Scary Monsters and Super Freaks author

My thing was copy boy to reporter in one year at the Post and then five more years of night police, cops and court, night re-write all the way up, general assignments. After I left the Post in 1984 I did one story for Rolling Stone which is not in this collection, then for the next couple of years I worked at local magazines in Washington. I mean the great lesson of, which sounds boring, but the great lesson of going out on you own to become a freelancer is that my grandfather sold rags and I can too…

Get out there and sell schmatas. You’ve got to put your foot in the door and bug the editors and try and get a job. You start out at a magazine and maybe you have one godfather, which is an editor who likes you. The editor of Rolling Stone since I’d written a story for him made sure that everyone up there had subscriptions to a paper where I had a column. Finally I did this story about a pimp and the editor liked it and asked me to go do a story about a pitbull dog fighter. Long story short, that’s like the freelancer’s wrap. It’s been a bootstrap thing. Creative loafing, alternative weekly to copy boy to reporter to local magazines, I tell people starting out its crawl, walk, run. I’m just feeling like I’ve started to get upright.

They had started to collect stories of mine in other collections where I wasn’t the only contributor.

I think collections are great because people can get a feeling of accomplishment, you read one story at a time and you’re not in the middle of a novel.

Right they’re hard to sell but over the years I’ve always wanted a collection. You try to sort of pump up the jam to the extent that someone would want your collection. So these people kept collecting my stories into other collections and I just said hey what about a collection just for me? So I started out with a John Holmes piece because the movie was coming out and that sort of peaked their interest.

Yeah

It wasn’t purchased in order to be used on the film, but I think that I’m the one who found those women in the beginning and essentially reported the story. I haven’t seen the movie, but I understand it follows my story pretty faithfully.

Well I know, but that’s what happens.

It is bull and you kind of get upset about it but on the other hand I think 8 of the stories in here have sold, some for a grand, but it’s all serendipitous. So when it happens you have to be happy and as a journalist, you go out and you report other people’s stories so it’s really not your story anyway even though you decide how to portray it and you make it into a good story. It’s an art, but you’re also kind of borrowing someone else’s life in order to have something to write about.

Right. Well the Veronica Guerin story in the collection was purchased by Bruckheimer and Disney.

It was purchased for me to be a consultant. There’s sort of a long story to that too, which is sort of obscure. It has to do with synergy and all kind of things.

It’s great for writers. Its like all of us in some way or another were probably smart enough to go into some other really high paying profession but we decided that we really wanted to do this then someone in Hollywood decides to throw you money, which is more than you’ve made in 10 years, for the rights to one thing and somehow I think that’s synergy. That’s the universe being synergistic in a way and giving you your payback for working hard. That’s how I look at it.

Well there’s a whole other genre of stories. This book is in that sort of true crime area which, especially the 80’s up until the early 90’s, was a big thing and I did a lot of that for magazines. At the same time I think that the thing that I kind of specialized in, that other people don’t do, is a sort of anthropological journalism. It started in the old days like at Rolling Stone like I lived with the crack gang and wrote about them. I lived with kids fighting pitbulls in North Philadelphia or in more recent times I’ve done a 92 year old man, a 17 year old boy, it used to be in the old days that it had to be heroin, crack, ice in Hawaii. It had to be hardcore stuff in order to generate the interest in order to do this sort of literary journalism/anthropology. That’s what I like the most. You really have to have a name to have a collection of that. Someday I hope to have that collection out. Right now this one is something you can put your fingers on.

Yeah

Jesse is my man [laughs]. I went to high school with him for like 4 months.

That’s great. The editor is a good guy. It’s been twenty some years of trying to be a writer and finally someone at least kind of understands me. You want that feeling. It’s been a long road [laughs].

There’s some good stuff in GQ now and then. I mean we all came from there like the editor of Esquire and most of us writers all used to be at GQ.

Yeah I dated her for a while, I was like 24 and she was 27 and when you’re 24 that’s a big deal. And this was the first troubled woman I had ever been with.

No I mean really on this scale. It was over my head. I’m 24 years old, I’m a full fledged staff member of the Washington Post, dating this woman who would eventually win the Pulitzer and have to give it back. By the time she wrote the story, we weren’t dating anymore, we were in that twilight period where were perhaps still seeing each other now and then. I was still editing her stuff and all that but I went to two people at the Post at the time it ran. Those two were this big investigative team and I was buddies with them. I said “this story’s going to win the Pulitzer and its going to turn out to be a fake.”

I was racked because in one way I knew it was going to win the Pulitzer because it was such a great perfect story. But on the other hand I had driven by her house the night when she claimed she was out reporting and her car was there. I don’t know if you’ve ever been out with a liar or had a relationship with a liar but even years later you’re finding little factoids in your memory bank and you say “wait a minute that’s not true.” She told me this one guy was impotent for instance, this big reporter guy I’ve known for years.

