Scoop City Magazine.

(Dr. Shin as a boy, back row, third from right, with other young street hoodlums, New York City.)

The following is as close to the truth as I can get. Though I interviewed him at length, the subject himself is noted as a flagrant liar. For the facts, I have had to rely mainly on public records and the testimony of former co-workers and that of his second wife. My heartfelt thanks to them.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, (date unknown) Dr. Shin* was raised in the finest orphanages and juvenile detention centers that The Big Apple had to offer. He lived a life of petty crime and poverty until his life was changed forever, at age 14, when he got a job as a copy boy at the New York Enquirer. He lived at the newspaper offices, absorbing all that they had to offer. The staff of the newspaper quickly adopted him and they became the only family he would ever know. With their help he developed his writing skills and within three years he was a staff reporter, covering the Crime beat. He had found his path.

He spent many years on the staff of that prestigious paper before the expose of a local slumlord (who happened to be the publisher’s brother in law) got him fired. Over the course of the next twenty five years he worked at and was inevitably kicked out of almost every newspaper and magazine in America. When asked about this, he shrugs his shoulders and says “I guess I never learned to keep my mouth shut.” He doesn’t seem to recall crashing his car into the lobby of the Bloom Picayune or setting fire to the Empty News office. “’Who am I to say? Guess it could have happened. Life’s funny like that.”

He occasionally supplemented, though more often diminished, his regular income with an addiction to gambling and an ill-advised part-time job fighting in illegal bare-knuckle boxing matches. To keep the wolf from the door, he also wrote numerous pulp novels, all of which are now out of print, and a controversial stage play, Good Morning Little Schoolgirl, a tremendous flop off-Broadway.

Attempts at serious literature ended when the entire two thousand page hand written manuscript of his Great American Novel, I’m Tore Down, was burned by a jealous lover. “It was divine intervention really,” he wrote in a letter to longtime friend William S. Burroughs, “The thing was too close to the bone-nobody likes to hear the ugly truth. I learned that a long time ago. If it had ever been printed, they would have tarred and feathered me. And they would have been right to do it.”

Author Norman Mailer’s opinion on the matter differs slightly- he was noted as saying that the book was “trash-just incoherent ramblings of a self-important lunatic” and that it was highly likely that Dr. Shin set fire to the manuscript himself during one of his notorious week-long benders. Of course, his opinion may have to be taken with a pinch of salt: the pair fell out famously after Mailer found Dr. Shin in bed with his third wife and hit him several times in the head with a claw hammer. Though this incident cost Dr. Shin his right eye, he laughs when it is mentioned. “No hard feelings. These things happen. Norman’s a hell of a guy and a model American.”

Dr. Shin never attempted another novel.

His two disastrous marriages, to socialite Clarisse VanBruen and Las Vegas showgirl Collette “Tippy” Thornton, along with a long love affair with alcohol, have left him penniless, unemployable, and ugly as sin (he has a bad limp in his left leg, a flattened nose, cauliflower ears, a missing pinky finger, and a glass eye). “As the great Bessie Smith said, nobody knows you when you’re down and out. I can count my friends on my little finger,” he says with a nicotine-yellow smile full of broken teeth.

Though he has lost nearly everything, he has managed to retain his enormous collection of jazz and blues records. “Blues is my religion. Howling Wolf, Muddy Waters, Junior Kimbrough, Lead Belly, and John Lee Hooker are my saints.”

Though a noted liberal firebrand in his younger days, he is now a die-hard right winger. “The Republicans are the ones with the vision and guts to get us where we need to go right now. The ends justify the means. We need this war. Hell, we need more wars. Bigger wars. Armageddon here we come! Yeee-haw!” He yells before breaking into a fit of hoarse coughing mixed with laughter.

Dr. Shin lives in an abandoned train car in a vacant lot somewhere in the deserts of the American south-west. His only companions are his three dogs, Benito, Adolf, and Mao. He has not been seen in public since “the incident” four years ago and has spent that time brewing his own wine and growing a beard. When I asked about the thick stack of typewritten pages next to a battered typewriter he looked at me blankly and said that it was time to walk the dogs. End of interview.

(*Footnote- Dr. Shin is not in any way a doctor. “Yeah, people get confused about that all the time. Truth is, the doctor who delivered me wrote his own name on the birth certificate. Dr. Shin. Must have been Chinese or something with a name like that. That’s life, huh? One stupid joke after another. Hardy har har.”)

Stumble it!