BIOGRAPHICAL HYPERBOLE

Half-lies, buried truths, and fictional remembrances of my life.
It's more interesting this way... and there are glimmers of truth here and there.

WARNING!
This is not the "dark and edgy" version.

(Photo of Mom or Dad, I'm not sure. Circa 1962)

Once upon a time...

Abandoned by my parents before birth, I was raised by a pack of voles in a Berkeley California backyard, and thus I learned to run away and dig like hell when attacked. I also developed a permanent squint in daylight. Always hungry, and never very well dressed, our family of voles moved from village to village in search of a pile of dirt to live in. We were so lower class (we weren't moles or gophers!) that we dreamt of being volebillies and were forced to watch the movie Deliverance over and over again.Of course, we learned that city folk weren't to be trusted. And by city folk, we meant anyone that wasn't a vole.

Somewhere in these years I saw the movie Goldfinger, read the Hardy Boys, and discovered Joseph Conrad. I wanted to be spy, a detective, or a writer. I would try to write stories. My dad would say "What the hell, there are no voles in this story!" and my mom would eat the pages since my dad was, in fact, a very bad provider and we were often hungry.

At the age of five I discovered, to my horror, that I was indeed a human being. This happened when I got too big to burrow effectively and kept blocking the hole for everyone else. I remember Papa Vole saying "Get the hell out of my way, I'm packing a load." What he meant by load was seeds, tubers, conifers needles, bark, various green vegetation such as grass and clover, and insects. Late one night, in Kansas City, I was forced from the burrow and told to never darken or block the door again. Of course, darken was figurative, block was literal, and door really meant "open hole that air blows through." Mama Vole cried as I walked away. I will never forget those two grasshopper legs still twitching in her mouth as she finished dinner and mumbled good-bye.

For the next twenty years I hopped a lot of freight trains and learned the hobo code. Secret marks on fenceposts could tell entire stories. I travelled the world. On a lark I lived in Germany for three years where I dug up World War II grenades and helmets with bullet holes in them. I spent three years in Cheyenne, Wyoming - ridin', ropin' and wrestling. In Wyoming, them's called the Three R's.

Still, I drifted on: a few years in Hawaii (voles don't surf being deadly afraid of water delivered by garden hose) and spent the late '60s in Haight-Ashbury. At least I think it was Haight-Ashbury. I know this much: there were nine of us living in the same house and I grooved on the "inner voleness" of living in a commune.

Yes, hobo life was good. Then I discovered: girl voles. One day an old time hobo revealed the secret. I learned that the symbol of a cat meant "kind lady lives here" and a cat with kittens meant that "an easy lady lives here." I learned that prairie voles were monogamous for life but the common meadow vole was seriously oversexed. Unfortunately, my family had been lost during an unannounced rototilling and there was no knowing which I was. With the news of my family's demise on the tuber grapevine, I buried myself in horror: Poe, Collins (Joan, not Wilkie), Lovecraft, Howard, Merritt, Matheson, Bloch and everything in-between. If the book had a monster on the cover I would be compelled to buy it. (Man, this is still true!) I spend so much time reading I forgot to write.

And I got married. (We'll keep this part of the story really simple and fictional. Let's just say that I [finally] found true love - vole style!)

And no little voles ever appeared. I must be a prarie vole so I gave up the hobo life, showered, got a haircut and decided that my future was computers and banking. This lead to years of writing experience - technical manuals, computer programs, and letters of termination. In my job I saw the horror of everyday living. Cubicles = vole nests. Management = vole royalty (too complicated to explain here). Over all the years I tried to time writing but each time I would discover that Stephen KIng had beaten me to the punch. He actually finished his stories AND had a publisher. I sought solace in the bottle (literally, I was living in one... one of those giant billboard bottles on Sunset Strip.) I was afraid of admitting the truth. I couldn't type fast enough with those little vole fingers.

Now the montage:
Portland, Oregon: the rain made it seem like I lived there forever.
Park City, Utah: yep, you guessed it - skied a lot, too many Sundance movies.
Santa Fe, New Mexico: Burn Zoby Burn!
San Ramon, California: So boring it scares the crap out of you. Literally. Every time you stand up.

In the end, we decided to pick up and move to Los Angeles. Hollywood to be specific. That's home. Bought a house. It's walls were creaky. It was scary. Every night when we moved in Mrs. Vole would wake up in alarm: "Did you hear that?" "Yes," I would reply sleepily. "It's a mouse." One night, after being awakened several times, I said. "Go back to sleep, it's only Mr. Fucking Mouse." As I tried to fall back to sleep I thought "That's a great title for a story." The next day I started writing it and that's how this whole horror thing began. The moral of this story: you can't keep a good vole down. Strike that. You can't keep a good vole underground.

So, sweet dreams, and I will take what is left of this energy and go write another horrible story. Er...horror story, my little voles.

Nitey nite.