| Bill
Coleman is a native
of Hamilton, Ohio, and a graduate of the University of Cincinnati. In
the past 20 years, between periods of retirement, he has worked as a writer,
editor, teacher, bartender and musician. He served as managing editor
of After Dark in New York City in 1977-78 and as editor-in-chief of The
Underground Exchange in Seoul in 1996-97. |
Mr.
Coleman's previous publications include short fiction, scholarship and criticism,
as well as newspaper and magazine articles. Trailer
Park Hippies is his first novel. He currently teaches English
at Cincinnati State College in Cincinnati, Ohio. |
Trailer Park Hippies
Set against a tacky backdrop of Midwestern squalor,
Bill Coleman's Trailer Park Hippies is a tale of parental insanity, adolescent
infidelity and the moral disintegration of the late 1960s. A 17-year-old
novice head, his father deceased, his mother confined to the state mental
hospital and his high schoolsweetheart halfway out of her bell-bottoms
on the back seat of his'61 Chevy Bel Air, meets a freaky, 23-year-old
pot dealer and ex-ecdysiast who turns out to be his cosmicsoul mate. But
when Storm leaves her husband, in the burbs and moves into trailer #37
with our young hero, his life becomes cosmically complicated. He must
learn to juggle not just two women (girlfriend Tonya and trailer- mate
Storm), but also his mother, Mona, whenever she's home on a weekend pass.As
graduation approaches, the son turns 18 and has to face some tough decisions:
Should he sign the papers to release Mona into his custody, stay in the
trailer, and ball the devoted Tonya between classes next year at SWOCC
(Straight, Weird and Overly Conservative College)? Or should he abandon
both mother and girlfriend to split on a never ending trip to California
with Storm and a trunk load of dope? More importantly, can he make the
right choice amid the distractions of school-skipping, drug-crazed teenagers
having highly consensual mobile-home sex while Country Joe and the Fish
blare at top volume from
cracked stereo speakers in the background? The answers to these questions
and more are here, in "Trailer Park Hippies."
A wonderful look at a past we'd all love to forget, but a past that will not go away.--James Crumley
A rich mirror image of the heart of America,
the craziness, the smells, the heartless anger, frustration, poverty and
godlessness that boils in the middle of this country.--Kate G. Harper,
author of Water Moccasins
Sex and drugs and rock and roll: a good old-fashioned debauchery-fest,
60s style--yet, at the same time, a quasi-classical tragedy.--Underground
Exchange
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