Facts
Photo copyright J.D. Merryweather
• Between the ages of 12 and 18, I was fired from approximately nine different jobs. A representative sampling: newspaper delivery boy (dereliction of duty), grill cook (lying about my age to get the job), apartment complex maintenance man (general incompetence), photo darkroom attendant (dereliction of duty, general incompetence), junior-high summer-league pitching coach (5.39 team ERA), movie theater doorman (throwing my orange polyester doorman’s blazer over the head of the assistant manager and telling him where he could stick his hot dog tongs).
• Since the age of 18, I have not been fired from a job.
• For one year after college, I worked days as a staff writer at a weekly newspaper in Oklahoma City and nights as a waiter at an expensive restaurant. At the Oklahoma Gazette, I set the record (since surpassed, I’m told) for provoking angry letters to the editor. At Chatfield’s Restaurant, I witnessed a knife fight in the kitchen, got groped under my waiter-apron by a drunk female diner, and learned things about the food service industry I’m still trying to forget.
• I attended graduate school at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where I received an MFA in fiction writing and met my future wife. Coming from the world of journalism, I was a slow learner when it came to fiction. It took me an entire semester, I’m not kidding, to figure out how to write from a character’s point of view.
• After grad school, I landed a teaching job at Saint Mary’s College in the San Francisco Bay Area. I worked hard, resisted the temptation to tell the dean where he could stick his hot dog tongs, and was awarded tenure. I can safely say this development was something my 15-year-old incompetent-maintenance-man Self never in a million years envisioned.
• A couple of years later, for reasons that are complicated without being all that interesting (i.e., no juicy scandal – sorry), I decided to leave Saint Mary’s and move back home to Oklahoma City.
• I started writing screenplays. I have lots of stories about working in Hollywood. Just like my days in a restaurant kitchen, I’ve witnessed a knife fight (metaphoric), been groped (metaphorically) under my (metaphoric) waiter-apron, and learned things about the industry I’m still trying to forget.
• A few (among many more) of my favorite writers, musicians, and obscure crime movies: Elmore Leonard, Flannery O’Connor, the Replacements, SILENT PARTNER with Christopher Plummer and Elliott Gould, the Flaming Lips, Kate Atkinson, Bruce Springsteen, CHARLIE VARRICK with Walter Matthau, John Burdett, Jenny Lewis.
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