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Orgasmo by Donald O’Donovan — Part 10
“Donaldo, my friend… How to crush the demon of creativity? This is the problem I’m wrestling with now. I’m more than willing to give General Grant my sword. But I can’t stop writing! I don’t know how to exorcise the demon. I am in essence that demon. How to kill the inner child, that’s what it comes down to. How to kill the inner child. I want to live a normal life. But how can one live a normal life in Los Angeles?” Fausto Diego Villarreal, from a letter to Donald O’Donovan
In 2008, my best pal Fausto Diego Villarreal asked me to help him keep a pledge he’d made to himself to quit writing forever, get a regular job and live a normal life. We were both at the time impoverished and unpublished writers who had spent twenty years trying to batter down the doors of the monolithic New York publishing establishment. Fausto managed to convince me that we needed to stop pissing out a window as it were and salvage what was left of our lives, and at the bar of LA’s historic Wilshire Royale Hotel the two of us shook hands and made a solemn vow to do just that. My autobiographical novel Orgasmo chronicles my disastrous attempt to quit writing forever and pursue the American Dream. Donald O’Donovan
after that Sylvia, Starz’s quality woman, popped in, wearing a floppy hat. It’s
a type, these rich women with their floppy hats. They take you over. But Starz
must have known what he was getting into when he put himself up for adoption.
It was a pretty sweet deal, though. He didn’t have to give her the time all
that often, plus she was a nice looking woman for sixty-one. I saw right away
however that Sylvia disapproved of me. I guess she could tell I wasn’t a member
of the cucumber sandwich set.
Starz latched onto Svetlana. I should have seen it coming when they started in
on the Banana Kush and the vodka. It was a thing with them, right from the
get-go, as though they’d invented that particular combination. Svetlana was crazy
about the sailing, too, another item they had in common. And then they ganged
up on me about the blood. “We need more blood.” They were united on that. So I
wrote in a flashback of the original murder. “The stepfather stabs her
eighty-one times with a flensing knife,” I told them. “Then a woodsman chops
the stepfather’s head off with an ax.” I made Svetlana run the lines with me.
She knew I was pissed off, and she understood perfectly well that I was the
woodsman and that it was Starz’s head I wanted to chop off, not the
stepfather’s.
one did….
Donald O’Donovan wrote the first draft of his novel Night Train (Open Books, 2010) on 23 yellow legal pads while homeless in the streets of LA. His other novels include Tarantula Woman, The Sugarhouse and Highway. An optioned screenwriter and voice actor with film and audio book credits, Donald O’Donovan lives mostly in Los Angeles. He can be reached at: [email protected]m
Find a list of O’Donovan’s books here and here. See O’Donovan’s other pieces on DDA: The Novel As Graffiti, Cardboard Villages, Simon Rodia, Architect of Dreams, and I Live Under Your Wallpaper
2012-09-21 03:49:23
Source: http://www.deardirtyamerica.com/2012/09/orgasmo-by-donald-odonovan-part-10.html
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