By the Balls Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, as well as events or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  Text ©2013 Jim Pascoe & Tom Fassbender

  Illustrations ©2013 Paul Pope, art ©2013 Paul Lee (originally published by Dark Horse Comics in Dark Horse Extra)

  ISBN-13: 978-1-61775-159-2

  eISBN: 9781617751714

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2012954509

  All Rights Reserved.

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Title page

  The True History of By the Balls and the Birth of UglyTown (2013)

  “Fireproof” (2013)

  “Partners” (2002)

  Five Shots and a Funeral (1999)

  “A Punch in the Gut and a Bag Full of Oranges” (2000)

  “Faze Out” (2002)

  By the Balls (1998)

  “Across the Line” (2013)

  Kind Words (2013)

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  About Akashic Books

  _______________________

  It all started with an idea, a bold idea, a youthful punk rock idea that we believed with all our might. The idea that we were right and everyone else was wrong.

  Let’s back up a bit.

  We met each other at the beginning of the 1990s while attending various comic book conventions and trade shows. At the end of these events, it always seemed that we were the last two standing, long after last call came and went. Fueled by adrenaline and a few drinks, we would talk about what was wrong with comics, what was wrong with books and publishing, and how everything would be better—at least a little bit better—if only someone would listen to us. We had the answers. We knew it. Not a single doubt in our minds.

  What we needed was a plan, a path of action. Once you’ve identified your solution as “if only someone would listen to us,” the next step is clear: find someone who will listen, preferably someone with money.

  Around this same time, a new entertainment conglomerate sprung up. Its name: DreamWorks SKG, formed by the power trio of Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and David Geffen.

  We began assembling a proposal. We crunched numbers, put together spreadsheets, did competitive analyses on existing content producers. When we were happy with the results, we printed three copies and FedEx’d them individually to Spielberg, Katzenberg, and Geffen along with a cover letter that said essentially: Enclosed is confidential material. For the eyes of the recipient only.

  Then we waited. One week. Two weeks.

  No response. Time to follow up. We picked up the phone, dialed Universal Studios, and asked to speak with Steven Spielberg. We did that two more times. Two of the three calls we made were pretty unsuccessful. But the call to Jeffrey Katzenberg got us talking to his lovely assistant. She said she had received our proposal, but Mr. Katzenberg hadn’t had time to review it. Could we call back?

  You bet.

  We called back every few weeks to check in. Mr. Katzenberg was a very busy man. Eventually a letter arrived to our attention.

  Dear Mr. Fassbender and Mr. Pascoe, thank you for your proposal. We are not interested at this time.

  Something like that. We forget exactly. We threw it away.

  We called back immediately. “Hello. We have received your letter. We would be happy to schedule that meeting at your earliest convenience.”

  “Um, the letter we sent you was a rejection letter.”

  “We realize that. And we look forward to discussing your feedback in a face-to-face meeting. That way when you are ready to go ahead with what we are proposing, we will have adjusted the plan to your liking and you will have two partners ready to execute.”

  Two months later we had a meeting at DreamWorks.

  * * *

  The content of that proposal was something we had been thinking about for a while. It started with what we thought was a simple, self-evident truth: all great entertainment successes are based on great stories. Hopefully you’re nodding your head right now. A no-brainer, you might be thinking. But it’s sad how our experience showed that the industry did not think like you.

  A few years prior, when we had first started working together, we were pitching ourselves as storytellers. We had decided to spend the money to go to the Toronto Film Festival because there was a film production trade show attached to it and we had somehow managed to acquire VIP passes. The registration form that we were gleefully filling out asked for a company name.

  We could have put down anything. But we took this seriously. We took everything very seriously. We needed something that would get people’s attention, something like . . . UglyTown. We laughed. We started a list. Every name we came up with got measured against UglyTown. None felt as right.

  When we arrived in Toronto, with our suits and slicked-back hair, we picked up badges that said: UglyTown Productions, Hollywood.

  Let’s just say that the combination of UglyTown + production + Hollywood + suits made us the most popular guys in the room. It was unreal. We had folks stop their conversations mid-sentence just to lean over and introduce themselves to us. They invited us to after-parties. When they asked us for business cards, we told them we already ran out. “It’s been a great show so far.”

  Then they asked us what we did.

  “We’re storytellers. Anything that needs a story, we can write.”

  Huh?

  The responses fell into two categories: 1. Screenwriters can’t write TV. And vice versa. You have to pick a specialty and stick to it; 2. What have you done? And more importantly, what have you done that I’ve already seen and liked?

  Ultimately we left the show disappointed. We also left with a plan: If people wanted to see what we’d done, we would show them. We would create a multimedia property that showcased our ability to write for film, for the web, for print.

  That project was called The Red Hat. It was the story of Dashiell Loveless.

