My father respected little, but he had an almost pathological regard for reading. I quickly learned as a little boy that when dad rolled up loaded for bear, ready to put me in the hurt locker, all I had to do was park my nose in a book to thwart him. He’d stop and watch me reading, get a puzzled look like a zombie suddenly deprived of the scent of brains, and walk away.
As long as I was hiding between the covers of a book, like so many before me and since I discovered all the worlds imprisoned within those words on paper, awaiting only the reader’s eye to free them. Robinson Jeffers and ‘The Mad Scientists Club,’ Harold Lamb and ‘Charlotte’s Web,’ Nietzsche and Jung and Conan and Mark Twain . . .
Although it meant little to me at the time, my aunt Elsie was in with the SF Beats, the Old Spaghetti Factory crowd – she even wound up on the landmark Mural Kaffe Fassett painted in 1960. She hung with Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti and the City Lights people, that whole crew of influential eccentrics.
I remember lots of wild parties with all the big name writers in attendance, drinking bashes with crazy behavior. I was allowed – sometimes encouraged – to get smashed along with these black clad Beats. I was eight years old the first time I got passed out drunk with them.
Dad moved us around a lot, pretty much all over the East Bay, often to ethnic neighborhoods where we were the only whites – I remember seeing my first knifing on A Street in Hayward when I was four or five, and we lived in Oakland off and on. Dad ultimately achieved whitebread living for us: house, lawn, barbecue and the American Dream in Caucasian neighborhoods – but it was a façade; it sure in hell wasn’t Leave It to Beaver.
Ironically my brothers and I were among the first children to take the SAT, and were told that we were geniuses. Despite that encouragement and the opportunities implied, I dropped out of school twice (once for a year) and was put into Special Ed in the belief that I was mentally subnormal – the ‘short bus’ experience was a hilarious interlude as you might imagine. I have a high school diploma but only due to California’s then-policy of ‘social promotion’ – my omnivorous reading has been the only thing that saved me from total ignorance, I’m pretty much self-educated. But perhaps claiming to be self educated is arrogant – after all, when guys like Thucydides and Montaigne contribute to your schooling, you’re in good hands.
Suffice to say my family environment was less than idyllic, and that I grew up with little positive adult supervision. At a tender age I had intimate interactions with people occupying many of the links in the food chain of the Life.
Staying out all night, seeing and experiencing things a kid probably shouldn’t. Hanging with Hell’s Angels and Black Panthers, punk rockers and crooked undercover cops, pimps and thieves. Running the streets of Oakland, Alameda and Berkeley with my other feral little hellion friends – most of whom are dead now, or in prison, or in and out of mental institutions, or ‘whereabouts unknown.’
As for myself, I have been homeless on numerous occasions, and a drug addict who broke the law to support my habit. I have been incarcerated briefly here and abroad (though never in prison myself). Not a cargo of experience recommended for amateurs, the old definition of ‘adventure’ definitely applies: ‘terror in retrospect.'
What can I say? The streets are a dead end, and ‘the Lifed, a~ is a bitch – always has been, always will be.
Books remained a constant throughout however, even at my lowest ebb. When I was reading, people left me alone and that suited me just fine. It was an in-joke amongst the kids in my crowd that if we were prowling around up to no good and passed a bookstore, they’d have to physically restrain me from going inside and browsing the shelves.
Moe Moskowitz of Moe’s Books on Telegraph in Berkeley was one of the few positive adult male mentors I ever had growing up, and his influence saw me through some of my roughest times. If you Google Moe, you’ll discover just how important a figure he was in the history of Berkeley, and of bookselling in general – I’m proud to have known him.
Noting my early love of books, Moe personally taught me as a kid how to spot first editions and works of value, pick them up cheap and sell them to him for a neat little profit. Of course Moe made his own little pile of bank off the deal, but being a ‘book hawk’ for Moe literally fed me more than once during my early years. I miss him, and I wish he could see that I became an author.
‘The Life’ is in my past now, decades gone. I have been with my wife for over 20 years. I have successfully raised my son, and even got to dance at his wedding. My friends and my family are my wealth and I have no complaints.
