How Many Guns Were in Your Church Christmas Eve?

Due to the severe isolation of the job, most literary writers, and a few of the genre guys, develop a co-dependency relationship with a specific bookstore. The store is usually a local, mid-sized independent where you can get to know the staff and the staff can get to know you and your idiosyncrasies. Authors become mascots, of a sort, like the store cat that customers see slinking through the stacks. We drop in at these bookstores four or five times a week, just to see the books on the shelves. We buy a few, of course, but most of the time we’re there to absorb vibrations off the printed page. We need to know books still exist. We need to renew faith that the book we’re writing now will one day be on those shelves, real and tangible.

My home store is Valley Books in Jackson, Wyoming. Steve Ashley owns Valley Books and he is the finest human I’ve known in my days on Earth. I have owed Steve money continuously for over thirty years. Back during the dishwashing decades, I would charge all my Christmas presents there, for the family back in Oklahoma, then spend the rest of the year paying off the bill.

After that, came the flush screenwriting years when I pretended Steve allowed me to hang out in his bookstore for a hundred dollar a month cover charge. In exchange, I pretended all the books were free. Most months it worked out well. Only in winter did I drop so far behind I had to write a massive check in the spring.

When I’m in the throes of writing a novel, I tend to get more than a little spooky. Steve’s employees have always been kind and patient with my abnormal behavior. More than once I came to after a bookseller touched me on the arm and asked after my welfare, when I was frozen up in front of a shelf.

Which brings us to Christmas Eve. Fifteen to twenty years ago, in appreciation of all Steve and his staff did for me, I would go in during Christmas week and clean the employee bathroom. I hoped to start a precedent ¬¬– a movement, if you will – whereby all authors clean their local bookstore employee bathrooms during Christmas week.

It never caught on. To this day, I think if Phillip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates, and John Updike had followed my lead, we would have created a new tradition, equal to Secret Santas and black-eyed peas on New Year’s. But then, Steve remodeled the store and did away with employee bathrooms. I would have probably stopped, eventually, anyway. There comes a time of life where it’s considered peculiar to clean other people’s bathrooms.

So, here is the current Christmas Eve tradition: First we – the family and I – go to the 4 p.m. Christmas carol service at the Episcopal Church here in town. My daughter, Leila, loves to sing, “Go Tell It on the Mountain.” I like tradition and ritual.

(Last Monday night, Dick Cheney was at the service. By my modest count, seventeen members of the congregation were packing guns. We skipped the Peace. Made the Good Will to Men thing seem a bit warped.)

Then, after church, I take a bottle of Frangelica liqueur to Valley Books, and right before closing, the staff, the owner, family members, and late shoppers toast to Christmas and the wonderful folks who sell books. Actually, we share several toasts. I don’t drink much anymore, so it doesn’t take but a couple shots to zip me right into the holiday spirit. And I’ve found the staff is more appreciative of a Dixie cup full of cheer at closing time than they were of a clean bathroom.

If there’s any Frangelica left, I take it home and put in into the French toast Christmas morning. I heartily endorse baking with liqueurs.

On another note, I once tried to explain to Leila why teenagers hate poems and songs featuring their name. I used the example of “Georgie, Porgie, pudding and pie.” I never met a kid named George yet who doesn’t loathe that poem. And girls named Brandy – my advice is don’t break into “Brandy, you’re a fine girl,” when you meet them. They’ve heard it before. At seven, my Leila is not impressed by people who knock out a verse of “Layla” the moment they meet her. Besides, no one can remember the line after “You got me on my knees.”

For me, the most damaging Christmas icon is that little brat Tiny Tim. God, I hated that sanctimonious suck-up. I was small for my age – I grew seven inches after high school – so the whole tiny thing made me neurotic as a Democrat in Utah anyway. It didn’t help for other kids to taunt, “Where’s your crutch, Tiny Tim? When are you going to say your line?”

But then I grew up and I am no longer an insecure, short, isolated, frightened, resentful, nerdy, twerp.

I don’t think. To prove my point, I will now take a giant step forward in my development as a whole human being.

“Merry Christmas.” Here it comes: “God bless us every one.”

p.s. Mark it on your calendar. Jimi Hendrix Turns Eighty comes out in paperback on January 4. If you’ve already read the book, buy a few for your loved ones. Grandparents love it even when they claim their friends won’t. And order three from chain stores. You don’t have to pick them up. Unclaimed books will eventually reach a shelf. I’m too old to wash dishes professionally.

