“As a young child, I wanted to be a writer because writers were rich and famous.” These are the words of William S. Burroughs, but they could have been spoken by countless other authors over the years. In fact, I suffered from the same delusion when I was twelve—until one Sunday afternoon when my parents dropped me off at a sketchy, two-star hotel.
“Comic Convention. Today. $1. Grand Ballroom,” read the sign in the lobby. Once I found the ballroom, I handed a crumpled dollar bill to the woman working the door. My hand trembled with excitement. I was moments away from breathing the same air as Marvel Comics writer Frank Castle (not his real name), the advertised “guest of honor.” As I stepped through the ballroom door, I tried to imagine what would happen once I was face-to-face with the author of such superheroes as the ass-kicking, cigar-chomping Wolverine. The possibilities were limitless, but they all ended with Castle offering me a job writing The X-Men.
After my eyes adjusted to the dim lighting, I surveyed the room. It was an endless sea of comic books, piled on tables and packed in boxes underneath. To my immediate left, I found what I was looking for atop a card table: a folded sheet of paper with the guest of honor’s name. A squat, potbellied man in a faded Batman T-shirt sat slumped behind the table, nursing a one-liter bottle of Mountain Dew. This obviously had to be the writer’s bodyguard.
“Excuse me, when will Mr. Castle be here?” I asked him.
The man chuckled. “He’s here right now,” he said. After an awkward pause in which it became clear I didn’t understand, he added, “I’m Frank Castle.”
“Oh.” I made no effort to disguise my disappointment. While I wasn’t expecting Castle to be injecting heroin into his eyeballs while getting blown by groupies, I was wholly unprepared to discover that the man behind the curtain was so ... ordinary. Were all authors such unremarkable creatures?
Backing away from the table, I quickly made up my mind to pick a different career.
I stumbled across Less Than Zero in a used paperback bookstore when I was fifteen. (For those of you who don’t know what bookstores are, ask your parents.) I tore through it in one evening, and then started rereading it. Less Than Zero was the literary equivalent of a Guns N’ Roses album—all sex, drugs, and bad attitude. And from what I subsequently read in magazines, its author, Bret Easton Ellis, lived by the adage “Write what you know.” Ellis was, in a word, cool.
Before long, I was drinking, smoking, and having sex (or at least trying to). My grades were slipping, too—not just because I was stoned most of the time, but also because I was spending more time reading books I wanted to read than the ones being assigned in class. Jack Kerouac was cool; Charles Dickens wasn’t. Hunter S. Thompson was cool; Jane Austen wasn’t. Cool writers were easy to spot: all you had to do was look for the cigarettes dangling precariously from their lips and the whiskey bottles next to their typewriters.
It wasn’t until I went to college that I realized how outdated the tortured-artist caricature in my head was. Kerouac was considered something of a joke by my professors and classmates; Ellis was regarded as a prima donna who valued shock over craft. Passing out drunk while filling the bathtub and accidentally flooding your hotel room like F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn’t cool—it was pathetic and sad. Drinking wine out of a human skull like Lord Byron? That was something only halfwits like Beavis and Butt-Head would find amusing.
Nowadays, unrepentant boozers in the tradition of Ernest Hemingway and Dorothy Parker are conspicuously absent from bestseller lists, where the courteous and sober rule the day. “Writers used to be cool,” James Frey tells me. “Now they’re just sort of wimps.”
Well, fuck. Whatever happened to the literary bad boys and girls of yesteryear?
In Literary Rogues, I turn back the clock to visit the writers who were as likely to appear in gossip rags as they were to be on bestseller lists. They wrote generation-defining classics such as The Great Gatsby and On the Road, earning them coveted spots in the literary hall of fame. They also lived like rock stars ages before Keith Richards smoked his first cigarette. From shooting smack to shooting other people, wayward authors have done it all—and lived long enough to write about it, in most cases. Their antics are sometimes amusing, sometimes appalling. But, like their work, always fascinating and impossible to look away from.
Pour yourself a drink. The party is about to begin...
Andrew Shaffer
Lexington, Kentucky
August 2012