The Witch Hunt

There’s a hysteria in the literary world right now, and it has the feel of a witch hunt. Did you use AI? Are you sure? Can you prove it? Show us your drafts. Show us your process. Swear on the bones of your craft that no machine touched your precious words.

It’s the same energy as every other moral panic. The same breathless accusation. The same guilty-until-proven-innocent theater. Someone points a finger, an algorithm spits out a percentage, and suddenly you’re defending your humanity to strangers on the internet. It’s COVID masks for the literary class. It’s are-you-now-or-have-you-ever-been.

In March, Hachette killed a horror novel called Shy Girl by Mia Ballard. One phone call from the New York Times and the book was dead within twenty-four hours. Almost two thousand copies already in readers’ hands in the UK. The author says a freelance editor introduced AI without her knowledge. Doesn’t matter. Contaminated. Pull it. Next.

Two weeks ago, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize — nearly eight thousand entries, one of the most prestigious short fiction competitions in the English-speaking world — announced its five regional winners. Days later, Pangram, an AI detection platform, flagged three of the five as partially or fully AI-generated. Three out of five. The literary internet descended like villagers with torches. The foundation issued statements about “artistic integrity.” The actual writers — accused, exposed, dragged — mostly went silent.

And here’s the part nobody wants to say out loud: the publishing industry was already broken before AI showed up. The average person has almost zero chance of being traditionally published. The gatekeepers are fewer and more frightened than they’ve ever been. AI didn’t break the system. It just gave a dying industry a new thing to be hysterical about. A new way to pretend it still has standards, when the truth is that Hachette didn’t catch it, the Commonwealth judges didn’t catch it, and the readers and the algorithms were the ones who blew the whistle.

I Use AI. I Have Nothing to Hide.

So let me be clear, since apparently this is something a writer now has to declare, like a customs form.

I have used AI as a tool in my work. Proudly and unabashedly. Not as a substitute for my own creativity — as a tool. The way a carpenter uses a nail gun instead of a hammer. The way a photographer uses Lightroom instead of a darkroom. My story is my story. I lived it. I carry it. No machine gave me the memories of hitchhiking ten thousand miles across America in 1973, or building a windsurfing school in Antigua, or the decades that followed in Vermont. AI didn’t give me any of that. What it gave me was a way to organize, to clarify, to move faster through the mechanical parts so I could spend more time in the places that matter — the remembering, the feeling, the truth of the thing.

I have nothing to hide. And I think anyone who treats the use of a tool as a confession has lost the plot entirely.

The Voice Was Always the First Draft

When I wrote Thumb Out — my first memoir, 330 pages — large parts of it began as dictation. Not dictation in the formal sense, not a man at a desk speaking into a recorder. More like walking through the woods behind my house in Vermont, talking. Just talking. Remembering.

The whole point was to defeat the blank page. I didn’t want to be the tormented writer in the garret with a typewriter and a bottle of whiskey, staring at nothing, waiting for inspiration to strike. That’s a myth and it’s a destructive one. I wanted to enter a state of remembrance — to get a flow going, to let the stories move through me the way they actually live inside me, which is as voice, not as text. The page came second. The page was always second.

What’s happening on YouTube right now is essentially that same thing, turned outward.

There’s a wave of creators — not influencers, not personalities, just people — making extremely casual, straight-to-camera content with almost no production. No sets. No thumbnails designed in Canva. No hype. Just a person talking about something real. And YouTube’s algorithm is rewarding it, especially for small channels. The platform is actively surfacing this kind of work.

Think about that for a second. The publishing industry is tearing itself apart trying to figure out which words were typed by a human and which were generated by a machine. And right next door, there’s a platform that just says: talk. Be a person. That’s enough.

No editor can contaminate it. No algorithm can flag it. It’s your face, your voice, your memory, unmediated. Either you were there or you weren’t. Either you have something to say or you don’t.

So I Started a YouTube Channel

I set it up today. The handle is @andrejdsp — same as this Substack, same as the website. Three videos are already up.

This Substack stays what it is. The writing, the memoir work, the long form — that lives here. The YouTube channel is something else. It’s the voice that comes before the page. Some of what I carry doesn’t want to be written down. It wants to move. It wants cadence and pauses and the particular quality of light in a story told out loud rather than read in silence. It wants a face behind it.

The channel is at youtube.com/@andrejdsp

If you go, I hope something holds you.

— AJ

The box arrived this morning. I knew what was in it. I’d been waiting for it for over a week — longer than that, really. I’d been waiting for it for fifty three years.

I opened it and there it was. Thumb Out. Volume One of The Spaces Between. 330 pages. Hardcover. As thick as a slab of 5 quarter inch pine. I picked it up and just held it. The thing has weight. Real weight. After years of staring at screens — at PDFs and ePubs and cover files and margin settings — here was something I could actually hold in my hand.

What I felt was a sense of accomplishment and finality. Pride in persistence, in effort, in determination finally paying off. And I’ll admit — pride that I opened it to a dozen random pages and didn’t find a single mistake.

