Origin of a novel: AMERICAN WARRIOR
American Warrior, my coming-of-age, David Copperfield-meets-Fight Club homage to one young man’s introduction to this unknowable journey we call life, began from two distinct encounters in my own life, fathoms of time and experience apart, and as amazing to me at the time as they were unforgettable.
The first encounter took place when I was still enmeshed in those years of terrifying trials and tribulations we refer to as the Grade School Era. At the time my family was living in a scenic, though decaying little fishing village at the lower end of Napa Valley, nestled in a mud and cattail bowl beside the Napa River. We had only been there a month or so when, one afternoon after school, I was riding my ramshackle bike through the village’s gravelly, potholed center. It was then, at the farthest edge of the village, I saw a tall, stout-though-elderly gentleman standing on his balcony overlooking the river and doing a sort of strange, slow-motion dance. I stopped and watched as he went through his routine to its completion. Only then did he happen to glance down from his balcony, spying me spying on him, when he turned with a truculent abruptness and went back into his cottage.
After that, whenever possible, I formed the (I’m sure) annoying habit of riding past the old man’s cottage, hoping to see him performing his exotic-as-they-were-mesmerizing maneuvers, all for my busybody benefit. Sometimes he was there, doing his slow and graceful pantomime, and sometimes not. Until one day, when he was there and finishing his dance, he suddenly looked down at me and growled, “You’re certainly a nosey sort, aren’t you, boy.”
And after almost swallowing my tongue in response, I managed to mumble something like, “I was just curious, that’s all.”
He waved me off then. “As I’m sure some people are curious about the Pope’s undies, but I doubt they write him letters.”
Obviously, I had no response to that, when his scowling face finally softened a bit and he asked me, “Ever have a cup of tea, boy?”
“No sir.”
He shook his head. “Well climb your towheaded little self up those wooden stairs and I’ll make you one.”
And that was the beginning of my all-too-brief friendship with the expatriate Dutchman (referred to in my novel as Pak Jan) and introduction into his extraordinary life and times.
My second encounter occurred some years later when I was a soldier with a tactical mobile unit, operating in conjunction with other NATO forces in Cold War Germany. Our mission was simple: prepare (um, as best as one could) for a nuclear war with the then Soviet Union. Part of this preparation involved being awakened in the middle of the night by bone-chilling alert sirens and pronto-deploying our command post into the mountainous hinterlands. And that’s where I was, pulling midnight perimeter guard duty, when I observed a shadowy figure approaching me out of the ongoing icy blizzard that had been pounding our encampment the entire day.
“What’s up, Chief?” I can still recall his wisecracked, friendly voice, his impish smile, and the half-empty bottle of Johhny Walker Black he was lugging along with him. He was Army, though certainly wouldn’t pass any uniform inspections with the ratty fatigues he wore. He was young, though his voice and face and manner were more that of a wizened old man, with a life of toil and hardship behind.
“Aren’t you cold?” I think I inquired, astonished he was hatless and coatless, standing there slumped and casual in the driving snow.
He winked at me and lifted the Scotch bottle. “Warm as a slice of mama’s fresh-baked cherry pie.”
He hung around with me my last hour on guard, mentioning how he was in Germany, “taking care of some medical shit over at Ramstein hospital.” Though he wasn’t specific about what the medical shit was. Then he mentioned how he’d gone awol from the hospital so he could catch our little “mountaintop happening.” Meaning, I guess, the exercise we were engaged at the moment. After that we went over to the mess tent for coffee. Of course, he doused each of his cups with a shot or two of whiskey and then proceeded to playfully dodge my litany of questions about what in God’s name war he had just emerged from, and, more so, what had he done in that war? But before we parted ways at daybreak, tidbits were revealed: Drafted as an Army grunt out of high school. Then a paratrooper in airborne. Then a Green Beret “fringing” it in Nam. And then, finally, “Something I can’t talk about, Chief.”
“Why not?”
“Cause you’d write letters home to your sweetheart. And then I’d have to come back and nix your ass. And then go find and nix her.”
And all I can say is that I’ll never forget the look on his face when he said that. He was smiling, and I had no doubt I was looking into the smiling face of someone who could and would perform that act without nary a second thought.
“Sorry,” I said.
