R Scott West - Smoke Rings: A Scruffy City Novel

What happens when the people trying to save a dying downtown become the criminals in its story? In this captivating episode of The Conversation, Terry Shepherd sits down with author R. Scott West to discuss his new book, Smoke Rings: A Scruffy City Novel.

Twenty years ago, Scott and his wife Bernadette helped breathe life back into Knoxville's nearly abandoned Market Square. However, this historic preservation was secretly funded by a massive marijuana operation, eventually leading to federal indictments, seized property, and prison time. Now, Scott shares how he transformed this extraordinary chapter of his life into a highly entertaining, fictionalized Appalachian family saga.

In this episode, we explore:

• The Market Square Miracle: Discover how Scott and Bernadette saw potential in downtown Knoxville when 33 out of 36 addresses were completely boarded up.
• The Perfect Crime Gone Wrong: Hear the details behind a $2.1 million historic preservation project that was secretly bankrolled by a 25,000-pound marijuana smuggling ring.
• Making Time Count: Learn about Scott’s resilient mindset during his four and a half years in federal prison, where he wrote four books, lifted weights, and composed songs while listening to an AM radio with a homemade Doritos-wrapper antenna.
• Blurring Moral Lines: Explore the uncomfortable territory between committing a federal crime and firmly believing you are doing something fundamentally good for a community.
• A Built-in Soundtrack: Find out why Scott wove 29 original punk rock lyrics into the novel as an Easter egg to help convey the psychology and mood of his characters.

Whether you are interested in Southern crime, urban renewal, or a story about getting back up after losing everything, this interview delivers. You can learn more about the book and the author by visiting rscottwest.com.

We all inevitably become the brand. And that's why I wrote, "How to Become a Dynamic Podcast Guest and Sell Stuff." It's a sweet and short primer that teaches you about the gear, the appearance and the messaging that can grab and hold today's micro-attention spans and motivate your listeners to take action. It's Just a dollar ninety nine at Amazon. Grab your copy today and sell mo

Transcript

Copy Transcript Copied

SPEAKER_00 0:35

In conversation with Terry Shepard, award-winning broadcaster, narrator, and author, a deep dive into the writer's craft with the artists and support systems who create the stories we love.

SPEAKER_01 0:49

What happens when people trying to save a dying downtown become the criminals in its story? Twenty years ago, our Scott West and his wife Bernadette were helping breathe life back into Knoxville's nearly abandoned Market Square, restoring historic buildings and creating businesses where boarded up stores and abandoned operations once stood. But behind that urban renaissance was money from a massive marijuana operation. Federal indictments followed, property was seized, families were separated, and our protagonist, our hero, went to prison. Now he has transformed that extraordinary chapter of Knoxville history into fiction. Smoke Rings, a scruffy city novel, is filled with family, friendship, punk rot, weed smuggling, historic preservation, ambition, betrayal, and the uncomfortable territory between doing something illegal and believing you are doing something right. West refuses to divide his characters neatly into heroes and villains. As he puts it, we each have the power to write our own story rather than allowing someone else to define us.

SPEAKER_02 2:06

Our Scott West, it's great to be with you. Welcome to the conversation. Thank you very much. I appreciate you having me here very, very much more than you know. It's very kind of you. I'm looking forward to our conversation.

SPEAKER_01 2:17

Smoke rings is fiction, but is rooted deeply in your own life. Why did you ultimately decide that a novel was the best way to tell this story?

SPEAKER_02 2:26

Well, everything in the novel is true. Of course, except for the parts I made up. But everything's true except for that. And well, I as I was working on it for the last 20 years, by the way. So July 16th is when I came up with the book. 20 years ago to the day on July 16 is when they kicked all our doors in. Hundreds of officers raided all of our homes and threw us all in prison. So it was the 20th anniversary of when the big bust happened that I got thrown in jail. That I published the book. When I got out of prison, my family, I showed them the books, which were very different back then. And they said, do not publish this. Because the time that when we got busted, marijuana was illegal in all 50 states. It was illegal everywhere. Now, of course, people are like, what do you understand? What was the crime again? But at the time, it was a crime everywhere. So that's what important for folks to understand. This when you talk about prohibition on marijuana's like that. It's it was it was legal in 1937 and it'll be legal again in 2037. But there's this hundred-year period where it's evil or whatever the quote, the powers that be have chosen for it. But it most of human recorded history, it was not a crime. But that doesn't change the fact that it's a crime when we did it. And I knew that. So I'm not bitter about going to prison. I understand that what we did was illegal. I get it.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

At the center of the story is this fascinating moral question. Can someone break the law and still believe they are doing something fundamentally good?

