Spotlight on … Lawrence Yitzhak Braithwaite Ratz Are Nice (2000) *

* (restored)

 

‘I met Lawrence Braithwaite only once, at a now-legendary writing conference in Buffalo in 2001, where many of the so-called “New Narrative” writers – Dennis Cooper, Robert Glück, and Kevin Killian among them – had gathered. Braithwaite was short – 5’4″, or, as he was fond of saying, as tall as his idol, reggae legend Lee “Scratch” Perry – and wore a long football jersey that hung nearly to his knees. A black patch covered his right eye (“Lord Patch” was one of his aliases), and a blue toque covered his bare scalp. He chain-smoked and charmed some of his fellow writers with a funny riff about black and Latino porn stars.

‘Later, that charm turned to menace when he interrupted a panel discussion called “Talking Dirty: Sexual Politics, Pornography, and Desire,” ranting incoherently, irrationally, about the racism of the conference’s organizers. When his tirade was over, he stormed out of the room. In his semi-autobiographical 2000 novel Ratz Are Nice (PSP), Braithwaite describes himself as a “SWOT” – a street tough, someone who’s excessive in force, relentless, even brutal – and the self-portrait seemed largely accurate.

‘Braithwaite died last July at the age of 45, an apparent suicide. He had hanged himself in his Victoria, B.C., apartment. According to police, he had been dead for at least four days before his body was discovered by a neighbour. Many of his friends and literary acquaintances didn’t even hear of his death until about a month later, reading about it on a blog maintained by San Francisco writer Dodie Bellamy.

‘Canadian literature has produced precious few genuine subversives, and Braithwaite – black, gay, working-class, a drug user – was perhaps the most subversive of them all. Though he was barely known outside the small-press community, he wrote two of the most daring novels ever produced in this country: Wigger and Ratz Are Nice (PSP). Both books are composed in an invented patois, an ecstatic, deliberately confounding fusion of street slang, porn, typographical trickery, and song lyrics. Hip-hop, dub, heavy metal, reggae, and, above all, punk dictated his rhythms and sensibility. His priorities weren’t plot and character, but speed and disorientation. He invited comparisons to transgressive writers like Céline and William S. Burroughs. He spelled Canada “kkkanada.”

‘“His work … was very atypical of Canadian literature,” says Arsenal Pulp Press publisher Brian Lam, who published Wigger in 1995. “It spoke more to American literary circles.” Indeed, Braithwaite found his most ardent support among the likeminded New Narrative writers, a coterie of innovative, largely gay writers concentrated in San Francisco and L.A. Kevin Killian considered him a “grand novelist with the sweep and technical bravura of Faulkner, Toni Morrison, Günter Grass, the Joyce of Dubliners, or someone like Don DeLillo.” Of Ratz, Dennis Cooper wrote, “Lawrence Braithwaite’s writing is so original, gorgeous, propulsive, and alive that it almost seems to reinvent fiction before your eyes.”

‘Braithwaite was born in Montreal in 1963, the youngest of four children. More inclined to visual art as a younger man, he studied film at Dawson College and then, improbably, spent 12 years as a clerk in the Canadian military, stationed on bases in Nova Scotia and B.C. “If I was to guess why,” says his older brother, Jack Braithwaite, “it was to get closer to our father.” (The senior Braithwaite was an airport manager and former pro baseball player who had also served in the armed forces.) According to Jack, a labour lawyer in Sudbury, Lawrence was discharged on permanent disability after an accident in which he broke his leg in several places. (Braithwaite claimed the disability was the result of constant beatings.)

‘In 1993, Braithwaite began to focus more on his writing, and one of his stories appeared in Arsenal Pulp’s Queeries: An Anthology of Gay Male Prose, the first anthology of its kind in Canada. He then settled in Victoria, where he wrote his three books – the last of which, More at 7:30 (Notes from New Palestine), remains unpublished – and eked out a somewhat mysterious, resolutely uncompromising, existence. His friend, Robert Garfat, the owner of Victoria bookshop Dark Horse Books, affectionately called him a “fringe-dweller.”

