Debris

It came to me one warm winter evening as I walked up Palm Canyon Drive and passed the Greyhound bus stop. An odd assortment of student travelers, elderly passengers and numerous transients were lined up on the street waiting for the bus to arrive. In a flash the phrase ‘Debris from the West Coast’ popped into my head. It stuck there even as I passed the motley-looking crowd and continued on.

Almost immediately a story began to percolate up from my subconscious. I thought about the woman at a consignment store weeks earlier who had announced to her volunteer partner that she was in Palm Springs because that was as far as her bus ticket would take her. I remembered the beautiful woman at Starbucks who claimed to have just arrived from India, having bypassed L.A. and who was looking for work. She hinted that she was as good with her brains as she was on her back. I politely declined to offer any suggestions for her future employment. I thought about the transients who camped out in the desert and only came into town at night to scrounge through the dumpsters. I thought about the oldsters who moved in their cheap trailers to live out the rest of their sad lives.

Then I thought about the Palm Springs neighborhoods where most of the homes have their own shimmering blue pool and many are surrounded by lush golf courses. Palm Springs was the perfect setting for two totally different worlds; rich and poor, cultured and illiterate, ambitious and arrived.

That story idea became a treatment. That treatment then became a rough draft. The rough draft, after five rewrites, became ’Debris.’ My novel became a microcosm of various relationships set in Palm Springs.  Palm Springs was the perfect setting for such a story. It’s your average surreal environment disguised as a resort community, vacation hotspot and the newest hipster’s haven. It’s probably no different than other resort communities like Key West, Las Vegas, Los Cabos or Aspen.

In short, it’s the perfect place for a collision of lives subtly hidden by crystal clear skies, shimmering pools of blue and warm seductive nights. ‘Debris’ is a Roman coliseum of broken individuals each at various points of conflict in their lives and almost all of them seeking some kind of redemption.

Millie is the aging movie star whom time and Hollywood have long since abandoned. She is an icon for all that was the glory and power of old Hollywood. But she is lost in the new Palm Springs.

Juliet is in the desert to find another man to fill out her tepid life. A chance encounter with Natalie, her new boss at the real estate firm, now elicits emotions long since buried beneath her puritanical upbringing and societies standards.

Brett & Payton seem the perfect couple newly ensconced in Palm Springs’ growing design industry until a chance encounter with Kevin threatens the stability of their relationship.

Robert is the half-Mexican kid scrambling to grab a foothold in the construction trade while he fantasizes about a better life. Opportunities and pitfalls await his every step.

Miranda is the troubled young woman who gave Robert a start but now faces her own avalanching doubts about a future in the valley.

The Indian Kid wants desperately to break out of his tribal constraints while still respecting his elder’s traditions.

Other characters keep piling up. Each is an footnote or a chapter liner without whom the main characters couldn’t function or evolve.

The Goldsteins who lost a son in Afghanistan and now grapple with finding meaning in their lives.

Tom Thornton whose eye for Juliet doesn’t rise above her waist and who must deal with a sordid past that is fast catching up to him.

Franee who has it all in money and power and beauty. All except the one thing she wants to control…Robert.

In its original form, Debris was too big as a print book (over 600 pages) and even larger as an e-book (more than 1500 pages.)  For an unknown author such as myself, a book of that size can be a very hard sell. So it was suggested that the original story be broken into two stories and a third added to form a trilogy.

                

           

Vida, my Jill of all Trades, has helped me break down the original draft into two separate stories. A third treatment written after the original ‘Debris’ and originally entitled ‘Tahquitz Dawn’ is now the basis for book three of the Debris series.

It will be a challenging and somewhat monumental task to rewrite books one and two and create an entirely new book three. But I think I’m up to the task. If for no other reason than my love of Palm Springs and the creative juices that flow there.

Once immersed in that task, I’ll be able to go back to old Palm Springs and relive the glory and glamor and sordid ‘tales of the city.’ I’ll journey with Robert as he struggles to carve out a place for himself among the rich and infamous. I’ll explore the strained relationship of Brett and Payton and get close to Juliet as she questions her own sexuality. I’ll peek into the lives of other characters that appear and then fade in and out of various chapters.