I am no poster child for the Underbelly – many of my friends survived much worse than I did. Nor am I smugly boasting of any attainment to ‘normalcy,’ of having become a ‘Citizen’ (even though it still feels like a masquerade sometimes).
If anything the schizophrenia of having a foot in both those worlds often makes for awkwardness and difficulty. Still, such a parallax view may help me produce writing of interest to the reader even if synthesizing such disparate experiences is jarring at times for me.
I started writing per se on a fluke – I was chauffeuring my wife to and from college, a creative writing class was open next to hers, and my initial assignment was to write about a personal experience. The first story I ever wrote was ‘Speedy’s Big Moving Day,’ which was ultimately published in Anthony Neil Smith’s Plots With Guns!, anthologized in the Dennis McMillan collection of the same name, and provided the inspiration for my first novel STREET RAISED.
In ‘Moving Day’ I fictionalizing the actual events that transpired when I helped my best friend’s brother-in-law recover all his worldly goods, which were stolen from him by a gang of drug dealers who kicked him out of his own house and took it over to sell from; I recruited a truck full of skinhead friends with baseball bats, and ‘justice’ of a sort was served. Ah, youth!
My creative writing teacher creamed his jeans, and I commenced my first outburst, a series of cathartic writings. I revisited some pretty dark places strip mining my own experience growing up in Oakland and the East Bay.
But in the end, after a lot of bullying and chivvying on the part of friends and family, I opted to try my hand at the novel format. Inspired by those events from my youth, and shoe-horning reality into the template structure of story arc, my little fictions ultimately gelled into a crime novel and STREET RAISED was the result.
We have to be clear here: while based on an actual milieu (Oakland in the 80s, then Murder Capital of the USA) STREET RAISED is fiction. This is not a memoir, nor am I telling ‘tales out of school’ or naming names (don’t k ill me brothers, I swear its not based on YOU) – but it’s also as close to a guided tour of the underbelly of the East Bay as an outsider is ever likely to get. With all these disclaimers, I must still confess that STREET RAISED is very autobiographical.
My wife came up with the idea for the STREET RAISED cover, which was ultimately photographed by my good friend Mark McKenna (www.mmphotographic.com). Another close buddy TJ was the model, dressed in a ratty flannel with a lot of history in its own right.
On the cover, TJ is the one brandishing my beat up old Thompson submachine gun in one hand, and clutching my friend Libby’s kitten in the other. We did the shoot at the graffiti infested Ruins behind our local Mall – a place where bodies are dumped on a semi-regular basis.
When we parked the car, a lot of people drove away fast when I brought the Tommy gun out wrapped in a blanket. As we were doing the shoot, at one point we heard sirens coming closer. Mark had a terrible thought and called the Police Department on his cell.
At the time Mark was head of the photo desk for our local paper – he explained to the police we were doing a publicity shot, and convinced them it was a fake gun. The sirens stopped the instant Mark was done with the call.
Mark ultimately did hundreds of shots, looking for that perfect one. There was a moment when the light was just right, and TJ and the kitten were both looking in the ex
act same direction. I pointed at them, starting to open my mouth – Mark said “Ssssh! You’ll scare the kitty!” and nailed the shot.
When STREET RAISED first came out from Point Blank Press, there was a lot of buzz. It was blurbed by Joe Lansdale, Ken Bruen, Jason Starr and a bunch of other people I really respect. It was featured in magazines; newspapers including a nice review by Eddie Muller in the SF Chronicle; TV & radio interviews; online crime fiction sites – my head was in a whirl, it was an A ticket ride all right. Pompous? Yeah, I’ll admit I might have tended in that direction for a minute or two.
Jess Mowry, Andrew Vachss, James Frey, Richard Ramirez – all of them said they liked it. It had the brilliant Mark McKenna cover that riveted everyone who saw it (and is being reprised for the Kindle re-release). It had a Borders book signing, and was even in submission for the 2006 Edgar for Best First Novel.
But then, due to a perfect storm of glitches, STREET RAISED fell through the cracks. Back to the drawing board, quitting is not an option.
