Blind Chance

Set against the backdrop of the counterculture of the 1960s, Blind Chance is about love, drugs, will, pain, purpose, alienation and the need to belong to some kind of human community. The main character, Lupe Figueroa, is a thirty-year-old blind ex-graduate student. Through a chance meeting with a pot-smoking nineteen-year-old, he becomes enmeshed in the drug-saturated counterculture of the 1960s. Lupe is bitter and angry at the sighted world for discounting him before he was even given a chance. He personifies the desires of much of mankind, wanting his share of love, power, happiness, and money. Although the characters in the novel come together as drug dealers, the ties that bind them go beyond the sale of drugs. For so long the characters were on the outside looking in, but because Lupe has access to drugs, they come to him to score, and find a space where they can belong. Although many of the themes of the novel may be disturbing, its tone is irreverent, at times outrageously funny, and often lyrical. For anyone interested in the underground world of the sixties, it's a great read.

Lawrence Aguirre was born in 1933 in East Los Angeles. He lost his sight when he was twelve years old in a car accident and was sent to the California School for the Blind in Berkeley. He has often said that if he hadn’t lost his sight, he would have never escaped the barrio. At the School for the Blind, he learned the fundamentals of being blind in the sighted world. He also learned to wrestle well enough to win four state championships. Later he attended the University of California at Los Angeles, majoring in history and philosophy. After graduating he married and moved to Venice, California. He and his wife decided that she would pursue her career as a teacher and he would stay home and raise their daughter and write. Blind Chance is Lawrence’s first novel. However, now that there are so many avenues for publishing, he is planning to make some of his earlier works available. Today at age 80, he lives in Santa Cruz, California, and continues to write.