And Here's How You Can Help

I've decided to take to the streets.  No, I'm not joining any Occupy movement.  I mean I am going to target small presses to get my memoir, Junkie Love, published, on my own, grass roots and all that.  I do much better being hands-on anyway. Sitting back and waiting for my agent to hear back from the big houses has been killing me.  It's not like the smaller, independent presses are going to necessarily respond any faster (or at all), but I'll be the one doing the sending and receiving, having direct exchanges, which doesn't really change anything, I know.  But it sure makes me feel like I am doing something more than sitting on my (finely toned) ass, checking my e-mail six billion times.  (Actually, it won't change that last part, will it?)

It's really a no-brainer, when you look at what I am after.  It sure ain't the money. The standard, average advance for a first book is about seven grand, I hear.  Some authors get more of course, and if you are a barely literate, fat tart living in New Jersey, I'm sure Harper Collins (or whoever published that drivel) is handing out six figures.  And they should.  I may not be a fan of fat tarts or reality TV in general, but I understand the value of name recognition.  Publishing crap like Sookie (or is it Snookie?  It's so hard to tell vampires apart from fat tarts these days.  And, yes, I know, technically Sookie is a fairy.  Which is why I stopped watching True Blood) might allow an editor to take a flyer on something a little riskier.  And even if that isn't my book, that is still a good thing.  And it is reading.  If barely.

Another personality trait/life circumstance that lends itself well to my going with a small press is my ability to bang my head against a wall longer than you (universal). I am relentless in promoting my art, and I am a machine when it comes to routine and schedule.  I could be better at time management, I'm sure, but my tenacity is never in question.  Small presses require the author to do more legwork.  True, I have an arthritic hip, rendering my right leg all but useless, but my other leg works pretty well.  Most importantly, this is what I do.  After the wife and kid, of course, it is what is most important.  The work, my livelihood and passion and all that crap. Who better to have for an advocate for you than you?

Problem is, I'm sorta flying blind here.  Like a newly divorced 50-year-old suddenly on the prowl again, only fatter, balder, and with no fucking idea how to use an iPad, iPhone, or iTouch (there's a double entendre in there somewhere).  I may not be fat. Or bald.  And, yeah, I'm really really good looking, but that doesn't mean I know jack about how to get publishers, big or small, to read my book.  Which is half the goddamn problem.  Of the myriad rejections we received, the vast majority were assumed.  Meaning, we never heard back one way or the other.  Strikes me as unprofessional not to even respond, but I miss a bunch of submissions for Lip Service West, so who am I to complain?  I am guessing publishers get a lot more submissions than I do for my bi-monthly reading series.  You need a really catchy query, and this book doesn't exactly lend itself to that.  I am convinced, if I can get people to actually read the damn thing and give it a chance, someone has got to see the value in it.  It's all about the query.

(Sorry for another LOL Cat, but my wife and her friend in Micronesia simply can't get enough of them.  Justine and Liz are always, like, "Nice blog--but please please please more LOL Cats!"  So here you go, Liz and Justine.)

I have a few strikes working against me.  One is the whole "junkie" thing.  The memoir is about more than just the drugs.  In fact, the real heart of the story is probably my relationship with my mom.  Probably should think about changing the title, which Michele and I did for the last round we sent out (to Boys of Belvedere), but it didn't seem to make any difference, and the title is Junkie Love.  But using the word junkie is a lot like using the word vampire in a title these days.  Vampire books sell like crazy, but those are the ones that are accepted.  I can only imagine how many frumpy, oversexed housewives and gaunt, pale men who look like Alan Cummings are inundating inboxes with yet another shit novel about the undead. I'm sure as an editor even sees the word vampire, he/she wants to scream.  Not sure "junkie memoir" elicits that different a reaction.  And there is another thing junkies and vampires (http://tinyurl.com/3ry9mx8) have in common, kinda like this dinosaur book.

