AUTHOR’S FOREWORD
Years ago I used to go with my friend Anthony Balsley to see this Irish punk band called The Troubles at a bar on Fairfax known as Molly Malone’s. Anthony was a burly, Harley-riding tough guy with a pompadour and a broken nose. We shared a love for rock-a-billy, punk, ska, and all things rowdy and loud.
One night as I was walking toward Molly’s green door, I saw Anthony at the curb comparing Harleys with a big, red-headed biker chick. Anthony is around five eleven, and this girl was a good three inches taller than him and as broad in the shoulder. He introduced her as Jane and me as Nathan, his Hollywood screenwriter pal, and she gave me a disinterested handshake. I didn’t blame her. Next to Anthony I looked as fascinating as a glass of lukewarm water.
Anyway, Jane came in with us and we spent the night singing and drinking along with the band and having a blast. At the end of the evening Jane went home with Anthony and I never saw her again: just another of Anthony’s one night stands. She passed completely out of my mind until last year when I got a strange package at my PO box. It was full of cheap cassettes, numbered one through fifteen, along with a nearly illegible note written on a piece of Motel 6 stationary. This is what it said.
I got yr address from Anthony. Maybe U can make a story out of this. If it makes any $ send half to PO Box ____, Coral Gables, Fla. Don’t try and cheat me about it either. If U do I’ll know and U don’t want that.
J. Carver
I groaned. The writer’s curse is to be constantly approached by well-meaning idiots who say, “Hey man, you’re a writer. I got a great idea for a story. You write it and we’ll split the money,” not realizing that having ideas is less than one percent of the work in writing.
I put off listening to the cassettes for months, but one night the cable was on the fritz and I was feeling too lazy to read a book, so I popped the first tape into an old boom box I’ve had lying around since the ’80s. I didn’t stop listening until I’d finished the last tape at eleven the next morning. Yes, Jane, I thought, I might be able to make some “$” from this.
At first I was tempted to do a total rewrite: tell it in a more traditional style, but every time I tried, it lost the original punch of Jane’s voice and died. In the end I let it stand, doing little more than excising the “ah”s and “um”s and the occasional mispronounced word. I left her colorful and sometimes non-grammatical prose the way I found it. I did rearrange a bit. I’ve spared you most of the “No, wait, I forgot, before that we were already...” stuff and put it all in chronological order.
Jane is remarkably honest in her admissions of her failings, but sometimes I wonder if she isn’t being too modest. She says throughout the tapes how ugly she is. Well, I met her, and though she was no Scarlett Johansson, she was by no means ugly. She had the kind of broad-faced, rugged good looks you associate with frontierswomen and female fire-fighters.
Other than that, the document is what it is. If you choose to think of it as a work of fiction, I’m sure my publishers won’t mind. If you take it as fact, well then, maybe you too will find a cave in the hills one day and have an amazing adventure.
And if you do, send me a tape.
Nathan Long
Hollywood, CA
March 2011
PS. No, her name isn’t really Jane Carver, so don’t go digging in the Coral Gables phone book.