Destroy by Jason Myers Read Free Book Online Page B

other great authors from generations previous, PieGrinder stands alone at the top, and Morgan has assured his own generation a voice for years to come.”
    To some, I was the next Ellis.
    To others, I was better than Ellis.
    And to Mojo magazine, “If Ellis and Palahniuk ever got together and had a literary baby, that baby would be James Morgan.”
    The readers ate it up. The book took off big-time. I mean, it absolutely blew the fuck up, and just as importantly, so did I.
    Aside from the moped gangs, there were seventeen bands with names that were references lifted from my novel.
    Twelve album titles.
    And over four-hundred songs.
    Rolling Stone sent me on tour with the Bronx for three weeks to write a cover piece. I covered the Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers farewell tour for MTV News. And I wrote a huge piece about my brief time in New York with the entire cast of The Lost Boys for SOMA magazine.
    There were lavish parties in New York and LA and London and Paris. I was on the cover of GQ . Playboy did a huge piece on me. I wrote the annual Best and Worst music list for the Buddyhead website. I did a photo shoot and interview with the Heartless Bastards for Interview magazine. SOMA used me as the male model for their annual fashion issue. I kicked it with Vincent Gallo during a leg of his European tour with Sean Lennon. I got wasted with a Hilton girl in a private hotel bar. Vice magazine did a Morgan Says issue where I ripped and ranted about everything from fashion to music to movies to literature to the best cities to use drugs in. The hardest bars to get kicked out of. The best places to end up swaying in an intersection at three in the morning with no identification and no money and no shoes on.
    I got drunk on six bottles of wine with that artist, Barney, in the south of France. Flew on a private jet to Tokyo for a club opening with this designer, Jacobs. There were a few dates with a Zooey, that chick from The Brown Bunny , and one of the White Stripes. A million rumors of me hooking up with a crazy Lindsay, another Hilton girl (multiple times), then Miss Furtado (true), and even one about me and Ohhhhhh Karen occupying a bathroom stall at the Warfield for an hour (very true).
    I was at movie premieres and book release parties, did four national signing tours, and took a weekend trip to Hawaii with PJ.
    But even amid all this glory and wealth, there were plenty of downer moments as well.
    A newspaper in Seattle called me “a very careful plagiarist.”
    Another one in Boston said, “The best thing for Morgan to do is quit writing books and roadie for Ashlee Simpson.”
    And a magazine in New York wrote, “James Morgan is to literature what Jessica Alba is to acting. Ugh.”
    To some, I was Ellis Light.
    To others, I was a black mark on the literary world.
    And to the San Francisco Bay Guardian , I was “nothing but a rip-off artist posing as an author.”
    I lost many friends along the way. A bunch of art-scene kids showed up at a reading in San Francisco and accused me of being a jock because I’d been a standout football player and a wrestler in high school.
    Twenty school districts banned my book. Two teachers were fired for recommending my novel to their students to read outside class. And James Dobson called me “a disgusting hedonist with pedophile tendencies” on the Bill O’Reilly show.
    Churches in Kansas and Nebraska and Missouri held book-burning ceremonies. There were death threats to me and my family. Four readings on the last tour were called off because of bomb threats. And I was arrested in Ohio on suspicion of supplying three underage girls with alcohol (the charges were later dropped when the girls admitted they’d stolen the beer and a blank tape I’d made—the Suicide Pussy Mix—from the back of my rental car at a gas station outside Cleveland).
    Yet still, some of these moments were easy to move past so long as the money and