Imaginary Life

 Imaginary Life is drawn from my own experiences working in a steel mill for seven years in what was then ex-urban (now suburban) Phoenix, most of that time while I was in graduate school. It tells the story of the friendship shared by three mill rats in that gritty blue-collar environment: a rowdy fugitive from justice in his home state of South Dakota, a cynical wanderer from the Midwest, and a former homeless heroin addict who has lived on the streets of Phoenix but is trying to redeem himself by getting a college degree. This failed folk musician narrates the story. 

The three friends represent a class of “deplorables,” to use Hillary Clinton’s term, a class of Americans completely foreign and utterly mystifying to America’s cultural elites. In my own experience with the elites, I found that in the “race, class, and gender” triad, the “class” component was a nonentity the elites would really prefer to ignore (and wished did not exist). There’s a reason the Democrats are no longer the party of the U. S. working class, and this novel helps to elucidate that reason: They are the most non-PC, and often the most defiantly non-PC, of the social classes. But deplorables have minds and opinions of their own. Go ahead and judge them, but remember, they’ll be judging you right back. 

This book is very close to my heart, but again way too non-PC for the mainstream. If you’re inclined to seek out safe spaces where your tender consciousness can be sheltered from harsh reality, you might want to avoid Imaginary Life. Somebody like AOC, who claims her life is perpetually imperiled by speech and ideas she finds disturbing, might die ten or twenty times before she reaches the end of the novel. 

I chose the cover photo for this novel because I’m in the picture, and the guy who’s jiggling the crane lever, causing me to splatter three-thousand-degree liquid metal all over creation (and probably prompting my foreman to wonder what the hell was going on) is the asshole on whom the narrator of this story is based. He told me he wanted the metal to splash so he could get a more spectacular photo. Very funny.