“We are being erased,” asserts American writer Bruce Wagner, but he’s far from sensationalism, even breathing a certain amount of relief. His latest book, The Marvel Universe: Origin Stories, weaves fables of broken characters and updates his biting, satirical take on the world of entertainment, bringing it into the era of social media. Raised in Beverly Hills, Wagner went to school with the children of film and TV stars, and drove ambulances and limousines until, in his mid-20s, he became a Hollywood screenwriter. And found success. A lot of it. “I became a hack,” he tells High Times, without blushing.
“Fiction was my way out,” he shares. “I had always wanted to be a prose writer. It wouldn’t have mattered where I grew up; I would have written about the same obsessions but with a different backdrop.”
In his books, his characters often use all kinds of drugs. However, Wagner has been sober for about 15 years, without so much as touching them. He says he’s “too old now to use them, though if I could get a guarantee that I wouldn’t die, I would probably again become the addict I once was. Too old now. I must want to live!”
And while weed is legal in Los Angeles, where he lives, he doesn’t consider himself a heavy smoker. “It’s very helpful to many people I know. If I get the Big C [cancer], I’ll enjoy the gummies. I’ve had extraordinary mushroom journeys. In fact, the earliest book I remember reading and adoring was called Voyage to the Mushroom Planet. I was probably seven or eight years old. On my first psilocybin trip, the goddess who oversaw her student, the mushroom, told me, ‘Let go of the mast, it’s already broken.’”
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Author: Hernán Panessi / High Times
