#yeah. those have always been favorite topics of mine. I am if nothing else predictable 😅

[peaches2217]

Regarding a Certain Panda's Nightmares

AO3 Link!

~~~

“I just… I keep having these nightmares, y’know? Real stupid stuff.” Po scoffed and tried to pass it off as a laugh, as if that alone could convince Tigress — maybe himself, too — that those dreams were as meaningless as he wished they were. “It’s always the same. Like… it’s snowing, but there’s fire everywhere, and I hear screaming all over the place, but I feel fine. I’m not cold if I touch the snow and I don’t burn if I touch the fire.”

The smile he gave Tigress was empty, and his eyes, though glancing between the cabinets, the table, and her, were somewhere on the other side of China.

A part of him truly did die there, she found herself thinking, though she forced the thought from her head at once. 

“That’s, uh, that’s usually all there is to it.” Po propped an elbow on the table in the unlit kitchen and rested his cheek on his fist, looking over Tigress’ shoulder at an ever-darkening nothing. “Sometimes it ends pretty quickly. Sometimes I see bodies and, uh, blood ‘n’ stuff. And sometimes I just hear the screaming, and then eventually I don’t hear anything anymore.” He shrugged. “But tonight’s the first time I actually…”

He swallowed heavily and tried half-heartedly to hide it behind his cup of tea. It was still full, but it had long since gone cold.

Tigress glanced down at his paw as he set it back on the table. His claws had grown out. Nothing drastic, and nowhere near as sharp as hers, but the usually blunted tips were reaching a point. He used the tip of his index claw to trace meaningless patterns into the birch.

���She, uh… she recognized me. Called me her little lotus flower. Said I’d gotten so big. But it was like, right in the middle of the, uh… the attack. So that was weird.”

Po looked down at his teacup, maybe observing his reflection in the cooled liquid. He looked so tired. Not the kind of tired brought about by a single sleepless night; no, this was just one of many in the past three weeks. 

“Tried telling her to run. Tried getting her to run with me, y’know, but… she said that, uh, well, my story didn’t have a happy beginning, but she was… uh, she was happy with the way hers ended. Told me she was proud of me. Then I woke up.” He blinked a few times, then his shoulders lifted, like his departed soul was returning to his body. “Just a real stupid dream, y’know? Borderline wish fulfillment. I mean, who would say something like that, right? I know she wouldn’t say that.”

“Do you?”

“I don’t know, but like… how do you die and then say you’re okay with it? I wouldn’t be okay with dying like that, especially if it was because…"

And his eyes grew glossy again, going someplace that Tigress, try though she might, couldn’t reach.

“Y’know, I-I don’t know how many… I mean, dozens? Hundreds, thousands? However many, it’s too many. And they’re all, uh, they’re all dead.” Po smacked his lips and shrugged again. “Because of me.”

“Po. You were a child. Nothing you could have done would have stopped it.” 

Tigress kept her voice low, in part to ensure she didn’t wake their teammates sleeping just a few rooms over, and in part so that he didn’t startle and back down. Any semblance of judgment or any suggestion that he had upset her with his words, and Po would apologize and thank her for listening and go back to his room to feign sleep until the morning gong rung. 

For someone so hell-bent on being open and friendly with everyone he met, he was fiercely self-reliant. That much they at least had in common.

“Well,” and Po smiled ruefully as he spoke, “maybe if I was never born…”

Tigress bit her tongue so sharply she tasted blood, because that was all she could do to keep from shutting him down. No, scolding him for such harmful thoughts would get them nowhere, not yet, not right now. “You think things might be different then?” she ventured instead.

“Can’t wipe out all the pandas if you never get told a panda’s gonna kick your butt one day. And that can’t happen if the panda who’s supposed to kick your butt doesn’t exist.”

Tigress averted her gaze to the tabletop as well, breathing as deeply and steadily as her cracked ribs would allow. Though Po had always, to some extent, carried feelings of resentment towards himself, they had never run this deep.

Or if they had, he’d simply never told her. Tigress preferred to think the former was the truth.

“Fate works in odd ways,” she said at last, slowly, thinking and then re-thinking each word before they left her mouth. “We can’t stop it, and we can’t control it. I’m inclined to believe that your absence wouldn’t have changed anything.”

For a moment, Po didn’t respond, just kept staring blankly at the table. Were it not for the minute shifting of his eyes, Tigress would have thought he hadn’t heard her.

“...you think?” Something in the way he asked it, maybe the way his voice fluttered or his brows lifted and scrunched, suggested that he was really considering her words. That was a good sign, at least.

“If it wasn’t you, it would have been someone else.”

“But it wouldn’t have been me.”

“People would still be dead, but the Valley wouldn’t have its Dragon Warrior. That would just ensure even more deaths.”

“Maybe the other panda woulda been the Dragon Warrior. Beat Tai Lung, brought peace, kept everyone safe.”

“But we’ll never know, will we? Because you were born, and this life is yours alone.” 

At that, Po nodded, though his face betrayed his despondency. 

I wouldn’t be okay with dying like that, he’d said only minutes earlier. But Tigress knew better. If given no other option, he’d happily die to protect others, especially the ones he held dear.

A tickle in the back of her throat made her cough, lightly, but enough to send a sharp pain through her chest.

A death wish in exchange for the safety and happiness of their loved ones. That was something else they had in common, for sure.

“For what it’s worth…” Tigress mulled over her thoughts for a brief moment. Would someone just like him have come along had he never entered the world? Perhaps. Perhaps the days at the Jade Palace would still be made lighter, and perhaps the meals they shared would still be just as flavorful, and perhaps she would still have found comfort and joy when she had long since given up on such things being part of her life.

But it would still be a world without Po. And such a world was a world Tigress didn’t want to think about, much less be a part of.

“I’m glad that you were born,” was what she finally decided on. “And I know for a fact I’m only one of many who feels that way.”

Po smiled down at his paws. It was small, barely enough to be called a smile, really. But it was warm, genuine, almost alien yet achingly familiar.

“I’m… I’m glad you were born too.”

At that, Tigress smiled in turn.

They didn’t really say much after that. They sat in shared silence until the darkness lightened with the impending dawn, at which point Tigress suggested they at least try to rest, if only for an hour or so. And though these all-nighters had become routine over the past weeks, when Po bid Tigress a good night (“Er, uh— good morning, early morning, I guess”) and ducked his head in thanks, she noticed he looked less tired than he had since they’d returned to the Valley.

It wasn’t some miraculous recovery. But little by little, her best friend was returning.

The thought dulled the pain of her broken bones and quieted her racing thoughts, and it made an hour of sleep feel like a slow and blissful eternity.

[iamtheblondestblonde]

Slides and Serendipity

Part Four (4.3k)

Part One   Part Two   Part Three

AN: Can we just appreciate how good he looks while literally just standing there doing absolutely nothing? It’s not fair. With that said, enjoy!

Warnings: Only language for now

I told him how I’d moved to the US when I was 18, right after finishing school. I’d always had a love for programming and when I was about 15 I had my first app up and running, but it hadn’t really been successful. At 17 some of my guy friends made me think of an idea that I wouldn’t be able to forget in the following years.

I was convinced that it could be my breakthrough but it would take up every minute that I could spare for the next few years because building the interface of an app with this magnitude usually took entire teams of people but I was doing all of the work by myself. By the time Tyler and I made it through the entrance I was telling him how during my freshman year of college I’d barely slept, writing code and improving like crazy.

“At one point I was so sick of it, I just wanted to do something else, anything else really, so I made this little game. It took me two days, although I probably could have done it in like four hours if I hadn’t gone out that night. The graphics were terrible and I thought it was stupid, a silly little distraction, but the friends that I’d shown it to loved it so I published it as a joke. No one could have predicted what would come and to this day I still don’t know what exactly happened”, I told him as we slowly made our way around the aquarium.

“So your little game became famous?” he asked curiously and I laughed dryly before giving him the last piece of information that he’d need to connect the dots, a look of shock now on his face.

“You made Flappy Bird?!”, he exclaimed so loudly that the actual birds around us quickly flew away. I put my hand over his mouth to try and avoid any further attention, even though most people had already turned around to watch us curiously.

“Yes I did but please be quiet. People weren’t exactly my biggest fans after I took it down”, I said and took his hand in mine to try to pull him along with me but he wouldn’t budge.

“Wow, like holy fuck I’m honored to be in your presence. I played that game all day long”

He smiled at me then and I was relieved that he’d calmed down again. With our fingers still laced together we watched some fish in silence before he spoke up again.

