Orifice: Book One of The Lola Trilogy

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Orifice was my ninth novel, and a difficult one to write. I began it in Aguascalientes, in central Mexico, living in the Mina Hotel and going every morning to the Excelsior Cafe. For three months I wrote pages and pages, none of which seemed right. Finally I returned to California, brooded for a while, tore the pages apart—and reorganized what I had until it made some sense to me. Then I hopped on another Mexican bus, returned to Aguascalientes...and at last got some serious work done.

I imagined a man, an aging, world-weary traveler, living in the ruins of a whorehouse deep in the jungle in Central America. He has with him Lola, a young American girl, blonde, slender, innocent in the way only American girls can be innocent. He has her act out his memories—perhaps his dreams, his fantasies—of the whores he had known here, in this same building, as a young man. She strolls, naked except for her high-heeled shoes, down decrepit corridors smelling of rotting wood. She slides stockings onto her legs. The ghosts of whores-past revile her and taunt her.,,,

Orifice is the first book in what has become my Lola Trilogy, which includes Autobiography of a Wanderer and Hag. All three novels are layered with dreams, fantasies, and realities. Lola is at once a muse, a savage, and a helpless girl. She is a love story, and a silken adventure; a man’s brutal nightmare, and his seductive siren. The drama they enact, in the ruins of a whorehouse in a deep jungle, is a complex exploration of passion, art, and despair.