An old Banner colleague hails "Last Baby Boomer"

I’m thrilled with all the 5-star amazon reviews “Last Baby Boomer” has earned. I’m posting this one in its entirety because it’s so carefully crafted — not to mention flattering — and because it’s from one of my many old friends from my Nashville Banner days. I was so lucky to have been tutored in writing and life by these vibrant men and women who coincidentally were great, lively journalists. I couldn’t have as a writer been treated to better formative years for what I hoped to one day become.

And that’s a storyteller.

5-stars

Live and Let Die

By William C. Hudgins on January 6, 2017

Format: Paperback

Disclosure: I’ve known Chris Rodell, author of The Last Baby Boomer, for around 30 years, starting when we were reporters at the late, great Nashville (TN) Banner. Neither of us owe the other money, though I think I owe him a couple of beers. I’d hoped to liquidate that debt at the tavern above which he had his office for a number of years, but the bar closed, and its resident wit had to find other accommodations.

This was also a loss for the community—by which I mean the regulars who occupied the barstools and hashed out the world’s problems with Chris. It seems likely that many of the quips, puns, jokes, shaggy dog stories and absurdities in The Last Baby Boomer were distilled from those companionable afternoons and evenings. And that more than a few of the characters, including the hero, the ancient Marty McCrae, sat a few places down from the author.

The Last Baby Boomer is funny meditation on life—and like life itself, there are bittersweet moments softened only by our ability to laugh at some random absurdity. And there is a central tragedy that is slowly revealed, which, like so much in life, leaves only questions.

The plot is deceptively simple—at age 117 Marty is the last Baby Boomer on earth. Despite a life of carousing, multiple marriages, making and blowing piles of money, and even being shanghaied to a distant planet, Marty seems to blunt the Grim Reaper’s scythe. A chance encounter with a stranger leads to what—before reality TV—would have seemed absurd: Marty agrees to be the focus of a ghoul pool on when he will die.

Installed in a specially designed suite in a museum, Marty welcomes an unending line of visitors who each get precisely 14 minutes and 59 seconds in his presence. The ghoulish guest who’s present when Marty kicks wins the ever-growing jackpot.

Marty doesn’t need money himself—he agrees to star in this macabre event so he can have a captive audience for his yarns and social commentary. As the timer counts down, Marty chats up each visitor and takes aim at tempting targets like politics, religion, technology, big Pharma, marriage, divorce, the entertainment industry, and, of course, the Baby Boomer generation’s narcissistic pursuit of perpetual youth and eternal life.

The Last Baby Boomer is a droll sketch of our media- and youth-obsessed culture, one that’ll have you laughing out loud between chuckles (and maybe the occasional pun-induced groan—though like Rodell I’ve never met a pun I wouldn’t take home to meet my folks). It wouldn’t surprise me if something like Marty’s ghoul pool does happen in a couple of decades—I just hope they give Rodell credit (and a big check).

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Check out www.ChrisRodell.com!

Exposing myself to high school students

I exposed myself to about 30 high school communications students yesterday. I was there to answer their questions about how I earn my living.

I told them you need to be provocative -- that’s what I tried to do here with that first sentence. So there’s no need to alert the authorities.

Of course, I didn’t expose myself in the criminal manner. But whenever I talk to students or people who sincerely desire to write for a living, a big encouraging part of me gets naked.

I’m usually self-effacing to the point of belittling about what I do for a living. I think that has to do with where I call home. Latrobe isn’t bohemian Chelsea or some dippy art enclave perched on the unstable cliffs overlooking the Pacific Ocean.

This is western Pennsylvania, a land populated by good hearted men and women with a reputation for rolling up their sleeves and going to work. They punch clocks in steel mills, on police beats and in the blue collar jobs that invariably lead to sore feet, aching backs and clocks in basement bars that count down the years, months and days until retirement brings relief.

How on earth can I compare what I do for a living with what they do? Even a rare day that’s bottom-line productive means having a pleasant chat with someone, sitting down in my cozy little office, selecting an inspiring iPod playlist for the stereo and then trying to conjure up a compelling tale. And there’s usually some brainstorming juggling involved.

I’m a storyteller. I had it put on my business cards -- Storyteller -- in places where other people put things like accountant, attorney or podiatrist.

So I go out of my way to deprecate how I make my money. In the great scheme of things, it’s like going to work in a sandbox full of bright little Tinker toys. It’s an endless recess.

I always wonder later if it’s right to tell students it’s possible to earn a living -- not necessarily a good one -- by skating through life the way I do. But I’ll never flinch in that situation.

How could I? It’s just so flattering to sit there and have so many bright eyes and raised hands ask you questions about how I got where I am, a place that clearly many of them think they’d like to be.

I was pleased that so many of them had read and seemingly enjoyed many of the offbeat stories from the obscure part of my website I call “The Orphanage,” a section of unpublished stories that are available for love or professional adoption. They wanted to know if the how much heart I put into satirical stories about the possibilities of golf in heaven and how, just maybe, God would be grateful if for just one week nobody prayed for anything.

They wanted to know where my inspiration for fiction and essays comes from. I fumbled around, but told them I really don’t know. If I did, I’d hunt the bastard down and flog the crap out of it for the many days when it spends avoiding me.

It went so well I’m probably going to keep the raft of e-mails from students who went out of their way to thank me and tell me I’m great. I may re-read them on the days when mounting rejections sinisterly try to convince me otherwise.

After the bell rang and I was getting read to leave, one friendly, lanky kid asked if I was famous. I felt like whistling the whole bunch of them back into their seats for a schedule-disrupting discourse on the answer:

“No,” I laughed, “I’m not famous. And I won’t consider myself so until editors and publishers call me and beg for fresh stories. I’m not the kind of writer who wants Spielberg or Eastwood to turn his novel into a movie. I’m the kind of writer that hopes someone -- anyone -- will publish his novel so it won’t sit there like a nagging reminder that it was just a colossal waste of time . So, no, I’m not famous.”

It was the only fib I told the whole day.

Because, truly, I am famous. I’m famous in places like that classroom and anyplace where someone struggling aspires to live solely by his or her wits. I’m famous to people who want to create something out of nothing and get paid, no matter how meager, for the proud little result.

Several of the students have said they were going to start reading this journalistic equivalent of a lemonade-stand for inspiration. And you know what that means.

It means I’ll have to strive to be even more ruthlessly honest. I can’t be caught in some rhetorical mischief because it’s likely someone’s going to call me on it and expose me as a fraud.

And I wouldn’t want to get caught with my pants down.