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On a recent road trip—traversing North Carolina and Tennessee—I stopped for one night in Asheville, NC.

I’ve been imagining Asheville all my life. Or at least since I was in high school and first discovered the author Thomas Wolfe (1900 – 1938).

Asheville, NC was where he grew up. It was the setting for his famous first novel, Look Homeward Angel.

Of course, Thomas Wolfe isn’t as well-known in 2026. But the Thomas Wolfe Auditorium is still one of the central attractions in the town. And there’s the Thomas Wolfe Historical House. And some other Thomas Wolfe locations, you can visit.

Asheville isn’t very big, and when you consider that Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Sinclair Lewis were Wolfe’s contemporaries—and that he was considered to be equally talented—you can see why he remains Asheville’s favorite son.

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When I was in high school, we read all the usual American authors: Melville, Hawthorne, Twain, Steinbeck. But for me it was the moody, brooding lyricism of Wolfe that most stirred my adolescent heart.

At 17, I literally fell in love with the celebrated introduction to Look Homeward Angel: “ . . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door . . . .”

Plus, it was easy to dip in and out of his books. Wolfe was a proto-autofictionist. His novels describe different sections of his life. You can start anywhere, immerse yourself in his mystical prose for an hour or two, and then check back out again.

And his life was pretty interesting. Escaping a small Southern town for Harvard. Moving to New York City. Traveling throughout Europe during dark and historic times (1930s). Struggling as a playwright. Breaking through as a novelist. Working with the most legendary editor ever: Maxwell Perkins.

As if that weren’t enough to make him a romantic figure: he was known to walk the streets alone at night.

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Actually, now that I think of it, that was the first thing I heard about him.

In high school, an older boy suggested I check out Thomas Wolfe for my independent English Lit project. His entire recommendation consisted of: “He liked to walk around alone at night.”

I didn’t know this older boy very well. How did he know that I liked to walk around alone at night?

At the time, I thought it was cool that I seemed like a person who “liked to walk around alone at night”. I didn’t actually do that yet. I lived in the suburbs. There was nowhere to walk to. But I did eventually become such a person. Very much so.

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Anyway, so here’s that killer intro to Look Homeward Angel:

“... a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces.

Naked and alone we came into exile. In her dark womb we did not know our mother’s face; from the prison of her flesh have we come into the unspeakable and incommunicable prison of this earth.

Which of us has known his brother? Which of us has looked into his father’s heart? Which of us has not remained forever prison-pent? Which of us is not forever a stranger and alone?

O waste of lost, in the hot mazes, lost, among bright stars on this weary, unbright cinder, lost! Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost lane-end into heaven, a stone, a leaf, an unfound door. Where? When?

O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.”

I mean, yeah, it’s a little over the top. But you gotta love the flow.

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When I first arrived in Asheville, I drove around looking for the boarding house that Wolfe’s mother ran when he was a child, this building being central to Look Homeward Angel. It still exists, and I was looking forward to seeing it.

But I got there in the middle of a monsoon. It was pouring down rain. I tried to go downtown, but it was a Saturday in October, and despite the terrible weather, there were people and tourists everywhere.

The parking was impossible, and the streets were bizarrely narrow. Downtown Asheville was a confusing, frustrating mess.

Making things worse, I was in a rent-a-car, which I hadn’t quite got the hang of. I’d already crashed into a sign at the Chick-Fil-A. O Lost!

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So I said fuck this, and bought some groceries, and retreated to my Airbnb outside of town and watched a college football game.

While doing that, I did some research on the area. I was on my way to Nashville, so I looked up stuff to do there. And stuff to see along the way.

One thing tourists seemed to flock to in Tennessee was a gas station/truckstop franchise known as Buc-ees. These gigantic way-stations featured rows of gas pumps, as long as a football field.

They were connected to an equally giant convenience store full of roadside gas-station knick-knacks. Things like hunting knives, camouflage hats, maps, mud-flaps and travel-mugs.

Maybe they would have vintage bumper stickers like: “Ass, Gas or Grass: Nobody rides for free.” (They didn’t. But that was the kind of stuff I was expecting.)

