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Author P Moss Talks With Anime Herald
🕑 Added 2025-12-29 08:26:14 +0000 UTCNote: Due to time constraints, this will be published on Anime Herald's main site on December 30, 2025. We apologize for the inconvenience.
Author: Seth Burn
Editor: Samantha Ferreira
Content Warning: P Moss uses a slur to describe little people.
Anime Herald: Let’s start with when you were eight years old, sitting in the back of your parents car, writing stories.
P Moss: Look who did his homework.
Anime Herald: Yeah.
P Moss: My recollection is that we were driving to some friends of my parents on a Sunday. I remember being in the back seat with a legal pad and a pen, and writing a story. That’s all I remember, but I remember it vividly. I don’t remember what it was about. I probably never finished it. There were no other stories until I was fourteen.
Actually, it fits in with this (New York Comic Con). I was writing Batman parodies. They were terrible, but I was 14, I didn’t know. That’s where my mind was. I just made that connection with where I am (NYCC). I did that. Later on, I got serious. I got better, got worse, got better,got worse, until I finally figured it out.
Anime Herald: I have to ask...
P Moss: Catman and Dobin. That’s how smart I was.
Anime Herald: No, you were building up. One of the best things about the Batman universe is the villains.
P Moss: Yeah, it absolutely is.
Anime Herald: How much fun did you have with them?
P Moss: I don’t remember them. They must not have been good, because if I had come up with a good one, that would have stuck with me.
Anime Herald: Tell me how you met the true love of your life, bacon.
P Moss: Oh my god. I met bacon the same way everybody else meets bacon. At the hospital, you’re born, your father is handing out cigars, and once he’s done with that, he gives you some bacon and you’re hooked.
Anime Herald: Good on you, dad.
P Moss: Best thing he ever did.
Anime Herald: I am familiar with your bars.
P Moss: Bless you!
Anime Herald: You have some awful drinks, and you have a really good one, the Fink Bomb.
P Moss: Ah, so you’ve been to Frankie’s (Frankie’s Tiki Room in Las Vegas). The origin there is that when we opened we needed to create several drinks that were unique to Frankie’s. That was one. It’s become hugely popular because it will knock you on your ass.
Anime Herald: When you go to one of your bars, and you want to order something a little higher end, what do you get?
P Moss: There’s a drink called the Scurvy.
Anime Herald: Scurvy. I love it already.
P Moss: I don’t know if it gives you scurvy, or if it cures it. To me, it tastes great. I don’t feel like I’m partaking in much alcohol. It’s a pleasant little sipper, until I stand up and I realize “Oh yeah, I did my job.”
Anime Herald: Well done.
(Editor’s note: Pineapple is an excellent source of vitamin C. I am confident that if you drink Scurvy, you won’t get scurvy.)
Anime Herald: Since we’re here on their dime, let’s talk about the book.
P Moss: I’d love to.
Anime Herald: What would you like our readers to know about it?
P Moss: It’s historical fiction. It’s an alternate history where you take a real story and you corkscrew the hell out of it. That’s fun. It’s 1960. Frank Sinatra, JFK, and gangster Sam Giancana are conspiring to fix the election, which they do. To some degree, that’s fact. A lot of it can’t be proven, not now anyway. Sam Giancana controlled Chicago, and Illinois’ electoral votes were going to swing the election. He paid winos to vote ten times. Voting machines disappeared. The good old days.
Anime Herald: You play to win the game.
P Moss: Good point, and they did. Everyone’s happy. A lot of promises were made. Then the Kennedys betrayed Sinatra. They backed out of the deal. The mob, Sam Giancana, the bosses around the country are furious. “Frank, he’s your guy, you brought him to us. Get him to honor his word, or we’re going to kill you.”
Frank tries his best, and gets real close, but he can’t. Frank has to go on the run because there’s a mob hit on him.
Anime Herald: I’d go on the run too, at that point.
P Moss: Once you get past the election, that’s when the story really goes off the rails. That’s when I made almost all of it up. And it is nuts. It’s insane what happens to Frank. But he’s Frank, he gets out of it.
Anime Herald: Speaking of life going off the rails, how would your life have gone differently had you had to repeat the third grade?
P Moss: I don’t know. I would have had a whole different set of friends.
(Editor’s note: This question was a reference to Robert Kennedy. It’s covered in Screwing Sinatra.)
I’m writing a new book now about a perverted porno midget, who is also a housebreaker. He’s talking about he’s never been jammed up. His friend says, “Except for when you had to repeat sixth grade three times.” He responds, “Hey, did you see the rack on that teacher? I stayed there on purpose! I used to prowl her house. I learned a lot in sixth grade!”
Anime Herald: When you’re buying real estate, it’s all about location, location, location.
P Moss: Absolutely.
Anime Herald: But then you have to clean up the place. I loved your line, “It took us a month of cleaning before we could get the cleaners to come in.” Tell me about that time in your life.
P Moss: This was great. This bar had been empty for a year. It was just a toilet. There’s no electricity on. The Realtor (laughs). Realtor. That’s what the broker likes to call himself. The broker takes us in with a flashlight. We open up one of the beer coolers. There’s a dead bird in it. But, I open up the front door and look. Four blocks away is the MGM. Who the hell wouldn’t want this.
