The Thing I Left Out

 

Yeah, they’re old now, 1,500 pages of breakthrough writing.

Because I trusted him so, I sent Paul Suerken my manuscripts of the work-in-progress called Sourh Street before it was finished. The scope and scale of it scared me. It was either great or a grand illusion of mine. He responded quickly. He hated it. He told me it all sounded like I had an ax to grind. He said literature was not about hatred but something more elevated I had not discovered.

He delayed me from showing it to a publisher by ten years. How much I valued his opinion.

Some years later I called him. Told him how much he had hurt me. And how he had catalyzed one of the key books of the Punk Testament, the one called ‘They’:




The Boomer Bible alone was 880 pages. The Book of They was about a thousand words. Suerken stopped my writing. What happens to writers. They trust too much.





He apologized. He said he knew, instantly, how great it was. And he couldn’t live with it. But you all have to understand, that’s a condition of my life. Nobody can live with me. Suerken was my friend. Even my wife loves me. But she hates me too. I would hate me too. So I stand up for him. As I would for everyone else who had to deal with the ineluctable awfulness called me. I forgave him. And then, like everyone else, he died on me.


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