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I also wondered if Buc-ees—or any place in Tennessee—would sell stuff with a Confederate flag on it. I didn’t know. Was that legal? Is the South still the South?

And didn’t they tear down all their Confederate statues? Who did that anyway? Local Southern activists? Does the South even have activists? And what do they tell schoolchildren about Robert E. Lee?

Back at Duke University, where most of the students were from other countries, they would take the politically correct position: Tear down the racist Confederate statues! Ban the Confederate flag!

But what about your average 35 yr. old white guy walking down the street in Nashville? Who would be—I was guessing—a little more loyal to his heritage than the woke Duke students?

I really had no idea. And how could I find out? I didn’t dare ask anyone.

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The next day, the skies cleared and I prepared to drive west, through the Great Smoky Mountains. But before I did that, I went on a short hike that my Airbnb host had recommended.

This led me to a viewpoint where I could better see the geography of Asheville. The modest town sat right in the middle of a circle of low mountains, which at that moment were warmly colored by the turning autumn leaves.

I thought more about Thomas Wolfe, his eloquent writing style, his nocturnal wanderings.

He was supposedly from a modest, middle-class family, and yet somehow got himself into Harvard. And after that seemed to have an almost aristocratic bent to his writing and his life-style.

There was his life in New York City, and his long romantic entanglement with a wealthy socialite, Aline Bernstein. Then he traveled through Continental Europe, like an upper-class Brit. Seems like a lot of upward mobility to me. Maybe his family wasn’t so modest.

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As for his writing, Wolfe was not troubled with trivial things like “structure”. He didn’t write novels. He just generated reams of elegant prose.

And when he’d filled up enough notebooks, Maxwell Perkins would be tasked with forming it into a novel.

This wasn’t Gordon Lish with pruning shears, trimming back the excess of a Ray Carver story. This was Maxwell Perkins, with a bulldozer, trying to dig a coherent novel out of a manuscript the size of A Remembrance of Things Past. (Which, come to think of it, might have been an influence on Wolfe).

But Perkins managed it somehow, and Wolfe’s rivers of narration did become readable novels, which put him in the company of the best writers of his time.

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JACK KEROUAC

A fun side-bar: Jack Kerouac was a huge fan of Thomas Wolfe and wrote his first novel, The Town and The City, in a Wolfian style. (The title is certainly a rip-off!)

Critics consider Kerouac’s second novel, On the Road, to be the beginning of his own, distinct voice, which is thought of as a renunciation of the more formal tone of his first novel.

But if you like both authors, you can see very clearly that Kerouac’s On The Road voice is still very Wolfian, with the long, lyrical run-on sentences and poetic flourishes. Not to mention the world-weary romanticism, the isolation, the loneliness.

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ALINE BERNSTEIN

Another tangential thought: what did my 17 yr old, provincial brain come up with when I tried to picture Aline Bernstein? Who I kept coming across in my research for my high school English project.

Bernstein, a multi-generational New Yorker, was a successful theatrical set and costume designer, and was married to a wealthy Jewish banker her entire life.

And yet she managed to have a lasting—and sometimes tumultuous— relationship with Wolfe, who was 19 years her junior!

I do remember having an image of the two of them in my mind, as I worked on my high school project. The older woman of means, the brash young author from the hinterlands. I kind of liked the idea of it. Even though she apparently caused some consternation for Wolfe. He was so wildly in love with her, he had to flee to Europe at one point, to get his sanity back.

I did not know then that upon his death, Bernstein immediately wrote a book about their affair which was published by her close friends, Alfred and Blanche Knopf. Also of note: the letters between the two of them, where Wolfe GOES OFF, using all his Keatsian talent to declare his love.

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WRITING ON THE REFRIGERATOR

One last factoid about Wolfe that always stayed with me: He liked to write standing up. Being freakishly tall, at six foot six, one of his favorite places to work was in the kitchen, writing on the top of the refrigerator.

What a strange thing it must have been to be Thomas Wolfe, an officially designated “Great American Writer”, in the 1930s. All the world dependent on you. All the world hanging on your every word.