In first writing STREET RAISED, I was writing about a time and place and environment I knew intimately, having grown up there. But after examining the finished product I came to realize I’d totally wasted Oakland and the East Bay as a milieu – I’d failed to bring the novel’s unique, intense background to life for any reader that wasn’t familiar with the locale.
And I realized as well: why not go back and make sure you felt the Bay on every page? Why not immerse the reader in what it was actually like to be running the East Bay streets during one of its most savage evolutions, when crack was king? Five years later, STREET RAISED’s current incarnation is the result, with about a third more material for your enjoyment.
Still, you might ask, why epublishing? Why the Kindle? For me there’s a sense here of striking while the iron is hot, and of dissatisfaction with what currently feels like a traffic jam in the whole brick & mortar book sales system due (in my opinion) both to panic over the current economic meltdown, and the impact of the new technologies on the traditional publishing process.
Bottom line though, STREET RAISED’s latest turn on stage isn’t ‘self publishing’ – it’s a re-release of a book that had a traditional agent, was professionally edited, and was initially printed by a brick & mortar publisher in physical format with an ISBN number, to critical acclaim. Heck, last time I checked signed copies of the first edition of STREET RAISED are going for $80 at Abebooks – it’s a freaking collector’s item!
Make no mistake: I’ve been a reader since I was a little kid, I love books, and as a writer it was and is still my dream to get print books published by a traditional house and sold in physical stores – but given my experience after 15 years of writing and paying my dues, I’d be remiss not to explore these new opportunities.
About The Author
Pearce Hansen is an East Bay native who writes about what he knows: the mean streets of Oakland and her sister cities, the place where he grew up. His work inspired by his experiences on those streets, Pearce has been writing 15 years and published over 80 times including four anthology inclusions; STREET RAISED is the first of his three novels to date. Pearce currently resides up on the Lost Coast behind the Redwood Curtain, empty nesting it with his wife and their spoiled fat Egyptian Mau cat.
GUN SEX, Pearce’s first anthology, is available for the Kindle at http://www.amazon.com/Gun-Sex-ebook/dp/B0054SDX2K/
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Connect with Me Online
Twitter: http://twitter.com/@PearceHansen
Facebook: http://facebook.com/pearce.hansen
Email: [email protected]
Blurbs for Pearce Hansen & STREET RAISED
Ken Bruen (author of London Boulevard, soon to be a major motion picture, Oscar winner William Monahan (screenwriter of The Departed) to write & direct): "One of the best writers I know. Imagine James Ellroy coupled with George R. R. Martin and overseen by Charles Willeford. But Pearce really needs no comparison to any other writer; he’s created his own compelling dark universe that ratchets up noir to an astonishing level.
True noir has finally received the rightful heir to the Dark Kingdom. Hail Pearce Hansen. The heir to Vachss.”
Jason Starr (bestselling author of The Pack): "STREET RAISED is a full-tilt, dead-on descent into the Bay Area underworld, with lovably flawed characters and stunning dialogue. Every page, it seems, has something to marvel at. This is literary crime of the highest order, on par with the work of the great Eddie Bunker. Pearce Hansen is a major new talent."
Joe Lansdale (author of Bubba Ho-Tep starring Bruce Campbell): “STREET RAISED is a scar of a book, but it's a beautifully healed scar. Gutsy, fast-paced, written in an electric style. Recommended.”
Eddie Muller (founder and President of the Film Noir Foundation, in his San Francisco Chronicle review): “A fast, ferocious and often ugly ride through the East Bay's feral underground. Hansen's tale is a curious blend of drug culture minutia and a story line that's more a cranked-up fable than a traditional crime story. In its best passages, STREET RAISED suggests a contemporary version of Jack Black's classic 1926 memoir of itinerant criminal life, You Can’t Win – albeit a heavily armed, hyperviolent update.”
Jennifer Jordan (author of EXPLETIVE DELETED, in her Crimespree Magazine review) http://www.crimespreemag.com/Bookreviews16.pdf: "I damn near did a solo ho-down after reading Pearce Hansen’s STREET RAISED. Our heroes are the bad guys of other novels, and they make this one of the best books of 2006. STREET RAISED is a very well executed, very human and very raw book that really stands out in a year of many mundane books."
