by Les Edgerton
Invisible this, I say in my head, when I walk by, and then I do whatever the fuck I want, whatever I feel like doing. Just what-the-fuck-ever. Just like that, amigo.
OF POSSIBLE INTEREST
JUST LIKE THAT, like most of my fiction, is based on events and people in my own life. In this particular story, about 80 percent of it is factual. I won’t reveal what parts are real and what parts are the product of my imagination, and the only reason I won’t is because of that pesky statute of limitations thing.
Bud is very real and is his actual name. The character Donna (not her real name) was based on a call girl girlfriend I lived with in New Orleans and who appears in a number of my books. In real life, she really did stab another girl I was seeing and nearly killed her and tried to stab me as well, except I was able to get the knife away from her. And, she did abort our baby, which led to the stabbing incident, not portrayed here. The scenes in Pendleton are all spot-on experiences I had with one small exception—I didn’t stab a guy on the roof of the laundry—but the rest of the experiences are almost verbatim as are the characters in those scenes. When I was an inmate, I lived through eight riots and then-President Lyndon B. Johnson came on national TV and declared Pendleton “the single worst prison in the U.S.” I was in Cellblock D watching the one TV we had when President Johnson made his announcement and we all stood up and cheered as if we’d just won the Super Bowl. In a way, I guess we had…
Assistant Warden Cathy Johns of the infamous prison at Angola, LA (nicknamed “The Farm” and the subject of an award-winning documentary of that name) read this and said it was “the best and truest account of the criminal mind she’d ever read.”) Thanks, Cathy.
It’s sometimes of interest to both writers and non-writers (and readers) alike, how “real life” translates to fiction. Here’s an example from JUST LIKE THAT. The trip in the novel is actually the synthesis of three separate road trips to Lake Charles, Louisiana. In the version presented, the protagonist ends up as a swamper in a night club/restaurant that actually existed when I was there, the Black Angus. However, I never worked there as a swamper, or bus boy as the job is known as in many other places. In one of the trips, where Bud and I ended up there, I wasn’t on parole at the time as is described in the book, but already held a Louisiana barber’s license from living in the state years before. We did end up there, broke, and I did have a rifle and shotgun I was able to sell to get enough money to get a room for a week (I kept the .45 pistol I had, just in case…), and Bud did end up going back to Ft. Wayne shortly after we got there as he missed his girlfriend (whose name was Lucy and who did work in the cafeteria at Parkview Hospital, not in housekeeping). I stayed and got a job right away at a styling salon. Can’t remember the name of it but it was owned by two of the nicest guys I’ve ever known. While I was there, rock star Freddy Fender (of “Wasted Days and Wasted Nights” platinum record fame) came to town to perform a concert, and our salon was chosen to cut their hair. I got to cut Freddy’s hair and we hit it off, both being ex-convicts and all that jazz.
Freddy ended up giving us backstage passes for the concert, and afterward, I was invited to a party at his band’s hotel. I showed up and Freddy wasn’t there yet. The booze and drugs were flowing and all his band mates were there as well as a ton of chicks. I was laying back on the floor smoking a doobie and chinning with Freddy’s lead guitarist (all of his band had met and hooked up in the Texas prison they were incarcerated in), and trading joint stories. About half an hour later, Freddy finally arrived… with four girls in tow. He didn’t say anything to anybody—just nodded a greeting—and disappeared with the four babes into one of the suite bedrooms.
His bandmate laughed and told me that Freddy always ended up with four girls every time they played a gig. He said he’d be in there all night and that he’d “take care of all of ‘em.”
That was when I wished I’d learned to play the guitar…
Anyway, I think this was a great story, but alas—it didn’t fit the fiction parameters of the novel I wrote here so it didn’t make it in. The story does make it into my memoir for which we’re looking for a publisher, ADRENALINE JUNKIE. And that’s how fiction that’s based on real life sometimes works. You have to forego using material sometimes that’s really kind of cool…
What I hope shows through is the criminal verisimilitude I feel I’m able to deliver as a real-life outlaw. A sensibility other writers are unable to deliver simply from spending a night in the drunk tank… or from a tour of the joint…
You decide.