But of course, Wolfe didn’t live long enough to mature into that greatness. He died young, at 37, in Seattle, of all places, at the conclusion of a western road trip. What must Seattle have looked like to such a person? Probably like the end of the world.

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I was on Facebook one day, when I happened to see an event schedule for the left-leaning, non-profit, Literary Arts Bookstore we have here in Portland.

I looked through their calendar. Most of the events were what you’d expect: A young woman presenting her trauma memoir, a BIPOC reading series, a Chinese woman’s immigration story, a female brain surgeon’s journey through the sexist medical field.

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An unusual grouping

Then I saw something strange. It was an event that featured three young white guys. You don’t see many literary events featuring multiple white guys in Portland. Or anywhere else, for that matter.

We’ve been at a low ebb of white guys in any kind of literary undertaking in recent years. Unless they’ve written a book confessing their toxicity, or revealing the dark secrets of patriarchal oppression.

Maybe they were gay, or non-binary, or of some unusual ethnicity. Maybe they claimed to be Native American, like Elizabeth Warren.

But their descriptions didn’t include any of those things. From what I could tell, they were just three normal-looking white guys. They were poets.

But that couldn’t be right. There had to be a catch.

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The good, the bad, and the certified

Reading through the listing, I saw these poets had a lot of credentials. That made sense. You couldn’t just have three white guys giving a reading unless they’d been vetted and certified.

All three of them had Master’s Degrees in the Fine Arts. One guy had a PhD. They had published widely and had won various prizes for their work. They’d received poetry fellowships. They’d held prestigious teaching positions. They were associate editors of important journals.

In short, they’d jumped through every hoop imaginable to be accepted into the woke academic poetry community—which typically hates people like them.

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Eyewitness to the improbable

Of course I went to the reading. I wasn’t going to miss this. And anyway, I still assumed there was some angle. Some extenuating circumstance.

I arrived and took a seat. There were a fair number of people present. Were the other attendees thinking what I was thinking? How did they get this gig?

All three were young and good-looking. That probably helped. The first guy was from Los Angeles. His poetry was about his difficult childhood under his football-coach father. Now he had a son of his own, which he had complicated feelings about.

The next poet looked like he might be gay. But he too had a son. And a wife. And a house, apparently. He was smartly dressed and very personable. He looked like a young literature professor at a cozy New England college, back in 1992, when sensitive white men had jobs like that.

The last poet was younger than the other two. He did interesting things with poetry “on the page”, blacking out sections of classic texts to form poems out of the words that remained.

He was clearly talented, but appeared oblivious to the ill-will he no doubt generated within the poetry community—taking up space as a privileged white male, while disadvantaged bodies struggled against systemic oppression.

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Silos

The one thing I noticed about all three of the poets: they were “silo-ed” in what they wrote about. They rarely addressed anything outside their immediate familial situations. Their homes. Their sons. Their fathers. Their painful memories of their fathers.

They did not write about their neighbors. Or the unrest in the streets. Or the identity politics that rule over all of us.

They had learned to stay very close to home in their writing. No politics. No social commentary. Nothing controversial. No unruly thoughts. No sex or desire or horniness. Their poetry was extremely contained.

All three of them knew exactly what they were allowed to write about. And they stayed within those bounds.

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One small step for man

Still, they were there. They were published poets. And they were reading in a state-funded, not for profit bookstore.

The Literary Arts woman who introduced them—gay, nose-ringed, POC—even made a joke about how the title of one of their books, The Committee of Men, had shocked and alarmed some of her coworkers, until it was explained to them that the poet was being critical of men.

Afterward, the poets signed books and mingled with the public. I stayed around for that. I felt a sense of relief from the crowd, and from the young men themselves. Nobody had protested the reading. Nothing bad had happened.

I even said to myself, jokingly: White dudes are back! But of course, that was only within limits. And only if they stayed within the narrative. And knew their place. And acknowledged their privilege. And didn’t . . . you know . . . act too much like men.

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One thing on this trip: I forced myself to spend money and make things as easy as possible, since I’ve noticed I’m getting more reluctant to go on complicated trips due to sore joints, lessening brain function, laziness, etc.

