Impolitic Press released BARSTOW BOY-A Love Story in January, 2025, the most recent novel published by Pete O’Brien. In trying to figure out a way to get people interested enough to buy and read it, Pete thought he might create a little curiosity and intrigue by telling you a little bit about the process that brought it to fruition and then give you a small taste. BARSTOW BOY represents a twenty-three-year labor of love, first conceived six months before Pete took the final steps toward a leaving a twenty-year marriage. In the middle of all the anxiety that accompanied making such a momentous life decision, the kernel of an idea for the book first formed the way he assumes most such notions occur in a novelist’s mind. Then for the next six months he sat in his little writing cottage in the upstate New York woods staring at a blank screen, completely blocked. His eventual departure from his marriage took him to Lexington, Kentucky, where he arrived there a total emotional mess. After describing to his dear friend Martina Barnard the frustration and despair he was feeling as an accomplished novelist (He had at that time published ten best-selling suspense thrillers under another name) whose well had gone completely dry, she told him she was leaving soon for two weeks at a Sufi meditation camp in the Mountains of New Mexico above Albuquerque, and that he might benefit from tagging along. Desperate to find his creative center again, he figured a few weeks of deep meditation surely couldn’t hurt and so off he drove with her to try something he’d never before even imagined trying. Once arrived at the camp he opted to pitch a tent in the surrounding pine forest rather than sleep in the men’s dorm and for the next several days underwent a rigorous dietary cleanse while engaging in several different types of meditation, sometimes involving drum circles and other times chanting various passages from the Koran, spoken in Arabic. It was in the middle of the second week of this adventure when, after sitting in the middle of those woods chanting for five straight hours, the trees started to take on shifting hallucinatory shapes like he was on psychedelics. Then, suddenly out of nowhere, the entire plot of BARSTOW BOY appeared before my mind’s eye. For the next several hours as daylight waned, he scribbled furiously in his notebook, filling forty-plus pages of what he believed his readers would find a truly remarkable coming-of-age saga about a boy, raised by White Supremacists; one who manages to defy the hatreds of his upbringing to grow into a man of strong ethics and deep virtue against daunting odds. He sent the book to his then-agent Philip Spitzer once he had completed a first version of it. Philip believed he was representing an accomplished thriller writer, not the author of a coming-of-age love story and had no idea what to do with it. The book was much too long and for some reason Pete cannot fathom now, he’d rendered the narrative in his protagonist’s first-person voice. In pre-Trump America, before the scab was picked off an ugliness that continues to infect our present society, White Supremacy wasn’t something the publishing world had any interest in talking about. In essence, at least insofar as Philip was concerned, the book was dead on arrival. Deeply disappointed and understandably frustrated, Pete put it in a drawer for eighteen years. Then, in 2022, with society in the grips of the Covid epidemic and in shut-down mode, he found himself with an excess of alone-time on his hands and decided to dig the book back out again to put a fresh eye on it. Several things occurred to him in that re-reading after so much time had passed. On the negative side, it was way too long and the voice was completely wrong. On the positive, somewhere in the past twenty years America had broken the needle on its moral compass. Perhaps ironically, the story of Danny Olmstead’s odyssey from witnessing his Klansman father murder a white woman in cold blood when he was five-years-old, simply because she was riding in the same car as a black man, to the details of his eventual escape from that hateful culture, has since become one of strong contemporary significance. What occurred next was a complete tear-down and overhaul of the entire text, a voice change, some serious flab-trimming, and the re-writing of many entire passages. The result is a much leaner but still meaty narrative that takes the reader on a rollicking and rewarding journey from the negative to the positive in a world that needs all the hope for the future it can get. For a taste of what we’re talking about, here’s the Prologue of this timely novel to whet your appetite. Pete encourages you to get your local independent bookseller to order you a copy and a few more for their store. Or, if you prefer, you can purchase the Kindle, audible, or paperback versions through outlets like Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble. BARSTOW BOY By Pete Obrien Prologue Harrison, Arkansas Winter The actual chain of events that launch this narrative transpired on a December night when Danny Olmstead was five years old. Five is an age when all boys are cocksure that they’ve got the whole world in focus. Their mama’s womb is in the distant past, as are many of the most crippling egocentric insecurities of infancy. A five-year-old boy has begun to comprehend the utter immensity of the universe and his own size relative to it. He thinks that he has started to really figure things out, but that doesn’t mean he has no questions. A five-year-old boy’s world is full of nothing but questions. At five, Danny wanted to know the why of most everything, and the why-not of everything else. Asking those questions, then troweling a million observations between their answers like mortar between bricks, was how he’d built his comprehension of the world and his unique place within it. That particular December night he was sent to bed at his usual hour, around eight or so. It’s hard for him now to recollect many of those kinds of details so many years