid trip or something and they didn’t enjoy the effect. Well, acid trips in books have their own sort of genre, don’t they?

There are certain lines, let’s call it line A between what you write for children and what you write for adults, then line B between what you write for certain adults and certain other adults. Then there’s line C between what you write for those adults and certain others, let’s call them hardcore adults who just want, ahem, certain things.

My writing would be classified in B. That’s it. B for buzz buzz buzz as in birds and bees. That level of dealing with reality, or what I consider reality. Nothing too hardcore. Quite a bit of salty language in there because that’s the way people speak but nothing too hardcore in terms of actual sex on the page. Maybe as far as some people think the writing might be somewhat on the BARF side in terms of B. But for birds barf is very much what life is about, isn’t it, so a little bit of barf now and then ain’t such a bad idea, either.

You do barf sometimes on an acid trip you know.

But, really, it isn’t like that at all...

The In-and-Out of the Style

More than likely, if I had an editor, she’d say, “Take this out, take that out.”

That’s what editors do, especially these days. There’s a market humming out there, hungry for a new kind of “speed reading.”

There used to be a kind of speed reading, developed by a woman named Evelyn Wood. Helped people to absorb and read faster.

President Kennedy studied the Evelyn Wood technique to get through all the paperwork he had to do in a day. Yes, Presidents used to actually read all that stuff! Not like certain Presidents today...

That’s the good kind of speed reading.

Today’s kind is to whip down the writer and get her to write worse and/or shorter to make it easier for the reader to get through a badly written book.

“Well, just take that bit out,” my editor would say.

First, she’d tell me to take out the “Well.”

And if I did that, half the character of the character would disappear. You see.

Let’s get one thing straight at the outset. These mystery/thrillers I’m writing may not be what you think, what this current market has programmed you to read. The fans of But Tell It Slant (when it was originally published and as it is currently revised) loved it for what it was: the introduction to Frank Gould, a highly intelligent but slightly neurotic widower and detective caught in a chain of circumstances he was increasingly trying to control; his closest friends trying to help him; and his two biggest adversaries attempting to stop him.

However, it was also the introduction to a long, arcing storyline that would build, morph and twist over the course of these four books (and later more) moving back and forth through time, as well as inching sideways periodically in Frank’s mind, and this was something even the most ardent reader/fans at first found slightly vexing.

The text doesn’t always move you along at a lighting pace (although it does, frequently) because it purposely wants you to stop, go slow and think at points. Not the standard for today’s mass market. Sorry.

This is not made-for-TV writing. (Although, I wouldn’t mind a Netflix series, honestly! As long as they don’t screw it up the way you-know-who did you-know-what to you-know-who…).

So, if you don’t mind a bit of back and forth, up and down, along with your in-and-out (did I say that?) then you might be able to go along for the ride quite merrily (seat belts are still required, however…). And hand-held devices at your own risk. Sorry.

There are, really, actual books out there telling writers how to be successful today. Telling them to forget all about "quality" because readers don't care about that any longer. All readers care about is getting to the "point" as quickly as possible. Zip. Zoom. Reading as television.

If you don't care, fine. I may not have what you want. If you do, though...I still may not, but I'm giving it my best.

In Re "WE MUST AN ANGUISH PAY"...

First, my apologies to the readers of the first edition of this book. True, it remained a bit too mysterious and left you a bit too befuddled. Thus, this revision…for that and a few other reasons.

Yes, in order to create a better mystery, some mysteries have to be removed. Resolved. Undone. Some readers, to begin with, were troubled by the fact that certain elements one would expect brought to a grand sort of closure by some point never were. Closed.

Or that certain characters, introduced with some drama and at great length suddenly went POOF. Those particular factors have not changed. Let me clarify, then:

The first book in this series (and the four-book cycle is one story, remember) now newly titled BUT TELL IT SLANT (how clever) serves as a general introduction not only to the main character and most of the main characters but to the background for the entire story. This second book, then, builds off that background, attempting not to repeat too much of what was in the first book (hopefully!) while beginning to spin the actual story that progresses through these next three books (the third, now published, THEN THE LIST IS DONE, and the fourth, any year now, A RIDDLE AT THE LAST...).

