It's Time to Talk About Dental Floss

"Beverly Peachface danced the hoochie coo in Walla Walla."

This was the first line of Ricky Dick's first novel. It was published in 1971. There were over three hundred thousand copies sold. It was not a very good novel.

The theory that critics of the book put forth was that because a photograph of a young concert goer at a Grateful Dead Concert reading it amidst all of the marijuana smoke and ecstatic dancing was published in Life Magazine, it became popular with the young, hippie crowd. Which probably was somewhat instrumental in its success. However, the true boost it received was when an ex-girlfriend of Frank Zappa took a photo of him sitting in a Porta Potty reading it before a concert in Queens, New York.

There's a passage in the sixth chapter, "Angel dropped the 45, rolled his tongue across his three remaining loose teeth, took his foot off of Donna's filthy macrame purse and said, "Baby, I don't care anymore, I ain't gonna kill ya. I'm going back to Montana. Gonna take up farming like my Pa. Anyway, there's more dental floss up there than you got brains. I'll write your name in the snow sometime and it won't be with my finger..."From "Murder at The Ricky Dick Steakhouse" By Franklin Cincinnatus

MY buddy, Richard, came by this morning. We talked about the state of things in the country. He started sweating. I was turning red and my left arm was hurting-- I had already taken my blood pressure medicine but the dose was obviously too small. Richard looked as if he needed to run and hide in Hitler's bunker -- since he wasn't using it anymore. Fortunately we chose to talk about dental floss instead...