#kool a.d.

The first time I interviewed Victor was in the fall of 2014. His debut novel, OK, was about to be published by poet Spencer Madsen’s Sorry House press. I’d read a galley, and I loved it — this trippy diary of an American self who transfigures from “half 2Pac half Kurt Cobain” to “half 50 Cent half J. D. Salinger” to hundreds of other concoctions over the course of 335 pages. That book never came out. As Vazquez stories it, his wife, Saba Moeel, didn’t like the first version. So he decided to “write the whole thing from scratch again” — to which she replied, “You don’t have to do that.” Two years later, a new OK was born.

OK redux is slimmer, with less hookups and drugs, more family spirit, and a stabler self. This time the narrator is a “professional mugician by the name of KOOL MAN” who, after converting to Islam on page two, becomes and stays “Muhammad X.”

In mid-November 2016, I hosted a reading with Vazquez, Ayesha Siddiqi, Melissa Broder, Mira Gonzalez, and Saba Moeel at the Standard Hotel in downtown Los Angeles. It was the second event of my new lit series Hard To Read, and the first launch for OK. The next morning, Vazquez and I met in the yellow hotel diner to discuss his novel and other stuff.