 Okay, good evening, everyone, and thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute. I'm Laura Sheffert, Director of Events, and we're very pleased to welcome you to our program with Barry Gifford for his new book, The Cuban Club, and he's in conversation with Tom Barbash. Of course, we're very pleased to be co-sponsoring with Litquake. We have a whole week of events, and we've been partnering with Litquake from the beginning, so it's an honor to have our authors here tonight and also to have you joining us for this evening's program. For those of you who are new to the Mechanics Institute, I'd like to invite you to come back on Wednesday at noon and take a free tour of our incredible Mechanics Institute library, which is on the second and third floors. We have the International Chest Club, which is right down the hallway, and also to get a little taste of our history and our background since the Mechanics Institute was founded in 1854, and we've been going strong ever since. We offer author programs. We have a cinema lit film series on Friday nights. We have writer's groups, the Proust Club, the Chest Club is having ongoing tournaments and classes, and everything is happening seven days a week, 365 days a year, so we hope that you'll take the tour, you'll become a member, and become part of this very vital literary community here in downtown San Francisco. So once again, it's a great pleasure to have Barry back. He's been here for many of his books, and now I'd like to introduce Tamara Walters from Litquake to introduce our program. Hi, welcome. I'm happy to have everyone here, and for those of you that may not be familiar with Litquake, because perhaps you're a Mechanics subscriber or member, and you just came here because the authors sounded interesting to you tonight. Litquake is an annual literary event. We're right in the middle of it. It runs for about nine to ten days. So after all the events tonight, there are still two more events that are in all of the catalogs that you can pick up when you leave, or if you have one in your hands now. And then it ends on Saturday night for our world-famous Litcrawl on Valencia Street. So it's going to be hundreds of readings, over 90 different venues, three different time slots. And if you've never done it, please come out. You will have, I guarantee you, you'll have a rip-roar in wonderful time. And Mechanics Institute is a non-profit agency, as well as Litquake. You know that most of our events are either free or a minimal charge. And unfortunately, we've lost some of our funding this year with the disintegration of the National Endowments for the Art. That was a big one that we used to get every year. We are, we're still vital, and we're here, and we're happy to be here. But if you care to make a donation, there is a donation bucket at the door. No pressure. But if you feel so moved to donate, we would gladly take your donations. If you go to Litcrawl, though, I'm starting out, I guarantee you're going to get help at every event that you go to. We also are selling our great posters this year. They're $8. They're on the back table. So see one of us at the end of the event if you have questions about Litcrawl. And please pick up a program so you can see what else we're offering. And it goes over all of the events on Saturday night. Tom Barbash is the author of the recent story collection, Stay Up With Me, as well as the award-winning novel, The Last Good Chance, and the nonfiction book, On Top of the World, Cantor Fitzgerald, Howard Lutnick, and 911, a story of loss and renewal, which was a New York Times bestseller. Barry Gifford is the author of more than 40 works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into 28 languages. His most recent prose works are The Up Down Writers, Sad Stories of the Death of Kings, Imagining Paradise, New and Selected Poems, The Roy Stories, and Landscape with Traveler. Gifford's novel, Wild at Heart, the story of Sailor and Lula, was adapted by director David Lynch as a film, which won the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. His other films include Lost Highway, City of Ghosts, and You Can't Win. Of Gifford, Jonathan Lethem says he invented his own American vernacular, Lean Faulkner by way of B-movie, Film Noir, porn paperbacks, and Sun Records Rockabilly. And according to Elmore Leonard, Gifford cuts right through the heart. Tonight he discusses his new short fiction collection, The Cuban Club, with Tom Barbash. Please welcome Tom and Barry. Thanks. Well, thank you so much, and I love this place, The Mechanic Scenes, too. I have a bunch of my students, and some of them are new to San Francisco, so you should definitely make this a place that you see a lot. And also, Lickwick is amazing, and if you haven't been out on the pub crawl night, it's sort of spring break in the fall for writers, or it's the night in which the coolest thing you can be in a tech community is actually a writer, is a literary writer. It's great fun, and it's really vibrant, and I'm so happy to be a part of it, and especially happy to be here tonight to be talking to such a wonderful writer, and I guess we'll just get right into it. But I love your new collection, and I love, you know, we're always reading some of these with my class tonight, in fact, and they're extraordinary. And these two to three pages, I guess as long as it seems to be around four very short stories, but you just get into things so quickly, and I'm wondering, these are part of the Roy stories, and you've written a lot of books, or a few books about this character, how it seems, how you can access that time, I know a little bit about your history, and growing up similar to Roy, but how it seems so much of the child's perspective, so much of his, it does not feel like the adult has put a spin on it, it's so full of what he cannot grasp, what he grasps, there's all sorts of situations in which adults, his father's missteps and parents' missteps collide with him, and he's not quite sure how to make sense of it, but the story makes sense of it, but it just retains that child sensibility, and I don't know how you do it, it's a very difficult thing to do, so can you talk about how that character continues to be fresh for you? Well, first of all, I want to thank Laura Shepard, who is the director here, the literary program, or whatever she calls herself, but I appeared here once before, and she's a lovely woman, and thank you for having me back at the Mechanics Institute. And yeah, if you haven't gone on a tour, this is a great building, man, and they have a chess room, and a wonderful library, and where there are lots of old guys sleeping, and it's really part of that old San Francisco, and it reminds me, I'm sorry that I'm departing from this, talking about myself, but I was with my friend Vinnie, and I'm always like to come down here, and before I'd come over here, or somewhere, I always go in the house of shields, and across the street, which is maybe now the oldest bar left in San Francisco, and I remember when I was first with William Saroyan, and Saroyan was a member here back in the 30s and 40s, and I'm sure some of you know who William Saroyan was, but I remember for the first time that Bill and I met, and this is probably late 70s, I guess, and he said, well, let's meet at the Palace Hotel in the Arboretum room. He says, you know, because really, it reminds me, it's all that's left of the old San Francisco, and the food's not very good, but it's the most beautiful room in the city. So anyway, Saroyan stories. And we can backtrack to San Francisco. It's an odd thing because the Roy stories to me really is a history of a time and place which no longer exists. So when I started writing the Roy stories, now there's a big volume called the Roy stories, and the Cuban club is really a sequel, more or less, an extension, but Roy in a little mature, more mature state, and it covers basically the very late 1940s, but the 1950s through the early 60s, mostly in Chicago, but also in Florida, Miami, and Key West, Florida, and Havana, Cuba, and New Orleans, where I grew up in all these places. I was born in Chicago, and now there's a guy doing a documentary called Roy's World, which is all done archivally with photographs, film, all of that kind of thing, and various people reading the Roy stories, Willem Dafoe, Matt Dillon, Lily Taylor, various others, and myself. So because he wanted to do a film about the Roy stories, and I said, as long as I don't have to be in it, then that's fine, that, you know, it's just, just evocative. No, I'm not going to appear, I'm not going to appear in it. I've done others, but anyway, I said, I just want this to be about Roy. And so yes, they are very short stories for the most part, but, you know, I debated early on whether to call them chapters, although there's an elliptical structure, so it's not chronological in terms of age, but it takes this childhood history and history of a place from the age of about 5 to 17, and then it ends. And I wanted to document this time, and to everybody, their own childhood, because