Where the hell is San Diego? The San Diego of my youth exists only in memory. The San Diego of last week, likewise. Ours is a town of relentless mutations that never seem to improve upon the original, a town without city, its roots eroded, its unspectacular history trampled beneath the rush of new arrivals. Californian since nine o’clock. Is this any kind of place to carve out a life, an identity, a career as a writer?

San Diegan Since Okie Bob

In the face of shifting territories and disappearing landmarks, a San Diego writer needs a good memory. Recollections unalterable and enduring: I can rely on thousands from the late ’50s and early ’60s. Air-raid sirens blared every Monday at noon. My favorite San Diego television shows were Johnny Downs (who danced atop Golden Arrow milk bottles) and Okie Bob (who hosted cowboy movies on XETV). The local TV news was black and white and no-frills; Ray Wilson and Al Coupee and Doug Oliver, always in black suits, white shirts, and thin ties, dispensed the daily litany of national surprises and local monotonies. At the tiny ballpark, where now stands the uninviting Robinson’s bunker in Fashion Valley, I relished minor-league Padres games, cheering for my hero Chico Ruiz. The AFL Chargers used to play in Balboa Stadium; to watch my idols, Earl Faison and Ernie Ladd, and to witness strange events like Tobin Rote Day, during which the heralded quarterback circled the field in a convertible, I had to endure concrete seats without backs.

Journeys downtown were a treat, an adventure. KCBQ used to broadcast from a see-through studio on the corner of Seventh and Ash; I hoarded all their weekly four-page record surveys; photos of all your fave jocks encircled the station’s mythical mascot, an ugly duckling named Kasey B. Quack. At Thearle’s on Broadway, customers could listen to LPs in private booths before making a purchase. Tagging along behind my father, I haunted used bookstores for Mad magazines; I once possessed unctuous Kelly Freas depictions of Alfred E. Newman. Back then, the downtown library was a palace; I knew the secret of the mysterious front doors — all you had to do was hit that black button inside the handle with the heel of your hand, and all would be revealed.…

When I was young, San Diego was a glorious, sunny immensity. Back then, all I had to do was enjoy and explore. But nothing lasts very long here. Our only traditions are over-the-line, airport noise, and boring mayors.

Is That a Vagina or What?

As I grew a bit older, the need to create slowly replaced the joy of acceptance. Some of the greatest imaginative fun I had as a boy was gained through coloring books. We were 10, 11, 12 — still buying coloring books from the Rexall drugstore at the Big Bear shopping center in Serra Mesa. But no crayons for us. Instead, along with each coloring book, we purchased a good, thick rubber eraser and a black BIC pen. War coloring books were the best; yet we did some of our finest work in F Troop and Brady Bunch books also. The strategy: erase the lines carefully and redraw our own lines in black ink. Some marvelous alchemy occurred. Imagine the Bradys preparing for a camping trip, standing in the living room surrounded by rolled-up sleeping bags. Through careful and deft erasing, a skill developed through hours of work on Combat or Twelve O’Clock High coloring books (many destroyed when the erasing went through the paper); we transformed those sleeping bags into huge scrotums and anatomically incorrect labia. A Brady kid then stood in his revamped living room, a mighty pair of testicles drooping from his tight bell-bottom pants, his head reshaped and extended, his family a zany collection of mutants, microcephalics, monsters, all of them tripping over entangled, slithering penises. What fun. Change. Rearrange. Conjure up a more fascinating version of life.

In junior high school, the urge to improve upon reality continued. My best friend and I wrote original collaborative novels, satirizing James Bond. Our hero was Irving Klodd, so much more wacky and endearing than Maxwell Smart even. For days we labored over these creations during class time, ignoring instructors, forsaking homework — preferring to draw elaborate insignias, to create devious weapons of destruction from our Bic pens, to assassinate the math teacher while dreaming up another improbable adventure. Finally, we were caught, our latest manuscript confiscated. The dreaded math teacher looked it over, smiled, and handed it back. He never bothered us again.

In high school I glided through, learning next to nothing. I was a Kearny Komet who turned to drugs out of deadening boredom. LSD was more engaging than schoolwork. The Vietnam War was raging, draft lottery numbers were in the wind, and I waged a muddled longhaired unfocused protest. For refusing to stand for the Pledge of Allegiance, I was sent to the principal’s office by my homeroom teacher, who was a graphic arts instructor and former cheer-boy at Mission Bay High. After a brief suspension, I returned, searching for this instructor to have my re-admittance papers signed. I discovered him behind the typesetting racks, bent over backward, with his head up against his crotch, demonstrating one of his old cheerleading contortions, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

My high school friends turned to social pursuits, while I played the role of court jester. All morning I crafted cartoons and poems and magazines, which I presented to a select group at lunchtime. My only goal was to make them laugh so hard they cried. I succeeded. That’s all I ever did in high school, and I still graduated.

