Flashback (Tehuti's Per On The Web 2.0)

Flashback

TEHUTI'S PER ON THE WEB NOTE: The complete existing text of Flashback, which is I believe eleventh in the D Is For Damien series. According to the D4D timeline, this takes place around March 1993--during the Waco standoff. This story deviated from the rest of the novels in that I at last took Damien & Co. away from Michigan, and away from Scorpio, to investigate another cult in another state--namely, in Texas. This move was inspired by a recent trip that I had taken there--my first trip to another state--and a brief one-night stay we had in Galveston. Pretty much all we got to see of the entire location was a cheap place called the Sandpiper Motel and the nearby Beach Club...but those two made enough of an impression that they play major roles in this story. Our room was overlooking the Gulf--and yes, there was a giant boombox out there one morning, playing--you guessed it--Toad The Wet Sprocket's "Walk On The Ocean." (I kid you not.) It's probably best that I never got far with this story--but not because it was particularly poorly written. Mainly, because I don't feel I know enough about the subjects I was attempting to include in the story--like santería, and Galveston itself. I also just didn't warm to my Galveston cast as much as I did to the out-of-state cops in a similar later, completed, novel: Minot.

There are a few obscure references in this story that will probably go overlooked if I don't explain them. I can't recall them all, but the primary one is the lead police character's name: Lucien Constanzo. He takes his name from Adolfo Constanzo, who led a palo mayombe cult which kidnapped and murdered an American in Matamoros, Mexico, on the Texas border. The name of the character "Darrell Howett" (who didn't get to appear in the existing text) was similar to that of Branch Davidian cult leader David Koresh (real name Vernon Howell), but I don't know if that was done on purpose or not. The character "Catera" was, I believe, named after a car, the ads for which I kept seeing on TV around the time of this writing. And the presence of the DEA agents (who, again, didn't get to show up in this writing) was also inspired by the Waco incident. There may be other little pokes in there, but I don't recall them at the moment.

Bonus tidbit: For a time I actually forgot the title of this story. In that brief interim, it became known as Galveston, until I located the original title and restored it.

Please feel free to compare this story to Minot, which was a later attempt I made at much the same thing. And see the note on Sidekicks (second draft) regarding typos, and additional formatting notes within the text.

This version, from the same file as the second draft of Sidekicks, may be a copy of a copy, typed up from a hardcopy text, or it may be the original text itself. The file's last edit date is August 2001, but this story predates that by a while. I probably did not start the writing in 1993, but it likely predates 2000. I think I might tentatively place it between 1995-97, though I could be a little bit off either way.

Table Of Contents

Prologue

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Childhood Writing