Bob Flaherty

That’s it. I demand a recall. I want my novel back. All copies should be sent to me with a self-addressed stamped envelope. Some changes need to be made.

You can tell my novel is a novel because it says so right on the cover, in smaller print. It’s called Puff: a novel. I always lower my voice when I say the “novel” part. It’s like a disclaimer. Like the old Dragnet show’s opening: The story you are about to see is true; the names have been changed to protect the innocent. In other words, a fictional pack of lies.

But after James Frey’s bold stand on national TV, where he defended his brilliant memoir A Million Little Pieces as having emotional truth, we humble novelists have been given a new lease on life. Emotional truth is what we do. We now have the status to go with it. From this day forth, we shall be known as: memoirists.

So that’s it. I am recalling all copies of my novel like a faulty intake valve on a Chrysler LeBaron. Hereafter, Puff, (Harper Perennial 288 pages) my story of two good-for-nothing brothers trying to score some pot in the middle of the worst blizzard to ever blow through Boston, will be re-designated as a memoir. It meets all the requirements of a memoir: It seems to be real, the main character speaks in the first person (very important) and it has enough emotional truth to beat the band. Also, death hangs over every scene like a portable guillotine. What more could be asked of a memoir? And the fact of all facts is that a memoir makes a lot more money than a novel and if there’s one thing we nov—I mean memoirists need, it’s money.

So enough of this “raise your right hand and repeat after me” crap. They’re ALL memoirs. And unlike Bill Clinton, James Frey and a whole lot of other folks who publish memoirs, I’m admitting that some of my memoir is made up. I may be the first to do this. The first to come forward. The first to come clean.

This much is indisputable: I was in the middle of the Blizzard of ’78. I had a van. I had a brother. And we would have climbed Mount Washington in our jockstraps for a bag of weed. An open and shut case: Puff—a memoir.

“But how much of this yarn is actually true, Bob?” I was asked at every stop on my book tour.

“67.6 percent,” was my usual glib reply, but then I started to wonder if the real figure was something much higher. So I brought in interns to pore over the pages with a fine-tooth comb. The amount of emotional truth they uncovered was staggering.

But we novelists, excuse me—memoirists, who work in first person use what is called in the trade: stand-ins. My stand-in in Puff is John Gullivan. People who knew me twenty-five years ago would swear John was me. Same with Gully, the stand-in for my brother Jimmy. You can close your eyes and hear him. I’ve got stand-ins for teachers, priests, cops, cats and knife-wielding maniacs.

And the greatest thing about stand-ins is that they only portray the interesting parts of your life. My stand-in may be me, but he’s the hot-shit version of me. Gone is the longwinded talk show I perform all day for the benefit of my family and anyone else who walks through our door. My stand-in talks sparingly, saying exactly the right thing at the right time. I imagine a lot of A Million Little Pieces is like that. So when does a substituted piece of dialogue cross the bridge into Liar Land? Who gives a fried frappe?

Only books require this burden of truth. We don’t bat an eye at reality TV and its multiple takes. We didn’t ask Tobey Maguire if that was really him swinging around in the Spidey suit. We didn’t ask the dinks in Bush’s White House a damn thing. But books? For books we demand a polygraph test.

It’s the first person stuff that does this. Writing in the first person lends authenticity to the piece, makes everything immediate. I did these things, it calmly announces. It was me. I saved the beagle from drowning. I had sex with Aunt Marlene. I got kicked out of altar boys for laughing during mass. First person. The author and the main character are assumed to be one. Is Salinger not Caulfield? Is Twain not Huck? Is Frey not Frey?

So here’s my confession: Some of the dialogue in Puff is (sob, sniff) completely made up—I’m admitting this now. For instance, page 228: In the scene where the brothers finally fight their way to the pot-dealer’s house, interrupting his afternoon TV watching, he invites them in out of the cold with: “You wanna know what’s happening? Speed Racer’s happening, my friends, followed by Kimba the White fucking Lion! Come in, come in, come in!” But, as every Bostonian of a certain age knows, Channel 56’s everyday lineup in 1978 had Kimba on at 3:30 followed by Speed Racer at 4. I switched the order because it had a better beat. I’m so sorry.

And later, when the same pot-dealer learns of the brother’s losing their mother only hours before, he says: “Cancer? That’s some harsh shit, man. Had an uncle died of cancer. Sonuvabitch looked like a bag of fucking assholes when he died.” Then he gives the boys a little something to get them through their troubling time. Except that the guy who I modeled the pot-dealer after never had an uncle who died of cancer. It’s a lie. He gained the uncle when he went from being a mere stand-in to becoming a real character, with a real life. I hang my head in shame.