I'm not an autobiographical writer per se. There are certainly elements of autobiography in here, which are jumping off places, let's say, for the stories, and there are real incidents that take place, but it's fiction, you know, fiction means that you made it up. And I didn't want any constraints, so I didn't want to write a nonfiction book where, you know, I'm doing a history of this place. Better, I'm a fiction writer, so better to be free, like that. And that's really, that's really what it is. But so much of it, I was noticing, are the sort of little moments that Roy witnesses, and he keeps asking questions. I was thinking of your past as a journalist asking questions, but he's asking the adults questions, and they're giving him sort of half answers. They're not entirely explaining things. Well, I've always been interested in what people mean behind the words they're using. And as a child, I was always interested in that way, and you know, you're always going to get some kind of double talk. And growing up in the situation that I did, I give you a brief history, some of which is reflected in the Roy stories in the Cuban Club, is I was born in Chicago. My mother was the University of Texas Beauty Queen in 1944. And she married my father, and she had then left the University of Texas, and she went to New York, became a model, went to Chicago, was modeling for coats in the merchandise market for Joseph Kennedy. And she met my dad, who had a liquor store and pharmacy on the corner of Chicago and Rush Street, which was sort of the center of town. That was it. Everything happened there. But he was involved in organized crime. I actually wrote a book about this called The Phantom Father, some years ago, back in the 90s. But in any event, he was almost 20 years older than my mother. And she was 22, I think, when she married him. 22 or 21. Anyway, so that was the world that I came up in, sort of hanging around, you know, in that club district, the club Alabama's next door and all of that. And it was a 24 hour kind of life. So it was very exciting, you know, I mean, and inspiring in all of this. But we, I was born in a hotel in the Seneca, and we lived it, which is where Blacksley Segal's mistress lived. I mean, all these guys, Cindy Corsac, all these guys, if any of you know about these people. In any case, but we lived in hotels. And my mother was often very ill. And she had lupus, which they didn't know about back then. There was no lupus foundation then. So, you know, she liked to be in tropical places, which is why we lived in Key West and we lived in Havana and, you know, like that. And we lived in hotels everywhere that we were. And this was the greatest possible university for a writer. I never went to university per se. But, you know, the thing is that already I was just listening to people's stories, people who are from all over the world. And I'd meet them, you know, in the lobbies or around a swimming pool or just wherever on the beach, that kind of thing. And my playmates were basically, you know, these Cuban street kids. And that's where I got my Spanish from, you know, which is pretty low rent, disgraceful Spanish, but they don't like me to speak it when I'm in Spain. And so it was that kind of life. And I was left on my own a great deal. Now, did you, there's a moment in Chicago, Illinois, that story we were talking about before, and the kids in the cab and the cab driver asked him, and he says just that. He said, yeah, I grew up in a hotel and we go back and forth between Havana and Key West. And it seems to him not unusual when he says it is just right. I mean, it's familiar to you. Even if you just grew up and you have nothing but the block you're on, you know, it doesn't matter. And you build a whole universe out of that. I was fortunate because I was aware of how other people lived. Like I say, so I'm listening to their stories. And if they were, you know, Bible salesman from Nashville, or wherever it was, these were whole worlds, you know, I was being introduced to in that way. And so then fiction came into a very early time. And you certainly understand this because I remember one time I was sitting and talking to these people and my mother came in and a woman and maybe her daughter or son or something. And the woman says to my mind, she's my mother. And the woman says, oh, your mother was, you know, your son was just telling us about, you know, your ranch in Wyoming and your dog and all that kind of thing. Well, I'd never been in Wyoming and I didn't have a dog. And so, you know, but my mother was cool, you know, my mother said, oh, yes, you know, she was a good liar to remember what Bruce said, literature is the finest kind of line. So I was able, you know, in some way to turn this into the kind of fiction where I'm telling a story. But yeah, there's there's something more, you know, going on there, you know, in Citizen Kane. And I think probably a lot of you have seen Orson Wilson film, famous film of Citizen Kane. And Wells said the greatest moment for him in the film of Citizen Kane is when Everett Sloan is the old man, Bernstein, who they talked to who was with him from the beginning with the newspaper and all the rest of his life and everything like that. And Bernstein is being interviewed about the life of Charles Foster Kane. And he says, you know, he says in 1896, I was in a ferry going across the river here in New York. And I saw a girl on the shore in a white dress. And he says, not a day in my life has gone by that I don't think of that girl. And it's the moments what Tom was talking about. That's the kickoff for any story. That's the kickoff for for anything that I'm right. I never know where I'm going with the story. I never know what the end of it's going to be. It's a mystery to me, but a good mystery because I want to find out with novels, certainly. You know, it's and that's really where it comes from. It comes from just those moments. And that's what I really wanted to capture, mostly in the Roy stories. It's funny because I wrote this whole series of Sailor and Lula novels, which now may be a TV series. I just cut that from my life was telling Tom, because Universal wants to do this. So we'll see. But the thing, the thing is that with something like Wild at Heart and all that, which is much flashier. It's a totally different thing. It's written out of the southern side of my life. But the Roy stories are all very different. And the temperature is different. And they sell about half the number of copies of Sailor and Lula novels do, but which is fine with me. But this is what I really wanted to capture. And it's the most important books to me personally. They're remarkable. And I think when you read them, it's this kind of distillation. And you arrive at those moments that that there's something that sticks there that he's probably going to think about. And it's going to mean something entirely different. In fact, one story, you do this flash forward that's great. And Roy's son actually asks him yeah, it's early on in the collection and says something. And he wants to know about because it's about the father said, did I think it's like, did you get your cheek kiss? Doesn't it? There's like some moment. Do you know where the show girl? Right, right, right. And that's the question that Roy's son wants to know. It's sort of like, and I read it to be, do you have that kind of quality of your father, that kind of mystery and charisma or something? The other thing that was sort of the mystery to me, because my parents were divorced when I was five, and he died when I was 12. And so I did spend time with him, of course, and I was interested in, you know, in that world. But I didn't continue in that world, because he was gone. My mother was married five times. And had a totally different kind of life. I mean, I supported her the last 35 years of her life, you know, but she had about 1012 years in there, where which was pretty exciting, you know, and she'd be in Rio, or she'd be in the Dominican Republic, or she, you know, be somewhere, Mexico, wherever it happened to be. So and also living in hotels and traveling mostly with my mother. Again, I was alone alone. So I'm left to my own devices. And that was great to me. I've always been comfortable being alone and being left to my own devices, you know, I mean, and what a better what better training than for a writer where you're sitting alone in a room for the rest of your life mostly, which is why I like doing movies. Because every once in a while, you get out there and you got 100 people with you. And you have a social life in that sense. Yeah, we all crave collaboration. So yeah, and it's fun. And that's good to do. But I'll tell you, at the end of that, I'm always ready to go back into the cave. Yeah. Well, I would say that it must never feel like you're entirely alone. Because I mean, you seem to you're one of the best writers of dialogue, as far as I'm concerned around and the way you sort of channel voices. I mean, I was wondering, speaking of that, if you could talk about this gem of a book, the