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The Greatest Story Ever Told — Shane

When she was thirteen years old, Tanya Tucker had a big crossover country/pop hit called “Delta Dawn.” Suddenly, in the blink of an eye, she found herself famous, the Miley Cyrus of her day. Tanya went into a wild spell marked by extremes, outrageous behavior, and public delamination of the celebrity sort. Now, she’s grown into a respected icon of country music, which, goes to show you — survival is the most important element in becoming an icon. You, too, can become a venerated elder of your tribe, no matter what you did as a teenager. It’s a matter of not stopping till you get there.

Anyway, Tanya Tucker put together an anthology called “100 Ways to Beat the Blues.” In the book, 100 more or less well-known people talk about their personal remedies for fighting depression. Mostly, she chose country singer and movie stars, along with a smattering of politicians and sports guys. And me. Lord knows how I made the cut. I’ve never met Tanya, although I have enjoyed her music and she seems to have come through the too-young fame syndrome with some level of sanity.

There are a few writers in the 100— Wally Lamb, Kinky Friedman, Cathie Pelletier. Not many live west of Austin. George And Barbara Bush had to share a chapter. Willie Nelson’s advice is short — “If you don’t like the blues, play from the whites.” I’m thinking it’s a golf joke. Garth Brooks chapter is serious, sincere, and personal. Among other things, Garth says you should watch the news on TV every night. Whatever makes you happy, I guess. Roseanne said it’s uplifting to beat the tar out of your ex-husband’s motorcycle with a baseball bat.

An alarming number of the musicians recommend getting drunk. Personally, I found myself drunk a lot, back in the old days, and I don’t remember it ever making me perky, punctual , and positive.

A bunch of the your more artistic types say depression is not necessarily bad for you.

Here is my chapter:

Kurt Vonnegut says a person must be depressed to write a novel, which is probably true. However, when I am depressed I have a tendency to sit on the couch and stare at that four-inch gap between my feet for several days, until the spiritual catatonia grows boring and I get up.

Boredom is the cure for long-term depression, and anything that alleviates boredom short-term — alcohol, sex with people you don’t like, rage — only puts off the cure. So, after a few days of sitting there like an African violet in need of sunlight, I get up and fix a pot of Kenya AA coffee. Then I pop Shane into the VCR. It’s a scientific fact that a person cannot remain in the dumps throughout a full viewing of Shane.

Alan Ladd, Jean Arthur. Jack Palance.

“Shane! Come back! Mother wants you!”

The movie will renew your faith in the inevitability of good’s victory over evil, the dignity of beauty, and the inspiration brought on by a nice view.

After Shane, and a couple of cups of strong Kenya AA, I can return to my work, refreshed and ready to produce.

That riff is the closest I’ve come to a bestseller.

I once saw Tanya Tucker at the Cowboy Bar. She was with Glen Campbell, at the height of her public flame-out. Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears are flashes in the pan compared to a country singer gone off the steep side of the roller coaster. Tonya had taken some sort of strange pills and got herself stuck up against a wall in the Cowboy Bar ladies room. Folks went in and out of there for a couple hours, trying to peel her loose.

Then, suddenly, Tanya bounced on stage, grabbed the microphone, and belted out one of the most kick-ass sets I’ve ever seen or heard. She was a true professional, and a hot singer. I later used that scene in “Western Swing.” Nothing is wasted.

So far as I can make out, nine readers of the last blog submitted titles containing three different punctuation marks. My favorite was Hooper Humperdink . . . ? Not Him!, submitted by Jill, because it used the most punctuation in the least words, which was the point of the Go, Dog. Go! exercise. I should have outlawed quotation marks, apostrophes, and nonfiction, but I didn’t so you readers have all earned your copies of “The Pyms: Unauthorized Tales of Jackson Hole.” If you will send me an address, through Messages — not Comments or Blog Comments or anything public — I will, eventually, when I get time between now and Christmas, mail you an autographed copy of this near-but-not-quite classic.

The rest of you can actually purchase this wonder at timsandlin.com. It’s the perfect Secret Santa gift, suitable for toilet reading, as each chapter takes the exact amount of time to read as a healthy #2. They are ten dollars each, plus three dollars shipping no matter how many you buy. Handling is free. In my value system, it is immoral to charge for handling. Who came up with that scam anyway?

Today’s assignment: In thirty-two words or less, tell me how you beat the blues.

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Jesus Invents the Limerick

Let’s say you’re hanging out in the campus Starbucks with a bunch of MFA students. You know the kind. The girls order their coffee decaf triple venti three Splenda extra hot stirred no-foam with double whipped cream and extra caramel. The guys call a movie a film. Some twit will jump down your throat if you use “party” as a verb. And these intellectuals (you can’t say pseudo-intellectual without being one) break out in a limerick reciting contest.

