Afterpunk Update. I’m a roller-coaster ride.
I started as a writer in a secretive family. It was called privacy then. Nobody outside the family was supposed to know what happened within its turmoils or triumphs. Not done. We lived inside a cloak in the country. Which is not odd in an historical context, only in a 20th century one. There were no big family sins to threaten any member of the family. No beatings, sexual hijinks, dirty dealings of any kind. Just a conviction that family doings were off limits to everyone else.
Except that from the age of seven on, I was destined to be a writer. I tried to obey the privacy rule. My first novel was not about my eccentric childhood. I didn’t write the callow prep school novel. The material was not thrown away, merely cached for reuse in other ways later.
The end result? I have revealed more of myself in a lifetime of writings than any writer I’ve ever read or otherwise encountered. With the sole exception of specific sexual descriptions from my life. Although I have been candid that I have fulfilled all my sexual fantasies, have never been anything but (perhaps obsessively) heterosexual, and kind of agree with Samuel Johnson in the end that physical coitus has been discussed too much, over-exposed, over-described—“The position is ridiculous and the pleasure fleeting.”
I have written about everything else in my life. Unlike every other author of the last century and a half, you can discover what I have read, where I have traveled, what mischievous things I have done on several continents, and how I have both succeeded and failed from earliest childhood to old age. Tales of my father’s and grandfather’s combat nightmares in the World Wars, near death of my family in a hurricane at sea, and the losses and ruin of my middle years. I have even fleshed out the details with images and recordings of my inspirational music and my personal recollections of everything from country stores and car crashes to corporate boardrooms, and I have written in every conceivable mood in the warp and woof of American Life. Throughout I have always told the truth.
In short, I’m a 70 years long amusement park ride, which also makes me a laboratory experiment. Why bother doing an archeological dig on me? I have five creative works that can’t be compared to any other in English literature. The Boomer Bible. Punk City. Shuteye Town 1999. Shuteye Nation. The Naked Woman. Each is unique. I have other works that are adventures in thought and personal/family/cultural/historical revelation. I am also demographically unique. Call me the last Victorian, the only survivor who has lived through the end of the World War I catastrophe, through the Greatest Generation, and into all the subsequent decadent descendant generations that have reduced us to tattooed totems of unconscious automaton existence.
Surely, this is worth an autopsy. I have provided all the exhibits the literary archeologist could possibly need.
My most significant takeaway. Nobody wants to talk about me. Nobody has the guts to take the ride. What I’m saying? Your loss. Ask me any question. I would answer. But you stand at the edge of the roller coaster car and say, “No thanks.”
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