Welcome to NOWHERESVILLE, a somewhat irregular dose of new writing, old writing, excerpts, observations, self-help (if you need help hating yourself) and assorted other forms of literary discharge.
After ten books, a gang of film & television, busloads of journalism and, in my twenties, the anonymous stint doing the Penthouse Forum advice column – Dear Penthouse, my girlfriend’s into yarmulke-play…. it’s time to give back, damn it.
Having just signed on to do a collection of old journalism (and by old I mean pre-internet) and other assorted writing, I’ve been sort of forced into reading a lot of my own early prose. A task I do not recommend.
I don’t know about you, but I would rather have testicle surgery, on horseback, performed by Special-K crazed lumberjacks than look at my own old writing.
This has nothing to do with quality. (Who am I to judge?) Nor, for what it’s worth, is it the subject matter that has me eating me arms. No. For any writer, be they novelist, journalist, or pro haiku master, a collection is is about facing the inescapable evidence of just who you were at a certain time in history. As witnessed by what you chose to write about, how you chose to write it and – this is awkward – how fucked up you were when you wrote it. (And by “you,” of course, I mean “me.”)
See, my idea of Gonzo journalism – a movement for which I was (story of my life) born a little too late – was getting fucked up, plunging into some strange world, then writing about how weird and uncomfortable it was to be there. A system employed for just south of a decade or three, until, somewhere in the Clinton administration, I stopped sticking needles in my neck and realized – quel surprise! – I could feel just as alienated and uncomfortable in my own skin without taking any heroin at all. Win-win!
One way or another, embarrassingly enough, I’ve been in print since the 70s. And until my first book, Permanent Midnight, in 95 – before that I’d banged out six unpublished novels, but who’s counting? - I was convinced that writing without dope was a rank impossibility. All the good adjectives were in the syringe. Of course, giving up coke and heroin does have a way of altering one’s work. But not how you might think. I remember once, in a fit of panic, whining to the great Hubert Selby Jr., the man who more-or-less saved my life, that I was afraid, if I gave up drugs, I would “lose my edge.” His response – after he finished laughing in my face – was fairly brutal. And absolutely accurate.
Great to have you on Substack, Jerry.
Sitting in the backyard’s morning light, reading and laughing. Yes, yes, yes!
Thanks Jerry😎😘