We here at Forth pride ourselves on digging deeper than the surface most other publications merely scratch. Without oppressive printing-costs to cut us off at the knees, we can indulge ourselves above and beyond the claustrophobic brevity that is generally imposed on standard Q & A’s. For those of you with a crippling case of A.D.D. your time is probably better spent watching the latest cute animal blunder on Youtube. For the rest of you: pour yourself a choice glass of wine, kick your feet up, and enjoy this one-of-a-kind conversation about failure, perseverance and how a writer boldly chose to follow-up his enormously popular novel-turned-Academy-Award-winning-movie.

Continuing the Dionysian exploits of Miles & Jack, Vertical – Pickett’s long-anticipated sequel to his now iconic Sideways — had me alternately laughing and crying through this hilarious, heartbreaking and ultimately moving meditation on Fame, Friendship and Family. I found it equally poignant and profound the way this epic road novel slowly but surely strips Miles down to his naked, sober soul — a bittersweet, existential deconstruction of everything this man is. Vertical managed to break my heart and then put it back together again, piece by piece, and should abolish any lingering doubts whether the author just got “lucky” with Sideways. This is a work to be both admired and savored like the great Willamette Valley Pinots Miles exults over (**Quoted on the back of Vertical’s hard-cover edition**). A story such as this, about real human beings experiencing real emotions, is unfortunately considered High Concept at a time when most “literary” adults are reading about vampires and wizards. Bravely dipping a pen in the ink of his own soul, Pickett’s novels chart a winding path from divorced, struggling writer in the throes of a mid-life crises, to celebrated author coming to grips with his success. A journey that should serve as inspiration for any underdog artists who feel that time — and hope — is running out for them.

I recently sat down with Rex at a coffee shop in Santa Monica to discuss Vertical and all the wine, sweat & tears that lead up to it. At 6’ 1” and with a full head of hair, the San Diego native is the complete antithesis to the nerdy portrayal of his alter-ego in the film.

MM: I admire what you’ve been through, Rex. You’ve fought the good fight.

RP: I’m blogging about it now (verticalthenovel.com), but you know, even after Sideways life wasn’t rosy. Success isn’t like one of those pianos that play themselves. No. There’s a blank page. People think they’re going to write that one thing and it’s going to be the be-all, end-all, well… think again.

MM: So for those who are unfamiliar with your background, describe the catalyst behind the writing of Sideways.

RP: My life was pretty much in the shit-can. My agent had died of AIDS; my mother had a massive stroke that rendered her left-side totally paralyzed; my younger brother took over her care out of ostensible altruism and then proceeded to gut all of her savings in a mere two years. I went through an amicable, albeit disorienting, divorce with my wife – who won an Oscar for a short-film I wrote in 2000 [My Mother Dreams the Satan’s Disciples in New York.] So I was pretty much nowhere when I wrote a novel called La Purisma – named after a golf course up in Santa Ynez – and it was a mystery novel. First novel I had written since some epigone avant-garde experiments in the ‘70s. It got me a publishing agent who took it on, but we couldn’t sell it. So that’s the other thing: if you have an agent and he likes your work, you can still have trouble getting published; it’s no guarantee just because you have representation. And in the novel world, things move slowly, unlike with screenplays. The rejection letters trickle in like a slow morphine drip.

MM: The frustration of Miles Raymond comes into focus.

RP: So thus we have Miles, the guy who can’t publish his novel. I started spending a lot of time up in Santa Ynez Valley. Initially I went up just for the golf – uncrowded and beautiful — then I started staying overnight at, where else? The Windmill Inn, just like Jack and Miles. Then I had to have a place to eat, so I ambled over to the nearby Hitching Post, now an iconic landmark because of Sideways. I would always go up mid-week when there was no one on the golf course, and practically no one dining at the Hitching Post. After a few glasses of their Pinot I’d strike up a conversation and suddenly I realized: “Oh my God, there’re wineries around here!” So, frustrated with my novel La Purisima, I took frequent sojourns up there. Then, because it was so beautiful and uncrowded I started taking friends. Once I went up with a buddy of mine, Roy, and we went from tasting room to tasting room, cracking each other up. He’s the inspiration behind Jack and he said, “Rex, you gotta write this as a screenplay”, and I thought, “Yeah!” So I wrote Sideways as a screenplay but it didn’t work. It so didn’t work, I didn’t give it to my agent.