‘Braithwaite had attempted suicide at least once before, as a teenager, soon after the death of another older brother, Joey, in a bike accident. Jack ascribes Lawrence’s subsequent anger to the loss of his beloved sibling. “[Lawrence] was a very nice, sweet young guy,” Jack says, “but after [Joey’s death], he just had a great difficulty dealing with society.” Jack recalls several conversations over the years, long late-night phone calls where Lawrence monologued about various injustices, occasionally quoting Kant and Joyce. “He spoke in paragraphs, with footnotes,” Jack says, laughing. “But he was intellectually intolerant of others, and nobody lived up to his standards. Ultimately, it didn’t even matter if I was on the other end of the line or not.” Every call ended the same way, with Lawrence asking Jack for money. When Lawrence died, the brothers hadn’t seen each other in nearly two years.

‘Toronto writer Derek McCormack was at the Buffalo conference with me and met Braithwaite as well. The two stayed in touch, and Braithwaite asked for his help in finding a publisher for More at 7:30. The relationship faltered when Braithwaite repeatedly asked McCormack to send money; he was too broke, he explained, to even afford paper on which to print out hard copies of his book. (McCormack was too broke himself to help.) Around the same time, Alana Wilcox, senior editor at Coach House Books, read an early draft of the novel and encouraged Braithwaite to send a revised manuscript. After several interactions with him, however, she was reluctant to go forward – their phone conversations were, in her words, “difficult.” The manuscript never materialized.

‘“Lawrence constantly felt he was intentionally being kept down,” Garfat says, “because of his race or his disability or because he was gay. And I can’t deny that there must have been some of that; we do live in a prejudicial society.” But Braithwaite was consumed by his paranoia, alienating even those who were most sympathetic to him. Lam describes him as a “tremendous talent,” but in the same breath stresses how badly he treated people. (The two hadn’t spoken in years.)

‘Aaron Vidaver, a Vancouver poet and activist for whom Braithwaite had written book reviews, says, “He had problems with just about everybody.” So much so that Vidaver even doubts that Braithwaite was a suicide. Investigating the death on his own, Vidaver discovered that Braithwaite had numerous genuine enemies – notably, drug dealers and a violent ex-boyfriend – and had recently been involved in altercations so threatening that, uncharacteristically, he called police for protection.

‘“But the problem with Lawrence,” Vidaver says, “was that often his friends couldn’t tell the difference between his paranoia and real threats.” There was no suicide note, explains Vidaver, and, most unusually, Braithwaite’s cherished German shepherd was left chained up outside his apartment for several days before his body was found [sic]. Vidaver is certain that had Braithwaite planned a suicide, he would have made sure the dog was cared for first. The police have concluded their investigation, but the coroner continues to work on the case.

‘Jack, however, notes that Braithwaite died on July 14, the anniversary of his brother Joey’s death. “He never got over it,” Jack says. “But I think he was also tired of fighting the good fight. He always called his own shots, even at the end of the day.”’ — Jason McBride

 

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Further

Lawrence Yitzhak Braithwaite @ Wikipedia
‘Pull Your Ears Back’, Lawrence Braithwaite
‘TURNTABLE INTERROGATION TECHNIQUES’, by Lawrence Braithwaite
lord patch (dub) @ myspace
‘In Memorium to Lawrence Braithwaite’
‘Suggestive reading: Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite’s Wigger’
LYB @ Revolvy
‘Ratz Are Nice (PSP)’ reviewed @ Quill and Quire
‘Poisoned Haggis: On Irvine Welsh and Lawrence Braithwaite’
Lawrence Braithwaite @ goodreads
Book” Biting the Error’
Derek McCormack on LYB’s novel ‘Wigger’
LYB @ DC Guerrilla Poetry Insurgency
Buy ‘Ratz Are Nice (PSP)’

 

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2 music tracks
by LYB

“Just A Sect For Whiteboys In Afrika”

“London bomb sensation (hoffman sub dub the samo samo) lord patch vs david patrick”

 

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3 poems
by LYB

 

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Braithwaite
by Joe Clark

 

In a previous lifetime, I excerpted the only experimental novel I ever found interesting: Ratz Are Nice (PSP). Read the excerpts out loud, in any dialect you wish.

No one is going to write a Kathy Acker–manquée biography of its author, Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite (no relation). They’re both dead, but this may be the news to you in Braithwaite’s case. It was to me.

Self-evidently this gay black Forces vet from Quebec killed himself – the form of demise the culture demands from eldergays and anyone who does not or cannot pay his own freight. I’m not next, but somebody will be, and fuck-me pumps in size 13 will prance on our graves.

