What look like kernels of corn in the photo at left are piñon nuts.

The Piñon Nuts

Spanning the width of the country and the last three decades of the last millenium, The Piñon Nuts follows four close friends in their youth, when the strains of war and college and sex drove them apart—and led to one of them disappearing—and in their middle age, when Jason's disappearance draws the remaining three men together again. Along the way, presidential politics, philosophical disagreements, and the clashes inherent in all relationships make life more difficult and close friends more valuable.

Although the book revolves around the Piñon Nuts—Jason, John, Matt, and Russ—female characters play at least as important a role. Indeed, the book opens with four generations of women: Amanda Black, whose death in the first chapter sets the book in motion, her daughter May, who thinks Jason may have been her father and that Amanda may have tried to abort her, May's infant daughter Libby, who has become a pawn in May's divorce from her low-life husband, and Amanda's mother Cynthia, who has few answers for May about the relationship between Amanda and Jason. May turns to John Kaufman, one of Jason’s old pals.

John’s life has hit some white-water. A hostage-taking by his daughter’s high school boyfriend propels John from the back room of the local newspaper in Estes Park, Colorado, to national headlines. (This plot line was written just months before the disaster at Columbine High School a few miles away.) May, curious about the psychedelic drug experiences that Jason and Amanda went through in the late 1960s, persuades John to go on a hike and trip with her, which John enjoys until his wife catches them together. He loses his marriage and his home and doesn't even win May. But she prompts him to call another of the Piñon Nuts, Russell Jones.

Russ’s small, Greenwich Village restaurant/art gallery keeps him busy enough, but he and his artist wife Sylvia dream of becoming busier still by having a child. Russ discovers, though, that his sperm aren’t even as lively as a frozen sperm sample Sylvia kept as a memento of her first husband, the world-renowned artist Guy Ellis, dead for over a decade. But Russ agrees with John that they should live up to their pledge to reunite the Piñon Nuts in Colorado Springs on New Year’s Eve, 1999, and the last of the Nuts, Matt McCleary, concurs.

Matt has everything: a challenging job at a biotech company, a quirky farmhouse near Seattle, and his wealthy, beautiful wife Deb, the only woman he’s ever loved. He also has prostate cancer. When he finds he has to choose between his manhood and his life, he chooses his manhood. But then he finds out how close Deb and Amanda were.

Friends since childhood, Deb and Mandy shared almost everything: they both dated John, they both slept with Bill—Deb conceived and aborted his baby—and in the turbulent spring of 1970 they shared a brief, life-altering moment of passion, just minutes before Jason and Amanda have a similar moment.

Jason binds the Piñon Nuts together. In June, 1969, his life began to fall apart. Within a year he had lost his brother to the war in Vietnam, his virginity to Amanda, his parents to divorce, his band the Argonauts (the future Piñon Nuts) to college, his innocence to the drug scene in Boulder, and his freedom to a mere mention of Tom Charles Huston. In July, 1970, Huston, a shadowy (and historical) figure in the White House, persuaded President Nixon to appoint him to head a committee overseeing the C.I.A., F.B.I., D.I.A., and N.S.A. (What seemed like a frightening prospect at the time, and even when I wrote this in 2000, has now become a reality in the Department of Homeland Security.) When Jason confronts Nixon face-to-face at the Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs, the Secret Service worries when he drops a chef’s knife, Nixon when he drops Huston’s name. Jason disappears in the early hours of the day Amanda is scheduled to abort May.

Ever since Jason's disappearance, the remaining Piñon Nuts have debated his fate and decide, despite all the problems in their own lives, to try to reunite in Colorado Springs at the turn of the millenium, as they had pledged to do 30 years before. They do this partly to explain to May the trying circumstances that surrounded them all when she was conceived, but also just on the chance that somehow Jason, had he survived, might find a way to rejoin them.

I realize that fiction is not for everyone, so I've also included an introduction to each chapter based on some event in my own life. But as is so often the case, not everything is as it seems. . . .

The Piñon Nuts deals with very real people with very real problems, but it does so in an atmosphere of humor and friendship. And it attempts something very few other works have tried: to make the reader experience first hand some of the peculiar effects brought on by what Amanda terms alternate reality.

[While nothing I've ever written comes close to matching The Piñon Nuts for complexity and depth of feeling, I touched on some of the same themes in one of my best short stories, Summer Of Love. If you'd like to read it, click here.]