My Pal Splendid Man

It was 1982 and we had just sold our first book. After years of separately writing serious novels that no one wanted anything to do with, we had decided to try writing something together just for fun, and we surprised ourselves by conceiving, writing, and actually selling a humor book, The Beaver Papers. It would be over a year before the book actually hit the bookstores, and during that time, fired with enthusiasm to work together, we dreamed up one humor idea after another. Some of those ideas later saw print in the National Lampoon, one of them eventually became the comic book The Trouble with Girls, but the one we loved best and did the most work on is the one that has just now, finally, arrived in print.
  We both lived in San Francisco, but not in the artistically edgy North Beach or Mission District that you read about in literary histories. We lived in the Richmond District, the foggy north-west corner of the city, a neighborhood of small apartment buildings with an almost suburban quality compared to the city that lay a bus ride away. We did most of the work at Will’s place, a second-floor apartment at the corner of 42nd Avenue and Balboa Street, and so it came to serve as the actual setting for much of the book. The second-hand furniture, the less-than-stellar housekeeping, and the general air of shabbiness all left their imprint on the stories.
      We didn’t have much money then, and in our memories we seem to have subsisted almost entirely on rice and chili—the rice we cooked at home, the chili we bought at a take-out Mexican joint down the street. When we felt like splurging we’d drive down to Mr. Hot Dog’s Cowboy BBQ, a Korean-owned diner on Geary Boulevard where a man could get full for less than four dollars. Our external lives weren’t much, but our internal lives were rich—if a bit peculiar. Besides surfeiting ourselves on William Faulkner, John Steinbeck, Ernest Hemingway, and other literary heavyweights, we also indulged in a shared obsession with the comic books of the 1960s. In our novels we tried to emulate the former, but we could never shake the temptation to do something creative with the latter.

      And so were born the stories that would become My Pal Splendid Man. It started with a quickly scribbled scene in which a superhero drops in on his young writer friend Will Jones—not as a prelude to exotic adventures but to talk about life, books, and highballs. That scene grew into a story, and suddenly we were seized. For a few months our favorite thing to do was to get together, eat our chili, and spin out a new Splendid Man story. We did wind up sending our heroes off on exotic adventures, but they were adventures of the sort that grew out of the peculiar chemistry of their friendship.
  Finally The Beaver Papers came out and made a modest splash. It earned us an invitation to write for the National Lampoon and the acceptance of our second book, a serious indulgence in our obsession called The Comic Book Heroes. By then we had begun to conceive My Pal Splendid Man as a book, but as life swept us along, we never found the time to finish it. After a while it became one of those projects in our drawers, remembered with great fondness but never returned to.
  Thirty years later we opened that drawer. We read the stories again, first with nostalgia but then with the joy of rediscovery. Not only were they still alive to us but they reignited the fire that had filled us decades before. We found ourselves writing five new Splendid Man stories to round out the narrative and weaving new threads through all the episodes to hold them together as a book.
  We were momentarily tempted to update the book’s milieu, but then we thought better of it. Not only was Will’s life built around the realities of being a would-be writer in the pre-internet age, not only were there some story elements that could really only work in the social context of the early ‘80s, but the essence of Splendid Man himself was clearly inspired by things we were observing in comics at the time. The wholesome superheroes of the “Silver Age” were then being supplanted by a newer, darker sort of superhero; the tension of that moment was much of what went into defining our hero’s character. So, despite the great temptation to fill Splendid Man and Will’s world with iPads, hybrid cars, and kale, we’ve set the stories in the time they were originally conceived.
       Fly with us, then, back through the time barrier to 1982. Ronald Reagan is in the White House. A dark grittiness is creeping into popular culture. The poor can still afford rent in parts of San Francisco. A writer needs Wite-Out to correct a mistake. Will Jones strikes up a beautiful friendship with a fellow known as Splendid Man. And up and away we go.

(The preceding is excerpted from the introduction to My Pal Splendid Man, on sale now from Atomic Drop Press!)