later, but as was often the case he remembers that he couldn’t fall directly to sleep. Christmas was less than a week away and there was surely something he’d had his heart set on and couldn’t get off his mind. Rather than count sheep, he’d laid on his back staring at the dancing shadows on his bedroom ceiling and played imagination games with the shapes he saw there. He does recollect now that just before the events unfolded that would forever change his life, those shadows suddenly changed. Cast by the tree outside his window they were thrown by the headlights of a car that had just pulled up to the pumps of his daddy’s filling station across the motel lot, and stood in stark contrast to the white ceiling paint. Business was generally slow that time of year, especially an hour past his bedtime, but when his daddy worked late on car repairs, he kept the island lights on. On nights when he didn’t have any repair business, he and Danny’s mama would generally fight and Danny could hear those hateful, screaming exchanges through his room’s thin walls. His daddy, or “Big Steve” as everyone thereabouts called him, had a temper on him. Everybody said so. And Danny’s mama wouldn’t give an inch to a D-16 Caterpillar, so there you had it. Big Steve and Brenda Olmstead would fight like a couple of super-charged hemis at a tractor pull; objects let fly in the fracas crashing into the opposite side of the wall just over Danny’s head. Mornings after, Brenda often sported the bruises of battle and while making Danny’s breakfast would mutter nasty epithets under her breath. It was better, Danny figured, when his daddy spent evenings in the filling station garage, pumped a few extra gallons of gas for “chump change” as he called it, and thereby preserved the fragile peace. From his young and untried perspective—those miles of bedtime mental meanderings notwithstanding—Danny tended to view the world in simple terms. It would be a better place if his mama and daddy didn’t fight. Summers thereabouts were hot, but the cold that crept up through the floorboards and leaked in around his window in winter was worse. A cheeseburger was much preferable to fried liver and onions. Since he’d started kindergarten, weekends were much nicer than school days but even kindergarten had its plusses. Other boys in his class—Stew Carr and Justin Burdett among the loudest mouths on the subject—thought all girls had cooties. They swore they hated them. But Danny? He practically ached every time he saw Annie Behrens and always tried to get as close to her as he could with his nap mat. He’d never seen a creature quite so beautiful and even that ill-fated night, as he lay watching those shadows dance, he could easily project her face amongst them, vivid in his mind’s eye. There were some days when just a glimpse of her forced a great gulp of air deep into his lungs, the pressure of it trying to quiet the thundering of his heart against his ribs. He’d wished he could tell her about those feelings but was terrified the telling would ruin everything; shatter his ardor like a dropped dinner plate. Instead, on nights like those, he lay awake staring at his ceiling, spinning fantasies of adventures they’d go on together. In them, she would invariably stumble into harm’s way and he would come to her rescue, saving the day and winning her heart. He remembered that an instant after those shadows appeared so starkly outlined overhead, the light suddenly changed. It not only dimmed, but the bluish cast thrown by the lights beneath the island canopy was extinguished just after a customer pulled up to the pumps, his tires ringing the bell. His daddy had shut off the overheads and this event was followed seconds later by the whump of a car door and a loud, angry male voice. “Hey, man! What the fuck? I need gas!” Curious, Danny climbed from the warmth of his bed and stole to the window to peer out. A large black man stood in the outside pump lane alongside a gleaming black Caddy Escalade. He was dressed in a camel-colored topcoat and faced the garage, his fists balled at his sides. Another person sat in shadow inside the car. At that moment, Big Steve appeared at the office door dressed in greasy coveralls, a can of Busch in one hand. “We’re closed,” he called out. The angry customer glanced up at the extinguished lights and spread his hands. “You was open when I pull in here. I be running on fucking fumes, man. Gimme a break.” “Like I said,” Big Steve replied, “We’re closed.” He advanced several steps toward the other man as he spoke. “Every light in the place was on. Minute you seen me you turn them motherfuckers out.” Still walking toward the man, Big Steve got that dark, angry look on his face that meant trouble. When he and the big stranger were practically toe-to-toe, he stuck his chest out the way he sometimes did. “You calling me a liar, boy? Cuz if you is, this here’s private property, you’re trespassing, and I got a mind to kick your ass.” Right about then Danny saw movement inside the car. The passenger side window came down and a white woman with masses of platinum blonde hair stuck her head out. Danny had never seen a white woman and a black man together before that, except on TV. “Don’t take no, Clement. We’re on a schedule. Tell him to turn the pumps back on, sell us some gas, or you’ll kick his ass.” At that, Danny saw his daddy stiffen slightly, the way he’d do just before he hauled off and hit Mama. He was standing maybe thirty yards distant but Danny believed he would have recognized that barely discernible attitude shift down the length of an entire football field. Big Steve’s hand snaked to a back pocket of his baggy coveralls to produce the compact little .32 Colt snub nose he always carried. While he was pulling it, he took several quick steps around to the side of the Escalade where the angry woman sat, reached in and grabbed a fistful of her hair. With her head jerked out the window, he jammed the barrel of that pistol against her temple. Danny was able to see her clearly then and the expression of pain and