I am Shields-compliant (also Paglia‑) in that I cannot deal with novels, a Victorian form even in science-fiction camouflage. I am somehow a dozen pages into Black Deutschland, which title Braithwaite could have lived. Pace Brottman, sometimes the movie is better; it is much more interesting to listen to authors interviewed by an eldergay intellectual Jew, a triple tautology.
 Ratz Are Nice is barely a novel, more of a cultural positioning statement, said culture being “co-opted” and on the verge of extinction (Doc Martens “de‑recontextualized”).

In donning the Black persona, symbolized through the silver jacket, Brian finally does what everyone has been attempting to do throughout the book. Brian is killed – his soul is killed, through that burden of the weight of the Black youth – the Black persona, that persona of deglamoured oppression. He has achieved the goal of being Black but he is unprepared to handle something that the Blacks are raised to deal with through centuries of struggle – you’d suppose.

It took decades of uptight, rule-governed severity and utter yet abject correctness to get to a point where I ate Braithwaite for breakfast. My culture is on the verge of extinction. I memorized the spatial location of his books at TRL, now the only remaining copies (if they go he does), and sat there reading them, pulled apart by booth of my wide finger tipped hands.

I ate fucked-up prose for breakfast. “Last Exit to Victoria”:

…as a child I was told that not knowing the alphabet will cause illiteracy. It’ll send you into a drugged-out gangland life of white-trash nightmares and corner-boy peddling to homosexuals, who are professional players, obsessed with age and willing to drag it and you into emptiness. That in knowing the letters, I’ll know that they assemble to construct various images that become words. Words are the narrative transformation of the images. Printing a page of unbroken words is like a fresh tattoo. It captures a moment/place, sentiment and period. It orchestrates the body in motion as it flexes to move a pen/​strike at a key/​form a fist/​lift a drink or move to a rhythm. The words become the unspoken intertextuality of ethnic, racial and cultural metaphoric speech. The meter of casual dialogue = a rhythm/noise/visual bass, a soundtrack to a post-literate train of thought. […]
Slayer is for the fury and speed and violence that the book has. Deathmetal is the living desire of the neo-redneck burnout. It’s all going after the sport of brutality – the art of hurting someone. The walking jokes, with targets on their backs…. The only violence is the way the words appear on the page, marked by the slashes that connote rhythm of speech and interrupted thought. They are like semicolons = / the // are colons and so are the = signs. Sometimes the – move out to separate speech – someone takes lead//does a solo.

Nobody wanted someone this difficult and “intersectional” in the wrong way. Crocodile tears:

Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite. It’s incredibly sad news. I hadn’t heard from him in years. There was a time there when we were corresponding regularly. He had a novel, an opera, I believe he called it, and he asked me to help him find a publisher. I did what I could – it wasn’t much, but editors did see it, and loved it, but the publishing deals fell through, for reasons I don’t know. Our friendship kind of fizzled out – he wrote to me and asked if I could send him money. I had no money. I would have sent him money if I’d had it. He was a handful, but he wrote beautiful, beautiful books. Beautiful, original books. Bless him.

I got a piece of mail today… from the government of Canada. It is addressed to the Estate of Lawrence Braithwaite. It is the first I knew of his passing. Lawrence lived in my basement suite for three years (’02–’04). He was garrulous, inventive, argumentative, not a great listener, highly intelligent and a disaster as a housekeeper.
He had this big German shepherd dog named Heindrich who went everywhere with him. I had a dog too so we had plenty of opportunity to chat.
I had him up for dinner several times.
Lawrence was a very interesting character.

Can you imagine being a black anglo Quebecker saddled with the name Braithwaite, redolent as it is of token tragic-mulatto Radio-Canada TV personalities? Basically every black person in Quebec de l’époque presumptively had the name Braithwaite. I’d leave too, but not to Afghanistan, and I sure as shit wouldn’t pick Victoria, B.C., where the only other gay black male is halfway to a decathlete, handsome, winsome, smart, a dense pack of muscle with ten inches uncut and the luckiest white bf. Everybody wanted him. He’s the minimum ante you need to survive as a non-Amaechi gay army of one.
Put enough ones together and you get a real army. Not sufficient for Braithwaite – but it’s early in my process, and all I can save are the animals I don’t eat or wear, not every wayward soul you or I didn’t know we cared about till he died. Early in my process, but it’s happening.