writer's book, and this, you know, I was the Hemingway that you capture, I remember reading Lillian Ross, I think had a profile profile of Hemingway. And I had a sense of him there. And that same vivid, you know, I don't know how you capture, whether it's Hemingway or Melville, or Camus, or, you know, I mean, just how, how did that come about? Tom's talking about a book called Writers, which are a series of what 14 play little plays short plays, all involving writers. And I've never written about writing ever. And I've never read about it either. So But specific moments like Camus is in a hotel. Yeah, so it's Camus and Melville. And there is one Hemingway, the Jane bowls one is maybe my favorite, and Emily Dickinson, Beckett and Joyce. And so it's, again, you're right, it's moments. It's just, you know, their plays, and they just capture this person, I hope, successfully through the moments like Camus in a hotel room in New York with a prostitute. And her ex pimp is going to be executed at midnight. Yeah. And so it's there. You need that. And I did drawings of all of them. That's it. Anyway, I don't know that they have copies here. But but anyway, it's a different kind of thing entirely. So this was my way of doing biography. But of course, I've made up all of the stories. You know, a couple of them are based on real incidents like Hemingway with the members of the Brooklyn Dodgers who used to train in Havana in the 40s. And, you know, sort of obscure moments of these people, you know, and then, of course, imaginary situations, you know, Jane Bowles, Paul Bowles' wife, who was a far superior writer to Paul. And, you know, she's having a martini, you know, at a hotel bar in New York. And, you know, it just, it's depends. So I just got a kick out of it. And then people liked them. And the publishers said, Well, why don't you do drawings of the people because I draw. And they did a lovely little book. And it's been produced a couple of times, the last time in New York, at the new school. And then Laura Shepard wants to produce a version of it here, which would be fun. Something else, you know, but that's the theater. You don't get paid much. And I did do a play Wyoming at the Magic Theater. When was that like 2000 year 2000, I think it was, which were really Roy stories. It's a section of the bigger book called Roy stories about Roy and his mother driving. It's very hermetic in this way. They're in a car. Everything takes place while they're driving in a car in the entire, it's a novel, actually. And it's all told in dialogue. All the description, description comes through their dialogue. And I always thought, if I could get to that place of understanding in terms of writing, where I could just reflect everything through the dialogue, that would be perfect or almost perfect. So that's what I did. I don't know if it's perfect. It's close to it. It's almost perfect. As somebody once said to me, well, you never want to have anything to be perfect, because better to be almost perfect, because then you still have something to go for and to look forward to in that sense. And that's really held true. So I wanted to ask you, you grew up in hotels. You told us a little bit about your parents. And then from what I've read, you go to Missouri on an athletic scholarship, but I'm not on what in what sport did you play? Baseball and football. Wow. What position? Well, I was a shortstop in third baseman and running back. And what was your baseball team that you rooted for? Well, that I rooted for? Yeah. Cubs. I grew up near Wrigley Field. Of course. By the way, did the Cubs win the game today? They lost? They were down one to nothing when I left. What? Sorry, this, this could throw everything up. All right, so they lost about five, nothing. Okay, so they'll play tomorrow. Anyway, but you know, we don't have to get into the Cubs. But you know, that was a local ballpark. And nobody came. You know, at the most, there were a couple thousand people there. If that. And so that was it. But anyway, to answer the question, yes, I mean, through school, you know, I went to school very erratically. When I was younger, I was often away. So I didn't go to school at all. So I didn't like the discipline, you know, that was forced upon you in the school. And so I spent most of my time looking out the window. And the only thing that really kept me sane was sports. I was good at them. And I really enjoyed it. And so yeah, so then I had an athletic scholarship to University of Missouri, basically to play baseball, and they had played for the National Championship the year before. And I knew the South, of course, because I'd lived in the South. And in those days, Columbia, Missouri was very much the South. You know, they flew the Confederate flag and all that stuff. So I was very at ease. I wasn't black. So the thing in those days, I wasn't black. So in any case, that's what I did. So I was there for a few months. And then I went to Europe when I was 18. I was 17. To England, right? And you were a musician. And I went to Europe a few months later. I just didn't want to be in school anymore. And I was never subject to the draft really, because I joined the Air Force Reserve at that time when I was 17. And without going into that whole story, so I never had a student deferment. So I went to Europe and was living there on and off for the next several years. And were you you were a musician? I was. And you met like from seems like you met Jimi Hendrix, you met who else you met? You met all these and you were a journalist for Rolling Stone at some point. I was one of the original writers for Rolling Stone when I came out here, beginning of 68. But yeah, but in London in those days, which is where I went first, I was between London and Paris. But it was very small. It was like this, you know, everybody knew everybody was easy to meet people, everybody played together. And it wasn't a big deal. And nobody was making a lot of money. You know, it wasn't that kind of thing. And in a way, it was very generous world, you know, and everybody was on drugs. And some got through it and some didn't. And so yeah, so I had a band in London in mid 60s. But I made my money working as a merchant seaman, I would take off and, you know, work as an ordinary seaman on a ship, make my money, jump the ship, come back to London or Paris or whatever it was. And I shipped out of Rotterdam then. So I did that for a couple of years off and on. But it was a way to make money without having a job that you had to be tied to in that way. And school was not for me. So that wasn't in my future. So that's that's that story. And what were you were you writing? You're writing songs? Also was the end of my athletic career. Well, I had a couple of questions is wondering what you were writing then and also maybe even what some of your stories were rolling stone where what sort of things have you covered? Well, what I was writing really was song lyrics. And then I began writing poetry, which came from the song lyrics. And when I was 20, I won this poetry prize in London. And my first book was published there. But I realized, looking at that book, that in fact, I didn't know what the second act was. I really didn't know anything about poetry. The the editor or that who chose this was an editor of a magazine, literary, amazing cobalt listener, which was very famous in those days. In any case, but I really didn't know where it came from. So I resolved to find out where it did come from. And went to people who knew people who had been students or were students or people who could say, well, read as your pound and let pound be your teacher, read the spirit of romance and the guide to culture and the ABC of reading and so forth and so on. And that's what I started doing and going to the references. I always like to read but where I really develop my sense of narrative was from old movies on TV. And being left alone, I'd stay up all night and watch all these old movies, whether in the hotel room in Miami or Chicago or, you know, wherever I was, New Orleans, and I'd be up all night watching any of them stand out old films, many I wrote a book about a couple of books about the devil thumbs ride was the first one. And then those essays got reprinted with more called out of the past, which is still in print. I just got a check for $54 residuals. But, you know, 25 or 30 years later, that's good, you know, in any event, but that's really where I learned how to tell a story. You know, it didn't come from somebody teaching me how to do this and then reading whomever I want to reading whether my models were Conrad and Jack London and all, and Melville. But then I realized that the people with whom I had the most affinity were women writers and gay writers. Now, I never quite understood why at at the time. But there was something about the sensibility once I understood who these people were. Regardless of the context that there was a sensibility that was really important to me and moved me. And so I wanted to know more about that because I thought, you know, being the kind of kid that I was