The Myth of Staircases

Latigo Flint once wrote a novel titled The Myth of Staircases. It was very well received. It won a number of highly prestigious literary awards. Latigo Flint was invited to a great many New York dinner parties.

Of course the book had absolutely nothing to with staircases. Or myths for that matter. In fact, other than the cover and the title page, the word "staircase" didn't even appear. The word "myth" did show up once in chapter 24, but oddly enough as a typo of the word "moth".

It was a wonderful time for me. Many brilliant, young urban women were eager to sleep with me. They insisted on talking the entire time, but mostly about my book and how great they thought it was. And that actually happens to be more than tolerable.

I was the life of a hundred parlors, fell in love twice a day and literally bathed in cognac.

The Myth of Staircases is about two middle-aged brothers named Edgar and Dallas Naverson, and their chance encounter in a Denny's restaurant outside of Bakersfield, California. It's the first time they've seen each other in over twenty-five years. Edgar has spent the last two decades as a professional rodeo clown, recently retired. Dallas is a reformed pedophile.

Two thirds of the book is the brothers' real-time dialogue. The rest is flashback, narrated in the first person by their deceased childhood pet--a purebred Samoyed named Bentley Dog.

Rumor has it, the review of The Myth of Staircases by esteemed NY Times book critic, Michiko Kakutani, was rejected a total of eight times because she kept on slipping in the phrase "infuckingcredibility awesome!"

I was a darling. I had it all--for about a week or two. Then a twitchful unease crept over me and it began to show. I knew I needed a follow-up but had no idea what to do. I spent months working on a remake of Watership Down, setting it in the Amazon and replacing the rabbits with a plucky band of tarantulas. And that was going all right for a while until I turned it into a reader-participatory literary opera. (It seemed like a good idea at the time... then the peyote ran out.)

I began punching people in the face before they could speak to me. You can't ask how the next book is coming along if your mouth is broken.

Then one lonely December I shoved all my mental chips to the center of the table, locked myself in a motel room, and wrote When Brothers Happen to Meet. Which actually wasn't about brothers or chance encounters at all, but rather staircases, and the myths that surround them.

The story itself was two pages long. I padded out the subsequent five hundred pages by repeatedly smushing my face into the keyboard. The publisher accepted it. (They kind of had to--they'd already shelled out a significant advance, which I spent on booze, peyote and an adolescent tiger shark named Fesbach that I kept in a bathtub.) But they didn't publish it. All the senior editors met in the conference room late one Friday afternoon, smoked the entire manuscript, page by page and threw darts at my dust jacket portrait.

So now I'm an outsider again, and that's okay because being an outsider is dangerous and sexy. Is it preferable to being a literary darling? I don't know. Probably. It sure is tough to put a price on being dangerous and sexy.