Empire & Victory

The story of a Detroit Free Press paperboy from the workingclass neighborhoods of Hamtramck, Michigan. On his twelfth birthday, November 20, 1971, Joe Pakotas bolts an angry household and escapes to Ann Arbor to watch the great Billy Taylor, hero of Saturday radio broadcasts, play in the Michigan-Ohio State game. The game takes on a transforming resonance, in which flight from hopelessness becomes a trip to the Rose Bowl. Working across the country with a wildcat crew of magazine subscription grifters, Pakotas finds his way to California, via Wyoming and a refugee named Nancy Nguyen. On the West Coast he discovers the Pasadena curse, hardscrabble life with the Ramirez family in the central valley, Catholic high school, and finally winds up in real trouble, becoming a reporter. Of sorts. And still manages to chase down the unnamed sources, in the heart, of some bad ink that threatens to consume his boyhood idol, and himself. Spanning the decade of the 1970s and the American continent, Empire & Victory is a literary adventure in the spirit of Huck Finn, offering a little less wisdom and a good deal more recklessness than even Tom Sawyer might abide.