Anyhow, here's how you can help.  If you are reading this blog, chances are you are a writer, or know one, or know someone who published with a small press.  Most importantly, you know what I do.  If you know the name of a indie publisher, or have a database that lists some of them, I'd sure appreciate it if you'd pass that information along.  I'll buy you a beer next time I see you.*

* Meaning if you ever find where I live and/or are invited into my house.  I have no plans to leave any time soon.  I've got a new book to finish.  

50K & Self-Publishing

By the time this goes up, we will be at, or very near, 50K hits (thanks).  I set out writing this blog to show publishers that people will buy my book(s) should they publish it/them.  In just under 10 months, we've hit this nice, round number, which is slightly deceiving, since for the few first months, no one besides my wife and Jimmy were reading the damn thing.  The majority of these page views have occurred within the last 6 months, with more and more logging on every week.  Publishers, however, have yet to jump on the Joe Train, apparently unpersuaded by my obvious marketing platform, rock star persona, and unparalleled pop culture knowledge (i.e., ability to post You Tube clips featuring cats).  Which leaves us with the big question: if we haven't landed the lucrative book deal, what, exactly, has this experience taught us.  Two things. Some people like cat videos.  Some people like Danzig.  And never the twain shall meet.  That is...until now.

*

Went back east for Thanksgiving.  Flew with the boy and the wife, and the kid cried the entire 5 hours into Boston.  Poor Justine was forced to walk the aisles as my son screamed, and we were that asshole couple.  Before I had a child, I, like all childless people, looked down on parents whose baby caterwauled an entire flight, with disdain.  Didn't really think about what they could do, only thought it about it from my point of view.  Which was, if you can't get your kid to shut up, don't fly on my fucking plane.  But perception is 9/10ths of the law. On the other side now, I sat back, fairly relaxed, as clearly irritated passengers glowered at me.  I could only shrug, as if to say, What the fuck do you want me to do?  He's a baby.  Sorry my aunt died and I feel compelled to go back east for Thanksgiving to visit family I've been ignoring, because in the end all you have is family and it's pretty goddamn important to make the effort, sorry my year-and-a-half old son doesn't understand why his ears feel funny and is unable to process why he can't hear or comprehend this new, awful feeling, and that his pain has interrupted your 36 channels of Direct TV programming.


I won't fly anything other than Jet Blue.  Justine, when she's booking our flights, prefers Southwest.  Or as P. Scott Cunningham calls it, Greyhound in the Sky.  I ain't flying fucking Southwest when I'm paying for the flight.  I've ridden enough actual Greyhounds that it simply isn't worth saving the $60-some-odd bucks to sit cramped next to unwashed sweaty people on upholstery that stinks like canned green bean casserole.


Anyway, that's why I didn't post much last week, and everything I did post had been written in advance, so I feel like I am just getting back.  And I missed writing a blog daily.  I missed the routine.  And the attention.


Sitting around on Saturday night, I was Googling my own name (yeah, that's what I do with my Saturday nights).  And I found this.

No 1: email Joe Clifford

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, Joe Clifford is a talented writer without a book deal. He blogs at Candy and Cigarettes and his stories can be found at various places in the online world. For me Joe is a classic example of the publishing problem, ranking pretty high on my should be published list. Joe plays this down, but the issue remains.

Joe also replied to the email, to my utter shock. He was pretty nice about it too. He kindly mentioned Railroad on his blog and said that he would send some poetry our way. To Joe my email was just a compliment from a reader, which was cool with him. To me – it felt like I was disturbing Kerouac in flow.

I would like to thank Joe for showing his support to an underground project but also for smashing my perception of ‘established’, or as he would put it, ‘visible’ writers. From here on, I’ll contact anyone I think can push things forward, I’ll contact anyone I goddamn like, in the name of writing – of course. Hell – I might even pen that letter to Ferlinghetti.

J.L

That's from Jade Willets's blog, What Would Neal Do? (http://jlwilletts.wordpress.com/tag/kerouacs-dog-magazine/).  He's the editor of Railroad Poetry Project (http://railroadpoetryproject.wordpress.com/), which you may recall requested some poetry from me (http://tinyurl.com/3m6cdvo). I'm not going to keep milking a nice e-mail, except that I found Jade's blog post a few hours before I received an e-mail from my agent, Michele, who, in light of our inability to find a publisher, uttered those two dreaded words.

