Crash Gordon, the author of Nitt-Witt Ridge, is my big brother—but I didn’t know him very well when I was growing up. We were thirteen years apart and Crash just disappeared one day around the time I turned four. Everyone thought he was dead. Three of his friends had been killed when their car went over a cliff in Big Sur. Crash had been with them, but his body was never found. The police told us that if the fall hadn’t killed him, then he most likely drowned. Either way, his body must have been swept out to sea on the tide.

They were wrong, as it turned out. Six years later Crash showed up again in Kingsburg, California—our hometown. His blonde hair had grown out into a wild, shaggy mane and he was wearing a grey, musty-smelling wizard’s cloak—or monk’s habit—that he’d picked up for sixty kroner in a Norwegian thrift shop. He had a long, weird story to tell about waking up in a Monterey hospital with amnesia, then spending the next five years at the Esalen Institute attending seminars and developing his trippy psychic abilities. There was also something about a Tantric sex tour in Europe.

Most people, listening to him, must have thought he’d gone a little nuts. I know our mother did. She wouldn’t let him stay in our house. But Crash was my brother, and I wanted to believe him, so I asked him to tell me more.

Over the years, Crash ended up telling me a whole lot more. And what he told me was so funny and frightening and bizarre that I eventually decided to write a book about it. Six years and more than six hundred pages later, that book was published by Three Graces Press as Crash Gordon and the Mysteries of Kingsburg.

It was my first book and it’s been such a success that I’m already working on a sequel: Crash Gordon and the Revelations from Big Sur. Crash doesn’t seem to mind. I’m not quite sure why he puts up with me cannibalizing his life for the sake of “Quality Lit”—as Terry Southern called it—but I think it’s probably because he wanted to be a novelist himself when he was younger.

In fact, Crash wrote a 332-page apprentice novel called Blind and Hairless when he was only sixteen. I remember him giving me a piggyback ride down to the local drugstore for a hot fudge sundae on the day that he finished it, not long before he disappeared. Later, we went over to our grandmother’s house to tell her all about it.

The main character in Blind and Hairless is a bald-headed juvenile delinquent named Eddie who has telekinetic powers because he wasn’t breast-fed as a child. There are dramatic conflicts inherent in that situation, of course. As I had Crash explain it to our grandmother in my first book:

“The telekinetic powers only work when Eddie is grabbing his, um, testicles… which kind of causes problems. So he starts seeing a psychiatrist, this guy named Doctor Ewen Cameron, who doesn’t really believe him. He thinks Eddie just has an Oedipus complex. But by the end of the book, the telekinetic powers have started attacking Eddie. They actually make him blind and hairless. Then they attack Doctor Cameron who, through the process of transference, finds out that he has telekinetic powers, too, which kind of drives him nuts—because it blows his faith in an intelligible universe. So Doctor Cameron ends up stumbling around like a bum, searching for a non-rational way of understanding the world and his place in it.

“Meanwhile, Eddie and his best friend, George—who’s, like, this weird, redheaded, six-foot-seven retarded milk truck driver—they, um, drive out to the river in George’s old milk truck and Eddie asks George to shoot his testicles off with a .357 Magnum. When the telekinetic powers hear that they stir up a windstorm that turns into a tornado and then there’s a rain of fecal greaseballs and the milk truck flies up into the sky, spilling milk bottles everywhere. But George is brave and he manages to pull the trigger and blow Eddie’s balls off in an act of true friendship. Eddie sits down bleeding under a pine tree, the tornado stops, and the fecal greaseballs turn into bread and start baking in the sun. And everyone gets to live happily ever after…. I mean, that’s it in a nutshell, but there’s a lot more to it and it’s way more complicated, of course.”

It was one hell of a book to have written when he was only sixteen (and more autobiographical and predictive of his future than you might at first think), but Crash obviously wasn’t dealing with universal themes. Not everyone could relate to it. The manuscript was left behind in a desk drawer in his old room back in Kingsburg, never to be published. I read it when I was sixteen, and I thought it was great—kind of a cross between John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men and Stephen King’s Carrie—but by then I was hopelessly biased. Crash was my mysterious older brother, recently returned from the dead, and I couldn’t help but look up to him.

