My New Novel . . .
HIGH STREET LOWS
My third novel, High Street Lows, is out!
High Street Lows is set in my hometown of St. Helena in the Napa Valley and follows a successful professional skateboarder whose girlfriend has unexpectedly died. David, rudderless and grief-stricken, embroils himself in seemingly harmless small-town drama while navigating the spoils of his pro model shoe's financial success.
This is book three in what I’m calling The Streets of Lissé, a collection of standalone stories that can be read in any order. Each book is connected to a fictional shoe company, Lissé, and some characters appear in all the story lines.
I’m not sure how other authors begin writing a novel, but my new one started with three questions.
What if there was someone who altruistically (and then, perhaps, spitefully) paid other people’s property taxes?
What if I’d been a witness to the murder that took place across the street from my childhood home in St. Helena?
What would it be like to win the shoe lottery as a pro skater?
The initial question struck me years ago while I was paying property taxes online. The website didn’t require any sign-in or verification that I owned the property. I basically just typed in the address and then paid the bill. What if I’d paid the wrong house? Could I easily get a refund? Would I confront the owners? What if I was rich enough and didn’t care? Could paying other people’s taxes become a compulsion? Could it get me into trouble?
The second question has haunted me for over twenty years. It was a miserably hot summer day and I had just purchased my first video camera (Canon GL2 for the camera nerds out there) with some hard-earned cash from my job at the Cameo Cinema. I was relieved it arrived the day before my pilgrimage to Visalia Skate Camp, but also immediately bored because none of my friends were around to skate with me that day. So I sat around, messing with the settings and then started packing for camp. I needed toothpaste, so I walked down the street to Safeway where I decided I was hungry. I bought a sandwich and ate it outside the grocery store. When I returned home, there was a crowd gathered across the street and a few police officers blocking traffic.
“Cool,” I thought. “Something I can film.”
With my new camera up against my face, I recorded the crowd and as I moved through it I asked what happened.
“Someone got shot,” a neighbor said. “They’re saying he’s dead.”
I immediately dropped the camera and stared in the direction of the corpse. Someone got shot across the street from my house? In St. Helena? What if I’d been home? I doubt I would have recognized the sound of gunshots, but would I have just walked out with my camera and filmed the killer? Would I have become entangled in the investigation? He escaped that afternoon and to my knowledge was never apprehended.
So began the slow, story development. First in my head, then on the pages of various moleskins, and eventually in an offline-accessible Google doc, where I tapped away for thirty minutes to an hour every day for about a year. In the end, the story evolved into something much different than I’d initially mapped out. It’s less about property taxes, and more about searching for answers after a loved one’s tragic death. The novel is a love letter to my hometown and a place to vent some of my frustrations with the skateboarding industry.
This is how it begins:
“I always assumed I would die young. Bleeding out from a gunshot wound, on a road in a small wine-country town, while lying next to a dead body, however, is not what I imagined.
I had pictured my early death being far more heroic. Like diving in front of a bus to save a small child, or defending my girlfriend’s honor in some bold but tragically foolish act. Or if not heroic, at least dramatic and altruistic in some way that you might want to tell your friends about. Like veering off the side of a Pacific Coast cliff to avoid hitting a struggling cyclist who was making the torturous climb. I would have just turned the corner, climbing the same mountain in my car, only to startle at seeing the seal-like human pumping at a near-standstill in the center of the road. After jerking my wheel to avoid killing the cyclist and a head-on collision with an oncoming car, I would then drift into the air, soaring until I met the rocks along the Pacific Ocean. Poor David, they’d say. He always hated cyclists, too.
But now here I lie, in too much pain to even scream, accepting as the blood seeps from me that I’ll be just another American gun-violence stat. There’s almost nothing more boring. Twenty-eight years old, survived by no children. The end of an inconsequential family line. And in the few moments I have left to live—surely it’s only moments, as the bullet seems to have ruptured some crucial artery in my leg—I can’t help but wonder if it’s all my own fault. This strange season that landed me here, bleeding out in a town I don’t much like, staring at the lifeless body of another person. Did this all unfold because of a silly accident? Worse than an accident, really. A typo caused by a mild case of dyslexia. It would seem too cruel a fate, too frustrating a failure, for it all to end this way.”
It was fun to write about my hometown from the perspective of a transplant. St. Helena is an interesting and complicated town. Like many tourist destinations, the town struggles between catering to the day-trippers and vacationers who allow most of the businesses to thrive, and being a livable place for the year-round residents. Growing up there, I hated the tourism, the tourists, and the boredom I felt as a skateboarder trapped in an amusement park for the wealthy. As a grown-up no longer living there, there’s a lot to love about what the tourists are offered. David, the protagonist, is neither a wine enthusiast nor a small-town dreamer. He grew up in Arizona, dedicated his life to skateboarding and only moves there because of his devotion to his girlfriend and her love of the wine industry. But when she tragically dies, he feels stuck.
The third question is one that every pro skater has fantasized about, including myself. What if my shoe makes me millions of dollars? I had the opportunity to design two pro model shoes, one for C1rca and one for DVS, but in each instance the shoe company fell apart just before the release. I never made a penny from a pro model shoe. So I loved imagining a guy who stumbled into a shoe that actually worked. Really worked.
David McClain is entirely fictional and not based on anyone in particular. He’s a skater plagued with injuries, and he’s lost the love of simply skating. His shoe situation draws from a few guys—Dennis Busenitz, Steve Caballero, Adrian Lopez—but is more a composite of the success of the Janoski and the D3, leaning into the lore, in some cases, more than the facts.
I appreciate everyone out there who reads these books! They’re a lot of fun to write and I hope they’re fun to read. Currently writing some short stories, which I hope to share soon.
Thank you to my insightful readers: Whitney Ryan, Ann Mitchell Ryan Nash, Nic Henry, Mark Suciu, Tracey Dewart, Patrik Wallner, and JP Mulligan Hawkins. Special thank you to Amy Medeiros for copy-editing and Chris Collins for the cover art and design.
I can’t wait to read your new novel, Walker!
I think it’s so interesting that you built it around those three questions, and I’m so glad your shared those questions with us as it has only added to the intrigue. :)