Self-publishing.

Well, I guess that's one word, actually, compounded and all.  

It's been hanging over my head now for months, a worst case scenario.  I had a lot of sayings I lived by back in my drug days, one of which being, If it's worst comes to worst, it's gonna be worst.  Or as Lou Reed says, "The path of least resistance leads to the garbage heap over there"...

I signed with CGS Literary/MDM Management two years ago, a two-year contract, which is up this January.  The agency was so thrilled with my memoir, Junkie Love, and we had so much interest right off the bat that I thought it was a forgone conclusion I'd have a book deal by now.  I don't fault Michele, who has never wavered in her faith in that book or in me.  If I blame anyone, it's this cocksucker.

That's James Frey, the lying douche bag who ruined it for all recovering junkies looking to cash in on a lifetime of bad decisions.  I mean, I am too fucking old to go out and find a new way to fuck up my life and come back from the dead. There's nothing to be proud about living life as I did, a derelict scumbag.  Still, it's somehow extra offensive to me that this guy tried to take credit for having survived something he couldn't have.  It takes a certain kind of person to live the way I did.  Not better.  Not worse.  OK.  Probably worse.  Still, they were my mistakes and resurrection, and I resent manscaped hipster douche bags trying to hone in on my action.  Or to quote the Hold Steady, "You want the scars but you don't want the war"...

I've been told repeatedly that publishers are leery of the junkie memoir now. But the more time that goes by, the less I can accept that.  It's in my best interest to believe it, and to blame James Frey.  But I can't.  Not really.  I don't know why publishers won't take my memoir.  There has been a universal recognition that the writing is terrific (it's hard to argue that it's not).  Still, there can only be one reason why I don't have that book deal.

My book isn't good enough.

Relax.  I don't need a pep talk, nor do I need consoling messages telling me to hang in there.  I know what I have here.  It's a damn good book. But publishers aren't in this business to promote the arts; they are in it to make money.  And you can't fault them for that.  No one's arguing that fat tart from the Jersey Shore got a book deal because of her deft ability to turn a phrase.  By saying my memoir isn't good enough, I only mean that publishers don't see a way to make money off it.  I think it would, obviously.  I am extremely attractive, and charming in short bursts, which I think would be a boon on any book tour.  But I don't make these calls.  I don't have a say in any of it.  All I have control over is the work.  Right?

Maybe.  Maybe not.  The publishing industry is changing (with pioneers like former Soft Skull publisher Richard Nash leading the way http://rnash.com/), and there are all sorts of avenues now available to writers.  One of them is self-publishing.  Michele works with a fairly discriminating e-publisher.  It wouldn't cost any money. And if we sold enough books, perhaps it would entice traditional publishers to take a chance, that is if I didn't tell them to go fuck themselves when they came calling.  Revenge fantasies and all.

I often hear from people that they would buy my book should it be made available, and with 50K readers in just under 10 months, one could make the argument that there are potential buyers.  Then again, when I shamelessly whored myself for the Best Blogger Awards, I got, like, 7 votes.  So who's to say?

In the end, however, I can't self-publish my memoir for the simple reason that it doesn't satisfy my ultimate goal, teaching writing at the university level.  Plus, news of my "book deal" wouldn't make former classmates want to stab themselves in the eye with a fork, overcome with jealously and feelings of inadequacy.  I'd just be another guy with a make-believe book, indistinguishable from Aunt Edna's Jams of the South and all the grammatically incorrect, plotless fantasy novels about mystery-solving magic unicorns. In short, I'd be no different than this guy.

