Last Chance Of A Crazy Virgin (Story behind the non-politically story)

The original title was Driving With Ace. It's a bizarre comedy.



Last Chance Of  A Crazy Virgin
(Story behind the non-politically correct story)

I wrote the first words of this novel on the back porch of a farm in rural Rebecca, Georgia in 1977. I had a pen and a yellow pad, and the sun was just coming up over the lake behind the house. I didn't live there. I had been living out of a suitcase for the past two years while singing in a road band. I was 30, in between gigs, in a place I had never been with a 24-year-old Georgia Peach named Debbie who was so stunning it hurt your soul just to look at her. She was also crazy as hell. She coached me on how to conduct myself with her parents by being nice and polite. So, I was surprised when I walked in with her and she said:

"Mom and Dad, this is Dennis. We sleep together in the same bed and we will sleep together in this house in the same bed."

That was it. I about fell over. Her parents nodded and smiled, and we all went along with the program. As it turned out, they were all nuts. But that first morning, her father came out on the porch with me just as the sun came up after I had written the first sentence of Last Chance, then known as Ace. He looked at me a few moments; he was a bent man, old before his time, with bone disease that left his bones so soft that a light punch could break them. He then gave me some advice.

"Boy, whatever you do, don't marry my daughter. Look what they did to me."

I took his advice to heart after Debbie and I moved to Atlanta months later. She was like a Medusa, both beautiful and deadly. We couldn't go anywhere because it took her hours to get ready and when we did go out, she always ended up punching any girl she thought I may be looking at sideways. We pretty much got barred out of almost every place we went. I could write an entire novel on my adventures with her, but I worked on this novel the entire time I was with her, and the twisted comedy situations were probably some kind of cry for help from the spell she had me under. I finally escaped to Cincinnati in 1978 and dropped back into my old band playing weekends in a "no colors wearing" biker bar in Kentucky right near Bobby Mackey's.

The last time I heard from Debbie was one night in 1980 when she called me at three in the morning. She was trashed.

"My father just had his leg removed," she said. "I rolled my car and I'm in a neck brace and my boyfriend gets out of jail tomorrow and says he's going to kill me."

"Sounds like one of your typical days," I said, then she cursed at me and hung up. I still don't know if the guy killed her.

I finally finished the novel around 1981. I sent it unsolicited to Bantam. I heard from them months later. It made it to a final marketing meeting so someone liked it. But they only had one opening, and an established writer got the nod. James Herbert, the English horror writer who was in New York and my penpal at the time, offered to put in a word for me at New American Library after I sent it there. But he had arrived after it had been rejected. Plus, he never read the novel. One agent gave some advice in 1982, telling me to remove some of the negative comments about women from the novel. Hmm, wonder where those came from? I did, along with some side scenes that didn't move the plot forward, and I ended up losing a hundred pages.  It's been published three times now, twice under the name Driving With Ace and the current title.

Last Chance Of A Crazy Virgin

It's about John Elvin, a 24-year-old Cincinnati bus driver in 1982 who lives with his crazy parents and his crazy war vet brother. He is also a virgin trying to take the plunge for the first time. I believe my influence for the novel came from Robert Klane who wrote The Horse Is Dead and Where's Poppa? I was working at a concrete company and the entire place read one copy of The Horse Is Dead, which meant no sales for the author, or what could have been a lot more sales.

Last Chance is like that. One copy will get passed around all over the place, which means lower sales for me. I'm glad those who have read the novel like it. You will laugh-spit any liquid you drink through your nose at certain parts if you read them at the wrong time. I guess, in the end, it's a reflection of my life at the time I wrote it. So, if you are ever down and need a laugh, this book may do it for you.

Last Chance and other Dennis Latham Novels