SPEAKER_02 3:51

I certainly hope so. I would I would argue that most crime in the history of the world would not be crime right now. There were crimes in think about all the civilizations and countries and the things that were being a Jew in Nazi Germany or drinking chocolate in Aztec, the Aztec Empire if you weren't the emperor or the king or whatever. There were all these crimes that are no longer crimes, and they're certainly not crimes here, but right now, here in America, marijuana is still illegal, at least in half of the states or a number of the states.

SPEAKER_01 4:20

You and Bernadette were helping to restore Market Square at a time when much of it was boarded up and struggling. What did you see in downtown Knoxville that other people didn't see?

SPEAKER_02 4:32

My wife was an international flight attendant that had grown up in Germany. And when I met her, she talked about how the town square of Knoxville, which in the book I call Scruffy City, the book's called Smoke Rings, which refers to the family, the fathers of Moonshine, and the sons get into drug smuggling, marijuana smuggling. So it's like the family of passed down tradition of being a smuggler. But my wife, she realized that the town square was like a gem in the crown of the whole region, not just Knoxville, because every town in Germany and every town in Europe, the town square is the center of activity. Knoxville's town square, there were 33 addresses that were boarded up and three open. So 36 addresses, 33 were boarded up. There was graffiti on everything. It was like tumbleweeds blowing through the old western town. That's how dead it was when we started. But she knew because she knew in Europe it was the center of life. So she thought we can do that in Knoxville. That's how that started. And then, of course, my brother and I were happy to help come up with the creative financing. Now understand when we did these crimes, the the crime, there were two major crimes. The marijuana conspiracy, it was my brother and I. When we got busted, it was 25 mil pounds. Yeah, 25,000 pounds is what we got caught with was 25,000 pounds of marijuana, and it was $2.1 million uh invested into historic buildings on the town square. So we got we're getting 10 years no parole for the marijuana conspiracy, but then they added 15 years to that because instead of putting the money into Panama or Swiss bank account or going to Vegas and blowing it on prostitutes and drugs, we took condemned buildings and saved them. But that gave us 15 more years. That added 15 years to the crime because we actually laundered the money. They call it money laundering. If you take illegal illicit gains, which the reason we did that is because at the time no bank would loan in downtown Knoxville. So you couldn't get money from any bank. And so my family loaned us money. We got about 1.3 million from Bernadette's mother, and then we got about 0.35 million from banks. And then we, I didn't realize because I was new to this, it wound up costing twice that. So my bro, I had gotten out of the business, and so I went back to my brother, who was still in it, and said, Man, I'm $2.1 million short here. And so he gave me $2.1 million cash, which I infused into these buildings to finish developing Market Square. So we developed six buildings of the 36 and became the biggest property owners on Market Square. And I thought I had the perfect crime because I told my brother, who's my brother, I said, no one can know you gave me this money because what you're doing is illegal. But that my brother gave me the $2.1 million put into the buildings, which then allowed us to finish them. But what I did not know is that my brother would brag. I told, I said to him, You can't tell anybody you gave me this money because it's a perfect crime. And if you get busted, he's like, I won't get busted. I'm like, if you get busted, they can't know I'm involved in you and when you get out of prison, you'll still have all this, all these buildings you and I'll be partners on. He's like, I didn't tell anybody. But then he was like showing everybody his underground tunnels that he had for his stash houses and everything. And in the meantime, he was saying, and I own Market Square in downtown Knoxville. So one of our friends from high school was actually wearing a wire, and he recorded all that and wound up putting all of this in prison, except for himself, of course, which he didn't do a day in jail, but the rest of us got to do a lot of time for it. But then because my brother was so proud of what we were doing on Market Square, he bragged about it. But that's how we got caught.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

We're talking with R Scott West about his fascinating book, Smoke Rings, a Scruffy City novel. The website is rscottwest.com. Take us back to that moment when you realized that everything you had built might disappear.

