OF POSSIBLE INTEREST

 

JUST LIKE THAT, like most of my fiction, is based on events and people in my own life. In this particular story, about 80 percent of it is factual. I won’t reveal what parts are real and what parts are the product of my imagination, and the only reason I won’t is because of that pesky statute of limitations thing.

Bud is very real and is his actual name. The character Donna (not her real name) was based on a call girl girlfriend I lived with in New Orleans and who appears in a number of my books. In real life, she really did stab another girl I was seeing and nearly killed her and tried to stab me as well, except I was able to get the knife away from her. And, she did abort our baby, which led to the stabbing incident, not portrayed here. The scenes in Pendleton are all spot-on experiences I had with one small exception—I didn’t stab a guy on the roof of the laundry—but the rest of the experiences are almost verbatim as are the characters in those scenes. When I was an inmate, I lived through eight riots and then-President Lyndon B. Johnson came on national TV and declared Pendleton “the single worst prison in the U.S.” I was in Cellblock D watching the one TV we had when President Johnson made his announcement and we all stood up and cheered as if we’d just won the Super Bowl. In a way, I guess we had…

Assistant Warden Cathy Johns of the infamous prison at Angola, LA (nicknamed “The Farm” and the subject of an award-winning documentary of that name) read this and said it was “the best and truest account of the criminal mind she’d ever read.”) Thanks, Cathy.

It’s sometimes of interest to both writers and non-writers (and readers) alike, how “real life” translates to fiction. Here’s an example from JUST LIKE THAT. The trip in the novel is actually the synthesis of three separate road trips to Lake Charles, Louisiana. In the version presented, the protagonist ends up as a swamper in a night club/restaurant that actually existed when I was there, the Black Angus. However, I never worked there as a swamper, or bus boy as the job is known as in many other places. In one of the trips, where Bud and I ended up there, I wasn’t on parole at the time as is described in the book, but already held a Louisiana barber’s license from living in the state years before. We did end up there, broke, and I did have a rifle and shotgun I was able to sell to get enough money to get a room for a week (I kept the .45 pistol I had, just in case…), and Bud did end up going back to Ft. Wayne shortly after we got there as he missed his girlfriend (whose name was Lucy and who did work in the cafeteria at Parkview Hospital, not in housekeeping). I stayed and got a job right away at a styling salon. Can’t remember the name of it but it was owned by two of the nicest guys I’ve ever known. While I was there, rock star Freddy Fender (of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” platinum record fame) came to town to perform a concert, and our salon was chosen to cut their hair. I got to cut Freddy’s hair and we hit it off, both being ex-convicts and all that jazz.

Freddy ended up giving us backstage passes for the concert, and afterward, I was invited to a party at his band’s hotel. I showed up and Freddy wasn’t there yet. The booze and drugs were flowing and all his band mates were there as well as a ton of chicks. I was laying back on the floor smoking a doobie and chinning with Freddy’s lead guitarist (all of his band had met and hooked up in the Texas prison they were incarcerated in), and trading joint stories. About half an hour later, Freddy finally arrived… with four girls in tow. He didn’t say anything to anybody—just nodded a greeting—and disappeared with the four babes into one of the suite bedrooms.

His bandmate laughed and told me that Freddy always ended up with four girls every time they played a gig. He said he’d be in there all night and that he’d “take care of all of ‘em.”

That was when I wished I’d learned to play the guitar…

Anyway, I think this was a great story, but alas—it didn’t fit the fiction parameters of the novel I wrote here so it didn’t make it in. The story does make it into my memoir for which we’re looking for a publisher, ADRENALINE JUNKIE. And that’s how fiction that’s based on real life sometimes works. You have to forego using material sometimes that’s really kind of cool…

What I hope shows through is the criminal verisimilitude I feel I’m able to deliver as a real-life outlaw. A sensibility other writers are unable to deliver simply from spending a night in the drunk tank… or from a tour of the joint…

You decide.

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