Thirty Years

It hit me recently, with a mixture of pride, nostalgia, and horror, that I was up against the thirtieth anniversary of the publication of my first book. It was August, 1983, that The Beaver Papers, written with my friend Will Jacobs, first hit the bookstores and launched the long, strange trip of my career. 
       That's a long time, thirty years. A lot can happen in that much time. In that much time, nations can fall and new industries can be born, careers can begin and end, babies can grow up and have babies of their own. In that much time, a bright-eyed, nervous, inexhaustible, naive 26-year-old who thinks his life will be perfect if he can only get a book published can turn into a tired, slightly cantankerous 56-year-old who sometimes wonders why the hell he ever wanted to write books in the first place. (Not saying that did happen. But it could have.)
       This is how long ago it was: Will and I wrote it with pens on paper, then revised it on a typewriter, fixing our mistakes with Liquid Paper. We could only work together when we could physically meet or when we were each at our homes, so that we could talk on the telephones plugged into our walls. When it was done we went to the library and collected agents' addresses from a book called Literary Marketplace, then we had copies of a cover letter run off at Kinko's, folded them and put them in envelopes, licked stamps and stuck them on the outside, and carried them to a mailbox. Then we waited, knowing it would take days to get even the quickest responses. It's amazing that anything got published at all in those days. 
       Also how long ago it was: Leave It to Beaver, a sitcom that we had both been fascinated with since childhood, off the air for twenty years and already feeling like an echo of a distant era, was being shown every afternoon on broadcast television. (Now it's been off for fifty years, a number I can hardly make sense of, and although it hasn't been entirely forgotten, it's not the icon it was; at that time, though, everyone knew it and got what it represented.) Somehow or other, Will and I started watching it together, making fun of it but also yearning a bit for that lost world—which was the lost world of pre-Vietnam America but also the lost world of wholesome TV and the lost world of our own suburban childhoods, before we became city boys and drove ourselves into anxious madness with dreams of being professional writers.
       Then one of us, we don't remember who, made a joke about what if some unwholesome, un-TV writer of the time—very possibly Jack Kerouac—had written about the Cleaver family. 
       To honor this anniversary of mine, I've decided to post an except from the book every few weeks from now through August. I'm sure I'll also try to dust off some memories of how it all happened. I'll have to resist the temptation to rewrite as I go—that young me and young Will could turn out an infinite variety of clunky sentences and bad transitions, but I have to admit that they were able to do things we could never do now. Even as I cringe at my old lack of polish, I can't help admiring my old energy, impulsiveness, and cock-surety. 
       Let's start with the original, preposterous introduction...  

On May 3, 1963, the news filtered down from ABC to Bob Mosher and Joe Connelly that "Leave It to Beaver" would probably be canceled. Just a month before, network executives had told Mosher and Connelly, producers and head writers of the show, that if new blood could be put into "Beaver," the series might be saved. But after weeks of frustrating meetings with regular writers Dick Conway and Roland MacLane and multi-talented director-star Hugh Beaumont, it was conceded that no new ideas could be contrived. 
       Mosher suggested an episode in which brother Wally gets drunk on near-beer, but Connelly vetoed it as being too outlandish. Connelly suggested an episode in which June appeared in a pair of slacks, but Beaumont considered it lewd. Beaumont suggested an episode in which Beaver actually metamorphosed into a rodent, but Mosher and Connelly denounced it as derivative.

       MacLane and Conway completed a script in which Beaver gets a flat tire on his bike and conceals it from his parents, but network executives, although impressed with its daring, decided that it didn't quite fit their standards for new blood.
       By May 5 the staff had cleared their desks and prepared to go to pasture when, with the afternoon mail delivery, the first submission arrived. 
       Clearly the news of Beaver's impending cancellation had leaked out quickly, evidently reaching as far as Lowell, Massachusetts, for Jack Kerouac was the first to rise in support of Beaver. His script, Dharma Beaver, was the first drop in a deluge of literary brilliance to flood the network offices. From Montmartre and Tokyo they flowed in; from North Beach and Greenwich Village, from Majorca and Fresno; and from as far away as Moscow and Nigeria. The cry rang like a trumpet blast through the artistic community of the globe: "The Beaver is endangered! Save the Beaver!" Even the petition to free Jean Genêt from prison did not inspire such solidarity among the literati of the world. Before the summer was through, mankind would witness a flowering of the arts since it had not seen since the Italian Renaissance. 
     Now, after years of diligent research into old studio files, we have pieced together the story of the "Lost Season." We present here the events of that summer, along with summaries of the twenty-five unproduced scripts that were slated for the 1963-1964 season of "Leave It to Beaver." Although dozens of other scripts were submitted, we include only those that meet the highest literary standards. 
       We  have endeavored to preserve the writing styles and dialogue of the scripts wherever possible. The fruits of the "Lost Season" have been harvested at last.

I'll post the first fruit, Dharma Beaver, next time.