What you can do, after you’ve read this blog, is show them up by reciting the original limerick. Not only the first but also the most famous, it has nothing to do with Nantucket or Terlingua.

Here is God’s Own limerick.

Our Father who art in heaven
Hallowed be thy name
Thy kingdom come
Thy will be done
On earth as it is in heaven.

Some dork will call you on the rhyme of the second line, but limericks are defined more by rhythm than rhyme scheme. Tell them when Jesus first created the poem in whatever form of Hebrew they spoke back then, that “name” and “heaven” rhymed. Not many can prove you wrong there.

Whoever actually did translate the prayer for the King James version must have done it limerick form on purpose. You don’t just fall into that 8-6-4-4-8 beat thing by accident. Maybe the old monk or whoever it was had been drinking with Irishmen who started conversations with, “There once was a girl from Regina.”

I heard a guy at Pearl Street Bagels tell this nice looking girl that Jesus spoke Yiddish. She said that wasn’t true, that her Jesus was a Southern Baptist and none of them talked in Yiddish at all.

I seem to be on strike. I went down to the Cowboy Bar looking for someone to picket, but they weren’t shooting any movies, so I left. People say this Hollywood drama is like pro football players striking— millionaires trying to cut other millionaires out of the cut — but I disagree. Writers of TV and movies are being shafted by the non-creative types at the top, who have been somewhat Draconian in this deal. As the saying out there goes for writers: “You can make a killing, but you can’t make a living.”

There’s also an old Polish/blonde/North Dakota/fill-in-the-blank joke about the woman who went to a movie set and she wanted to get ahead so she slept with the writer.

I’m on page 300 of the fourth book of the GroVont trilogy. For those of you who haven’t read the story so far, the first three books take place in 1963, 1973, and 1983. At the end of the 1983 book, Sam Callahan’s mother, Lydia, went into hiding after the Secret Service discovered she’d Fed Exxed a poison chew toy to President Reagan’s dog.

Now, in 1993, Lydia has been let out of prison. Her community service requirement entails taping an oral history of a 100-year-old codger named Oly Pedersen, who appeared in a paragraph or two of each of the other three books.

Did you follow that?

I’ve been searching for a title for a couple of years. At first it was “Oly and Lydia,” but that then Garrison Keillor started telling Oly and Lena jokes on his show and I gave it up. Then it was GroVont IV. I hate movie sequels that use numbers because no one involved was creative enough to come up with a name, so I threw that out. Then I read about this experiment where they hooked people up to a lie detector machine and read them lists of words, and the two words that caused the greatest emotional response were “Mother” and “Blood.” So, naturally, I named the book “Mother’s Blood.” My editor didn’t like it. He said a book with that title would not announce itself as a comedy. He said, “Mother’s Blood is dark.” Even though that was a straight line for the ages, I had to walk away.

So — drum roll. The new title of the new novel: “A Clean Catch.”

I can hear you now. “I don’t get it.” For some, the reference may not be obvious. “Clean catch” is a term used by people who are explaining the proper way to give a urine sample. Basically, you whiz two seconds, stop, position the cup, start again, and stop before overflow. This procedure can either be medical or legal. Everywhere you go these days, someone wants your pee.

Anyway, I told my good friend and internet guru (drop him a line if you need a web page designed) Curt the new title and here’s what he wrote back.

“To me the stream is a person. You start off full blast with a big hole to shoot for, but as time goes by, you come to a point where you suddenly have to stop and aim for the cup (society), without dripping, missing, or overflowing. Or the huge hole becomes a tiny cup whether you want it to or not. My dad’s simplification was ‘Piss on it.’ ”

Both of these explanations are brilliant. It’s like when a high school kid writes a paper on your novel and finds all kinds of symbols, metaphors, and motifs you never dreamed of. After you read the paper, you say, “Yeah. That’s what I meant. I just didn’t know it at the time.”

So, all you Blog Commenters — and you know who you are — this is a challenge. I’d like to hear your interpretation of the metaphor behind a novel entitled “A Clean Catch.” Go wild (although keep it short. The rest of us have to read these things).

Years from now, after the strike ends, when I’m interviewed on “The View” and one of those vibrant women says, “Tell us the meaning of the title,” I may go into your very own rap, and you can e-mail your friends and loved ones and say, “Tim stole that metaphor from me.”

How about this: If the title stays till publication, I’ll put the best one you guys come up with in the Acknowledgments. It can’t get more exciting than that.

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Why I Left Hollywood: part IV

I couldn’t sleep last night. I got to worrying about why ravel and unravel mean the same thing. What’s that all about? And why cleave is its own opposite. About three in the morning it hit me that if a semi-truck has 18 wheels, a whole truck must have 36. That’s the kind of thing that kills us literary types.