Anthony Neil Smith (Editor of Plots with Guns!): "Pearce is a wild man, and demands your attention. Hansen is definitely one of the gonzo crowd and deserves a stage with a loud amplifier and some bright lights."
Todd Anderson at Thug Lit: “There are those who write about the street, and those who write from the street. Mr. Hansen has obviously walked that walk, and speaks the language of the down and out with a heartbreaking, frightening realism. Gutter-low and dirty, the way we like our women.”
K. Robert Einarson (editor of the Spinetingler Magazine Short Story Anthology 2005, in his Spinetingler review): http://www.spinetinglermag.com/streetraised.htm: “Pearce Hansen's bio let's you know this isn't just any work of fiction. The characters, descriptions of life on the street aren't just from his imagination but from real life experience. Hansen's difficult past gives his prose an authentic raw and unfiltered feel. This isn't the San Francisco area from the postcards, but a nasty dark place that doesn't forgive or forget easily.
But don't confuse fact and fiction. This is not autobiographical nor is it a memoir. Instead it is a look into a world that most people look away from. His style is raw and yet refined at the same time.
I suggest that anyone who wants to read a story that might change the way they look at crime fiction to pick up a copy of STREET RAISED.”
Craig Clarke at his Somebody Dies blogspot: http://somebodydies.blogspot.com/2011/05/street-raised-by-pearce-hansen-now-out.html: “I believe the current e-book wave's greatest benefit is in how it allows books and authors that were neglected the first time around, another chance to get noticed. And I can't think of a single novel that deserves this second chance more than Pearce Hansen's STREET RAISED.
The story displays a sure hand that knows what a good story requires: relatable characters, detailed settings, a clearly defined arc, and a satisfying ending. It is in the spaces between, though, where Hansen's experiences and innate knack for storytelling shine through: There is no distancing from these people; we get up close and personal with their ways of life. STREET RAISED is filled with situations that could only be described by one who has seen them happen up close.
He simply brings the rawness, the grit, and the upfront humanity to a genre that has, over time, gotten far too glossy. Hansen's unflinching (and completely engrossing) take will change how you feel about other crime writers. Kudos to Hansen for writing what is witho
ut a doubt the most affecting crime novel of the year.” (STREET RAISED was included on Craig’s Book Club’s list of Ten Best Novels 2006: http://www.oocities.org/craigsbookclub/2006picks.html)
Laird Barron (author of The Imago Sequence and Occultation) at his Domination of Black website: http://imago1.livejournal.com/98100.html: "This novel is a beautiful and horrifying proposition. Hansen’s writing evokes an almost paralyzing aura of authenticity. His depiction of human predatory wildlife is sharp, yet neither glorifies nor condemns its subject. More like he’s simply clicked on the camera and the secret microphone and allows nature to take its course. All told, this novel contains more bloody darkness in one pinky than ten times its weight in typical category horror fare. I’m one jaded fella when it comes to shocks in literature, and I was gratified at how many moments Street Raised raised my hackles or caused me to reread a paragraph because I couldn’t quite accept that I’d seen what I’d seen. Hansen's delivery is nothing like Cormac McCarthy's, but this novel possessed a few visceral and nasty surprises that put it in the same territory of viciousness and macabre grandeur as Blood Meridian.
There is something of Michael Shea’s street beat poetics in Hansen’s rhythmic prose, and maybe a tab or two of whatever psychedelic Cody Goodfellow mixes into his morning joe, and maybe even a slight hint of what it would look like if Wambaugh stopped giving a rat’s ass about anyone else in the entire world, hitched up his suspenders, spit into his cupped palms, and then grabbed an axe and started in with blood in his eye."
Bill Crider (author of the Sheriff Dan Rhodes series, in his Pop Culture blog): http://billcrider.blogspot.com/2006/12/street-raised-pearce-hansen.html: “STREET RAISED is the real deal: the raw, bad-ass, in-your- face story of a lot of people that you might enjoy reading about but that you really don't want to meet. The violence level is high and the pace is fast. You're not likely to run across anything like this for a while, at least not until Hansen publishes another novel. Fasten your seatbelt and check it out.”
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