Tom Bradley on Sam Edwine

People are constantly coming up to me on the street and saying, "So, Tom, tell us, are you Sam Edwine, the eponymous hero of your magisterial SAM EDWINE PENTATEUCH, comprising five award-winning novels which amount to just under a million dazzling words?"

And I say, "Well, if you stood the pair of us side by side and told him to shut the fuck up, you couldn't tell us apart. His is the higher native intelligence, while I behave better. For example, I haven't sunk a shovel into the skull of a former Iran hostage in the basement of a Popish convent; nor have I kidnapped the Crown Princess of Japan and allowed her to perform a strange kind of verbal fornication on me outside a bathroom. I did, once, however, like Sam, pass around pirated mimeographs of the Anarchist's Cookbook to an excitable bunch of grad students in Red China, resulting in at least one of them being shot in the back of the head point-blank in a public execution.

But Sam cackled about it, and I feel like a horrible shit.

"I never ate way too many psilocybin mushrooms in the Oaxacan jungle, stumbled on a man dying in the road, and failed to remember my Spanish grammar, because, unlike Sam, I never had any Spanish grammar in the first place. In fact, he speaks a lot more languages than I do. But I write better--otherwise he'd be answering this question about me instead of vice versa."

Sam Edwine came to me, fully fleshed, one night in high school, long ago. One of my pals whose dad was a pharmacist had gotten her hands on a bottomless supply of the most beautiful dexedrine I have ever seen or heard of in my whole life. It was embodied, if you can apply such a word to the elixir vitae, in these elegantly slender capsules, myriads of tiny time-release pills nestled inside, so that it came on smoother than a baby's ass, without any of the creepy Michael Jackson-type associations that image now evokes. My pals used it for sneaking into rock concerts. I, on the other hand, being a better sort of person, used it to do my English homework.

And, with that sun-in-a-magnifying-glass concentration that only a fifteen-year-old mind can conjure up, I found myself at Shrewsbury, on the plain between Hal's camp and the rebels', and this big, fat, hilarious, cowardly, self-indulgent sot was standing over a corpse, saying "...if thou embowel me to-day, I'll give you leave to powder me and eat me too tomorrow."

Having stabbed that already dispatched body (which, my drooly-trembly teacher had assured me, was among the most heinous atrocities you could perform in those codpiece days), this entity billowed up before me and said, "...with a new wound in your thigh, come you along with me." And he took me up on his back, and away we went.