SPEAKER_02 8:11

It was really weird because we were struggling because I had just gotten into the developing and I didn't realize how expensive developing a condemned building was. Now I know it's it cost everything is twice as expensive as you think and takes twice as long as you think, and will generate half the revenue you think. That's pretty much how you have to plan for it. But once we got into this thing, then once my we went, I was just before my my I went down with my brother, and there's like dozens of us that went down at the same time. But I was worried that I was gonna have to sell off a building or 10% ownership. I was so worried about it. I was stressing all the time about the money. And then the next morning, they seized everything we owned. And all of my stress disappeared because I learned why monks shave their heads, wear robes, and don't own anything. If you don't own anything, you don't stress about material possessions. So it was weird going to prison because I actually became much more zen about it. I was fine with the loss because it was gone. Whereas I was terrified I was going to lose it when I had it. But once I no longer had it, I was fine with it. So now I have this theory that if you take the richest guy and you put him under the bridge, homeless, you take the guy under the bridge, you put him in the mansion on the hill. It takes about three months before the guy under the bridge that used to be a billionaire will say, Man, those cans of beans we found in that dumpster are delicious. And about three months before the homeless guy that now lives in the mansion will say, This caviar is terrible. Take it away. Bring me, bring me something else. That's it's human beings are very adaptable, very adaptable.

SPEAKER_01 9:37

You have said I didn't lose time in prison. I used it. How did you reach that mindset?

SPEAKER_02 9:45

Because I didn't want to lose four and a half years of my life. I got in there, and luckily for me, I had a degree in creative writing. And when I went to prison, I'm like, look here. Now we got something. So then as soon as I went to jail, I'm like, okay, I've been drinking every day, like 365 days a year or something. I was drinking all the time. So now I can't drink and I'm gonna work out and I'm gonna write. So I wrote four books while I was in prison and I got in great shape. I was uh squatting 360 pounds for 10 squats and stuff. I couldn't do one of 100 pounds now, but at the time I got pretty strong because four years working out, you get pretty strong. Not as strong as the younger guys, but you get pretty strong. So I didn't waste any time in there because I thought I don't want to regret. Like I would ask guys in prison, I'm like, if you could fast forward to the day you get out and lose this time, would you do it? And every one of them said yes. And I'm like, I wouldn't. I wouldn't lose a day of my life. I'd rather do the time and better myself. And by the time I got out, I was kind of thinking, oh, I don't have enough time. I need a little bit more time in here to finish these books. So it was a very interesting, I turned it on its head so that I actually wanted to stay. I didn't really want to, but in my head I wanted to stay because I needed to work on the book some more. But then, of course, those four books are not what I've published since I got out. I published one of them, was essentially essays in prison, which looking back on it, I got when I got out of, I remember my brother-in-law, I showed it to him and he said, Well, you know, you're bitter. And I'm like, What are you talking about? It's funny. It's supposed to be funny. He goes, No, you're bitter. You it's understandable, though. You weren't you got thrown in prison. I took all your stuff. And I'm like, it's not supposed to be bitter, it's supposed to be funny. And that I learned from him saying that to me over time, it really does heal wounds because where I am now mentally, I would probably be shocked to hear myself speak, even though I'd used the time till I got out. I was probably a lot less okay with it than I let on. I think I was a little bit more upset than I let on.

SPEAKER_01 11:32

What was that process like for you when you were writing in prison?