So instead of an Uber, I drove myself to the airport and parked in the economy lot, which was a little e…

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In October, during my sophomore year of high school, my schedule was: school from 8am-3pm, football practice 4pm-6pm, a couple nights working at the gas station, and then on Fridays, I’d come home and my dad …

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The first time I saw Andy Warhol was in 1983. It was a sunny spring day. I was walking to class. I had recently transferred to New York University.

Andy Warhol…

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The day I left for college was easily the most exciting day of my life.

First off: I was going to the East Coast. I had been raised in Portland, OR, which was a pleasant, normal town to grow up in.

But to be back east! Near Boston and New York! To live where it snowed in the winter and the leaves turned bright colors in the fall.

East Coast people were smart and sophisticated. The men wore suits; the women wore high heels. People took trains from city to city, like in the movies.

A big music fan, I imagined myself hanging around at CBGB, or Newbury Comics in Boston. And what would the hipster kids be like? Impossibly cool was my guess.

Everything about the East seemed intellectual, fashionable, advanced, and elevated. I could hardly wait to get there.

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The Prestige

Secondly, the school I was going to was highly rated! That meant it would be filled with smart and interesting students from all over the country. Hopefully, I could keep up, or at least wouldn’t embarrass myself.

But when I arrived—in 1979—I found I wasn’t as fortunate as I thought. My particular college was at the vanguard of pre-woke “political correctness”.

The professors were all former 60’s radicals. Feminism was on the rise. Activist students were constantly “outraged” by the most insignificant things. The student paper was a parody of itself. Anything non-PC was considered “abhorrent” or “egregious”.

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Classic American college

Fortunately, there were many normal students there as well. I joined a campus rock band my freshman year and traveled to less-annoying colleges to play dances and parties.

Just being that age and being part of that East Coast collegiate culture was incredibly fun: traveling to different schools, exploring historic parts of the country, meeting all kinds of people, making all kinds of friends.

As people often said at the time: “College is the best four years of your life.” Which was definitely my experience.

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The anxiety of higher learning

Because of these fond memories, I always pay close attention as my friends and acquaintances prepare their kids for college in the fall.

But I can tell by their faces and the way they talk that this is not the experience it once was.

The parents are worried about money. The kids are hesitant to leave home. Everyone is thinking about rising costs, scholarships, loans, and career considerations. Not to mention the contentious and divisive atmosphere one might encounter on campus.

Going to college is not the freeing and exhilarating experience it once was. Now it is a business decision. A risk vs. reward scenario.

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Strong and wrong

Besides being insanely expensive, most universities have become strongholds of leftism, feminism, and DEI sensibilities. Censorship is rampant. Woke-ism is brutally enforced.

Now, the main goal of college life is to avoid “harm”, process “trauma”, and create “safe environments”.

College is no longer a chance to spread your wings. It’s not about intellectual exploration and personal growth.

It is a pathway to a more lucrative career. Or for activist-types, the beginning of a life steeped in politics.

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A matter of degrees

College is now a slog. Something to get through. “A degree” is the main objective. A bigger paycheck being the ultimate goal.

A “degree” bumps you up on the pay scale. It is how you get from the cubicle in the middle of the room, to a cubicle in the corner.

The idea that college will expand your horizons, or foster introspection, or give you a sense of history, the cycles of civilization, the great works of art or literature . . . well, that’s not the point of higher education anymore.

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Problematic whiteness

All of this gets worse if you’re a white male. In this case, your institution will likely find you guilty of something. You will be forced to acknowledge that guilt and show repentance.

You will also be expected to step aside to let disadvantaged groups go ahead of you, to make up for your sins of the past.

If you don’t step aside, you will be run over. Or reported. Or #metooed.

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Demography is destiny

Rapid demographic change is also changing higher education. College is no longer a gathering of young people who share a similar culture and background.

Now, every culture in the world is at your school. And often in the same, or greater numbers than you are.

At the same time, your own traditions are constantly critiqued and devalued. Core Western Civilization courses are now considered problematic.

As a consequence, many people advise high school graduates to reconsider a liberal arts education altogether. They urge young men to go to trade schools or other specialized forms of practical education.