and going to see or doing these kinds of jobs and all that sort of thing was. Yeah, it's in that London Conrad, Melville Molder, whatever you were, but that was limited to me. Well, isn't that a lot have to do with what a powerful presence your mother was in your imagination? And she was she told you these stories. He's one of the first person who's telling you imaginary stories was your mom. So well, my mother really didn't tell me stories. My mother, actually, she was a good musician. She played the piano and sang she was a talented woman, but her illness brought her down. And but no, it wasn't it wasn't that. I really wanted to know how to tell the story. And then I began writing stories. And I realized that I was learning, as I said, from the movies, from those mostly those movies. And my mother loved to go to movies. So she would take me all these foreign films, even when I was little. And it was great. And some of the Roy stories are about that. And, you know, seeing these movies and her comments and our conversations about them, because she was very intelligent. And at the same time, rather lost. So, you know, as my daughter used to say when things weren't working out so well, she'd say, pop, we're doomed. And I always liked that word. And my mother was sort of a doomed person in that regard. So anyway, that's that's where it developed and all these different influences. But the one thing I want to say is that, because I really didn't have any formal education, and basically an auto diet, I'm not alone in this. But the thing is, I would always seek out those people whom I thought could teach me. I do it to this day, you know, and if somebody knows something about whatever it was, it's like, you know, I wanted to know I was always interested in horse racing. So I wanted to writing a piece of the Atlantic Monthly, and which eventually became a book about it. But I want to running resources thoroughbreds with a guy for a year. So there I was wound up, you know, not like John McPhee or something. But nevertheless, I was in the stall wrapping the horse's legs, you know, and doing all that. It's like going to the end of something. Otherwise, how do you know? It's like, you know, going to the end of a love affair. Let's, you know, let's go to the end of this thing. You know, where's this going? You know, if it's going anywhere. But I've always been a big believer in that. Otherwise, how do you find out what's right for you and what's not? You know, what's enduring? You know, whether it's a marriage or, you know, a profession, and whether you have any talent for it, you know, if you got any chops, I mean, that's the key to the whole thing. But yeah, because I was a musician, when I came out here to San Francisco, Rolling Stone was just starting up. I had been here for a few months, year before, in 67, because I come here to get a ship to go to the Far East. And then when I came back, as I think January of 1968, Rolling Stone was starting. And so somehow I got involved with them. In fact, now they have a thing my assistant told me this while back. He said, you know, he says, there's this archive, Rolling Stone is his archive, and you're the person whose pieces are in the archive, so you can go read half a dozen of your articles. Oh, I want to do that. Or stuff like that on the Rolling Stone archive. And yeah, it was nice when I went to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. I was doing something at Oberlin there, and opera thing. And so I said, to the composer, Olga Neuvert, I said, well, let's go to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. What else is there to do in Cleveland? You know, and I got there and I was talking to the person that you know, the entrance. Oh, yeah, you're on the Rolling Stone list. So you get in free. So all I can say about Rolling Stone is it got me free. You did it for some reason. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. But it was fun. And it was way to make a little cash, make a little money. And it was a very vital publication in those days. It was very important, you know, politically, and certainly the music and the music was part of the politics at the time. And they sort of made me my the blues guy, Jan, maybe the blues guy because I came from Chicago and going to high school in Chicago. So I knew a lot of these people. So I'd do the piece on Howlin' Wolf because I knew Chester and I, you know, or a buddy guy, because I knew buddy. And you know, and that's where I learned how to play guitar, which was in the blues clubs like the Alex Club on Roosevelt Road in Chicago and stuff, and learned how to play the guitar for Magic Sam. You know, what an amazing thing, you know, to have that, but you just have to show up, you know. Oh my God. And who wasn't that said, you know, three quarters of it is what you know, but it was like that. And you tell that to people, a lot of people today, and they don't get it. Exactly. Now everybody's on their devices anyway. They don't have to show up. Can you tell me when Lula and Sailor came into your life? Yeah, I was in a little hotel in Southport, North Carolina, right on the Cape Fear River. And I woke up one morning. And it's in North Carolina people here. Anyway, I woke up one morning. And I had this conversation going on in my head. And I'm sure you can identify. And I just sat down at this. It was a strange room. It was all blue. Blue walls and the blue bed. You know, everything was blue. Anyway, I sat down and I started writing down the conversation, this dialogue. So I'll make this quick, because it became a story. I was supposed to be writing another book for the Atlantic Monthly Press. And it was on deep sea fishing. Because I had a period of about a year and a half, two years where I had, I was sick, and I couldn't read and write. And I had two children by that time actually raising four children and I needed to make money. So I thought that the quickest way to make money is to do some journalism. So I did the horse racing thing, wrote that book. And then I was going to do one I contracted for and taken money in advance to do this book on deep sea fishing on billfish tournaments and all that and all the gambling and stuff behind the sort of a John McPhee thing who I always admired. And it wasn't necessarily what I wanted to do. But, you know, I had to feed the family. So I just got carried away with these characters. And I remember, I called my agent in New York, my literary agent and said, listen, I'm not going to write this book on deep sea fishing. I'm going to write this novel and it's involved these people. And he says, Oh, listen, listen, listen, he says, we already took the money. And, and, you know, I said, just ask them if they would take the novel instead. Well, I published two novels prior to this. My first film was Landscape of Traveller and then another novel portrait peak and all that and they've done okay. But in any case, so the answer came back no. Just tell Barry to finish the this other book and, and then we'll talk about no future with those characters. So I said to Peter, my agent, Curtis Brown, I said, well, how do we do this? Because this is the book I'm going to write. And I, the thing was, I had to give the money back if I wanted, you know, to do this instead or some way. And I said, give the money back. So he had an apoplectic fit. And he said, because we'd taken I think the contract was for $65,000. So I had taken, you know, 32, five or whatever it was, which is a lot of money in those days. And especially in those days. In any case, that's what I did. I had him give the money back for whatever reason, I just said not now I was feeling good. And I wasn't going to do a job anymore. And I knew that sailor Lula were really there for me. So we sold the the novel, you know, to another publisher. And I had a couple of offers I remember, but I sold it to Grove Press, because I liked the editor there at the time, Grove was really great in those days. And that's what I did for a lot less money. And I said to my agent, I said, don't worry about it. We're going to come out on top. And we did. So I called my own bluff in that situation. And that really that's absolutely 100% true story. That's what happened. And then it went on and on. And the movie got made and all the rest of it and well, I want to and I want to ask about the movie. But I was wanting to ask before that, what are the pleasures of because now you've written a number of books about these characters, and the pleasures of sticking with characters for several books, what what, you know, why did you stick? Why did you, you know, what was the thought process behind thinking there were more books to be had? I didn't. At first, I mean, I wrote Wild at Heart was the first of the Sailor and Lula novels. And then that got bought for the movies. And then when David Lynch called me up and he said, Barry, I want you to write the screenplay. I said, okay, in about six months, because I'm writing the second what became the second part, Perdita Durango, which also was made into a film with Javier Adam and James Gandolfini and Rosie Paris. And I said, but I can't do it now. I said, so you write the screenplay and send it to me and then I'll tell you what's wrong with it. And so that's what happened. So I read a story in which he'd read the novel and then he said, did they stay together? And you said, supposedly, yeah, sure. And so then he read that's part of the story. What happened was anyway, so what happened just to answer your question? Yeah, I thought I was finished, but then I wound up writing six novels and novellas right in a row. All about Sailor and Lula and the attending characters and all that kind of thing. 