Let me try to explain what went into it.

I’m 74. Learning Kindle Direct Publishing’s cover designer. Learning via Claude what recto and verso mean. Learning about gutters and bleeds and leading and why a chapter should always start on a recto page. Watching Claude build Python build scripts to typeset a 330-page interior with the right proportions that suited my style and preferences. Learning ePub structure. Learning all of it, in my seventies, because the book demanded it.

Three years. From the first draft of what was then called Surfing the Interstates to the book I’m holding today. It wasn’t a straight line. The book started as one thing, became another, got published, got unpublished, got expanded, got combined with a companion volume, got rebuilt from the ground up.

Surfing the Interstates turned out to be Act Two of the final book — the road itself, 7,000 miles hitchhiking in the summer of 1973. Then I wrote Boomerang — four chapters of backstory before the road, eight chapters of aftermath after it. Then I realized they weren’t two books. They were one. Thumb Out is the sandwich: Boomerang as the bread, Surfing the Interstates as the meat. Twenty-eight chapters. Three acts. The complete story of a young man in motion — what launched him, what the road gave him, and what it finally cost him to stop.

Now about that cover.

The image is a DALL-E generation, shaped over many iterations with Claude’s help. What I wanted was something that felt like a memory — and somehow we got there.

Look at the compositional line: it runs diagonally from the guitar hanging at the hitchhiker’s side, up through the outstretched thumb, right into the oncoming headlights. Your eye follows that line before you know you’re following it. And off to the left, almost hidden in the warm haze — the old farmhouse, and beside it a weeping willow.

There was a giant weeping willow over a pond in front of our house at Ledge Acres. My mother loved that tree. There’s something bittersweet about a willow that weeps. I didn’t ask for it specifically. It arrived in the image via AI magic and I recognized it immediately.

The road itself carries the quality of Byram Lake Road — the paved road at the foot of the dirt road we lived on — the one I crossed when I stuck out my thumb in the summer of 1973. The mountains in the background blend the Rockies, the Sierras, and the coastal ranges of California, all at once. The whole trip in one frame.

And the colors. That warm golden amber against the deep blue of the sky. The thumb right in the headlights, dead center. I’ve stared at this cover for weeks and it still pleases me every time.

The main thing I feel, holding this book, is a sense of having come full circle.

At twenty-one I stuck out my thumb with eighty borrowed dollars and no plan. Scared but certain that if I just kept moving, something would open up. It did.

At seventy-four I sat down to relive it, wrestle with it, understand it — and discovered I had to learn an entirely new set of skills just to get the book into print. Different road. Same principle. Keep moving. Something will open up. It did.

Even if I never sell a single copy, opening that box this morning was my payoff.

The point was never the destination. The point was the journey. The road teaches you that at twenty-one and you spend the rest of your life remembering it.

Thumb Out (Vol. 1 of The Spaces Between) is available to read in its entirety for paid subscribers ($5 per month) here on Substack (with embedded author readings) — with new chapters from Volume 2, Sahara Dust, dropping as they’re written. Volume 3, Green Mountain Flash, will follow.

Read my book !!!

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ subscribe

A few weeks ago I published Thumb Out, Volume One of The Spaces Between — the story of the summer I was twenty-one, when I dropped out of college, stuck out my thumb on the side of Route 22, and headed for California with a backpack and a 1943 Harmony Cremona archtop guitar. The book covers seventy-two days on the road in 1973. It also reaches back into earlier years, because that’s how memory works — the road keeps unlocking doors you didn’t know were there.

Three objects from that journey ended up shaping the book.

A guitar I bought for eighty-five dollars at Manny’s on 42nd Street. A tambourine that came down off the stage from Pigpen’s hands at a Grateful Dead concert. And three translucent stones — white, pink, and yellow — that I found in a dream on a bluff above the California coast and wrote down in my journal the next morning.

I lost the first two. The third never existed in the first place.

This week I gathered the stand-ins I had collected over the last 6 months for all three of them, set them up on a table in my house, and took the photograph above. This is a post about why.

The guitar in the photograph is not the guitar.

The original was that 1943 Harmony Cremona archtop. It went four thousand miles with me. Through Pennsylvania rain, Colorado mountains, redwood fog, the desert. Jerry Garcia held it once at the Grateful Dead’s office in San Rafael, sat on an amp, played a few bluesy bars, and called it a cannon. These old ones, they’ve got songs already inside them. The wood remembers everything. He pointed out the Brazilian rosewood fingerboard and the wooden trapeze tailpiece — wartime build, metal scarce, needed for bullets.

Not long after Jerry held it, it was stolen out of my campsite in Santa Elena Canyon while I slept. I woke up to a depression in the dust where it had lain all night, and footprints — not mine — leading to the road.

That guitar carried Jerry’s hands. It carried Pigpen’s tambourine in the same backpack. It carried every campfire and every silence and every song I tried to learn in the dark. And then it was just gone, the way things go when you live on the road.

