The World According to Gio

The last couple of years of high school and for some time after until I got my first home computer, I had one of those electronic typewriters. The kind that actually had a 3 1/2" disc drive and a little bit of memory so you could save what you were writing in ASCII format. It was ridiculously expensive at the time, but cheaper than a computer, and good enough for writing papers, and definitely a step up from the manual IBM typewriter I'd been using at school until then (we started having computers at home some time in the late 70s because of Dad's job, but none of those joined me at boarding school...). Anyway, a lot of years, several countries, and a couple of continents later, I still have this small box of 3 1/2" discs, full of papers, letters and other drivel from my high school days.

Occasionally, when I'm looking for writing inspiration, I'll select one at random and pop it into Kosh's floppy drive, to see what's on there and whether I can recycle it in any way. The entire can-opener/hospital scene at the very beginning of London Calling was recycled from an anecdote about Schnuffi and myself I wrote back then.

So last night I popped a random unlabelled disc into my drive, and amongst the philosophy papers and English essays, I found a file that turned out to be 25K words of the beginning of a novel about a bunch of old high school friends whose lives are falling apart for various reasons as one of them is dying of AIDS. It's not very good, it's highly melodramatic and you can smell the issues a mile off. But I vaguely remember writing this when I had my first pretty good seat for a death. Before then I'd been up in the cheap seats of the balcony, but that one struck pretty close to home, and I needed some sort of occupational therapy.

I read on a bit, trying not to cringe too much, and found a lot of familiar scenes: the open-casket funeral of the brother of somebody I went to HS with, who had died very, very messily of a heroin overdose (and by the way, when somebody dies very messily, an open casket might not be the best choice for the funeral), the meeting with somebody I knew in elementary school, just after she'd been dumped by her first real bf because of her mother's cuttlery (I kid you not!), a re-writing of several memorable fights with saabman, a swan song to somebody I knew well who drank himself to death... it's all there, several years of teenage drama compressed into 25,000 words.

Nobody will ever see the original (too bad!), but I think a couple of scenes are salvageable, re-writable through the kaleidoscope of time and experience into scenes of other stories. Maybe they'll even be half-way good :)