“Okay Bob,” you say, picking apart my argument, “what about that scene where your brother disrupts his own induction into the Naval Reserve, knocks over a pitcher of ice water, calls the commanding officer a “real long descriptive name ending in Cub Scout” and ends up getting chased through Boston’s waterfront by Military Police—was that all real, Bob? Did your brother really do all that?”

Sadly, I must answer no. My brother never did any of that. I did. Word for word. It made more sense to give it to Gully. Memoirs are funny like that. You pick and choose.

It doesn’t matter that Twain never rafted down the Mississippi with an escaped slave and, in a crisis of conscience, set the slave free. It doesn’t matter because Huck Finn did all those things and Huck Finn is as real as the air all around us. Same with James Frey. So let’s just slap a BASED ON A TRUE STORY on it like they used to do on made-for-TV movies and end it once and for all. Novels are done. Novels are cassettes. Memoirs are the new novels. It even sounds better coming off the tongue.

Of course, some of these memoirs, though laden with emotional truth they may be, will be far more “fictional” than others. The customer has a right to know. I propose we devise a system, a Fiction-O-Meter if you will, and rate the veracity of the memoir right on the cover. What would noted memoirists like Wally Lamb score? 65-70? What about Richard Russo? Toni Morrison? John Irving? Don’t make me laugh.

On my book’s cover you can safely print: 73% true. That’s pretty good. The bible should have it so good.

We get into Wilmington at around noon. The snow has just about stopped. The train leaves you on an outdoor platform—and there the city is. Colder than hell. Everybody thinks we’re crazy to not take a cab or, saints deliver us, a BUS to the hotel, but I googled the thing, it’s like a mile, I do that with the dog. Besides, I just traveled 300 miles without puking or experiencing acute anxiety—why push it? As agreed before we left, we were walking to the hotel. Of course, walking the dog generally does not involve lugging a heavy backpack round your shoulders while hauling a large wheeled suitcase behind you. What a pair we were, me and my wife, dragging our belongings up Market Street hill, breathing heavy in the nor’easter air.

      “At least no one will rob us,” I said. “They’ll think we’re homeless.”

But we made it. And our room at the Sheraton was everything a room should be. And we slept in it for like the next ten hours.   

Ani DiFranco’s guitar is played like a hard-rid horse, taped-up fingers clawing at its midsection, fret hand yanking away from its neck with each defiant twang. You almost feel sorry for the instrument. But you never feel sorry for her. Not with that smile, that joyous swagger, that self-assured survivalism she’s had since birth. DiFranco is the rockstar in its purest form, Mick and Keith come back as one, with whispers of Joplin in one verse and warcries of Slick in another. “Everyone….is a fucken Napoleon,” she sings, but there’s that little chuckle in the middle there, as if the realization of it is as funny as the failings it speaks to. But Ani DiFranco, the quintessential cynic, is happy, after all these years, happy to be in love, happy to be a mother, ecstatic to live in a country that elected Barack Obama. “Thank you, America, for being more than I expected,” she sings in a song written on election day.

Anyway, my bride of 30 years and I set out early last Monday in a blinding snowstorm to see the Ani DiFranco concert at the Grand Opera House in Wilmington, DE., 300 miles from our house. It was really just an excuse to take a trip on leisurely old Amtrak and stay a couple days in a city we never heard of. Ordinarily, up to about five or six years ago, a trip like this would have been done by car. Except now we hate the car. Well, I do anyway. This has nothing to do with global warming or reducing my (must I say it?) carbon footprint. I just hate the car. Annemarie doesn’t have that much trouble with it, except for the times I’m in the car with her. Oh, boy. Here are two facts you should know about me: From age 17 to about age 40 I was a hellion on wheels. I could drive anything and did, was often employed in some sort of driving capacity, could easily back the biggest truck you wanna name into the ass-narrowest loading dock you could point to and was the cabbie you’d wanna flag down if your flight was taking off in 10 minutes and you were 15 minutes from Logan. I also drove every mile of every vacation we ever went on, there and back. Then something happened. I’m not sure when exactly, but the objects moving around me seemed to increase in speed, while I stayed my middle-aged paranoid self. Faster and faster came the bicycles darting out and the drunkards running lights and the rotaries with six ways to merge until now I feel like George Jetson in the middle of an asteroid field, death and danger around every bend and crossway. And the TRAFFIC JAMS, one after another, no end in sight, no end in sight, suicide hotline on speed dial, no end in sight. I do not breathe during traffic jams. I barely breathe when the traffic’s moving. Now toss in some subtleties like trying to find your hotel in a city you’ve never driven in and you’re now hollering at your bride of 30 years, in that insipidly high squeaky voice you drag out for only such occasions, all because of the idiotic directions she got off the Internet.

