Author: Michael Davis

The March of Dimes

I went to the west side to see Moth, but the girl who lived on his back porch said he wasn’t in and she didn’t know when he’d be back.  I said you’ve got to be kidding me.  She said, “Wut?”  So I paused a second then told her she’d be seeing me again, which scared her.  She thought I was about to shoot the place up or some other awful thing.  Good, I thought, serves her right.  I don’t like to be put off by some back-porch girl who spends all her time laid up and stoned in the heat.

I didn’t know how Moth got his name.  He probably didn’t know, either.  And I wasn’t about to bring it up.  If I’d had time to bring up the old days and names and stories and the legend of King Arthur and shit, I wouldn’t be wasting it on Moth.  I had other things to talk about, like my $1500 running a weekly 30% vig for, oh, I don’t know, maybe the whole time he was on the boat in Alaska trying to scrape up the jack to pay me off.  Now I put it around $10gs, which I thought was very merciful.  It doesn’t get more merciful than that.  Moth should have been more appreciative.  To be honest, he should have stayed in Alaska.

$10gs was nothing.  I could toss it in the fireplace.  That’s not why I drove down the block, did a U, parked under a tree, and waited for the girl to put out the light.  I could see the back of Moth’s house, a little yellow square in the dark.  Then it winked out.  I figured they were in there, running around like headless poultry, packing and cussing, scared to death that any minute I’d start blasting the windows.  I didn’t even own a gun at the moment.  I owned a card room downtown.  I wasn’t some hard case.

It was a humid Missouri evening, the kind that makes you feel dirty 10 minutes after you shower.  Everything had a smell.  It got so hot in Hauberk one summer when I was a kid that I had to sleep in my dad’s car every night with the windows rolled down.  Of course, that didn’t do much good.  To this day, most tickets in and around Hauberk, MO, are probably earned by people who don’t have working a/c in their cars and have to maintain a certain speed just to breathe.  It was hot like that.  Dense air.  Like I had a fever and was about to go out of my mind.  But I knew what I was doing.

I started the Impala and rolled down the street with the headlights off.  What did Moth expect me to do?  People were already laughing, calling me “ATM,” Mister Free Money.  So he runs to Alaska.  Then his lowdown sister shows up with a suitcase full of weed and tries to settle his debt because she and her family don’t like it that Moth’s up in the frozen north, on a boat with a bunch of fellow ex-cons, pulling nets in the dark.  Well, that was truly a shame.  I told her to go sell the weed and bring me some cash and in the meantime not to let the door hit her on the way out.

The things people will do to get out from under their own bad decisions never cease to amaze me.  I knew a guy just like Moth when I lived out in Montana.  He used to be a bible camp counsellor every summer with a trunk full of booze so he could invite the older girls out to the parking lot.  Once, he locked himself in a park restroom at midnight and I had to drive up to Whitefish with a crowbar.  Got fired from a solid night janitor position at the university for stealing.  Like that.  Always thought he was the cleverest person in the room and was always wrong.  Make enough of those choices and stupid becomes your way of life, if you can call that living.

I never wanted to be the guy who swept up or lifted crates.  It’s like Henry Ford once said, if you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right.  When I bought the card room, I definitely thought I could.  I was done for good dispatching at Starlight Cabs.  At least, I thought I could avoid having to work every waking moment until I died like my old man back in KC.  But Moth and a few other regulars just like him were fucking it all away.  Pretty soon, I’d have to buy another gun.  I didn’t want to.  But I’d have to just to survive.

Rolled up beside them in the street, Moth and his girl, and didn’t say anything when I powered down the window.  She had a stuffed camo duffle bag with little rollers on the bottom.  He had a backpack and a vinyl briefcase that looked like it had been fished out of a dumpster.

I said, “Hey,” and they both jumped about three feet.

“Oh, hi,” Moth said.  “I was lookin’ for you.”

“Yeah?”

He had the appearance of someone who’d been shot out a cannon into the middle of the desert and had to walk all the way back.  Leathery.  Bony.  Bald on top with curly mane down the back to make up for it.  Not a lot of fat on Moth.  And he didn’t look much like a moth.  More like a dude who’s been poor for a long time, who likes to tell himself stories about how it’s made him smart and hard.  Sure.  He must have just run out of the shower because even in the half-dark of the streetlight I could see his mane dripping.

“Yeah, Marty.  Serious.  I just got back from work.  Gotta go back right now.”

“At the garage?  You going on a business trip at 7 on a Saturday night?”

“Well, you know.”  He grinned.  “All work and no play.  Ain’t no rest for the wicked, am I right?”