15 years later, I went back and wrote another one called The Imagination of the Heart about Lula, because I want to know what happened to her after Sailor died. And then a couple of years after that, I went back and I wrote a novel called The Up Down, which came out last year before, which was about their son Pace after both of his parents had died. And so I went to the end of it. I went to the end of it. So went through all of Pace's life. So I wanted to know. So it was my own kind of curiosity. But what happened with Dave was, after the movie was done, basically, or was close to being done. He called me up because I sort of stayed away. I was around the set some, but you know, I didn't have a real function, so I didn't need to be there. But he he called me up on Danny's to Sailor and Lula go on from here. Because the original ending in the movie was the same ending I had in Wild at Heart, which is where Sailor and Lula part. We don't know if temporarily or forever or what. And I said, Sure, they go on because here I am writing Sailor's Holiday and the ones that came after. And he said, Great. And he hung up and he put the happy ending onto the film because Sam Goldman Jr. didn't like the ending. Because it was not a happy necessarily upbeat ending. And they had a happy ending. And that's when he threw in the Wizard of Oz, Light Motif and all of that and added that stuff on to it. I didn't care. They were paying me. And that's a truth of it. That's a cynical truth of it. And no, no, it was fine with me because, you know, movie is one thing. And that's a whole other conversation. And, you know, the book is another. I mean, nobody ever changes the book. The book is already there. That's what I like about it. Nobody changes a period or a comma. You know, we're God in that instance. And that's it with a movie. You know, despite what people say about a tour and so forth, it's a collaboration. Right. And I was going to ask you that because you've talked about, you know, how the need to be alone with the work, what it was like to work with David Lynch, and you worked again with Lost Highway, you know, if you could talk a little bit about that. But it you know, what was that whole experience with an incredible filmmaker? You know, I mean, well, after after Wild at Heart, we did Hotel Room, which were the first plays I ever wrote, really. And he directed both of those for this TV series on HBO. But we were HBO hated it because they wanted tales from the crypt. And in those days, these are wonderful. It's lost directorial work in a way of David's. You can get it on YouTube. You can see it on YouTube, because it was never released in DVD. But there's a book that still exists. The Hotel Room plays Hotel Room trilogy. Because I wrote three of them. And and we did two. And that was the next thing that we did. But the cast are wonderful. Freddie Jones and the Shakespeare Company, Harry Dean Stanton, our dear friend, wonderful people. And then we did Lost Highway. David had bought the rights to a novel of mine called Night People. And was trying to figure out how to make a movie of it. And I said, Well, listen, we're, you know, we're each capable of half of an original thought. So why don't we put our heads together and come up with one original thought? And he said, Well, there's a couple, there's a couple of lines I really love from the movie. I said, what are from the novel? And I said, Well, what are they? He says, Well, as one woman says to another, we're just a couple of patches riding wild on the Lost Highway. I said, Okay, we can use that line. And I said, What was the other one? He says, He says, you and me, Mr. You know, we can out ugly them some bitches, can't we? And I said, Oh, we can figure a place for that too. So we wrote Lost Highway. That's where it started from. And, you know, that movie didn't do very well. But what happened to that movie? I mean, Kai DeCinema named it one of the 50 great films of the century. And it's had a long life and legendary thing. And you know, I was with Dave a couple days ago, I just got back from LA. And we were talking about this with a couple of other people. And I was saying, Well, you know, I always saw that as a bridge for your own work, because you're asking about him as a great filmmaker, which is entirely true. But it kind of a bridge to the work that came after he said, Absolutely, that was the turning point. That was the thing, you know, that really did it. And it's had this long life and sort of passed into a kind of a legend. And for that, I'm happy. You know, so, you know, that was that then we had a couple of other projects which didn't go as typical for things like that. Yeah, it seems it feels like it should happen more often. I mean, it seems like there's a lot of movie talent that needs storytelling. There's sort of people that are great at making movies. Well, the director, like Lynch needs a story. He needs the dialogue, he needs the people, because he's a painter, and he's a visionary. And so you want to give him his vision and give him the framework, the frame of reference to create these images and these situations where he can work out his imagination. And sometimes, you know, you have a push and pull with all these things. But no, working with Lynch, which was not my first experience with the movies is my novel portrait peak had been bought for the movies. They asked me to write a screenplay for it, which I did. But that movie never got me. And I had some other dealings with people. But that was the first work, you know, that ever came into being. And went on from there. And then other directors asked me to write for them. And I've been very privileged in that regard to do writing for some really great directors and in Europe, too. And so that's, that's what happens. But it's an entirely different language, Tom, you know, I mean, you have to it took me a while to really learn how to write for the screen, because if it's Gerald never learned it, right? It's no. And it's another language, and not everybody can do it. But for me, it was like, you know, learning Esperanto, or something, Portuguese, you know, and, and you have to do the your due diligence and find out how to do it because you're just to quote the obvious, not telling you anything you don't know, but it's showing not telling. But if you can figure out how to tell something and sneak it in there, that's pretty great. But what is experience like of, of sitting and watching something that you've, I mean, as a novelist sitting and watching a film that you had a part in creating? I mean, is it pleasurable? Is there a point which you turn off your own sense of authorship and just experience the people, you know, on the screen is, is this his life on the screen? Or are you always constantly thinking about your own role in the making of it? No, I've never thought about my part. I'm only thinking about what's going on on the screen. You know, why is the camera on her? It should be on him. You know, this should have been shot day for night. It should have been, you know, in other words, you just, you know, but unless you're the director, you're in control of it all. That's nothing you can do about it. But sometimes it depends how closely some directors want you to be there like with Lost Highway. You know, I sat to the whole thing because Dave and I were co proprietors. So we were, you know, I sat on the set every day and worked together with all of that sort of stuff. So that was a rare experience because David had never even had allowed a writer on the set before. But we were partners. And and it's always been that way. And we're still good friends. And in fact, he named his new daughter Lula. So you can see that it's a close connection. In that sense, it worked out. And everybody from those days are still friends. Steve Golan, who was one of the producers, became a mogul. He produced 12 years of slave. He won three or four Academy Awards now. You know, he was I remember him when he was a PA, you know, driving around in a used Mustang. And you know, so when you start and still has a poster of wild at heart behind his desk, you know, and it's wonderful when you can start out like that, really, and have that beginning because basically it's sort of all downhill from there. No, it really is because then you get into the reality of it. So I never wanted to be sucked too much into that Hollywood stuff. And I'm not and I haven't been and I'll only work on films that I think can