Robert Ward writes:
I published the first novel I ever wrote, Shedding Skin. Of course, I rewrote it for five years, and almost died in the process.
The first two years I worked on a version while living in Haight Ashbury. I wrote it on a portable typewriter that made my fingers bleed. After I had two hundred pages or so I made the fatal mistake of reading them all, and found myself getting sick. What impossible, talentless idiot had invaded my body and spewed forth such titanic garbage?
I was living in a hippie commune at the time, and my girlfriend, Lake Purnell, and my other buddies all climbed up on the roof of the old Victorian house we lived in at the corner of Steiner and Fell. The place was called Goat Hill, and we made like goats easing our way around cornices and abutments until we got on the flat part of the roof.
Then I took the novel and gave everyone pages and after a small ceremony of self debasement ("You have in your hands the worst manuscript ever written, which given the amount of books in the world is no small feat.") we threw the pages into the air and watched them zoom, and dive and sail all over town. Some of them sailed down into the Fillmore, others up towards the Haight. That version of the book really reached it's apogee o' beauty in that moment.
When the Haight and my mind crumbled, I moved back to Baltimore and lived in the black section of town on North Avenue. I started working on the novel full time, and suddenly I found my voice. I was excited, thrilled and terrified that it would leave me as quickly and mysteriously as it had come.
I wrote all day and night, and worked for a madman buddy of mine who had invented an ID Card Business (material which I later used in my comic novel The King of Cards). This was 1968, that terrible year. I was still living in the ghetto when Dr. Martin Luther King was shot. Stunned and horrified I tried to get out among my neighbors to find out how they felt. That is, I went even deeper into the ghetto and tried to interview people on the street for the underground paper I was working for, and helped found, the Baltimore Free Press.
Not surprisingly, my white presence wasn't appreciated, and when I tried to explain to several angry and grieving people that I, Bobby Ward, Boy Revolutionary, was on their side a man stared at me and said, "Thas cause you are a Communist." I tried to explain that this wasn't so, but one of my neighbors cut me off saying, "You must be a Communist cause if you wasn't why the hell would you live down here?"
I decided against explaining that I was trying to get in touch with the "people," for fear he would kill me. (And because suddenly it sounded absurd). A few minutes later, everyone around me started screaming. "You shouldn't a killed Martin. You shouldn't a killed Martin." I was astonished to find that they were addressing myself and a friend who had come along to take photos.
Shortly after that I was hit with a Yoo-Hoo bottle in the back of the head. That's when my buddy and I decided to take off in the direction of Sears, which was being guarded by a ring of National Guardsmen. In the end, I, a humane socialist, had to suffer the indignity of having the hated Baltimore cops help me get to my apartment to save the two items of any value I had in the world, namely my guitar and my four hundred page rough draft of a novel.
Shortly after the cops saved my sorry ass and my book, the entire block was burned down. For the next month or so I lived on a pal's couch and worked on my book at his breakfast table when he went off to work. Finally, I headed down to Arkansas to go to the Writer's Workshop, under the leadership of Bill Harrison and Jim Whitehead.
Down there I handed my massive manuscript to Bill Harrison. Though it was funny and some of it was touching there seemed to be no plot and no way of getting to one. But Bill thought differently and we laid the whole thing out on his study floor and found a way to hook up all my street riffs, insane fantasies and drugged out madness. Thus, finally, Shedding Skin was born.
A year later it was really finished, and my friend Jack Hicks, then the editor of the Carolina Quarterly at UNC published a few chapters of it, along with Don deLillo's first story. I was paid in contributor's copies but it was a huge thrill.
Now comes the best part of this bizarre tale. Somehow a copy of the Carolina Quarterly ended up in the great editor Fran McCullough's office at Harper and Row. But Fran had too many literary magazines to read and decided to clean out her office. She hired a poet she'd published, Dick Gallup, to read through the magazines, and promised him 100 dollars if he could find anything she might want to publish.
The second magazine he picked up was the Carolina Quarterly, and the first thing he read was my chapters of Shedding Skin. They were wild chapters about my adventures in the Haight...One of them was about playing in a game of speed freak football with guys who had just shot up crystal meth. He started laughing and told Fran he'd found something really good. She read it, cracked up and sent me a letter in Ohio, where I was teaching at Miami of Ohio.
Thus I found a publisher, five years after I'd started writing. I'd survived the Haight, the riots in Baltimore and I even survived the grimmest trip of all, living in Ohio. (Hit me with Yoo-Hoo bottles until my brains liquefy but don't make me go back to Ohio.)
It took a year and a half more to publish the book. And twenty five more years to get a paperback sale. Even now it's out of print again...but there are a lot of copies floating around on the Internet, a new way to keep writing alive...My novel is probably the only real novel ever written about the Haight, and a couple of years ago Publisher's Weekly called it the "sine qua non of hippie novels."
Robert Ward is the author of seven acclaimed books, including Red Baker, one of the finest working class novels ever written. He is also a prolific screenwriter, having written and produced for such shows as Hill Street Blues, Miami Vice and others. His most recent piece of fiction is part of the new anthology, The Cocaine Chronicles.
