When I returned home for Christmas, I announced that I was dropping out of school to write music and shack up with my new soulmate. I let her pierce my left ear and learned to play a few chords on the guitar. I won both the job and an initiation into the strange and wonderful world of Daphne Robichaux, a crash course in alternative music, pharmaceuticals, and a lot of sex, with the occasional light bondage. I began the interview with a heavily edited account of my country club experience, but at the urging of my interviewer-a twenty-something peroxide blonde punk rocker and weekend college radio DJ with a killer smile-I kept adding details until we were both rolling on the floor. I spent the rest of the summer as an unemployed thorn in my parents’ collective ass.īack at school, I responded to an ad in the student paper: banquet catering. We escaped mostly unscratched, thanks to vodka’s armorplating effects, and the talk of pressing charges turned out to be just that. The ensuing explosion of glass delivered a thrilling end to what had been, up until that point, a brilliantly executed shortcut across the bunkers on Hole 13, improvised with the help of a half-bottle of Stoli, an angry golf marshal in hot pursuit, and the bridesmaid’s reciprocating fingers down the front of my pants. My passenger-a bridesmaid with Stevie Nicks hair who minutes earlier I’d been finger-fucking behind the Pro Shop-was late for her scheduled toast at the wedding on the other side of the window. My summer plans to bus tables for the snobs at the Hempstead Golf and Country Club had collapsed when I’d tried to drive a fully airborne golf cart through a plate-glass window. I met Daphne when I returned to the U, a broke sophomore in need of a part-time job. Followed immediately by four hours of paranoid delusions, violent arguments over meaningless nonissues, and, during our final week together, a pair of suicide attempts wrapped around assault with a deadly weapon. But she was never happier than the couple of times I’d seen her receive a shipment of Simpamina, which was apparently Italian for seventy-two straight hours of sex, rock and roll, and menial household chores completed with manic gusto. Cocaine, when she could afford it ephedrine-powered nasal decongestants when she couldn’t. The race for Daphne lay in the corridors of her mind, long and labyrinthine, and the girl needed her get-up-and-go. Not in the traditional sense: she rarely pushed her weathered Honda Civic past third gear. And the nearly perfect wrap up, well, that's something I'd rather not talk about. Push in a few music references - like the show does - and you got yourself something that isn't bad, but isn't something you'd expect. The book starts reading more like something out of the mind of Hank Moody toward the last half, but the voice is still lacking. I'm not sure how much instruction he got or how much creative freedom he was allotted, but after a few chapters into the book, I thought less and less about Hank Moody's persona on the show and more about how this book seems completely color-by-numbers. In actuality, Jonathan Grotenstein - who, possibly, wrote this book - probably had Hank Moody in the head. And I know, I shouldn't even think like that because neither Hank Moody, TomKat (in the sense of the show, anyway) or the real (though, actually, fictional) God Hates Us All don't really exist. I can't even fathom how something like this could ever be adapted into a romantic comedy starring TomKat. And I really didn't know what to expect when a fictional novel is released into the real world, but whatever I did expect, I can assure you this wasn't it. But then again, let's not forget how disappointed I was with the novel. Finally having finished the novel, I have to say that I understand why Hank Moody was pissed off when his novel - which takes its title from a Slayer album - was turned into the TomKat flick, A Crazy Little Thing Called Love (which, god forbid, no one decides to actually make). Note: It wasn't the fact that I couldn't afford his book last year, it's just that it takes me a year to grow the balls to read a novel based on a novel in a TV show. My prayers were answered when his novel, God Hates Us All, was released last year. So it goes without saying, when Californication came into my life, I wanted to read Hank Moody's novels. When I read Wonder Boys by Chabon, I wanted to read the collective works of Grady Tripp and those of "the first real writer" Tripp ever knew - August Van Zorn. Fictional books - as in, the ones that don't exist in the real world - always intrigue me.
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