So, these new elements that do not seem to find closure here will find closure later…these characters introduced will reappear later…maybe. Maybe not. Ah. Mystery.

At the same time, however, many other stories are being told.

Try to imagine it this way: If you go to a movie (and I hope you do, often, or at least watch as many as possible at home) during the average movie span of 90-120 minutes, you are being told between two and four stories. This is being captured on less than the equivalent of 30-40 pages of script (if you simply count the actual dialog and description, leaving out all the white space and hobby-gobby necessary to make a movie).

Your average novel runs 250-600 pages. Do the math. Yes, more detail, etc., but one does end up telling more than three or four stories between two covers if one is doing the job correctly.

For example, in WE MUST AN ANGUISH PAY, there are five major stories (all related, of course) and a plethora of minor stories told that support the major stories or, in some fashion develop the overarching storyline that carries over into the next two books (or reference back to the previous one). This would not necessarily be the case in a “standalone” novel where you still might have a structure with multiple storylines, however. You would not require these “backwards and forwards” references. Nor would they tax the reader, become, as some find them, confusing (so sorry).

As I see it, they should not be confusing. But then, I’ve written the damn thing. How would I know?

In our case, while Frank Gould is becoming more and more actively convinced about what Terry Blankenship told him during his tete-a-tete in book one, he’s also going about doing his job, being a snoop and a cook and a slightly neurotic nudge. Finding animals and errant spouses and lost whatevers. Until…well, we haven’t gotten past book two yet, have we? So, you’ll see.

But this is something that some readers have also found, let’s say, disturbing. “Get on with it!” they say. Well, again, from my perspective, I am doing just that. If the reader is impatient for the story to progress any faster, I can only suggest that they do something I have already suggested: go watch a movie.

Some other writers will write at a faster pace. I do not. Not usually. My readers have to be prepared to read. If this isn’t for you, I would ask that you at least give it a shot.

Those who have taken the time find it rewarding. Not all do. Not everyone likes chocolate, either. Some are even allergic. Not my call. Obviously, the bestseller list does not await.

Shame on me for lacking such ambitions. Horror of horrors. And I who have a cat to feed no less. Please don't tell her. She's so sensitive.

A BLAST OF GAS FROM THE PAST

This here (below) is more-or-less a copy of the final blog posted by my pseudonymous self, Deren, as he/I came forward, at last, to extinguish himself as a former GOODREADS author. Although you can still find him around somewhere. Gawd.

All the good stuff about what he did is there in his bravado tone, noted. Shame, shame. All that narcissism and the la-ti-da about all he's gonna do. Goody-goody.

Well, we know where that led.

Right here.

No four-book boxed set. There are trees to be saved in the jungles of Indonesia, pal. Get an iPad, you friggin' moron.

Well, no hissy-fits for me. That's just one item on the list. You can figure out the remainder for yourself. If you want to. I can't stomach it, myself... Here goes:

No matter what anyone has to say about what I write, and no matter what anyone calls it—cozy indeed—just being in the same room with Robert B. Parker and some of the other notables here, including some of my own friends, gives me goosebumps. That under the bridge…

Speaking of bridges, first, or second, I am moving, one of several reasons I have not been writing, here, lately. If any of you have ever relocated, and I’m certain that most of you have, it is often quite nerve-wracking to say the least. In my case it is more trauma inducing, having to leave my world of beasts, and even animals behind. Well, you can have the beasts, frankly, but I loved my animals, just about all of them. I watched several generations of them grow, named half of them, fed and cared for them day and night.

I’m feeling as though I should never have left New York. Well, maybe not that traumatic, but close.

But there you are. And here I am. Having to leave my little estate in the woods and move on to the city once again with its air pollution and noise. I wonder what I’ll be writing about in the future?

And back to this cozy thing…

These young misses in that cozy mystery place (www.goodreads.com/group/show/1357-coz...) aren’t talking about cozies at all, are they (you)? Not with the likes of Parker and Steve Martini? I never considered my book(s) cozy’s. (Hey, do you apostrophize that or not?) I thought putting a lot of humor into a mystery/thriller, like they do in Die Hard or Lethal Weapon only added to the mystery/thriller. Plus, I was trying to do something different altogether (maybe I didn’t succeed in that regard but…). Throw in all kinds of disparate elements and crack open the genre an itsy-bitsy bit. Not cozy at all. I’ve even thought about putting in some recipes. I know people like that, and I have plenty, oh brother do I. And not just for people. In fact, the third book has a couple. But not for people. It’s a tease, you might say. The second book has a lot of wine talk and travelogue. That’s very trendy in cozy mysteries, I know...