“Tell me about your life back then”

“I feel like people have kind of forgotten about me now but it was absolute madness then. I was 19 and racking in around 50 grand a day, which is something that no teenager should ever do. I did a lot of stupid shit as you can imagine but also became my own investor, so at least something good came out of it”, I told him, not really daring to look him in the eye. Only a handful of people still knew about Flappy Bird and while I didn’t regret telling him, I’d had to face all kinds of reactions before.

“Yeah I know a thing or two about being left unsupervised and making too much money as a teenager”, he said bitterly and I remembered some of the stuff that Mara had told me about him and his time in Boston. I go the feeling that he probably understood me better than anyone else.

We kind of dropped the topic for a while after that, instead just talking about his workouts and the upcoming weeks. I had noticed a group of teenagers recognizing Tyler a while ago but so far they hadn’t come up to us, leaving us to continue our conversation in peace.

A while later I heard him curse and turned around to see them taking pictures of us, making me swear as well. He tried to apologize but I wouldn’t let him as I’d kind of expected something like this to happen again and it wasn’t really his fault either.

I let go of his hand to avoid stupid rumors but didn’t step back from him. We continued walking, hands still brushing once in a while but neither of us reached out again. I asked Tyler to take pictures of me for my Instagram and he acted like a professional photographer, crouching down to get the best angles and everything. I wanted to get a picture with both of us in it but didn’t dare to ask anyone else. He posted some pictures as well but I made sure to stay out of the frame.

“I just remembered your other idea. Did it have the success you expected it to have?”, he asked me a while later, surprising me with the sudden change of topic as we’d just had a discussion on whether a sloth was a good spirit animal or not.

“Yes it did, actually more than I’d hoped and my sources also told me that you’re an avid user yourself”

“I swear if you tell me that you’re behind Instagram I am absolutely losing my shit”, he said, probably only partly joking and I had to laugh.

“Nah I wish but not quite. I guess you could call me your wingwoman though because I’ve heard that you met quite a few of your hookups through my baby Bumble”, I revealed, again laughing at his reaction. He looked at me as if to try and figure out if I was kidding before coming to the realization that I wasn’t.

I didn’t make a secret out of the fact that I founded Bumble, having given interviews and everything and it was probably the biggest reason why the media paid me any mind. If he’d googled me, he would’ve found lots of articles and pictures but I guess a guy like him refrained from googling anyone, including himself.

“I’ve been wanting to ask though, why Bumble and not Tinder? I know for a fact that the amount of people looking for hookups is higher on Tinder”, I said and watched him curiously.

“I was actually on Tinder for a little while but I didn’t like having to make the first move. I didn’t want to put myself out there with like pick up lines in case people would upload screenshots, but whenever I just wrote ‘Hey what’s up?’ people were giving me shit about the Tyler Seguin being basic so I deleted it. Bumble is nice because I only have to respond and I can just ignore the crazy bunnies until their profiles are gone”, he explained and I smiled, feedback always much appreciated.

“Well the Tyler Seguin using one of the most basic lines is pretty disappointing, I’d be mad as well”, I teased and he laughed, his eyes crinkling.

“With you I put in more effort, I mean I even made my dog steal your shoe and everything, kinda like a reverse Cinderella”, he came right back and we both burst out laughing again. Spending time with him was probably one of the easiest things I’d ever done. There weren’t any awkward pauses or moments and besides the fact that I was trying my best not to fall for his charms, I could easily count us hanging out among my favorite things to do nowadays.

Once we’d seen everything at the aquarium and barely avoided getting shit on by a bird we decided that it was time to head out.

“So I know that you said that you avoid Italian restaurants but there’s this German place in town and I feel like you’re best qualified to judge it. You have to tell me what to order though”, he said as we were walking back to my car. I wasn’t even that hungry but he looked so excited that I agreed to go anyways.

The restaurant was cute, actually reminding me of places I’d been to in Germany and when the waitress came to take our order I was surprised by her being German as well. I didn’t want to be rude towards Tyler so I kept our chat short but it always felt good to speak my native language again. She told me that the restaurant was owned by a couple from Germany and I vowed to myself to come back if I was ever in the need for some quality comfort food.

“I always remembered German to be quite harsh but it actually sounds kind of beautiful when you speak it”, he said afterwards as we waited for our meals.

“Well yea, you probably only heard people yelling at each other on the ice in Switzerland and the language there also sounds quite different from the one I grew up with. Angry German is definitely harsh but I don’t think you’ll ever hear that from me”, I assured him and he started pestering me about teaching him some slang.

The food tasted more authentic than anything I’d had in the States so far and it caused a feeling of longing to bubble up in my chest. For the most part I was glad that I’d left when I did but from time to time I still missed my old home, even if the US now felt more like my home than anything else.

“Do you miss Toronto?”, I asked Tyler, knowing that he probably felt the same.

“Yeah definitely, not as much right now because I just got back from Canada but whenever I feel down I wish my family could be with me to support me. Don’t get me wrong, I absolutely love my life here in Dallas but I guess whenever things get bad it’s easiest to want to go back to your roots, you                                         know?”, he asked and I nodded, even if I couldn’t relate that much. I didn’t have such a strong support system as the one he obviously had but I could still understand him wanting to be surrounded by familiar things in those moments.

We talked about our lives outside of Dallas and his love for fishing and the peaceful look he got on his face when talking about his cabin that he had up north was completely different from what you’d expect because of the way the media portrayed him. Of course he mentioned parties as well and while some stories were crazy, I’d been to wilder parties and no one would ever give me shit about it because no one cared.

“I think it’s because it plays into the stereotype of the party-loving hockey player, like people actively wait for you to act out so they can say that they were right”, I said as were downing the last of our drinks. He was in the spotlight and people wanted him to behave responsibly, which I understood, but he was still a real person with real feelings and I could also see why he wanted to escape those expectations from time to time.

Tyler wanted to pay our bill of course and while I thought that it was a sweet gesture, I insisted on him letting me cover the tip at least. I wrote a little note in German on the receipt and then we left. We’d spent so much time inside that the sun was already painting the sky in reds and oranges, dipping everything around us in a beautiful light.

“I think I’ll really like it here”, I said to Tyler while I looked up into the sunset.

“I’m trying to help you with that”, he responded and I tried to talk myself out of feeling my heart flutter at the soft smile he was currently giving me.

This time his song choices were more laid back and I felt myself relaxing as much as I could without causing a traffic accident. He asked me to park the car at my house so we could walk over  to his place and I happily obliged, wanting to savor these last few moments together.

There was still a little bit of the sunset sky left by the time we made it back and I basked in its light as we slowly approached his gate. I was still humming one of the songs he’d played earlier when we made our way through his front door, four dogs coming at us with full speed. Soon enough we were both buried under masses of fur and wet noses, their excitement only slowly dying down.

“Thank you for today, I had a really great time”, I said to Tyler once we were both able to untangle ourselves and stand up again.

“So did I. I’ll see you tomorrow after practice, right?”, he confirmed and I nodded before leashing Yogi and thanking Tyler’s friend for watching him on my way out.

Back home I decided to be productive, so I pulled out my laptop and began researching people I’d want in my team when I got a facetime call not long after.

“Dude how was your date?”, Lisa immediately asked me as soon as her face filled my screen.

“It wasn’t a date and you know it”, I responded, rolling my eyes at her suggestive smirk.

“I don’t know, a guy going to the aquarium with you and then taking you out to dinner sounds pretty date-like if you ask me”

“Well I’m glad no one is asking you then”, I said before giving in and telling her about the day, not date, I’d had with Tyler.

“He sounds really fun, I’m surprised with everything that Mara keeps saying in our groupchat. Anyways, what were you up to before I called?”, she wanted to know and I told her about my mission to find people that I could see myself working with, which was honestly harder than I’d expected. Lisa and I had worked at an app development company in Denver together so she knew how eccentric a lot of people in our line of work could be.

“I think I can actually help you out with that one. Do you remember Mia from back in Massachusetts, the girl with the pretty handwriting that we met at the foam party back when we were Freshmen? She was in my recommendations on Insta a while ago and she told me that she moved back home to Dallas not too long ago. Even if she has a job already you’d probably be able to poach her if you wanted to and she might know some people as well.”

I remembered Mia of course, because we used to hang out a lot during our time in college. Afterwards we’d kind of lost touch, as it happened with a lot of people but if she was back in the area I’d definitely hit her up again, remembering her to make great designs. I asked Lisa for Mia’s info and then she told me the latest office gossip about my former coworkers. Leaving the company had been a risky move but because I’d always done a lot of freelancing and was sick of only following orders, I was confident that I could pull this off by myself. I’d already had requests lined up for when I’d start working again.

My fingers were itching for something to do and I was starting to seriously consider moving up the deadline to get at least some work done. I wasn’t really good at sitting around, so I decided to text Mia to see if she wanted to casually meet up this week, while also hinting that I might be interested in having her work with me before going to bed.

