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.

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.

During parties, especially ones in designer-conscious downtown Los Angeles lofts, the couch is coveted territory. People have just spent twenty minutes making polite non-committal remarks around the kitchen island, and all anyone wants to do, at this point, is rest on the cushions and maybe squeeze an end pillow. However, the same competitive drive that applies to every other aspect of life in the city is amplified here. The people on the couch are ruthless motherfuckers. They’ve earned that seat; when a choice spot opens up, you be better be ready for conversational battle, or you will be booted back out into the unfinished concrete of the renovated hallway.

Recently, despite my better judgment, I attended such a party. Weary from exchanging platitudes near a collection of Rocky memorabilia, I decided to sit down on the couch, and found myself engaged in a conversation about conspiracy theories with a bankruptcy lawyer. Clearly, he had sat on this couch before. Not only was he was able to cite specific book titles, but he was making insightful comparisons between presidential assassinations and major terrorism events.

However, he had not consumed nearly as much of the champaign punch as I had, and therefore was unprepared for my counterattack. I began to cite my Basic Theory of Human Nature, drawn from my experience running businesses and running from other people in business environments. My central argument, that incompetence always triumphs over organization, caused him to finally blow out his cheeks in exasperation and get me another drink. No matter what Sun Tzu tenet he may have been trying to employ by getting me another drink, he did legally leave the couch to get me the drink, which officially won me the conversational match point.

Energized, I quickly bested a pleasant woman in a green vest, whose tales of blowing off her friends in order to pass the Bar Exam, although interesting, did not technically qualify as couch material. Self-sacrifice, when paired with heart-warming achievement, is more suited to personal memoir than the sharp-tongued volley of urban happy hour. I felt bad, but this was the couch after all: she would undoubtedly be happier leaning up against the refrigerator while eating some celery sticks.

Now, I was ready to face the alpha couch denizen, the man whose eyes watered only for smoke. I could tell, as we shook hands and settled into our corners, that human emotion meant nothing to him. He had sat on a thousand couches at a thousand different parties, eaten innumerable hors d’oeuvres, listened to tales of prestige and woe with formidable indifference. I was dealing with a master. The only question was: what technique would he employ?

After a quick warm-up, in which we plied some test digs and light undercutting banter, he went for the throat: genuine racial invective! It was a surprise move, cloaked naturally in an ironic tone, but unmistakably a slur. Who calls who a ‘sandnigger’ on a scotch-guarded piece of furniture? It’s a little like lighting somebody’s cigarette with a flamethrower. I began to realize, at that moment, that I no longer wanted to sit on the couch, if I had to sit next to this giant asshole.

It felt like a big moment. He had certainly breached couch etiquette, but who was there to enforce the policy? It fell to me to call him out, and what did I do? I went home. Blame it on the drinks, the late hour, the culminating fatigue of facing down conversational opponents. The point is: I may have lost this couch battle, but I’m still fighting the war.

When viewed abstractly, lounge singing seems to be a parable about the struggle to bring meaning to one’s existence. The lounge itself is the place to be on Saturday night, and the audience, the people to be with on a Saturday night. Never mind the paucity of conversation, the tired sashay of the cocktail waitresses, the unyielding stare of the bouncer; this is where it all happens, baby, so be glad you’re inside.

Meanwhile, the lounge singer, the chief of this low-lit kingdom, has somehow wound up here: his slack posture says it all. Lounge singing is less of a choice, and more of an inevitable phase; everybody, at one metaphorical point or another, will be up there, working the showtunes, hoping to break out of the regional circuit. But isn’t every place just like this one? Maybe the lights are brighter, maybe the drinks are mixed better, but isn’t this it, the existential nightmare, the realization of futility and mortality all in one climactic chorus of “Beyond the Sea”?

There’s no mistaking that spotlight as a stand-in for the blinding enormity of the universe. Maybe you’re up on that stage, singing into the infinite, or maybe you’re on the floor, happy to clap along when the sound stops. Whatever your deal is, best of luck on figuring out what the hell it all means.