Jacks

So, Friends #3 is off at the printers… Everything went pretty much according to plan, shockingly enough! The only fuck up was in scheduling the time to letterpress print the covers with my wonderful boss Mara at the San Francisco Center for the Book: they are all booked this week, so the initial run that I’ll be selling at APE this weekend will have some sort of alternative printing method, perhaps this version, made with the mysterious Risograph photocopier/silk screen printer (which I got for free last year from the church of Scientology):

The thing’s damn temperamental, and there’s this ink spot that keeps landing in the middle of the page… but that red ink! I love it! Maybe I’ll just discount these copies.

Finishing this issue also brings the “Jacks” story to a close. I came up with my idea for these two characters years ago, while I was living in Chicago… they were orignally a pair of reckless gamblers, hence the “Jacks” name: two of a kind (a Jack of Spades & a Jack of Hearts, to be specific). Over the years the story stayed in the back of my head, changing over time and getting farther away from a romantic if noirish concept of inveterate gamblers and crooks into a slightly more familiar short story about the place where I first conceived of the two in the first place. I wanted to capture some of the flavor of my long-ago life in Chicago, a mix of maniacal energy, despondency, drugs, and ill-conceived scams; a place that I still somehow miss, despite having made a very serious decision to get away from that life years ago. I’m sure that I will return to that world again in my thoughts and my work, I’m just not mature enough as a creator to even start to do it justice, or to give a well rounded account of what even one bad day there might have been like.

More importantly, I wanted to address some of my feelings about male companionship in my life; and here I feel my failure was the greatest. The two Jacks aren’t meant to be me and any friend in particular (in fact I often think of them as different parts of one conflicted character, namely myself); but much of the flavor of their relationship is meant to reflect a long and all-encompassing friendship I’ve had with an old and now distant friend, O. We met while we were in high school, and lived together for many years, in San Diego, Berkeley and finally Chicago. Our relationship was so convoluted and close that I think that both of our personalities began to merge into each others (I’ve discussed this briefly with O recently and he agrees), we were rarely apart, and after a while we were truly “two of a kind”. But we were both slowly changing over the years, drifting apart, and we finally were more or less separated when I moved up here to San Francisco and he moved back to San Diego. We rarely talk much these days, but I think that we both have a huge wellspring of love for each other, despite our differences…

As I began to work on Jacks, and it became increasingly clear to me that I was really trying to address my complicated and deep feelings about my friendship with O, I became more and more nervous. As a fledgling author I just couldn’t begin to plumb the depths of that friendship, probably the most important of my life (It also doesn’t help that O is possessed of a devastating critical streak, when I finally did send him copies of Friends #1 & #2 he wrote me back and said they were “offensively bad”). But that’s the thing… I can’t wait around until I get better, I’ll never get better if I’m not working now; I would rather try and fail then keep silent (which had been the case for years). I can only hope that each story and each issue will be some improvement on the last, and perhaps someday I will have the creative wherewithal to do justice to all the amazing people and places and sparkling, surprising moments that I’ve had seen in this life.