Katie picked me up the next morning and we caught each other up on the last few days while driving to where we’d meet the other girls for an early lunch. I had only spoken to Dominika and Alandra for a little while at the party but we’d hit it right off. They were funny and nice to me and greeted me with warm hugs as soon as we spotted them sitting on a table in the corner of the restaurant.

“You look amazing, I love your jacket”, Alandra said and I tried my best not to blush while returning the compliment. They all looked stunning in fact and I didn’t understand how people could hate so much on these genuine and great girls. We ordered something to drink and some light lunch and then Katie and Dominika started telling me how excited they were for the season to start up again.

“You’ll have to come to the games with us. I’m sure Tyler will ask you as well but even if he doesn’t, because he can be a little dense sometimes, you still have to come”, Katie said and I laughed at her insulting her boyfriend’s best friend. I’d been to quite a few hockey games in Denver and I’d always loved the atmosphere there so that was an easy yes.

“Anything exciting happen between you and Tyler since that super hot almost make out sesh in the pool on Saturday?”, Dominika asked and I hid my face in my hands.

“You guys saw that?”, I groaned, a slight blush now definitely creeping up my face.

“Girl I think everyone saw that and the way he was looking at you all afternoon... like damn”, Alandra threw in and started fanning her face with her hands.

Surely it hadn’t been that bad, now had it?

They continued telling me how I’d raised quite a few questions within the team, people wondering who ‘that hot blonde’ was that had managed to have Tyler wrapped around her finger.

“I swear nothing interesting happened since, the most exciting was perhaps a kiss on the cheek that night”, I said but I could tell that they weren’t fully convinced. I didn’t dare telling them about the hand holding, cuddling and all those other sweet moments out of fear of making a fool of myself. I knew damn well that he might only be that way to charm my pants off and I certainly didn’t need anyone else reminding me of that fact.

Soon enough it was time to head over to the practice rink and I got back in the car with Katie again. She was telling me about how Jamie first introduced her to everyone and how nervous she felt among all of those big guys and their better halves. I could totally relate to the feeling now, even if I’d already met some of them and wasn’t his girlfriend either, but being confronted with so many new faces at once still managed to freak me out.

Katie pulled into the parking lot right before the boys were coming through the exit. She greeted Jamie with a kiss while I tried not to drool over Tyler’s post-shower look. The guy wasn’t exactly taking it easy on me lately. I went over to hug him, secretly enjoying his smell before turning around to everyone hanging around in a loose circle.

“This is Liv by the way, for anyone who hasn’t met her yet”, Tyler introduced me and I tried my best to keep a neutral but friendly expression on my face.

“He’s told us how smart you are, so good luck on being the only one with any brain cells left between the both of you”, one of the guys chirped and I had to laugh out loud.

“Let’s not embarrass me any further please”, Tyler said before throwing his arm around my shoulder and slowly leading me towards his car, not without dirty looks towards his teammates of course. I could only wave at the girls with a shrug before we reached his G wagon and he opened the door for me, even holding out his hand to help me inside.

I told him about all of the stuff I’d need and while I’d need some stuff to be delivered, I was still convinced that we could get most of the stuff home today.

Tyler put on a snapback as soon as we reached the parking lot, unfortunately covering his beautiful curls but at least he refrained from wearing sunglasses inside. We grabbed a cart and made our way around the place, contemplating on shelves, desks and the best chairs before considering decorations. Tyler helped me with his input sometimes, but mostly he just let me do my thing and stuck to following my orders on what to add to the cart.

We couldn’t take the conference table I’d chosen with us of course, but everything else fit into his spacious car after getting the backseats out of the way. I was glad to have him assisting me today, as I would’ve never been able to fit everything in the Audi, let alone play Tetris the way he did.

I connected my phone to the speakers and had my hands full with multiple items when the display showed an incoming call from Mara. I looked at Tyler to see if he had anything against me taking it and after he shook his head no I accepted.

“Hey girl, just a heads up, you’re on speaker in the car and Tyler is with me”, I warned her before she could say anything stupid, like mention any of the things we’d talked about the last couple of days.

“Hi Tyler”, she said and I knew her well enough that she was probably trying her best not to squeal, successfully taming her inner fangirl.

“Hi Mara, I’ve heard a lot about you”, Tyler greeted her and gave me a playful wink.

“I guess it’s good that you’re both there”, she started and I immediately started to worry as this couldn’t mean anything good but my train of thought was interrupted by her continuing with: “I’ve got some news for the both of you. I’ve kept a close eye on the hockey blogs lately because of everything that has been going on and I’m so sorry Liv, but you’ve been spotted and identified.

“I guess you haven’t really been on your phone today but there’s pictures circling of you two on the hike, a video from the party with you two in the background, which really started this entire witch hunt and more sets of pictures just recently from the aquarium and you shopping for furniture together, I’m really sorry. Liv, you’ve also gained lots and lots of new followers on Insta and I guess your DMs must be blowing up as well”, she finished and if my hands were free, I’d bury my head in them right now.

I’d expected something like this to happen, but not a week after I met him already. I had a public account with quite an impressive following base as well because of my business and Mara went on to explain how the fans had pointed out the similarities in our recent posts and stories, concocting all kinds of crazy stories.

I couldn’t watch it at the moment, but the video from us at the party was apparently the worst. In all of the other pictures you could see us standing close to each other, occasionally touching, but according to Mara the video showed two girls lounging at the party with us in the background, Tyler’s arms clearly wrapped around me right after we fell into the pool.

Mara could sense that I wasn’t in the mood to discuss this any further because she hung up pretty soon after dropping that bomb on us. Needless to say that the rest of the ride was quiet, a loaded silence between us for the first time since we’d met. I could tell that Tyler was trying to figure out what to say to me but I doubted that anything he could come up with could lift my mood right now.

He helped me unload the stuff from his car in silence, both of us lost in our thoughts, only speaking up to greet Yogi. We carried the stuff into the office and except for me pointing out where to place the boxes for now, no other words were spoken after that for a while.

“I’m so sorry that you got dragged into this Liv, it’s not fair that the only thing people can say about you right now is about you supposedly dating a hockey player, you deserve better”, he finally said as he was about to leave and while his apology was sweet, it was almost immediately lost in the whirlwind of thoughts rushing through my mind at this point.

I felt exposed and watched, like the victim of an obsessive stalker. I’d been reduced to nothing but a fling in Tyler’s long list of conquests in a matter of hours and probably already had his fangirls threatening me. There was no point in trying to diffuse the rumors either, not that I’d demand that from him, because people always believed what they wanted.

I didn’t mind being recognized for the hard work I’d done all my life, but this was different. This wasn’t about my knowledge in programming or any of my ideas, people were now solely interested in me because of who I was supposedly with.

It was a weird feeling, being objectified like a butterfly in a glass case with no other purpose except to be studied closely and picked apart.

“It’s not your fault Tyler, it just comes with your lifestyle I guess”, I shrugged halfheartedly and he wrapped his arms around me. His hug gave me at least some feeling of comfort, although I couldn’t bring myself to enjoy it the way I would under different circumstances.

“I can tell that you need some space right now but if you need to talk to someone I’m always just a few minutes away and I’ll tell the girls to look out for you as well”, he said softly and with a kiss to my forehead he was gone, leaving me alone in the cacophony of thoughts screaming against each other inside my head.

[chiseler]

Nick Tosches’ Final Interview

On Sunday, October 20th, 2019, three days before his seventieth birthday, Nick Tosches died in his TriBeCa apartment. As of this writing, no cause of death has been specified. It represents an Immeasurable loss to the world of literature. The below, conducted this past July, was the last full interview Tosches ever gave. 

***

In Where Dead Voices Gather, his peripatetic 2001 anti-biography of minstrel singer Emmett Miller, Nick Tosches wrote: “The deeper we seek, the more we descend from knowledge to mystery, which is the only place where true wisdom abides.” It’s an apt summation of Tosches’ own life and work.

Journalist, poet, novelist, biographer and historian Nick Tosches has been called the last of our literary outlaws, thanks in part to his reputation as a hardboiled character with a history of personal excesses. But he’s far more than that—he’s one of those writers other writers wish they could be. He’s seen it all first-hand, moved in some of the most dangerous circles on earth, and is blessed with the genius to put it down with a sharp elegance that’s earned him a seat in the Pantheon.