Onward through the fog. Or blog.

Attitude is language. Which means we are not only what we say but how we say it. Here is all you need to know about the difference between publishing novels and writing movies.

In publishing, if an editor doesn’t want your work, they send you a rejection letter. Rejection is the key word for New Yorkers. Editors like to look at writers from the point of view of Cotton Mather’s “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” sermon, and they are God. Once misspelled word, or a margin too narrow or too wide, and they not only ship you a rejection slip, but a form rejection slip.

Compare rejection to how Hollywood turns you down. The producer who doesn’t want your work will say, “This is the best first draft I’ve read all year, buy I’m afraid I have to pass.” Isn’t passing so much softer than rejecting? It’s also sneakier because it leaves the door open for coming back, as in “I’ll pass on those pork chops but I may take you up on it later.”

And when they do pass, they do it by sending an e-mail to your agent. Down at the bottom of the e-mail are letters CF/rb, or whatever, indicating who said it and who typed it. But below that, at the very bottom, you’ll find this cryptic sentence:

Dictated but not read.

That means whoever said it said it but they reserve the right of denial, if it goes to court or their job is on the line. Isn’t that sneaky?

Actually, you’re lucky to get a Pass in Hollywood. Mostly what you’ll get is silence. People out there hate to say “No.” It might be awkward and awkwardness is not tolerated. Stars never say “No.” You send them the script and if they like it they say, “Maybe, depends on the money,” but if they don’t like it, eight phones calls, twelve e-mails and four months later your agent’s assistant lets it slip, “Too bad that didn’t work out with the star.”

“First I’ve heard it didn’t.”

“Oh, they passed a couple months ago.” This always comes from the assistant, never the agent. No agent who wants to stay alive in that town will tell a client anything the client doesn’t want to hear.

And then here’s what happens more often than could be statistically random. A friend of yours at a hummus and pita bread party will be standing next to your star and your friend will say, “Too bad you passed on Such-and-So’s script. You would have been great for the part.” And the star will say, “What script? I didn’t see any script,” which means either the star, his agent, or your agent, or all three, are lying through their teeth.

You’ll never know for sure, but the odds run to his agent. Agents love to protect their clients from artsy character-driven passion projects by turning them down without telling the star the offer existed. Nothing an agent hates more than a client taking on a project for some reason other than big bucks. Better to keep him mindless tentpoles.

Or maybe your own agent didn’t want to tell you the famous actor will never in this lifetime play in your cross-dressing musical and he told you he submitted it but instead he stuck it in a file cabinet for three months before telling his assistant to leak it to you that the star loves the script but it’s not for him.

Or maybe the star is lying.

If you plan to work in the movie business you must accept that everyone lies and it’s normal behavior and your job is to figure out what they really mean. They don’t even know they are lying. They think they’re speaking in a code (which we will discuss in a future blog) and, if you’re a professional you will be able to translate the truth. For instance, in that earlier statement, “This is the best first draft I’ve read all year,” the only part of that you need to hear is “first draft.” That means if they take it you’ll be doing rewrites on your death bed.

Richard Price once said, “Thank you, in Hollywood, means you’re fired.” It my experience, the studios said “Thank you,” but the producers said nothing. Remember when your first girlfriend broke up with you in high school? You talk on the phone every day for a few months and then it stops. No Goodbye. No thanks for the memories. If you throw a wall-eyed cat fit she has her best friend tell you you’re being shallow. That’s how it is with producers. One day you call them and their assistant says he’ll call back in ten minutes and that’s the end.

Your progression should be idealism to cynicism to acceptance. Otherwise, the business will destroy you.

Here’s an example of Hollywood and language. Early in my career, an actor — we’ll call him Tom Skerritt — hired me to adapt an unpublished novel. Mind you, I never talked to Tom in person. That isn’t done. I talked to his son the producer who said Tom wanted the script aimed at sixteen year olds. He also said when the movie came out he and I would share screenwriter credit. I was so green at the time, I didn’t realize a producer taking half the credit for a script he didn’t write is as ethical as parking in a handicapped zone and as legal as gunning down a Git Shit clerk.

Anyway, I wrote for four months, turned in the script, waited a few more months, then I called the son who said, “I misheard Dad. He wanted the script aimed at sixty year olds.”

He hung up and that was that. I was out four months of my life and they were out a fairly large chunk of money, because Tom said “Sixty” and the son heard “Sixteen.”

Or maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was a case of Dictated but not read.

