Read Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader Presents Flush Fiction for Free Online

routine now includes running, weight lifting and a careful diet of “happy foods,” such as Asian salads, homemade yogurt, cautiously imported fruit, and baked goods made with special protein powder shipped in from Barcelona. He spent last fallin a rehabilitation center in Palm Springs, where he dried out and straightened up. While there, he worked with a nutritionist, a psychologist, and spa technicians, as well as a hypnotherapist. He has continued with the hypnotherapy for smoking cessation and weight loss as well as emotional issues. He also gets his tea leaves read regularly.
    When the waitress comes by with a plate of complimentary appetizers, he waves his hand and says, “Wontons? Not now.” Just over a year ago, he tells me, he probably would have eaten the entire plate and then smoked a pack of cigarettes like he did after every meal, and maybe do a line of coke after that.
    After we discuss the state of food and drug addicts the world over, I ask him about the new book.
    “So, what is Nate Bit a Tibetan really about?” I ask.
    Phlattwaire leans back and taps his fingers against his newly shaved head and yawns. “Racism, drugs? I guess. I don’t really know. It’s about a lot of things. I was basically in a hypnotic trance when I wrote most of it.”
    “What was the idea that started you on it then?”
    “I had a dream about this guy—I called him Nate—who was a cocaine addict, like me. He carried it around with him in these special sugar packets he made and put them on the tables at fancy restaurants he went to. Then one night as he was leaving some party, really out of it, he walked into a man wearing all these robes and watering a plant. He looked like a monk, you know? Nate tripped over the guy, and the guy dropped his watering can. The water ruined all these sugar packets that had fallen out of Nate’s pockets. That was basically the dream. So I thought, Yeah, well, I’ll bet this dude wants to get even. So he goes around looking for the guy who ruined the coke.”
    Dream analysis, Phlattwaire explains, was a big part of his treatment at the unnamed center. He worked very closely with his therapist to uncover the hidden meaning behind even his most mundane dreams. Through this practice he was ableto make connections between his subconscious mind and his behavior to give him a better understanding of himself. He saw why he had been making bad choices and how he could heal himself. He continues to analyze his dreams, writing them down in a lime-green notebook he carries everywhere. He is still working on overcoming his desire to go on safari again.
    “It would be so easy to slip back into that. I really gotta be careful right now. This is a crucial time. It helps to just focus on my writing. I’ve been writing a lot of poems, mostly about elephants.”
    When I ask Dick about his influences, he is quick to answer. “Definitely the Village People!” he exclaims, leaning forward. “In Fleece Elf , I quoted a line from ‘In Hollywood (Everybody Is a Star)’ at the beginning of each chapter. In my third book, Solo Gigolos , I mentioned ‘Just a Gigolo.’ Their music really speaks to me, you know? I try to live my life with that optimism they present.” As for literary idols, Phlattwaire cites Bernard Malamud’s The Magic Barrel (the winner of the National Book Award in 1959) as a huge inspiration for its “amazing use of the semicolon.”
    With his extraordinary fourth novel, Nate Bit a Tibetan , Phlattwaire once again manages to capture a series of strangely transcendent moments and package them in glitter and in dirt. He offers them up to the reader in a way few writers can, preaching from his knees. There is no doubt that he will continue to write one madly intriguing, creepily beautiful book after another. Just give him time to finish eating his tabnab, please. This man does not like to be disturbed while he eats.
    “It’s all about just sitting and savoring the meal, the moment,” he