California Book Awards
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Scott Phillips, Author of The Ice Harvest
Silver Medal Winner for First Work of Fiction, 2001 California Book Awards
Late one summer afternoon in Wichita, Kansas, in the late eighties, I was waiting for a haircut. Around the corner from the barbershop was a neighborhood bar called The Spot, and with twenty minutes or so at my disposal I wandered over for a quick beer.
Inside, a very drunk young man sat on a barstool, leaning on the bar with a cigarette burning in his upraised hand. The barmaid was talking on the phone and pretending not to notice me, and I stood waiting and watching the cigarette migrate slowly toward the young drunk's head. Eventually they met, and whatever noxious substance he had used to gel his hair began to smolder. The acrid odor of the smoke finally caught the attention of the chatty barmaid, who scolded him, confiscated his smokes and without question or hesitation refilled his drink. It was only then that she acknowledged my presence and asked me what I wanted to drink, and as I stood there slugging back my thin, watery glass of Miller High Life I remember thinking I should write it down. Then I went and got my hair cut.
Roughly a decade later I was living in Ventura, California, at loose ends after a job writing something to someone else's specifications. The entire experience had been discouraging and disappointing, equally unsatisfactory to my employers and to me, and my first impulse following it was to try to write something very commercial, something I had attempted before without notable success. It was then that the story about the burning hairdo in The Spot resurfaced.
I had told the story a number of times, and had even made an attempt to write it down once; now, though, it seemed to demand that I set it down and do it justice, and I was afraid if I didn't I would lose it forever. I began by describing The Spot and by giving it another name and history, then the barmaid and the drunk, and decided that it was Christmas Eve of 1979, with a winter storm about to blow.
Finally I was faced with the challenge of naming the observer of these two. I knew he wasn't me, if only because I didn't want to write (or read) about myself. I decided he was a lawyer, and a crooked one, and I named him Charlie Arglist. After the hair is singed and the barmaid, now called Susie Tannenger, serves Charlie a drink, he gives her an envelope to pass along to the proprietor. I didn't know what was in the envelope yet, and I didn't know exactly what Charlie had done or was about to do, but I knew it was all going to come to a head by eight or nine the next morning.
I was writing for my own amusement only, with very little hope it would ever see print. Probably my girlfriend (now my wife) would read it in manuscript, maybe my brother, a few of my friends if I could strong-arm them into it. There's no need here to go into the long series of serendipitous events and strokes of dumb luck that landed the book at Ballantine; suffice to say that very little of it was my doing, and that every single step of the way has been a pleasant surprise for me. The day I started the book, the idea that an institution like The Commonwealth Club would a few years later hand me an award for it, would have struck me as nothing more than a fantasy.
But it's happened, and I suppose it all comes down to my barber running behind schedule one afternoon twelve or fourteen years ago. Just for luck, my second book, almost finished now, also opens with someone trying to get a haircut.
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