The guitar in the photograph is a 1940 Harmony Cremona, the exact same model, purchased last fall on reverb.com, since fully restored by a professional luthier. Same headstock. Same F-holes. Same Brazilian rosewood fingerboard. But this one is pre-war, so it has the original metal tailpiece — not the wooden one they switched to in ‘43, when metal went to bullets. Not the original. A stand-in.

The tambourine is also a stand-in.

The original came from Pigpen’s hands at Irvine Auditorium on October 16, 1970 — Bob Weir’s birthday, my freshman year at Penn. Acid on my tongue, ten thousand organ pipes overhead, the Dead playing electric communion. Ron McKernan handed it down off the stage. I carried it home that night to a yellow room I’d painted on cocaine, and the tambourine sat there on the floor catching light while everything else in my life rearranged itself.

I lost it somewhere in the years that followed. I don’t even remember where. That’s the worst kind of losing — not a dramatic theft, just slow attrition, the way objects slip out of your life when you’re moving too fast to notice.

The tambourine in the photograph is black plastic with brass jingles. It doesn’t have Pigpen’s fingerprints on it. But when I set it on the table next to the guitar, something in me recognizes it anyway.

The crystals never existed.

I dreamed them on a bluff above Bixby Creek in October 1973, three months into the road. In the dream I was barefoot in warm African mud, walking through golden grasses toward a village where everyone had grown up together. I came upon three translucent stones, each the size of a peach pit. One is white, one is pink, and one is yellow. I gathered them, cleaned them in a stream, and put them in my pocket.

I wrote the dream down in my journal the next morning. White for clarity. Pink for the heart. Yellow for what I could not yet name. The three stones traveled with me for fifty-three years inside that journal, never as objects, only as words on a page.

The crystals in the photograph are the first time they have ever existed in the physical world. Citrine, rose quartz, clear quartz. They are stand-ins for objects that were never lost because they were never real to begin with — and yet they were the most real of the three, because the dream survived when the guitar and the tambourine did not.

Here is the part I didn’t expect.

I wrote most of Thumb Out before I went looking for any of these objects. The book was already done. The guitar was on the page, the tambourine was on the page, the three stones were on the page. The writing didn’t need them.

But the writing pulled them into the world anyway.

I went and found a 1940 Harmony Cremona and had it restored. I bought a black tambourine. I bought three crystals — citrine, rose quartz, clear quartz — and arranged them on the table where I write. Not because I needed them to remember. Because the act of writing for two years had made them necessary in a different way. They had become real on the page, and the page wanted them in the room.

That is something I didn’t know about memoir until I was deep inside one. The book doesn’t just record what happened. It calls things back. Sometimes it calls back the original — Jerry’s exact words from a 1973 afternoon in San Rafael, surfacing unbidden after fifty-three years. And sometimes it calls back something close enough to stand in for what was lost, because the loss itself has become part of the story.

On May 23 I’ll be signing books at Bear Pond Books in Stowe. The guitar will be there. The tambourine. The three crystals. Talismans, all of them — not the originals, but truer than nothing, and the only kind of evidence a memoirist gets to bring.

The wood remembers everything, Jerry said. Even when the wood is different wood.

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ subscribe

e-book ~ kindle ~ paperback ~ hardcover ~ subscribe

For Charlie and Anni

That moment -

you both walking toward me

coming up Oregon Road

backlit in the dying light

holding hands

You’ve both been in my heart

since mama brought you home

You still are

Epigram

(Author readings are embedded at the top of each chapter)

Every young man tells himself a story about who he’s going to become.

My dreams were blocked.

Every resource denied.

All that was left was the side of an American highway.

Thumb out.

Scared shitless.

But I felt a growing confidence that if I just put one foot in front of the other and walked out that door, I would make it.

I had nothing to lose and everything to gain.

ACT ONE: BEFORE THUMB OUT

Purple Barrels

Fish Out Of Water

The Band That Never Played Out

Detonation

ACT TWO: SURFING THE INTERSTATES

Thumb Out

Turn On Your Lovelight

The Kindness of Strangers

The Price of Paradise

The Frequency of Freedom

Solitary Push

Chicken Coop Days

Sasha Among the Giants

Target Practice

Let the Guitar Decide

ZIP!

Love Through Stone

The Ocean Don’t Lie

Out in the West Texas Town of El Paso

The Descending Dark

Phantom Ships

ACT THREE: AFTER THUMB OUT

Caught In The Light

Together Brothers

The Grind

The Rug

Hitting The Big Time

The Factory Floor

An Entrepreneur Is Born

Before Thea

“Raw, unflinching 1970s hitchhiking memoir blending family trauma, Vietnam-era tension, Grateful Dead mysticism, and vivid road encounters. Strong voice, evocative prose, no filler—reads like Kerouac raised on acid and Allman Brothers.”

A few months ago I made a decision that surprised me. Surfing the Interstates — the 1973 hitchhiking memoir I’d been carrying for fifty years and finally published in 2025 — wasn’t a standalone book after all. It was the middle of one.

