O P I N I O N

NOT THAT PROFOUND

By Nathan Graziano

In a recent column, I wrote a nostalgic piece about my Jack Kerouac summer in 1998, where my friend and I decided to pack up and just go, baby, go until we hit the Pacific Ocean, then we turned around and drove back to New Hampshire. 

In the piece, I included an excerpt from my 2012 book, “Hangover Breakfasts.” Afterward, I received a couple of emails from readers telling me that they enjoyed the excerpt and wanted to know where they could find the book. 

Then a strange thing happened: I realized that the book has seemingly vanished off the face of the earth. I was confident that I had multiple copies hanging around my house. Wrong. I have two copies in hardcover and not a single copy of the paperback.

I contacted the publisher, an old friend of mine named Bill Roberts who runs Bottle of Smoke Press out of his home, handprinting many of the books and broadsides on an antique printing press, including the cover of “Hangover Breakfasts.” Bill told me that he only had a single copy left from his personal collection, and there is another copy currently archived with the Bottle of Smoke collection at Yale. 

So I looked online to find copies of my own book, and the cheapest copy that I could find was $79.95, albeit it is signed—by me! There was another copy on eBay selling for $104.95, also signed—by me! 

What was going on here? I started thinking of a documentary I watched that was recommended to me by both my buddy Brian and Ink Link Publisher Carol Robidoux titled “Searching for Sugar Man,” where an obscure musician discovers that, unbeknownst to him, he has been a sensation in South Africa for decades, and just about everyone in the country owns his album. 

Is my book a big success in a foreign country that I don’t know about? Doubtful. 

Still, “Hangover Breakfasts” holds a special place in my heart. I don’t keep photo albums—although the cover of “Hangover Breakfasts” was taken from a photo of me outside the Elvis Is Alive Museum in Wright City, Missouri—but I’ve written and published books about various times in my life, so when I want to revisit those times, I take my books from the shelf and read them. In many ways, “Hangover Breakfasts” is a eulogy to two of my friends and roommates at the time who are no longer with us. 

You see, for one year we lived in a house on Lake Winona in Ashland. It was the house where I lived while I was student-teaching and then took my first teaching job as a full-time substitute at the school I teach at today. Jay and I were living in that house when we decided one night to take off for the West Coast without any real plans. 

It was while living in that house that I first decided that I wanted to become a writer. 

In many ways, “Hangover Breakfasts” is the best book that I’ve ever written, simply because it is raw and honest and brimming with those undefineable things that make us all so human and flawed. 

I’m not entirely sure where I’ll go from here. Maybe someone will agree to re-release the short collection, or put it out as an eBook, or both. I’ve discussed having an actor friend of mine record the book and then releasing an audio of it. 

The only thing I know is that without it, a part of my past disappears, and I cannot allow that to happen. I won’t. 

So here is another excerpt from “Hangover Breakfasts:”    

“Tubes”

In two days, I was moving out of the lake house, away from the mountains and the local bars where I was starting to fit in. Of course, I’d always find bars wherever I went, and I still find bars wherever I am. Like a man with his eyes burned by the sun, I seek the safety of shade. 

With a hankering to get loaded, Ray and I decided to spend the afternoon drifting in tire tubes on the lake with a cooler in a third tube packed with beers. Bare-chested, wearing sunglasses, we set off from shore, our asses in the donut holes, our arms and our legs dangling over the sides of the tubes. We barely spoke, and when our skin began to bake, we dove into the lake to cool off.

At one point, as I stared into the blue sky above the mountains, lulled by the chirping of birds, I remember thinking that I might return to this place when I die—entirely serene, buzzed on beer, floating. 

You can email Nate Graziano at ngrazio5@yahoo.com.