I took it on the spot. Cleaned it for at least a month before the cleaners could come in, but it was worth it. It’s a punk rock dive. It looks like it’s dirty, that it has seen better days, but it’s not. It’s very clean. We scrub it from top to bottom every day. It just looks that way on purpose. There’s no dead birds in the beer cooler anymore.
Anime Herald: I would have opened up the cooler and said “Where’s my rent, birdo?” You’re also a musician. Tell me about touring Japan.
P Moss: It was a one-off. The musician part. I was talking with a friend and he said “We should form a band.” I didn’t know how to play an instrument, and he was an idiot. He said “We should never play in America.”
I was in London, on Denmark Street, the guitar street of London. I’m walking and I see this guitar. I am looking at it. It’s unique. I went back again another day, and then again on another day. Finally, the old hippie downstairs comes out and says, “It’s nice” and he starts talking about it. He asks if I wanted to play it. I couldn’t tell him I didn’t know how.
I tell him it would be a gift. He says, “Nice gift!” so I bought the damn thing. I am walking back to my hotel carrying this guitar. It’s about a fifteen-minute walk. I was positive every single person on the street was looking at me knowing I couldn’t play that guitar.
I went home and bought a chord chart. I wrote a few songs, and the next thing I know is we went to Japan eight times, went to England once. We recorded four albums. Yeah, it was great.
Anime Herald: I will tell you with absolute certainty that when you were walking around with that guitar, people were assuming you’ve been playing it for twenty years.
P Moss: Well, yeah, but at that time in my mind I’m going “My god, ugh.”
That’s how it started. Eventually, it got to a point where we were playing the same clubs, doing the same stuff. It was time to just stop, so we did. We did a big last hurrah there, which was huge. It was great. That was my one and only foray into music. But it worked!
Anime Herald: That’s great.
P Moss: I surrounded myself with really good musicians. I would describe myself as the guy who could play a pretty good rhythm guitar on songs that I wrote. Other than that, I can’t do a damn thing, but I could do that and it was enough.
Anime Herald: You made it work and that’s what counts.
P Moss: I absolutely did, yes.
Anime Herald: You made that location work, you’ve made writing work for you, which is not easy.
P Moss: It’s not.
Anime Herald: What is something you would like our readers to know about you?
P Moss: Are we back to bacon again?
Anime Herald: We can be. It can be anything you want.
P Moss: I invented the bacon martini.
Anime Herald: Yes, I know. It’s disgusting.
P Moss: You’re welcome! Want to know what’s really disgusting? As you know, Ass Juice is our signature drink.
Anime Herald: It’s better than the bacon martini.
P Moss: Personally, I will agree with you. When I get back to Las Vegas on Monday, I’ve already made the signs “Pumpkin-spiced Ass Juice.” What do you think?
Anime Herald: It will sell.
P Moss: It’s going to be disgusting, but it will sell.
Anime Herald: Switching the table around, do you have any questions for us?
P Moss: Yeah, let’s talk about the book.
Anime Herald: My favorite scene is from the last chapter. They’re sitting around with (Ronald) Reagan. I believe it takes place in 1977.
P Moss: Yes.
Anime Herald: Reagan is asking for Frank’s endorsement. He wants Frank to let all the people in entertainment in California know that it’s okay to support him. But you know Reagan’s history. You know he spoke out against fellow actors during McCarthyism and the red scare. He made a lot of enemies. He also became governor, but he made a lot of enemies.
P Moss: That’s why this is historical fiction.
Anime Herald: Well, hold on a second. Frank gave him $4,000,000 for his 1980 Presidential election campain. He also held galas for Reagan, and in return Reagan awarded Frank with the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
P Moss: I did not know that but I don’t doubt that a bit. I know he was very pro-Reagan at the time.
Anime Herald: Sinatra took a full route. He went from being as blue as a Democrat can get in New Jersey, to supporting Ronald Reagan in California.
P Moss: People think that Frank turned into a Republican because the Kennedys fucked him.
Anime Herald: That certainly helped.
P Moss: Maybe, maybe not. I don’t know. From real indications, Frank was totally broken up when Kennedy was killed. Frank deserved to have a happy ending. After what he went through in the second half of this book, I thought he deserved to have a happy ending. That’s why I ended it the way that I did, even though it is well documented that he and his wife fought like cats and dogs all the time. “I’m happy to stay home with Barbara.”
He needed that. Like with Jackie (Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis). I had to give her a pair of balls. She was the perfect first lady. She was elegant. She did her job. But her personal life, her heartache. Her husband is a dog and everyone knows it. It’s a shame. Yet she keeps her face on. She deserved to get some strength and as this is alternate fiction, I was able to do that.
Anime Herald: I’ll tell you who I thought got off easy in your book: Landslide Johnson. Lyndon B. Johnson.
P Moss: He did, didn’t he?
Anime Herald: Yeah.
P Moss: The thing about that is, and I’ve run into this in other books… the one I did before this was an alternate history of 1966 Las Vegas and Howard Hughes. I mentioned some other characters. People said “Oh my god, you should have hid him. He did this.”
If I include that, I’m taking away from the story. If I were to do something like that here, I’d be taking away from the story. He gets his mention, but if I were to say anything about him, I’d be sidetracking.
Anime Herald: Thank you very much. It’s been an absolute pleasure.
P Moss: Thank you, same here.
Comments
Karel P Kerezman
What a fun interview! At no point did I have any idea what topic would come up next. This must've been a hoot for Seth.