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Dating and social life

In the past, college was a place to make lifelong friends and possibly meet a future spouse.

But to admit an attraction to the opposite sex is currently a social faux pas on many campuses. Gay flags point you in the direction of social acceptability. Heterosexuality is reactionary. Among other issues, it might lead to marriage and other forms of inequality and exploitation.

If you’re a woman, and you’re not gay, you will be expected to complain about the oppressive presence of men. Your Gender Studies classes will provide instruction. If you still can’t figure it out, you can go to the Student Grievance Center and they will help you file a report.

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Community College

Many people hope to avoid campus politics by sending their offspring to a Christian college, or a less-ideological state school.

Some people go so far as to send their kids to colleges in the South, hoping those schools will be more traditional and less politicized.

Community college is another place that is relatively free of progressive activism. But there too you are looking at endurance rather than revelation. A slog more than a transformative experience. A credential at the end, instead of epic memories.

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Thank you mom and dad!

I don’t know what I would do if I had a child just graduating from high school now.

I think of my own parents watching me board that airplane in 1979. How excited I was. How bittersweet—and yet satisfying—for them that I was getting this incredible opportunity.

What does that same scene look like in 2026? Anxious parents. Stressed-out kids. More pressure. Less adventure. All of it heartbreaking.

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This happened many years ago. I got in an argument with an academic friend who was defending multi-cultural studies and dismissing Anglo-Saxon culture, saying it was over-rated and over-represented.

She thought Americans should learn about other cultures, and other artists, who were just as good, if not better.

I was like, better than Beethoven? Better …

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Last night I went to a “listening party” at a new-ish venue in downtown Portland, OR, called MONO SPACE. I guess it’s a venue. I’m a little unsure what to call it. Here’s what they call themselves:

Mono Space is a high-fidelity listening gallery dedicated to the preservation of music culture and the presentation of music recordings as works of art. Located in a renovated warehouse in Portland’s historic Pearl District, this nonprofit venue creates a setting for attentive listening and cultural exchange.

The gallery is basically one big room. Along one wall it’s got the biggest, fanciest speakers I’ve ever seen. There’s a turntable area, off to the side. This is not a DJ booth. It’s two turntables and tube amplifiers arranged on a table, which is fairly low to the ground, so that the person putting on music is sitting on a rolling stool.

Vinyl records are definitely preferred over MP3’s, which seems to be the purist approach at this level of sound-quality exceptionalism.

As the proprietors say:

Mono Space recognizes that music is a crucial connective tissue within the human experience. Individuals use it to align their bodies, hearts and minds, and shape their personal well-being. Communities wield it as a sonic code to define who they are and what they believe, manifesting a shared history and purpose.

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In 2019, I moved back to Portland, my hometown, to help with a family health situation.

I rented an apartment near where I grew up. I began doing my food shopping at the local Fred Meyer’s supermarket which I…

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This piece originally appeared in TheBlaze.com in October, 2025

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I was driving through Boise last winter when I heard about a new Idaho law that made the drug I…

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I was cruising around on Substack, and I came across a new alt-lit webzine that I hadn’t seen before.

There are a lot of these on Substack. I think of Republic of Letters and The Metropolitan Review as being the first to appear.

Maybe ROL or TMR will eventually become the standard bearers in culture writing. They will replace the (often unreadable) The New York Review of Books and the (notoriously biased) Sunday NY Times Arts section.

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I looked to see what interesting twist this new alt-lit webzine might provide. But it appeared to be a fairly routine lit-mag. Poems, stories, reviews. I checked to see if I recognized any of the contributors. I did not. Probably, they are young people just starting out.

The fact that this webzine is starting now, and not several years ago when Substack was new, might hurt their chances of success. They might be a little late to the party.

But if there’s a spark there, if the founders have enough talent or personal charisma to create a buzz and some excitement around their project, they have a chance.

Timing is important, but it’s never the wrong time if genuine talent is involved.

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I think of that wave of literary webzines that appeared in the 2000s: Hobart, HMTLGIANT, The Rumpus, Muumuu House, Tyrant Books.