From there I jumped from college to college, chasing the dream of becoming a writer. “Oh, yeah? Where are you from?” San Diego. “Oh.” I published a few stories in obscure little journals, but I spent most of my time cultivating the writer’s role, drinking with abandon, my jesting darker, my attitude bleaker. Not much fun to be around. San Diego was something to shed, something to excuse. Then it was the Army. Guns and liquor. I returned, rode out my GI Bill, wrote porno novels. (At my ten-year high school reunion, deranged by wine and magic mushrooms, I received an award for my unsavory publishing credits — a small ceramic cup decorated with the Kearny “K” and stuffed with pencils. Blind man’s bluff. More contortions.) Then I got a wild job rewriting paperbacks for reprinting. Every two weeks, I picked up a large brown envelope from the Greyhound depot downtown; inside were old pulp novels of all genres — mystery, detective, romance. My job was to edit thoroughly, on the fragile pages themselves, deleting anachronisms, changing dates, modernizing dialogue. I mailed these revamped books to a local typist, and a few days later, I received a load of manuscripts in return. The typist had instructions to transcribe only the first 25,000 words of the edited books, even if the books ran twice that long. The remainder of my job required that I add three raunchy sections near the beginning, middle, and end, before deftly cauterizing plot hemorrhages. That’s basically all I did while in graduate school, more than 75 of those makeovers. And I still got my degree.

The Monster Is Revealed

Ironically, I wrote the first draft of my novel A Genuine Monster six years ago, while temporarily exiled in Alabama. Like most of my friends, I had chosen to leave San Diego and seek my fortune elsewhere. I eventually returned, another prodigal son, while the friends did not. What they’re doing now, I haven’t a clue. The last I heard, one was a symphony conductor in Europe. One was still a state department functionary. Another was a future famous rock star in San Francisco. San Diego offered nothing nourishing, and they bailed out. Other friends remained but preferred looking for an angry fix, roaming the mean streets of self-destruction. I don’t see them anymore either; talent can be a curse in San Diego. At least I have my book, my genuine hardback first novel. They can still read it until they cry; they will recognize themselves on its pages — permuted, transfigured, their lines redrawn — that old Brady Bunch of mine. A Genuine Monster says, “Live here and yearn for transformation.”

Before making the move South, I was tired of San Diego. I thought a change of scene would be just the thing, a new place to do my drinking, if nothing else. Upon acceptance to the writing program at the University of Alabama, I was excited yet fearful. Something new, sure. Yet similar feelings afflicted me almost a decade earlier, before I shipped out for 14 weeks of infantry training at Ft. Polk, Louisiana.

Californians don’t curry much favor in the Heart of Dixie — particularly alcoholic San Diegans with bad attitudes. My initial attempts at flashy stories detailing the adventures of disaffected, drug-weary Golden State angst-mongers were received indifferently. So, after a stupid scandal and a messy divorce (another long story), I holed up to write my first real novel. Placing a sheet of fresh paper into my new electric typewriter, I typed the words “Happy Hour,” and a monster was born.

I stopped drinking and wrote every day, seven days a week, forcing myself to generate at least two pages every 24 hours, even if that meant writing until dawn. I set out to write a novel that I would like to read — the usual clichéd motive — but at the time, most of the contemporary books and stories I gobbled up sounded woefully similar, their landscapes revealed through unadventurous third-person windows. What I found inspiring, however, were Cormack McCarthy’s dense and evocative novels of the South — works that required slow yet delicious reading and rereading, offered in a layered and palpable style. That’s how I desired to convey my San Diego, in a thick and overwhelming contrast to its postcard definitions. All the rage on campus that season were Donald Barthelme’s short stories, which I found ponderous and impenetrable; that sort of measured erudition I rebelled against, striving for refreshing diction instead, words that would spark haunting music and sustain penetrating images — effects that would challenge stereotypes of America’s Finest City.

The first task was to sustain a unique voice, a first-person narrator who was addled and naïve, whose oblique view of the world would allow me to take precarious risks with language. He would be me, which goes without saying — however, an eraser would be applied to the lines of my life in the name of characterization. That’s why they call it fiction. This time, my motives surpassed the gross or the lascivious. For a change, I was after the truth.