Crash wrote a second book, The Sensuous Hermit, while he was recovering from amnesia at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur. Richard Price, one of Esalen’s founders, had offered him free room and board there, for as long as he wanted to stay, in exchange for letting them use him as a psychic guinea pig. Crash was especially talented at remote viewing—basically, sitting alone in a dark room and describing what’s happening at a remote location, after being given no more information about that location than its longitude and latitude. I know it sounds crazy, but the military and the CIA have been using remote viewers to find crashed planes, spy on the Russians, and track down Middle Eastern terrorists ever since the early 1970s. Crash was supposedly trained to do remote viewing—and other things, like remote influencing—in a CIA-sponsored mind control program while he was growing up.

No wonder our mom wouldn’t let him stay in the house, right?

But here’s the thing: there was corroborating evidence for Crash’s abilities. I’ve heard him predict things that later came true more times than I can even count. And once, during the summer before I started college, I was hanging out in Crash’s cabin drawing a picture and when I went out to tell him I’d chugged the last three beers in his refrigerator, I found him sitting at the picnic table on his deck drawing the exact same picture. I was so blown away that I went back inside and drew a dozen more pictures, as an experiment. Without any way of seeing me, or even knowing what I was doing, Crash drew perfect reproductions of all twelve—even the one of the silicone-enhanced alien girl and her basset hound sidekick, who was up on his hind legs in a filthy raincoat with a fedora tilted at a rakish angle over one eye, French-inhaling a cigarette.

And then there’s the anecdotal evidence, which wouldn’t be admissible in court, but still… it’s impressive. For instance, over the years I’ve heard this story from at least three different witnesses who all claim they were there when it happened:

Kurt Vonnegut was on a book tour in California when he decided to stop by the Esalen Institute to see what their “human potential movement” was all about. This was sometime around 1984 or ’85, I was told. There was a seminar going on in the Big House that day about the siddhis—the occult bodily powers that arise along the path to enlightenment. Vonnegut smelled bullshit and at one point he stood up and said:

“Anyone here who believes in telekinetics, raise my hand.”

Crash was standing across the room, and he was having one of his fluky moments when his remote influencing abilities were running particularly strong, so he raised Vonnegut’s hand for him.

I guess old Kurt just about shit a brick.

Anyway, to get back to The Sensuous Hermit… Crash was obviously using the manuscript as a way to organize his returning memories. It was structured around the somewhat loopy notion that there are four distinct stages to any successful hermit’s life: the Budding Hermit, the Reluctant Hermit, the Traditional Hermit, and the Sensuous Hermit. It’s a strange read—a bit too gnomic for my taste, especially in the last section—but you can definitely see how Crash was trying to fit his life experiences into a template, so he could make better sense of them.

Crash’s childhood was pretty bleak—I know that much from personal experience. Our mom was a pill-popping nudist with a violent temper. Once, she smacked me across the skull with a pooper-scooper (seventeen stitches and a really bad infection…). I’m sure she did about the same or even worse to Crash. Our emotionally aloof dad flew a Cessna into his own living room on the day after Crash’s thirteenth birthday. No one knew if it was an accident or suicide (or maybe a misguided attempt to murder his wife…). I’d been conceived about eight months earlier, so I never had a chance to meet the guy, but Crash was the first person on the scene when the plane hit our house. He found our dad’s dismembered corpse, which must’ve really screwed with his head. And then, to top it all off, there was that cliff in Big Sur a few years later where he lost three of his closest friends.

All that stuff got written about, allegorically, in The Sensuous Hermit as it was dredged up from the murk and muck of Crash’s receding amnesia. No wonder he wanted to become a hermit!

If you ask me, I don’t think Crash ever intended to publish The Sensuous Hermit. It was probably just something he had to get out of his system. The whole thing comes across as a sarcastic self-help guide for misanthropes, interspersed with true-to-life stories about those awkward moments and small (and large) humiliations that the world doles out on a regular basis. The plot is sort of a smutty Pilgrim’s Progress that follows an alienated young man through childhood, sexual maturity, and existential despair—and then on to something like orgasmic enlightenment. But that last part, for me at least, remains vague. It has something to do with transcending the duality of spirituality and sensuality by masturbating into a tuna sandwich, and frankly, I just don’t get it.

After Crash had finished writing the manuscript, he packed it away in a little antique Chinese leather trunk, packed the trunk in an old beat-to-crap Jeep Wagoneer, and then he left the Esalen Institute to find a new life. He didn’t know where he was going. He just had the idea that he was becoming too insulated from the rest of the world at Esalen—he obviously had issues, writing a book called The Sensuous Hermit—so he struck out for parts unknown. He only got as far as Cambria, about sixty miles down the coast, but it was a start.