SPEAKER_02 11:35

It was interesting when I first got to jail, which was the worst time I did, because the lights never go out. You get every morning is oatmeal, every every lunch is like really loose bologna on white bread or peanut butter on white bread, and every evening it's beans with applesauce every meal. Lights never go out. So it's it's a very it's a very unpleasant, unhealthy kind of environment. And after three years of that, my brother got to my prison. He was like a white fish belly. He looked terrible when he got there. But I was in there for six months. But we had these AM radios. One of the there's all kinds of money games that they play in jails and prisons, like the sheriff owns the commissary, which is the store, and then you can buy Doritos. But you're, you know, all these poor guys, their grandma puts money on their books, and you pay twice what you would outside in the free world, that they call it the free world. You pay twice as much in jail for the Doritos for half the Doritos that you would if you were outside, but guys would do that, and their grand poor grandma would be putting money on their books. But you could buy these headsets of these like almost like AM radios, they're real, and you're in these cinder block rooms, everything's a cinder block and metal, right? And what you learn things too, like there's a reason they make everything metal and cinder block. I walk into my cell when I first arrive in jail, and the guy goes, You want to see something? You want to see something cool? My cellmate. I'm like, Yeah. He takes my sheet off the bed, which is it's a crappy, it's not a very good sheet, but he drops the sheet in the toilet and flushes it, and it goes, and my sheet's gone. And I'm like, that is actually pretty cool. But I did learn if you did if they didn't make toilets that would flush a sheet, then you have the place flooding all the time. So whenever you hear somebody complaining about their jail flooded or their prison flooded, the inmates did that on purpose. That's uh that's because those things are indestructible. Anyway, you get in there, you have this metal and concrete and all these angry guys that are stressed out. Guy goes to trial and comes back, he's got 40 years. Some 19-year-old guy that's from the ghetto, from the hood, comes in this same pod as the deep pod. I was in deep pod. He just got 40 years. That's a dangerous person if the wrong person says the wrong thing to him. So, but luckily I had a very big crime which made me respected in my pod, because if you've got the biggest crime, you get the most respect. That's how it works. As long as it's there's certain crimes, of course, that's the opposite, right? But if you got a big money crime or you got a murder or something like that, you're respected. But if you got something, or you can imagine like pedophiles or something like that, those guys have to separate because they are in danger. But I but in that place, you could buy these radios and we would take Dorito, the Dorito wrappers, and you can make these real long antenna. Because through these center block rolls, you couldn't get the radio stations. But you make these, so we all look like termites or ants walking around with these big antennas sticking off our head. But every day guys would go, hey Square, they call me Market Square because everybody has a nickname, nobody gets about their actual name. And if they call me Square because of Market Square, because my crime was on, it was the biggest crime of the year in Knoxville. So they say, Square, you're on the radio. So I put on my headset and listen, and it would be like them talking about the crime. So everybody loved that about me because then I'm big news or whatever. But the point is, I also could hear radio. So I wrote all these songs in jail when my life is just like that sheet. My life was spiraling down the toilet. So I was sitting in jail thinking, I'm looking at 25 to life, no parole, and my and it was not hard to write songs because I just came. So I wrote a whole lot of songs and I would hear whatever song in the radio, and I would just write songs to whatever was playing. And I don't even remember what the songs would be. I probably wrote five, six songs to the killers. Mr. Brightside was on the radio at the time, so I kept writing different lyrics to that and stuff. But like one lyric I wrote to that was She's Not Waiting, because my wife, who was not happy with me at the time, but uh, I said, I wrote you a song. It's called She's Waiting. And she says, No, that way I'm talking to her through the mesh, right? She looks through the mesh and she's like, You wrote that for somebody else because I'm not waiting. So I rewrote the song as She's Not Waiting, which is a way better song, by the way. Way better song. That's a punk, that's punk rock there. Punk rock is she's not waiting, right? Like hip hop would be she's waiting, or blue, or soul, she's waiting. Punk rock is she's not waiting. And I'm like, that made that song so much better. And of course she did wait, but she wasn't very happy with me at the time. So I thought that was pretty funny.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

What led to your getting out relatively early after four and a half years?