People were skeptical of these webzines at first, being totally online. But they looked cool, they were fun to read, and as it turned out, a lot of interesting writers came out of them: Tao Lin, Blake Butler, Jordan Castro, Stephen Elliott being some obvious examples.

Oftentimes, these people created the platforms themselves, as well as contributed to them. That’s really all it takes. Just one person. With ability. And energy. And a cultural moment that is eager for something new.

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My first experience with an activist journalist came in 2019. I had traveled to Oregon’s state capitol in support of a small group of Republican state legislators. They had refused to appear for a vote to prevent the Democrats from passing a hotly contested education bill.

This was a strategy the Re…

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I’ve been listening to The Clash lately. Haven’t done that for many years. They sound better than I remembered. A lot better. I’m a little bit shocked how good the songs are.

It’s f…

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I recently visited the Hawthorne district in Southeast Portland, which is historically the counter-culture area of Portland.

It’s Portland’s version of Haight Street in San Francisco. It’s where the Oregon hippies gathered during the late 1960s, to “turn on, tune in, drop out”. It remained the preferred youth hangout through the 1970s.

In the more conservative 1980s, it fell out of fashion, but like Haight Street, its preponderance of vintage stores, head shops, multiple bars and cafes made it possible to survive as a popular youth-culture strip.

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In 2026, there are still young people wandering up and down Hawthorne Blvd. It’s still a prime hang-out spot, with its trendy clothing exchange stores and bohemian cafes.

Currently, it is Portland’s best representative of “Diner Goth” culture. Diner Goths being young people who create their own personal styles, using various fashions from the past (mostly Goth), often resulting in odd and not-always-flattering mashups of those styles.

Hawthorne is where you see high school girls attempting the latest Instagram looks, not realizing that until they lose the nerdy wire-rim glasses, the fake leather miniskirt or Brandy Melville Baby Tee, isn’t really going to work.

They may not pull off the latest styles, but at least these young people are trying. So you root for them. But of course, being stuck in Portland, with their dorky, “We Believe In Science” parents, they can only dream and experiment, and imagine life in New York, London or Los Angeles.

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I met Courtney Love in the winter of 1985, when we both lived briefly in Portland, Oregon. I was twenty-four, she was nineteen. She wanted to be famous at that time. She wasn’t very specific about what for, it didn’t seem to matter. I wanted to be famous too (as a writer), and we talked about that a lot. It became the basis of our friendship. I remember our conversations on the subject: we’d argue about strategies, backstories, the different pathways to fame, the different personas of other celebrities and how the public reacted to them. As with all our conversations, Courtney was brilliant, hilarious, insightful. She was easily the most influential person in my early artistic life. I based numerous characters on her, in my fiction. It was she who patiently explained to me how to get an agent. Friends often joked with me that she was my original “muse”, which I suppose is the truth.

We continued to run into each other in different cities until 1991, which was the last time I saw her in person. Her latest band, Hole, was playing a gig in Portland at the X-Ray Cafe. There were about five people in the audience. They didn’t sound very good in the empty space. Afterward, standing around the van, she gave me a Hole T-shirt and a hug. At the time, I thought that might be it for her. Over the last six years, she’d had a couple bit-parts in movies, she’d played in a couple bands. It wasn’t like she hadn’t done anything. But the big-time fame she had dreamed about seemed to have passed her by. All that talk and preparation had been for nothing. And yet she was still funny and crazy and indefatigable. Laughing and smoking cigarettes. Handing out T-shirts to her “fans”, (me).

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I don’t know what I clicked on that caused this, but lately most of the suggested videos on my YouTube sidebar are of morose and lonely young men, saying things like:

--Nobody wants to be in a relationship

--I’m 31 and I’ve never had a girlfriend.

--Everything about life sucks and is horrible.

--I’m not sad. I’m empty.

--I look at women and I’m exhausted

--I prefer to live alone. In silence.

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This was a gig we played in my college band. It was at Princeton University, at an “eating club”. At Princeton, the upperclassmen joined clubs which were a cross between a fraternity/sorority and a dining hall.

I don’t remember if you picked your eating club or if they picked you, but there was some matching involved. Each eating club had its own vibe, its own social niche.

