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Hack wrote the first “Grumpy Old Bastard” earnestly about his efforts to teach the teenagers in his neighborhood some manners, and only claimed he meant it to be funny when everyone told him it was when it was when they read it in in proofs. For this sequel, he tried to make it funny and the thing fell right on its face.
Hack had intended this to be the story of how he had heroically fought down some young thugs in his neighborhood but when everyone read the proofs, they congratulated him on writing a hilarious book about a mean-spirited old bastard who was constantly harassing innocent teens. He quietly changed the title from “The Hero of the Neighborhood” to “The Grumpy Old Bastard” and pretended that was what he had meant all along.
This is the only Hack Werker novel where Hack appears on the cover. He was depressed about the social distancing required by the coronavirus pandemic so he asked his cover artist Jonny M. to depict him for the first and last time. It relives an actual incident where he was talking to his friend, world famous dominatrix Snow Mercy, at a party when he began diddling himself. Hack swears he doesn’t remember what happened after that but he woke up in an alley with his backside so bruised that it looked like two rotten avocados and Snow Mercy had to have hand surgery shortly afterwards.
Hack’s friend Eddie Frierson (see Mayonnaise is Nonsense) is an actor famous for a one-man show he performs about 16th century baseball player Christy Mathewson. When Frierson snubbed his nose at the coronavirus scare and performed the play in Los Angeles, Hack wrote this novel in tribute.
This Jonny M. adventure was based on the exploits of Jonny’s buddy James “Tree” Cleveland, an accomplished fiddler whose serenades to the ladies got him more poon tang than Hack got in his wildest dreams.Hack got so excited after finishing it that he took his kazoo to a nearby girl’s Catholic school and played old Tony Bennett songs on the physical education field until he was dragged off by police.
This was inspired by an evening when Hack’s cover artist Jonny M. and his pug Boris went to a karaoke bar and the women in the audience stormed the stage and sexually ravaged them after they performed a duet of the Paul McCartney/Michael Jackson hit “The Dog-Gone Girl is Mine.”
Hack’s obsession was still at it height after seeing Frances Fisher and Gregory Harrison perform James Goldman’s play. This book is nasty, even by Hack’s standards.
Hack was surprised to discover that his books sold well south of the border, so he wrote this one in Spanish using Google Translate with his musical crush Linda Ronstadt as the heroine. Sadly it sold poorly in Mexico (where it was considered incomprehensible) but it was an unexpected hit in Thailand.
Hack went through many phases where he thought that playing a musical instrument would make him irresistible to women. The concertina era was probably the most disastrous where he would confront random women frantically pumping the bellows (which he had no concept of how to actually play) and then proposition them sexually, inevitably receiving a brutal beating from their male companions or from the women themselves (often both). He wrote this highly idealized novelization of the experiment in which the fictional version of himself was infinitely more successful with the ladies than he was in real life.
Hack originally wrote this book in 1960 as an unpublished manuscript titled “Horny Angels Come to Earth to Screw Horny Men,” but reworked it after his cover artist Jonny M. told him of his fondness of Ms. McLachlan’s music and especially her song “Angel.” Although Jonny created the cover for the rewrite because he was contractually obligated to, the pornographic nature of the novel drove a rift between the two men that took years to heal.