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HW: Work uniform?

BC: A white tee-shirt and pajama bottoms with snowflakes on them. I know, it’s awful.

HW: Misconceptions about people who graduated from UNC?

BC: That if by some rip in the space-time continuum, Al-Qaeda managed to get a Division I college basketball team together, and if that team somehow made it to the NCAA tournament, and then survived March Madness, and, now here’s a real stretch, were facing Duke in the championship game on Monday night, that UNC fans would put aside their petty rivalry and root for Duke over the terrorists.

GINSU TONY: THE SHORT STORY THAT BECAME DESERT PLACES

I'm often asked where the idea for DESERT PLACES came from, and the primary source is the following short story I wrote in the spring of 1999, as a student in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The amazing writer, Marianne Gingher, was the professor of this intro to fiction-writing class, and I turned in a story called "Ginsu Tony" for my final project. Please don't email me to say how awful it is...I know. But for those of you who've read DESERT PLACES, you may enjoy this glimpse into its earliest incarnation.

"GINSU TONY"

BY

BLAKE CROUCH

Spring 1999

Engl. 23W

Professor: Marianne Gingher

University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

July 14

Traveled 517 miles today from Kansas City to western Nebraska. Cool and clear this morning, so I put the top down on the Jeep and drove several hundred miles with corn fields extending to the horizon and a summer wind in my hair.

Hit storms at one o'clock and drove through blinding rain for an hour. When I came into sunlight again, the land had changed. The corn fields were gone, and there was nothing but prairie as far as the eye could see. It amazes me no matter how many times I encounter this vast open space of land and sky. It's the West. It's the feeling of something that's too big for man to tame, even in this age of exploitation.

I stopped for the night in Scottsbluff. It's a small town surrounded by parched, yellow grassland and red cliffs. The sun has just dipped below the horizon as I sit on the bed in my motel room and scribble down these words. It's eight o'clock, and I'm tired and hungry, but more than anything I just need a drink. Hope there's a bar in this town.

July 15

Wyoming. It's July, and yet I saw mountains today that glistened with snow under a summer sky. Wish I'd had the time to leave the highway and drive up into the hills of this wild country, to touch snow while sweating in summer heat or to see the high, desert plain from a rocky peak.

Started late this morning. Last night is still a pleasant, throbbing dream. Got drunk and high and met a girl at the bar in Scottsbluff. She stayed the night with me, and I can only say that she was blond and had enormous tits. Good God! But I've a feeling that the obscurity of her face is a blessing. All I've got to remember her by is a half-smoked bag of weed.

I headed north today towards the Wyoming/Montana border, and the sky was cloudless and winter blue. For much of the day, the highway ran parallel to a distant chain of brown hills, separated from the highway by twenty miles of sand and sagebrush. There was rarely a sign of civilization in sight, just lonely, beautiful wasteland--my kind of country.

It's nine-thirty now, and I'm writing by the light of headlights. There's still a shadow of crimson on the western horizon, but it's useless for writing. That dying sort of light only shows the silhouette of things on the horizon, and there's nothing on the horizon here. I'm twenty miles into Montana, a quarter mile off the highway, in the midst of an immense prairie. Deerlodge is still many hours away, and I'm far too exhausted to make the journey tonight.

It's cold and clear. I'm gonna smoke a joint and go to bed. I'll throw my sleeping bag onto the grass and sleep under the stars tonight. So quiet here. No wind. Only the sound of my pen