What stopped him in Cambria was a radio program. He was just driving along, listening to the local station, when a DJ calling himself A.C. Nightshade came on the air to say, “You’re listening to KOTR, wet ‘n’ furry radio for the Central Coast.” Crash instantly recognized the voice as belonging to his childhood friend from Kingsburg, Jimmy Marrsden.

Five years earlier, Jimmy had been in the car with Crash and his three friends for their rendezvous with the cliff in Big Sur. But Crash recalled, dimly, that Jimmy had been standing in the road off to the side of the car just before it smashed through the guardrail. How had that happened? He pulled off the highway into Cambria to find Jimmy—or A.C. Nightshade—and talk to him about it.

It turned out to be a very long conversation. Crash spent the next several years in Cambria. For much of that time, he and Jimmy were roommates in the same tiny home.

It wasn’t a bad existence… at least, not at first.

With the hippie-academic stench of Esalen still clinging to his wizard cloak, Crash introduced himself to Cambria’s demimonde by delivering an impromptu lecture entitled, “Quantum Physics and Reaganomics: How Much Longer Before the Fabric of Reality is Ripped to Shreds?” The lecture took place in Old Camozzi’s Saloon on the night of Crash and Jimmy’s reunion, after a few too many celebratory gin-and-tonics. By that time, Crash was beyond taking himself seriously. Goaded on by Jimmy, he managed to convince a morose marimba player from a Don Ho-inspired hula band to accompany him while he was up onstage.

“Dancing,” Crash suavely slurred into the microphone, “is encouraged.” He expected he would either be ignored or heckled mercilessly. He was, after all, only going through with the act to amuse an old friend—a round of karaoke for the metaphysics nerds.

Half-eloquently, half-incoherently, Crash riffed on the Holographic Model of the Universe, Zen quarks, Laffer curves on the Feynman momentum-energy space map, and the virtues of raw oysters and psychedelic mushrooms as counteractive agents against existential despair. By the end of the lecture, to his astonishment, he was drunkenly applauded by the crowd and then embraced by a silver-haired woman with a Boston accent who introduced herself as Nora Biddle-Whitney, owner and editor-in-chief of the Cambria Insurrectionist. Right there on the spot, Nora offered Crash a job on her newspaper.

Some find religion. Crash found journalism and he was saved.

Crash has never really explained to me why he went into his hermit tailspin at Esalen. From what he’s told me, it sounds like a great place—full of shamanic psychotherapists, braless quantum physicists, and flaky but adorable hippie nymphomaniacs. But I guess Crash couldn’t shake the feeling that he was some combination of charity case and circus freak while he was there. He told me that demonstrating his psychic abilities in front of a new crowd always felt embarrassing, like putting on a white cape and jumping out of a birthday cake with his hard-on wagging. He didn’t want to do it anymore. So when Nora Biddle-Whitney offered him a new career as a journalist, Crash saw it as a way out. I think he knew, intuitively, that he needed to get past his morbid self-consciousness by devoting his energies to some cause greater than himself. So what if Nora could only pay him $5.50 an hour? He was happy to take it.

Gainfully employed, Crash was able to rent a one-room shingled geodesic dome cabin that nobody wanted because its tenant had to climb a nine-story flight of rickety stairs up the side of a cliff to get to it. But at the top of the cliff, the cabin had a small redwood deck with a magnificent view overlooking Cambria’s Moonstone Beach. On a clear day, Crash could see all the way up the coastline to Big Sur—or so he believed. (Realistically, there wasn’t much to see but ocean out beyond the lighthouse at Piedras Blancas.)

Crash fell in love with Cambria. He loved the tall, gnarled spires of Monterey pines growing everywhere, making the roads look like wide aisles for altar boys in a shady green cathedral. He loved the beach in front of his cabin—which really was full of moonstones—and he loved the tide pools filled with strange sea anemones, purple starfish, and briny clumps of bearded mussels. But what he loved most of all was his new job.

Nora started him out on production paste-up and sent him on a few inconsequential photo assignments. Crash’s photos came back looking much better than anyone could have reasonably expected. Soon he was shooting the majority of the Insurrectionist’s photos and doing most of the darkroom work, too. Nora’s previous darkroom technician had decided he had a more lucrative career ahead of him as a tree surgeon. He only hung around long enough to teach Crash the basics. It felt like alchemy to Crash, watching a silver gelatin print come up in the developer tray under the red safelights. He turned out to have a preternatural talent for photography that quickly evolved into a kind of warped greatness.