Born in 1949, Tosches was raised in the working class neighborhoods of Newark and Jersey City, where his father ran a bar. Despite barely finishing high school, he fell into the writing game at nineteen, shortly after relocating to New York. He quickly earned a reputation as a brilliant music journalist, writing for Rolling Stone and authoring Country: The Twisted Roots of Rock ’N Roll (1977), the Jerry Lee Lewis biography Hellfire (1982) and Unsung Heroes of Rock ’N Roll (1984). After that he staked out his own territory, exploring and illuminating the deeply-shadowed corners of the culture and the human spirit. He’s written biographies of sinister Italian financier Michele Sindona, Sonny Liston, Dean Martin and near-mythical crime boss Arnold Rothstein. He’s published poetry and books about opium. His debut novel, Cut Numbers (1988) focused on the numbers racket, and his most recent, Under Tiberius (2015) presented Jesus as a con artist with a good p.r. man.

While often citing Faulkner, Charles Olsen, Dante and the Greeks as his primary literary influences, over the past fifty years Tosches’ own style has evolved from the flash and swagger of his early music writing into a singular and inimitable prose which blends the two-fisted nihilism of the crime pulps with an elegant and lyrical formalism. Like Joyce, Tosches takes clear joy in the measured, poetic flow of language, and like Dostoevsky, his writing, regardless of the topic at hand, wrestles with the Big Issues: Good and Evil, Truth and Falsehood, the Sacred and the Profane, and our pathetic place in a universe gone mad.

For years now, Tosches’ official bio has stated he “lives in what used to be New York.” It only makes sense then that we would meet amid the tangled web of tiny sidestreets that make up SoHo at what remains one of the last bars in New York where we could smoke. Tosches, now sixty-nine, smoked a cigar and drank a bottle of forty-year-old tawny port as we discussed his work, publishing, religion, the Internet, this godforsaken city, fear, and how a confirmed heretic goes about obtaining Vatican credentials.

Jim Knipfel: When I initially contacted you about an interview last year, my first question was going to be about retirement. You’d been hinting for awhile, at least since Me and the Devil in 2012, that you planned to retire from writing at sixty-five. And since Under Tiberius came out, there’d been silence. But shortly after I got in touch, we had to put things on hold because you’d started working on a new project. As you put it then, “I find myself becoming lost again in the cursed woods of words and writing.”

Nick Tosches: It is unlike any other project. I am indulging myself, knowing nobody has paid me money up front. Is it a project? Yeah, I guess anything that’s not come to a recognizable fruition is a project. So yeah. I do consider the actual writing of books to be behind me.

JK: Did thinking about retirement have anything to do with what we’ll generously call the dispiriting nature of contemporary publishing?

NT: Oh, very much so. Very much.

JK: There’s a remarkable section in the middle of In The Hand of Dante, it just comes out of nowhere, in which you launch into this frontal attack on what’s become of the industry. I went back and read it again last week, and it’s so beautiful and so perfect, and as I was reading I couldn’t help but think, “Who the hell else could get away with this?” Dropping a very personal screed like that in the middle of a novel? And a novel released by a major publisher, in this case Little, Brown. Was there any kind of reaction from your editor?

NT: Okay, is this the same passage where I talk about all these people with fat asses?

JK: Yeah, that’s part of it.

NT: Okay, my agent at the time, Russ Galen, said he heard from {Michael} Pietsch, the editor who’s now the Chief Executive Officer of North America. And the moment he became so, he went from being my lifelong friend to “yeah, I heard of him.” He complained about the fat ass comment, and my agent told him, “If you go for a walk with Nick Tosches, you might get rained on.” Apart from that, no. And I have to say, he considers that one of his favorite novels, ever. When I tried to get the rights back because of a movie deal, he said “no I won’t do that.” I said “Why?” And he said because it was one of his favorite books. So no, there was no real backlash. A lot of comments like your own. A lot of people saying “Boy, that was great.”

JK: As we both know, marketing departments make all the editorial decisions at publishing houses nowadays, and over the years you must have driven them nuts. There’s no easy label to slap on you. You hear there’s a new Nick Tosches book coming out, it could be a novel, it could be poetry, it could be a biography or history or anything at all. I’m trying to imagine all these marketing people sitting around asking, “So what’s our targeted demographic for The Last Opium Den?”

NT: I just set out to do what I wanted to do. If they wanted to cling to the delusion that they could somehow control sales or predict the future of taste, fine, let them go ahead and do it. I’ve always found it’s the books that gather the attention, they just try to coordinate things. All they’re doing is covering their own jobs. If they can wrangle you an interview with Modern Farming, well, there’s something to put on a list they hand out at one of their meetings… They’re all illiterate. Thirty years ago there was still a sense of independence among publishers. Now they’re just vestigial remnants that mean nothing because they’re all owned by these huge media conglomerates.

JK: To whom publishing is irrelevant.

NT: Right. It’s all just a joke.  

JK: I guess what matters is that the people who read you will read whatever you put out. If you put out a book of cake decorating tips, I’d be the first in line to buy it. Actually I’d love to see what you could do with Nick’s Best Cakes Ever, right? It’s something to consider.

NT: Maybe not that particular instance, but what you have so kindly referred to as my current project, which is very…eccentric. It’s the herd of my obsessions that will not remain corralled as I intended.

JK: What brought you back to writing? You’ve said in the past that writing is a very tough habit to kick.

NT: Well, what brought me back? I have no idea. Maybe just actual, utter, desperate boredom. There was none of this Romantic need to express myself. Just a lot of little obsessions, that’s all. As I said…well, I didn’t say this at all. There’s nothing at stake. There’s no money, there’s not going to be any money. There’s no one I need to give a second thought of offending or pleasing. But that having been said, I’m taking as much care with it as I have with everything else. I’ve always thought of myself as the only editor. And having had the good fortune to work with good titular editors, which means their job consists of perhaps making a suggestion or stating a preference or notifying me that they do not understand certain things, and beyond that leaving it be. As I told one editor,I forget when or where or why, “Why don’t you go write you’re own fuckin’ book and leave mine be?” He had all these great ideas. The best editors are the ones that aren’t frustrated authors.

JK: I was lucky enough to work with two editors like that. One had a nervous breakdown and is out of the business, the other just vanished one day.

NT: Well, you’re fortunate. Not only do most editors, a majority of editors, which are bad editors, like the majority of anything, really. If they don’t interfere with something, and nine times out of ten make it worse, they’re not justifying their jobs. The other thing is, we’re recently at the point where the new type of writers, which are the writers who are willing to do it for free, think the editor’s the chief mark of the whole racket. But it’s not—he’s not, she’s not. Their job is to get you paid and leave you alone. That’s the thing. Now you got pseudo editors, pseudo writers. If you think of a writer such as William Faulkner. Now there’s a guy who just screamed out to be edited. Fortunately the editors were willing to publish him and leave him alone, which is why we have William Faulkner. That was the editor’s great contribution, protecting William Faulkner from that nonsense. People speak about, what’s that phrase applied to Maxwell Perkins? “Editor of Genius.” Well, the genius was you find someone who can write really well, and don’t fuck with ‘em. There’s something to be said about that. It’s to Perkins’ credit.

JK: If I can step back a ways to your early years. You were a streetwise kid who grew up in Jersey City and Newark. Your father discouraged you from reading, but you read anyway. So what was the attraction to books? Or was it simple contrariness on your part because you’d been told to avoid them?

NT: I got lost in them. It was dope before I copped dope. I used to love to drift away, in my mind, my imagination. I loved books. My father was not an anti-book person, but he was the first generation of our family to be born in this country. A working class neighborhood where okay, this guy worked in this factory, and that guy owned a bar, and that guy delivered the mail. Nobody was going any further than this. And I remember my father saying, “These books are gonna put ideas in your head.” I guess I enjoyed that they did. Terrible books, some of them. Terrible books, but it didn’t matter.

JK: You’ve also said that very early on you wanted to be a writer.

NT: Yes.

JK: Or a farmer.

NT: Or a garbage man or an archaeologist. Those were my childhood aspirations.

JK: Considering the environment you were coming out of, three of those seem counterintuitive.

NT: Garbage men got to ride on the side of the truck, and that looked great. Archaeologists, wow. I didn’t know they were spending years just coming up with little splintered shards of urns. Yeah, writer. Writing had a great attraction for me, because writing seemed a great coward’s way out. You can communicate anything while facing a corner, with no one seeing you, no one hearing you, you didn’t have to look anyone in the eye. It’s a great coward’s form of expressing yourself. That coupled with the fact that what I felt a need to express was inchoate. I didn’t even understand what it was I wanted to express. Sometimes I still don’t.

JK: You’ve also said that in your teens you started to listen to country music, which given the time and place also seems counterintuitive.

NT: Did I say my teens? Maybe I was nineteen or twenty. Yeah, I never listened to country music until the jukebox at the place on Park Avenue and West Side Avenue in Jersey City.

JK: It was right around that time, when you were nineteen, twenty, that you published your first story in the music magazine Fusion. Which means we’re right around the fiftieth anniversary of your start in this racket.

NT: Let’s see…that was 1969, so yeah, I guess so. Fifty years ago.

