The Naked Raving Empty

A wry comic mystery set in Los Angeles –the land where dreams go to die– The Naked Raving Empty is the story of one desperate man’s attempt to win the love of a fickle and perhaps sociopathic woman through a single act of brazen fraud. But in a culture where lying to yourself can be the only way to survive, fraud can sometimes reveal a deeper truth.Our hero’s girlfriend has a boyfriend of her own, the other woman in his life is a drug-addled agoraphobic, and his only remaining friend is a fast-talking aggressively gay hustler with a penchant for dangerous stock swindles. The future looks bleak. So in a desperate act to revive his flagging career, Randy resorts to fraud. He creates a mystery, a wholly manufactured conspiracy around the sudden death of failed television actor Jack Kane, and he tries to sell this story to the highest bidder. But if the conspiracy is a lie, then why are so many people suddenly trying to stop him? “We believe in what we want after all; and we want what we cannot have. This I knew all too well from experience. But what came new on the floor of the holding cell was the final lock-step end to this reasoning–we believe in what we cannot have. So I would give them what they wanted, a conspiracy to grace their past with interest. I would pretend I had a mystery and interview the men and women of Jack Kane’s life, recording their real responses to a mythical plot –the gold dildo that killed him and its mysterious disappearance.”