SPEAKER_02 15:44

The way the plea bargain works is if you don't plea out, you're gonna get 25 years no parole. But that's not how it works. 90% of all people that are indicted, they're looking at that kind of time, and then the prosecutor, who's God, that's God, because he can give you that time. The judge can't stop it, okay? Unless you w you win a court, which you're not gonna win at court. I'll explain that in a second. But you've got a 90% of people are gonna plea out. Of the 10% that fight their crime, the allegation, that go to court, I think it's 75% lose. So you have a 97%, no, it's 85% lose. You have a 98.5% chance of losing. So most people like me are like, yeah, I'm probably gonna lose. I don't want to do 25 years, so I'll take the plea deal. Mine was a little weirder than that. There's two parts of my plea deal that were very strange. One is how cool the person I wrote that she's waiting song for that became she's not waiting. They sat us down, DEA, IRS, federal prosecutors, I two. And and my mom and dad, my mother-in-law, my wife, all these guys are my two defense attorneys. They're all sitting in a room, and the prosecutor says, Here's the deal, Scott. You're toast. You're toast. You're gonna get 25 years, no parole if you fight me. And my my lawyers don't say a word. So I know crickets. So I'm like, oh my gosh, this is actually gonna happen. And then he says, Your wife can beat us in court, but if she doesn't plead guilty also, then we're not gonna give you the plea deal and you're gonna do 25 years, and we're gonna do a superseding indictment, which means there's no, they haven't yet done it. But if you don't play along, they're gonna we're gonna arrest your mom and your dad and your mother-in-law. How do you feel about your dad with arthritis sleeping in jail with those? It's like a yoga mat, your mattress, okay? And your sheet doesn't even cover you. You can't go to your neck from your neck to your feet. You can only cover, you can cover maybe from your waist to your feet or your from your head to your knees, but you can't. So how do you feel about your mom and your dad and your mother-in-law sleeping like that and then going to trial for your crime? I'm like, I guess I'll take the deal and then burn it, and I'll tell you this: 90% of all spouses are would not do this. Most people leave you. So if you're in prison, it's 90%. It's crazy high if how a few people stay with you, which I don't blame them, but she said, I guess I'll go to prison too. Then and I look back on the reason they did that, of course, is because all the all the property, which is eight million dollars in property, is in her is our name. Maybe her name, actually. But they can't they wanted to make seizing the property easy. So she had to plead guilty also. So she did two years also. And then the other part that's pretty crazy about it is I did an interview with the newspaper after I got busted, and it was on the cover of the back when the newspaper was a very big deal. Sunday Above the Fold was a very big deal. There I was on the newspaper cover saying everything's gonna be okay. Because I was a local celebrity. The the prosecutor got very upset, and he called my attorney and he said, You tell that son of a bitch I'm gonna bury him. Which, if the federal prosecutor, remember, he has the power, has divine power over your life, can destroy your life, crush you like a bug, right? Like just like the Kafka story, right? Or Camus can crush you and you no longer exist. He says that it gets your attention, your whole insides go to water. And so I tell my attorney I need to talk to you. And he says, Don't do that, you'll make it worse. As soon as I see the prosecutor, I go up to him and I'll say, Look, I know you're really mad at me. And he said, Yeah. And I said, Let me explain why I did the interview. Like, okay, and I said, You're gonna seize all of our properties, right? And he said, Yeah, you're not gonna have a dime left. Like, okay, the building's value is created by the rents that the tenants pay. Now, in addition to no banks loaning us money, nobody wanted to rent in downtown Knoxville either. So we had to create all of the businesses that went into our buildings after we developed them. So I said, if the business is closed, the buildings don't have value. And he went, ah. So I said, so the businesses need to stay open. So he made my my family had to sign agreements with the federal prosecutor, with the federal government to keep the businesses open, which is a very unusual plea deal. And in in the trial, he's like, got west, you know, it's a downward departure, not because he's a snitch, which I was actually thankful to him for saying that. He said, not because he snitched, but because he agreed to keep the his family's gonna keep the building businesses open so that Market Square is safe or whatever. And so that that was the other weird part about our sentencing that I've never seen before. But I thought that was pretty cool. And anyway, those businesses are still in operation, still going. Of course, I had to buy them back from my family and all that, but they saved me with that one.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

We're talking about Smoke Rings, a scruffy city novel written by our special guest, R Scott West. RscottWest.com is the website. You said that shortcuts are often the long road. Yeah. That sounds like wisdom earned the expensive way. Yeah. What shortcut taught you that lesson?

SPEAKER_02 20:29

I can tell you that most get rich quick schemes are not very quick. Because obviously, that marijuana conspiracy, I would be, I think I would be a further along in life. I spent 10 years getting to where I was, maybe more, 20 years getting to where I was. First, you had the decade, decades of the illicit marijuana proceeds. Then you had the development of Market Square, then they seized all that. Now, I would say that's 30 years, 25, 30 years lost, except knowledge, right? So there's you win or you learn, right? You've that that's pretty much how. If you're smart, you win or you learn. You don't lose. You may someday die, or the game clock might run out. But you didn't Michael Jordan was saying I never didn't lose. I didn't lose, I ran out of time. But I I had that game on. I just ran out of time. The same thing with me. It's like they they took it from me, but I knew when I got out, one of the big things I I had in my mind was when Winston Churchill was interviewed after World War II, he was disliked by a lot of people. And they said, Do you think history will be kind to you? And he said, Oh yes, I intend to write it. That's my basic point of view on this. I'm like, I the prosecutor said to me, You're when I told him why I did the interview, he said, You're not the good guy. You're not the good guy. We're the good guys, you're the bad guy. And I thought, I didn't say it. I thought, we'll see about that. And the whole time I'm thinking, I'm gonna write this, and then we'll see. Who cares more about my story than me? Nobody, right? So when I got out, I wrote it so that, and I'm not saying it's like a glowing you've looked at it glowing like the I'm the superhero. No, it's humorous and it's all these mistakes made. So what happens is you take the shortcut to get trying to get there quickly, but then 20 years later you realize you're not there yet. And then maybe it wasn't a shortcut, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:12

After prison, you and Bernadette did return to Market Square and even bought back some of the places that were seized. What did it feel like to walk back into that world?