I don't need a book deal for the money (which is good, 'cause there ain't shit to be made in books).  I'd like the fame and adoration, sure, because I am a big ball of empty inside.  The most important aspect of writing, however, is the audience.  Which I sort of have with this blog (soon to be new and improved), and the short stories, etc. (seriously, thanks for reading).  Plus, like every cynic (and men who dress like mauve unicorns), I am a romantic at heart, and I have to believe, eventually, an editor will see what I know is in that memoir, something good, something special, something worthwhile.  And if not?  There are worst things than knowing you've created something you're proud of.  


Or as Gluehead used to say, "I don't do felonies for free."  

(*The best compliment I ever got for Junkie Love came from Gluehead.  He said, "[It] makes James Frey's A Million Little Pieces look like the Bernie Mac Show."  Not really sure what that means, but it sure sounds cool.  I included that quote in agent query letters.)

Tom Pitts & Hepatitis Heights Pt. II

Got another piece of flash fiction taken today over at my current favorite ezine, Shotgun Honey (http://www.shotgunhoney.net/).  700 words or less.  Their tagline: a blast of fiction to blow your mind.  They published my short story "Chain Reaction" a few months back, which led to my Bullet Award (http://tinyurl.com/44gymlb), a recognition of short crime fiction on the web.  It might not come with a paid fellowship or booth at AWP.  But it gets my name out there and seen by the writers I admire most these days, a list of modern noir's who's who (Todd Robinson, Thomas Pluck, Paul D. Brazill, et al).  When I got the e-mail that SH was taking my latest "Copperhead Canyon," I wrote my former partner-in-crime, best buddy, and fellow aspiring writer, Tom Pitts, who just read (a record third time) for my non-fiction reading series, Lip Service West (where we believe firmly in nepotism), at this year's Litquake Litcrawl.  I usually don't read at these things myself, since I produce the event, but this was a special occasion (http://tinyurl.com/439pp85).  Though I was careful to separate Tom and I.  Like I told the packed house on Saturday, we tell the same story.

If you read this blog regularly, you know that Tom and I were junkies together up at Hepatitis Heights, the decrepit ol' crumbly house high on the hill above SF General. But I always thought of us more like brothers in a shared, trapped misery, like a Billy Joel song (that works on so many levels).

And when I say Tom and I tell the same story, I mean it quite literally.  The story he read on Saturday night involved injecting mice feces, something I myself have done; and if you are finding yourself shaking your head in disbelief, asking why on God's green earth would anyone do that, all I can say is, you'd understand if you lived the way we did.  Not that I'd wish that on anybody.

When I texted Tom that Shotgun was taking another story, he texted back, Congrats, Fuck You.  Tom had been trying to get into that same magazine but no luck.  Until today.  Because he wrote back a few minutes later, saying to never mind the "fuck you"; he'd just got an e-mail from SH telling him they are taking one of his stories, too.  I asked him, Did you ever think all those rotten years when we living up at Hepatitis Heights that some day we'd be clean, have kids, and getting stories published in the same magazine?

This sort of shit never ceases to amaze me.  Like running into someone from your hometown while backpacking through Europe.  It was like when I went back for my 20th high school reunion. I'd see these people I knew all those years ago, especially the girls, only now they were women, with kids and shit, but you could still see that girl inside you were crushing on at 12 (Hi, Anne & Tracy), and I wanted to be ask, Can you believe we're the same people?  But I didn't.  Because they'd think I was as weird as I was when I was 12.  Which I am.  But it's like we traveled in a time machine, or it's some sci-fi alternate universe.  It's a goddamn John Woo film.

Where I am you, and you are me (and who the fuck is that?)  Because so much changes, and yet so much doesn't.

Of course, you have the regret.

I know Tom does.  Just like me.  I hope you'll forgive an old man a little moment of melancholy and nostalgia.

Tom wrote a song a while back with his band, Short Dogs Grow, which was pretty big in the '80s.  The band.  Not so sure about the song.  But I love this title.  Or maybe it's just a line.  "I don't want the money back.  I just want the time."  We wasted a lot of both.  The first time I heard the song was a few years ago at the Eagle, when Short Dogs reunited for this DVD that had just come out, a documentary about the Chatterbox, a punk bar in SF.  I went to see him play with my then-fiance/now wife, Justine.  It was surreal, running into so many old faces, in such an old scene, everything the same yet somehow radically different.