After Crash was comfortably adept with his new photography chores, Nora started assigning him to do interviews and local color pieces. She suspected Crash could write, based on what she’d heard during his drunken lecture, and the interviews had been her true goal all along. She wasn’t disappointed.

Crash started work on a series of interviews that he collectively titled Cambria Souls. His inspiration, once again, came from a line by William Blake:

The worship of God is Honouring his gifts in other men, each according to his genius, and loving the greatest men best; those who envy or calumniate great men hate God; for there is no other God.

In Crash’s mind, that line provided him with the bent justification he needed to become a “Journalist of the Soul” and go after interviews with some of Cambria’s most infamous oddball characters.

The list was long. Cambria seemed to be a magnet for independent thinkers and inspired dreamers. There was Warren Leopold, the rebel architect, who’d owned and operated a whorehouse up in Alaska with Dashiell Hammett during World War II. And there was Phoebe Palmer, the visionary portrait artist, who rendered the tacky, polyester-clad visitors to Hearst Castle—with their sun-wrinkled skin and flabby bellies—in erotic poses modeled after 11th-century Tantric temple carvings. But perhaps most significantly, there was Art Beal—alias Captain Nitt-Witt—the rabble-rousing folk art genius creator of Nitt-Witt Ridge.

To prepare for his newspaper story about Art Beal, Crash spent a lot of time hanging out on a sprung couch up in Nitt-Witt Ridge’s decrepit old crow’s nest, just shooting the breeze with Art and watching the sunset. Crash swore that a beautiful calm would sweep over him every time he was up there, making him think, This is the way life should be lived.

After the interview with Captain Nitt-Witt was published to great acclaim, Crash started writing the novel that would become Nitt-Witt Ridge. He kept up his journalism work in the meantime. By turning local people into celebrities, Crash was becoming a celebrity of sorts himself. He was finally getting some recognition as a writer.

The novel came together slowly over the next three years. Based on his earlier writing efforts, Crash had no reason to think the completed manuscript would change his life in any significant way. Unlike his previous two books, however, this one would be published. Horst Veblin—the shabby genteel publisher of the Cambria-based Owlphart Press—happened to be an avid reader of Crash’s newspaper articles. When Horst met Crash at a local bongo drumming party, he assured him that Nitt-Witt Ridge sounded like the perfect book to add to Owlphart’s roster of neo-surrealist fiction. Crash was ecstatic!

The soon-to-be-bankrupt Owlphart Press picked up Nitt-Witt Ridge for a $500 advance (the check bounced) and did an initial print run of 1,000 copies (most of which were destroyed in a warehouse fire suspected to have been started by Horst’s cousin, a twice-convicted arsonist).

Poor Crash just never had much luck with his damn novels….

He quit writing books after that. Who could blame him? He might have kept going if it hadn’t been for some well-timed discouragement from his undermining friend, Jimmy Marrsden—aka A.C. Nightshade—whose agent had sold the film rights to Jimmy’s unpublished first novel, Vampirism Made Easy, for a cool $666,000 on the very day that Crash’s books went up in flames. With his ego pumped up beyond all reason, Jimmy told Crash that it was probably for the best that Nitt-Witt Ridge’s entire print run had been torched—because the books wouldn’t have sold, anyway. Now, at least, he could collect on the insurance.

Nice, huh?

Some glib malcontent once said that success is always sweeter when it’s accompanied by the failure of a friend. I wouldn’t know anything about that, but A.C. Nightshade sure does.

The big irony is that a few years earlier, when Jimmy had hit bottom in a full-on alcoholic flameout (a quart of vodka a day, an unfaithful new wife, a chainsaw applied to the conjugal waterbed), he’d moved in with Crash to get his shit together. It was tight quarters with two big, smelly guys living in a one-room cabin, but Crash had gladly put up with Jimmy because he considered him his best friend. They’d worked on their novels together, reading the pages out loud, doing their best to crack each other up. It had been a fun and productive time for both of them—although a little skeevy on the housekeeping front.

With a check for more than half-a-million-dollars on the way to him, Jimmy decided he could finally afford to rent his own place. He moved out over the next weekend, leaving Crash with a lot of unpaid bills. Not much later, he was seen driving a sexy black Ferrari around town with spider web pinstripes and vanity plates that read: NTSHADE.

