It’s been nearly five years since my father passed, and I hope by the end of this year to publish one of Keith’s novels that has faded out of view. It’s a comic work and when asked how I am editing it, I reply that it’s more like I am retelling the story. Although I’m aware that he was given some advice, I’m not a hundred percent sure Keith actually had a serious editor for “Mordecai of Monterey” way back in the day. I’m discovering I have my work cut out for me.

As I remember rolled up bills falling out of my father’s shirts when I was collecting the laundry back in 1984, I am pretty sure the inconsistencies from one paragraph to another had something to do with the drug of choice in the eighties. But please note, the inconsistencies populate some parts of the novel and then clear up in others. Reading many of the stories in “Mordecai” reminds me of the times my father told similar ones at parties. Most of the characters I easily recognize because Keith had a habit of putting the real names of his friends in his novels which is amusing to me today, of course.  But curiously enough, the inspiration for one of the main characters is someone that I don’t remember seeing at all.  The man was always something of a phantom to me, a name only, but he was a very real person to my father’s friend Richard Brautigan who was inspired to write his own novel “Confederate General in Big Sur” based on escapades with Price Dunn.  Richard’s novel was a wild success.

My father followed suit, writing about Price Dunn, twenty years after Richard. Mordecai did not achieve the success of “A Confederate General in Big Sur”. I’m half way through transposing “Mordecai” into my computer. I’ve been checking the correspondence that I have of my father from the 1980’s when he’s talking about the book. Since the novel is set in 1973, I’ve also gone back and read what my father had published during that period, mostly writings in poem form. While writing the book, Keith often consulted with his friend Michael Sowl, the poet and the inspiration for the character of Mordecai. I don’t suppose adding a few lines of a poems or two to the prose as a support would compromise the poetic leanings of the main character in any undue way…..and don’t forget Watergate was going on as well, broadcasted from televisions in the background, which lends an extra dimension to the general surrealism.