be, you know, possibly special or great, whether they're from my own work or it's original work or whatever it happens to be. And I'm wondering if you I have this theory that that what actors do is very close to what novelists do in terms of trying to figure out who they are and figure out gestures, backstory, all that. And I'm wondering, you've had such extraordinary actors, you know, that have that have been in things. And you just mentioned James Gondolfini, you mentioned, you know, Rosa Perez, all the different people that you've worked and then, you know, Laura Dernan and Nick Cage. But if you can talk, did you have rapport with any of these actors that get get to know them talk to them about their parts in any way over the years? First of all, actors are mostly trying to figure out who they are in real life, right? The movies, the movies give them who they are. They're that character. You know, oh, yeah, now I can be the Prince of Sweden. You know, and like that, I mean, this is the obvious, the obvious thing. Well, on the wild at heart, I'll never forget Harry Dean came to me one time and he asked me about motivation of his character. Just classic. And, and of course, Harry Dean had been in like every television show on Western and the Untouchables and going back to the 50s and was in every movie ever made. And, and, you know, it was a wonderful guy. So there he is asking me about the motivation of this particular character. So, you know, I'm just hanging around and I told him what I thought about the character. So about 20 minutes later, the producer Monty Montgomery comes up to me and he said it was the on site producer. And he says, don't you ever talk to Harry Dean Stanton again about character? Because now, when when Lynch told him something or other, you know, the expression he's supposed to have, or I don't even know what it was, you know, like that, he was telling David how this character thinks, you know, and David said who told you that and he said Barry. So I was fucked after that. You know, they didn't want me around much anyway. I mean, I could see it already. But I learned my lesson right away. It was really fun. You know, you didn't have to tell Harry Dean really, no, I wouldn't think you would. I'm wondering if you've been to Cuba, you know, recently or since I was there a few years ago. And how was that to go back there and you know, just seeing it now versus when you're well, it was in what regard. You everybody knows about how Cuba was stuck in time. Right. But just the experience of someone who knew it as a child, you know, and now is coming back as an adult. Well, I went back to the Nacional where my dad had his apartment. And you know, walked around and it was very familiar to me. It was, you know, I didn't remember all of it all so well. But yeah, I mean, it was it was familiar. I will tell you something that happened there, which nobody here will believe. But I wrote about it for El Pais in Madrid, and forget where else he got published, but about going back. And after 40 years, I hadn't been there 40 years. And so I went to a cigar factory in the body of Cibone. I can tell you're nodding. So you've been to Cuba. And I was with a friend of mine, Jose Pinto from Madrid. And we go in there and I asked this guy who was taking us around, who says like a special thing, you know, and, you know, all the rollers are doing what they're doing. And I said, Do you have a, do you still have a lector or a lector who reads because, you know, in the for the rollers, for those of you who don't know, they always had somebody reading the newspaper or a novel, some something like that to entertain the people while they're rolling the cigars. And that was age old. And, and the guy said, Oh, yeah, sure. He said, the lector, Zaid, I said, Do you want to meet her? And I said, absolutely. You know, so this big, heavy set. Afro Cuban woman comes out and we were talking a little bit. And, you know, she says, Well, what have you written? And I said, I said, Sailor and Lula, because Sailor and Lula is how wild and hard is known. Most of the world caught us on this a lot. He said, you know, but in any case, she just had got her got wide eyed and threw her arms around me. And she said, Sailor and Lula, I love them. You know, and she said that she had seen the movie, which they pirate all the movies. And she had fallen in love with the movie and she had gotten the book because of the Spanish edition. And all that's our Mexican, I can't remember what she said. And she said, You know, I'm going to read this is going to be the next book that I'm going to read. And she showed me the book that she had. It was just unbelievable. I mean, talk about serendipity. I mean, that was just remarkable. And my friend Jose Pinto, and then she took me around and introduced me to all the most efficient rollers that she said, you know, she said, you know, the specialist. And so that really happened. And my friend Jose, we're walking out on these steps there. And he said, What more could a writer ask for? That's great. So I've been fortunate in this regard to have, you know, it goes a long way, these things. And it's anyway, it's wonderful. It was wonderful for me. I'm wondering, do we have time to get some questions from the audience? Oh, yes. Yes, will you questions from the audience? And also from Facebook? Oh, and Barry was it's, is it all right if he reads a little bit? Okay, great. I'm not gonna read from that. No, no, I wouldn't need it. Do you want to meet you wanted me to read a story? Yeah, but whichever you want. But I yeah, either this one, I thought was great. But they're all great. Can I read two? Yeah, give me the Chicago one. Yeah, then you want it. Yeah, because I don't have that. Or maybe it's in the other book. No, it's in this book. So this is from the Cuban clock, which is more of the right story. Chicago, Illinois 1953. Roy and his mother had come back to Chicago from Cuba by way of Key West in Miami. So the cheek had attend the funeral of her uncle like her father's brother. Roy was six years old. And though he would not be going to the funeral, he'd stay at home with his grandmother, who was too ill to attend. He looked forward to seeing pops his grandfather, during his and his mother's time in the city. It was mid February and the weather was at its most miserable. The temperature was close to zero. Ice and day old snow covered the streets and sidewalks and sharp winds cut into pedestrians from several directions at once. Had it not been out of fondness and respect for her father's brother, Roy's mother would never have ventured north from the tropics at this time of year. Uncle like had always been especially kind and attentive to his niece. And Roy's mother was sincerely saddened by his passing. She and Roy had first stopped on the way in from the airport to see Roy's father, from whom his mother had recently been divorced at his liquor store. And we're now in a taxi on their way to Roy's grandmother's house when she told the driver to stop so that she could buy something at a pharmacy. Wait here in the cab Roy, she said, it's warmer. I'll only be a couple of minutes. Roy watched his mother tiptoe gingerly across the frozen sidewalk and entered the drugstore. The taxi was parked on Ojibwe Avenue, which Roy recognized was not very far from his grandmother's neighborhood. That your mother, the driver asked. Yes. She's a real attractive lady. You live in Chicago. Sometimes said Roy, my grandmother lives here. Right now we live in Havana, Cuba and Key West, Florida. You live in both places. We go back and forth on the ferry. They're pretty close. Your parents got two houses, huh? They're divorced. My mom and I live in hotels. You like that, live in hotels? We've always lived in hotels, even when my mom and dad were married. I was born in one in Chicago. Where does your dad live? Here, mostly. Sometimes he's in Havana or Las Vegas. What business is he in? Roy was getting anxious about his mother. The rear window on his side of the cab kept steaming up and Roy kept wiping it off. My mother's been in there a long time, he said. I'm going in to find her. Hold on, kid. She'll be right back. The drugstore's probably crowded. Roy opened the curbside door and said, don't drive away. My mom will pay you. He got out and went into the drugstore. His mother was standing in front of the cash counter. Three or four customers in line were behind her. You dumb son of a bitch, his mother shouted at the man standing behind the counter. How dare you talk to me like that. The clerk was tall and slim and he was wearing wire room glasses and a brown sweater. I told you, he said, we don't serve Negroes. Please leave the store or I'll call the police. Go on, lady, said a man standing in line. Go someplace else. Mom, what's wrong, Roy said. The customers and the clerk looked at him. This horrible man refuses to wait on me because he thinks I'm a Negro. But you're not a Negro, Roy said. It doesn't matter if I am or not. He's stupid and rude. Is that your son? The clerk asked. He's white, said a woman in the