 

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Book

Lawrence Ytzhak Braithwaite Ratz Are Nice (PSP)
Alyson Books

‘This Victoria, British Columbia, author’s second novel is one of the riskiest books yet from Alyson, publisher of cutting-edge gay titles. (His excellent debut, Wigger, appeared in Canada in 1994 and, unfortunately, received almost no critical notice.) It is difficult to read, with typographical symbols and codes, forward slashes, idiosyncratic spelling, acronyms and self-invented slang meant broadly to indicate the radical and transgressive nature of the voice serving up the narrative: “Wot’z Sparker’z subjet: Killer//ras enuff to be on that tree of life of hiz n hiz familiez’, buddiez absorb’n light.” The unconventional text follows several mods, skinheads, hardcore punks and other socially dissonant young men on the streets of Victoria. Sex is a connective tissue among them all, and–amid the drugs, drink, slam dancing and violence–there are even quixotic expressions of tenderness and love. Neo-Nazis mix dangerously with racially mixed punk scenesters; the protagonist, Edison, is a black skinhead. Edison describes the rivalry between two gangs that form the core of the culture called PSP (Pure Street Punk). These guys aren’t straight, but neither are they gay, and their edgy sexual mutability underscores their daily lives in the musical, social and emotional zones of PSP. Fearlessly experimental and antiestablishment, Braithwaite’s story is too disjointed for clarity; the lives of the punk boys get tangled up in a knot rather than interconnect expressively. This is a tough read, but hardcore, punk rock kids and souls sympathetic to the down-and-dirty street lifestyle may recognize something meaningful in all the distortion.’ — Publishers Weekly

‘Ratz Are Nice (PSP) is incredibly good. Lawrence Braithwaite’s writing is so original, gorgeous, propulsive, and alive that it almost seems to reinvent fiction before your eyes. Novels just don’t get any more exciting than this one. It gave me hope.’ — Dennis Cooper

 

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Excerpts

Flücky seemed to be able to forever look without changing physical appearance to fit comfortably anywhere with anyone’s fantasies.
He’s yammering and yelling the parts to YDL’s Skinhead88 – really loud and does a bitch about a vespa. Flücky waz a scruffy and noivus dude. He kept hiz hair at a length btwn these onez here and not the otherz. He waz a bit more posh in hiz selection of dress. Hiz sharkskin waz tailored to his train of thot. A special night it waz not – he just favored it sometimes – when he got a call to go out, hang wid the crew. Flücky was a bit ridiculous.

-Why are homosexuals always so obsessed by everything-
Chubby walks toward me. I thot he waz going to try and stomp on me. But then battyboichailz never do anything without a group involved and they don’t like to get their hands dirty. That’s why they have those Skin wanna be/SA types = Q-patrol/marching up and down the street.

The possibility of Elie going to school without getting the crap kicked out of him/was next to nil…. He was condemned to an existence filled with disjointed signifiers//​schizoidNigger/chimp/mallrat. The biggraçoons in the white collar hood thumped him blindly/​mad eyed bruiser/​detestation of the little retard. A nigger and an idiot is, too much, close to the truth than could be handled.

I always figured it like this…your average joe normal–casual–battyboichail–are peds man. They wont ya/​when you’re starving/​on the street/​they wont ya – it’s all control. They go weekend hunting looking for ruffboichail’z. They wontz to be quickened… I Edison basically loseout 3 ways.

So he met him…
You should haf seen hem he waz a beauty/areal lil’-darlin in blk stingy brim, new harry and a snorky pair of old oxbloods…. He jus sits by himself n readz n drinks til his crew shows up – a book, hez got always spread eagle, pulled apart by booth of hiz wide finger tipped handz. Hiz face pulled into it. I wont to go over n talk to him, alot, but I never got the noive….
It was amazing. Why doez he look at me like that, real sweet, wid thouz big blk eyez n that smoik.
I saw him the other day wid that gutter Skin, Eddy, sittin ontop of a newsbox on the street. Jus starin down at me. He’s too rude. He’s too stackt – what a neck, such a smile. He’s got lips, up close, that could stop a speeding train. So soft, I could use my mouth n finger to meet it and leave myfist to hold my heart.
It’s fun to see all of it go down. It waz, whatelse could happened wid thoze 2 – wot goez on inside…
He couldn’t even come over and say hi wottup. How long could I keep readin that fukkin book…. He waz caught, somtimez, starin back, but he don’t come over or say hi…. Iz he goin with that bonehead?