I'm not being overly dramatic when I say I really thought we were both going to die back then.  And the tragedy of that is, it was no big deal.  Like, hey, it might rain later, or we're out of milk.  Oh, well.  Those times have been reduced to a series of anecdotes that both Tom and I tell, ("Hey, remember doing coke with David Bowie's drummer in that motel?"), but each time we tell them, we do so with less conviction, almost out of obligation, like when ex-Army pals get together over beers and reminisce about the old platoon, because, goddammit Charlie Finnegan might've been an asshole, but he was a good man and a fucking patriot.  And in many ways, there lingers this almost PTSD aftereffect.  Whenever something goes wrong these days in my life, however seemingly small, my mind can immediately spiral out of control back to that place.  If I bounce that check, then the bank will close my account, and I'll get a a disease, and eventually it ends with my living back under the bridge.

Not that I actually ever lived under a bridge.  That's just a euphemism.  Though I doubt it could've been worse than that shitburg on the hill.  No running water. Overstuffed black trash bags, reeking in the hall, because garbage men long ago stopped collecting our garbage.  Which is what happens when you don't pay the bill.  We didn't pay any bills.  We didn't pay rent, either.  We squatted, even if we couldn't actually take a shit in the house, fucking toilet so clogged with Lord only knows what.  We'd have to walk all the way down to the hospital to use a bathroom. The place was crawling with mice. They'd get in your hair, in your clothes when you slept.  There was always some ex con du jour crashing there, and as reprehensible as some of the people I'd hang out with, they were seldom dangerous. But you'd get these monsters just released from San Quentin, who'd come up there, beat the shit out of anyone holding, maybe rape a girl, y'know, a typical Wednesday.  And this was my home.  All I really had was Tom, who'd disappear for long stretches at a time, but he'd always come back.  Like a Yo-Yo. Or a foot fungus.

I remember I'd find Tom, holed in the corner on this beat-up desktop computer he hauled around with him everywhere he went, which contained all his stories, furiously typing away. Made no sense to me at the time.  I still played music, but I'd long given up on its being anything more than a hobby.  My life was scamming, stealing, scoring, repeat.  But I think Tom actually believed he'd get out one day, and that he would be a writer.

When I cleaned up and got my degrees, I was far from San Francisco.  I just assumed that like Junkie Jason and so many others, Tom was probably dead. The odds were certainly against both of us making it out of there.  That's what he said when I finally tracked him down (and I do mean "tracked"...).  I got his email address and typed him a message, something like "This is Joe from Hepatitis Heights."  He wrote back, "Oh, I see you made it out too."

Now we both have families, kids, and are getting stories published in the same magazines.  Life is some trippy ass shit.  But it sure is a nice feeling to know we both made it home.  So here's to my brother from another mother...

Top Five Break-Ups

I spend so much time culling, paying homage to, imitating, alluding to, referencing, etc., High Fidelity, I figured it was time I outright stole from it.


High Fidelity is one of those very rare times when the movie is better than the book. And this is no knock on the Nick Hornby novel.  Which is damn good. The movie, however, is fucking great, a study in the power of restraint, proving that it's the notes you don't play that makes the real difference.  When you read the book and compare it with the film, you see the choices director Stephen Frears made regarding what to leave out, how to take 300 pages and make it into (roughly) the best 90 minutes possible, and you can't help but be impressed by his (as the kids say) mad editing skills.  He left a lot of good jokes on the cutting room floor, I'm sure.  But what he left though, as a whole, in my humble estimation, is virtually flawless, a perfectly crafted expose on the subjects of growing up, girls, and rock 'n' roll, three of my favorite things (most of the time).


When I was going through my second divorce, I must've watched that movie 50 times.  It became like a mantra, a new Breakfast Club, a movie my brother Josh and I saw so many times when we were kids, we could quote every line of it, from start to finish.


