Pinball Wizard

"Are you the Pinball Wizard or the pinball?" asks Ralph's manager inside a nuclear hardened bunker in England. That is the question driving Michael D. Meloan's new novella—a story of love, sex, jets, and Bukowski. Lights flash and bells ring as Ralph is buffeted between a controlling father, international intrigue in the US defense industry, and a friendship with the writer Charles Bukowski. A wild girlfriend also ratchets-up the action. But in the end, it is Ralph's turn at the controls.   Michael D. Meloan's fiction has appeared in Wired, Huffington Post, Buzz, LA Weekly, Larry Flynt's Chic, and in many anthologies. He was an interview subject in the documentaries Bukowski: Born Into This and Joe Frank: Somewhere Out There. With Joe Frank, he co-wrote a number of radio shows that aired across the National Public Radio syndicate. His Wired short story "The Cutting Edge" was optioned for film. And he co-authored the novel The Shroud with his brother Steven. For many years, he was a sof