Among our minute group of incipient Dartmouth hipsters, however, a few were claiming already to have ingested the cactus. Eating it straight was supposed to be a one-way ticket to the vomitorium, so they said they’d either ground it into a paste for cookies or whirled it with ice cream and milk into a shake. One, an aspiring poet from West Virginia, had described his experience to me in glowing terms. Yes, he was sick for an hour or two and threw up all over the bathroom, and, yes, there was a period when all he could see were giant beetles coming out of his toilet … but then the visions … ah, the visions. He waved his hand at the transcendent magic of it all and gazed at me as if I were hopelessly square and hopelessly cowardly.
I didn’t know whether to believe him or not, but he certainly had a point about my being scared. When the time came to turn on to our cactus stash, I pretended to eat while nipping tentatively at the skin of one of the buds as if the flesh beneath were imbued with rattlesnake venom, not mescaline. Then, when I thought no one was looking, I stuffed the cactus in my pocket. I waited until others began to report a “buzz” before nodding my concurrence. Yes, I said, those street lights outside our dorm did glow with incredible colors. The group clustered in our room that night was probably suspicious of me, but I just had to live with it. I wasn’t ready for my first hallucinogenic trip and wouldn’t be for some time to come.
Turned on or not, as my years at Dartmouth wore on, I felt increasingly isolated in Hanover, New Hampshire. Many of the more interesting upperclassmen like Geller had left and the world was changing at a rapid clip, the epicenter of the student universe moving west to Berkeley and the Free Speech Movement. By the time I entered the Yale Drama School in fall 1965, I was relieved to be in New Haven. There was a Berkeley girl in my playwriting class—Dyanne Asimow—and I quickly fell in love with her, knowing she would be a good companion in my growing desire to explore this new world and be part of the “My Generation,” as the Who sang. And for a while, she was. But in those days, and in Hollywood especially, staying together wasn’t easy.
3
MOSES WINE IS BORN
Recollecting the morning of September 11, 2001, I sometimes think that my fictional hero, my alter ego, detective Moses Wine, was among the tragic, desperate figures plunging down the façade of the World Trade Center. Even that day, I sensed it. The values and worldview of the left-wing hippie detective—the “stoned Sam Spade” as the Los Angeles Times called him years ago—had been battered practically beyond recognition, as had mine. I tried to explain this in my eighth Moses Wine novel, Director’s Cut, but the book received the least attention and some of the most mediocre reviews of any I had written. Moses Wine’s fans didn’t want a revised Moses—at least a fair percentage of them didn’t.
I owed a lot to Moses, and still do. I had invented him almost on a whim twenty-nine years before that September, sitting in my backyard in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles, sharing a joint with Alan Rinzler. It was like a scene from some Sergeant Pepper rerun—two lost Jewish members of the Beatles, me with a John Lennon beard and long, scraggly (but already prematurely thinning) hair, Alan with an Afro à la Abbie Hoffman or Dylan—giggling from marijuana.
Inside, I wasn’t so happy. Alan, the editor of my first two novels, was rejecting my third. He had just become the head of Straight Arrow Books, the new publishing arm of Rolling Stone, and his “business guy” had said my latest effort—a grim, Simenon-like tale of an anti-Castro Cuban in LA kidnapping the child of the radical lawyer next door on the anniversary of the Bay of Pigs—was not commercial. No doubt his “business guy” was right. I knew it even then. Alan felt guilty, however. We were friends, and he didn’t want to reject me. The other books I’d done for him were successful, relatively, anyway. And the Cuban one might have been better written than the previous two books. But this time he was working for a new publisher. Indeed, he was almost the publisher himself, as long as he stayed in the good graces of Jann Wenner, the young and ambitious founder of Rolling Stone and the real publisher in this instance. He had to think as a businessman, albeit a stoned one—not much of a contradiction in those days.
“Couldn’t you do something more Rolling Stone?” he asked me. If only I could, I thought. At that moment I was pretty close to broke. No Hollywood jobs. No novel. Two little kids and a wife, and no prospects. My father’s warnings about going to medical school as a backup were sounding all too accurate. But then something came out of me in a rush, something I’d never thought of before. “Y’know,” I said, “I’ve been reading a lot of detective novels lately … Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler … maybe I could do a detective for our generation … Left-wing, hippie-ish … smokes hash instead of drinks booze…”
Alan’s eyes lit up. “Wow, that’s great!” he said, “How fast can you do it…? And what do you want to call your dick?” “Moses Wine,” I said, equally impetuously. That was the name of the protagonist in an autobiographical novel I’d been playing with, for lack of anything better to do.
“Perfect,” Alan said. Then he added, “Make him divorced, with kids,” already identifying with the character.
About six weeks later I had written The Big Fix, which became a best-seller. It has been published in a half dozen editions in the U.S. since and in over a dozen languages. It also jump-started my Hollywood career and was made into a movie starring Richard Dreyfuss, for which I did the script. I wrote seven more “Moses Wine” books, which won awards in the U.S. and abroad, and made me friends in many countries.
In other words, it changed my life. Now I was the guy who wrote the radical hippie detective. Sometimes I liked the idea. Sometimes I wished I did something else, something with more apparent gravitas. Why not make films à la Antonioni, perhaps, or write fat, impenetrable novels in the style of Gaddis—or anyone else whose books appeared on the front page of the New York Times Book Review, not on the back pages under “Crime.” But Moses Wine was what I was most identified with for many years, and it wasn’t so bad. I’m not going to go on here about the ever-shifting line between popular and serious fiction, or about whether Edmund Wilson was correct in his attack on the mystery genre in “Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?” It was never an argument that interested me, except in the areas of pride and ego. I didn’t like being in the back of the bus. But intellectually I was and am bored by the question. If Wilson didn’t like mysteries, that’s fine with me. I’ve always preferred Graham Greene to Edmund Wilson anyway.
My strategy for writing The Big Fix, and the Moses Wine novels in general, was a simple one. I just selected a crime I thought relevant, put myself in the role of detective, and used as much of myself as possible, pulling in as many details from my personal life and times as I could. I never really outlined the books, just made them up as I went along, “taught myself the story,” as Gore Vidal described his own process. I didn’t even always know “whodunit” in advance. In first person detective fiction, I told myself, this was a superior technique, since it put the author in the emotional and psychological position of the detective, baffled by the crime and trying to figure it out until the end. It would also add spontaneity. Privately, however, I was embarrassed and insecure about my casual approach until, a few years on, while appearing on a panel for aspiring writers with Tony Hillerman—then considered a master of the genre for his books starring Navajo detective Jim Chee—I was asked the question of questions: “Do you outline your stories or do you make them up as you go along?” On the spot in front of an audience of perhaps two hundred with a tape recorder going, I could not tell a lie. “I make them up as I go along,” I admitted. The unexpected sigh of relief next to me came from the multiple-award-winning Hillerman. He did, too, he