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*American Freaks, my short story collection, is out now. Please buy, read and review on Amazon. Reviews really, really help. Please spread the word. Share this post. Etc. I was thinking of what to say about it when I realized the introduction of the book says it all.

You can also read the whole book right here on Substack with a paid subscription. First story free. CLICK HERE FOR THAT.

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Introduction

Truthfully, I should have published this story collection years ago. The stories in this collection represent a very different time in my life. The pieces are mostly dark, gritty, edgy, realistic, heavily autobiographical (but not entirely so), and mostly covering the period of my active alcoholism, the decade between 2000 to 2010 (age 17 to 27).

From my vantage point now—in 2025, at the much wiser age of 42—I look back on my former self with a mix of pride, confusion, humor, sadness, shock and forgiveness. In 2000 I was a sophomore at a college prep high school and had just discovered punk rock, booze, serious literature and girls. In 2010 I was in my later twenties, estranged from my family, living with a fellow drunk in a raggedy apartment in a rough part of North Oakland.

Much happened in those years.

I’ll never forget the first story I ever had published. (Tightrope.) It was 2012; I was 29 years old and less than two years sober. I was living in a tiny 500-square-foot illegal studio (a converted garage) with a little kitchen and bathroom and paying (amazingly) only $795/mo including all utilities. Back then writers still mostly submitted physical work and received physical rejections. (Or, I had heard, acceptances.)

One day I walked out of my apartment, barefoot, on a nice spring day, pushed open the old rickety wooden gate, and pumped over to the area with the half dozen silver flat mailboxes. I turned my key in the slot of my small box and found two envelopes. One was from an editor at the renowned literary magazine, The Sun. It was a rejection for a story I’d submitted, but for the first time it included a nice few-sentence-long personal note, signed by the editor saying that the piece wasn’t for them but that she saw my obvious talent. She encouraged me to keep writing. My heart soared. I remember that moment well. I had, at last, received some kind of support, a voice in the dark wilderness saying, Yes, keep going; you ARE a writer.

The other envelope was a congratulations and a contract for a different story, Tightrope—the more or less true but thinly fictionalized account of my drunken blackout and “kidnapping” in Mexico circa 2006, age 23—from a U.K. literary magazine called Alfie Dog Press. I couldn’t believe it. The contract included a check. It wasn’t much, but it was something. For the first time in my life I’d had a short story accepted by a magazine, and I’d even been paid. I stood there in the bright spring sunshine for a moment, contract in hand, and I almost cried. It was the best moment of my life up to that point. I was sober. And I was a published writer.

Things went from there. From that point on I had something like 20 or 25 stories published in little literary magazines and journals, as well as some articles and essays in various places. Ever since getting sober in 2010 I’d felt creative energy pouring out of me like sweat during a marathon run. It just flowed out of me. I could barely keep up. I finished the first draft of my YA punk novel, The Crew, mere months after getting sober. (And then spent 13 years revising and editing and going through rejections.) I felt like an unknown, non-genius but nevertheless highly inspired young Bob Dylan, the prose just raging through the fingers to the page like spiritual manna from heaven.

These stories, like I said, document a dark, often tormented time in my life. I was broken: Deeply wounded, very angry, totally lost, bitter, resentful and out of control. And yet, at the same time: In the end I was always a “good man,” if only unsure of who and what I was, tortured by childhood trauma, raised a lucky, privileged white rich kid in Southern California who nevertheless suffered much as a child.

My literary influences and forefathers should be easy to parse. Mostly Jack Kerouac (and the Beats in general) a la On the Road and Dharma Bums, both of which changed my life literally (I hit the actual road in 2006, thumbing around America), stylistically in terms of writing, psychologically in terms of how I thought about myself and the world, and the hurling out the existential window of bourgeois convention, which was the poison (I thought then) I’d been raised on. Beyond Kerouac were Denis Johnson (a la Jesus’ Son), Raymond Carver, and of course the obvious sources like Charles Bukowski, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Flannery O’Connor, Steinbeck, Didion, etc. (I later found Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Balzac, etc.)

I must have written hundreds of stories by now. The first one I ever wrote was physically on a little orange lined notepad I used to carry around with me when living in San Diego in my early twenties. I wrote how I felt, what I thought, what I witnessed (both internally and externally), about the pain of loneliness and metaphysical isolation, about the scourge of active alcoholism, about the women and the friends and the terrible ache for love which I craved and seemed to never truly find.

As I said before: Most of these stories are heavily autobiographical; some less so. With the exception of Yardo (completely made up), The Fish (a warm memory from my childhood), The New Toy (childhood), Secret Sex (about an old friend of mine), Bob Dylan as a Contemporary Female Writer in New York, 2019 (NYC age 36), Youth: A Short Story (before the year 2000) and Riding the Night (ditto), and Torn Cords of Youth (pre-teens), these stories are all mostly about “me” in the years I mentioned, the drinking days. Of course stories are never really, truly, completely about “you” even if you hold as close as you can to reality, because reality is always distorted based on the passing of time, the slipperiness of memory, wish fulfilment, ego and pride, our own narrative biases, self-mythologizing and self-heroizing, etc.

In this sense I cannot call these stories “memoir” or “nonfiction.” The moment I write about some vague notion of “me” and implant it onto the page it becomes in effect “fiction.” (There are many writers who reject even memoir as a category of nonfiction altogether.) And so the narrators of these tales—the protagonists or if you want the anti-heroes—are “made up” for all intents and purposes. They’re sordid semi-versions of myself which I do not claim represent “real life” fully. Some might contain slight exaggerations, distortions of the truth, false recollections, the merging of more than one memory or time in my life, less than accurate recall, etc. But they do represent, in total, a sense of the spirit of that time in my life. A psychological time capsule. In this way I hope the pieces resonate with something like at least a taste of universality.

Thus these pieces are fiction; short stories. I hope you enjoy them. A warning: These stories are NOT politically correct; they make zero effort to be safe, light or easy. The prose aims for subjective truth amidst the grit, meanness and roughness of a life unchained from social norms. If you can’t handle that: This collection might not be for you. I lived a very wild life in the years discussed herein. From being kidnapped in Mexico in a blackout to getting into a bad situation with the Hell’s Angels to firing guns while high on acid to stealing cars to fist fights to drunken wild sex with random women across America while on my own Kerouacian adventure called Life: These pieces represent a younger, crazier, more loose anarchic and restless version of who I am today.

I look back on that guy as a wild child.

I’m grateful that he survived to tell the tale.

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