JK: Then for the next fifteen-plus years you wrote mainly about music. You were at Rolling Stone  and other magazines, and you put out Country, Hellfire and Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n Roll. So How early on were you thinking about branching out? About writing about the mob, or the Vatican, or anything else that interested you?

NT: Before I ever wrote anything. You have to understand, these so-called rock’n’roll magazines provided two great things. First as an outlet for young writers whose phone calls to The New Yorker would not be accepted. And they all, back then before they caught the capitalist disease, offered complete freedom of speech. So yes, in the course of writing about music you could…or actually, forget about writing about music, because nobody even knew anything about music. We were just fucking around.

JK: I remember an early piece you did for Rolling Stone back in 1971. It was a review of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid album, but all it was was a description of a blasphemous Satanic orgy straight out of De Sade.

NT: Yeah, I remember that one.

JK: It was pretty amazing, and even that early, your writing was several steps beyond everything else that was happening at the time. But from an outsider’s perspective, your first big step away from music journalism was actually a huge fucking leap, and a potentially deadly one. So how do you go from Unsung Heroes of Rock ’N Roll to Power on Earth, about Italian financier Michele Sindona?

NT: After Hellfire, someone wanted to pay me a lot of money to write another biography. But I realized there was absolutely no one on the face of the earth whom I found interesting enough to write about other than Jerry Lee Lewis. I’d caught sort of a glimpse of Sindona on television. My friend Judith suggested “Why don’t you write about him?” But how am I gonna get in touch with a guy like that? And she said I should write him a letter.

JK: He was in prison at that point?

NT: Yes, he was in prison the entire time I knew him, until his death. He died before the book was published. I met him in prison here in New York, then they shipped him back to Italy to be imprisoned, and I went over there.

JK: You were dealing with The Vatican, the mob, and the shadowy world of international high finance. Were there moments while you were working on the book when you found yourself thinking, “What the fuck have I gotten myself into?”

NT: Well, yes, because the story was too immense and too complicated to be told.    

JK: Something I’ve always been curious about. Publishing house libel lawyers have been the bane of my existence. Whenever I write non-fiction, they set upon the manuscript like jackals, tearing it apart line-by-line in search of anything that anyone anywhere might conceivably consider suing over. And I wasn’t writing about the likes of Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, or Michele Sindona.

NT: “Conceivably” is the key word in this country, where anyone can sue anyone without punitive repercussions. That’s the key phrase. What these libel lawyers are also doing above all else is protecting their own jobs.    

JK: Were you forced to cut a lot of material for legal reasons?

NT: Yes, including proven, irrefutable facts. So yes I did. And it’s not because it was libelous, but because it was subject to being accused of being libelous. It’s a shame. Some of the things were just outrageous. I once threw a fictive element into a description that involved a black dog. “Well, how do you know there was a black dog there?” I said there probably wasn’t, that it was just creating a mood. “Well, we gotta cut that out.” So what’s offensive about a black dog? It sets a precedent. Misrepresentative facts? Morality? I don’t know. These guys.  

JK: I don’t know if this was the case with you as well, but I found out I could write exactly the same thing, and just as honestly, but if I called it a novel instead of nom-fiction. They didn’t touch a word. Didn’t even want to look at it. As it happens, your first novel, Cut Numbers, came out next. Had that been written before Power on Earth?

NT: Let me think for a moment…Well, the order in which my books were published is the order in which they were written. The only putative exception may be Where Dead Voices Gather, because that was written over a span of years with no intention of it being a book. So yeah, Cut Numbers. What year was that?

JK: I think that was 1988. I love that novel. There’s a 1948 John Garfield picture about the numbers racket, Force of Evil.

NT: Yeah, I’ve seen that.

JK: But of course they had to glamorize it, because it was Hollywood and it was John Garfield.

NT: I like John Garfield. Terrible movies, but a great actor.

JK: What I love about Cut Numbers is that it’s so un-glamorous. It’s not The Godfather. It’s very street-level. And I’ve always had the sense it was very autobiographical.

NT: I’ve never written anything that wasn’t autobiographical in some way, shape or form. The world in which Cut Numbers is set was my auto-biographical world. “Auto,” self and “bio,” life. My auto-biographical world. The world I lived in and the world I knew. It’s a world that no longer exists. Like every other aspect of the world I once knew. Except taxes. Which I found is a really great upside to having no income. I’m serious.

JK: Oh. I know all too well.

NT: I mean, but It comes with “Jeeze, I wish I could afford another case of this tawny port.”

JK: A few years later, after Dino, you released your second novel, Trinities. While Cut Numbers took place on a very small scale. Trinities was epic—the story spans the globe and pulls in the mob, the Vatican, high finance. You crammed an awful lot of material in there. It almost feels like a culmination.

NT: I wanted to capture the whole sweep of that vanishing, dying world. It was written during a dark period of my life, and I was drawn to a beautifully profound but unanswerable question, which had first been voiced by a Chinese philosopher—sounds like a joke but it’s true: “What if what man believes is good, God believes is evil?” Or vice versa. And we can go from there, the whole mythology, the concept of the need for God. To what extend is our idea of evil just a device? We don’t want anybody to fuck our wives. So God says thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife. We don’t want to be killed, so thou shalt not kill. It’s a bunch of “don’t do this, because I don’t want to suffer that.” I don’t want to get robbed. I dunno, what the hell. Yeah, this has something to do with Trinities, and I somehow knew as I wrote Trinities I was saying goodbye to a whole world, not because I was leaving it. It was basically half memory, as opposed to present day reality.

JK: I remember when I first read it, recognizing so many locales and situations and characters. At least from the New York scenes. That was right at the cusp, when all these things began disappearing.

NT: Yes, and now it has to such an extent that I walk past all these locales, and it’s a walk among the ghosts. That was a club, now it’s a Korean laundry. This was another place I used to go, now it’s Tibetan handicrafts.    

JK: I don’t even recognize the Village anymore. I used to work in the Puck Building at Lafayette and Houston. Landmark building, right? It’s since been gutted completely and turned into some kind of high-end fashion store.

NT: Yeah, it’s all dead.

JK: Now, when Trinities was released, I was astonished to see the publisher was marketing it like a mainstream pop thriller. You even got the mass market paperback with the embossed cover treatment. I love the idea of some middle management type on his way to a convention in Scranton picking it up at the airport thinking he was getting something like Robert Ludlum,, and diving headlong into, well, you.

NT: I can explain why all that was. It was volume. It was the same publisher as Dino. They were happy with Dino. Dino was a great success. I think that was 1992, because that was when my father died. This is now, what, 2019? There has not been a single day where that book has not sold. Not that I could buy a bottle of tawny port with it. So whereas with Cut Numbers I was paid a small amount and eagerly accepted it. Eagerly. In fact it’s one of the few times I told the editor, ran into him at a bar, and said all I want is this, and he said “Nah, that’s not enough, we’ll pay you twice that.” Then Dino was double that. And look, I really want to do this book Trinities   and be paid a small fortune for it. They had to say yes. They had to believe this was going to be the next, I dunno. Yeah, mainstream. Most of these things are ancillary and coincidental to the actual writing.

JK: There were a lot of strings dangling at the end of the novel, and I remember reading rumors you were working on a sequel. You don’t seem much the sequel type. So was there any truth to that?

NT: Not that I was aware of. I’m sure that if they’d come back and said, “Well, we pulled it off,” and offered twice that, there would’ve been a sequel. Because I loved that book, so if they were going to offer me more to write more, I would have. I hated saying good bye to that world and the past.

JK: Maybe you’ve noticed this, but the people who read you often tend to make a very sharp distinction between your fiction and your non-fiction, which never made a lot of sense to me. To me they’re a continuum, and any line dividing them is a very porous, fuzzy one. Do you approach them in different ways?

NT: Oh, god. Do I approach them differently? Yes. In a way, I approach the fiction with a sense of unbounded freedom. But parallel to that, that blank page is scarier knowing that there is not a single datum you can place on it that will gain or achieve balance. With non-fiction, I am constrained by truth to a certain extent. That’s also true in fiction. They just use different forms of writing. There are poems that have more cuttingly diligent actuality than most history works. It comes down to wielding words. Tools being appointed with different weights and cutting edges and colors. Words, beautiful words. Without the words, no writing in prose is gonna be worth a damn. Used to be, I get in a cab, and back then cab drivers were from New York, and they’d ask me what I did. Now I don’t think they really know what city they’re in. They know it’s not Bangladesh. But if I told them what I did, it was always, “Oh, I could write a book.”  Yeah, you’re gonna write a book. Your life is interesting. So what’re you gonna write about? Great tippers, great fares? Become a reader first. Read the Greeks sometime. I decided next time a cab driver asks me what I do for a living. I’m gonna tell him I’m a plumber. “Oh, my brother-in-law’s a plumber!”

