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*****
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| Your Intrepid Writers: Allan Cole & Chris Bunch |
With her pointer, she tapped a large banner above the blackboard, which
read:
LA VISTA
And informed us, "This is where we publish Mira Costa's student newspaper,
La Vista."
The kid in front of me snickered. "No shit," he said in a
stage whisper that I'd come to learn was one of his trademarks.
Miss Fordyce whirled on him. She said, "Chris? Did you have
something you wanted to share with the class?"
The kid named Chris said, "No, Ma'am. I was only expressing my
pleasure that I wasn't in the wrong room. And I almost forgot the name of our
school newspaper. Thanks for setting me straight."
Miss Fordyce paled and her lips, which were already thin, became pencil
lines. For a minute I thought she was going to give the kid a righteous piece
of her mind, but then she sighed, adjusted her stylish (for 1960) cat's eyes
spectacles and returned her attention to the rest of us.
She said, "For your first assignment I want each of you to write a
short biography about yourself, and then-"
The kid named Chris raised a laconic hand to half mast, saying, "You
mean autobiography, don't you Miss Fordyce?"
She gave him a confused look - what the hell?
But before she could speak, the kid named Chris explained, "A
biography about yourself would be an autobiography, wouldn't it, Ma'am?"
Another long sigh. "Yes, Chris," Miss Fordyce said.
From her tone I guessed she'd endured previous encounters with the guy.
Probably last year, when he would have been a Junior. Only Juniors and Seniors
could be in Journalism. I was a senior and the kid had that Don't Mess With Me,
I'm An Upperclassman look, so I figured he was a senior as well.
It was my first day at Mira Costa High School in Manhattan Beach - I'd
transferred in from Hollywood High. The semester before that I'd attended three
different high schools - one in Florida, two in Philadelphia. And before that,
Kubasaki High School in Okinawa.
How all that occurred is another story, and you can read all about it
in my book, Lucky In Cyprus. In brief, I was a young nomad - a CIA brat who'd
spent his life bouncing around the world, leaving everyone he knew behind and
mostly forgotten.
And now I was in sore need of new friends.
Up front, Miss Fordyce was telling everyone that she expected the
biog... mmm... autobiography... at the end of class. She would review them
overnight and in the morning she would announce which of us were to be editors
and which of us were to be mere reporters on "our award-winning student
newspaper - La Vista."
Somebody asked, "How many pages."
Miss Fordyce raised three fingers. "Three," she said.
There were groans. In an outraged tone, somebody said: "Three
pages?!?"
Miss Fordyce remained firm. "At a minimum," she said.
There were more groans - but not, I noticed from the kid named Chris.
Miss Fordyce told us to get started and he just shrugged, got out paper and a
pen and started writing.
I glanced around, noting there were about two dozen of us. All girls,
except for me, the kid named Chris, another kid whose name I'd later learn was
Tom, and another guy whose name escapes me. Among the girls was a petite blond
named Carol Cavanaugh who was destined to be my ex-wife. But that catastrophe
was in the future and so I was of good cheer when I got to writing.
It only took a few minutes. I was a good writer, a fast writer, and
besides I was used to this sort of thing. By the time I hit Mira Costa I'd
attended thirty one schools and had explained myself to so many people so many
times - both formally and informally - that I had the whole thing down pat.
The kid named Chris had finished his assignment as well and fetched a
book from the stack beneath his desk, opened it and became instantly absorbed. Hmm,
I thought. A reader. That's a good sign.
I took further note. He was still in his skinny teenage stage, but from
his long legs I could tell that he was tall. And he had a huge head topped by a
buzz-saw haircut.
I craned to get a better look at what he was reading. From what I could
see it was an odd-looking tome, with weird symbols and illustrations.
I whispered: "What's the book?"
He glanced back, displaying a long, shovel-shaped face and steely blue
eyes. He shrugged and showed me the cover. It was The Encyclopedia Of
Witchcraft. Volume Six, no less.
Damn, I thought. Now this has got to be one interesting guy.
I gave him a thumbs up and a grin. "Name's Cole," I said. He
nodded. "I'm Bunch." Then went back to his book.
The following day, Miss Fordyce announced that she and the editor of
the paper, a girl named Carol Chadwick - whose family owned a nursery across
the street from the school - had made their choices. The other Carol - the one
who was to be my future ex-wife - was named editor of Page One. I forget who
was made editor of Page Two. Chris Bunch was to be editor of Page Three, the
feature page, on which he would soon establish a humor column titled,
Phantasmagoria. It was packed with puns, some obscure, some not and the column
gave Miss Fordyce conniptions each week trying to ferret out any that might contain
a rude double meaning. Without great success, I'm pleased to say.
