Current Fiction Writing Endeavors: The Trip House Tales

Antonio flees Southern Texas and heads for the dot-com prosperity boom of the S.F. Bay Area, where the Electronica underground and polydrug generations are rattling the rave scene. There, he befriends the scene’s digital, DJ gurus and discovers a decadent, social playworld, perpetuated by the spirit of Haight-Ashbury’s historic counterculture, preserved in one DJ Radio founder's 19th-century Painted Lady, a mansion known as the Russian Embassy.

As he gathers information for an article, Antonio realizes he’s found the perfect escape, and he immerses himself in a world outside his heritage. He begins to see his friends whither from the dissolution of the drug culture, watches as his life unfolds amidst a backdrop of dot-com chaos. The truth he uncovers about himself and the mansion take him to the edge of social normality, as he struggles to finally find a place in 21st-century, American society.

By: Andres Bella

"My old house on the outskirts of Houston was a rural painting masterpiece, a shotgun-style, rectangle flanked by gray wooden boards sitting on red, adobe bricks, surrounded by long-bladed green grass, wooden posts, and distant trees. There was vegetation everywhere, perfect for a child’s imagination, but detrimental to a 19-year-old, self-proclaimed, counterculture enthusiast. Only one small highway, Highway 6, connected our dirt road to civilization, one small highway surrounded by ditches, rice silos, and horse and cow fields. We didn’t see the first apartment complexes or plaza development along the highway until the mid 1980’s. And still, everything looked the same. After reading Wolfe’s book, civilization felt impossibly distant, telescopic – I’d never see the other side, the other half. The world continued to stretch, past its vanishing point, and suddenly there was much more ground to cover."

"It's about multicultural issues, set against the San Francisco, Ecstasy, DJ scene at the end of the century."

"Coming of age through an experience of community/subculture, drugs, sex, and music/art."

"It’s not the Joy Luck Club…it’s the Joy Drug Club."