recommended media: Tim and Pete
Last year I read a totally crazy, brilliant book called Fuel-Injected Dreams by this guy I'd never heard of, James Robert Baker. I had written it down in my "To Be Read" list, and got it from the library, and was blown away - I just couldn't put it down until I had finished it. It had been a long time since a book did that to me, and I was very excited to read more by this guy.
So I bought a used copy of Tim and Pete off Amazon. And the same thing happened again, except almost worse this time... James Robert Baker wrote something so much like what I've been trying to do, so much like the way I think, except far more reckless and gutsy, that it was like a supernatural experience. It wasn't like reading You Don't Love Me Yet, Jonathan Lethem's most recent work (which I also couldn't put down, and was, as he always is, brilliant), where I wanted to be cool like he is, like his characters are, live their twisted and glamorously unglamorous lives - I felt like James Robert Baker actually channelled my soul, or else I've channelled him. It's so similar to Wounds in so many ways that it took my breath away, except he showed me that I really was holding back in that book - that I was too scared to actually depict the kind of violent emotionalism, the kind of lethally caustic wit and unfettered rage, that I actually had in mind. I wimped out. Baker never did.
Tim and Pete doesn't hold back one bit - not with the insanity, not with the drug use (and the longing for same, leavened by a sincere commitment to the principles of A.A.), not with the sex (and longing for same), not with the anger, not with the violence, not with the wall-to-wall pop culture references - which I got EVERY SINGLE ONE. Every single one. How did he do that? Or is that me? Am I one of the only people around who is able to completely understand this book from top to bottom (pun intended, for sure)?
I think Tim and Pete should be taught in high schools as the perfect portrait of late '80s-early 90's gay Los Angeles, gay America, America in general; it evokes a very specific time and place more perfectly than I've experienced in a long while. And the story and structure is fantastic; it all takes place on a single day that starts out kind of boring and annoying, and rapidly escalates into a veritable nuclear explosion of intensity that just gets crazier and crazier. The characters are complex, knowable, and yet caricatures - like, aren't we all?
I kissed the book when I was done, and then I looked up James Robert Baker on wiki. He's dead, of course, but not of AIDS, as I'd suspected - he committed suicide instead. Tim and Pete ruined his nascent career; nobody in publishing would go near him after that book because it was so controversial, so filled with bile and vicious thoughts about slaughtering people (and yet so goddamn funny at the same time, but of course, right-wingers couldn't see that at all). Baker killed himself in 1997. I wish I had known him; I wish I'd been able to stop him. I love that man and he's gone, right around the same time as I was on the same plane as him, writing stuff so similar...
I wish he was alive so I could talk to him. It's like finding out that you had a twin sibling you didn't know about, who died before you ever met, but you see them in a photograph and they have the same face, are wearing the same shoes as a pair you used to have, wearing a T-shirt with your favorite band on it.
So I bought a used copy of Tim and Pete off Amazon. And the same thing happened again, except almost worse this time... James Robert Baker wrote something so much like what I've been trying to do, so much like the way I think, except far more reckless and gutsy, that it was like a supernatural experience. It wasn't like reading You Don't Love Me Yet, Jonathan Lethem's most recent work (which I also couldn't put down, and was, as he always is, brilliant), where I wanted to be cool like he is, like his characters are, live their twisted and glamorously unglamorous lives - I felt like James Robert Baker actually channelled my soul, or else I've channelled him. It's so similar to Wounds in so many ways that it took my breath away, except he showed me that I really was holding back in that book - that I was too scared to actually depict the kind of violent emotionalism, the kind of lethally caustic wit and unfettered rage, that I actually had in mind. I wimped out. Baker never did.
Tim and Pete doesn't hold back one bit - not with the insanity, not with the drug use (and the longing for same, leavened by a sincere commitment to the principles of A.A.), not with the sex (and longing for same), not with the anger, not with the violence, not with the wall-to-wall pop culture references - which I got EVERY SINGLE ONE. Every single one. How did he do that? Or is that me? Am I one of the only people around who is able to completely understand this book from top to bottom (pun intended, for sure)?
I think Tim and Pete should be taught in high schools as the perfect portrait of late '80s-early 90's gay Los Angeles, gay America, America in general; it evokes a very specific time and place more perfectly than I've experienced in a long while. And the story and structure is fantastic; it all takes place on a single day that starts out kind of boring and annoying, and rapidly escalates into a veritable nuclear explosion of intensity that just gets crazier and crazier. The characters are complex, knowable, and yet caricatures - like, aren't we all?
I kissed the book when I was done, and then I looked up James Robert Baker on wiki. He's dead, of course, but not of AIDS, as I'd suspected - he committed suicide instead. Tim and Pete ruined his nascent career; nobody in publishing would go near him after that book because it was so controversial, so filled with bile and vicious thoughts about slaughtering people (and yet so goddamn funny at the same time, but of course, right-wingers couldn't see that at all). Baker killed himself in 1997. I wish I had known him; I wish I'd been able to stop him. I love that man and he's gone, right around the same time as I was on the same plane as him, writing stuff so similar...
I wish he was alive so I could talk to him. It's like finding out that you had a twin sibling you didn't know about, who died before you ever met, but you see them in a photograph and they have the same face, are wearing the same shoes as a pair you used to have, wearing a T-shirt with your favorite band on it.