JK: As varied as your published works are, there are two I’ve always been curious about. Two complete anomalies. The first was the Hall and Oates book, Dangerous Dances, which always struck me—and correct me if I’m wromg—as the result of a whopping check for services rendered. And the other. From thirty years later, is Johnny’s First Cigarette. Which is, what would you call it? A children’s book? A young adult book?  

NT: Right. Of course they’re many years apart. Okay, Hall and Oates, Dangerous Dances. I knew a woman who was what you’d call a book packager. I owed money to the government. Tommy Mottola, who was at the time the manager of Hall and Oates, wanted a Hall and Oates book. She asked me if I wanted to do it, and I said yeah, but it’s gonna cost this much. And Tommy Mottola, in one of the great moments of literary judgment, was like, “How come he costs more than the other people?” She said something very nice about me. He has got on his desk a paperweight that’s a check for a million dollars in lucite. We weren’t talking nearly that much. So I came up with the title Dangerous Dances. I had never heard a Hall and Oates record. So I met them. It was over the course of a summer. So I did that and made the government happy. That’s one book I try not to espouse. But everyone knows I wrote that, it has my name on it. As I wanted, as my ex-agent says.

Now. Johnny’s Last Cigarette, which as I said was many years later. I don’t even think that was ten years ago.

JK: I think that came out in 2014, between Me and the Devil and Under Tiberius.

NT: I get so sick of all this political correctness. I mean, every man. Every woman was once a child. And there are all these good. Beautiful childhood moments and feelings. Which is the greatest step on earth that we lose. It’s not a nefarious book like Kill Your mother—which may not be a bad idea—but sweet. Why do we rob these kids of the dreaminess of the truth? So Johnny’s first Cigarette, Johnny’s First whatever. I was living in Paris at the time when I wrote that.. I knew a woman who was one of my best translators into French. We put the idea together with a publisher I knew in Marseilles and a wonderful artist-illustrator we found and were so excited about.

To tell you the truth I think the idea of legislating feeling is like…How the fuck do you legislate feeling? And forbidden words. It may have been Aristotle who said, when men fear words, times are dark. You and I have spoken about this. Sometimes we don’t even understand what it is about this or that word. It’s like that joke—a guy goes in for a Rorschach test, and the psychologist tells him. “Has anyone ever told you you have a sexually obsessed mind?” And the guy says, “Well, what about you, showing me all these dirty pictures?” What do these words mean? I don’t know. Why is it a crime to call a black man a crocodile? I have always consciously stood against performing any kind of political correctness. And I have written some long letters to people I felt deserved an explanation of my feelings.

JK: Whenever people get outraged because some comedian cracked an “inappropriate” joke, and they say, “How could he say such a thing?” I always respond, “Well, someone has to, right?”

NT: Yeah. So one book came from the government’s desire to have their share of what I’m making. We’re all government employees. The other was, why can’t I write something that’s soft and sweet with a child’s vocabulary that’s not politically correct?  

JK: If Dangerous Dances and Johnny’s First Cigarette were anomalies, I’ve always considered another two of your books companion pieces. Or at least cousins. King of the Jews an Where Dead Voices Gather are both biographies, or maybe anti-biographies, of men about whom very little—or at least very little that’s credible—is known: Arnold Rothstein and Emmett Miller. And that gives you the freedom to run in a thousand directions at once. They’re books made up of detours and parentheticals and digressions, and what we end up with are essentially compact histories of the world with these figures at the center. They strike me as your purest works, and certainly very personal works. More than any of your other books, it’s these two that allow readers to take a peek inside your head. Does that make any sense to you?

NT: Yes, it makes perfect sense. In fact I couldn’t have put it any better myself. This whole myth of what they called the Mafia in the United States—there’s no mafia outside of Sicily. Or called organized crime, was always Italians. The Italians dressed the part, but the Jews made the shirts. It was always an Italian-Jewish consortium. And this Irish mayor wants to play ball? So now it’s Irish. Total equal opportunity. It was basically…Well, Arnold Rothstein was the son of shirt makers. Not only did he control, but he invented what was organized crime in New York. He had the whole political system of New York in his pocket. Emmet Miller was this guy who made these old records that went on to be so influential without his being known. Nobody even knew where or when he was born. The appeal to me was as both an investigator and then to proceed forward with other perspicuities, musings and theories. I never thought of them before as companion works until you mentioned it, but they are.

JK: People have tended to focus on the amount of obsessive research you do. Which is on full display in these books, but what they too often overlook, which is also on full display here, is that you contain a vast storehouse of arcane knowledge. It’s like you’ve fully absorbed everything you’ve ever read, and it just spills out of you. These forgotten histories and unexpected connections.

NT: I’ve always kept very strange notebooks. I still do, except now it’s on the computer. There’s no rhyme or reason to these notebooks, it’s just,”don’t want to forget this one.”

JK: Speaking of research, has your methodology changed in the Internet Age? I’m trying to imagine you working on Under Tiberius and looking up”First Century Judea” on Wikipedia.

NT: The Internet demands master navigation. There are sites which have reproduced great scholarly, as opposed to academic, works. There’s also every lie and untruth brought to you by the Such-and Such Authority of North America. This is what they call themselves. I experienced this within the past week. It was not only complete misinformation, but presented in the shoddiest fashion, such as “Historians agree…” I mean, what historians? I couldn’t find a one of them.

So my methodology. I love Ezra Pound’s phrase, “the luminous detail.” Something you find somewhere or learn somewhere…They don’t even have a card catalog at New York Public Library anymore, let alone books. You want an actual book, they have to bring it in from New Jersey. Who cares anymore? What they care about is who’s in a TV series, and they whip out their Mickey Mouse toys and, “look, there he is!”

JK: I was thinking about this on the way over. You and I both remember a time when if you were looking for a specific record or book or bit of information, you could spend months or years searching, scouring used bookstores an libraries. There was a challenge to it.

NT: It was not just a challenge. It was a whole illuminating process unto itself, because of what you come to by accident. So in looking for one fact or one insight, you would gather an untold amount. That is what it’s about.

JK: Nowadays if I’m looking for, say, a specific edition of a specific book, I take two minutes, go online, and there it is. I hit a button, and it’s mailed to me at my home. Somehow it diminishes the value, as opposed to finally finding something I’d been searching for for years. Nothing has any value anymore.

NT: No, definitely not. When I was living down in Tennessee, all those Sunday drives, guys selling stuff out of their garages. Every once in awhile you hit on something, or find something you didn’t even know existed. Now education on every level, especially on the institutional, but even on a personal level, is diminished. People are getting stupider, and that probably includes myself.

JK: And me too. Now, if I could change course here, you’re a man of many contradictions. Maybe dichotomies is a better term. A streetwise Italian kid who’s a bookworm. A misanthrope who seeks out the company of others. A libertine who is also a highly disciplined, self-educated man of letters. It’s even reflected in your prose—someone who is always swinging between the stars and the gutter. It’s led some people to say there are two Nick Tosches. Is this something you recognize in yourself?

NT: Yes. It’s never been a goal, it’s just…

JK: How you are?

NT: Yeah. I’ve noticed it, and much to my consternation and displeasure and inconvenience, yeah. But there’s no reward in seeking to explain or justify it.

JK: One of the most intriguing and complex of these is the savage heretic who keeps returning to religious themes, the secrets of the Church and the sacred texts. And of course the devil in one guise or another is lurking through much of your work. Again it’s led some people to argue that since you were raised Catholic, this may represent some kind of striving for redemption. You give any credence to that?

NT: No. Absolutely not.

JK: Yeah, it would seem Under Tiberius would’ve put the kibosh on that idea.

NT: I don’t even consider myself having been raised Catholic, in the modern made-for-TV sense of that phrase. I was told to go to church on Sundays and confession on Saturdays, and I usually went to the candy store instead. I was confirmed, I had communion. To me, it was a much deeper, much more experiential passage when I came to the conclusion that there was no Santa Clause than when I came to the conclusion there was no God. I remember emotionally expressing my suspicions about Santa Claus to my mother. Toward the end of his life, I was talking to my father one day, and I said, “By the way, do you believe in God?” And he said no. I said me neither. And that was about the only real religious conversation we ever had. I think religion, without a doubt since its invention—and God was an invention of man—is a huge indefensible evil force in this world. When people believe in a religion which calls for vengeance upon those whose beliefs are different, it’s not a good sign. Not a good sign.          

JK: This is something I’ve been curious about. Two of your novels—In the Hand of Dante and Under Tiberius—are predicated on the idea that you come into possession of manuscripts pilfered from the Vatican library. The library comes up a few other times as well. You write about it in such detail and with an insider’s knowledge. Either I was fooled by your skills as a convincing fiction writer, or you’ve spent your share of time there. And if the latter, how does a heretic like you end up with Vatican credentials?

