a prank in progress
In the mid-seventies in Santa Cruz I shared a beach cottage briefly with a guy who was in need of someone to split the rent as I was in need of lodgings for fall quarter. A friend we had in common effected the connection. We got along famously, and while I think I disappointed him when I bailed after that quarter because I had the opportunity to co-found a household of my very own, we remained on cordial terms.
I last saw the guy here in Oakland over forty years ago—we were to get together for dinner in Chicago in 1998, but at almost the literal last moment he bailed, pleading physical indisposition, and after that we lost touch. During his 1981 visit he dropped off the photocopied typescript of his novel. I’d rather been dreading this, because I was working at the time on something in that line myself, and it somehow would have been difficult to bear if his work proved conspicuously better.
It wasn’t, not that mine was any great shakes. There were some nice set pieces, but also quips and patter and routines that he’d obviously been saving up from his undergraduate years, and some labored, lifeless scenes where he was clearly forcing the muse (easily recognized—how well I knew!). It was very much a young man’s work—he was about twenty-five when he wrote it—and rather too-nakedly autobiographical. Indeed, I have a brief appearance as the minor character, otherwise not particularly recognizable, who helps the unnamed protagonist to move to San Francisco (as I did) and who inadvertently insults his Russian landlady (as I did).
The story follows our daydreaming hero as he finds and then loses love, as he blows out a lung, as he toils day in and day out washing dishes in a chain restaurant, World O. Pancakes (“The Jolly Place”), and I’ve got to say, having done time in that work environment myself, that he absolutely nails the food service manager archetype. Still, no one was ever going to publish this.
But suppose someone had?
I’d been idly pondering this project for years—I’d forgotten that I “typeset” a few pages as long ago as 1987—but had no idea what had become of the manuscript. Then, while undertaking a massive reordering of my cluttered study last week, I uncovered it. Over the course of the next three days I passed the 300 pages through a flatbed scanner, fed the output to an OCR package, cleaned up the output—the manual typewriter quality was muddy, which gave the software fits—and have now formatted the thing with pretty close typographic fidelity in the style of a Penguin paperback circa 1965. Cover image here .
So, as I say, I’ve lost touch with Rob, but I know someone—they grew up together in the same tiny Mendocino County town—who has remained in contact with him. My plan, which I’ve already shared with my accomplice, is to have my bespoke printer run off a few copies. I’ll send a couple to my contact and she will dispatch one of these to Rob saying that she ran across it in a used bookstore (or at a garage sale, or in a “Little Free Library” kiosk), and would he mind signing it for her?
I imagine he’ll be thunderstruck. Now, my work product, while I anticipate it would survive a casual scrutiny, will not fool Rob for long. He’ll know that Penguins have not looked like these (the classic orange “Marber grid”) in over half a century, and of course Auld Blighty switched to decimal currency a full ten years before the book was written. But ah, I wish I could be there to see his expression when he opens the thing!
And unless I’m the only person to whom he vouchsafed a copy, I’m disposed to doubt whether, if he even remembers dropping one off here, I will top the list of suspects.
Unfortunately, the thing appears to have stalled at the online printer. I’ve inquired, but I suspect that they’re choking on the cover’s mimicry of the Penguin identity. I’ve composed an eloquent defense of my use, comparing the image to that of a US twenty-dollar bill bearing an engraving of a smirking Bugs Bunny in place of Andrew Jackson’s visage: no one’s going to mistake that* for the real thing, amirite?
Anyway, I’m hoping to have this cleared up and a copy available to surprise my old chum in time for his sixty-eighth birthday next month.With luck, they’ll listen to reason without I have to leave the head of a thoroughbred in someone’s bedclothes.
cordially,
*Actually, around 1972 or 1973 a group of Santa Cruz undergraduates publicized a “surrealist art show” by means of photocopied dollar bills, altered with cut-and-paste on bog-standard photocopy paper. No one would have imagined that they could pass these at a convenience store, but the Secret Service swooped down on campus uttering dire threats of prison terms…
I last saw the guy here in Oakland over forty years ago—we were to get together for dinner in Chicago in 1998, but at almost the literal last moment he bailed, pleading physical indisposition, and after that we lost touch. During his 1981 visit he dropped off the photocopied typescript of his novel. I’d rather been dreading this, because I was working at the time on something in that line myself, and it somehow would have been difficult to bear if his work proved conspicuously better.
It wasn’t, not that mine was any great shakes. There were some nice set pieces, but also quips and patter and routines that he’d obviously been saving up from his undergraduate years, and some labored, lifeless scenes where he was clearly forcing the muse (easily recognized—how well I knew!). It was very much a young man’s work—he was about twenty-five when he wrote it—and rather too-nakedly autobiographical. Indeed, I have a brief appearance as the minor character, otherwise not particularly recognizable, who helps the unnamed protagonist to move to San Francisco (as I did) and who inadvertently insults his Russian landlady (as I did).
The story follows our daydreaming hero as he finds and then loses love, as he blows out a lung, as he toils day in and day out washing dishes in a chain restaurant, World O. Pancakes (“The Jolly Place”), and I’ve got to say, having done time in that work environment myself, that he absolutely nails the food service manager archetype. Still, no one was ever going to publish this.
But suppose someone had?
I’d been idly pondering this project for years—I’d forgotten that I “typeset” a few pages as long ago as 1987—but had no idea what had become of the manuscript. Then, while undertaking a massive reordering of my cluttered study last week, I uncovered it. Over the course of the next three days I passed the 300 pages through a flatbed scanner, fed the output to an OCR package, cleaned up the output—the manual typewriter quality was muddy, which gave the software fits—and have now formatted the thing with pretty close typographic fidelity in the style of a Penguin paperback circa 1965. Cover image here .
So, as I say, I’ve lost touch with Rob, but I know someone—they grew up together in the same tiny Mendocino County town—who has remained in contact with him. My plan, which I’ve already shared with my accomplice, is to have my bespoke printer run off a few copies. I’ll send a couple to my contact and she will dispatch one of these to Rob saying that she ran across it in a used bookstore (or at a garage sale, or in a “Little Free Library” kiosk), and would he mind signing it for her?
I imagine he’ll be thunderstruck. Now, my work product, while I anticipate it would survive a casual scrutiny, will not fool Rob for long. He’ll know that Penguins have not looked like these (the classic orange “Marber grid”) in over half a century, and of course Auld Blighty switched to decimal currency a full ten years before the book was written. But ah, I wish I could be there to see his expression when he opens the thing!
And unless I’m the only person to whom he vouchsafed a copy, I’m disposed to doubt whether, if he even remembers dropping one off here, I will top the list of suspects.
Unfortunately, the thing appears to have stalled at the online printer. I’ve inquired, but I suspect that they’re choking on the cover’s mimicry of the Penguin identity. I’ve composed an eloquent defense of my use, comparing the image to that of a US twenty-dollar bill bearing an engraving of a smirking Bugs Bunny in place of Andrew Jackson’s visage: no one’s going to mistake that* for the real thing, amirite?
Anyway, I’m hoping to have this cleared up and a copy available to surprise my old chum in time for his sixty-eighth birthday next month.With luck, they’ll listen to reason without I have to leave the head of a thoroughbred in someone’s bedclothes.
cordially,
*Actually, around 1972 or 1973 a group of Santa Cruz undergraduates publicized a “surrealist art show” by means of photocopied dollar bills, altered with cut-and-paste on bog-standard photocopy paper. No one would have imagined that they could pass these at a convenience store, but the Secret Service swooped down on campus uttering dire threats of prison terms…