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Suicide and Reviews: Part II

So, the page proofs of Rowdy in Paris have come and gone. The novel has been written seven times, edited twice, copyedited once, and, now, proofed, all with the goal of making it sound spontaneously regurgitated. Unless someone hires me to write a screenplay, I’ll never read the book again. Today, I can take any given sentence and tell you the eight other ways I wrote it, but the names are already starting to drift away. In a year, readers will know the book much better than I do.

Many writers use the birth metaphor in talking about novels. That’s because both take roughly nine months to put out and, once they’re on their own, you quickly lose control over them. Both also tend to put your car in the ditch at least once.

The pregnancy comparison works, so far as discomfort and time are concerned, but writing a novel also requires continuous effort for all those months. You have to get pregnant every day. My metaphor runs more along the lines of crawling from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean, picking various denominations of coins out of the dirt every eight inches, using only your tongue, lips, and teeth, while children with sticks beat you about the head, shoulders, and occasionally, genitals.

The crawling coast-to-coast represents the general bull-headedness it takes to keep going. Almost anybody can crawl from one ocean to the other, the question is, who would want to? Picking up the small change using tongue, lips, and teeth stands for the sentences. You can’t bury your brain and go on. You must maintain the same level of alertness to detail for months or years at a time. If you use the wrong word on page 312, it can screw up a word you used back on page 36.

The children beating you with sticks is your outside life, the life that respects that you are a writer but can’t stand it when you actually write. Toward the end of any long work the writer has to view any distraction — disease, death of loved ones, divorce, financial collapse, hurricanes, 9/11 — as part of a conspiracy to keep you from getting your words down that day. It becomes both weird and clinical, and it is just as horrid if you’re writing a bad book as it is if you are writing enduring literature. So, you might as well write something that matters since the process is going to kill you anyway.

Jim Harrison has a list of writers who committed suicide within a month of finishing a novel. Last I heard, he had 35 names. It goes along with the postpartum metaphor, I suppose. You’ve been holding the universe and your body together by sheer will for so long, that when you allow yourself to let go, you tend to let go of everything at once and the results can be messy.

The closest I’ve come to After Novel Disaster was to blow a knee the night I finished Sex and Sunsets. Dancing in the Cowboy Bar to a country version of the theme song to The Flintstones TV show. Went down like a sack of cement thrown off the back of a truck. Saw my kneecap on the wrong side of my Levi’s and thanked God I’d finished the book before the operation I knew was to come.

Reviews. I’m supposed to write about reviews again. Searching for the perfect segue here, let’s talk about the most frequent comment you read on Amazon trash jobs. “[The author] phoned the book in.” The charge is that the author put no effort into the book, therefore, it sucks. I’ve read reviews of many novels from many writers and that’s the common indictment that goes with the single star (“I would give less if I could,” is the second most common comment.) Often these reviews start out with, “I am [Blah Blah’s] biggest fan and I love his or her novels, but . . . ” and then they go on to castrate the writer, destroy his wife and children, and burn down his house.

Self-evident truth #1: You can’t truly hate a person that you didn’t love first. (God, I wish these blogs had italics.) Nine out of ten crimes of passion — both in real life and metaphorically — are consummated by former or present loved ones.

And humor brings out the nastiest of the vendettas. People just plain hate the writer who tries to be funny and, in the eyes of the reader, isn’t. You want a cult following, write humor. You want stalkers, write humor. You want hate mail spray-painted on the side of your house, write humor.

Here is the story that gave me my current attitude toward fame. Back in the 60s and early 70s, Richard Brautigan was the most famous writer of his generation. He was the king. Hell, in Japan he was God. The man was beloved by the multitude.

Richard committed suicide — which isn’t a life lesson in itself. Besides funny novels, he also wrote poetry and an astoundingly high percentage of poets kill themselves. Go through the Norton Anthology of Literature sometime and try to find a poet who didn’t take the shortcut to the finish line, so to speak. You choose the career, you live with the risk.

But, now for the life lesson about fame: Richard Brautigan killed himself at home, out in his backyard. Here comes the moral of the story: His body wasn’t found for over three months.

Think about it.