 

*

 

*

-I LIVE LIFE ONNA TILT,
MUFFAFOOKCA!!! KNOWLEDGE PHET!!!-

So he had issues. …and this lil wigga at the food bank, day before last, was hassling him for 60¢ for a likkle fake point of uppertunity that he had alledged to have fronted him. He waited every lunch hour on the lawn inna ramble of garbage bags, sleeping bags and karate kicking prison toned grads who had made it from the juvi to the pensive state higher learning institutes — tummies as tight as a ripple chip practicing the fußball kicks — aiming their strikes at the street corner cams, they would knock out for the common wealth, while hoping to hook up or peddle their trade with a bwai pimp who went by the name of Jimmy the K. It was Jummy the K who walked around with a pimp cup, woht he got at a micky ds, which he had glued shellacked gummy bears, polished glass, bamma rubies and latino figurines he all got from the gumball machines at the mall.
…and it was Jimmy the K woht was giving Assassin hassles for the .60¢. Jimmy the K approached him as Assassin did his dance wave, bending his ankles side to sway, dipping his hands into his empty pockets for change that was long gone, since last xmas, and swept My tar with his peepers, and the edges of the sidewalk beneath him, for a dropped fatty butt to roll a slut with.
pphhzzzzt!

…and he said ‘where’s my money b@tch’ or something like that woht you’re suppose to say from a downloaded skit and he cackled something bout Assassin being a ‘rip off artist’ or something and Assassin said this and that and that he didn’t ‘owe him shit’ after sayin “woh” or something and questioned the entire integrity if the issue and the credibility of the dastardly wigger — which Jimmy the K feeled that he had to now defend, and all that street cred sitiation, which seemed a lot more important than what a media hooper would give a fookc about on any given channel or press.
So was it time to swang? a woh/woh? Woht time was it? was it time for a knuckle up? awo, wanna juggle, wigga? too early to handle your liquar?
-muffafookca-
b.u.t. nada, the chins kept their wiggle and the hands remained untransformed into knuckles and the crowd never really gathered and the street reverands never came out to settle. All woht got done was a crizkid, who use to be a sk8er, who made graf typos all over the downtown core, come running up to the Jimmy/Assassin with two triple “A” batteries in his hand and says;
-Don’t make me restrain you… Pphhzzzzt!- which the horse throat bettys with broken pagers pointed and chuckled at that.
-I come get my shit tomorrow…you’re my fookcin bitch-
says Jimmy and stroles back to the garbage bag fortress under the tree and chats it up with bearded chick with a dick.

-WOh/WOh!!! Am I foockin Citizen!!!!!?-
The chase was to fly the bird to the mystery god. Woht’s the lesson of the day? Calculate. What does the math say of the bolts of energy to the ratio of the falling body subdued. The bus stopped and so did Assassin’s heart after the jakes came with the 8th 50,000ths’volt to the corpus = …and the coroners report read, “oh well”.
{8 cops} 〈 Heart stop x the 8th blast?
Do the math…hakim

 

 