line. He's got a suntan, but he's a white boy. I'm sorry, lady, said the clerk. It's just that your skin is so dark. Her hair's red, said the woman. She and the boy have been in the sun too much down south somewhere. Roy's mother threw the two bottles of lotion she'd been holding at the clerk. He caught one and the other bounced off his chest and fell on the floor behind the counter. Come on, Roy. Let's get out of here, said his mother. The taxi was still waiting with the motor running and they got in. The driver put it into gear and pulled away from the curb. You get what you needed, lady, he asked. Mom, why didn't you tell the man that you aren't a Negro? Roy's mother's shoulders were shaking and tears were running down her cheeks. He could see her hands trembling as she wiped her face. Because it shouldn't matter, Roy. This is Chicago, Illinois, not Birmingham, Alabama. It's against the law not to serve Negroes. No, it ain't lady, said the driver. It should be, said Roy's mother. How could they think you're black, the driver said. If I thought you were a Negro, I wouldn't have picked you up. It's amazing. Anyway, that's sort of the drift. And of course, the language is all the language of the time and like that. But can I read one? Yeah. That I think explains some things too and then I'll be happy to answer any questions or it's such a good book. It's wonderful. That's enough things. No, but thank you. I mean, it's it means the most to me personally in terms of my own work, the Roy Story's book and and then The Cuban Club. Not that say the Lula books don't or the other novels don't, you know, they all have their place and and I'm certainly very fond of those characters and everything like that. But this is different. It comes from a different place. You know, it resonates to me in a way. And you know, it's like I said, to me, it's that the only way to regain that time and place. It sounds like a, you know, I'm stealing from Proust, but that's all there is. It's all dreams and memories. That's what everything is. A role model. On Roy's 14th birthday, he came home from school and found his mother sitting alone at the kitchen table drinking a cup of coffee and reading Holiday Magazine. Hi, ma. He said, what are you reading? An article about Brazil. You know, I was there once. You told me who you're there with. Oh, a boyfriend. It was before I met your father. We spent a week in Rio. The beaches were lovely. The sand was so white, but very crowded as crowded as Times Square on New Year's Eve. The karaoke girls were almost naked, brown and slithery and beautiful. I had a wonderful time. Why haven't you ever gone back? Rio is not the kind of place your father would have liked. And since he died, I've not had the opportunity. It was a dreary day, drizzly and gray and colder than usual for the time of year. Roy knew his mother preferred warm weather. It's my birthday today. I know, Roy, are you going out with your friends? Later, maybe. Right now I'm going to work. I just came home to change my clothes. Your father always dressed well. People used to dress better in the old days. You mean in the 1940s? Yes. Before then, too. Well, I'm going to be boiling hot dogs and frying hamburgers. It wouldn't be a good idea for me to wear a suit. No, Roy, of course not. That's not what I mean. It's just that people cared more for their appearance when I was young. This is 1961 and you're only 34. You're still young. Roy was standing next to the table. His mother looked up at him and smiled. She really is still beautiful, he thought. She had long, auburn hair, dark brown eyes, perfect teeth and very red lips. I know you miss your father, Roy. It's a shame he died so young. He was a strong person, Roy said. People liked and respected him, didn't they? Yes. He handled things his own way. People trusted him. You know, your father never gave me more than $25 a week spending money, but I could go into any department store or a good restaurant and charge whatever I wanted. I'll tell you something that happened not long after he and I were married. We were living in the Seneca Hotel where you were born and there was another couple in the hotel we were friends with, Rikki and Rosita Danillo. Rosita was a little older than I. She was from Puerto Rico and Rikki was a few years younger than your dad who was 19 years older than me. What business was Rikki in? Oh, the rackets like everybody in Chicago. But he wasn't in your father's league. He looked up to Rudy. Anyway, late one afternoon your father came home and I was wearing a new hat, blood red with a veil and he said it looked good on me. I told him I was just trying it on. He asked me where I'd gotten it and I said it was a gift from Rikki Danillo that I'd come back to the hotel after having lunch with Peggy Spain and the concierge handed me a hatbox with a note from Rikki. What did the notes say? I don't remember exactly something about how he hoped I'd like it that when he saw it in a shop window he thought it suited my style. Your dad didn't say anything but the next day when I went down to the lobby I saw that one of the plate glass windows in the front was boarded up. I asked the concierge what happened and he told me that Rudy had punched Rikki Danillo and knocked him through the window. Then told the hotel manager to put the cost of replacing it on his bill. That night I said to your dad, you knocked Rikki through a plate glass window just because he bought me a hat? What did he say? No kitty. I did it because he didn't ask me first. That's the kind of guy your father was. I didn't say another word about it. What happened to the hat? I never wore it. I gave it away to someone. Roy did not tell anyone at work that it was his birthday and afterwards he was too tired to go anywhere. When he got home there was a chocolate cake on the kitchen table with 15 yellow candles stuck in it. His mother wasn't home. He picked up a book of matches that was on the stove and lit the candles, then took off his wet jacket and draped it over the back of the chair. Roy thought about making a wish but he couldn't think of one. He blew out the candles anyway. So I guess we'd love to take some questions from the audience. We got a question via Facebook. Can Barry talk about times or one particular time when the fear of action, the fear of creating, has taken hold of him? He seems completely fearless, born or learned. What was the question? Have you ever read Writers' Block? Time, well no, time. What did they say about time? Can Barry talk about times or one particular time when the fear of action or fear of creating has taken hold of him? Yeah, no, Tom's right. No, I've never thought about Writers' Block because when I don't feel like writing, I don't write. And it's always been that way. I'd rather go to the racetrack or the ballpark or you know, whatever else I'm doing. But I really never have. And as time's gone on, I know that, you know, it doesn't matter how you get it done. I know people, like I remember when Ian McEwen said one time, he said, you know, many years ago, I'd sit down at the typewriter every morning and it's a blank typewriter then, not a computer. And you know, I'll sit there for eight hours and wait for something to happen. I said, well, that's not my style. I mean, I could never do such a thing. So when it pops into my head, like as I explained with the Sailor and Lula thing, yeah, then I'm writing and then I'll go on writing until it stops. And then usually I'm finished with the story or with a novel even and all of that. And then I'm done. You know, that's really it. I think Hemingway was the one who said that you know, a book comes out and everybody thinks, oh, here's this writer, you know, working away every day in this studio or whatever. And he says, I'm rolling around on the floor drunk or out on the fishing boat. I wrote the book. That's over. You know, I mean, and now, and Richard Price once said to me, Richard's a wonderful writer and a good friend of mine for a long time. And Richard said, you know, I was, I wanted to start another novel, forget which one he was talking about. And he said, and so I had no clue of how to begin. He said, so I called up, he mentioned the woman's name, who's also a writer, and said, how do I do this? You know, where do I, where do I start from? And everybody has their way as long as you get it done. But I never felt need to force anything. It just doesn't work that way. As a journalist, back in the day, you know, however much I did, which was really just to make some money. You had your assignment. There it was, you know. I started as a journalist, too. But that's fine. I mean, you know, as long as you don't do it forever, the thing is, you know, it's going to intrude on your, your, your fiction, if that's where you're headed. But the thing is, no, I never had a time like that. I just don't pay attention to it. And there are too many other things to do. Yes. And oh, sorry. I guess I should start again. You talked about learning to write screenplays and how that you found that quite different. But on the other hand, a lot