What was missing was the boy before the road, and the man who came back. Both of them needed their own pages. So I wrote Boomerang — the four years before Surfing the Interstates and the seven years after.

But it didn’t feel right to have them as two separate books. I decided Boomerang was the bread and Surfing the Interstates was the meat. So I made a sandwich.

The result is Thumb Out, Volume One of The Spaces Between Memoir Series.

Two voices share the book. The opening and closing acts are told in the reflective voice of a seventy-four-year-old man looking back — sentences that breathe and circle and take their time. The middle act — the road itself — is written in a cinematic present tense: short, fragmented, verb-forward, the way the road actually felt when I was twenty-one and broke and scared.

Below are three short excerpts, one from each act. Together they show what Thumb Out is and how it moves.

FROM ACT ONE — BEFORE THUMB OUT

Chapter 1: Purple Barrels

I wasn’t ready. Everyone knew it except the one person whose opinion mattered.

I was thirteen when my father pulled me out of Whitby Montessori School and sent me to the Phillips Exeter Academy. A year early, to save a year of tuition — the kind of calculation that made perfect sense on paper and no sense at all inside the life of a boy who’d just begun to find his footing. Paul Czaja, who’d taught me to sit with a photograph and let words come from the silence, thought it was a mistake. My other teachers agreed. The boy needed another year. I had friends now, or the beginnings of them — girls in Greenwich I couldn’t see outside of school because they lived thirty minutes away and I didn’t have a car, but still. The architecture of a social life, just starting to take shape.

My father didn’t care. Exeter was Exeter. The name carried weight. The boy would adjust. He had gone from Choate to Harvard.

I didn’t, not really. I survived.

This is the voice of the older narrator — full sentences, internal weather, the long view. This is how Act One opens, and how Act Three returns at the end.

FROM ACT TWO — SURFING THE INTERSTATES

Chapter 5: Thumb Out

Tossing and turning, I finally awake. Twenty-one and broke. Already past noon, the mid-July sun in its full glory. I’ve been crashing in Ledge Acres’ servant’s quarters in the back of our sprawling 1865 farmhouse. Jimmy Matsudo’s old room. One foot already out the door.

Getting up. Survey the clutter. 1943 Harmony Cremona, I’ve nicknamed “Mona,” safe in her battered hard case. Brand new Kelty backpack loaded — tent, sleeping bag, mess kit, few days’ food. Sony cassette deck with carefully recorded mix tapes: Dead, Allmans, Airplane, CSN. Colombian weed and Bambus tucked away. Water bottle full. Everything I own.

Wander the empty house. My father — moved to the city. The younger kids — scattered to camps and day school. The two older sisters — somewhere. My mother — has taken Nana to the Senior Center.

Passing the living room doorway. Stop.

The July heat can’t erase the ghost of that first Christmas at Ledge Acres.

The voice shifts. Verb-forward, fragmentary, present tense. This is the engine of the road sections — sixteen chapters of it, from leaving Ledge Acres to a five-day fast in a Texas canyon. The whole middle of the book runs at this rhythm.

FROM ACT THREE — AFTER THUMB OUT

Chapter 21: Caught In The Light

The two of us stood in the middle of the road, looking south.

And coming toward us from the direction of 684, over the crest of the next hill — golden hair first. Blonde and straight and fine, backlit by late afternoon sun. Turner light — low, slanting, the kind that dissolves edges and makes the world look like a memory even while you’re standing in it. Then their heads. Their shoulders. Small bodies in navy and white, Rippowam uniforms, collared shirts. Books in one hand each.

And their free hands holding each other.

Charlie. Twelve. Anni. Ten. Walking home from school.

They were the babies. Youngest two of six, and the only ones truly native to Ledge Acres — born at Northern Westchester Hospital, rooted in this place from their first breath. A solid decade of one address, one school to walk home from. They had lifelong friends. I’d moved eight times by their age and lost touch with all of mine.

The reflective voice returns. The boy who left has come home to a sold house and an arthritic dog, and his two youngest siblings are walking up the road. This is where Act Three begins, and where the book turns its attention to what was left behind.

That’s the architecture. Two voices, three acts, one volume. The boy on the porch at thirteen, the man with his thumb out at twenty-one, the man who came back at twenty-two and had to figure out what to do with what he’d seen.

If any of that pulled you in, Thumb Out is available in paperback, hardcover, Kindle as well as an e-book for non kindle readers. The whole story runs about 110,000 words, twenty-eight chapters, the long arc from Exeter to the canyon and back to Pound Ridge.

e-book download

kindle

paperback

Volume Two — Sahara Dust: 1980’s Windsurfing Antigua Memoir — is in progress with chapters dropping here as they are written. Be sure to subscribe and receive them in your email.

Someone asked me recently what the payoff was for a reader who buys my memoir, Thumb Out. It was a fair question. I thought about it seriously and gave a serious answer.

But the more honest answer is the one I gave after that.

The payoff that matters most from this book has already been collected. I collected it in the writing. Everything else — sales, reviews, readers, whatever praise or indifference the world decides to offer — is gravy.

