The Pad: An excerpt from Michael Goldberg's The Flowers Lied

Michael Goldberg's rock 'n' roll coming-of-age novel, The Flowers Lied, has just been published. Richard Meltzer wrote that Goldberg's first novel, True Love Scars, was "Radioactive as Godzilla." Goldberg has been called a "21^st Century Kerouac" by Kerouac biographer Dennis McNally and compared to Lester Bangs by Rolling Stone. The new novel focuses on Writerman (Michael Stein) a sophomore at The University, which is located in Northern California on hill above a beach town not unlike Santa Cruz. He's a music freak and wannabe writer – he struggles with a Captain Beefheart album review, and tries and fails to type a single word of the Great American Novel he is so desperate to write. He pursues a hip but traumatized 18-year-old artist named Elise, who introduces him to tequila and Almaden Red. And he becomes best friends with Jim AKA Thee Freakster Bro, the over-the-top, gregarious writer/poet/music obsessive stoner he first meets in True Love Scars. This excerpt is a flashback to 1970, when Writerman was 16, and with his high school buddy Bobby, for the first time visits the renowned rock critics known as Sausalito Cowboy and Buckaroo at the office of Peak magazine, AKA The Pad, the rather decrepit apartment where both critics live and write, to get some writing tips. Over the phone, Sausalito Cowboy had indicated that Writerman should bring an extra large pizza. The front door of The Pad has just swung open.