Thank you so much for this. I might be processing that time in...

Thank you so much for this. I might be processing that time in my life a bit too and you’re so right nobody that read that fic when it came out is the same person now. My partner also reminded me I did more research for Juicy fruit than my graduate thesis and I did a lot of research for my graduate thesis haha.

My dad died about 2/3 through writing, like right around the time shit goes dark in the story and that was hard. The last time I saw him I was moving out of my apartment in Oakland and he came to help load the heavy furniture into the truck. I hadn’t known he’d relapsed, but maybe that was mostly willful ignorance on my part. I knew he hadn’t been doing well for awhile.

So I was being my usual writer self and asking lots of questions about drugs in the 80s, running bits of of the plot by him like “okay but does this sound right? Would it be like this?” He did a little dealing but really only to support his own habits. (although I think he had some brief financial success growing marijuana in central California in the early 80s.)

We ordered Chinese food and I played him the music I’d been collecting that sorta captured the era for me. For me the story is this weird fever dream of popular films like Born in East LA & Scar Face where I pull a lot of the Spanish slang, but also I’m trying to bring elements of Gregg Araki’s cult classic The Living End, that indie queer cinema gritty cool, which is where a lot of my obsession with the music comes from. My dad was more of a Led Zeppelin kinda guy, but he endured my obsession with emo punk influences of the late 80s congenially enough. Then I drove to Oregon in the morning and 3 months later he was dead.