But cozy? Nah. I think it’s too tough for cozy, even with the humor. So, seeing that so many other books and authors being mentioned aren’t cozy, I suppose it’s okay.

Anyway, someone there, someone named Emily, said something about the first book, but I haven’t the faintest what it was. Apparently, she didn’t actually read the darn thing (that’s okay, Emily; no hard feelings) and there’s no way I can ask anyone about it because, well, I can’t. Rules be rules around here. Maybe she said something nice like, “I read all those great comments and I can’t wait to read it, but I’m just SO BUSY!” That would be cool. And I do have a thing for people named Emily, after all.

Speaking of being busy, I’ve been SO BUSY:

1) Revising books one and two for re-release in the four-book boxed set. Now, why do I keep calling it “book one”? Because, friends, I have changed the title. You Belong to Me was a mistake of epic proportions. I have made many in my life, but this was a doozy. I’d always planned to entitle the other three with lines or partial lines from Emily Dickinson’s poetry. But I chose to steal a line from an old song for that one due to sentiment. So, proof that you never let sentiment get in the way of hard-assed poetry.

2) Also revising for the sake of better reading (not mine; yours, silly). Most people who liked book one really liked it, and that’s great, but I did see some flaws that I wanted to correct. Then came book two (which I’ll keep calling “book two” even though I haven’t changed the title). Readers were ticked for reasons I won’t argue about. I needed to address those reasons, even though, at some gut level I did not want to. But I had already made the second book more readable on the basis of the way the first book had been received so, what the hell.

3) The third book has been very challenging because of its subject matter and the difficulty I’ve faced in pulling the disparate parts together (unfortunately, there are loads of disparate parts—I wonder if I am becoming dissociative…) and getting it all done in under 2500 pages. The fourth book, already mapped out, will only be a struggle writing because the telling of the story will be so difficult (and wouldn't you like to know...).

Last but, as the old baseball announcers used to say, not least in your yeast, I had to make an important decision that will affect us all here, first, in the following disruptive manner:

This will be the last Deren Beck post, for Deren Beck c’est morte…

In fact, Deren Beck, he never was.

If you look back a ways (how boring…) you’ll find a post or two where I discuss the matter of writing under a pseudonym and why I was doing so. Well, the most important of those reasons have essentially disappeared and when the four-book boxed set is published, with the newly revised first two books, all four books will be published under my real name.

These blogs will remain (I hope) or they will be repackaged somehow and archived under my new blog by-lined with my real name when that joyous day arrives. The same will be true for my other social media. But I am still here (or at deren@asnen.net) to respond to your plethora of questions. See you then.

IF YOU SHOULD KNOW ME, OR SHOULD YOU...

As in “Should you happen to know me,” not “Should you know me.” A statement. Not a question. Of course you should know me. I’m a genuinely nice person.

But in the end, that has nothing to do with whether or not you’ll want to spend any time or money on reading my books.

First... There ARE reviews of BUT TELL IT SLANT... You can find them on AMAZON. However, you will also find them under YOU BELONG TO ME by DEREN BECK, my old pen name, right here on good old GOODREADS. They were written by readers of that original (and second) edition way back when.

Even though SLANT has been significantly revised, the writing (as the writer!) is essentially the same...

What is more important, my life or my work?

A very small bit about me, then...

I was born and grew up in New York City, was schooled there (initially) but, for many reasons, felt drawn elsewhere. So, elsewhere I went...

I traveled across America and today I live in its heartland, more or less. Its heart is everywhere, don’t you think?

If I were Frank Gould, the main character in my detective series--and I am not Frank Gould, nor was I ever--and if Melissa (more or less the closest he has to a current “girlfriend”) were to be looking over my shoulder right now, she would tell me to place the second part of this “blog” first.

And, since I have a propensity to “pretend” when I write, let’s just pretend...

So I shall, for Frank always listens to Melissa when it comes to his writing. She being the better, award-winning writer...