SPEAKER_02 22:22

Yeah, it was that was another, you know, I hadn't thought about this in years until you just asked that, actually. I walked on to Market Square, and by the way, we bought back the buildings they seized from us, and it took a decade. May actually took longer than a decade. 15, 20 years. But I was, and guys in prison told me they said, You know, that if you have money, you can do anything with it. You don't have to buy this but this exact building that someone else owns. You don't own it, they own it. I'm like, I don't care. Give it back for the I want the same, you know, the story matters to me. I want the full circle thing. So I get out, and that's entirely my focus is that I'm going to rebuild this small little empire we had, and I rebuild it. So I get out and I walk onto Market Square, and this guy who's a manager of another venue, and that's similar to the one with Preservation Pub, which is called Preservation Pub, because all the profits it generated went back into fixing up historic buildings. Preservation pub, right? So I see this guy when I get back on Market Square. First thing he says to me after I've been in prison for four and a half years, I've paid my debt to society, right? So now he sees me and he says, Scott, I'm very I'm mad at you. I'm really mad at you. And I'm like, Ken, why are you mad at me? And he goes, Because you cheated, man. He said, The rest of us are working on paying our dues, paying our taxes. You cheated to win, man. You you the reason you succeeded is because you cheated against. I'm doing the same thing as you, but you're cheating. And I'm like, first off, I didn't ever launder any money into Preservation Pub. All the monies it generated were profit. So that's not true. I did not have an unfair advantage against you. I actually paid bands less than you did. But that being beside the point, I paid my dues to society, forget that part. I said, I'm out now, I'm back, I'm gonna do it again, and this time what's your excuse gonna be? That's what I said to him. So I thought, yeah, that was a pretty good comeback. What what's this time when I kick your what's your excuse gonna be? Because you know, people I everybody, a lot of people want to say they just want to cast dispersions and blame, and they never want to say, I could do something, I could make my life better. It's always this my life is this because somebody prevented me. Instead, the people that succeed in anything work at it. You know, you to be a great author, to be a great athlete, to be a great thinker, anything, a great business person, it doesn't just it's not given to you. And if it is, there's plenty of people that'll take it from you, right? So, so you have to work, and there's nothing that takes a place of stick-tuitiveness, right? Persistence, Rocky. I've got the song in the book, Smile with Your Teeth Knocked Out, which is just another way of saying it. You know, you got to get up one more time than you get knocked down. That's the key in anything. Like if you if you're a writer and you you send a you know, like we've all heard the stories about the Pattersons and the J.K. Rowings, they're getting dirt turned down dozens of times and they just keep going. It's the same thing in anything. So I went back to the same place, did the same thing. And I am fortunate in this. If we were really the bad guys, which I see as we're bad guys, but we're good intentioned bad guys. You know, we're like I I saw my brother and I was like butchcasted in the Sundance Kid, except we didn't shoot anybody, Robin Banks. You know, people would come to you and say, that's good product. I'll be back next week, which is a crime somehow. So they would do that and they would come back over and over, but you're a criminal for that. So I saw my brother saw marijuana as a sacred medicine, by the way, just so you be clear on how he thinks. He marijuana is a sacred medicine, so you cannot take it. You know, to him it's like a sacred war. You gotta you gotta keep fighting the war. For me, as I knew it's illegal, we get caught, we get your time. That's why I told him don't tell anybody we're doing this. But I knew that I had no ethical or moral dilemma. That to me, smoking weed or or taking gummies or whatever, anything marijuana-based, cannabis-based, there's no wrong in that. It's so so doing that, yeah, it's criminal, but it's not ill ethical or immoral. That's the basic point of view.

SPEAKER_01 26:06

Where does your drive come from?

