ON THE EDGE OF NEVER-NEVER LAND

Always a bridesmaid, never a bride. I know the feeling. For many years now I thought how wonderful it would be to make my way as a writer. I envisioned sitting at the keyboard, a bottle of Irish Whiskey at hand, soft music playing in the background and my fingers gliding over the keys. But what to write, what style to follow? Not knowing where to start I decided to pick an author of some renown to emulate but every time I settled on one it turned out badly. I should have cheated and read the last chapter of their life story first.

First it was Ernest Hemingway. I read his books, studied his style, read A.E. Hotchner's biography, "Papa Hemingway", flew to Paris to drink in his cafes, traveled to Key West to walk in his steps, fished his favorite spots, and drank copious amounts of Mojitos, but when it came right down to it I was a failure.

As Ernest liked to say, "Every man's life ends the same way. It is only the details of how he lived and how he died that distinguish one man from another." I lived, he didn't.

Next I turned the clock back to 1886 settling on Leo Tolstoy. I thought a good Russian would be hard to beat. Little did I know at the time my favorite of Leo's books would be "The Death of Ivan IIyich". Do you sense a pattern here?

I connected with Ivan, his life "had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible". Ivan didn't fair too well, dying alone in a train station; Leo didn't do much better.

Well, it was clearly time to put some distance between me and death, time to live on the edge and experience life to the fullest. Who better to get crazy with than Hunter S. Thompson, the father of gonzo journalism? I could use a little fear and loathing in Las Vegas.

I settled on Hunter when my muse shared her simple explanation of why she loved me - "Because you are everything I'm not." Hunter and I were like that, he lived for drugs, I'm a pretty straight arrow, missing the 60's as I had. He drank - a lot, I'm a Poland Spring kind of guy. He loved guns, I gave mine away to a pixie. He road motorcycles, I drive a Mercedes (how boring). He enjoyed and wrote about sports, I'm artsy fartsy. But when it came right down to it I realized I was more like Hunter than any of the other writers I had chosen.

I've always liked the idea of living on the edge or at least close to it. I seek out edgy people, counter-cultural types who act and look different than me - people who are everything I'm not. That is probably why Hunter, and even Ivan, appealed to me - they both lived on the edge. Ivan "all alone on the brink of an abyss, with no one who understood or pitied him." Hunter, on the other hand relished life "on the edge...there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."

But I wasn't ready to jump, I needed a safety net, a wide stance with one foot firmly planted on each side of the abyss. Hunter chose a mountain top to find his edge.

After all this death I decided to pick a story with a happy ending rather than a specific author. Then it came to me, I would use a fairy tale as inspiration and write my own ending. What better tale than J. M. Barrie's "Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn't Grow Up." Sir James, or Jimmy as I called him, felt dreams come true if you wish hard enough but they come at a price. Jimmy once said "You can have anything in life if you will sacrifice everything else for it." Why not? I was willing to give everything I had to live in Neverland. Is that close enough to the edge for you Hunter?

Off I went to London to trace Jimmy's steps, visiting Peter Pan's statue in Kensington Garden near where Jimmy had lived. Jimmy wasn't fond of the statue because it didn't show the devil in Peter; I could do better, I've got plenty of devil to spare. One look at Peter and I knew immediately this was it, I was the perfect Peter Pan, the little boy who never grew up, and I had my own Tinkerbell to boot; a figment of my imagination to be sure, but she seemed real enough to me. She came to me in a dream ..."that place between sleep and awake, the place where you can still remember dreaming." Tink took me to Never-Never land and that is where I will always love her.

Like all good stories this one has an ending that leaves you dangling, waiting for the next chapter. In my version I tried to clip Tink's wings but she flew off without me and I may never see her again. Jimmy's Peter Pan story ends a little differently, the narrator says, "But I was never to see Peter Pan again. Now I tell his story to my children and they will tell it to their children, and so it will go on - for all children grow up .....Except one!

Good night Tink, wherever you are, I will see you in my dreams.