I want to explain what I mean, because I think it matters to anyone who has ever considered writing something true about their own life and talked themselves out of it.

Writing Thumb Out was a deep dive into understanding my life. Not performing my life for an audience. Not crafting a narrative designed to make a reader like me or feel comfortable with me or come away with a tidy lesson. Just looking at the thing honestly and writing down what I saw.

What I saw was not always flattering. I was a young man of considerable privilege who took a very long time to do anything with it. I drifted. I chased a film career across three thousand miles and six years and learned, finally, that what I was chasing was hollow. I lost a guitar to a theft I partly enabled. I walked away from things I should have said something about. I spent years in rooms that were wrong for me, doing work that had nothing to do with who I was, and called it searching.

Writing all of that down — not to excuse it, not to dramatize it, but simply to see it clearly — was worth more than I can calculate. Not because confession is therapeutic, though maybe it is. Because understanding your own life is one of the rarest things a person can do, and most people never do it at all.

The book cost me something to write. There are scenes in it that required me to implicate myself, to resist the comfortable version of events, to let the people I loved be complicated rather than heroic or villainous. That is hard work. It is also the only work that produces anything true.

I am not going to pretend I have no interest in whether people read it. I do. I think it is a good book. I think the readers who find it will get something real from it — permission, maybe, to look at their own drifting years without shame, or recognition of the particular pain of a father who could have shown up and didn’t. Those are not small things to offer a stranger.

But I refused to write the book a market might have asked for. I am who I am. I cannot twist myself into a pretzel chasing acceptance. The book that gets written in pursuit of approval is never as good as the book that gets written in pursuit of truth, and I have read enough of both to know the difference from the inside.

So here is what I will tell you about Thumb Out.

It is the first volume of a memoir called The Spaces Between. It covers my years before the road, on the road hitchhiking across America in 1973, and the decade that followed — New York, California, Hollywood, and finally the return east that ended with a paintbrush in my hand and a golden retriever named Brer riding shotgun in my Datsun. It is written in a voice I have spent fifty years developing and did not compromise to make anyone comfortable.

The payoff for you, if you read it, is something I cannot fully promise in advance. That is the nature of honest books. They give you what they give you, and it is different for every reader.

What I can promise is that I did not hold anything back.

E-BOOK
KINDLE
PAPERBACK

A 50-year memoir spanning 1973 to 2023 chronicles one man’s journey from compulsive wanderer to reluctant settler—from hitchhiking across America during the last wild summer of the 1970s to finding hard-won wisdom in learning to stay put. This three-book memoir series explores the evolution from thumb-out freedom to the inevitable truth that you can’t outrun what travels in your bones.

What if everything you've been taught about freedom was wrong? What if the answer isn't in the leaving but in the staying? What if paradise isn't a place you find but what remains after everything else fails?"

Volume One: "Thumb Out”

Published April 22, 2026

Summer 1973. A 21-year-old dis-inherited French aristocrat's son “borrows” $80 and hitchhikes 7,000 miles across Nixon's crumbling America. Jerry Garcia blesses his guitar. UFOs read the Pacific's memory. A paranoid friend ends up in a police shootout. In a Big Bend canyon, fasting and alone, he receives a vision of water and a woman who moves with the wind. The road teaches him he needs the ocean.

Read More

Subscribe now

Volume Two: "Sahara Dust"

Currently being written

1982-1987, Antigua, West Indies. Building a sandcastle dream on a massive pristine beach with Thea, the woman from the prophecy. The woman born with cystic fibrosis who ignored her life expectancy, choosing to instead live “zestfully.” Paradise manifests—turquoise water, perfect wind, teaching tourists to fly. Success, international fame. Suddenly a small plane drops out of the sky before their eyes, 50 yards off the beach, hitting the water like a meteor, killing six young men instantly. Record Sahara dust storms arrive soon after. Thea’s battered lungs start failing. She dies at 37 in a NYC hospital surrounded by loved ones. Sandcastles and ashes return to the ocean, gently sprinkled from a schooner off Pemaquid Lighthouse in Maine. Hearts try to process the infinity of the loss.

Read More

Subscribe now

Volume Three: "Green Mountain Flash"

To be written after completion of book two

Vermont, 1997- 2023. Buio, his one year old golden retriever, attracts Veronica’s attention on the dirt road in front of his house. Together, they build a photography business—a self-directed and creative life. After the 2008 financial crisis they are forced into retirement. But the wanderer's ghost won't rest. 2019 he spends everything he has left on an overlanding rig that never leaves the county. Eleven seizures at 4 AM over 12 months force the stillness he could never choose. The body succeeds where the will failed. Freedom ultimately means learning to live within your limits.

Read More

Subscribe now

This Isn't Just A Memoir—It's American Mythology In The Making

From the servant's quarters of a Westchester estate to Big Sur's rainbow buses. From Caribbean trade winds to Vermont's brutal winters. From prep school damage to boarding school ghosts. From noble French bloodlines to picking Santa Rosa plums. This is the story of America's promise and betrayal, told through one man's body.