***
PUBLICATION CREDITS
Excerpts of JUST LIKE THAT have been published as short stories in the following publications:
1. High Plains Literary Review
2. Houghton-Mifflin’s Best American Mystery Stories 2001
3. Murdaland
4. Flatmancrooked
5. Blue Moon Literary and Art Review
6. Noir Nation, forthcoming in Issue 1 and Issue 2
7. Gumbo Ya-Ya, story collection, forthcoming from Snubnose Press
8. Kansas Quarterly/Arkansas Review
9. Monday’s Meal, story collection, published by the University of North Texas Press
Two of the stories excerpted have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize, and one has been nominated for the Edgar Allan Poe Award (short story category).
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
LES EDGERTON IS AN ex-con, having served two plus years in Pendleton back in the sixties, charged with burglary, strong-armed and armed robbery, charges reduced to burglary for which he was sentenced to 2-5 years. He graduated from the Pendleton Barber College and practiced hairstyling for over 30 years upon his release. He is also a Navy veteran, serving from 1961-65 as a cryptographer during the Cuban Crisis and beginning of Viet Nam.
Following his parole, he began college at Indiana University at South Bend, where, three years after emerging from prison, he was elected Student Body President. He later graduated from I.U. and later, earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Vermont College.
All of his life, Edgerton has been a writer, beginning in grade school. He has eleven books in print, with several more forthcoming. He also teaches creative writing and has taught online for the UCLA Writer’s Program, Vermont College, Painted Rock, Writer’s Digest, the University of Hawaii at Manoa, and was Writer-in-Residence for three years at the University of Toledo and for one year at Trine University. He taught speech at St. Francis University and currently teaches online for the Writer’s Program at Phoenix College. He also coaches writer-clients on their novels.
Edgerton has been a semifamous hairstylist (was an “A” national platform artist for Clairol, won 16 state hairstyling championships in Illinois, Michigan and Indiana, co-hosted a Cox Cable TV show on fashion with Paul Cimino in New Orleans), and when he was the Artistic Director for the Snobs Salon in New Orleans, they were the hairstylists for the 1987 spring release fashion show for Liz Clairborne. He has held various jobs in not-so-ordinary lines of work, including working for an escort service (whose clients were older, wealthy women), as a professional gambler, a “manager” for a call girl, a drug user and dealer, and a singer in a rock band (very minor rock band... very minor singer...).He was also a sports reporter for the South Bend Tribune, drove a T-Bird at speeds over 120 mph down city streets in a police chase, and has been shot at more than once (and shot back) as well as being the victim of an attempted stabbing in which one of his girlfriends stabbed another and tried to nail him as well. He’s also been married five times. All of these things (and others) happened at different times in his life if you thought he was just having a busy week. He’s working on a memoir that will actually hold up to scrutiny and vetting better than James Frey’s and in which things actually happen…
Work of Edgerton’s has been nominated for or won: the Pushcart Prize, O. Henry Award, Edgar Allan Poe Award (short story category), PEN/Faulkner Award, the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Book Award, and the Violet Crown Bo
ok Award. One of his short stories appeared in Houghton-Mifflin’s Best American Mystery Stories, 2001. One of his screenplays was named a semifinalist in the Academy Awards Nicholl’s Foundation competition, and another placed as a finalist in both the Writer’s Guild competition and the Best of Austin Screenwriter’s Competition.
Edgerton says that what inspires him creatively: “Anger. I write because I hate and I hate hard. Lest you misunderstand that, what I hate are those who take themselves too seriously, politicians, bullies, too much government, pretentious individuals, movie stars who play intelligent people on the screen that a screenwriter created and begin to think that transfers to their own real life persona—and the people who take these actors seriously, those who take what they haven’t earned and think nothing of it, People Magazine and those who subscribe to it, and people who own lots of mirrors. People who are “all hat and no cattle,” to use a Texas saying. Lazy people.”
Electronic Edition Copyright ©2011 by Les Edgerton
All rights reserved as permitted under the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior permission of the publisher.
StoneGate Ink 2011
StoneGate Ink
Boise ID 83713
http://www.stonegateink.com
First eBook Edition: 2011
The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to a real person, living or dead is coincidental and not intended by the author.
Cover design by Fuji Aamabreorn
Published in the United States of America
StoneGate Ink