NT: Okay. You go buy yourself a very beautiful, very important let’s say, leather portfolio with silk ribbon corner stays that keeps the documents there. Then you set about…Well, my friend Jim Merlis’ father-in-law, for instance, won the Nobel Prize in physics right around then. So I went to Jim and said, “Hey Jim, do you suppose you could get your father-in-law to write me a letter of recommendation? I know I never met the man.” Had a tough life, but won the Nobel Prize. Did a beautiful letter for me. I don’t even know that I kept it. You put together five letters that only Jesus Christ could’ve gathered. And he probably couldn’t have because he was unwashed. It was twice as difficult for me, because I had no academic affiliation, not even a college degree. But the Vatican was so nice. There are two libraries. One involves a photo I.D. and the other one doesn’t. They gave me two cards, and they made me a doctor. That’s how you get in. So what do you do once you’re in? They have the greatest retrieval library I’ve ever seen. The people that you meet. One guy was a composer. Wanted to see this exact original musical manuscript because he wanted to make sure of one note that may have changed. So this was all real—I just hallucinated the rest. If you can use a real setting, you’re one step closer to gaining credibility with the person who reads you. I still have my membership cards, though I think they must’ve expired. They were great. You go to a hotel and they ask you to show them photo ID? “Ohhh…”

JK: One of the themes that runs throughout your work is fear. Fear as maybe the most fundamental motivating human emotion.

NT: Any man who thinks he’s a tough guy is either a fool or a liar. Fear is I think one of the fundamental formative elements. And I’m just speaking of myself becoming a writer. Choosing to express yourself with great subtlety in some cases, when what you want to express is so inchoate. But that was a long time ago. I still believed in the great charade. These days I’m just living the lie. But it’s so much better than fear. To convey fear. The more universal the feeling, the easier it is to convey powerful emotions. There was a line in Cut Numbers; “He thought the worst thing a man can think.” Michael Pietsch my editor said, “What is that thing?” And I said “Michael, every person who reads that will have a different idea.” It’s an invocation of the Worst Thing. One woman might read it and think of raping her two-year-old son. Some guy might think of robbing his father. To you or I it might not be that bad a thing, but to that person it’s the Worst Thing.

JK: That’s the magic of reading.

NT: That is the magic of reading. That’s the bottom line. Writing is a two-man job. It takes someone to write it and Someone to read it who’s not yourself.

JK: Exactly. Readers bring what they have to a book, and take away from it what they need, what interpretation  has meaning for them.

NT: It’s also possible to write certain very exact phrases and have them be evocative of nothing but a thirst for an answer that the person who wrote them doesn’t know. Readers never give themselves enough credit. Now all the experiential and soulful depths of all our finite wanderings, roaming imaginations and questions thereof are relegated to a Mickey Mouse toy. That’s what I see, people who interact with these toys instead of another person. I don’t care. I was here for the good times.

JK: There’s another idea that’s come up a few times in various forms and various contexts in your work, where you say, in essence, “once you give up hope, life becomes more pleasant,” which is a wonderful twist on Dante.

NT: It’s true!

JK: I know, and I’m in full agreement with you. Hope, faith, belief, are all great destroyers. But I’m wonderinh, when did you come to that conclusion?

NT: A lot of the things I write or think I do put in that notebook I mentioned, and I usually put the date. That was one where I did not put down the date. I do believe it’s true. People say, “never give up hope.” Why the hell not? If you don’t give up hope, it leads you, at a craps table, betting you’re aunt’s car. Where did hope ever get anybody? It’s terrible.  

JK: Now, there are two quotes which have appeared and reappeared throughout your work, and I think you know which two I’m talking about. The first is from Pound’s Canto CXX: “I have tried to write Paradise// Do not move/ Let the wind speak/ that is paradise.” And the other’s from the Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” As you look at your life and work now, and look back over the last half century, do you think you’re closing in on that point where Pound and Thomas finally come together?

NT: Yes. I never thought of that phrase you choose, “come together,” but yes. They’ve become more and more deeply a part of my consciousness. Yes, every day I pause. And I still hold the 120th Canto to be the final one. It was just one person who insisted no, this is not how he would have ended. Which is why the current modern edition of the Cantos goes two cantos more. There’s this line that is so bad. It’s hilariously bad. The joke of history. The line that Pound was supposed to have written to go beyond that beautiful line was, “Courage, thy name is Olga.” The other of course, the meaning of that line, that line being the one you were referring to, if you bring forth what is within you it will save you, if you do not bring forth it will destroy you. Of a hundred translations from the Coptic, that, to me, is the perfect translation. What is that thing? That’s what everybody wants to know. That’s me. That thing is just the truth of yourself. If you do live in fear, that will destroy you. If I speak the truth, the worst it’s going to do is frighten another. That will save you. That will set you free. Those two things, yes. And there’s another element, if I can add it unsolicited. I’ve noticed this pattern with people such as Pound and people such as Samuel Beckett. The greatest depth, the most majestic wielders of language as a communication form, slowly trail off to silence. Which is what Pound refers to in what I know is the last Canto. Be still. Paradise. Ezra Pound’s own daughter, Mary de Rachewiltz, translated The Cantos into Italian. Her translation had moments when it was an improvement on his phraseology. In Italian, “Non ti muovere” is much better than “be still.” Books, reading, writing, lend themselves to interpretive subtleties which are by no means pointless. What can people get out of an app?

by Jim Knipfel

[anistarrose]

Some Sunny Day - Ch. 1: Prologue (Gravity Falls Same Coin Theory)

Summary:  Time isn’t linear, Stan has a catchy piano tune stuck in his head, and blue flames threaten to consume the peace that the Pines family has found.

Warnings: None for this chapter

Next chapter

AO3

(Based off the Same Coin Theory by @dubsdeedubs and @renmorris, a longtime favorite theory of mine!)

The gryphon they encountered on the rocky Alaskan island was nothing like those that Stanford had met before. The near-omniscience was impressive enough, but given what he knew about gryphon vocal cords, Ford almost thought the fluent English was even more extraordinary. Almost.

“Stanford and Stanley Pines,” it addressed them, not moving its beak at all. “Though you’ve both gone by other names at different times — most notably in Stanley’s case, of course.”

It gently floated to the ground, then folded up its wings and began to groom (preen?) its chest fur.

“I’d appreciate it if you put your weapons away,” it told them. “Though I don’t blame you for that sort of reaction. I am something an outlier among my family.”

It spoke the word family in a way that made Ford suspect it was referring to its entire species. And seeing as this gryphon was the only one they’d met that hadn’t tried to eat them, Ford was inclined to agree with it.

“Of course. We apologize,” Ford told it, holstering his gun. He noticed that the gryphon was a bit smaller than the ones he’d seen before, though not drastically, and its wings were a darker dappled brown instead of the usual beige. Were the biological differences a result of its unique abilities, he wondered, or were those abilities an adaptation made in response to the disadvantages the biological differences caused? Being nothing if not a scientist, he couldn’t help but ask.

“If you don’t mind the question, what is it that makes you you? What is the cause of this outlier status?”

The gryphon tilted its head at him like a dog expecting a treat. Ford supposed it didn’t get very many chances to talk about its talents — or talk to anyone, really — in this barren environment.

“You could probably trace it all back to my precognizance,” it told him. “I can see into many different times, but knowledge of the future was what changed me most.”

Stan narrowed his eyes. “Oh yeah? Give us an example of this future knowledge.”

Ford could relate to Stan’s skepticism. Most people would have believed it without a second thought — the gryphon had addressed them by name, after all — but being raised by a fake psychic tended to make you suspicious of such things.

“Gladly,” the gryphon replied. “First of all: there is a reunion awaiting in your future.”

Aware of the usual cold reading tricks, Stan and Ford stayed silent, careful not to give the gryphon any extra information.

“You’ll return to a familiar situation, but you aren’t trapped in a cycle — there once was a cycle, but you’ve already broken out of it. You will, however, reminisce on past mistakes, and the correction of those mistakes. And you’ll both find answers to questions you didn’t know you had — at least not consciously.”

It paused. “Is that sufficient? I don’t want to go and spoil everything, you know.”

Stan and Ford exchanged a look.

“The ‘reunion’ thing means spendin’ another summer with the kids, I guess?” Stan suggested.

“Probably.” They had indeed been planning to reunite with the kids in Gravity Falls next month. “Returning to a familiar place… that’s Gravity Falls, of course, but I have no idea what cycle we used to be trapped in.”

“Petty arguments and grudges?”

“Fair enough, I suppose. But what about the questions we didn’t know we had?”

“Well, right now we don’t know we have ‘em, duh.”