The eating club we were playing at was called Terrace Club. It was home to the oddball, artsy, mad-genius types we were told.

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Our band, at that time, was in a transitional phase. We had been a New Wave cover band that played parties and dances.

But I had come from the Portland punk scene, so I was encouraging the guys in the direction of becoming a real band, meaning write our own songs, develop our own sound, play local clubs more, play college dances less.

The other guys—mostly due to where they grew up—hadn’t been part of a local scene like I had. I knew how it worked. One of my best friends in high school had formed a band, wrote a bunch of songs, found a cool girl singer, and become one of the top bands in Portland (The Ziplocs). All of this before he left for college!

So I was gradually steering my bandmates in that direction. And gradually, it worked. We eventually did become a real band, with records and college airplay and local fans.

But we hadn’t gotten there yet. We were still finding our way. And we still took gigs like this one at Princeton. Not that it wasn’t always fun and exciting to play out. And of course, it would be extra thrilling to play somewhere like PRINCETON UNIVERSITY which was cool just to walk around in and think about.

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The first step in being on the Fresh Air with Terry Gross radio show was a pre-interview.

A producer at Philadelphia’s WHYY—where Fresh Air is based—called you on the phone and asked you questions. She wanted to see how articulate you were, and what you might sound like on the radio.

I was being considered as a guest because of the new Gus Van Sant film Paranoid Park (2007), which was based on my young adult novel of the same name.

Paranoid Park told the story of a teenage skateboarder who accidentally kills a security guard. And then decides not to tell anyone.

Because Gus used real teenagers as actors, the film producers had no “name” movie stars to put on the posters and other promotional materials. So they put my name on a lot of the stuff. As if I were a famous person, you should have heard of.

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That was fine with me. I could use all the publicity I could get. And it created some interesting opportunities. Like at the Cannes Film Festival, I ended up on a panel talking to a tent full of aspiring screenwriters about writing for movies. I didn’t actually know anything about writing for movies. But I went. And I talked.

And if Terry Gross would have me on Fresh Air, I would do that too. I said yes, to everything I was offered during the Paranoid Park promotional period. Not just for the career advancement. But because it was fun. And because it seemed unlikely I’d ever have such opportunities again.

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The band tears through the last chord change and pounds the ending with one sharp: WUNGH!! Before the crowd can even react, the guitars are off, and they are down the stairs, off the stage. No “thank you”. No “goodnight”. No nothing.

When the crowd realizes they have been abandoned, the roar is deafening. The sound follows the band members into the dressing room. Whistles, screams, thumping feet: it builds, holds steady for several moments, fades slightly.

In the dressing room, there is a mad grabbing for beer, water, towels. The six or eight people hiding out there guiltily rearrange themselves, trying to help, wanting to join in the wild energy and adrenaline and excitement that the band brings off the stage with them.

And this isn’t some local club. This is the Olympic Ballroom. And the place is fucking packed.

Gavin grabs a beer from someone, drinks half of it, hands the beer back. He runs a towel over his face. The band members, the four of them, find each other, and huddle for a moment.

“What’s the encore.”

“West Coast?”

“How about the new one.”

“Can we do two?”

“Someone ask the fucking guy if we can do two!”

They break apart again. A moment of calm. Everyone drinks, catches their breath. The crowd noise is coming back, building up. They’re pounding their fists on the stage.

“They’re going apeshit,” says one of the hangers-on.

“What the fuck,” says someone else. “You better get back out there . . . !”

Gavin’s bandmates find each other again and commune without speaking. This is a new level for them. This is a height they have not previously known. The adrenaline sharpens them. The moment fuses the four musicians in an absolute bond.

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I arrived at Wesleyan University in the fall of 1979. It was a classic small liberal arts college: green lawns, ivy-covered buildings, good-looking prep-school kids walking around in shorts and Grateful Dead T-shirts.

I wasn’t going to college for anything in particular. Except to be around smart people my age. That must sound quite luxurious to young people today. But college didn’t cost hundreds of thousands of dollars then. And student loans were modest, and arranged in a reasonable, non-predatory way.

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