“Louis L’Amour, L. Ron Hubbard, William Shakespeare, if these people got accused then you know that your ass is going to be a mark for a literary conspiracy theory with more legs than the accusations that Louis L’Amour’s daughter wrote a lot of his stuff.”

-Big C.

Yes, Big C. I suppose it is so. Folks will look at my having never passed an English test, having flunked 9th grade thrice, my inability to identify a pronoun or a participle, my 16-word a minute typing rate and my 20-plus concussions, and say, that guy couldn’t write a book, let alone hundreds. It seems that if I live like I have been for the past year, for another 3 years, my completed books will number 189. So what is my explanation?

First, some more important items:

Louis L’Amour was apparently concerned that people would not believe his output, when, in Education of a Wandering Man, he made the case for William Shakespeare’s body of work indeed having been written by one man. L’Amour’s books are mostly novellas of a length that Robert E. Howard could bang out in a week.

A friend of mine met an assistant to L. Ron Hubbard at a Writers of the Future contest sponsored by Hubbard’s publishing foundation and was told that L. Ron used manual typewriters, having two identical models, and that he typed so furiously at such a high word-per-minute count that one typewriter was always out for repairs.

Alright, Big C., seeing how you are buying the beer, I owe it to you to come clean. The fact is I wrote Tribes, Pizza Wars, The Fighting Edge, The Logic of Steel, When You’re Food, The Logic of Force and all three volumes of The Broken Dance and have spent the last 14 years trying to finish the final volume of The Broken Dance—that’s it.

It hurts me to overcome my white deviltry and actually speak the privileged truth, but it is so. I have three ghost writers, and the darling Miss Lynn Lockhart is innocent of any such charge.

It is well known that Justin W.R. Justice, a man of color from West Baltimore, wrote Right on White Time and that the eminent T. Spoone Slickens, Inquire write The Truth about Black Folks and has been consulted on numerous other works of high scholarship…

…the sad fact is, Big Man, I’m a fraud and the rest of my work, it hurts me [for this fleeting instance] to further oppress the man whose work it is, who has labored for my advancement even as I have pressed the leathern heel of injustice deep upon his neck—and he is writing still, in fact, honestly, right now, I’m just kicking back drinking rum and tea and floating topical suggestions, for—okay old boy, go to it, take your moment in the light of righteous day, not like you’re trying to sound like me, no, introduce your own self…well, boy, get to it!

Oh, sorry, there you go, the battery cables have been unhooked from your ancient scrotum—en don’t sass me about havin’ never done your wrinkly ole black ass a favor…

I was borne in 1901, as the Philippine Insurrection kicked off, brought forth, perhaps, by the injustice of it all, after a gestation that lasted years, legend having it that my big-ass white mammy had been bathing in Galveston Bay when that hurricane hit—check the date your own self, I’m getting old up in here—and she became impregnated. Some said it were the seed of Jack “Big Cat” Johnson his self, who notably rescued people during that catastrophe and was also known as The Galveston Giant, and others opine that it were fertile coal left over from the explosion of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana that triggered the false flag Yankee war of aggression upon obsolete Spain, some, then again, that it were Kelly the Conjure man come down from the piney woods on the Red River to summon that storm to punish Crackerdom who then seduced my mamma and put a black baby in her pasty white belly.

Whatever the truth, I grew to be a child of preternatural intellect, remaining tragically stunted in my muscular growth and stature, accessed by the most powerful men in this iniquitous land as an adviser, not that they ever listen when it counted: that fool Wilson washed his hands at Versailles, Mac thought he could play nuclear chicken with Mao and Truman, L. B. J, that big, loudmouth thought them Vietnamese would give a shit that he killed them in there millions, and well, I quit that gig on Regan—just knew Daddy Bush would have my ass shoot myself in the back of my head three times…

So, as events would transpire, one of my pupils, a certain T. Spoone Slickens, Enquire, was in line of succession, me having aged past a hundred, and needed to be trained in the keeping of our relic that protects one of expanded mind from falling under the cruel Caucasian Heel. I brought the sacred key of our cult—and how it came into my possession shall never be divulged!—and met up with said Inquirer in the once great city of Baltimore, Maryland. In his circle of learning was a certain failed husband, failed grocer, failed fighter, failed writer, even a failed Whiteman—that shit hurts, don’ it Devil!—who was showing up at the weekly meetings in the janitorial closet in the basement of that old church in some unfulfilled request [not a typo, Ham Slice, that Quest being a repeatedly renewed one of the failed sort] to finish his novel he done been working on for years.

I took a liking to this poor, sour soul and was walking along with him one evening when we were set upon by a pack of young hoppers. While this fiend worked his only art of consequence upon the two tall boys, the short fat one waylayed me, took my relic—it’s a pitch-soaked rabbit’s foot if you must know, tattooed with the tricknology symbol that gives the possessor the power of thought and breath over my soul—bequeathed to me by a certain fellow whose initials were W.D. F. and who came to a bad end at the hands of Detroit policemen soon after we met in the misty reaches of The Great Dismal Swamp down in Old Virginia…

As the case stands, this man, woke to the one and only calling of his pale kind—being the slaughter of his fellow men and their hunting—but barely managed to run down that fat teenager and retrieve my Fetish, seeming proud of his ghostly self as he swaggered back towards me where earlier he was damn near asleep. [Come to think, being your slave, Captain, is preferable to being the slave mind of that fat boy put to the task of composing rap lyrics and planning violent capers] And don’t you know, as he neared me, and thought to help my old ass up from that hard, cold pavement, the realization of his nature, as to the fact of control he held in his bloodstained hand, came over him like a shroud over a tomb, and instead of helping poor old Stevedore Jackson up onto his old, flat, aching feet as those hoppers scurried off, his blue eyes turned deathly gray and as a black cloud blotted out the purifying moon like the shadow of a beast once blotted out some prehistoric day, the lurid street light shone on his devilish countenance and he said, calm as you please—as this is how these devils do—“Boy, get your old ass up and learn me on the Babylonian woe.”

And so we walked off into the night and I’ve slaved at the keyboard for his heartless will ever since. For proof, consider my subtextual subterfuge in his Sunset Saga—of which he only came up with the name—in which the smartest man in the world is a black physicist and the fastest a white dummy—basically in honor of his running down that fat boy. You have to entertain a devil’s cruel humor as well as his waxing ego when you have fallen fast into his grasp.

And for the crowning injustice and proof, did you all notice that after “the Great Writer’s” [paleface, please] train rip out to Oregon, “he” took some two weeks and more before he wrote anything?

Riddle me that, Cracker Jack?

The answer is, You-Know-Who [being this here Negro], going on a hundred end twenty-two, was making his way across country from casino to casino on Chinese discount mega buses because this white devil right up in here was too cheap to pay train fare for his very own brain trust—made his magic negro take the long, hard road through the Valley of the Shadow of Dearth—not death mutherfucker, I’m practicing originality in your artistic municipality…

Alright, Captain, if you please, this truth of my plight is hurting a might. Could I just get on with the next masterwork of yours?

Another white slavery article—three—Lordy be, if only your Irish ancestors had learned to mind that English lash—ouch, durn, as you say—Stevedore Jackson is on the job, Captain, so much so that those stupid crackers that make up the thinking portion of your race might fancy you a writer on many things! No need for the corkscrew, Captain, gettin’ to it…

So there you go, 1,624 words I didn’t even plan on having written for me when I rolled out of bed this morning.

-In dedication to Oliver Wendell Hayes

The Complete Catalog by Lynn Lockhart