I wrote in a focused frenzy. Each day was devoted to hammering out another two pages. I was absorbed by the book, drawn into its genesis as thoroughly as anything I’d known before. My writing desk commanded the center of the apartment, surrounded by almanacs, atlases, baseball encyclopedias, histories of Vietnam, guides to obscure science-fiction movies — and a steadily growing manuscript. Outside, cicadas screeched and the Crimson Tide rolled, insignificantly. In memory, San Diego grew vivid and intense. At a distance of 2000 miles, my hometown enfolded me. I recalled the incidents and details long forgotten — the sound of the gold pendulum in the Natural History Museum toppling wooden pegs; the stoic visage of El Cid astride his bronze horse in Balboa Park; the faint incense from eucalyptus along the dust trails in Florida Canyon.

A few months before beginning work on my novel, I had the good fortune to interview the novelist Wright Morris for The Black Warrior Review. As my story moved closer to completion, I recalled a pertinent moment from that conversation about Morris’s award-winning novel Field of Vision. I mentioned that his characters seemed incapable of escaping their pasts, despite the fact that transformation was an undeniable theme in his novel. Yet the novelist — the artist — seemed to be the only successful transformer, continually converting experience and imagination into fiction. He replied, “This is surely close to the heart of why I have persisted as a writer of fiction and continue to find it necessary. I ask myself — What else is there? Fiction restores to the writer, to the person, some of his lost sense of power — his imaginary role as ‘legislator of the world.’ Legislate he does not, but he does, in his durable fashion, transform.”

When I felt I had legislated enough, I stopped.

What Else Is There?

Upon completion of the first draft, I celebrated with a train trip to Washington, D.C., to visit a long-time friend — my Irving Klodd compatriot, who had forsaken San Diego for a life of international diplomacy. He had first exchanged Hillcrest for Haiti and was now waxing domestic with his wife in a row house on the outskirts of the gentrified inner city. We drank all night long, played poker, smoked cigarettes till our throats were raw — never once suggesting that escaping San Diego had transformed our lives.

On the ride back to Tuscaloosa, after another boozy night in the Southern Crescent club car, I discovered my right leg was useless. It had fallen asleep big-time. Shifting sideways through the moving train was no problem with a bum leg; I figured the thing would wake up by the time I reached Alabama. This was not the case. A week later, doctors at the university hospital informed me the nerve was pinched; I was the victim of Saturday Night Palsy. But at least I had my novel.

A few days later I hobbled to a restaurant to chat with an instructor about my book. He had been reading it while I was out of town. He wasn’t pleased. He explained to me that the book suffered from something even worse than Saturday Night Palsy: “the torpor of puerility and the randomness of caprice.”

I persisted for a few months, seeking a second opinion. With my trusty copy of the International Directory of Little Magazines and Small Presses at my side, I searched for a suitable publisher. Selecting a pair of my strongest chapters, I mailed them to a succession of magazines, racking up rejection slips, sure, but a series of encouraging and constructive comments as well. I revised, I kept the novel alive, I realized there were readers in this world beyond the parochial voices of Tuscaloosa. Finally, Jim Haining at the Salt Lick Press in Austin expressed his desire to publish my work in a chapbook. I left Alabama shortly thereafter, without taking another degree.

Back home. Drinking heavily. Scrounging up part-time teaching assignments at local community colleges. Resting on my laurels. Writing poems sporadically. Unable to write fiction. Fortunately, some friends in Cardiff took me in. The drinking ceased, yet the novel remained in a storage locker in Mission Valley, in the shadow of the Jack Schrade Bridge and mountains of gravel. After my head cleared and the liquor fumes diffused, my Cardiff saviors encouraged me to unearth the book, to find an agent. I tried a few names in New York and was told, among other things, the novel was too outlandish and in violation of good taste. A local agent expressed mild interest but also wanted over $100 for a reading fee. If the book couldn’t stand on its own, I wasn’t going to pay anyone to read it simply to learn their opinion. So I withdrew the novel once again and lost myself in a hideous teaching schedule, lecturing and grading from dawn till dusk, literally. The writing ceased.

Then, months later, the Salt Lick Press was profiled in The Nation; the reviewer was very impressed. “I don’t know where Zielinski proposes to take this character,” he said, “but I know I will rush out to buy the next chapters.” National attention. The Saturday Night Palsy was wearing off.

Feeling more confident, I tried that local agent again. I sent the very same book, with the review attached. This time, the reading fee was waived. Glowing responses. Shortly after, I signed an agreement. Thirty days passed, and the book was purchased by the Atlantic Monthly Press. Two years later, following five major and minor revisions, I wrote this essay. Those who know my book find it disturbing. Characters die, characters kill. The vision is harsh. When I met my agent for the first time, she remarked to her assistant, “Well, he looks normal enough.” So does San Diego.