A bus trip from Storrs, CT to upstate New York, modified by a fictitious drug similar in action to LSD, turns into a search for meaning for a 25 year old author/artist/college student. Mentored by an often sadistic shaman/teacher our antihero is led through his own past, present and future in a barrage of sometimes euphoric, often terrifying confrontations with his own mind. Standing somewhere between the Beat poets and renegade authors like Bukowski and J.P. Donleavey, this novel, written in 1994, was my first attempt at the "great American novel" archetype. It's a coming of age novel. It's a love story. It is a political commentary on middle to lower class America, and an indictment of the campus drug scene. It is about struggling. It is about failing. It is about succeeding. It's a snap-shot of college life in the 90s, warts and all.
I was born in Bristol, Connecticut, 54 years ago. At 24 years old, I wrote this novel. Four years later, I published the first very limited edition of 50 softcover books. Thirty years later than that, I actually decided to proofread it.
At the time it was written, I was enamored with the Beat poets as well as renegade authors, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Burrows, Bukowski, Donleavy, and others. "First thought, best thought" was a concept that I clung to. In my mind, I treated this novel as if it were Kerouac’s 120-foot-long scroll of tracing paper manuscript of On the Road, except it was a text file on a Brother word processor. It took me about two weeks to write - just me, a carton cigarettes, a big bag of weed, and a large bottle of Jack Daniel's in a small college dorm room. I slept when I needed to, but I banged away at the keyboard pretty much around the clock.
When I released it onto the local scene, it was released in the raw, unrevised and relatively unedited, except for a proofreading from an old friend who left it relatively untouched. 30 years later, I came across the manuscript on an old hard drive. It was good, but it needed some work, especially since this was a scanned version of the hardcopy assembled into pdf form (OCR leaves something to be desired). I've always had a hard time letting things go; so, I decided to do the work, give it some TLC, and give it another go. I dug through a generous mass of typos and occasionally muddy wording to do that. I'm hoping that it benefited from 30 more years of amassed life experience.
Do you want to take the trip?
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