— for Ian Dunn
After two decades of wandering the country by bus and living below the poverty line, I’d been unable to find whatever it was I was looking for. My adventures had not supplied me with the artistic depth and raw material for a sensational first novel. I’d bet every last chip on the literary roulette wheel, and the ball had chuckled and hopped around and landed on someone else’s number. It was 1995, and I was thirty-nine years old. Maybe it was time to retire from writing and be a proper nobody, relax for a change, sleep late, buy some new underwear, feel the wet grass under my bare feet, plant some fruit trees, and play pinochle every Friday with my neighbors Bill and Madge.