SPEAKER_02 26:09

I think that chip on the shoulder doesn't hurt, does it? That big boulder on my shoulder. But yes, being told you're not the good guy or whatever, I'm like, eh, we'll see about that. I think that's part of it. You when Michael Jordan got cut from the basketball team in high school, and you never get over it. So they that's your drive for the rest of your life. Is when I got cut from the high school basketball, so you just keep going because you keep thinking, and a lot of boxers will do this while they'll have a fight coming up and they'll think of some reason that they've been put down or insulted, right? Somehow the other fighter insulted them, even if the guy didn't do it. They create it in their head so that they have a fire in their belly to train, right? So I think it's the same kind of deal. It's like I had a fire in my belly because I want, I'm not done yet, but I I want the it's not really a legacy so much as to me, it's a it's I wanted to take true story, fictionalize it, make it more meaningful even than the meaning in your story in your life comes from the meaning you take from it, right? And the book is the same thing. You can write a novel that means nothing and has the same plot as a book that means something, right? So the the there's meaning in some books and not meaning in others. I don't want to write a book that has no meaning, but I want to write a book that's entertaining. I want the book. I hope you laugh out loud if you read my book, Smoke Rings. I really hope you do. I've I've written books prior to this, but this is the first one where I've put it out there for the world to read. And I hope people like it. I've gotten some a number of good reviews on Amazon, which you can get the book on Amazon if you happen to live in Knoxville. I have several businesses on Market Square. You can pick it up. I'll give you a copy. If you find me, I will give it to you. I'll sign it free. Free copy. If anybody that wants one, just find me, have a beer with me, and you get a free book. And a free beer. But outside of that, I just I just I think the fire is creative people will create, right? So I used to be in a punk rock band. Before that, I was an artist. I was a writer, I wrote poetry, and I got a I got a cut scholarship in poetry. Then later, I basically sitting in jail and you're writing all these songs and poems, and then I get out and I write the book, and I'm like, one of the things that sets this book apart is kind of Southern Crime. Smokerings is a family, Appalachian family saga, multi-generational saga. It's kind of a gothic in a way, because there's magical supernatural elements to it, but it's done in a humorous way. More than I say, more than any other aspect of this, it's literary, but it's humorous, humorous literary. The characters' names are Huck and Tommy, which obviously I'm alluding to another famous Southern writer when I name them Huck and Tommy. So you have the two brothers that get in all kinds of trouble. They're trying to get this money to give to Clementine, who's the smart one. That's Tommy's girlfriend, who's based off my wife. And she's the one with the idea to revitalize the town square. But he's just trying to get the money. So they get all kinds of crazy trouble with all kinds of crazy characters, like characters with names like Wolfman and Fritz, who's the old German from World War II that lives in the mountains making moonshine. So you have all these unusual characters in the book that that that kind of orbit them and give you all kinds of hopefully some hilarious moments as they try to get this money, which, yes, it's a crime. Yes, I understand it's a book about drugs. Most books about drugs, it's either all these terrible cartel guys from Columbia, we should line them up all against the wall and shoot them, right? Or that poor guy in that bathroom with that horrible toilet and train spotting his terrible addiction, we should feel sorry for him, right? There's a few in the middle, like a Hunter S. Thompson, that's just this crazy rollicking story. And I don't think I'm as intense as a Hunter S. Thompson. I'm much lighter than that. But the idea is to give you a rollicking adventure. So I don't know if I succeeded to the level of a Hunter S. Thompson or of Mark Twain, but my intention is to write a book that people would say that was a fun read, at the very least.

SPEAKER_01 29:54

The book is Smoke Rings, a scruffy city novel, and it is a great read. Highly recommended. Thanks. Based on a true story, and written by our special guest, R Scott West. Rscott West.com is the website.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Yeah, one of the things I remember I was in the band for all those years. I'm still in the band, which don't practice for the last few years, but the band has been many incarnations. It was a punk band. So when I did the book, I had all these lyrics from all these years. And so I did the lyrics and songs are in the book. So you get a 29-song soundtrack, which is for free. So that's just thrown in there as something to make it a little bit different. A little, it's a maybe an Easter egg, folks, I can enjoy. It gives you the mood of the theme of the landscapes and the psychology of the characters, the different songs and so forth. That was the idea to convey the moods that I imagined. And of course, everyone, the beauty of books is that like if you do a movie or a song, you kind of sit back and you listen and watch. And but if you read a book, you are half of the artist. You read the there's just black squigglies on white pages, and your brain has to imagine it. So you become a co-author when you read a book, which makes it the highest form of art, in a way. It's the highest form. I was in a band, I've wrote all those things, but I think the novel that pulls you in and makes you think along with the characters is the highest form of art, I think.

SPEAKER_01 31:20

Beautifully put.