The divorce probably played a perverse part in how much satisfaction I garnered from watching High Fidelity, like listening to the sad songs after she's gone; it made me feel somehow less...lonely.  But everyone should see it, even if they're not getting divorced.  Because it's such a brilliant film.  It's so funny, and violent, and the soundtrack kicks ass...


Sorry.  This is about my personal humiliation.  Not my ability to steal, word for word, from movies and pass it off as my own.


So without waiting any longer, my Desert Island, All-Time, Top Five, Most Memorable Break-ups (in Chronological Order) are as follows...


1. Tracy B.
2. Amy K.
3. Julie
4. Hadley
5. Marla


(Do you see your name on this list, [insert ex-wife's name here]?  You could maybe sneak into the Top Ten.  But, I'm sorry, there's just no room for you in the Top Five.  It's reserved for the type of heartbreak you're just not capable of... Sorry, I should stop doing that.  It's mean.  I found out a little while ago that my ex-wife reads this damn thing, which is about the funniest shit I ever heard. I really don't harbor any will toward her.  She's just funny to use as, y'know, a punchline.  Not much else you're getting from a marriage that lasts six months. [But, really, (insert ex-wife's name here), you should stop reading this.  Ain't nothing I say is going to make you feel good...]).


I've decided to change names, or at the very least stop using last names.  Even though it's pointless since everyone knows damn well who most of these girls are (and even if they didn't, I will no doubt post a link to an old blog post in which I give her full name, which I won't go back to change, not out of any artistic principle, but because I am too fucking lazy).


1. Tracy B.  


It's hard to classify this as a "break-up" since we never actually dated.  And don't I mean as in "technically."  Didn't come close to dating.  No walks by the pond holding hands.  No love love letters.  No first slow dances in the Berlin High gymnasium (Melissa Cote, where have you gone [sigh]...).  We threw some snowballs at cars when we were 10, and once we went to the Berlin Fair together (http://tinyurl.com/3o2r86t) when I was 12.  My "relationship" with Tracy didn't even last six hours (not for two hours, neither before or after The Rockford Files, for 3 days in a row).  And there was no Kevin Bannister (there was this guy named, I think, Darnell, later on in high school, and I guaranfuckingtee you he's bald by now, but he didn't steal her, because by then I was firmly entrenched in the art room with the ugly kids, and Tracy had risen to the ranks of the ridiculously popular).  It would be nice to think times have changed, skin's thicker...but like Allison Ashmore, there has been an element of the heartbreak I felt over Tracy my whole goddamn life. She was the first girl to truly break my heart. I don't think she ever knew it (well, she does now, dipshit). I remember seeing her in school and wanting to say the right thing, but even then I was so riddled with insecurity, knew something wasn't right inside me, the black dog and darkness taking over; I felt like there was a spotlight on my every move, and the world was just waiting for me to say or do the wrong thing so it could pounce on me... Of course, the world wasn't thinking about me any more than Tracy was thinking about me.  But I'd still sweat and smell like Good Seasons salad dressing (http://tinyurl.com/3lr686s), acting self conscious as hell.  She was just a girl  I could've probably asked out when I was 12, but instead I kept all that love inside, the poetry I wrote for her a secret, so that any time I did see her, I mostly stared at her shoes, smelled like salad dressing, and mumbled incoherently.  Like a kid who kept a box of pet worms and ate Play Doh. Fucking weirdo.  No wonder I didn't have a date to prom.


2.) Amy K.


If you want to know Amy's last name, you only need look at my song catalogue, which contains, last I checked, 412 songs written about her (including, but certainly not limited to, "The Last Song about Amy Krois, Pt. I").  But like Tracy, I didn't really date Amy either.  I had had actual girlfriends by the time I met Amy in college but no one I loved like her.  Jesus, I was crazy about her.  And at this point, you can probably note a certain obsessive theme emerging, and nothing--and I mean fucking nothing--scares off a girl like desperation.  And, oh, my brother, was I desperate. You could smell it on me the second I walked in a room (if you could distinguish it from the Good Seasons fragrance), frantically searching whatever I thought I could save me from myself at that particular moment.  I let nothing come to me, skin too tight, unable to relax.  I chased it hard.  So even when a girl did like me, like Amy did, very much at one point, I suffocated the life out of whatever chance we may've had.  But it all worked out in the end.  I got songs to write about.  I hear she married a bald dude and lives in China.  Win-win.