  * * *

  The meeting at DreamWorks was not with Jeffrey Katzenberg (or the other two big wigs for that matter). We met with a room full of executives from the just-launched animation studio. It took place on one of the top floors of the Texaco building in Universal City. It felt magnificent.

  We pitched them a fourth division of the company. Joining the film, music, and animation teams would be a print division, run by the two of us. We asked for enormous salaries; although, in retrospect, while it was probably three times what we were making at the time, it was probably a third of what a position like that should have demanded. The centerpiece of the proposal was the creation of a magazine, modeled after Disney Adventures, which would promote new stories while leveraging the characters the other divisions were creating. The magazine would be called UglyTown.

  They asked a lot of questions. We answered confidently. We pulled no punches.

  And at the end of the meeting, they said the most amazing thing.

  While they had no intention of starting a print division, as they had stated in their original rejection letter, they liked us, liked what we had to say. Plus, though still early in the process, they were looking for a publishing partner.

  This was their offer: if you two can build a team and secure an established publishing/distribution partner, we will give you the DreamWorks license to create comics and stories using our characters.

  * * *

  Perhaps what we should have done was taken
this tentative commitment, redrafted our proposal, sought out investment money, and then headed off to do a dog-and-pony tour of New York in search of an existing publishing company to partner with. But we were young—young men of action. Starting a publishing venture meant doing something. Something exciting.

  We still had this idea for The Red Hat kicking around. The story we had come up with involved a hapless pulp writer named Dashiell Loveless who wrote a surprise best seller titled By the Balls: A Bowling Alley Murder Mystery. Taken aback by its success, poor Dashiell faced the dreaded sophomore slump and had no idea how to follow up his first novel. He was out of ideas. Then an article about a murder in the Los Angeles Times got him thinking: If I start investigating this murder myself and find some answers, I can use this as the plot for my next book.

  This led our man into the dark, downward spiral of a noir world. Once in, he couldn’t pull himself out.

  We liked this idea, but as young writers, we couldn’t figure out how to pull ourselves out or how to break this story. We couldn’t figure out who Dashiell Loveless was.

  Then came the idea that would change our lives forever: Let’s write Dashiell Loveless’s first book, By the Balls. It would serve as a character study for the fictional Loveless. We could get our up-and-coming cartoonist friend Paul Pope to illustrate it. Which meant that we could print it and sell it to his fans. During this process we would be able to figure out all of the ins and outs of publishing, which meant that we could go back to DreamWorks with a publishing company established, distribution partners attached, and a physical product to show. We would win. Easy.

  We thought of it as a big business card. It would prove that we could do it, whatever it was.

  We announced By the Balls in February of 1998 as an online web serial. We wrote it in the spirit of old pulp writers—often drunk and pounding the keys, struggling to make our weekly deadlines. We made it up as we went along. We tried to outdo each other. Our goal wasn’t to write something good . . . it was to write something fun. And fast. And it set us free.

  We thought we knew everything. We knew nothing. We worked around the clock. We figured things out as best we could.

  In July of that same year, in time for Comic-Con in San Diego, we published By the Balls. We got cartoonist Don Simpson to hand draw the title treatment. We worked with cartoonist Jay Stephens to design the UglyTown logo. And just like that, UglyTown was real. We printed five thousand copies of that book. Sold them for the ridiculously low price of $5.95.

  We had our detractors, of course. The old guard. The tired, stale, do-business-as-it’s-always-been-done types. Those who sneered, saying patronizing things. “Oh, cute. A trade paperback in mass market format . . . interesting choice.” Whatever. We ignored them. Get on board or get left behind.

  The distributor orders came in. We sold just 338 of them.

  We didn’t care. We made a book. A book! It was intoxicating, addictive. We were ready for the next step.

  We flew to New York, eager to talk up a possible deal with DreamWorks now that we were real publishers. But no one cared about some flighty DreamWorks thing. Everyone wanted to talk about By the Balls.

  During lunch with Calvin Reid, a reporter from Publishers Weekly, the next step started to come to focus. He’d read the book, and wanted to write an article for PW. We were ready for the hard questions. All except for one: “When does the next book come out?”

  The next book? What next book? Dashiell Loveless only wrote one book!

  You can have all the plans in the world, but once you’ve experienced the ecstasy of having someone read what you’ve written and then ask for more, well, there is no turning back.

  We came up with Five Shots and a Funeral—the title and a loose outline of the five short stories that would make up the book—on the plane ride back to Los Angeles. We made it a prequel consisting of shorts because that made the most sense within the mythology of Dashiell Loveless we had created—even though no one knew anything about him or his story.

  UglyTown grew a lot over the next decade. Other people started to move in. Talented newcomers like Sean Doolittle, Victor Gischler, Curt Colbert, and Brett Battles looking for a break. Established veterans like Gary Phillips, Nathan Walpow, and Eddie Muller looking for something new.