Back-porch girl looked down.  She had a blue-black dye job, bobbed and sprayed since last we spoke, and it looked like she was now wearing all her clothes: jeans, possibly multiple sets of underwear, two flannels, some kind of blouse under those, maybe some T-shirts.  She’d put on lipstick, too.  International travellers, they were.

“That’s for sure.  No question about that.”  I turned on the headlights.  “Why don’t I give you a lift?”

“That’s really kind of you, uh, Marty, but we were heading out for a bite first.”

“I’m hungry.  I could eat.”

They looked at each other.  The girl opened her mouth and Moth glared like he was about to slap her silly.  Then she looked down again and he broke out in a wide, friendly smile.

“That’d be grand,” he said.

But you can’t do simple things with a felon.

We went to Flapjacks, which was open all night and therefore packed with the degenerate bar crowd.  We ate some waffles and eggs without saying much.  The girl, who’s name I learned was Corgi, kept her eyes on the table.  She didn’t order anything.  She just took little bites off Moth’s plate.  I wondered if that’s how they did it at home and decided, yeah, probably.  When we were done, I picked up the bill because I’m a classy guy.  It made Moth shit himself that much more.

I’d parked out behind the restaurant in the dark.  And walking back to the car, I could feel Moth’s anxiety—like he was weighing the odds of running as fast as he could across the highway into the wheat field on the other side, like what were the chances he could get away before I ran him down with the car and put a bullet in his neck.

Corgi was inside using the bathroom.  But not really because I saw her out the corner of my eye take an immediate detour toward the pay phone in the restroom hallway.  Flapjacks had one of the few remaining pay phones in the state of Missouri for all kinds of reasons, none of them good.  More deals were made on that pay phone and then completed in the dark lot out back than you might expect now that the restaurant had an alternative vegan menu.

Given the usual clientele, I couldn’t imagine who’d want a vegan menu, but times were changing.  After five pitchers of Blue Ribbon and some shots, maybe you want a gluten-free hemp short stack while you wait to hand over a jacked Honda out back to some methed-out hillbilly who runs a chop shop in Muskvane three counties over.

Maybe you have to let him get a kombucha spritzer first.  It’s beyond me.  Probably a Generation Z thing.  I don’t actually know what gluten is.  Regular food is supposed to be pumped full of it and that’s why your dick falls off at age 50 or something.  Pretty soon, someone like Moth will be selling gluten in baggies out behind Flapjacks.  But tonight, we sat in the car and waited for Corgi to finish her pretend bathroom business—probably just her trying to call one of Moth’s associates to come out and fuck me up.

I asked did he want a shot and he said, “No,” all low and ominous.  And I said, “Okay, well, I want one.  I got a bottle in the trunk.”

He didn’t say anything.  I got out, real nonchalant, went back, and popped the trunk—but not so wide that I couldn’t see the passenger door open just enough for him to slip out.  Now we’ll see, I thought, and got the bottle of Four Roses I had back there in a paper grocery bag.  But I didn’t notice Moth running for the highway.  So I put the bottle down and grabbed my crowbar instead.

When I walked around the Impala, he was already standing by the driver’s-side door, pointing a little .22 automatic at me.  It gleamed in the headlights hissing down the highway.  I could see Moth’s eyes and I heard him shout, “Fuck you, Marty!”  Corgi gasped somewhere off to the side.  And then I hit his arm as hard as I could with the crowbar.  The gun went off with a pop.  Then Moth was on his knees, cradling his arm.

“Fucking shit, Marty.  I think you broke my arm.”

“Sorry.  Was that you trying to kill me a minute ago?”

He explored the break with his fingertips and moaned a little, which I could hear, even over the constant truck traffic on the interstate.  Then he said, “You know a little piece like that can’t do shit.”

I stood over him, kept the crowbar ready by my leg.  Because: Moth.  And I hadn’t seen where the gun went in the dark.

Corgi came up, wiped her eyes, said, “Please don’t kill us,” which made Moth cuss until he started coughing.  He ordered her into the Impala and I helped him up by his good arm.

“I don’t got your money,” he said.

“I know it.”

“Then—what?”

“We can’t go on like this, Moth.”

He nodded, cradled his broken forearm.

“Your sister tried to buy me off with a valise full of weed.”

He nodded some more.  “That was my idea.”

“Stupid.  I don’t take it out in trade.  You know that.  This ain’t the March of Dimes.”

He kept nodding.  “But I don’t see how else to square up.  And it just keeps gettin’ bigger.”

