The late Gabriel Gracia Marquez was one of my all-time favorite authors, one of the most gifted authors of his time. In my mind, he was up there with Thomas Merton and Henri Nouwen – someone whom you could pick up one of his works and know you wouldn’t go away disappointed.

Sure, he was probably a Marxist by nature, but his prose was seldom equaled, and whether it was on a lounge chair on a cruise ship or soaking my bod in a bubble bath at home, whenever I felt like escaping to another place (i.e., Latin America) and simply enjoying the gift of writing for what it is, his works always took me away and brought me pleasure.

For the preamble of the Goodboys newsletter this year, I thought I would try and write something in the spirit of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Here, then, is the preamble to my first novella (planned for the fall of this year), “A Goodboy in His Himalayan Decrepitude”. It tells the story of Goodboy Ron “Cubby” Myerow, who ends up the lone remaining Goodboy following a time of American evolution and revolution where the liberal intelligentsia has triumphed and, in a post-Hillary Clinton presidency, put all Goodboys they could find to death.

But not Cubby: out of a dream he finds the path to Buddhism, and in his dotage, finds his dharma as a Tibetan priest high in the Himalayas:

“…And it occurred to him in those later years, when he could still vaguely recall his time as a Goodboy, before the ravages of time and space would rob him of those memories forever, that it had all seemed akin to a dream, that of doors opening and doors closing, much in the way the dense jungle gives way to the open sea and in the abandonment of her clothing a mistress submits to her lover. The bricks of the monastery floor felt cool to his feet in the gray dampness of the Tibetan morning, easing the fever that raged in his head. He longed for an orange, yet found only almonds in the kitchen. Perhaps it was the fever that brought back so clearly in his mind the way it had all ended: the smell of lilac, the Elizabeth Montgomery statue, the final ceremonial tossing of that damned Spielberg Memorial Trophy into Salem harbor. Before the Goodboys he had been Ron, once a Goodboys (always a Goodboy?) he had been Cubby, now in his dharma he was Drokmi Lotsawa. ‘Things have a life of their own’, he recalled “Vegas” Clark saying before his execution. ‘And this thing is horseshit.’ A gong echoed across the fog-shrouded Himalayas. He heaved a heavy sigh and returned to his bed.

I await an interested publisher.