  Other industry types noticed us and liked what we were doing. We got serious distribution. We got publishing cred. We got imitated.

  As we strove to publish four books a year (that was the goal at least), we got offered the chance to write comics based on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. That gig came our way after an editor took a liking to By the Balls. So it turned out that the big business card worked.

  All of that meant less and less time for Ben Drake, the hardboiled PI we created for those first books. We wrote a few stories for some small magazines, but even by the early 2000s the perfect partnership of Fassbender/Pascoe was starting to strain under the pressure and the work.

  Then our distributor filed Chapter 11. We got another one. They filed Chapter 7.

  Despite our seemingly tremendous success, losing tens of thousands of dollars sucked.

  So we did one final rock star move. We disappeared.

  We tried to take care of as many people as possible. Truth is, some people got hurt. A lot of people didn’t get paid. Maybe we could have sold UglyTown to a larger publisher. But we had long ago realized that UglyTown owned by DreamWorks wasn’t really a good idea. A lot of folks would have loved an UglyTown imprint at a major New York company. Just not us. We did our thing, we did it our way. We were done. Better to burn out than fade away.

  Although . . . some things don’t die. They won’t stay down. Through the years, we remained humbled by the love people continued to express about all that we achieved during those crazy UglyTown days.

  At some point we looked up and realized that 2013 would mean fifteen years had passed since we launched By the Balls on an unsuspecting public.

  And we thought, you know, publishing needs a good kick in the balls now.

  With the help of a true rock star, Johnny Temple, and his amazing team at Akashic, we have collected all of the writing of the fictional Dashiell Loveless. We have arranged the stories in their narrative chronological order, along with new opening and closing stories, which represent the first Pascoe and Fassbender writing collaboration in over ten years.

  Who knows how long we’ll stay this time? For now, it’s good to be back.

  Jim Pascoe and Tom Fassbender

  Los Angeles

  January 2013

  _______________________

  I smelled like smoke and sweat, like I usually did after a fire. My wife was used to it—as much as anyone could be—but this morning was different. She knew there was something else hanging over me. The stench of death.

  She kissed me. “Mm. Good morning.”

  I could have kept kissing her, just standing there, despite how exhausted I felt. But I knew I stunk something bad. A shower would probably be best for both of us.

  “You’re up early,” I said as I unbuttoned my shirt, got my arms out of it, then pulled the stained ribbed T-shirt over my head.

  “Insomnia again. Must be the heat.” She sat down at the table where she had set her coffee cup. “Thought I would get up and read a bit while I waited for you.”

  My body slumped against the bathroom doorjamb, partially because I didn’t want to walk away from my wife while she was talking, but mostly because my muscles were ready to give up.

  “It was a tough one, yeah?” she asked.

  I exhaled the tension as it all came back to me. “We found a body. Man in his thirties, probably. Hard to tell. He was charcoal. Well, mostly, anyway.”

  She let that hang in the air a bit. She was a firefighter’s wife, well familiar with the horror stories I brought home. She didn’t like ’em. And even though I’d developed a stomach for them, I didn’t like them either.

  “Found him in a bathtub. I had been following the burn, tryin
g to contain it. Forgot the plan: evacuate, isolate, terminate. I should have found that guy sooner. There might have been a chance. At least Kenny Shrubb wasn’t handling the sweep. Boy is so gung-ho about fighting fire, he can’t see the details. That body would probably still be in the tub.”

  She came over to me to rub my back, rough with ash. “You were doing your job. I’m sure you did everything you could.”

  “My job is to put out fires, and I put it out. That won’t make me sleep any easier. Plus I had a bad run-in with the police, these two detectives who said the most ridiculous . . .” I pinched the bridge of my nose with my hand like I was trying to deflate a giant beach ball. “You know, never mind. I’ve laid too much of the job on you. Get back to your book and your coffee. I’m going to let a bunch of water pour over me.”

  “Wash away the sadness and stress of Testacy City. Think about Los Angeles.”

  I smiled. “Was it really only last week? Christ, it feels like forever ago already.”

  “Don’t let it get away. It could be ours, Benny. A new city, a new life.” She looked down and pulled a strand of hair behind her ear. “A new everything.”

  The energy came to me to go over and kiss her on her beautiful forehead. I stumbled back into the bathroom and twisted the shower handle. The hot water came down.

  But I couldn’t wash out the memory of those two cops.

  * * *

  “Hey, soldier, get over here!” Sweat beaded up on the forehead of the meaty cop with the crewcut. It was still hot in there, even though the fire was out.

  I took my helmet off, went over to the plainclothes. His partner was playing the silent type, hanging back, smoking a cigarette. I addressed the loud one: “I’m not a soldier. If there’s a problem, I’d be happy to help you boys.”

  “Want to talk to you about this body you found. Heard you were talking to your buddies about some foul play. Why don’t you give me a little bit of your story time?”