Dirty Ashtrays in the Tiki Garden is a long short story I wrote circa 2000 AD. I was 24 years old, roughly halfway through my twenty-two year drugged-out, drunken, spring break-inspired bender.
I didn't know when I was writing it that I would be telling my future. Or maybe I did. Either way, it turned out to be an overly dramatized but not too far off version of how my life actually played out. I'm 37 and sober now, revisiting the story I wrote in the midst of a riot.
This is the 2nd bound draft copy. It hasn't been professionally edited so it is riddled with mistakes. In general, the story itself is unbearably personal in a completely autobiographically fictitious way.
"How do I get my mitts on a copy?!" you ask. Like a pair of maladjusted and critically endangered animals left behind by the Ark, there are two copies in existence. One copy is forever mine and the second copy is tradable for the small but important price of a round trip plane ticket from Dallas, TX to Peoria, IL (where I will be a resident artist at Prairie Center of the Arts later this year).
The End.