“Shits and giggles,” he answered back, and we parted ways soon after. And it was only years later, doing my voluminous research for American Warrior, I turned a page in one book and there he was, standing dead center of his recon team. The same ratty, sterile fatigues. The same lethal smile, brandishing his CAR-15. And I knew. “Shits and giggles,” I may have whispered to myself.
Origin of a novel: DESOLATION RUN
Desolation Run, my prison-escape, nationwide-manhunt character study of desperate desperadoes, actually began life as a totally different type of reading experience. That particular story had been turned over to one of my editors for proofing, who came back to me after a couple of weeks and said: “You have two different storylines here. Two, for the most part, different novels that could stand on their own. Why don’t you separate them and then come back to me.” And that’s exactly what I did.
Anyway, the specific origin of Desolation Run began sitting in the front seat of my Washington State, detective-uncle’s unmarked police car. He would occasionally take me along during his investigations (you could say “On Patrol Live” years before Reels came up with that other show), and I was able to experience a few spine-tingling, OMG moments along the way. In this particular instance, a prison break had recently occurred at some remote Puget Sound corrections facility, and reports were coming in hot and heavy the three escapees could be passing through my uncle’s county. And that very night we (along with several other marked patrol cars) were involved in a high-speed chase after a Dodge van matching the description of the getaway vehicle. But, alas, it turned out to be only a couple of Christmas tree thieves, with their load of stolen spruce. The dudes were arrested, my heart was broken, but (little did I know) the seed was planted for my future, seat-of-your-pants getaway tale.
As the tangents that go to create my novels—both for the characters, as well as plot—are as endless as some are unknowable, I will only add that just before I began writing Desolation Run, my daughter and I took a road trip through the Texas badlands, as a final bit of research I needed for the book. Down along the Mexican border and on through the awe-inspiring Big Bend region. She took photographs as we went, and one of these I turned over to my book designer who then turned it into the book’s cover. But it all began, years prior, in the front seat of a cop car.
Origin of a novel: THE BEAUTIFUL-UGLY
I’m not sure about other fiction writers, but as for myself, I find I generally don’t specifically plan or choose material and themes and such for a novel. The novel, the characters and their situations, choose me. More often than not they seem to come out of nowhere, when I suddenly begin to remember things, slowly putting these and other things together, until it all begins to make sense. The Beautiful-Ugly, my coming-of-age tome about one girl’s fourteen-year journey to find self and family, is an example of this process.
Again, there were two sparking origins that ignited and finally blazed into the novel. The first was a girl I knew around my high school years. We were in Mr. Payne’s drama class together, and I recall seeing her the first time and thinking: “My God, can anyone really be that beautiful?” As she was, with her raven-black hair with its dark-red highlights when the sun would hit it just so; her lovely skin tone that could appear almost translucent in a snowy-crystal sort of way; and we won’t even talk about her face, except to say it had that touch of tragic beauty about it, I couldn’t quite define, until I asked her for a date one day after class, and she shrugged and said, “Whatever.”
I actually was able to score a couple of dates with her, before she suddenly disappeared from the common universe, which didn’t surprise me. That’s when she revealed to me everything that had happened to her in her young life, and the reason for her “whatever” attitude about that life. How both her parents had been killed in a car accident when she was six, and she and her only other sibling, her slightly older brother, had both been left orphans, with no known or at least close relatives that could take them in. How they had both been sent to a children’s home, where they clung together for each other, until “the wonderful system fostered my brother out,” was the way she put it. How she had eventually been fostered out, and how, a year or so before, her brother had disappeared, running away from his latest foster home, and how she wanted to go find him. Most of this told to me over a six-pack an older Calistoga buddy of mine had bought for us, when we drove into the surrounding hills to talk.
As I recall, it was a week or two later that she disappeared as well. And, thinking of her after that, always wishing her the best of luck in her life’s journey.
The second spark is much easier for me to understand. I became a father. And as probably most parents would understand, when that happens, all other bets are off. Your life readjusts itself, or it should, regardless of other factors. Much joy. Much concern, with that dose of angst thrown in for good measure. After finishing The Beautiful-Ugly I always wished I could have found that drama-class girl again and given her a copy of the novel for her opinion. I’m sure she would have taken it with a shrug and said, “Whatever.”