I was named co-sports editor, along with the kid named Tom, whose last
name I learned was Mead. This decision, no doubt, was made because, besides the
kid whose name I forget, we were the only other males. And in those days only
humans bearing the XY chromosome were deemed suitable for the Sports Beat. The
kid whose name I forget was a genial jock who could barely spell, so that left
him out of the running.
Of that group, three of us would become pros. Me and Chris, plus Tom
Mead who would go on to become a reporter for Copley News. (Chris and I used
him as a war correspondent in our Vietnam novel- A Reckoning For Kings. )
It was at Mira Costa that Chris and I hatched our first conspiracy.
The school was building a new indoor Olympic-sized swimming pool as
well as a new auditorium. Why anyone would construct an indoor pool in Southern
California where it rains maybe once every seven years is anybody's guess. But
Mira Costa was blessed with an enormous amount of vacant land, and in those
days California schools were brimming with money, thanks to Baby Boom parents shelling
out taxes so their little darlings would be decently educated to deal with a
future made uncertain by the Russians beating us into space with the Sputnik.
Wondering how Mira Costa had acquired so much land in a beach community
where property values were sky high, Chris did a little research. When he kept
coming up with Japanese surnames attached to the previous property owners, he
really dug in. Manhattan Beach was an upper middle class, very white, aerospace
community where there was only one black family and a young Japanese American
guy and his wife who ran a restaurant across from the pier. And they were
newcomers.
Chris learned that prior to World War Two there had been many Japanese
families who had lived in the area for years and owned well-established farms
and nurseries. When World War Two broke out, so did mass hysteria and
xenophobia and despite the fact that most of the farmers were native born
Americans, they were rounded up and stuck in concentration camps. Their land
and possessions were seized, or sold for less than a song.
The law that permitted this enormous ripoff was Executive Order 9066 signed
by President Roosevelt and later upheld by the Supreme Court. (More than
120,000 people of Japanese descent were interred. Most were native-born
Americans.)
And guess what, folks? The land our school sat upon and was building
new auditoriums and lavish indoor swimming pools upon had been stolen from
Japanese-American families not many years before.
Chris wrote a series of articles exposing this wrong-doing, and a companion
editorial urging that the families be located and properly reimbursed.
The articles never saw the light of day. No surprise there, right? But,
Chris dug in and fought the censorship, enlisting first my support, then
others, but nothing ever came of it.
Except that Chris ended up on Miss Fordyce's permanent shit list for
causing so much trouble.
Well, what could she do to even the score? She could give him a poor
grade, but other than myself, he was easily the best writer in the class.
Nothing less than an "A" would be acceptable.
She bided her time until the annual Navy Day came round. Navy Day was a
rather clever U.S. Navy PR (meaning Recruiting) program, in which student
journalists spent a day and a night aboard one of the nation's battleships or
aircraft carriers, and then wrote an article about the experience for their
school newspaper. The article would be entered in a contest and the winners in
various categories would win a handsome plaque, or framed scroll - I forget
which. Maybe it was both.
Considering the times, you won't be surprised to learn that only boy
journalists were allowed to participate in the program - just like only boys
could cover sports.
That was when Miss Fordyce struck. She handed official invitations to
me, Tom, the kid whose name I forget - but, not Chris.
"Your classroom attitude leaves something to be desired," she
informed him when he protested. "And so I must withhold your invitation."
In later years, Chris would have told her where to put that attitude
business, but he was too close to graduation to take the risk. It seemed that
nothing could be done about it. The real pity was that Chris was the only one
of us who really gave a damn. Sounded like fun, sure, but not that much fun.
Chris, on the other hand, loved everything military. Read stacks of books about
wars and battles and weapons. Plus, his father had served aboard an aircraft
carrier in WWII. (The same carrier the First President Bush - father of the
Shrub - flew off of during his wartime service, and then crashed into the sea
where he was rescued after a harrowing time afloat. Some of you might think the
rescue was a good thing, others might not.)
"This is totally screwed, Cole," he complained. "If an
editor spikes your story you're supposed to have the balls to kick, right?"
Well, sure. Unfortunately, the First Amendment stops at the gates of
your local school district, and even bitching about it brings down the wrath -
and pettiness - of The Powers That Be.
I tried to plead his case to Miss Fordyce, but she had put her Mean on
and could not be budged. So, I got together with Tom Mead and the other guy and
we joined forces and told her that if Chris couldn't go, none of us would go.