Every Paradise Contains Its Own Ending

Watch a man build and lose three different versions of heaven. Learn why the vibrant nightclub singer who gifted him the ability fly over water had to die. Understand why the dairy farmer’s daughter who had the heart to stay had to be different. Discover how nine electrical storms in the brain can be grace, not tragedy.

The Pattern Hidden In Plain Sight

Military jets violate every sacred space—F-4 Phantoms through Big Bend, A-6 Intruders over the Caribbean island of Vieques, F-35s above Vermont. The war follows him because the war is inside. Steve Ferry's paranoia wasn't paranoid. The kindness of strangers is real, but so is the cruelty of fate. Some wounds don't heal—they teach you to understand life differently.

Why Follow The Full Journey?

Because this isn't just one man's story. It's about the last generation that could truly disappear, the first generation that couldn't. It's about what happened to the counterculture's children. It's about privilege that doesn't protect you, movement that doesn't free you, and love that arrives only after you stop running from it.

The Wandering Was The Point. Until It Wasn’t.

Contact the author.

Home

Bear Pond Books has been a Vermont institution for decades — the kind of independent bookstore that reminds you why independent bookstores matter. Seeing these covers on their shelf feels like the clearest marker yet that this project has become real.

And the writing continues —

I’m currently writing Sahara Dust, Book Two of The Spaces Between, which I’m hoping to publish later this year. Green Mountain Flash — the Vermont book — will close out the trilogy after that.

If you’re anywhere near Stowe on or after May 23, stop in, pick up a copy, and tell Bear Pond you heard about it here. Supporting an independent bookstore and a Vermont writer in the same transaction — that’s the kind of wave worth catching.

More soon.

— AJ

My father had sayings. He collected them the way other men collected tools — sturdy, practical things he could pull out and apply to any situation, whether they fit or not.

“You can accomplish anything you want in life. You just have to want it badly enough.”

He told me that one early and often. It was his core belief, the engine of his worldview. Want it. Work for it. Get it. The formula was simple, and he delivered it with the absolute conviction of a man who had gone from Choate to Harvard to Columbia Law School, who’d worked on Park Avenue alongside men who shaped the country, who’d raised six children in a farmhouse on twenty-five acres and called it Camelot.

He also told me I should marry a rich woman because I had expensive tastes.

He told me to attach myself to a man who is going somewhere and become indispensable to him.

He told me that he wore Brooks Brothers suits and rode the commuter train because that’s what it took to make the money — and if he had to wear long hair and smoke weed to make the money, he’d do that too.

He told me I could catch a skirt anytime.

He told me that sex was the greatest source of sin in the world.

If you’re keeping score, that’s a man who believed you could accomplish anything through sheer willpower, but also that you should attach yourself to someone more powerful. Who believed in self-reliance, but also in marrying money. Who wore the uniform of the establishment without question, but claimed he’d wear any costume if the price was right. Who acknowledged that his son wanted women, but warned him that wanting women was the devil’s work.

Every one of these sayings contradicted the others. He believed them all simultaneously. That was my father.

• • •

But I need to say something else first, before the rest of this, because the rest of this is hard.

He kissed us goodnight. Every night, when we were small. He sat on the couch and sang songs with us. He was physically affectionate in a way I didn’t fully appreciate until I met Veronica decades later and learned about her childhood — parents who never hugged or kissed any of the children, who told them to go outside and play. My father wasn’t that. When we were young, when we were still small enough to be his, he held us. He was present in a way that was warm and real and not performed.

It didn’t last. As I grew and began to resist his blueprint — as I grew my hair and wanted Bergman instead of West Point, as Jacques became an incorrigible rebel drawing increasingly severe physical punishments, as the family started flying apart — the affection withdrew. Not all at once. Gradually, the way a tide goes out. But it had been there. That’s the thing I need to say plainly. He loved us. I still love him. What follows is not an indictment. It’s a portrait of a tragic man, and the tragedy is that the love was real and it wasn’t enough.

• • •

His name was Jean Marie-Samuel de Saint Phalle. He had a gold signet ring with the family coat of arms — a shield with a cross and a lion, and the Latin inscription “Cruce deo gladio jungor.” My cross binds me to God, my sword to the King. Supposedly, a distant ancestor had saved the King of France’s life in battle. We were once twelfth in line to the throne, he liked to remind me. Noble extraction. That phrase hung over my childhood like a weather system. Noblesse Oblige. Duty and responsibility hung over me in the form of my father’s shadow.

I remember him combing my hair before church one Sunday morning. I was probably ten or eleven. He was working through the tangles, and when he got to the back of my head — the nape of my neck where the curls were thickest, the heavy Irish curls I’d inherited from my mother — he paused. His hands slowed. I could feel him looking at the back of my head with something I couldn’t name at the time. Disapproval. Or maybe something deeper than disapproval. Regret.

