King of Diamonds

Author Interview: 10 (Actually 14) Questions
(and some possible answers I might give)

1. You're pretty far along in years for a first novelist. What took you so long?

I started King of Diamonds 12 years ago, and took 8 years to write it, because my life is so filled with other things that the only time I could write was winters, which I spent in Mexico. I hand-wrote the entire manuscript by candlelight in a palapa, a thatched-roof hut with no walls, in the Mexican jungle, all the while keeping an eye out for scorpions, which are common and nocturnal, and deadly down there.

2. The cover says the book is about baseball, sexual healing and biodiversity. What do you mean by biodiversity?

'Bio' is life. It's the diversity of species on the planet, or in any given area. The book is really about extinctions. Naturalists tell us we're killing off 50 to 100 species every day, and we're in a wave of extinctions greater than the four great die-offs in planetary history, including the loss of the dinosaurs that marked the end of the Cretaceous period. And we're all interdependent on each other, so we're really killing ourselves.

3. How did you find your way into the alternative exploration of sexuality?

From the time I was old enough to know about sex, my relations with women were a disaster. I was full of rage. I had rape fantasies and I even had an urge to rape once, that scared me. By the time I left Los Angeles at age 49 and moved to the hot springs resort where I now live, I had given up on women. I didn't expect moving to end my problem: after all, I was taking me with me.

Then I discovered HAI: the Human Awareness Institute. They conduct workshops in Love, Intimacy and Sexuality. I had taken lots of workshops in the past, and I was in therapy briefly. I got a lot out of all of them, but nothing healed my relationship problem. HAI did.

The entire San Francisco Bay Area in California is an oasis in a sea of sexual repression. Thousands of people are seeking what I sought, and moving on to explore the potential of their sexuality once it's brought up out of the dark cellar where civilization likes to stuff it.

4. What happened with the Human Awareness Institute that didn't happen in all the other workshops?

I felt loved. The workshops take place over a weekend, and I spent the entire weekend in love with everyone there. And everyone there loved me too. I felt safe. The facilitators go out of their way to create the safest room on the planet. So for instance, if I were to approach a woman in a way that made her uncomfortable, instead of giving me the evil eye, she would tell me very lovingly what wasn't working for her about my approach, and I could ask her how I could do it better. And with all this safety and communication, the women felt safe too, and I found that some were attracted to me. And they would even tell me!

5. What does all this sexuality have to do with baseball?

King of Diamonds grew out of two separate story ideas. The first was just an account of all the strange, painful events that marked my dealings with women. My agent told me to write it as a novel. The second was a zen baseball story, with a second-string catcher, and all the things that would go through his mind before each pitch. That would have been pretty turgid, and it got reduced to about two paragraphs in King of Diamonds.

So, to answer your question, one thing I hoped to accomplish with King of Diamonds was to write a book that would help sexually educate men who read baseball books. I also hoped to sexually educate women, but what I wrote turned out to be primarily a men's book - although there is a chapter in there that's a must for any woman who wants to light her man's fire.

6. How is human sexuality related to healing the planet?

How can we heal the planet if we can't heal our relationship with another person?

Our relationships with the opposite sex are a microcosm of our relationship with our mother Gaia, the earth. As Stan Dale, who founded HAI, says, sex is just a metaphor for how we are with each other. If we're practicing violent sex, we're going to act violently toward each other in other ways. Sex simply reflects our feelings. If we feel loving toward other people, we love the planet too.

7. So you think the world would be a better place if we just had better/more sex?

Better and more. Look at the obvious results of sexual repression: the scandals in the Catholic priesthood, the priests wrestling with what they have been taught to regard as demons, which are really just natural animal urges, and it's highly presumptuous to think we're different from other animals in this respect; all we have on them is the dubious growth of our brains. How about rape? Sex is the most powerful urge in a young man: if it's bottled up it gets mixed with rage. Incest is sexual energy all tied up in taboo. When people feel scarcity, they take what they can get, and integrity goes out the window.

8. Suppose we have a listener who feel like Charley Orange, your sexually frustrated main character. How can he find a woman who will love him?

