It's called The Boys and Men of Mickey Rooney's Gang and it's completely different from any of my other 'nice' books.
Unlike them it contains a lot of sex and violence. But, I have to add quickly, all for legitimate literary purposes.
It follows nine teenage boys into adulthood; and how can one talk about nine teenage boys struggling with adolescence without recording their sex-obsessed thoughts, language and activities? And how can one describe the lives of nine men without recording the weaknesses and flaws of their male character.
Next step: submission to publishers. That could take a while.
Here's the revised cover blurb:
It was at the Point, a working class suburb of Auckland, New Zealand, in nineteen fifty-seven, that eight mildly rebellious adolescent boys, naturally obsessed with sex and frustrated by the conservatism of their cautious elders, were attracted to the charismatic but thoroughly delinquent Mickey Rooney whose fantastic dreams of Hollywood fame and fortune were to be his downfall. The little gang didn’t last long; it disintegrated after a cruel practical joke played by little Mickey Rooney on big Pearly Gates. Despite his size and strength, the hapless Pearly Gates was the gang’s most vulnerable member and the others came to regret their contribution to his humiliation. As a result each of the boys – annoyed with himself, with nothing in common with the others but his sex, age and place of residence, and confused, as all adolescent males are, by his inner testosterone-based turmoil – then went his own way.
This book follows each
of them into adulthood and, for those who survived, into old age. Nine lives
Nine stories. In New Zealand, Australia, America and around the world. Nine men with nothing in
common but the teenage year they wasted in Mickey Rooney’s gang.