My mother was Agnes Joan Furlong — Joannie. The orphaned daughter of an Irish immigrant. Nana had crossed the Atlantic with nothing, raised three children alone after her husband died on Boxing Day. My mother was pretty, warm, devoted. But she was not noble French. She was not what a de Saint Phalle was supposed to marry. And there I was, his firstborn, his namesake, his project — and the curls at the back of my head were proof that the bloodline had been diluted. That the throne of France was receding with every generation.

When he was finally free of my mother — after the divorce, the annulment that erased twenty-two years and six children in the eyes of the Church — what did he do? He married Meryl, a brash little Jewish woman who brought his slippers. Not noble French. Not even Irish Catholic. The pattern repeated. Twice he chose women who didn’t fit his own mythology, and twice he seemed surprised by the result.

• • •

He was vigilant about masculinity in ways I didn’t understand until much later. I picked out a blazer once — nice fabric, a faint purple stripe in it. He refused to let me buy it. The implication, unspoken but unmistakable, was that a boy who liked color in his clothes might be something other than what a de Saint Phalle should be. Another time, my cousin Edme talked me into buying a pair of Beatle boots in the city — beautiful leather, stylish. My father made me go back the next day and return them. Too expensive, he said. But I think the real objection was the same. Edme, it turned out, was gay. My father didn’t know that yet, but his antennae were always up. Any hint that his eldest son might not be performing masculinity correctly set off alarms.

Jacques picked this up and ran with it. Jacques was the second son, the football player, the carpenter, the guy who worked with mob-connected Italians and ate hash to save us from a state trooper. Jacques was a man’s man in a way my father recognized and approved of. I was the sensitive one, the artist, the kid who liked Bergman and the Grateful Dead and psychedelic wonder. Jacques would mock me for years — decades — with this cooing imitation: “Oh, wow, man.” The line between my father’s anxiety and my brother’s contempt was a straight one, drawn early, and it never wavered.

• • •

He taught me chess when I was young. He taught me the Avalon Hill war games — Gettysburg, Battle of the Bulge, the kind of hexagonal map simulations where you moved cardboard counters and calculated odds of attack. He loved strategy. He loved the architecture of winning.

I was never able to beat him. Not once. Not at chess, not at the war games, not at anything.

I kept coming back to the table. That’s the part that breaks my heart now — the boy who kept sitting down across from a man who would never, ever let him experience what winning felt like. The boy still believed the saying: you can accomplish anything you want, you just have to want it badly enough. So he wanted it. He wanted to beat his father at chess. He wanted it badly enough. And it never happened.

I don’t think it was pathological, exactly — not a conscious need to prevent his children from surpassing him. It was more that the only version of success he could recognize was the one that followed his blueprint. Win the way I win. Think the way I think. Wear Brooks Brothers. Ride the train. Marry well. Serve God. And when I refused that blueprint — when I grew the curls and chased the cameras and dropped the acid and put my thumb out on 684 — I became illegible to him. He couldn’t read me anymore. And a man who can’t read his own son has only two options: learn a new language, or double down on the old one. My father doubled down. Every time.

• • •

He was a man who charged into things without preparation, with total confidence and no expertise, and expected the world to arrange itself around his will.

One summer at Lake George — I must have been thirteen or fourteen — he decided that we were all going to learn to water ski. He had never water skied in his life. He’d rented a flimsy little outboard motorboat and had no idea how to use it properly. He had me stand in knee-deep water with the skis flat on the bottom and told me to let him know when I was ready.

I said go.

He gunned the throttle and pulled me straight forward, face-first into the lake. Water up my nose, skis everywhere. We tried again. Same result. I gave up. Eight-year-old Jacques took over — Jacques always took over the physical challenges — and tried it maybe half a dozen times, nearly drowning each attempt, refusing to quit because that was Jacques. Finally another boat went by, and the driver yelled across the water: “Put your tips up!”

Put your tips up. The one piece of information that would have made the whole thing work from the start. My father hadn’t known it. Hadn’t thought to ask. Hadn’t consulted anyone or read anything or done thirty seconds of preparation before putting his sons in the water. He just went. That was him. Total authority, sometimes zero knowledge. The confidence of a man who believed you could accomplish anything, even things you’d never bothered to learn how to do. It was the same story with the annual summer vacation — he’d pack everybody into the car and wing it. No reservations, no plan, frequent disasters.

Years later, at my sister Fal’s wedding in 1979 — a backyard ceremony at Pound Ridge, six years after the divorce — he showed up with French champagne. A generous gesture, and I think he meant it warmly. But then after the ceremony he wanted to play touch football, and Jacques — being Jacques — dove over a stone wall trying to catch a pass, risking serious injury, somehow coming up victorious. My father at fifty-one, still competing, still needing the game, still turning everything into a contest. And Jacques at twenty-three, still trying to impress him, still willing to hurt himself for a catch.

• • •

My grandfather André had a saying too. “Leave no stone unturned.” He was the patriarch — the banker who’d arrived from France in 1925, who’d built a firm on Wall Street, who’d partnered with JFK’s inner circle. He left no stone unturned. He also left a family in wreckage. Two of his children committed suicide. His daughter Niki accused him of sexual abuse. His wife told me he’d put his heart in the deep freeze. He had been receiving amphetamine shots from Dr. Max Jacobson, the infamous Dr. Feelgood who treated the president. Leave no stone unturned — even the ones that should stay buried.

