The Kid Stays in the JPEG: Chapter One

I was 26 when I opened my first website. I'd been lurking around the fringes of the writing industry for years, and all I had to show for it was two failed marriages and a book of dirty palindromes I wrote in a drunken fog five years prior. I was staring down the barrel of 30 and every chamber was loaded, baby.

So picture the scene: 12:30 on a Friday night, and I'm slinging back mai-tais at Trader Vic's when who should walk in but Salman Rushdie. He and his crew belly up to the bar next to me.

"Gerry, I read your piece in the last issue of Harper's," Rushdie says to me. "I think you should issue a fatwa against your editor."

"Sal baby, you ain't kidding," I replied.

Rushdie starts to tell me a dirty joke involving the prophet Mohammad and a pig when it hits me like a ton of bricks: Max, you old devil, you should be writing comedy. A column or something. The whole thing was starting to come together in my head and I knew I had to get to a word processor before the rum wore off. I excused myself from the bar just as Rushdie was getting to the punchline, and told him he should maybe lay off the blasphemy a little 'til this whole Ayatollah thing blows over.

I banged out that first column in one Turkish coffee-and-methamphetamine-fueled weekend. I spent the next weekend decoding what I'd written, and it was dynamite. I faxed it off to my agent and waited for a sign.

And then the rejection letters came rolling in. Collier's passed, so did Harper's. Cracked told me it "wasn't cerebral enough." Highlights for Kids said it was too Goofus, not enough Gallant. Spin wanted more White Stripes references, and the letter from Mother Jones just read "Fuck off, kike."

I was feeling low. I was sitting on a comedy goldmine and the general store was all out of pickaxes. There was only one thing that could cheer me up: illegal narcotics. And I knew just the man to go to.

*****

I showed up at my old buddy Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Newport Beach bungalow on Sunday morning. I hammered on the door for five minutes before Sammy's haggard face stared at me through the doorjamb.

"Lemme in Coleridge, I need that Green Fairy pronto."

"You're interrupting me Max. I was writing something."

Turned out he'd been knee-deep in some poem called "Xanadu" about Genghis Khan or something. I wasn't about to let him off the hook, so I kicked the door in and started rooting through his liquor cabinet. Sammy, good sport that he is, decided a little absinthe couldn't hurt, and maybe he could finish his train of thought.

Glasses in hand, Sammy and I commenced to getting twisted. I told him about my column and the pencil-neck suits who wouldn't publish it. He asked me why I didn't put it up on the Web.

"Web? That's small potatoes. Sammy baby, these veins have printer's ink flowing through them." (I wasn't lying either. W. Somerset Maugham taught me how to mainline it in one blissful weekend the previous June.)

But Sammy couldn't be phased. He was talking up this blogging thing like it would turn everyone into F. Scott Fitzgerald. And maybe it was the absinthe buzz but this old crank was starting to make sense. Total creative control? Editorial power? Gigabytes of bandwidth?

I left Sammy in a green haze and headed back to my office. I pulled up Blogger, cut-and-paste and that was that. My future was calling me, and baby, you take that call no matter who you have to put on hold.

(Little epilogue to that story: Coleridge wouldn't take my calls for months afterward, claiming he'd completely lost the thread of his epic poem. Eventually he decided that "Xanadu" ended in a raging helicopter battle over the streets of Los Angeles. He sold the rights to Paramount and made a mint with points on the back end.)

*****

Next chapter: Max grapples with the heartbreak of writer's block, and reminisces about a memorable knife fight with Truman Capote.