“Embrace Your Madness”

HE IS A man in the wrong place at the wrong time, a man wearing a polka-dotted dress and a mohawk next to a bunch of kids wearing t-shirts and jeans. He is a young man who is angry about something, screaming at unsafe decibel levels, even if no one can make out the words.

In a few years, he will be mildly famous. Foreign newspapers will call him a poet of the American soul. They will compare his literary gifts to those of Faulkner, Pynchon, Céline, Bukowski, Twain. But for now, he’s just a weird-looking white dude in a dress, screaming about … what? About the amphetamine uproar. The fatted calf. He’s screaming REDRUM on a dinky music stage at the back of one of Drexel University’s outdoor quads — his lyrics getting hacked to bits by the crappy P.A. system —

DRUNKONNNNREDRUMMM …

And 50 Drexel kids are looking up at Tristan Egolf and his three bandmates, thinking …

Huh?

He has failed.

“ALRIGHT,” he says, “THIS DEAD BULLSHIT IS GONNA STOP.”

His gaze falls on the crowd.

“I WANNA SEE YOU PEOPLE PILING OVER EACH OTHER.”

Normally he’d solve the problem of low audience energy by pulling down his pants and flapping his dick around. But he can’t do it today. A rent-a-cop is eyeing him from stage-right. So he moves to Plan B. Steps to the edge of the stage, four feet up, and dives. His six-foot-five body makes a belly-flop pose in midair. The few kids in front of the stage just barely cushion his fall, so he tumbles awkwardly to the concrete as the kids laugh and laugh and Tristan, back onstage in a flash, screams:

“ARE YOU ALL FUCKING DEAD?”


YOU CAN SUM UP HIS LIFE IN A SENTENCE. Here goes. Tristan Egolf wrote the Great American Novel when he was 25 years old. That’s it. The defining fact. Because nobody does that. Millions dream about it, millions are going to fail. It’s hard enough to write a bad novel, exponentially harder to write a good one.

And yet here was this redneck from Amish Country who didn’t just write the Great American Novel — which he called Lord of the Barnyard, an angry, heart-stoppingly gorgeous 410-page yarn about a garbage man in a small Midwestern town — when he was 25 years old. No. He did it in a way that gave all the other hopeless dreamers actual tangible hope. Tristan began his first draft of Barnyard when he was a broke, starving punk-rocker in Philly. He had dropped out of Temple University. He didn’t have an MFA or any other degree. He didn’t even have a literary agent. What he had was a pad of paper, a bottomless bag of pot, an idea, and a philosophy — sometimes expressed as “Embrace your madness” and sometimes as “All hail discordia,” his personal motto — that boiled down to an overriding love of chaos on the page. “He was always telling me, you gotta blow things up,” recalls one of his ex-girlfriends. “His whole thing was, have carnage in the book.”

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