When I publish a book and the good people on Goodreads, say, come back with their reviews and honor me with 4.7 stars (as they did way back when) it tells me something. I am never certain what, precisely, except that they are pleased with it.

Why? I don’t know. What are they pleased about? I don’t know.

Sometimes they say this or that and I get clues. That’s nice. But still I never know quite enough.

And that’s okay.

If I knew too much it might tend to tell me things I wouldn’t want to know, things that might cause me to write in a way I don’t normally. Get the picture?

From my personal point of view, people today read even less as a percentage than they ever have before in modern times. Of those who do read, readers tend to want to read what they are used to. They will wait months for the next Donna Leon or Elizabeth George or Tony Hillerman or Agatha Christie (good luck with that) rather than searching out something new or different.

For that tiny handful willing to take a chance on something new or different...

I’m am not what they are looking for.

Why? Because I break every mold.

No agent will touch my work because they cannot see a viable market for it. Not because I can’t write or the people who read my work don’t like it (obviously...4.7 stars?) but because it cannot be labelled.

No label, no market.

You could not find my market with the finest sequence of Galilean lenses.

I write in such a way, a non-marketable fashion purposely. And most people, particularly agents, cannot abide it for that reason.

In the same fashion that most people do not like jalapeno ice cream or chocolate in their kale salad.

Because I mix genres so freely that people literally (no pun) get confused. One finds the essence of Mickey Spillane and J.D. Salinger on the same page at times (and those were not my words; they come from a substantial critic...and a foreign one at that!). Comedy and tragedy bounce up against each other rather freely. Mystery and romance, thriller and philosophical treatise.

Oh! And the comedy!


If you take a look at my reviews, you will notice a kind of trend.

I spent some time (not enough, clearly) trying to understand marketing when I first published these little darlings. Now I have a friend in marketing who tells me I have to find my “niche.” I guess it’s kind of like looking for your bliss.

Well, my niche, as best as it can be found or defined, is pretty obvious and making itself known in those reviews.

The people who have read, or read partially, or claim to have read my books and not liked them, all say basically the same thing. “What? I don’t get this at all.”

That’s fair.

While others, when detailed, also all say the same thing: "It took me time to make it out, but once I did... POW!!! What a payoff!"

I feel genuinely sorry for (most) agents who have had to read my manuscripts. They must wonder if I am some Latin American writer, some Ricardo Piglia, a version of Roberto Bolano or Roberto Arlt.

BUT I’M NOT, HONEST. I’m from BROOKLYN. Originally...

I only pretend to be something other than I’m not at times... Like when I write. Or when I’m in the shower, which is, often, when I do some of my best writing. Like, I wrote this when I was in the shower... Not that this was my best...

TRUE CONFESSIONS

Hello. My name isn’t Deren Beck.

My name is Alan Asnen.

That’s my real name. Why would anyone lie about a name like that. Think about the possibilities for mispronunciation. Not the “Alan” part.

Some of you already know me, but know me under a disguise, under a pseudonym. I’ve been calling myself “Deren Beck” for a while.

I’ve written, and at some length, about the reasons for this. So, I won’t go into that. Yet. You can look it up, as the old baseball announcers used to say. Somewhere.
But, those days are over.

Awwww.

First, speaking from my materialist side, it was an awful mistake, that Deren Beck thing. Even my friends warned me it would be.

Second, the biggest reasons for doing this, using that (or any) pen name no longer apply. Almost all the people I was trying to protect with that pen name no longer require my protection. Indeed, the only character in my books now of concern, Robin, is being confused with so many different women, that it has become something of a joke.

So, Deren Beck, c’est mort.

It has become easier to do this, to kill him off, as it were, now, because those books, for some reason no one can fathom, despite being so well-received, here and elsewhere, did not sell very well.

Actually, Deren Beck didn’t sell very well, and the title of the first book, YOU BELONG TO ME, was an absolute disaster. So, au revoir Deren and, with the new revision of the first two books also comes a new title for the first book.

That’s really all I wanted to say, here, about that. But there’s much more to say. So, please, go on to:
“IF YOU SHOULD KNOW ME, OR SHOULD YOU...”

Thanks. And keep reading. Something.