Born Irish Catholic, I was shaped more by the nuns than the priests. The harridans almost convinced me the seminary was my destiny. It took a convent of rulers to the wrist and swats to the bare butt to steer me away from the true path. No, not really. It was weed, reds, and beer, sprinkled with hours of Hunter S. Thompson, Ken Kesey, Lenin, and Tom Wolfe. Even with the pull of the Vatican and the Sisters of Providence, I escaped into the 60’s like a penniless starving boy crawling to the Main Street Dairy Freeze. Working class America remained the hero. It was the bourgeois and the military-industrial complex that became the enemy. And a war we fought as a police action that killed millions of Vietnamese and over 54,000 Americans.
My battles weren’t in a jungle with humidity you could drink. I fought with the local United States Selective Service office run by a redneck tire salesman. Uncle Sam seemed to desperately want a confirmed anti-war and peace activist to join in the killing. Pacifism wasn’t a strong card and I was drafted anyway, only to experience a last second redemption that kept me on the streets rather than sucking napalm. If things had worked out differently and I was shipped to a Southeast Asian rice paddy, my brother, a Marine stationed on a firebase outside Chu Lai, would have “killed me.”
Besides drugs and protest, I evolved as a long haired freak who was often shown the finger and threatened by the pickup truck set. Rugby teammates called me either “Hippie” or “Porky,” depending on the amount of mac and cheese I’d eaten that week. The evolution of a small town star quarterback, married to the head cheerleader, was frightening enough without the shoulder length hair and com-symp rhetoric. My first presidential election found me in the booth voting for Eldridge Cleaver, head of the Peace and Freedom Party and Black Panther. Cleaver was later to morph into a Reagan republican and designer of leather codpieces.
Armed with a university degree and time in law school, I began my adult working career as a car antenna assembler, soon moving up to a sheet rock hauler. A daughter crawling around the house brought a change in my views on the worker’s revolution. I began to exploit my comrades like every reborn capitalist. The highlight of these years was planting nearly 5 million trees in the blast zone surrounding Mt. St. Helens. Of course, I didn’t do the real work. That was left to the proletariat and undocumented laborers.
During the reforestation period, a son arrived squalling on my parent’s bed, while the family dachshund licked at the after birth. He was destined to become a local legend youth soccer player recruited by several professional English teams. I put lots of miles on logging roads in 4 x 4s, but my hand was never far from a book.
Tree planting was seasonal, and the hot weather found me trying to squander all the profit on some scheme to make millions. Never happened. Eventually, I ended up in a paternity testing lab, helping design a program to accept and track specimens. HIV/AIDS was just surfacing. The condition was called “gay cancer” and the lab was attempting to expand their services by introducing the newly developed mechanized HIV antibody test. In my entrepreneurial way, I began to think of a screening method that would be more valuable to everyone and lucrative to me. By exploiting the minds of numerous research scientists, the result was invention of a rapid home test utilizing both blood and saliva for the detection of HIV antibodies. The company went public in 1992 and I became the CEO, fired in a corporate coup in 1996. Since then, the medical diagnostic field has held its allure and several faltering companies have resulted.
While the 90s were dominated by introduction of HIV tests, the personal cost was a divorce after 30 years of marriage and subsequent dating of a series of wacked out psychotherapists, including one who left a dead cat on my doorstep. During those years, while attempting to promote the HIV tests, I visited 76 countries, including my first tour of Vietnam. A grand daughter was born and the ex happily re-married, her focus turning on a different poor soul.
The late 1990s and early 21st century was the start of writing and learning to write. I didn’t know the word “craft” applied to writing, but was prompted to educate myself by a girlfriend who read my first semi-autobiographical work, No Direction Home, a 600 page opus puked out while she was in the Netherlands. Her comment: “you have stories to tell, but now you have to learn how to write them.” My initial mentor, Roger Larsen, encouraged me to move on to the best known teacher in the Portland, Oregon area, Tom Spanbauer. I joined his Risky Writing class and brought seven pages of Don’t Mean Nuthin’ to read every week. One of my classmates was Chuck Palahniuk, who was then drafting Fight Club. After two years, Spanbauer kicked me out, saying I was “killing” him with all the gore and sending him to places he had no desire to go. Since then, I have been on my own and written another 4 novels, including the most recent, Pashtun, set in Afghanistan.
Recently, I died 19 times. Of course, I wouldn’t be writing this unless I had been revived by both CPR and the paddle. I don’t remember much except hovering over the turmoil of a guy flopping around on the carpet, frantically being attended to by unrecognized men. As I nonchalantly watched, I drifted toward a bright tunnel of light. Now I know this is a relatively common response by those who have died and are re-born. The experience has prompted me to compose a non-fiction book entitled I Died Nineteen Times and So Can You. In my head anyway.
Self-publishing became a reality through the prodding of the wonderful woman with whom I am now living. She not only encouraged through her kind actions, but also put in cash. Additonally, my agent, Peter Riva, said going this route may lead to a real publisher.

Website: http://www.ronlealosbooks.com