Early on in Bret Easton Ellis’ “Imperial Bedrooms” (his long-awaited sequel to his debut “Less Than Zero”) this old Hollywood joke is shared between characters. Not because it’s funny, but because it offers a hint to the novel’s central theme: the Screenwriter’s Sexual Revenge. A theme that could have been used in so many effective ways to further the narrative Ellis set in place 25 years ago… but ultimately falls flat.

When I was maybe 16 or 17 I randomly picked a copy of “Less Than Zero” off the Barnes & Noble shelf in my hometown. The bright yellow spine beckoned me like a moth to flame, and the title was so very cool. The red and blue colored sunglasses on the cover didn’t promise much, but a quick glance at the back reeled me in. It was about sex, drugs and rock n’ roll set in Los Angeles. That’s all I needed to know, because I was already entertaining notions of moving out to Hollywood after graduation.

Little did I know that the novel I was about to read was already a cult sensation, having spawned a popular movie by the same name starring Robert Downey Jr. It centered on an apathetic, bisexual college student named Clay returning home to decadent L.A. for the Christmas holiday, and followed his downward spiral around the dirty drain of hedonism before leaving it all behind once again. With its blunt style, and casual approach to shocking content, it cemented Bret Easton Ellis as a literary force to be reckoned with. Hedonist. Misogynist. Nihilist. Love him or hate him, it was the spring-board for a prolific career that has produced controversial works such as “American Psycho”, “The Rules of Attraction” and “The Informers” (all adapted into half-baked, but mildly entertaining cinematic versions).

With each subsequent novel, I became more and more immersed in his bleak, twisted universe – a dark dimension disguised as a sexy party where “hope” and “love” are considered vulgar apparitions. His protagonists are superficial, addicted, oversexed and indifferent to any emotions including their own. College students, Wall Street serial-killers, fashion-model terrorists, socialite vampires and mid-life crisis movie producers – all damned by their own infinite appetites for lust and greed. Scathing, gross and sometimes hilarious, his body of work comprised a colorful Rubik’s Cube of doom, which could never be properly aligned no matter how much you read between the lines.

And at just about the time I thought I had him figured out, when it seemed his bag of tricks would finally become deflated and dusty, he tossed 2005’s “Lunar Park” our way, and completely turned his own world up-side-down – and my head effectively inside-out. This brilliant novel was about a writer named Bret Easton Ellis who is haunted by a book he wrote called “American Psycho”, who becomes a family man in the suburbs in some half-assed attempt to reconcile his relentless demons. Self-deprecating to the point of satire, the novel then miraculously shifted gears from horror story to a bittersweet redemption plot. When I closed that book, I was flooded with conflicting emotions, but none of them were negative. The impossible had happened: I was genuinely moved by the coldest writer in modern American fiction. It seemed as if Ellis had finally turned a corner of some sort. In short, he had elevated his own game.

Lindsay’s arrest on July 24th 2007 for drunk driving was an unwanted punch-line to an already overlong joke. Before my current “glory days” at Forth, I was a cheap entertainment journalist, desperate enough to do a stint at the National Enquirer but contemptuous enough to piss people off and not keep the job for longer than a month. I never DID publish a single word with them, and in hindsight getting paid to sit at a desk in their corner and pretend to look busy was the easiest money I have made so far. Back in those days, I was hungry for dirt, worms and all, and my research into the ’07 Lohan case yielded some shocking revelations. Revelations that a sorry excuse for a rag like the Enquirer could not comprehend.

If the Santa Monica Police Department’s blood-tests of the troubled starlet were true, it would indicate that she was not only above the legal blood/alcohol limit and had traces of cocaine in her system, but that she also shares the same basic DNA of “Periplaneta Americana” …also known as the American cockroach. Such insight suggests genetic tampering for “youth retention” purposes, or perhaps some extraterrestrial origin that we are too afraid to contemplate. Either way, this information spells trouble, as Lindsay’s resilience could render her indestructible to the penal system, tabloid criticism, and worst of all, fire and pitchforks.

