Love Is the Law (18 page)

But then I think of my father’s face and realize that the red smear across the boiled bones of his skull was the last thing I was ever sure of.

Once again, there are far too many people to thank, but these are the people I remember. First there’s Michele Rubin, late of Writers House, who encouraged me to write a “boy book” for the YA market. I finally said, “How about
Harriet the Spy
, but she’s a punk rocker and into Crowley and Trotskyism!” and then I didn’t have to hear about the boy book too much anymore. Rachel Edidin loved the idea though and acquired it for Dark Horse, and Jemiah Jefferson got the book from hard drive to storefront. Molly Tanzer, Jason Ridler, and Kenneth Wishnia had a number of useful comments for me. The blogger known to me only as keith418 regularly shares his insights into the intersection of the political and the esoteric on his online journal, many of which I liberated and détourned for my own aesthetic ends.

And I must thank some people whose names I don’t even remember. Once upon a time, in 1989, there was a comic shop called Flashpoint, and the cashier had something to do with a new fanzine-style political/culture rag called
The Long Island Alternative
, the first issue of which was available for free in the store. I got it, read it over and over till it fell apart in my hands, and then I wrote a little essay called “Schmucks for World Peace” and sent it in. They published it. I was seventeen and in high school. I was paid in copies and a subscription to the magazine, and ever since then I’ve been doomed to write. If you had anything to do with the magazine, or that comic shop, thank you.