*

p.s. RIP Marian Zazeela. ** Conrad, Hi, Conrad! How’s it? We often seem to be in the same cultural space without knowing it. Interesting. I loved the 7038634357 piece, like I said. I liked the first maybe ten minutes of Mark Fell/Rian Treanor, but then I thought it became a total mess. I missed Saturday, but The Friday concert was great. Phew, Aaron Dilloway, and Marc Baron were all fantastic. I’m glad you liked the PdT shows. I need to go see their current ones. I haven’t seen much art that blew me away. The Pinault show has some good things, especially the Fischili/Weiss sculptures, but it’s mostly just a rich guy showing off his purchases. The Lafayette Anticipations show is only okay, not so great. I’m curious about the Heavy Metal show at the Music Museum. Nothing amazing so far. You good? Things good? Happy world beyond Easter to you, pal. ** Tosh Berman, Ah, you had ‘Alice’. It wasn’t really even a game per se, or a strangely built one. Interesting re: the earthquake. I remember that. We just had a couple of cracked windows and major bookshelf tipping and spillage. Thanks, Tosh. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hey. PT2 is up on my agenda for today. Panting. I remember ‘Billy Liar’. It’s strange how strong the UK was in film during that era. Really so many of the best films came from there. Nowadays it seems pretty dreary. Lots of ‘intelligent’, well-mannered movies but the daring things are very far and in between. You could s the same thing about the US too, btw. ** Bill, Hi. He did very interesting work. Those were the days when games were an actual art form, very experimental at times, and those games were even widely played. Very different than now. 7038634357, who’s an extremely cool guy, said yes to us using his track, so we’re very happy. I don’t know ‘Impaled’. Hm, dare I? I’m of the opinion that his photos and collages are a lot better than his films. ** Steve, Oops, feel better, man. I haven’t seen the making of ‘Kids’ doc, but I am curious to. The things the young guy in ‘PGL’ recounted from his stint in Clark’s film are actually shocking. Like ‘lucky he’s not prison’ shocking. Everyone, Here’s Steve: ‘For Artsfuse’s April “Short Fuses” column, I reviewed the climate change-obsessed new album by Montreal band FYEAR. (Scroll down the page to “jazz.”). ** Nika Mavrody, It was indeed. ** Gramski 😘, Hi, thanks. You underestimate our film’s non-conformity relative to the conformity that big festivals want from films that they accept. Sad world. But we’ll see. 2025, gotcha. Well, missing the Olympics is probably to your residency’s benefit. But, yeah, come over and do the pure Paris. With a cupcake in tow! Thanks, hugs. ** Harper, Yeah, it just seems like you’d regret if you don’t go, and surely it will result in some kind of colourfulness re: your depiction of ‘him’. Do tell how it was/went, yes, thanks. Games back then were really different. The form hadn’t settled into the fighting/hunting/war-like genre it is now. There were seriously strange games. Here’s a post about my favorite games of that era if you’re curious. Big up! ** Mark, Hey, Mark. A monthlong birthday, very nice. Someone else here just saw Laurie Anderson, but I think in SF. Lord Byron, interesting. Yeah, I can see the value of that dive. DL Alvarez is an old pal of mine from the Queer Punk days and even prior. Super nice guy. I’m good, so close to the film’s finish line I can … I was going to smell it, but it doesn’t have a door, so … see it. Good to see you! ** Justin, When we meet and have an inevitable coffee or something, I’ll spill the beans. I never keep journals. Well, I did as a young teen, but my nosey alcoholic mother found where I hid them and read them and sent me to a psychiatrist, so I stopped. I guess ‘I Wished’ has a journalistic aspect at times. Anyway, thank you. What are you up to? ** Darby🥙, Hey. I do remember that, yes. I don’t know ‘Beyond a steel sky’ but I think I’ve heard of ‘Sanitorium’. I’ll see if I can find some evidence. 90s computer games were like art, really, at least compared to what 90+% of games are now. You not being dumb is a huge given, my friend. I don’t think you mentioned that stuffed animal stash before. Nice. Gosh, I hope weed doesn’t stay in the system that long. Doesn’t seem like it would. Oops, good luck. Weed makes me totally paranoid, and I stay far away from it. I’m definitely more easy going than austere. I’m shy and a little reserved sometimes, but I am never ever austere. I can’t imagine you being austere? ** Uday, I like video games. I don’t know, they’re so absorbent. That is really amazing about your mentor having worked with Nina Simone! Whoa! I saw her live once back in the late 60s, and she scared the hell out of me in the best possible way. There was a real Ziggy. He was a young friend of mine. He called himself Ziggy after some comic that used to run in newspapers called ‘Ziggy’, not after Bowie. I sort of based the character on my friend, although I changed a lot of things, because I adored him even though he was a complicated boy, and I based it on him pretty much because I knew if the character was him it would be a sympathetic one because he so was himself. So, I did try/hope, I guess. I’m happy he made you feel stuff. ** Right. I’ve revived an old spotlight post about Lawrence Yitzhak Braithwaite’s second novel/novella because it’s wonderful and so little known these days. Lawrence’s best book was his third, ‘More at 7:30’, which has never been published. It was supposed to be the first book in my old Little House on the Bowery imprint, but Lawrence was so extremely difficult to deal with as a person that the publisher refused to let me put it out. I don’t know what’s happened to that manuscript, but someone should put it out because it’s really brilliant. Anyway, ‘Ratz Are Nice’ is excellent, and here’s hoping it’s of interest to y’all. See you tomorrow.