My first detective.
Last May, I had the thrill of a lifetime releasing my “debut” mystery — but the truth is I’ve been trying to write one in fits and starts since the age of 15. That’s 40 years in the desert, folks!
My very first earnest attempt, Lovebeads & Guns, written under the teenybopper pseudonym Dexter Fuel, starred a insanely cliché hardboiled private investigator who’s given the task of tracking down a teenage girl who ran away in the throes of an LSD freakout.
I was under the influence of the Paisley Underground in those days—and of course Chandler, Ross MacDonald, Vincent Price as The Saint, Chinatown, and a super-rare detective show called The Outsider starring Darren McGavin. Actually The Outsider was on TV before my time but I was lucky enough to catch the pilot on late night KTLA where they frequently ran some long-lost filler just to cover the hour.
Lovebeads & Guns was also inspired, natch, by a gnarly LSD trip of my own. My junior high pal Munzie (who wore a custom-made t-shirt that read Munzie the Mexi-Germ to denote his mixed Hispanic/Germanic ancestry) had scored some acid on an RTD ride down Hollywood Boulevard…in the form of tax stamps of all things. He produced them from his pocket as if he were revealing a map to buried treasure. I never heard before or since of LSD being distributed that way, on official US Tax Stamps, but who was I to protest?
Along with our friend Rob, we tore the postage-stamp-sized things apart and placed them under our tongues—per instructions. Then we hoofed it over to Fern Dell Park, just above Hollywood Boulevard and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
We’d been ripped off, we’d been burned. With nothing to do, we climbed up the sloping hill above Fern Dell and watched the families trickle in for Saturday picnic-time. We talked about whatever it is 15-year-olds talk about—and we definitely reprimanded Munzie for being so gullible and wasting his money and wasting our time. He held fast. He absolutely insisted that the stuff was gonna work.
Hours passed. And then—
Well, I can’t tell you exactly what happened next but the last thing I remember, we were running for the Boulevard and all the buildings and parked cars were breathing in broad daylight.
Over the ensuing weeks, after school and half-crazed with inspiration, I started typing as fast as possible on my Sears electric, juiced on Kerouac’s “no stopping allowed” mode. The typewriter vibrated so much it would slide across the table like Ouija—what fun!
For the record, I never did complete Lovebeads & Guns.