These were the days of Teacher Loyalty Oaths and Commie Scares, so in
the end she had to cave. Otherwise, she'd look unpatriotic.
We went. Had a nifty time. And when we returned we elected Chris to
write the story about our experiences. He filled it with authentic detail, colorful
quotes from officers and enlisted men alike and eventually it was Chris Bunch
who snapped up the Navy Day prize for Best In The State, bringing honor to La
Vista and pissing Miss Fordyce off.
Although Chris' articles about Executive Order 9066 never ran, many
years later he and I sold a story based on that travesty to the late, great Jack
Klugman for ten grand. Which ain't bad for a little high school research.
And thus began a friendship that lasted over three decades; twenty of
which we spent as writing partners. Our first collaboration was a very bad
thriller, which we wrote by mail while he was humping jungle in Vietnam and I
was pounding a typewriter in a newsroom.
The book was kind of a game. I'd write a chapter with a cliff-hanger
ending, then ship it to Chris. Chris would solve the cliff-hanging business,
continue the story, ending his chapter with a cliffhanger. If one guy couldn't
solve the puzzle, he owed the other guy a bottle of scotch. If the guy who set
up the cliff-hanger was stumped himself, he owed two bottles of scotches. I
don't remember how it all came out.
We also collaborated on the world's worst porn novel (Palace Of Strange
Delights, by Rod Cummings ), but gave up midway, bored out of our skulls.
Both of us had dreamed of becoming novelists and screenwriters well
before our ages hit the double digits. And in 1976 we made a pact to team up
and launch a concerted effort to crack the literary walls of both Hollywood and
New York.
We worked 35 hours a week, while holding down stress-ridden full-time
jobs. We got so many rejections you could have papered an executive bathroom at
Universal Studios.
But we persisted.
Finally, in the summer of 1979 we got not one but two breaks.
We sold our first novel, Sten, and our first TV script, Quincy, M.E.
A month later we quit our jobs and never looked back.
What follows are the sometimes frustrating, but always hilarious
adventures - or misadventures - of Bunch & Cole, who became known far and
wide as the fix-it boys.
NEXT: THE BLONDE ALL OVER LADY AND THE LION
*****
Here's where you can buy it worldwide in both paperback and Kindle editions:
United Kingdom ...........................Spain
Also: NOOK BOOK. Plus ALL E-BOOK FLAVORS.
Here's where to get the paperback & Kindle editions worldwide:
Here's what readers say about Lucky In Cyprus:
- "Bravo, Allan! When I finished Lucky In Cyprus I wept." - Julie Mitchell, Hot Springs, Texas
- "Lucky In Cyprus brought back many memories... A wonderful book. So many shadows blown away!" - Freddy & Maureen Smart, Episkopi,Cyprus.
- "... (Reading) Lucky In Cyprus has been a humbling, haunting, sobering and enlightening experience..." - J.A. Locke, Bookloons.com
*****
THE SPYMASTER'S DAUGHTER:
A new novel by Allan and his daughter, Susan
After laboring as a Doctors Without Borders physician in the teaming refugee camps and minefields of South Asia, Dr. Ann Donovan thought she'd seen Hell as close up as you can get. And as a fifth generation CIA brat, she thought she knew all there was to know about corruption and betrayal. But then her father - a legendary spymaster - shows up, with a ten-year-old boy in tow. A brother she never knew existed. Then in a few violent hours, her whole world is shattered, her father killed and she and her kid brother are one the run with hell hounds on their heels. They finally corner her in a clinic in Hawaii and then all the lies and treachery are revealed on one terrible, bloody storm ravaged night.
*****
TALES OF THE BLUE MEANIE
NOW AN AUDIOBOOK!
NOW AN AUDIOBOOK!
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Venice Boardwalk Circa 1969
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In the depths of the Sixties and The Days Of Rage, a young newsman, accompanied by his pregnant wife and orphaned teenage brother, creates a Paradise of sorts in a sprawling Venice Beach community of apartments, populated by students, artists, budding scientists and engineers lifeguards, poets, bikers with a few junkies thrown in for good measure. The inhabitants come to call the place “Pepperland,” after the Beatles movie, “Yellow Submarine.” Threatening this paradise is "The Blue Meanie," a crazy giant of a man so frightening that he eventually even scares himself.
*****
STEN #1: NOW IN SPANISH!
Diaspar Magazine - the best SF magazine in South America - is publishing the first novel in the Sten series in four episodes. Here are the links:
REMEMBER - IT'S FREE!
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