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Why I Left Hollywood: Part II

In a bizarre example of irony on parade, after I wrote that last blog full of George and Dick jokes, I went down to Valley Books here in Jackson and had run-ins with both the Secret Service and Dick Cheney. The Dick run-in wasn’t so much a run-in as a stand-next-to while Dick and Lynn bought books and I talked to Ashley the book sales girl about my run-in with the Secret Service outside. The Cheneys bought nonfiction, but I don’t know what. I should have looked, only I was distracted by Ashley, who was more interesting than the Vice President.
I did fight off the nearly irresistible urge to thrust one of my novels in his hands, but Dick just didn’t seem to type to read about Vice Presidents on coke or three-ways in nursing homes. The Honey Don’t tour (the Vice President on coke book) took me to Washington D.C. and one of the book buyers at Politics and Prose told me Republicans don’t read fiction.
“What do they read?” I asked.
“They watch television.”
The actual run-in part of the day happened earlier, outside with the Secret Service. I would wager there is some poor drudge of a bureaucrat whose job is to read all the blogs that mention Dick or George, searching for teenagers or Unabomber wannabes who post threats. If so, this is for him. Or her: Tell the Secret Service that if they identify themselves before pushing people around, they would save themselves and the people they push a lot of grief.
I thought this guy with the Mormon missionary haircut was saving a parking place for his wife who was driving the Winnebago around the block, and I told him to get his ass up on the curb so I could park.
“It’s unethical to save parking places,” I said.
In my mind, the man overreacted. He said, “Get out of here.”
The conversation deteriorated from there and I was ten seconds from digging into the glove compartment for bear spray when I noticed several other guys of similar build and hairstyle closing in.
I said, “Shit. You’re Secret Service.”
He sort of blinked a Yes. The turkey never did say it out loud.
I said, “I thought you were a tourist jerk.”
He said, “I don’t have time for this,” and I drove off. Had to park a block away, then when I finally make it to the bookstore — walking past the Secret Serviceman who didn’t seem to recognize me — there was Dick Cheney, browsing.
Which isn’t at all what this blog is about. I’ve written two political spiels lately, and that’s my quota for the month. There’s nothing worse that a highbrow blog evolving into an anti-government rant. Nobody wants to read that crapola.
This blog is about the screenplay I wrote for Jerry Bruckheimer. Jerry’s a famous person in Hollywood. He produced all kinds of movies from Top Gun to Armageddon to Pirates of the Caribbean, and why the nice folks at his company thought of me when it came time to write a script about a coal miner strike in Kentucky, I’ll never know. I am known for Rocky Mountain humor, not Appalachian angst. The project was based on a book by John Yount, who is one of my personal heroes. He wrote a book called Toots in Solitude that should be required reading for anyone before they are allowed to write a novel. This project wasn’t Toots, it was based on a book called Hardcastle, and I think the fact that I owned the book and had read it before they approached me was what sealed the pitch.
You probably think this is one of those bite the hand that fed you and allowed you to move indoors pieces, but it’s not. The Bruckheimer people were a pleasure to work with, especially his wife Linda. She is the finest example of quality folks in Hollywood. They flew me first class, put me up in a high-end hotel (I forget which one, some place they took for granted I had heard of before) and they never tried to hustle me for free drafts. All the other producers I wrote for hustled free drafts. Out there, you either get paid like you’ve never been paid before, or you work for nothing, and the labor is the same either way.
But Bruckhemer Films isn’t like the normal producer. They know the writer is the rock that keeps everyone else out of the water.
About four drafts in, someone finally showed Jerry himself a copy of the script. They flew me out from Wyoming and picked me up in a limo and drove me out to Santa Monica where I was given a fancy bottle of water and shown into this room straight out of your Hollywood fantasies.
A guy named Chad said, “Jerry wants you to kill a white guy by page twenty.”
I said, “I can do that.”
Chad said, “Great,” and they flew me home.

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Why I Left Hollywood, part 1