There are so many men who are just lost souls when it comes to women; they've tried everything, and women don't like anything they try. I was like that until I discovered HAI and got healed. The other main male character, Whizzo, is me after HAI, emotionally. I've been very popular with women ever since then, beautiful women, charming women, seductive women, sex goddesses - and I love them all! It happened to me, guys, and it can happen to you.

I think the key to it is to move out of scarcity, if even only for a day or an hour - in a workshop, with a sexual healer. Feel the love, and hold onto it by giving it away without expecting anything back. Hey, if you haven't been getting anything back anyway, that part's easy. I noticed that when I just started feeling loving I didn't necessarily get love back from the person I was loving at the moment, but someone else would be loving me later. When you're loving you give off a certain resonance, a vibration, and it's recognizable and attractive to others in the same loving vibration.

9. Will readers learn about tantra in the book?

Tantra has been sexualized in this country. Tantra teaches sexual techniques as a way of reaching heightened states of consciousness, but this is a small subset of what it's all about. It's really a philosophy, part of what Aldous Huxley called the Perennial Philosophy: that is, that everything is divine and to live in divinity requires nothing more (or less) than being present in the moment. I don't give a lot of space to the sexual aspect of tantra in King of Diamonds; the hands-on activities I describe (pun intended) are taken largely from the work developed by More University, a sexual school, and by Annie Sprinkle for Body Electric, another group devoted to teaching more enjoyable sex.

10. What can you tell us about having better sex?

Feel more love. Communicate. Love, intimacy and sexuality are learned experiences, and our culture has let us down terribly in this area, until now. These should be standard fare in our schools, not to mention our families. Tantra teacheers are popping up all over. Try some of their workshops. Try HAI, More and Body Electric.

King of Diamonds gives you a few basics, but I left it open for inquisitive readers to seek out real-life, "hands-on" as it were, solutions.

11. Who would you say are your major influences?

Stan Dale (founder of HAI), E. O. Wilson (naturalist, wrote Diversity of Life), Joanna Macy & John Seed (co-creators of The Council of All Beings workshops) Muhammad Ali, Dizzy Dean, Hugh Everett Wheeler (father of parallel universe theory).

On the literary side, George Bernard Shaw, James Joyce, Sameul Beckett, William Burroughs, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Anton Wilson, Tom Robbins

12.Where did you come up with all those weird baseball games?

They all actually happened. Frank Lary, the "Yankee Killer" for the Tigers in the 50's, once beat them twice in the improbable ways Whizzo beats the Lemon Sox. Whizzo's major-league pitching debut is taken from a pitcher named Earl Wilson, who started with the Boston Red Sox. Most listeners probably remember Jose Canseco having a ball bounce off his head for a home run. The amazing season finale game-ender actually happened in a game I played in, and I was part of the play.

13. Some of the baseball characters seem familiar, too. I seem to recall a pitcher who talked to the ball.

Yes, that was Mark "The Bird" Fydrich, rookie of the year for the Detroit Tigers some time back, who never had another good season. Whizzo also has a lot of Dizzy Dean in him, and Muhammad Ali. Foo Foo McGonigle is modeled after Casey Stengel. I put a few of Dodger broadcaster Vin Scully's trademark lines in Bluster Hyman's mouth, though he's modeled more after Howard Cosell. His brother Buster, the umpire, owes a lot to Ron Luciano, the most entertaining umpire in major-league history. Baseball is so rich with comic lore: I lifted a few lines from some of the great clowns.

14. How about the outrageous names in King of Diamonds?

I actually knew someone named Maxwell Veribushi once. (good story about him) Ladye Hannah Aura is taken from Janice Aura, also known as *Kozmick Ladye*, to whom I dedicated the book. She was a character who showd up at Bay Area New Age events, very colorfully dressed, passing out leaflets like the one I used in King of Diamonds. Anloie: I met a woman at a dance in Mexico. I asked her her name and over the music I thought she said Anloie. Later I learned it was Joaninha! Charlie Orange is also taken from someone in Mexico called Orange Charlie.