“We’ve tried everything,” said an anonymous source working at the undisclosed treatment center Lohan was located in ’07, “Electro-shock therapy, synthetic cerebral injections, even exorcism.”

Exorcism?

“Well, yes, a priest was called in and performed a seven hour purification.”

And the results?

“He packed up his things and shook his head.”

If such reports were true, if she was really locked up in some secret facility in the outskirts of the Utah desert region, and if she was really beyond the helping hands of science and Jesus… the question for 2010 is: what now? At 24 years-old, Lohan has already been to rehab three times, faced two DUI arrests and served approximately 84 minutes in jail. Her recent 90-day sentence is either the poisonous crescendo to a cursed life, or the set-up for a sordid porn to be shot on prison guard’s iPhones — maybe both. How long will this poor fair-skinned creature be left to wallow in such heartbreaking conditions? Would you let your dog suffer this long? Or would you take pity and finally have her put down, the humane way? Here’s a glass of warm milk, Lindsay, good girl Lindsay, drink every last drop Lindsay…

“Just look at her mug-shot,” James Butts, chief of the SMPD told me in a phone interview after her ’07 arrest, “Look at her expression. I’ve seen hundreds, maybe thousands of mug-shots in my day, but this one really stands out.”

How so?

“Just look at how her eyes are pleading to us. Her eyes are begging us, please, please world, please believe in me. Don’t give up on me yet. I am a mixed-up little girl and I have a lot of love to give…” Butts cleared his throat and resumed a professional tone, “At least, that’s what I see.”

The jury is out on whether Lohan is, in fact, mortal, or if when she dies she will simply implode and instantly re-appear in some other terrestrial form, like a jellyfish or a cloud. Reincarnation is NOT the prevailing theory at the local church, as His Eminence Roger Cardinal Mahony attested over the phone. As the archbishop of Los Angeles, Mahony speaks for nearly five million members when he says, “Nonsense. This girl is flesh and blood. If we burned her at the stake, she would very much catch fire and not come back.”

Could Lindsay have been sent among us to be punished for all our sins?

“If you are insinuating that this troubled young woman is the Second Coming, I am afraid this interview is over.”

Well, if God’s first and only son was a poor carpenter who partied at weddings and hung out with prostitutes, is it really such a leap in logic that perhaps his only daughter might come in the form of Lindsay Lohan?

“My son, there is no redemptive quality within that girl. If anyone has sent her among us, it was the devil.”

Brittany may have shaved her head and flashed her hot-pocket all over town, and Paris may have released a porn and done her stint at prison, but all of these things seem to pale in comparison to Lohan’s current state of affairs. She has remained in the unflattering limelight long after her peers have all but faded into irrelevance. Perhaps Brittany and Paris were mere test-patterns, perhaps Lindsay is the devil’s TRUE magnum-opus — as the Archbishop would attest — his David or Sistine Chapel of cocaine sluttery. It is true that Lohan is not the first and only celebrity train-wreck to hit rock-bottom. Robert Downey Jr. is no stranger to the Man Downstairs himself, but Downey is removed from Lohan by one slight distinction: he can act, and act well, whereas Double L has freckled cleavage and… that’s about it. Watching the verdict being laid down on her on CNN was like watching an anguished baby seal realize that the club looming over her head is not for providing shade, after all. Her pathetic balling showed signs of some base instinct still kicking around her addled head, a tiny echo of an ember of the little girl who once had a bright future in front of her and has no idea how it all went wrong.

Surely if the actress was a 24 year-old black male, none of this would have happened. She would have been maced, tasered, arrested and thrown behind bars back in ’07 faster than she can do a bump in the bathroom at Hyde. Her privileged stature has gotten her this far, and how much mileage is left in her withered karma is hard to say. It is the opinion of this humble journalist that the collective media perform a “Lohan Blackout” effective immediately. No more reports, articles, pictures or sound-bytes. No updates, interviews, rumors or hearsay. Maybe, just maybe, if we all ignored her she would cease to exist… poof …out of sight, out of mind. The real question remains: how can we expect Lohan to overcome her addictions when WE are incapable of overcoming our own? Can it be that we are all locked into some kind of sick, symbiotic relationship from which there is no escape?