Moth was right.  He was in the hole.  He wouldn’t be digging himself out.  And there was a line that would eventually be crossed—maybe it already had been—where I’d have to make an example out of him or I’d never hear the end of it.  Everybody and their brother would try to cheat me.  Eventually, the business would go under and I’d be done in this town.  Like I said, the money wasn’t really the point.

“Well, you got any savings, things you could cash in, favors people owe?  Can your sister borrow some just to get you out of the hole?”

He shook his head.  Nothing like that.  “I could hit some stores.  Maybe get a little scratch.  Do some deals.  There’s these tweekers up in Moon Town doing a lot of biz.  We could go fuck ’em up.”

“We?  With that little gat of yours?”

Moth leaned against the car, wiped his forehead with his unbroken wrist.  “I got other items I could use.”

But he could see I didn’t like that idea.  And his eyes kept drifting to the crowbar in my right hand.  I didn’t have to explain that this was his problem and that I didn’t intend to start walking around in a Born Loser T-shirt with “ARREST ME” on the back.

“Okay,” he sighed.  “I guess I better figure something out, right?”

That was right.

But then he turned around and looked at Corgi, sitting in the front seat, staring at the endless, red, back lights rocketing through the night toward Tibadeaux, Senneta, Scroton, Muskvane, and on to Hermitage, Bolivar, and eventually Springfield, like a stream of fireflies.  There was no telling what a girl like Corgi might be thinking at a time like this with men like us.  Maybe she wasn’t thinking anything at all.  Maybe that’s what put her here in the first place, in the front seat of my car, while Moth tried to weasel out of this.

“You like her?  You think she’s worth a little grace?”

A sixteen-wheeler thundered by and, for a moment, Moth’s frown looked strobed in white.

“I’m not saying everything,” he added, quickly.  “Just a little grace.”

I nodded and a look of relief passed over his face.  “Okay,” he said.  “Okay.”  And he slipped into the driver’s side.

I could hear him in there shouting at her.  She was crying, saying something.  And then I think he slammed her forehead against the dash and things got real quiet.  Then Moth got out, said he’d be in touch, and made his way around the corner of Flapjacks, still cradling his arm, no doubt to go use the payphone inside.

I found the .22 about a few feet away on the ground.  I must have hit Moth’s arm harder than it seemed, but that was appropriate.  I knew he’d pull some shit.  By the time I moved the Impala around to the front and got some ice from the skeptical cashier lady, who’d seen it all a million times and looked over the register at me like she was Miss Cheryl at Window 4 of the DMV—Oh you hurt your foot, did you?—Moth was long gone and Corgi’d stopped crying.

I had the ice in a paper napkin and told her to press it on her forehead, which she did without comment.

“I think Moth just sold you to me for a grace period on his debt.”

She didn’t have a comment on that, either.  I positioned the car facing the bright side of Flapjacks.  We stared in for a while and watched the bar culture wolf down waffles and ice cream sundaes or maybe tofu ham substitute and spirulina crepes.

“So I guess I belong to you, now,” she said.  Dull voice.  Dull eyes.

“Why were you with him anyway?”

“Dale traded me to him for a turntable.  Dale’s a musician.  He’s super good.”

I shook my head.  “You’re worth more than a turntable.”

“Dale didn’t think so.”

That was the truth, her truth.  Before Dale, there was probably a Randy or a Stu or a Ronald or a Bobby in some unbreakable lineage back to whoever once passed for dad.

“Can you waitress?”

“Never tried.”

“What can you do?”

“Did some dancing.”

Ah.  “Well, since you belong to me now, there’s a woman named Gabby at the card room I own, who handles all the money, and she’s going to teach you how to serve people drinks.”

She looked at me as if I’d said we were going to worship snakes at the bottom of a well.

“Okay?”

Corgi put the ice back on her bruised forehead.  “Okay.”

“And you can stay with me.”

She nodded slowly.  Of course.  This is where she figured she’d be putting in the real work.  That wasn’t how it was going to be, but there was no explaining that to her.  Girls like Corgi are all show don’t tell.  Show me the money.  Show me there’s a lock on my door and you won’t be coming in there in the middle of the night.

Well, there was a lock on my daughter’s old room, now a guest room, but really a store room.  Before she left me the final time, my wife, Sonya, said I should put my moose trophy in there because at the time I was big into hunting and she hated it.  Then she added I should go fuck it.  I hadn’t fucked my moose trophy.  And I didn’t plan on fucking Corgi, either.  But I was going to have to lock her in.  Because maybe she wanted to know there was some kind of barrier between us.  She needed to feel like I wasn’t going to go in there at 2 AM and make her pay the rent, but I needed to feel she wasn’t going to cut my throat in my sleep and rob me blind.

