268 pages

ISBN:9781931982603 trade paper $15.95

ISBN:9781931982597 library binding $26

EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK:

     It was my mother who asked me one time, she said, “Greg, how do you get yourself into so much trouble?”
     “Simple,” I told her, “by trying to get myself out of trouble.”
     She never allowed herself to understand that. That is one of the reasons why she is dying of an old man’s disease.
But she was right about one thing. She used to say, “When it’s hot it’s hot, when it’s cold it’s cold, and when you’re not thinking about either it doesn’t matter.”
     To this day I don’t know why I left Santa Cruz so willingly. Then again, I do. I mean, it was bound to happen. As lucky or as unlucky as it may sound. The odds worked themselves out perfectly. Boom! First there was a cloud of smoke and then there was Cindy.

     Cindy had a way of making things go around. Take the world for instance. She could spin it freely from her fingertips. She was a beautiful freak of a girl with dyed blonde hair that bounced with her every move. And she loved to move. More than that, she loved to dance. Every Friday night I would go watch her. Those were the most expensive dates of our short-lived relationship. A tally of what her love eventually cost is unnecessary and altogether impossible, but I tell you, once it started I could not stop: I fed her till the calf got fat then took her home. She said only one thing the first time we made love and it was this: Relax.
     “Why?” I asked her.
     There was no reply, only a smile, and we went on to have two simultaneously massive orgasms. And, of course, it was Love.
     She left my house three days later wearing the same clothes she came in with and returned that afternoon with all of her stuff. In a phone call from my mother I tried to explain that nothing moves as fast as true instantaneous love, and I went on to explain the concept of Spontaneous Love, which is similar to spontaneous combustion.
     “Yes, it’s a fire,” I said.
     “No, not a real fire. A metaphorical one.”
     “No, it doesn’t burn.”
     I was high at the time and found nothing gloomy or foreshadowing about the conversation; on the contrary, it felt alive and wonderful and I was all for it.