The Weird Origin of
The Great Dick:
And the Dysfunctional Demon

I woke from brain‑tumor surgery with a fully formed supernatural thriller in my head. Here’s how it happened.

 

A few years back, I was speaking on an Asian cruise when I snuck a peek at the clock and realized I couldn’t figure out what the hands of the clock meant. The next day, during a session, I introduced the ship’s captain. Twenty minutes later I picked him out of the audience and asked him what he did for a living. (The uniform did look a tad familiar.)

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That same day, I gave up trying to understand foreign currency. Even American money was getting tricky. In Viet Nam, a vendor wanted $7.00 U.S. for a baseball cap. I gave her two hundreds and a ten. It was a nice cap, but it wasn’t that nice a cap.

 

Back home, the first thing my doctor did, after hearing my symptoms, was have me draw a clock face at ten minutes to three. The second thing he did was take away my driver’s license. He sent me for an immediate MRI. The nurse there couldn’t comment on the results. But when I asked where the restroom was, she said,

 

“I’m sorry, I can’t let you go in there alone.”

 

I pointed out that bathroom visitation was a particular expertise of mine.

 

“Like telling time?” she asked. “You need to talk to your neurosurgeon.”

 

“I have a neurosurgeon?” Just what I always wanted.

 

I also had a brain tumor—the size of a basketball. Or maybe the neurosurgeon said “softball.” I wasn’t tracking too well at that point. Still, I quickly grasped he was planning on carving open my skull with some sort of power tool. Suddenly telling time didn’t seem nearly as important. I could always just buy a digital watch.

 

It wasn’t that I doubted the neurosurgeon’s skill or his intelligence. His walls were filled with framed diplomas, Harvard and Stanford prominently featured. But I’ve been surrounded by intelligent people my whole life, and I’ve seen some of the dumb-assed things they’ve done.

 

I don’t want to insult any readers that happen to be human, but I’ve always believed human intelligence tended to be considerably overrated. As I see it, on a scale of everything there is to know—everything there is to understand—in the universe, the main difference between Einstein and Koko the Wonder Chimp was that Einstein couldn’t pick up bananas with his feet. (As far as I know.)

 

But my brain was running out of room in my skull, so I let Chain Saw Charlie put me to sleep and carve away. Maybe I had a seizure during surgery. They weren’t sure. But I came out of it with Lady Gaga singing non-stop in my head, and a vivid, fully-formed, horrific story like a memory of something I’d just watched.  

 

Twenty-seven days of radiation targeted the remaining cancer and my remaining hair. “You might experience some small cognitive decline,” the radiologist said. No problem. Intelligence is over-rated. And it doesn’t do you any good if you’re dead. I wasn’t looking to be the smartest corpse in the cemetery.

 

Fortunately, compared to what a lot of people have gone through, I was extremely lucky. The tumor didn’t encroach upon my brain. I was able to regain my ability to think clearly—as clearly as I ever could anyway—to work, to write. I can tell time like a champ.  If anything, the experience made me more focused, more empathetic. Maybe even a bit wiser and, I think, a better writer. And it gave me that story. A story well worth writing.
 

Which worked out great, because—like an impending hanging—a brain cancer diagnosis concentrates the mind wonderfully. And I decided that I didn’t want to spend nearly as much time as I’d been spending in airports and hotels to do all those speaking engagements. I’d still do some; I love speaking. But I’d realized that what I really wanted to do was what I’d always wanted to do. And that was write novels.

 

So, I spent the next couple of years, working on that story I’d gotten in surgery. Developing the suspense, working out the potential humor, honing each scene. Making it as good as I could possibly make it. And that became The Great Dick: And the Dysfunctional Demon.

 

You can find the book here.

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