The Recluse

I think this is it! This is--I hope--the opening of my first novel. It is going well and (I think) will be linked into my other short story "The Locked Man"

The first I heard of Oliver Dent was back in 1979 when news ripped across the headlines that he had died of a sudden cocaine overdose. I still remember the way the news gripped the city, how it fell  into a stupor and people drifted about with a a blank look in their eyes, their heads shaking, and how this daze lasted for two full weeks until Oliver Dent’s press agent released a junket which announced that the information was unequivocally false, that the famous director was alive and well and was in fact living a comfortable existence in his 18th century English manor house, enjoying the solitude of country life. I was a young man back then, just thirteen years old. But it was the way that the fervor grabbed a hold of my household and the old men hanging outside of the pool halls, how the sensational story of a mad genius’s descent into drugs and finally death caught the whole city’s attention and unified it in sorrow and confusion and relief that intrigued me. The Oliver Dent episode expanded my understanding. The news, junk news, became my world. 

       So it was only natural that I took to writing and photography. I graduated from university and after a few tough years I learned that freelance journalism was a hard and difficult life, the jobs came in slowly and the money dripped in, although I had talent it never rained nor poured, the money always dripped. After a decade or more of near poverty, I gave it up, hung up the lenses and moved on. There were some good times, though. The life of a paparazzi in the nineties was almost glamourous and still very innocent. I had gotten some exclusive photos of Kurt Cobain holed up in some dive on the Sunset Strip and sold these for a pretty penny to The Inquirer, got shots of Tarantino going out the back door of the Viper Room, Johnny Depp jumping into a limo with Kate Moss. But 1997 rolled around and Lady Di and Dodi Fayad were crushed in her car and the glitz and glamour died with her; I could no longer do the chase. I realized this was no line of business for a man with a conscience and so I found something else. 

       Nothing quite matched Oliver Dent’s disappearance for me, though. The questions surrounding his disappearance had a more alien texture than anything else I had dealt with before; it was an oddity, an event that burned deeply into the collective consciousness. The media and celebrities were still innocent back then and I guess I was too. Fast forward twenty years and the hype surrounding celebrities was drowned out and droll. A celebrity’s death is flashed on the screens, singed into our ever depleting memory banks and within days we move on, soak up the car bombs in Iraq with our pizzas and beer, and hang around waiting for the next great death. For me, though, no death was as great as Oliver Dent’s. Although he had lived, he was gone; gone from the public eye, no longer attending functions, or doing interviews, no longer pumping out films that redefined the medium’s landscape. But, Oliver Dent wasn’t gone for me. His story stayed with me and I followed his story in the newspapers and magazines and art journals until they stories and interviews stopped but I continued to search for whatever material I could find, which were scant and slapdash. I couldn’t forget the hysteria and wanted answers. Why was he no longer putting out feature length movies? What happened to the man, the great man that was?

 

Author's Note

I'm wondering if this grabs you? Does it work? Sorry about and grammar mistakes. I'm following the books and not going back to edit until much later. Now is write, write, write time.