Fight Or Flight: A South Side Story
Forbidden love and fierce rivalry drive Jeff Hollister, a street-smart high school senior and gang leader of the Hurricanes, to the brink of disaster. Thinking he’s got the world in his back pocket, and the police at a safe distance, he and his scrappy gang of teenage delinquents come to discover they don’t always come out on top after all.
March 31st was Easter Sunday and it was also the one-year anniversary date of the release of Fight or Flight. I was hoping to commemorate the date on this site, but instead Wendy and I were out in Beaver Creek, Colorado with our friends Richard “Krash” Krasner and his wife Cynthia. Here’s a picture of Rich with his copy of the book, standing on the patio of their awesome time-share unit with a beautiful vista of Beaver Creek Mountain. Cynthia actually took this picture with my phone because Wendy and I couldn’t get near him–unfortunately we both came down with some nasty respiratory virus thing, and he was slated for back fusion surgery the day after we returned to the Denver area, so it really put a kibosh on the fun.
As a writer, I know we’re not really supposed to say that a fictional character was based on a real person, and in the case of Fight or Flight it’s technically true, but I’m sure many writers would confess that the characters they write about have traits that resemble real people in their lives. That’s certainly the case here. Rich has been my friend since the fourth grade and he knows all about the history of Fight or Flight, which we called South Side Story back in the day. While he doesn’t do much running anymore, mainly because of his back issues, he was a star on the South Windsor High School cross-country team, and the inspiration for the Crazy Legs character in FOF. He’s also had a serious affinity for the weather all his life, so when Jeff Hollister says to Crazy Legs, “Like I need a weatherman to tell me it’s raining outside,” you can bet that’s something I would’ve said to Rich back in high school. Rich took that affinity and carved out a great career for himself as a weather officer in the US Air Force, where he earned the nickname “Krash”, I think because he used to crash into stuff. He now works as a civilian employee for the government following his retirement from service, with significant contributions to the GOES-R satellite project, and other stuff that he would probably have to kill me over if he ever told me about it. It’s great to see him having so much success in life, and it’s fun to think back about the trouble we used to get into back in the formative days of South Side Story.