I wrote five novels about my problems and then I ran out of problems. The fact that I stripmined myself for five fairly good books shows just how deeply screwed up I was. I have always thought a novelist with nothing to say should shut up, so I did, waiting patiently for new problems to appear. In the meantime, I wrote screenplays because you don’t have to have anything to say to write a movie. You just have to be able to give good meeting.
In seven years I wrote 11 scripts for hire, which means they paid me to write them, and created hundreds of takes and treatments. Generally, you don’t get paid for those. Three of the last projects I worked on in good old L.A. were biopics. This means biographies loosely based on someone strange. My three assignments were Gorgeous George, Ron Popeil, and Brian Zembic.
Gorgeous George was the first true TV star. Or at least he tied with Milton Berle for first. George was a wrestler. The earliest hit TV shows were professional wrestling and it’s been going strong ever since. G.G. created the villain as star. He discovered that by pretending to cheat and preen and taunt, he was much more popular than the good guys. he faked the bully, cheating, homosexual, so people would hate him. This concept is foreign to me. While there are people the world over who don’t like me much, I’ve never gone out of my way to foster animosity.
Since then, many TV stars have found love through hatred. My favorite was J.R. Ewing back on “Dallas.” I guess they do it on that Survivor show all the time. And Bill O’Reilly has adopted all of Gorgeous George’s techniques for making people think he’s an arrogant ass. I’ve been told O’Reilly is a regular guy until the camera comes on. He says all those incredibly stupid things so people will believe the opposite. Without him, the Democrats wouldn’t control Congress.
Ron Popeil invented that stuff you spray on your head to make it look like you have hair. And the Pocket Fisherman and the In the Shell Egg Scrambler. He created hundreds of products no one knew they needed. Where would civilization be without the Veg-O-Matic? He also coined the phrase, “As Seen on TV,” as if being on TV makes an object or person legitimate. His dream is to sell people products they don’t need.
Brian Zembic is a flaming redneck who underwent a boob job to win a bet. I spent a week running around Vegas while he chased Chi Chi (I believe is how it is spelled), and hustled poker. He’ll bet on anything. He’s best at Ping Pong and backgammon, not bad at blackjack. He once made a bet taht he could watch continous porn for ten days straight without abusing himself. He won, but he told me porn has never been the same.
Brian has really big knockers. The other two guys were just treatments but I actually wrote an entire script for Brian. It’s called — get ready — “Stacked.” I made him considerably more charming in the screenplay than he is in real life. You can read it on timsandlin.com if you want. Anyone with two million bucks should send me a message. There’s some good actors attached. And a director.
The point of all this is I’m not like these guys. I would never try to make someone hate me. I would never sell anyone something they don’t want more than life itself. And I wouldn’t, as a rule, get large knockers to win a bet.
After these three projects —WALLAH (how’s that spelled? This is harder than Chi Chi) — I had enough problems to go back to writing novels. I’ve been doing it ever since.

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Jackson Hole: Where Bush Hides His Dick

I live in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, and so, theoretically, does Vice President Dick Cheney. I say theoretically because he really doesn’t. There is this rule in the Constitution that says the President and Vice President can’t be from the same state, and Dick was living in Dallas at the time he was nominated, so he quickly came to Jackson and registered to vote here. I’ve seen the voting registration lists and he’s the only one in the valley with General Delivery for his address. They won’t allow the other transients to register General Delivery, on the theory that people should live somewhere before they vote.
Dick was raised in Wyoming, but way over on the other side of the state. We don’t exactly claim him. His granddaughter played with my daughter one afternoon at the library. She seemed like a normal little girl — no sign of Devil spawn — except for two large goons with really bad haircuts and yellow dangly coils coming out of their ears who sat over by the cardboard cut-out of Angelina Ballerina, the dancing mouse.
Whenever the news folks say the Vice President is in an undisclosed location, he is here, fishing. He’s supposed to be in hiding, only two ambulances follow him around wherever he goes, so locals tend to keep track of the man without help from CNN. If you miss the ambulances, a sure sign of Vice Presidential occupancy is quick, little jets darting through the valley, or oversized helicopters hovering over the Snake River.
Those helicopters were a bone of local contention the week after Katrina wiped out New Orleans. Besides the obvious literary comparison of Nero fiddling while Rome burned and Cheney flyfishing while New Orleans drowned, there were those who thought the helicopters could have been used for rescue work instead of tracking a #14 dry humpy lost in the willows.
I think Cheney got a bad rap on that one. He was on vacation for Chrissake. We shouldn’t expect him to care what happened to New Orleans. Black people don’t vote Republican. I think he did just what he should have done. He fished.
Here is what I meant to write about before I got sidetracked. I find this interesting:
Teton County, Wyoming, has three registered Republicans for each registered Democrat. This is the Vice President’s hometown, and yet (I’ve written nine novels and this is the first time I’ve ever typed “and yet”). And yet, Teton County was the only county in Wyoming that voted for Kerry in the last election. How can that be? My only theory is that people who actually live near the Dick and know him, won’t vote for him.
Maybe there is another reason. If anyone has any ideas why the man’s Republican neighbors won’t vote for him, I’d like to hear them.

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What Kurt Vonnegut Told Me to Do but I Didn’t

Back in my early twenties I used to squat illegally on National Forest land in a Cheyenne tipi my then-wife and I put together with canvas and lodgepole pines. I would work an entry leveljob in a restaurant I knew was closing after summer tourist season to make enough money to move inside for the winter. When the restaurant closed, I went on unemployment and wrote a novel as hard as I could until spring when I moved outside again.
In four winters, I wrote four novels. As soon as one was finished, I dashed off 120 to 150 query letters to agents and editors across America, asking them if they wanted to read my book. No one did. I could have been writing damn classics and no one would have known. Luckily for literary history’s sake, I wasn’t.
In a fit of pique, I wrote a letter to Kurt Vonnegut. As I recall, mostly I whined about the state of publishing. At the end, I asked him to read some of my stuff. Now, after bringing out eight or nine books of my own, I realize what a pushy son-of-a-bitch I was. but, amazingly enough, he wrote back.
This is what Kurt Vonnegut said.
The letter is typed on bond paper using a fairly old ribbon. It is dated November 25, 1981.