of your fiction is very dialogue rich. And much of that dialogue seems to me, from what I've read, I certainly haven't read everything by any means, but to be the kind of thing that would very naturally suit films. So I wonder what, what's the difference here? Is there what kind of transition did you have to make? Well, at first I thought that and people would say to me, producers or directors would say, well, we want you to, you know, you write the great dialogue and this and that's what we need, you know, in movies and that sort of stuff. And I said, oh, that's, that's fine. And then once I was with Matt Dillon and Matt, I wrote, I wrote a film that he directed City of Ghosts. And we were being interviewed together. I can't remember where. But somebody asked a question and he immediately said, said, oh, but Barry's so good with structure. You know, he just said, I really never pay attention to structure. The thing is that, that the dialogue is where everything comes from for me. And I thought I explained, you know, having this kind of university of hotel lobbies and the street and all that kind of stuff, just listening to people talk. And, and so I have a good memory and or used to anyway. And, and so just to recreate that, you know, and so if it sounds true to people, that's great. I mean, there are a number of wonderful writers of dialogue each in their, in their own way. But I try to be true to the character and I don't mean to be disingenuous by saying this. You have to know your character. Who is it that's talking? You know, you can't have everybody talk like yourself or, you know, that sort of thing. I'm not an autobiographical writer per se. So I got to know who, who are these people in the Roy stories. In fact, Roy doesn't talk very much. You can see there are many, many stories within the Roy stories. But he's not the one telling the stories. It's everybody else. So that's really what if I do anything well, I would take great pleasure in knowing that it's through the dialogue. Question back here. Hello. First of all, thank you. This evening has been a spectacular delight to be a part of. There are many things that I wrote in my notebook tonight and there are quotes from you, Barry. One of one, one of them was I was always interested in what people mean behind the words they're using. My question is what role does your imagination play in character development? And what is the technical process you use to develop your characters? Do you use pen and paper? Do you have? How do you? How do you do that? Thank you. Well, for the first part of your question, when I was around my father and his associates, these people spoke very symbolically often. I mean, unless they were just, you know, telling you about some incident or something that was going on or was very direct, you know, you wanted a milkshake or something. But when they spoke to each other, there weren't any specifics that I was privy to. And so I began to wonder what they were talking about. It was like another language. And you know that when you hear two nuclear physicists talking to one another, they've got their own language, right? Their own tells. They're, you know, all of that kind of thing. And so that's really what that's about. Like I said, you have to know your characters. It's the characters that you're portraying and you're conveying whatever it is that, you know, is meaningful in that particular context. And for the other question is, yeah, I write in the long hand. I've never had an electric type writer, even. I put it from long hand on to a manual typewriter and then, you know, I'll make my revisions like that and then I have somebody put it on disc because it's, you know, it's the old adage of if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And so I continue that way. And also I feel closer to it. And the reason I never even had an electric typewriter, I remember somebody gave it to me one. And I didn't like the hum. I didn't like the insistence. And I didn't like the idea of being plugged into the wall so that I needed electricity, you know, to write. I said, what a forgot idea that is, you know. I mean, I said, that's crazy. I can just have a candle and I can write. And the other thing was I always liked the idea of being a writer in the sense that I could just put a little notebook in a pencil or pen in my pocket and go anywhere and be anywhere. And I didn't have to drag a guitar around anymore or a piano around or, you know, that kind of thing or even as an artist, you know, I could still, which is why my art such as it is is basically limited to drawing because I could draw in the notebooks as well. And again, mostly that I like to draw faces. That's pretty much it. I mean, I can draw other stuff. I can draw a horse running or baseball player swinging a bat, you know, not great. But again, you know, I just somehow resisted the academic side of things. You know, I listen to people all the time. The thing is to listen, really just listen and see again, what are they really saying? What do they perhaps want of me? What, you know, this goes back a long way, you know, it goes back a long way. I think that's why I like sports so much. It was so direct. You know, you struck the guy out or you hit the ball or you, you know, ran the ball down the field or you made the basket and that was it. And they were keeping score. Writing to me is totally subjective. I mean, in the sense that the audience, I mean, you can't compare. I hate it when people start comparing writers or anything like that. It's odious to me. You know, that's what the Buddha said anyway. You know, comparisons are odious. And the thing is because it's so subjective. So you may enjoy the dialogue that I write. You like the rhythm. You know, you identify perhaps with some of the characters and that sort of thing. And that's terrific. And somebody else says, you know, how can you read that stuff? I mean, I'm sort of that way myself. So it's entirely subjective. Why bother with the rest of it? You know, Norman Mailer said something to me once, which was interesting. He said, you know, he said that only 1% of literary writers in this country make money from their writing. They might make it from the books or from ancillary rights like movies or television or something that, you know, are where the writing is exploited in this way or however it works. But he said, I'll bet if you knew that statistic, when you began, you would have gotten a real profession, you know, or whatever it was that he said. And, you know, I said, I never thought about it. And he said, that's the key. Never gave it a thought. This is all I liked were, you know, I liked writing and reading, you know, I liked baseball and I liked girls. Nothing's changed. Okay, this is our last question. Hi, Barry. You're a musician. What are your instruments and who is your favorite musician? Well, the letter is a big question. If I tell you, Pablo Casals, you know, you'd not say, oh yeah, that's very respectable. But I don't know, maybe Jimmy Rogers. Or I mean, I can give you, maybe we can sit here all night and talk about musicians and musicianship. That's, that's another thing. But I started out, my mother and my grandmother played piano. And I used to, they used to have me sing with them when I was a kid. So I knew all these popular songs and so I fell in love with the music of the song writers like Hogi Carmichael. And the great, you know, Harold Washington and Jimmy McHugh and, you know, the Tin Pan Alley writers for the most part. And so that's really the music that I wanted to play. And that's most relevant for me. And, but I started by playing, I did take piano lessons for about, you know, three weeks. But I, anyway, I couldn't do it. I mean, not that I couldn't play the piano. I just didn't want to sit around waiting for this teacher or something. I wanted to go out and play ball. So I did. But then years later, I started playing the guitar. Like I said, I started with guitar and then I went to the piano because the piano was easier for me to compose on. And so I'll write there in front of you. Right. And so I realized that if I had any skill or any talent at all regarding music, it was as a songwriter. So here we're right back to writing again. The poetry came out of the song lyrics. It's all there. It's all that. And Buddy of Mine and I wrote songs for Warner Brothers for a couple of years and, you know, all that to no great success. And it's a hard life. I mean, it's a tough thing to do. But it's Augustine Lara. It's the Joe Veeam and Joe Berito. It's the songwriters that impress me and that I care about the most. So it just comes right back to where we are and why we're here. It's the writing. Well, thank you. Yeah, that seems like a great place to end it. So thank you so much, everybody for coming up. Thank you, Barry. Thank you, Tom, for an inspiring evening. Come on up. We have books for sale, Cuban Club, and also Tom's book. And please join us tomorrow night for another Lidquake program. Thank you for joining us here at the Mechanics Institute 57 Post Street, San Francisco.