It was kind of interesting and cathartic to meet her again and to write about it. As it says in the story when this whole thing came to a head I was in Europe and one of the reasons I was there was just to get away from Janet. She was freaking me out, she was attempting suicide and I just fucken went to Europe for the first time. I had never been to Europe and that was my mindset.

It reflected on me because my name was on the edit trail of the story. I was this short little Jewish guy but I could write and I can fucken edit. So I would be helping out this tall, black chick. So that’s how we got involved in the beginning. She kept wanting me to run back and forth to her desk and read the story and I just sent “send it to me” so she sent it to me and in each record of the story. This was the very early days when there was an edit trail and you could see what each person along the line had done to the story so I edited the lead of that story and changed it around. Everybody knew that I’d gone out with her. Bob Woodward grilled me for two days about my involvement in it.

First it was under the guise of a breakfast sp there’s Bob Woodward and he’s starts asking you and then the second day he wanted another session. I told him some of the shit about what life with Janet was like. That’s what I had to do. I had to explain to him how this happened this time and some of that is in the story but

If I had anything to say, I’m sure I would have said it [laughs] I remember sort of complaining a little bit and all that stuff, not being happy. I was innocent and I was a little in over my head, but I was smart enough that I had gone from copyboy to reporter, but still you can’t substitute twenty-four for thirty-four no matter who you are. Life experience only comes from living so it was a big part of life experience and I think its fitting in a way because Janet caused me a lot of heartache.

I’ve had really good success over the years. I was really happy with the advent of email because you can keep in touch with people whereas before a phone call was a big deal. I’m still in touch with a lot of the people I have written about and I think one of the reasons why is because I write the stories for them and you can’t make up anything better than what is true. S o I put in the time and when you put in the time you establish a relationship with people so you’re coming at them honestly and they’re coming to you honestly. It’s this thing that builds and sometimes it’s hard to be friends with them after that because you’re never quite as interested in someone once you’re finished writing. But I remember there was one of my mentors at the Washington Post, Art Harris, who’s now on CNN was one of the first bald guys there. He used to sit at his desk with the phone to his ear, his neck crooked and he’d be typing on his IBM electric doing interviews hour after hour just typing, typing, typing and it was like Art, what are you doing? I was young so I would just watch people especially while I was a copy boy and he would look over at me and see me staring at him. I’m like what are you doing? You’re always here all late at night typing like that, what are doing? “Mike by the time I’m finished writing about someone I know how many pubic hairs they have” [laughs]. That’s the whole anthropology thing you attach yourself to some spirit guide who takes you to this world and you really need them.

Over the years I’ve kind of noticed when I interview somebody I keep my head lower than theirs, subtly. Often times I’m resting my chin lovingly in my hand listening and for that moment of time that I’m with these people no matter who they are I have that interest in them that a lover has. I want to know everything.

When I was at Rolling Stone I was the drug correspondent essentially. I kind of took over where Hunter Thompson left off. They sent me out to do these anthropology stories on all of the latest drugs. So Hunter Thompson got arrested for drug possession it was a whole big deal case back in the day. In fact he had the same lawyer as Kobe [Bryant] now has. Hunter was facing jail time so in the grandiose spirit of Rolling Stone, Hunter Thompson and Jan Wenner they sent me out to Woody Creek to write about the case. Everything was done by faxes so everybody’s faxing back and forth and Jan says to Hunter “I’m sending you Mike Sager, he’s one of my best.” So I arrive at fucken Hunter’s door and there are peacocks shrieking. To make a long story short he’s in the middle of getting prosecuted and his assistant had run off, without an assistant Hunter can’t function, he just needs someone. So I indentured myself to Hunter for the next few weeks. He would go in these 36-hour cycles where he would wake up and I’m going to leave certain details out but you can imagine what fueled that 36-hour cycle. I’m in charge of using this little blue blender to. So I would get there and he’d be writing in his kitchen with a big TV, making salmon croquets, making drink. It was just manic like 36 hours later something would happen like he’d shoot his gun into the ceiling or announce it was time for everyone to leave because hangers-on would come.

One night he said “I just want to be I want to be with a woman” and I said, “hey you wanna get laid? Lets go.” and he said “sometimes you just need a hug.” Then you’d come back after an interval, it was kind of gloomy and the peacocks would be shrieking and you’d wouldn’t know if Hunter would remember you or not [laughs]. But he did, as it turned out he had a column then in one of the San Francisco papers and I helped him do two columns. I really did work as his caretaker and assistant for a couple of his weeks. Then years went by, he was in New York and we intersected again. I was writing about the pope of pot for Rolling Stone and he was in New York for Esquire trying to do. I was staying at the Chelsea hotel and at like 2 in the morning I get this call from a mutual friend, “Hunter lost his ball of hash. Can you help?” Again that was another couple days.

I don’t want to feel like I’m exploiting, but anybody that has a book coming from nowhere, you need someone to say something about you. He remembered that I put in my time for him and asked how he could help.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck