Tuesday, August 16, 2011

My Drunken Inspiration










People often want to know what an author's inspiration is for writing a particular novel or story. This is true of some of the folks (unfortunately for my wallet, this is a select group) who have read my first novel, Dirty Hands. For the uninitiated, Dirty Hands is a crime drama detailing what happens after an accidental death at a drunken party. To be brutally honest, the inspiration from this novel came from my heavy drinking days in college.

As with so many young men and women, reaching legal drinking age flipped a switch in me. To say that I could knock them back with the best of them would be an understatement on the par of saying Barack Obama is a good speaker. I might not have drunk friends under the table, but I drunk myself under the table every time.There were numerous occasions when a friend would describe to me some of the ridiculous things I'd done while drunk out of my mind. Of course, I didn't remember most of what was described. I always felt like the person who told me about my drunken self was describing a third person's exploits to me. It couldn't have been me who smacked a stripper's ass hard enough to leave a palm print and came within a hair of being thrown down a long staircase by a bouncer who looked like an all the way Black version of Vin Diesel. It couldn't have been me dancing like John Travolta circa Saturday Night Fever in the middle of a Baltimore County Street.

I always shrugged off the recounts I was given, but inside I felt terribly embarrassed. I felt so embarrassed, in fact, that I would swear off drinking for as a long as a week.I feel very fortunate that no tragic circumstances befell me during my out of control drinking phase. Years later, I began to wonder exactly what trouble I could have gotten into. Thus, the seed of the novel Dirty Hands was planted. I'm glad that my first novel is in no way autobiographical.

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