My father inherited more than money from that man. He inherited the conviction that control was love, that discipline was devotion, that winning was the same as being right. And he inherited the deep freeze. The emotional shutdown that allowed him to annul a twenty-two-year marriage and six children with a single petition to the Archdiocese. The shutdown that allowed him to go after his dead sister’s children’s inheritance, four years after she’d shot herself in his other sister’s house. The shutdown that allowed him to train racehorses while his sons painted houses and demolished triple-deckers for a living.

• • •

He’d loved thoroughbred racing since he was a boy. He used to take us to the track, though most of us didn’t enjoy it. He had a card table set up in his bedroom where he’d work on his racing form, index cards everywhere, his ever-present roll of Ben Franklins on his dresser, a system for handicapping that he refined obsessively. He burned incense in that room and listened to Gregorian chant. He was a solitary man in a house full of children, and the betting mathematics were his real companions — the ones who performed on command, who could be studied and predicted and bet on, who never talked back or dropped out of college or borrowed eighty dollars from a closet.

• • •

He used to make me read fifty pages a day. Fifteen for the Bible. He’d edit my school essays with scissors — cutting paragraphs apart, rearranging them on shirt cardboard, teaching me structure through disassembly. He forced me to pitch like Juan Marichal until my damaged elbow screamed. He drove me to West Point for an interview I didn’t want. He forbade me from going to Woodstock. He flushed a hundred hits of acid down a dormitory toilet and left without asking a single question about what I’d experienced.

He hit my mother in the laundry room and I kept walking.

And he kissed us goodnight. And he sang songs on the couch. And he took us fishing at the reservoir, and those afternoons were the best hours of my childhood — just the rod, the line, the water, and a father who was, for once, not performing anything. Just present.

He was a complicated man. That word gets used as a euphemism for cruelty, and I don’t mean it that way. I mean that he contained genuine contradictions that never resolved. He believed in education but wouldn’t pay for the one his son wanted. He believed in family but annulled his own. He believed in God but married outside his faith. He believed you could accomplish anything, but he could not accomplish the one thing that mattered most — being present for the people who needed him. Except sometimes he could. That’s what makes it so hard.

• • •

My grandfather said leave no stone unturned. My father said you can accomplish anything you want. And what I learned — what took me twenty-eight years and a lost decade and a factory floor and a paint truck and a summer in Providence to learn — was simpler than either of their sayings.

He wasn’t coming.

Not to USC. Not to Providence. Not to the chess table as an equal. Not to the conversation I’d been trying to have with him since I was thirteen. The man who had to win could never find his way to the one thing that didn’t require winning at all — just showing up, just being there, just letting his sons be who they were instead of who he’d planned for them to be. It wasn’t malice. I don’t believe it was even conscious. He was a man shaped by a brutal inheritance — a father who may have been a sexual abuser, a mother who dealt out pieties and slaps, a family that produced suicides, a religion that sanctified his rigidity — and he passed the damage forward because that’s what damaged people do when they don’t know they’re damaged.

I was twenty-eight when I stopped waiting. I had a truck, a dog, a paintbrush, and no ambitions beyond the next job. It was a small life. But it was mine. And for the first time, nobody was going to pull the rug out from under it, because I’d built it on the ground.

A month later, a woman walked into my sister’s dress shop and everything changed. But that’s the next chapter.

The man who had to win died in 2022. He was ninety-four. He’d outlived his first wife, all four siblings, and the patience of most of his children. I don’t know if he was still handicapping horses at the end. I hope he was. It was the one thing he did that made him purely, uncomplicatedly happy.

I never beat him at chess. He told me once, when I turned twenty-one, that when I was old I would look back and see that every decision I made caused me to become who I was. But I think, in the end, I became something he never expected — a man who stopped competing altogether and found that the life on the other side of giving up was better than anything either of us had imagined.

I genuinely loved him. He genuinely loved us. The tragedy is that both of those things are true, and it still wasn’t enough.

subscribe ~ e-book ~ kindle/paperback/hardcover ~ table of contents

Read more

subscribe ~ e-book ~ kindle/paperback/hardcover ~ table of contents

Read more

subscribe ~ e-book ~ kindle/paperback/hardcover ~ table of contents

Read more

subscribe ~ e-book ~ kindle/paperback/hardcover ~ table of contents

Read more

subscribe ~ e-book ~ kindle/paperback/hardcover ~ table of contents

Read more

subscribe ~ e-book ~ kindle/paperback/hardcover ~ table of contents

Read more

subscribe ~ e-book ~ kindle/paperback/hardcover ~ table of contents

Read more

subscribe ~ e-book ~ kindle/paperback/hardcover ~ table of contents

Read more

subscribe ~ e-book ~ kindle/paperback/hardcover ~ table of contents

Read more