Category: Celebrity Cameo

Redd Foxx/Dead Foxx

It’s our beloved friend Eddie Frierson’s birthday!

One of Hack’s favorite Eddie stories is back in the 1990s when Eddie and Hack’s cover artist Jonny M. ran computer sports leagues and made elaborate video presentations of the championships. In 1991 during the baseball championship series, Eddie’s announcer Pigworthy Manhattan and Jonny’s announcer Sam Grunion talked nonstop about Pigworthy’s obssesive and perverse relationship with his gay lover, Sanford and Son star Redd Foxx.

It was all good fun and they knocked out the commentary for the games that afternoon for “broadcast” (meaning the video would be played for their friends in the league in Jonny’s tiny living room) the following Saturday. Until Eddie went home and Jonny flipped on the news to discover that Redd Foxx had died of a heart attack while they had been recording their merciless taunts about his fictional gay relationship.

Shortly afterwards, Jonny’s phone rang. It was Eddie on the other end.

“We KILLED Redd Foxx!!!”

The Eye of the Beholder

This is one of Hack’s more esoteric novels, inspired by a holiday called Beautiful Day, which celebrates all things of beauty. Hack had an idea for a story in which the hero seeks out “true beauty” but he and his cover artist Jonny M. discussed what was beautiful to them and they could only think of hot chicks, to which their male friends agreed. Jonny’s pug Boris suggested pug food, so that was thrown into the mix but the resulting story was only seven pages long. Fortunately, Hack started getting suggestions from female acquaintances along the lines of painting, music and natural phenomenons like sunrises, inspiring faces, and the white plastic bag from American Beauty, which gave Hack enough material (padded by a bunch of his signature anal sex scenes) for a full-length novel (and one of his better ones).

Murder on the Super Chief

The Super Chief was the express train between New York and Los Angeles that was favored by the Hollywood elite in the 1930s and 1940s. Hack had long wanted to write a murder mystery set on the train but when he discovered that Agatha Christie had already written Murder on the Orient Express using precisely the plot that he planned to use, he sued her for plagiarism even though her book had been written 45 years before and he had yet to commit a word to paper. After losing the case in court, he wrote his version anyway which is almost a word-for-word rewrite of Christie’s book except that the characters are classic Hollywood stars and the murderer turns out to be Groucho Marx. Both Christie and Marx sued and were victorious in court, even though Hack was so destitute that they never collected a penny.

Murder at the Nudist Colony

Happy heavenly birthday to the great Burt Lancaster!

Honestly, Hack just wanted to write a book titled “Murder at the Nudist Colony” and when he found out Lancaster’s birthday coincided with its release date, he just had the cover artist redo the cover with the actor in his Elmer Gantry role as the victim. The story is more about Jonny the detective running around the nudie colony seducing the women who stay there.

Wordsmiths

The book opens:

“They say the pen is mightier than the sword. Well, I’ve never had my dick come close to being cut off by a pen.That’s a round about way of introducing you to my writer’s group. We met every Thursday in a little bar in noho near the strip club where the woman I am in love with works. I intend to marry her, once I can figure out how to get the judge to remove the restraining order.

There were seven of us in the group, all professional writers. I was the best and most accomplished writer, though JK and Stephen King would say otherwise. I hated them both and the feeling was mutual. I was always sure that one of them would be the one to try to cut off my dick, not Dave Barry. I thought he was a fruit who didn’t have the balls to try something like that, to be quite candid.

That’s ironic, because when this sorted little story ends, as you’ll see, he’ll have more balls in his hands than he started with.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. “