So, no, taking the car on a romantic getaway will surely defeat the purpose of the romantic getaway, thereby assuring that the diaphragm stays put in the suitcase with the silky negligee. The airport? Worse. One long shoe-removing, luggage-losing hassle and rental car mess—and there you are back in some little shitbox again yelling at each other. So why don’t you let HER drive and you ride gun, Bob, you may well ask. Good idea. Annemarie is an excellent driver. Problem is me—I don’t ride gun well. The anxiety I already have shoots to 164 over 23 and I get carsick like I’m 12 years old. Peter Pan bus, you say? Not possible. By the time we pass Hartford I’ll have already heaved on the floor, the seat and the shoes of the guy sitting next to me. That leaves the train. The train has its faults, the main one being price—they’ll raise their fares 50 bucks in the course of a day—but the train don’t get all wigged out over weather and it has a bar and a dining car and the seats are nice and the view is remarkable. You see the ass end of every town between Springfield, MA and Wilmington, DE. Backyards and body shops and abandoned mills and warehouses. You also see incredible graffiti all along the retaining walls and buildings, not all of it scrota and mammary, much of it pointedly and expertly rendered. Funny though, the artwork that you might associate with a given town as you pass it by on the train—a squirting dick, for instance—is artwork that has probably never been seen by 90% of its inhabitants, it being on the ass end of town and everything, and facing out. But it’s as representative of that town as the steeple in the distance. And just as much fun to look at. I mean, spray paint has its place, don’t get me wrong. I don’t wanna see it on my house, or on the steps of City Hall, or on the Robert Frost statue or on that steeple just mentioned. But in alleys or underpasses or ass ends of town? Honey, I’m home.

Anyway, the snow is coming down steadily the entire trip. Very romantic. For some reason, I don’t get sick on trains, unless you count subways, otherwise I’d be just as much a dink now as then. Here, all I am is cool. We commandeer the seats across from us and create our own little pad as we laugh and kiss and read and rub each other’s pulled muscles and gaze out at the storm. If we weren’t already hitched this’d be a helluva date.

“Don’t we look comfy?” my bride asks the conductor as he punches our tix.

“You look like you in love,” he grins.

“Do you think you could find us some curtains to hang right about here?” I ask.

“That’s disgusting,” he feigns, and moves on down the aisle.

The reason we are interested in Ani DiFranco is because we saw her play Northampton’s Look Park last summer and were blown to pieces and sawed in half. Up to then, we had merely been aware of Ani Difranco, heard her on college radio, saw reviews in the paper, knew she was political, fearless, knew she was cool. What we did not know was that she was great. Great in a once-in-a generation way. Or at least that’s what it seemed like on a balmy night under the stars at Look’s Pines Theater, with us way in the back up against the hedges, too far to see her face, but plenty close enough get pulled in by that voice, that irrepressible body movement, and a plugged-in acoustic guitar getting bludgeoned from both ends.

So we are rolling through a major snowstorm through the ass end of America to see a singer we barely know in a town we’ve never set foot in. Ah, love. Wilmington is also home to the Delaware Art Museum, which exhibits paintings done by Iraqi artist Thamer Dawood, who I wrote about in a Gazette story. A visit there is planned for Tuesday morning. Our quest for the entire three days is to never enter an automobile. Of course, we did arrive at the Springfield Amtrak station by car, one driven by my brother, in fact, one he then had to drive back to our house in a foot of snow at five o’clock in the morning. So, to accomplish our car-less vacation, we essentially had to enlist someone else with a car to drive through hell first. Irony is often a pesky dish.

This would be Bob’s first entry into blogness. Bob is not sure about this. Or anything else for that matter. That is why it has taken Bob so long to get around to it. The blog frightens Bob. The blog does not come with the usual cadre of editors and copywriters who protect Bob from himself. Bob is afraid that, a week into it, he will let something slip, I don’t know, a revealing story from fourth grade geography—a month later he’s blogging his head off about the bowel movements that control his very life. So you can see Bob’s dilemma.

When Bob was a kid only girls kept diaries. That was fine with Bob. He would have been too lazy to keep one anyway. A blog, he figures, is like a diary. Except that your little brother finds the fucken thing and shows it to the world.  

To say that Bob is fearful is the understatement of the year.

Watch this space for fresh posts from Bob real soon !