Jerry Flu

Jerry Flu graduated from the Yale School of Art and Architecture in 1966 and moved to the Big Apple to paint, freelance book jackets, hang out in the East Village, and dodge the draft. In 1970 he moved to Alaska, where, over the course of the next forty-five years, he taught school in remote Native villages, penned editorial cartoons for the Anchorage Times, wrote grant applications for rural clinic construction, and occasionally commercial fished, tended bar, rode motorcycles, boxed, played in a band, and attended court-ordered substance-abuse treatment programs. He now lives in the woods seventy-five miles north of Anchorage and spends his time writing.

Jerry Flu, as interviewed by, Who else? Jerry Flu.

Jerry: Thank you so much for taking the time out of your busy day to be here and do this interview.

Jerry: Thank you for having me.

Jerry: You say you didn’t begin to write seriously until after you turned seventy. What made you decide to embark on a new career at such a late stage in your life?

Jerry: Whaddaya mean, “late stage in my life”? I’m hardly all grown up yet. I know, some people my age take up full-time fishing and buy boats, tie flies, and dress up in Frogg Toggs and baseball caps with ridiculous sayings stenciled on them. Other geezers take up travel. They spend their golden years exploring the remote, exotic corners of the planet, globetrotting from one far-flung Holiday Inn, Walmart, Burger King, and souvenir emporium to another. Still others take up Jack Daniels. Me? I can’t afford such extravagant bucket lists—so I’ve taken up writing and self-publishing.

Jerry: What’s that, you say? You can’t afford to drown worms, tour Graceland, or book passage aboard a sock-hop reunion cruise, yet you can afford to self-publish?

Jerry: That’s right. For as little as pennies a day, well, at least for the cost of a little less than a fifth of Jack a day (individual results may vary), I can be a self-published author and share the accumulated wisdom of nearly three-quarters of a century of road trips, keggers, and court ordered attendance at twelve-step meetings with the world. And best of all, I can pick up a little extra bingo money in the process.

Jerry: Had you done any professional fiction writing before embarking on Who Killed Randy Ratphink: The Post-Mortem Adventures of a Fried-Brain Hippie?

Jerry: None, not counting a decade of writing government grant applications, which, while not quite fiction, creatively stretch the limits of non-fiction. Stylistically, grant writing can be quite crippling—clichés, jargon, buzz words, redundancies, and awkward, wordy phrasing being the surest way to the cockles of a grant reader’s heart.

Jerry: How long did it take you to write your first novel?

Jerry: It took me nearly three years to write Who Killed Randy Ratphink: The Post-Mortem Adventures of a Fried-Brain Hippie! Of course I had a steep learning curve to climb: my total fiction-writing resume when I began the project consisted of little more than the recent-relevant-experience sections of application-for-employment forms, and some ancient income-tax returns.

Jerry: Why did you choose to self-publish Who Killed Randy Ratphink: The Post-Mortem Adventures of a Fried-Brain Hippie, as opposed to going the traditional route of finding an agent and signing with one of the Big Five publishers? Was it because as a self-published author you could exercise more creative control over your writing? Control your costs? Earn larger royalties?

Jerry: Well, uh, no. To tell you the truth, I just couldn’t find a traditional publisher who wanted it. Self-publishing wasn’t my “plan A.” I’d actually submitted Who Killed Randy Ratphink to over forty agents with addresses in the Big Apple . . . with nary a nibble. But I was in good company. F. Scott Fitzgerald is said to have collected 122 rejection slips before he finally sold This Side of Paradise. Louis L’Amour finished out of the money 200 times before he made it into the winners circle. Jack London was a paradigm of perseverance: he’d accumulated over 600 rejection slips before he made his first sale. Margaret Mitchell, Jack Kerouac, George Orwell, and Mario Puzo—all skunked before they scored. Even Beatrix Potter, in days long before POD and e-book readers, was the proud proprietor of so many rejection slips she was forced to tell her Tale of Peter Rabbit in a self-published edition.

Print-on-demand technology has revolutionized publishing. Any wannabe Wilder, Wodehouse, or Wolfe with a laptop, time on his hands, and a few thousand bucks to spend on editing, cover design, and copyright registration, and whatever he can spare for marketing, has a shot at becoming the next Grace Metalious or E. L. James. So, I thought, why not I?

Jerry: So, tell me, who is this Randy Ratphink fellow?

Jerry: Randy Ratphink is Joe Six-pack with flowers in his hair. He’s a kid from mom-and-pop-and-buddy-and-sis-land who was overwhelmed by the cultural tsunami of the sixties: Eastern mysticism, drugs, activism, and rock ’n’ roll. A post-Summer-of-Love hippie whose life, and afterlife, was forever altered by forces he never fully understood, but who coped with life and death with a twinkle in his eye, a smirk on his face, and a “whatever!” attitude. In Randy’s words, “I wasn’t born rich. I wasn’t born brilliant. I wasn’t born talented. And I sure as hell wasn’t born with looks to kill for. I just played the cards I was dealt as best I could.”

Jerry: So, why should readers care about Randy?

Jerry: Because he’s funny. Because he’ll make you laugh—I hope. He made me laugh.

Jerry: Can you tell me something about the plot?

Jerry: It’s a paranormal odyssey, a dead geezer boomer’s search for his murderer through the labyrinth of his post-mortem unconscious. A whodunit tracing Randy’s struggle to hold onto his ego while he scours the memories of his most recent journey through time and space from the sixties to the present—and beyond.

Jerry: Beyond?

Jerry: Beyond the grave.

Jerry: So what’s the point?

Jerry: He that knows, doesn’t tell. He that tells, doesn’t know.

Jerry: What kind of a bullshit answer is that?

Jerry: Works for me.

Jerry: What’s the genre?

Jerry: It’s a paranormal cozy mystery, but it’s mostly humor.

Jerry: Why do you choose to write humor?

Jerry: Because it’s cheaper than analysis and less painful than electroshock therapy.

Jerry: Who are some of your favorite humor writers? Who do you read when you want a good laugh?

Jerry: Carl Hiaasen. Jimmy Buffett. Jean Shepherd. Harvey Kurtzman. Fyodor Dostoyevsky.

Jerry: Fyodor Dostoyevsky? You read Fyodor Dostoyevsky when you want a good laugh?

Jerry: I have a sick sense of humor.

Jerry: Well, thank you for dropping by, Mr. Flu. This has been a most, ur, abstruse interview.

Jerry: Abstruse? Whatever!

Jerry: And don’t forget to take your meds.

Jerry: Same to you, fella.