It’s going to be one heck of a journey. But with the San Jacinto Mountains looking over my shoulder, I’ll feel like I’ve come home again.

Eating an Elephant

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.

How do you write a book?  One page at a time.

‘Apache Death Wind’ was written in 1973 over a period of one year. That was roughly ten pages at a time, type-written. Then each of those ten pages was edited and rewritten all over again. On and on until the story was done. Another western was written a year later. Both languished in a paper box until 2005 when the first novel was scanned onto floppy discs (remember those), rewritten on a Mac then transferred to a word document and finally rewritten on a PC. It lay dormant for another year or two and was resurrected then as my first serious attempt at novel writing. Four years later, it was finally published.

After Apache Death Wind, ‘Love in the A Shau’ captured my imagination and begged to be written. It first germinated as a 56 page treatment and finally wound up as my first published novel. I chronicled that process in I Gave Birth Today. Between ‘Apache Death Wind’ and ‘A Shau’ another novel entitled ‘Debris’ was created.

 After coming to the Coachella Valley for almost thirteen years now and spending a considerable amount of time here, I’ve become a native in mind and spirit. The mountains have become background to my early morning runs and afternoon bike rides. Our cache of friends has grown to include folks from around the country. Our neighbors became real people who watched our house and we watched theirs. Downtown was seldom frequented unless company was in town. L.A. became a two hour Sunday morning ride to the Pantages Theater in Hollywood and Laguna Beach became a weekend destination for long beach walks and ocean side fantasies.

There was a story here, I just knew it. But old Palm Springs had long since faded into a vapid memory to the oldsters still around town and the new Palm Springs hadn’t yet shaken itself out of the recession.

 

Palm Springs wasn’t the small village as some natives liked to imagine it nor was it a mecca for the rich and famous like down valley. Palm Springs was a storied history book of Hollywood lore, scandal and glamor. But that was its past. Its future was still being debated in the Desert Sun, Chamber of Commerce meetings and during the cocktail hour in many backyards.

I wanted to tell the story of old Palm Springs but in the context of a new Palm Springs arising from its ashes. But where and how?

 

The title came to me several years ago as I was walking by the Greyhound bus depot in down-town Palm Springs. The depot has since been moved to another location but at that time it was a gathering spot for those folks one wouldn’t normally see in Palm Springs. Those were the home-less folks and vagrants as well as sundry folks whose only means of transportation was the bus. A thought jumped into my mind: “They were all just debris from the West Coast.”

Fair or not, the label stuck and I began to wonder about those folks who have ended up in Palm Springs because that was as far as the bus would take them. Or perhaps they came here in hopes of a new career or a new start on life. I began to imagine what kind of folks end up here because there is nowhere else for them to go.

I had already seen a number of them in the early morning hours at the Starbucks near downtown.

Saint Joseph’s of Starbucks

The tall striking blond who claimed to have just flown in from India where she was doing charity work. She kept reappearing day after day at the coffee shop, always dressed in the same clothes and asking about jobs in town. She was beautiful, mysterious and probably diseased.

I can’t count the number of older men who come into the place, digging into their torn pockets for change for a cup of coffee. Their odors linger long after they’ve left. Some of them have dogs that smelled better than they do.

The tourists, often foreigners, also looking for their morning fix and a taste of the other side of

Palm Springs.

I began to build a cast of characters who would populate my novel. Each would bring a different story to those pages. It would be stories of love, betrayal, ambition, lust and death.

It would be another side of Palm Springs. The everyday lives of people not associated with the green golf courses, the shimmering blue pools, the magnificent mountains, the glamor of Hollywood and the hedonistic sub-culture of some folks who come to visit. It would be about real (in my imagination) folks who live in paradise but fight hell in their lives more often than not. But it would also be about the longing for love, the fight for survival, the quest for sanity in an insane world, driving ambition and painful betrayal.

It would be the flip side of the Palm Springs that the tourists never see. And I hope it would make for one heck of a story.

I’m on my fourth rewrite now and the story is taking shape nicely. It probably won’t be the fodder for the tourism department but it just might make for an interesting story in a remark-

able place, my second home.