surprise on her face as his daddy yelled, “Say what, you fucking slut?” There was a loud ‘Pop!’, the little gun jumped in his hand and at that same instant the inside of the car windshield was drenched a dull crimson. When Big Steve took a half-step back, a look of supreme satisfaction on his face, the big black man rushed his blind side. With a shoulder dropped low and his head up the way Danny had seen football players do, he hit Big Steve below the waist, wrapped his arms on impact and drove him over backwards to the pavement. Both of them landed hard and immediately started to buck and wrestle, Big Steve trying to bring that .32 Colt to bear while his opponent fought to wrest it from his control. They rolled into the left front tire of the Cadillac, the gun disappeared from view, and an instant later there was another “Pop!”, this one slightly muffled. With a forceful heave, the black man rolled away from Danny’s daddy just as Big Steve commenced to thrash and convulse like a gigged frog. With all the commotion, lights came on all over the motor court. Doors opened and people appeared looking out into the night to see what all the ruckus was about. The black man staggered to his feet looking bewildered. Danny heard the wail of a siren in the distance as he watched dumbfounded. With his hand hanging at his side, the black man held the gun and looked from the red-spattered windscreen of his car to Big Steve, now motionless on the ground, and then to the motel patrons staring in his direction. “He fucking shot her,” he shouted at them, sounding more perplexed than anything else. With his hands lifted from his sides in a gesture of helplessness he slowly shook his head. “Grabs a fistful of her hair and pops a cap in her like he’s shooting a fucking dog.” Still too numb with shock to fully grasp what had just transpired, Danny stood frozen at his window. He’d seen plenty of people shot in action shows on television but still wondered why Big Steve was lying there on the ground like that and not moving. Those other people were characters in television shows or movies. This was his daddy; a presence too big and menacing to be felled by a mere bullet from a silly little snub thirty-two. The wail of that siren grew so loud it was all he could hear. The door of his family’s unit opened and his mama stepped out between two parked cars, her hair in curlers and a robe hugged to her bosom. She stared dumbly at the open-mouthed black man while a Boone County Sheriff’s cruiser burst suddenly upon the scene and skidded to a tire-screeching halt. The driver’s door flew open and a deputy jumped out to lean weapon-extended over the roof. “Drop the gun!” he yelled. The bewildered black man moved to comply, bending slowly at the waist to place Big Steve’s .32 on the pavement at his feet. As soon as he’d done so, the deputy opened fire. SIX MONTHS LATER… From the passenger side of his family’s Ford F-150 pick-up, Danny watched the real estate man take the keys to the motel office from his mama’s outstretched hand. Across the parking lot, the pumps of the filling station were mothballed in white plastic. A large FOR SALE sign hung in the office window. A similar sign, bigger still, was hung between the two six-by-six timbers supporting the motor court roadside sign, the word SOLD emblazoned across it. It was mid-June and the weather in Northern Arkansas had turned hellishly hot with stifling humidity to match. Danny had the windows on both sides of the truck cab run down and still couldn’t catch a breath of breeze. He didn’t know if the feeling of near suffocation he suffered came from the heat or the past six months’ bewildering turn of events. Harrison, his family, his friends from school, the woods, the creek behind that stretch of road and the life of a motel and filling station proprietor’s son were the only life he knew. All of that was about to change. After the key exchange, Brenda Olmstead shook hands with the broker and turned to walk toward the truck. Before she climbed behind the wheel, she stopped to stand a moment staring at the office unit that had also been their home. Then she contemplated the twelve-foot U-Haul trailer hitched to the truck before glancing to the spot on the ground beside the gas pump where her husband and a New Orleans Saints linebacker named Clement Bradley had died that awful night. With her eyes squeezed shut, she shook her head. An abrupt about-face brought her to the truck where she jerked open the door and looked in, tears glistening on her cheeks. “Buckle up, baby. We got us a long drive ahead.” Danny grabbed the belt harness and dragged it across his chest. He saw sweat trickling from his mama’s hairline, running in lines parallel to the tears that streamed down her cheeks. She wiped her face with a broad swipe of one forearm while buckling her own belt, then reached out to slam her door. “I don’t get it. Why we leaving here?” Danny asked. “Daddy bragged on this being God’s country; how people be fools to live nowhere else.” Brenda gave the key an impatient twist in the ignition and the engine started with a deep, throaty snarl. “That was afore he up and went to see Jesus, baby. All I’ve felt since is godforsaken.” One hand on the gear shift, she looked over and tried to force a smile. “We’re leaving cause I cain’t handle this no more, baby. Not by my own self. Your Uncle Willis, he wants us to come live with him. Use some of the motel money so I can go to beauty school. Start life over in California. Leave a lotta bad memories behind.” That said, she dropped it into Drive. Once the play came out of the hitch, the trailer gave a violent jerk that slammed Danny’s head against the seat back. Then they swung in a wide arc through the motel lot and he got a last look at the physical world he was leaving behind. His imagination filled in what his eyes couldn’t see. It locked onto Annie Behrens’ lively laugh, and her slightly crooked, mocking smile. At the highway, Brenda waited for a break in traffic, then pulled out and started them south toward Little Rock.