Pemberton never slept with a sofa

Forest of Fortune turns 10

It’s been a weird week.

On Sunday I stepped into a convenience store to buy something to drink when a driver T-boned another vehicle in the intersection I’d just driven through. Then the next day a condo three doors down caught fire when a go-kart exploded. It feels like a time of near misses, wild swings of the pendulum, and uncanny reversals.

My overall good mood has been enhanced by some promising developments with some of my writing projects, which I hope to be able to share with you soon, my novel-in-progress is cooking, and my last two pieces for the LA Times seem to be getting some attention.

But I suspect the real reason for my happiness is how much I’m enjoying being on the internet lately. Last week I wrote about the power of hope with regards to the presidential election but I wasn’t prepared for how swiftly the American people have rallied around Kamala Harris. It’s been so spontaneous and, I can’t believe I’m saying this, joyful that it’s done something I didn’t think was possible: It’s made Twitter fun again.

For instance, last week there were a couple days when I believed JD Vance fucked a couch. Someone made a joke and the internet ran with it. Granted, it proved not to be true, but the subsequent jokes were so good that no one cared. They just decided that Vance was a “sectional predator” and that was that.

Now some will say, “Jim, this is not good. This is disinformation!”

Yes, this is true. Disinformation is never good. But in this case the disinformation in question, i.e. the joke, was corrected immediately, but people decided it was funnier to reject it on the basis that Vance looks like a guy who would fuck a sofa. I also think it was payback for the ridiculous things the right has convinced its gullible base was true. (See virtually anything out of MJT or Alex Jones’s mouth.)

I don’t want to wade into the morass of American politics any longer than I have to, but I suspect when this election is over people are going to remember three things: that someone tried to assassinate Trump, Harris replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, and JD Vance fucked a couch. I think this is what they mean when they say the internet is undefeated.  

A decade of Forest of Fortune

Today marks the ten-year anniversary of the publication of my first novel, Forest of Fortune, which kind of blows my mind. It’s the story of a haunted slot machine at a fictional tribal enterprise called Thunderclap Casino.

The novel revolves around three characters trying to turn their luck around: a custodial employee with epilepsy who has been having strange visions, a gambler coming to terms with her all-consuming addiction, and an alcoholic copywriter named Pemberton. The book was inspired by my experiences working as a copywriter at Viejas Casino in Alpine, CA. The second I walked in the door for employee orientation, I knew I was going to write about the place. I didn’t know that it would consume me.

Forest of Fortune is a dark novel that reflects the way I was feeling about many aspects of my life at the time. I started working at the casino in late 2006. It was a happy time for me. I was newly engaged and planning my wedding in Valle de Guadalupe, making frequent trips across the border to various restaurants in Ensenada and wineries in the Valle for wine tastings, cake tastings, meal tastings. So many tastings! This was easily my favorite part of the whole wedding-planning process.

But there were storm clouds on the horizon. Marriage is hard. Living with someone who was every bit as stubborn and opinionated as I was took some getting used to, (especially since it was Nuvia’s place). My boss at the casino was a first-class asshole and working for him was incredibly stressful. Then the recession happened. First the quarterly bonuses went away and then the layoffs started. I hated my job, but felt trapped.

None of this helped my writing career, which I felt was slipping away. Although I’d won a prestigious fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2004 and published a short story collection the following year with Gorsky Press, which was then an offshoot of Razorcake, my agent couldn’t sell my WWII novel I’d spent a decade writing. Driving out to a remote corner of rural San Diego County every day, New York publishing felt like another planet.

And then there was my drinking. It was already excessive, but now I was using it to calcify my disappointments over my setbacks into bitter resentments. I went from being the kind of person who drank boisterously to a secret drunk who slipped vodka into the free orange juice in the employee cafeteria. I essentially made a god out of alcohol. It was my answer to everything. Happy, sad, angry, or indifferent? Drink, drink, drink.

In the summer of 2008 I submitted the novel I’d spent the last two years working on to my agent. I thought it was going to make me famous. Instead, he fired me.

I went into to woe-is-me mode for while, which felt good in that everything-is-falling-apart-and-IDGAF kind of way, and then everything fell apart. I lost a friend to an intentional overdose and started putting more drugs and alcohol into my body than it could possibly handle. I had to stop.

After getting sober, I went back to something I’d written during NaNoWriMo after getting dumped by my agent and before the death of my friend. It was 50,000 words and didn’t have an ending, but it felt strangely alive. My two previous novels were historical fiction, but this story was set in a casino very much like the one I was working in and was animated with scenes inspired by things I saw every day. It was a ghost story about loss, addiction, and despair that I called The Haunted Casino.

At the peak of my alcoholism I spat out a messy document about addiction, and while I wrestled with sobriety I revised the manuscript. I joined a writing group with Judy Reeves (Hi Judy!) through San Diego Writers, Ink and with the help of some extremely kind and talented writers (Hi Sandra, Marivi and Tammy!) my weird little ghost story began to take shape.

Book cover, poker chip, tattoo

For all its darkness, Forest of Fortune is a weirdly comic. I don’t think it gives anything away to say that Pemberton is my most autobiographical character. I had so much fun tormenting him. I was able to make fun of aspects of myself that I wouldn’t have been able to do if I was still in the grip of my addiction. That was the most unexpected thing about sobriety: it freed me from so many lies and that honesty made its way to the page.

I’ll never forget the cold November day in 2013 when I crossed the border at Tecate after a long weekend in Valle de Guadalupe and turned on my phone to discover a message from Ben Leroy (Hi Ben!) from Tyrus Books. He wanted to publish my novel. It was an incredible experience. The book got a starred review from Publisher’s Weekly, was reviewed in the Los Angeles Times, I was interviewed on the radio, and I traveled all over the world doing events from Anchorage to Anaheim, Brooklyn to Berlin.

Before I quit Viejas, I wrote a column for McSweeney’s about what it was like to work in a casino. Before the release of the paperback, I gathered those pieces together and published them as a zine called This Is Not a Camera. I recently found a bundle of them so I lowered the price to $5 on my site. It’s the perfect companion to the novel, and if this edition of Message from the Underworld inspires you to purchase a copy of Forest of Fortune, (hard cover or paperback, new or used) I’ll send you the zine for free. Just shoot me a screenshot the receipt and I’ll drop it in the mail.

If you read Forest of Fortune ten years, ten months, or ten minutes ago, I thank you from the bottom of my black heart. And if you’re eager to see Pemberton again in another book someday, I have to say I like your chances…

This is not Pemberton

Thanks for reading! If you liked this newsletter you might also like my latest novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. I have more books and zines for sale here. And if you’ve read all of those, consider preordering my latest collaboration The Witch’s Door and the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights.

Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get my deepest gratitude and Orca Alert! on most Sundays. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, crime, and killer whales.