3.)  Julie


Julie and I actually did date (http://tinyurl.com/3d7uqrp).  We moved to San Francisco together.  And it was like a Tom Waits song.  We drank.  We fucked. We fought.  She'd cheat on me, and I'd get fucked up and throw all her clothes out into the street. Then we'd make up and fuck and one of us would move back in. Then I'd say I was moving to New Mexico, pack up everything I owned into my little red hatchback, and hit the open road and buy like, 18, cartons of cigarettes at an Indian Reservation in Arizona (American Spirits, of course), and chain smoke and meet weird dudes in motels and spend all night on speed in the dessert, conversing with cacti, and then when I'd come down, I'd go back to San Francisco, swearing I'd never see her again, only to end up at her place that night.  And for many many years after we broke up for good, through all the nasty exchanges and polite dinners, the lanes and the miles that separated us, I never really acknowledged just how much she'd meant to me, because it hurt too damn much.  I'd been young and wild and full of it, and I'm not any of those things anymore.  And it's only been recently that I've come to terms with the hole she left in my heart.  Because I loved her very much.


4.)  Hadley


Don't really need a last name for Hadley.  Everyone who knows me, knows about Hadley  And if you don't, you can read my memoir.  Though not published in book format (yet), you can find various selections scattered across the Internet (just look at the right hand side of my blog).  They say a man gets married a second time because he loved his first wife, and a woman gets married a second time because she hated her first husband.  I loved my first wife very much.  But we were young, and I had that drug problem, and she was...afflicted...and we were pretty much doomed from the start.  There's nothing I can write here any better than I wrote about her in my memoir.  I'm happy to send you a copy (or you can hunt down Big John on the streets of San Francisco.  I hear he's still passing them out...)


5.) Marla


This was a weird one.  She was the first girl I dated after the second divorce. And for most of that time, I took her for granted, didn't see much of a future for us.  She was pretty, I liked her enough, but we didn't seem to have a whole lot in common, and now freed from the shackles of a terrible mistake, I wasn't looking to jump back into another one.  Plus, I lived in Miami.  She lived in Berkeley. I met her through my buddy, Rich, while I was visiting SF.  She was a friend of his ex-wife.  We carried on this long-distance thing for a few months, and for most of it I was still getting over my (second) ex-wife.  Which is what makes this so damn odd, a wound that lingered long past unexpected.  Because that second ex-wife, once the initial hurt passed, faded from my memory.  It was like a bandaid over a scab.  One quick pull, a little skin ripped off, some blood, a scream.  Then it heals.  Marla?  She was a slow, dull ache, a motorcycle accident cutting the story mid-sentenc...


That's it.  Not terribly funny stuff, I know.  And now let me do a little damage control.  Because my current wife, the lovely Justine, reads all these posts.  And though I tell her (over and over again) that I love her most of all, Justine still gets a little emotional reading about my past loves, and understandably so. Can't say I'd be anxious to read about all of her heartbreaks and questions of what might've been.  But what my lovely wife needs to understand is this: I'M A MUTHERFUCKING WRITER.  This is what I do.  Mine the depths of personal humiliation and put it on public display.  Because my heart is a black, gaping hole of need.  And one love can never be enough.  I need you all to love me. More, more, more, more.  Plus, I want the hits.  I write, "And then I lived happily ever after in my big house, with my adorable son and loving wife, and it's all puppy dogs, sunshine, and (double rainbows)," I'd get less hits than Aunt Betty's Blog of Homemade Jams.


Now let's close with some delightful outtakes from a terrific, terrific film.


Who needs a drink?

Yeah, that about does it.