Deep thoughts and heavy questions on a topic that has as much nutritional-value as a worm’s semen. But in 2010 America, worm-semen can be quite the lucrative commodity, and a strung-out 24 year-old girl the perfect target for our sins.

courtesy of Showtime

So Showtime has a little series called “Californication” about a compulsively hedonistic writer who also happens to be a devout family man. Maybe you’ve heard of it? Tom Kapinos created the splendid walking contradiction that is Hank Moody, who is played with mellow charm by David Duchovny in a performance that makes us forget he once chased aliens for a living. Struggling to reignite his earlier success, Hank is constantly torn between settling down with his girlfriend and daughter, or letting his raging id steer him into one sexual collision after another. Currently en route to its fourth season, the series has become one of the hottest on cable and has recently spawned a literary spin-off in the form of Hank’s infamous novel, “God Hates Us All”. That’s right. You can now purchase and read the book that put Hank on the map, with his very name on the cover and a brief bio on the back. And it’s not only a bona fide work of fiction, but a damn good one at that.

Jonathan Grotenstein taken by Marco Mannone

Fans of the raunchy-yet-bittersweet comedic series will be able to decipher some semi-autobiographical back-story on Hank’s youth in New York, but the novel defiantly stands alone as its own narrative, independent of the show. This is thanks exclusively to the novel’s real writer, Jonathan Grotenstein, whom I had the pleasure of sitting down with at a coffee shop in Eagle Rock to discuss the nuts and bolts of his creative process. Jonathan’s story centers around a young, nameless narrator living in New York City in the late 80’s. He is a blue-collar kid with a psychotic ex-girlfriend, an adulterous father, a flirtatious best friend and no real direction in life. Recklessly quitting the food-service industry, he finds himself running pot all over the city for a powerful dealer called The Pontiff. This new vocation affords our narrator the ability to move into the famous Chelsea hotel, and to begin consorting with a colorful cast of characters that shade-in the term “sex, drugs and rock n’ roll”. But his newfound life in the fast-lane comes with its heavy share of heartache and stark, personal revelations.  From one writer to another, our conversation went something like this…

MARCO MANNONE: How did you get the job to write Hank Moody’s infamous novel?

JONATHAN GROTENSTEIN: I got the job because of the relationship I have with the editor on the book. The first book I ever wrote was “Poker: The Real Deal” with Phil Gordon, and the assistant editor was a woman by the name of Cara Bedick. Cara became an editor in her own right, and she was given “God Hates Us All” as sort of her first book that she was going to shepherd through the process. She needed to find someone who could work quickly and cheaply.

MM: How long did you have to write it?

JG: It’s for a division of Simon & Shuster called Simon Spotlight, that generally has really, really tight deadlines. Probably not more than four months (for a nearly 200-page work of fiction).

MM: Were you a fan of the series before you ever got this job?

JG: Yeah, I watched all of the first season, and when I started writing it, the second season was just about to get underway. I liked the show. I have to confess I didn’t love Season One, but as I was writing the book and watching Season Two, which I thought was much stronger, I very much fell in love with the show. Also getting to meet Tom Kapinos, who created the show, and sort of hearing his voice and realizing what he was trying to do with it, helped develop an appreciation for it. But yes, I had seen all of the episodes (at the time) before I was ever approached to write it.

MM: What aspects of the show did you connect with — as a male, as a writer, also living in Los Angeles… any specific aspects you could identify with?

JG: Yeah. I mean, I like to think that one of the reasons Cara thought of me was… Hank and I are similar in certain ways and very different in other ways. I’m not in any way the ladies man that Hank is, or as brilliant as Hank is supposed to be, but I definitely have my angry moments, my darker moments. I didn’t have an old, beat-up Porshe that I was driving around, but I did have an old, beat-up Mercedes convertible that I was driving around. I’m a guy from New York who’s been out in L.A. for a while, and sort of has the same kind of love-hate relationship with the city that he seems to have. I’m also a recovering entertainment industry person. I found that industry to be a lot more bullshit than I could tolerate. I think that helped me relate to where Hank was coming from, as well.

