This is a blog originally written for and posted at Multi-Hyphenate.com. We thought folks interested in Postcard Comets might enjoy this piece about David’s literary activities.

I’ve known Gerry McCarthy since his family moved to Toronto from Peterborough many years ago. We went to the same high school and started playing in bands in the same neighbourhood around the same time. But I knew his brother even better, and it was that relationship which gained me entry into the McCarthy household.

It was also my friendship with Gerry’s older brother Don that brought me to A Man of Substances. Don has been telling me for years that I should be writing more. He also told me that Gerry had a strong desire to document the remarkable elements of his own life but was having difficulty committing it to paper to his own satisfaction.

That’s not surprising. Putting your life down in words is a daunting prospect. I’d find it daunting, at any rate. The only one who did not appear to be daunted was Don. He invited me to accompany the two of them on a drive to Peterborough to visit their parents. The idea was that Gerry would tell me the story and his ideas for the book on the two hour-plus drive. To be honest, I was more compelled by the thought of a bowl of Ma McCarthy’s chicken and rice soup than I was by hearing Gerry’s story. But regardless of the motivation, I agreed.

The reason I was under whelmed by the prospect of Gerry’s story was that I thought I knew it. I did not. Over the course of that drive, I realized that his tale had more unexpected twists and turns than the car journey itself. To say that I had questions is flagrant understatement. I decided that I had to hear his story again now that my questions had taken shape.

I suggested that Gerry come to my studio; he could record his recollections and I could ask the questions that struck me as his narrative unfolded. I thought that the audio files would help Gerry find a writer that could tell his story in written form. Gerry knew at least one journalist, a crime reporter as it happened, that might be interested.

About three sessions in, something clicked. I realized that Gerry’s subject was not a crime; it was a life. I started to see a way that I could write the book, not as a series of exploits and arrests but as a broader, contextualized story. In all of this, I would have the benefit of having my real life protagonist as an ongoing guide, critic and corrector of facts.

To be clear, Gerry’s brother Don had asked me to do this from the start. But I was reluctant to take the leap. My joke was that I’d never written anything longer than the text on the back of a DVD sleeve. I had, in fact, written thumbnail executive bios, a few magazine pieces, more than a few sales and marketing presentations and entirely too many songs. But the obstacle was the same. That obstacle was, “How in hell do I do something this big?”

Gerry’s original idea was to specifically document his grow-op experiences, even going so far as to conceptualize a work centred on a chapter per location. His provisional title for this was “Growing Pains”. I liked the pun but, given the massively successful TV show of the same name, thought the name misleading to a casual, stumble-upon audience.

But Gerry’s title had real value to me in developing the book’s structure. I felt that the grow-op material would benefit from some context– Gerry’s growing pains over his broader journey, not just through the life cycle of the cannabis. Who was this guy, what drove him through so many setbacks to the position he reached? And, crucially, how did it go so spectacularly wrong? I proposed to Gerry that we apply the idea of “growing” to him as well as to the pungent plants. I suggested starting in Peterborough and following the winding path that led to eventually to serial courtrooms and a long-term lawyer.

I also felt that, regardless of the fact that it was my digits on the keys, Gerry’s story was most compellingly told in the first person. I needed to develop a text version of the voice that he used to tell me the story without the repetitions and shortcuts of day-to-day communication. Helping to form this voice may have been the greatest contribution those tapes were to make. But beyond that factual recounting, I also believed that the story should grow an inner voice, reflecting on events and attitudes with the benefit of time passed.

Gerry agreed. We did our sessions almost weekly and soon Gerry was writing “talking point” summaries of each session after the fact. Talking points soon evolved into session outlines, sometimes almost stream of consciousness in style, sometimes highly conversational. Pretty soon, I stopped listening to the recorded sessions entirely. My notes and give-and-take participation in the sessions themselves were more than enough.

Even so, in the case of the technical elements of the cloning, cultivation and harvesting process, and in matters of the nightmare we came to call “the money-go-round”, I relied on Gerry’s outlines almost entirely. It’s hard to fault his expertise on those topics and it’s hardly surprising that the serpentine details of his monetary misery are still vividly with him, even to this day. Conversely, because we had lived in the same era, in the same city and attended some of the same events, my personal, impediment-free memories sometimes supplemented Gerry’s own. I recalled the colour of the roof of the family house, for instance, when he did not. Additionally, I knew a number of the people in Gerry’s story, most often in a radically different context, but I knew them all the same.

So we each brought pieces to the table. One of the pieces that Gerry brought was his willingness to document his personal flaws. He never once asked me to change a word that I wrote, as unflattering as the telling may have been. When the cards hit the table, they stayed there. I still wonder, were the roles reversed, if I’d be willing to do the same.

And so, in this way the story was told. A Man of Substances: Misdeeds and Growing Pains of a Pot Pioneer is now available in hard and soft cover on barnesandnoble.com, amazon.com, amazon.ca and chapters.indigo.com. It appears that I am truly a ghostwriter. Now, when I see a pebble hit the pond, I feel an affinity not just for the stone but for the ripples that spread from it as well. It’s Gerry’s story, not mine, but I’m grateful for my part in the telling.