PARIS ESCAPADE - TED MYERS
In the summer of 1963, seventeen-year-old Eddie Strull goes off to Europe with a supervised camp group of New York Jewish kids. But Eddie, ever the rebel, has other plans. Eddie wants to live as an adult. A writer. Right now. When they arrive in Paris, the last stop before heading home, Eddie sneaks out of the youth hostel and disappears into the bohemian labyrinth of the Left Bank. There he encounters a colorful array of artists, writers, actors, musicians, and one extraordinary prostitute who draws him into a risky adventure. Ultimately, he becomes a wanted man, sought across Europe by the police and the ruthless henchmen of Mme LaBrot, a trafficker in prostitutes and heroin. Instant Adulthood turns out to be much more than Eddie bargained for.
This week we have a (almost) rock legend to talk to! Ted Myers, welcome to Martin Matthews Writes!
Thanks for having me, Martin. It's great to be here!
A pleasure! Tell us a little about yourself, Ted! What did you do before writing, and how did you get into it?
I grew up in New York City -- Manhattan -- which I considered to be the center of the world. And, in the '50s and '60s, I guess it pretty much was. I was always an "arty" type, starting in grade school I did a lot of drawing -- mostly cruel caricatures of teachers I despised…
Oh, I did the SAME thing, man. My mistake was drawing them on the table where I sat in class, so they had a good idea who it was doing it…but that’s another story… Please, continue!
I went to an elite public high school, the High School of Music & Art as an art major. But by then I had started playing guitar and wanted to be a musician. This was the early '60s, and in my view, the coolest thing to be was a black ("negro" then) jazz musician. So I took jazz guitar lessons and sat in on jam sessions with my black jazz musician buddies. I was actually not a good jazz guitarist, couldn't read music, but they tolerated me -- god knows why. But everything changed when The Beatles came in 1964. I had found my calling. I already had the long hair and an electric guitar, and this new rock 'n' roll was much easier to play than jazz.
In college (1964) I started my first rock band. We played at a local club in Vermont and, after a semester of rehearsing, we all dropped out and went to Boston, where we became local rock stars and got signed by Capitol Records. I was nineteen.
What happened with Capitol?
Three albums and twenty years later, I was forty, and realized the rock-star ship had sailed without me. I eventually got a job with a record company, and then another record company. fifteen years later, I was out of a job and set my sights on writing. I got a couple of jobs copywriting and proofreading for advertising companies for the next few years. But I really wanted to be an author. A published author. So I wrote short stories and some got published in literary mags. I wrote an outrageous memoir about the rock life in the '60s and '70s and it got published. After that, I decided fiction was more fun and wrote a couple of novels, both of which were ultimately published. Any resemblance between me and my protagonist in PARIS ESCAPADE (my second novel) is purely unavoidable.
Sometimes (often) the path to authorship is a meandering one. Much like life itself. Tell us a little about this new book of yours.
The headline of the press release for PARIS ESCAPADE is THE CATCHER IN THE RYE ON STEROIDS -- IN PARIS. When I read The Catcher in the Rye when I was fifteen or sixteen, I thought Holden Caulfield was a dimwit. Even then, I could write circles around him. So, for my second novel, I used the chaperoned camping trip to Europe I took when I was sixteen as a jumping off point. I made my protagonist, Eddie Strull, seventeen and the year 1963 because it was more plausible that I might have actually pulled these stunts at that age. So, the first two chapters of PARIS ESCAPADE are almost memoir. But starting when Eddie sneaks out of the youth hostel in Paris and disappears into the Left Bank, it's pure fiction.
Intriguing. Tell us more about Eddie and his friends.
It's a first-person past-tense account from Eddie's POV. On the plane and on the bus going across Europe, he forms a romantic attachment to Robin, one of his fellow campers. There's also Johnny, Evy, Art, the senior counselor, and a couple of other guy friends on the bus. Then, on the beach at St-Tropez, he meets Martisse, a beautiful artist of nineteen. He gets her address and number in Paris and they agree to meet when he gets there. No one on in his group suspects that he has been planning to disappear in Paris from the very beginning.
On his own in Paris, he finally has his rendezvous with Martisse, who turns out to be a prostitute and a junkie (in addition to being an artist). She convinces him (after sleeping with him) to go on a dangerous mission to buy heroin in Marseilles. This mission is financed and engineered by Mme LaBrot, the proprietor of the building where Martisse lives (which turns out to be a brothel).
The list of unusual characters Eddie encounters and his entanglements with the law could fill a book (LOL). There's a whole subplot that involves a serial killer who has been butchering prostitutes and happens to live in Eddie's rooming house. I also throw some real historical characters into the bouillabaisse: Legendary jazz saxophonist Dexter Gordon, legendary publisher of the Olympia Press, Maurice Girodias, and others. Luckily for me, none of these people are alive, so they can't sue me.
You read my mind! Well, maybe their relatives can sue you. So it sounds like the idea for this book came from your own background and experiences. Pretty cool! I had a similar trip to Amsterdam and Paris in my youth. The Red Light District was a real eye opener for sure. Those Russian Mafia guys are fun.
Yeah, that camping trip I took with a busload of kids all across Europe when I was sixteen was best summer of my life.
So, is there a message behind your book? The summer of lost love?
Really, it's pure escapist entertainment. But Eddie grows during the course of the story and comes to realize how his thoughtless actions affected his family and chaperones.
A real coming of age story. So tell us a little about who or what are some of your biggest influences.
Favorite writers include: Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Dan Brown and much more. The Beatles certainly influenced my music and my life. I'm a big fan of old movies, especially black-and-white noir. Directors like Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock.
Man, I love that stuff too! Classic. What are you currently reading?
From what I read of her reviews, she’s more of the falling star type maybe…? Are you working on another novel? Can you tell us anything about it?
I received numerous requests from readers and my publisher for a sequel to my first novel, Fluffy's Revolution, so I'm working on that now.
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Well, I'm seventy-five now, so I better decide soon.
Thanks for stopping by and chatting with me today, Ted. It’s been a pleasure!
Thank YOU, Martin. Always a pleasure talking about myself!
TED MYERS
After twenty years trembling on the brink of rock stardom and fifteen years working at record companies, Ted Myers left the music business—or perhaps it was the other way around—and took a job as a copywriter at an advertising agency. This cemented his determination to make his mark as an author.
His fiction has appeared in many literary magazines and anthologies. His epic and amusing memoir, Making It: Music, Sex & Drugs in the Golden Age of Rock was published in 2017. Fluffy’s Revolution, published by Black Rose Writing in 2019, was his first novel. BRW will publish his second novel, Paris Escapade, in December 2020.