MM: In the series the book’s story is never revealed. How much freedom were you allowed to create it from scratch?

courtesy of Showtime

JG: A lot. An insane amount of freedom. I’m not even sure how much a huge fan of the book Tom Kapinos is. First of all, it’s very hard for him because Hank is his baby, and has a very specific voice, and he thought of the book in a very specific way.  And having someone else write that, I think… He wasn’t going to write it, not in three months or four months. But he had a very definite idea of how he wanted it to be, and the sort of tone it should have. We met once and talked about it on the phone a couple of times and exchanged a bunch of e-mails. Ultimately, I latched onto the idea that Hank was a writer in the 1980’s, the late 80’s in New York City. The book that Tom and I sort of hit on was (Jay McInerney’s) “Bright Lights, Big City”, and he thought that was a book that Hank might have written. There’s another book called “The Fuck-Up” (by Arthur Nersesian) so I went back and read “Bright Lights, Big City” and “The Fuck-Up” and I thought, alright, if Tom thought that Hank would have written those kinds of books, then I’m gonna sort of go in that vein. But you know, I’m not the writer that Tom is, especially when it comes to Hank’s voice, so I was forced to go with things that I knew. And a lot of the book are things that are semi-autobiographical to my life, or people that I’ve met or encountered and I had as much leeway as I wanted. Especially with the first draft. With the second draft after Tom had a chance to read it, we sort of figured out some ways to help what I had written converge with the idea he had for the book all along.

Chapter 1
THE PHOTOGRAPH

WHETHER BEAUTIFUL OR TERRIBLE, THE PAST IS ALWAYS A RUIN.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seemlike artifacts from a lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass. I remember the spherical alcohol lamp that glowed like a tiny ghost, ringed with dancing blue flames, which hung over the dining room table of the house where I grew up. I remember the sweet, oily smell of coal smoke, and the creaking of horse-drawn carriages on the dirt road outside. Most of all I remember
the summer twilight over the mountains and how, on certain evenings, just before the sun sank below the horizon, it cast rays so luminous and golden that they felt like a solid, enveloping close into which a small boy could simply disappear. An intensity no light today seems to match.

These images appear as snapshots of a vanished world— literally vanished, considering how much has changed between those years and the present day. Since then, airplane flights linking the continents have transformed once-in-a-lifetime voyages into matters of a few hours spent in a comfortable seat. Things like telephones and automobiles, once improbable rarities possessed only by the very rich, are now taken for granted by average people. When I was young, the changing of the seasons was the most important punctuation of life: ancient rhythms that have since been replaced by electric lights that turn night into day and fragment each day into electronic-precision intervals measured by the punch-clock instead of the almanac.

Now, watching the young men and women dressed in skintight leotards rollerblade past the bench where I like to watch the sun sink over the Pacific on these warm Los Angeles evenings, I know that my world no longer exists. It has vanished utterly, and would be incomprehensible to these self-satisfi ed, bright-faced youths.

Thanks to the genius of human invention, things have sped up until I can hardly keep track anymore: the new-new internet, the new world order, the next big thing that seems to arrive every day (if the newspapers are to be believed). Carried on the tide of progress, we all seem to be fast-forwarding into a future where our memories become irrelevant relics from a useless and discarded past.

Let me be clear: I don’t mean to glorify the “good old days,” or to condemn the contemporary milieu. Whatever charms the past may have had, I don’t believe those bygone times were any better than the present (at least, apart from my own preferences—and I won’t pretend to speak for anyone other than myself). Instead, what I’m trying to explain is that I am a kind of dinosaur: a member of a near-extinct species, fumbling with arthritic talons on the
typewriter keys as I write these pages.

Several years ago I took a composition course at the local communitycollege. During those sensitivity-laden sessions (where badprose was miraculously transformed into “challenging work,”and cliché into “irony”), the instructor taught us that a story shouldstart by making clear where the narrator stands, establishing thevoice. And that’s what I’m hoping to do here—only, rereadingthese last few paragraphs, I see that it doesn’t seem to be working.And to be honest, clarity in general isn’t one of my strengths thesedays. So maybe it’s best if I begin(again) by simply explaining how it all began.

IT WAS TWO YEARS ago when the little bells above the entrance tothe antiques store tinkled and the door swung open, a sweating delivery man staggering through. I looked up from the book I’dbeen reading and stood.