Dear Tim Sandlin,
I can’t begin to read all the stuff people expect me to read. I am smothered by manuscripts. Also: I have never acted as an agent, have never gotten anybody published.
Writing is a business like any other. You are going to have to hustle some. It would probably be smart for you, if you really believe in your work, to come to New York to persuade an agent to take you on. As to the indifference of publishers to queries by mail from unknowns: They simply can’t afford to read and evaluate the tons of stuff which is written in this enormous country of ours year after year. They don’t have that kind of money. So they leave it to the agents to conduct the talent searches. Agents themselves can’t afford to consider everything, either. They have to be wooed, which is why I suggest your coming to New York.
Sorry about that, and good luck.
Yours truly,

Kurt Vonnegut
He signed it in blue ink.

It’s odd that a man who had a phobia about semi-colons would use two colons in one page. And that “tons of stuff which is written” line isn’t quite right. I daresay he didn’t expect the letter to end up on a blog.
Sometimes I imagine what would have happened if I took his advice. I mean, at the time, I wasn’t living on pavement. Moving to New York was as bizarre an idea as moving to Mars. Or Tralfamador. Since then, I have published books, without moving, but I wonder if I did go woo, would I have bigger advances or print runs? Would I know people who go to cocktail parties and eat brie? Who can tell. We all make choices.
But, I think it was enormously kind of Mr. Vonnegut to write me a letter that wasn’t a copy/paste get-away-from-me-kid. I will always think well of him and cherish his books.

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Bear spray and mosquito spray are not the same thing

I would like to be remembered as the man who invented the word gazillion. Not that I did, but most people given credit for creating things didn’t. I would encourage you to tell your friends that Tim Sandlin coined the gazillion.
Which isn’t what this blog is about. This blog is about evolution.
On our way to Yellowstone the other day we came upon a major bear jam up around Pacific Creek. A couple hundred cars were pulled over and the display of photo equipment was truly impressive. There were lenses the size of bazookas aimed at this mother grizzly and three cubs that appeared to be grazing out in the field. I know, you are thinking grizzlies don’t graze, but it sure looked like they were eating grass. Maybe it was for the same reason my dog eats grass — so they could crap indoors.
Anyway, the token idiot from Utah wandered out in the field for a close-up. Suddenly, the interesting nature lesson became one of those Darwin Award deals. All the hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment left the bears and moved to the idiot. I blame YouTube. And those TV shows of Stupid Human Tricks, or Nature Gone Wild. Any tech weenie with a cell phone can get rich selling tragedy to network news now, so nature itself takes a backseat to the chance to make a buck.
People were saying, “God, I hope she just rips his arms off instead of killing him outright. It’ll make for much better footage.”
I told my daughter the man was committing suicide and we might be able to watch. All these comments about his brainless, stupid, Utah-like behavior were made within hearing distance of the man’s wife and kids. After a bit, the woman herded her children back into one of those pickup trucks so big it takes six tires instead of two to keep them on the road. And the cab is big as a limo. They idle loud as an airplane. The boy was playing some kind of handheld game where he got to kill people, which is modern life for you. Kids are more interested in wasting electronic humans than watching their dad buy it from a grizzly bear.
The bear stood on her hind legs and looked at the guy, but she never charged. The crowd was disappointed.
She did pick off a jogger a week later. Bit him in the ear and shoulder. People who live in grizzly country don’t call it jogging. We call it trolling.
A photographer in Yellowstone was mauled the same day as our near but not quite adventure with the idiot. The guy in Yellowstone was two miles from a trail and three from a road. The bear ripped out his eye, and the guy walked three miles with his eyeball hanging off the side of his face. I think. The news story said the bear ripped out his eye, and another story said doctors spent so-many hours putting his eye back in, which means he either carried his eyeball in his hand for three miles or it was hanging by mucus or whatever off his cheek there. Both make an interesting image.
I wonder if he could see out of it. I read that Frenchmen who were guillotined were able to see for around three minutes after their head popped off their body. I don’t know how the scientist who figured this out figured it out, but I suppose it’s possible. The eye and the brain are both there together. You could see until oxygen became a problem. It would be fun to write a poem under those conditions.
Back to the title of this little piece: Last year a woman from Texas sprayed her kids with mosquito repellant then did the same with bear repellant. Results were about what you would expect.

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