RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
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RGL e-Book Cover 2019©
Amazing Stories, May 1941, with
"Meet the Authors: David Wright O'Brien"
I WAS born on the back of a racing camel in the middle of the Gobi Desert, and by the time I was four years old was peddling papers in the streets of Port Said and had taken to drink.
My friends said I had no future.
On my sixth birthday I met my first dancing girl. Her name was Lola and she worked in the notorious Café Roué, a joint run by my great-uncle, Ben Abu. I wanted Lola to run away with me and every night we'd munch opium krispies and discuss means of escape. She's still there.
My friends said I was all washed up.
Taking the bulrushes by the roots, I faced the facts. Here I was, seven years old and a failure. Of course I held the rough-'n-tumble, catch-as catch-can championship of Middle-Arabia. But what does untrained muscle amount to, anyway? I couldn't go on like that forever.
I put in my application with a troupe of whirling dervishes, and one month later, having passed my examination, entered a monastery.
But once again Fate kicked me in the stomach. It seems that the monk factory was one of those cloistered joints. Everything done behind high walls. What fun was there to whirling if no one could watch? Dizzy and disillusioned, I resigned.
My friends were now openly pointing the finger of scorn. The word flew 'round the opium parlors, "O'Brien has gone phffffft!"
At ten years of age I couldn't stand it any longer I came to the United States to seek my fortune. After working the Union Pacific Line as a candy-butcher and inventing the electric light—oops, sorry, that was Edison...
As I was saying, I came to America, and subsisted for weeks on nothing but the crumbs I was able to scrape out of the bottoms of New York's automats. It was ghastly, and there were times when I was almost desperate enough to look for a job.
But enough of the sordidness of my early childhood! Enough of the stark truth and grim reality! Let us continue in a lighter vein. Let us, just for the sheer hell of it, skip a few years.
I found myself in Chicago, entering Loyola Academy in search of education. Under the tutelage of the football mentors, I spent four years learning how to clip the legs out from under a defensive half-back and whistle at pretty young things on street corners. Having a firm grip on culture, and practically none at all on myself, I got a job as a police reporter. This led, quite naturally, to a position digging ditches.
Deciding to take a whack at "higher" education, I left my shovel and entered a local institution celebrated as being the only kindergarten in the nation awarding college degrees.
The "college" dropped football, throwing me and a number of other subsidized slap-happies off the payroll. After a merry interchange of insults with the Dean, who hated ever itsy-bitsy intestine in my anatomical structure, I bid adieu to the dump.
Next to the University of Chicago, where I spent a year as a cinder in the educational eye of Prexy Hutchins. Inasmuch as I was hacking out fiction and holding down a news feature job on the side, I decided to leave the Midway to Compton and other show-offs.
Been pounding out stories with wild enthusiasm ever since in order to assure an exceptionally lovely little red-headed colleen that we will live happily ever after. As a sort of sideline I accumulate utterly staggering debts and play a little game I have called, "Dodge The Creditor."
I detest people who, when informed that I write ask me. "What do you do for a living?"
If I were asked (and it isn't likely I will be) to name America's most promising young fiction writer, I'd pick William P. McGivern.
Roy Glashan's Library
Non sibi sed omnibus
Go to Home Page
This work is out of copyright in countries with a copyright
period of 70 years or less, after the year of the author's death.
If it is under copyright in your country of residence,
do not download or redistribute this file.
Original content added by RGL (e.g., introductions, notes,
RGL covers) is proprietary and protected by copyright.