“Got a shipment for you,” he announced, dropping the packages next to my desk. “Need your signature.”

I wrote my name on the screen that he shoved in my direction. “See you around, boss.” He gave me a thumbs-up gesture before departing into the brightness of the world outside. I looked down at the three large boxes.

It had been almost a decade since I’d opened my antiques store, and by then it was a reasonably successful business, located in a middle-class Los Angeles suburb. I should emphasize that I didn’t start the business because I was ambitious. In fact, I had opened the store for quite opposite reasons: as a refuge, a way of retreating from life. Despite my decades of trying to feel comfortable in the world, I had never really managed to fi t into this place (this sprawling California city with its constant noise, its nirvanas of vitamin juice and self-realization—or this twentieth century in general, for that matter). The store was intended to be a place where I could hide, where I could be alone and let the world forget me.

To my surprise, although I didn’t have much in the way of a gift for salesmanship or knowledge of antiques, the shop provided me with a modest but healthy income, until a larger, more polished antiques store opened a few blocks away. Since then, to compete, I’d been forced to sell less furniture and more historical knickknacks.
For the most part these were old magazines and books that I purchased in bulk, mainly from estate sales in the Midwest: inexpensive curiosities that might attract casual shoppers who wandered in to purchase a fragment of the past.

Through the small windows of the shop, dusty beams of sunlight illuminated the cluttered interior of the space: the worn upholstery of armchairs, an assortment of Edwardian-era dressing tables with age-silvered mirrors, a curio cabinet bearing a row of ormolu clocks (all motionless, since I couldn’t stand the sound of their ticking). Outside, the shapes of palm trees shimmered in the heat.

I slit the packing tape on the first of the boxes and began to inventory its contents. Issues of Time magazine and Life magazine, covers displaying images of celebration and catastrophe. A newspaper clipping and a small black-and-white photograph that had been taped together fell out of one of the magazines and I stooped to pick them up, glancing at the picture. A snapshot of three people sitting at a table in a bar, two men and a woman.

The next thing I remember was the door swinging open, ayoung couple entering the shop. I looked up from the photograph, trying to wipe away my tears with shaking hands. The couple stared at me and I stammered something about the store being closed. They hurried away, and I closed my eyes again.

I told myself that the photograph didn’t make any difference or change anything. But already I understood that, whatever I might want to believe, everything had changed. All my efforts at forgetting and indifference were abruptly meaningless. Like it or not, I would have to go back and unbury everything. Somehow I would have to find a way of telling this story: of salvaging some fragment from the scrap heap of the past.

It has been two years since then, and I’m still struggling to fit the pieces together. At one time I imagined that I could be a good scholar, but if I’m honest with myself I never was—and, at any rate, I’m too old for such efforts now. Despite my hours spent hunched over library books and staring at the glowing hieroglyphics of computer screens, I still can’t prove anything.

More than once, in fact, I told myself that writing this story was a waste of time, a lost cause. But in the end, the cunning of desire always triumphs over the cunning of reason. (Or, as Byron put it, “There is no instinct like that of the heart.”) So that even after I’d decided to give up, at the least expected of times—sitting in my apartment, watching the electric nighttime silhouette of Los Angeles—it would all come crowding back to me…

Well, at least it’s a good story. (Of course I’d have to say that, wouldn’t I? But really: it is.) It’s a story about conspiracies and struggles to reshape the world; about secret wars between men like J. P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. It is about one of the strangest and least-known mysteries of American history: the
existence and disappearance of the Lost Kingdom of Ohio. It is about science and faith, and the distance between the two. Most of all, it’s a story about a man and a woman, and about love.

In my imagination, it begins with a day in the heart of winter. I can picture it effortlessly: the gray sky and the leafless trees, the solemn profile of a young woman standing near a riverbank. A whisper of cold on my cheek as I look up to see the first flakes of snow beginning to fall—

But that’s not right. That scene comes much later—or, looking at it another way, much earlier. Really, the only place I can honestly begin is in the middle of things, with New York City, in the year 1900. With the construction of the first subway tunnels through the dark bedrock beneath the metropolis, and with a young man so distant from where I sit now that he seems an unrecognizable stranger: a mechanic, an adventurer, and perhaps also a criminal,
named Peter Force.