Ford sighed. The predictions were vague, but the more specific parts seemed plausible. Only the passage of time would allow him to seriously assess their accuracy… though Stan, for his part, had taken the whole thing (relatively) seriously, which meant he probably believed it was real. And given how skilled Stan was at spotting scams, his gut instinct was more than good enough for Ford, even as unscientific as it was.

“That’s sufficient. We believe you,” Ford told the gryphon. “But if you don’t mind, how exactly did you gain this ability? Is it inherent, or acquired?”

The gryphon spread its wings — preparing to take flight, Ford realized. He knew gryphons didn’t like staying in one place for too long, but he’d hoped this particular one would stick around for a bit longer — he just had so many questions…

“Time isn’t linear,” it said, “you of all people should realize that.”

(Was it just Ford’s imagination, or did the gryphon look briefly at Stanley?)

“That means that seeing the future really isn’t all that difficult. A lot of people can do it — at least to some extent — if they’re taught the right way. But if you must know — well, I can’t go spilling all of my secrets, but I will leave you with this: there is a being I am indebted to in many ways, a being that itself sees many things that from your perspective are yet to come.”

For a second, Ford was afraid that that was all they were going to get, that the gryphon would fly away and leave them with only questions and no answers. But then, it added:

“Stanford Pines, I believe you’ve heard of the Axolotl during your travels?”

And with that, it took to the sky and didn’t look back.

Well, that was an answer that just raised more questions in its place, Ford thought, his mind whirling as Stan gave him a concerned look. But I’ll take it. I’ll definitely take it.

“Ford? Earth to Ford?” Stan asked. He may have repeated it a couple times; Ford wasn’t really sure. “I’m guessing you do know something?”

“Yes, something. You could say that,” Ford finally answered. “Let’s get back to the boat and pray we have an Internet connection. There are a lot of things I want look into.”

***

“We’ll meet again…”

Stan was by no means a good singer, but Ford thought he’d gotten used to it over the past eight months. And really, he was used to it — it was just the song that he couldn’t bear to listen to.

“Don’t know where, don’t know when…”

He was trying to ignore it, to not make a big deal out of something he shouldn’t have cared about, not after the better part of a year had passed, but —

“But I know we’ll meet again, some —”

“Could you shut it already?” Ford snapped, slamming his fist onto the rail of the Stan O’ War II with more force than he’d intended and instantly regretting it. Not so much because it hurt his hand (though it was a little painful), but because he worried how Stan might react to it — not well, that was for certain.

But Stan just gave him a look that was more concerned than hurt. “Whoa, Poindexter, I’ve been singin’ for about six seconds. Somethin’ wrong?”

Ford looked down. “I’m sorry, I just… I don’t like that song. Do you think you could sing something else?” He could have elaborated on why that song unnerved him so much, and Stan probably would have understood right away, but Ford had stayed up unhealthily late the past night researching and wasn’t in the mood to talk about Weirdmageddon.

And Stan couldn’t have possibly have believed him that it was that simple — Ford never snapped at him unless he did something remarkably stupid or unintentionally triggered a painful memory, and Stan wasn’t doing anything remotely stupid or risky at the moment — but he didn’t question Ford.

“Meh, my voice is kinda tired anyway.” It was a blatant lie, and the attempt to change the topic that he followed it up with was just as blatant. “So, you figure out anything else about that salamander god?”

Ford accepted the escape route Stan had offered him. “Well, technically I suppose I have, but not nearly as much as I would have liked.”

They’d spent three days sailing south since the gryphon encounter, and despite their Internet connection holding out far better than Ford had ever dreamed of, he’d hadn’t been able to find very many things that he hadn’t already known.

“It manifested itself to countless groups across the multiverse, I’m sure of that, but it seems that the only surviving records in our dimension were created by the Aztecs. And you know I’ve already read nearly everything there is to read about their god Xolotl.”

“Yeah, god of ‘twins and deformities.’ You’ve had that obsession since, like, middle school.” Stan tried not to pronounce the names of the god or the amphibian if he could avoid them. “And you even had one of the pink frilly guys in your lab.”

“I wish we could visit Mexico to conduct more research of our own,” Ford mused. “I have a vague idea for a summoning ritual, but I need more…” He paused as Stan’s words sank in.

“Yeah, too bad the kids will never forgive us if we skip out on them this summer to search for a magical fish lizard,” Stan told him, not realizing anything was wrong. “And I can’t remember what name my all my arrest warrants in Mexico were put out under…”

“Stanley, wait. You said you found an axolotl in my lab?”

Stan blinked. “Yeah, the one in the fish tank. I was afraid I was gonna accidentally kill him or somethin’ after you… ya know, fell through the portal, ‘cause I didn’t know what to feed him or how to clean his tank, but the little guy stuck around almost until you got back. You… you knew about it, right?”

“Almost until I got back?!” Ford asked. “Axolotls can live for fifteen years if they’re cared for well, but twice that?!”

“Yeah, I always wondered if you did some weird spell on it or somethin’. But… you really didn’t know about it?”

“I never kept an axolotl in the Shack,” Ford confirmed. “I honestly would have loved to have one as a pet, but I didn’t have the time to take care of one. They require a specific type of food, a specific temperature range, a specific type of materials in their tank… I can’t imagine any way one could have gotten there by natural means!”

“Would it freak you out more if I told you it just disappeared a couple days after the kids showed up last summer? Literally nothin’ left behind, like it dissolved in the tank or somethin’?”

Ford slammed his hand against his forehead. “Stanley, I can’t believe you had a ghost axolotl in your house for three decades and never brought it up until now.”

“Hey, how am I supposed to know what’s normal for pink salamanders? They could have all lived that long and disappeared like that, and I would have sounded like an idiot for bringing it up!”

Ford shook his head. “It has to all be connected!” For about the seventh time, he regretted not bringing a bulletin board and red string with him on the Stan O’ War II. “Your axolotl, the god Xolotl, the countless references I’ve heard across the multiverse to a benevolent creature that guards against evil and patronizes those with prophetic ability…”

“So… you really think it was the Axolotl in that tank all those years?”

“I think it’s quite probable. But… just what would the Axolotl want with you, Stanley?”

***

Ford had fretted over the Axolotl for several more minutes before they encountered what had to have been some sort of cursed seagull — no normal bird could possibly crap that much, right? — and their attention was very quickly drawn elsewhere.

As they were cleaning up the aftermath of the attack, Ford mentioned something about the Axolotl probably knowing that Stan was destined to defeat Bill, but he quickly abandoned the thought to continue cursing out seagulls in every alien language he knew. The explanation must have at least partially satisfied him, though, since when they went ashore that evening Ford fell asleep almost immediately in the hotel.

“I’d still like to do more research, of course,” he told Stan before completely losing consciousness. “Maybe we could sail south after this summer, visit the region where the Axolotl manifested himself as Xolotl. But I do think it’s likely that he paid you a visit knowing about your eventual role in Cipher’s downfall.”

Stan wasn’t as satisfied, for reasons he couldn’t quite pin down. Rare were the times when Stan was the twin lying awake at night, thinking about the day’s unsolved mysteries, but tonight, for whatever reason, he’d transformed into the resident sleepless conspiracy theorist.

He had a weird gut feeling telling him there was something he was missing — forgetting? — about the Axolotl, and he’d learned to trust his gut over the years — it had saved him so many times he’d lost track. His subconscious apparently knew a hell of a lot more than he did — though that really wasn’t much of an achievement, he figured.

There was a weird sense of urgency to his gut feeling today. Stan wasn’t sure he’d be able to describe it if he’d tried. There was just a hard-to-explain emotion — not really fear, he didn’t think, but definitely not a positive emotion, either — that rose up in his chest whenever he thought of the future: of returning to Gravity Falls, of reuniting with Dipper and Mabel and everyone else, of actually traveling to Mexico with Ford one day to learn more about and maybe even meet the Axolotl.

Big things are coming, he thought. And I can’t stop them.

Then he thought, Come on, Stan, you’re getting as paranoid as Sixer. Next thing you’re going to be keeping a diary all written in code.

So he ignored his gut and let himself fall asleep, a familiar tune about reunions and clouds and sunlight running through his head just as it had been ever since leaving that barren Alaskan island.

L wrog brx wkdw zh’g phhw djdlq Vdlg L glgq’w nqrz zkhuh ru zkhq. Exw qrz wkh vxq lv vklqlqj Vr pdbeh zh’oo uhdolch L’p qrw frplqj edfn RQH GDB — L’yh EHHQ edfn iru rxu zkroh olyhv.

Thanks for reading, feedback is appreciated as always! 

I’m aiming for weekly updates, but I can’t promise anything, especially if I’m struck with inspiration for other unrelated one-shots and the like. I have the whole plot planned out, and completed fic will probably be about 14 total chapters, plus or minus two.