DCKHEAD would’ve been more appropriate, if you ask me.

“Success makes assholes of us all,” Crash once said to me, in a philosophical mood. He didn’t really blame Jimmy for being a jerk, but I did. “Just wait until it happens to you,” Crash told me. “You’ll do the same. Even Gandhi couldn’t please everybody.”

Well, maybe…. Look, I know I haven’t done enough to end world hunger, provide shelter for the homeless, or find a cure for Lesch-Nyhan syndrome (a disease that causes spastic but strangely personable little boys to bite off the ends of their own fingers). I’m definitely no saint. I probably could have bought five gallons of fresh water and a bucket of government rice for every starving kid in Burkina Faso with all the money I’ve spent on imported beer. But at least I look out for my friends.

That’s why, when Three Graces Press asked me if I knew of any other writers who might benefit from being published by them, I told them about Crash’s old incinerated novel, Nitt-Witt Ridge. Maybe it could rise, Phoenix-like, from the ashes, I suggested. The guys at Three Graces promised me they’d take a look at it.

Crash was a little skeptical when I told him about it. He wasn’t sure that publishing a sixteen-year-old novel was such a great idea. I pointed out to him that people still read Moby-Dick—and that’s a lot older.

“Don Quixote might’ve been a better example,” Crash told me. Then, encouraged by the vision of old Quixote tilting at windmills, he dug up the original manuscript and handed it over.

And now here it is: from my hands to yours. Books are incredibly wonderful things, don’t you think?

Reading Nitt-Witt Ridge is probably won’t change your life in any meaningful way, but if you’re the right kind of person it can provide you access to an alternate hippie-freak universe that’s somewhat kinder and happier than the world we live in now (despite the occasional exploding hamster and the rampaging of a giant, vindictive, chrome robot-rooster). The Pine Bluff of Nitt-Witt Ridge is Crash’s fictional stand-in for Cambria—a timeless place where computers, cell phones, and right-wing Republicans don’t seem to exist. Or as one of Crash’s characters imagines it:

In the Pine Bluff of Mickelodia’s dreams, no one was ever mean or egotistical. Everyone lived in a web of gentle hippie magic, connected by threads of love and serendipity. The mayor wore blue jeans. The Tao was required reading in high school. The streets were shaded by elms, oak trees, and Monterey pines taller than any buildings. When two grown men couldn’t link their hands around a tree’s trunk, Pine Bluff threw a party and gave the tree a tire swing. The tire swing count was a source of civic pride. Anyone could tell you the number.

A creek ran through the center of town. You could fish for trout from the back porch of Wilfred Logan’s General Store—but you had to use flies. Wilfred disapproved of bait.

Water wheels and solar panels provided most of Pine Bluff’s energy. Almost everyone practiced a trade—from blacksmithing to zither stringing—so that very few goods were ever brought in from the big cities. Bartering was a way of life; cash rarely changed hands. Mickelodia imagined she could get everything she needed, which was really very little, by growing a simple garden and bartering her natural skills as a babysitter, a reader of bedtime stories, a gatherer of wildflowers….

Mickelodia makes Pine Bluff sound like a place where I’d like to live—or at least be able to visit. I kind of envy Crash his days with the Cambria Insurrectionist. Those days are long gone now and maybe they were never as great as Crash makes them seem. But if the Pine Bluff of Mickelodia’s fictional imagining never truly existed, I would argue that it should exist. And it does, thanks to Crash’s writing. Nitt-Witt Ridge may be a shaggy, Brautiganesque bong water bubble of a book, but it’s also semi-profound in its own laid back way and laugh-out-loud funny. Or at least I think so.

But what the hell do I know, right?

Maybe A.C. Nightshade had it nailed from the start: the world doesn’t need or want a book like Nitt-Witt Ridge. Instead, what we need is another book about a vampire girl with perky tits who rips the throat out of a sleeping wino while the wino’s scabby, hairless Chihuahua tries to hump her leg. Or a book about demons and the fun they have eating the souls of clueless humans.

But now, at least, you’ll have the opportunity to read Nitt-Witt Ridge and make that determination for yourself, rather than having A.C. Nightshade decide for you.

I hope you end up liking Crash’s book as much as I do.

—Derek Swannson, Summer, 2007