So, you are one of the first people to read a single word of the 400 page monster I’ve been toiling over for 2 years,
“How I Abandoned a Book Deal with Penguin/Random House, Partied Away the Advance, and Ended up an Online Gig Worker. And How You Can Do it Too!”.
I’m not too far from finished, so I figured excerpts can start soon. This was actually a scene I currently have CUT from the book. I was looking at all these outtakes yesterday and realized this little action portion would be good for this blog. True story from 2018:
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It was Saturday night on calle la setetenta (seventieth street), the big weekly show, the night and place where anything could happen, any deal could be made, any manner of trouble could come walking down the street, preening with temptation. I was sitting under a tree inside a giant concrete pot that made for good sitting and people watching—the same tree under which I’d seen a trans woman beat the shit out of a Colombiano a couple weeks prior, with the man screaming “Ayudamee, ayudaameee” (help me, help meee!) as his face absorbed every blow. She had taken off her red heels, holding one in her left hand, occasionally switching from a punch to a heel strike to the face, inducing winces from onlookers.
Since it was about midnight, and of course, right on the wild wild seventieth, and right outside the triad of bars just a block up the street from my apartment, I figured it had been a case of a tipsy, machismo Colombiano denigrating the trans woman, and getting the surprise of his life. As my friend Alan from New York had said,
“Don’t think one of these trans won’t beat the shit out of you. They’ve taken so much shit during their lives, have so much built up inside of them, you DO NOT want to be the one to make her snap.”
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Notes from the Amazon by Jason Edward Harrington 