Ever since I started mentioning him in these columns, folks far and wide have been asking me to tell them more about my friend, celebrated writer and welder, Eddie Salinski. Just this morning, I received a Morse code message from an Intuit Eskimo living in the icebound environs of the Arctic Circle.
“Want more Eddie,” came the faint plea.
So here goes: Eddie is hard to track down because he lives in an ancient 1978 Winnebago Sportsman (320 hp, Allison six-speed tranny) and goes wherever he wants to, whenever he gets the notion.
It’s hard to figure his age: he’s not a kid anymore but he doesn’t slump like an old guy either. He’s about six feet tall and is lanky—but his build isn’t the slim, peach fuzz-types you see Venice Beach. It’s the skinny, boney build you get through years of over-work and under-nourishment.
Eddie has short gray hair on the top of his head and a three-day growth of beard on the bottom. His eyes are hazel and, notwithstanding a wide smile showing uneven Chiclets of teeth, his features are rugged, ragged yet quite studly.
I caught up with him last August at a tractor-pull in Salem, Kansas. He told me he was there to lay his mother to rest and after that he was heading for LA for a writers conference where he was a featured speaker. He reminisced a bit about his beginnings as a writer.
First goal: Learning to read. Since Eddie says he is dyslexic, autistic and toxic, it was an onerous task. But with that out of the way, he began jotting down Eddie-type thoughts in a notebook that eventually became a manuscript that landed in the hands of a noted New York literary agent. One cold winter’s night, this agent (whose name rhymes with Scott Meredith) was just about to toss Eddie’s work into a blazing fireplace along with a bunch of other manuscripts when Eddie’s typed words caught his eyes.
That was all it took. The more the agent read the smoking pages, the more he was captivated by Eddie’s roughhouse but innocently powerful writing style. Before long, Eddie was the toast of the publishing world. He was lighting the gas hotplate in his old trailer with 100-dollar bills.
But instant, lightning-bolt-out-of-the-heavens success has not changed Eddie Salinski. He remains humble and self-effacing to a fault and still gives free advice to lesser beings such as yours truly—which I try to pass along frequently in these columns.
Hope it helps. But if it doesn’t, don’t blame Eddie. It’s just that somewhere between Eddie’s telling and my re-telling, maybe the magic was lost.
But we’ll keep trying.
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