This from the roast-worthy writer, Steve Almond:
I remember seeing [George Singleton] at some civic lit fest in the South—Nashville or Charlotte, one of those cities with a flower for a theme and lots of corporate sponsorship. I’m taking this elevator downstairs to the lobby and the door opens and there’s George, stinking of cigarettes with a can of beer in his hand. It’s, like, 8am and he starts howling “Steve Almond! Steve Almond!” because, see, the first time we met was in New York, at some Book Magazine junket, where he got plastered and I was (of course) stoned out of my fucking mind.
Anyways, down in Nashville or Charlotte or Richmond or wherever it was, George drags me to an abandoned bar in the hotel where he continues to drink and smoke. It emerges that he did not, in fact, sleep the previous evening. Then he looks at his watch and says, “Shit! I’ve got a panel.” And he lurches over to the panel, where he reads beautifully and answers questions in his big booming voice, very relaxed and exuberant, so that everybody is thinking, “Wow, The George seems like he must be drunk but it’s 8:30 in the morning so he’s clearly just PRETENDING to be drunk.”
So yeah, George.
At this point Almond added that he and George had been lovers, but those of you who know Almond understand that this is just a nervous tic of his.
Photograph by Christina Storozkova.
What is an HTML tag? When I go here to offer a defense, it reads “(You may use HTML tags for style). For style? You know who has style—that Steve Almond dude. Man I hope he doesn’t see that photo of the snake in my hand.
Mark Franks—those were fake fighting moves?
All right. Off to write a novel made up entirely of acknowledgements. I’m running out of ideas. I’ll put all of y’all in it.
Over and out—GS