That little lock my daughter wanted, when she became an embarrassed teen and I was still out all night dispatching cabs for a living, was going to keep things nice and calm.  Because Moth still owed me.  Because I had to be able to get my beauty sleep.  And you really cannot do anything with a felon.

I pulled out of the lot and got on the interstate.  We were almost to my house in east Hauberk when Corgi said, “Moth’ll be back, you know.”

“I’m counting on it.”  I grinned.  She frowned.  And that’s how I got my first waitress and moved her in shortly thereafter with Gabby, who needed a roommate.  A waitress needs drinks to serve—why I eventually applied for a liquor license and turned the card room into a mostly drinking establishment, which improved my overall mentality 100%.  And it’s how I eventually met certain public officials who led me into the business I’m in today.

But at the time, I was just trying to do something maybe not so bad.  And this girl, named after a fluffy poodle-dog, with ice on her forehead, kept looking out at the lights of the houses of Hauberk going by, maybe thinking about Dale the super-good musician and his turntables.  And I was thinking about Sonya and the giant taxidermized moose head currently staring up at the ceiling of my daughter’s old bedroom.

And yes, I knew Moth would be back, but I could not have foreseen that he’d try to shoot me a second time and that I’d beat him so severely with the crowbar that he’d be released from the hospital to a facility up north and I never would get my money.  But yesterday is only a dream.  And tomorrow is only a vision.  And in-between we try not to shoot each other or let our regrets become unmanageable.  At least, that’s how I try to live; though, it doesn’t always work.  Then again, what does?

Dark Passanger

Marketing isn’t the root of all evil.  But, if evil exists, marketing’s probably involved.  And, for creative types trying to survive in a world generally hostile to their values and intentions, marketing can serve as a kind of anti-life navigation system, offering a thousand opportunities to sell out and ten-thousand more to destroy oneself.

Marketing also keeps the lights on, puts food on the table, and may even allow an artist to run a convincing simulation of normal life if she’s very lucky and not overwhelmingly stupid.  It’s everywhere all the time.  We engage with its principles, its ubiquity, on a daily basis.  This is why, as writers and artists, we often don’t like to talk about marketing or even acknowledge it exists.

It’s a great servant but a terrible master.  When we’re honest, we’ll admit it’s usually functioning as the latter not the former in our lives.  It’s an invisible presence everywhere we go, our dark passenger, the demon elephant in the center of the room that we can’t bear to look at but around which everything else moves.  Like this paragraph, marketing runs on clichés, uses clichéd logic and clichéd sensibilities to transform art into commerce.

Marketing sees creative works in terms of units, thinks Fifty Shades of Grey is one of the greatest novels ever written because of its sales figures, considers a velvet painting of a dolphin under the moon superior to van Gogh’s Sunflowers due to consumer research in China and data from post-menopausal office workers who can name every Kenny G album in order of release.  Marketing has no taste.  It’s crass, often dumb, and worships the bottom line.  But I couldn’t say these things yesterday to a group of fashion design students in their early 20s.

I work in an academic department that houses a fashion design merchandising program.  And sometimes, because I’m an old, often befuddled, straight white guy who looks like he found his wardrobe jumbled up in the “Men’s Bin” of a dollar store, I stand out to post-adolescents who want everything to be cool, edgy, beautiful, and, above all else, culturally relevant.  In a perfect world, we’d never speak, since explaining the arcana of fashion to someone like me would be tantamount to explaining the physics of a bicycle to a cockroach.  But, for better and worse, we don’t live in a perfect world.

In this one, I’ve had the opportunity to interact with the interesting, friendly fashion design professors, who are always willing to answer my questions about what they do.  And I’ve even had a few conversations with some of the less insecure and fragile program undergraduates—who no doubt took down their dolphin wall art last summer; though, mom probably couldn’t bear to toss it and put it back up in the den.

What I am able to say to these students (especially since they are not my students) is very limited.  As for the question of whether it’s possible to lead a creative life and also make a living at it, I do not talk about the amount of suffering that normally entails.  I don’t tell them to enjoy these years because art school (of any sort) is a beautiful opportunity for them to focus exclusively on their creative work without having to labor in a basement and worry about food stamps.

I don’t point out that getting a college education is tantamount to buying time and that, even if they aren’t on student loans, they’re on existential student loans.  They’re staking years of their lives on a gamble that these studies are going to mean something.  Unfortunately, many of them seem to be waiting around to be told what that something is.

There are no answers, I could say.  There aren’t even questions.  There’s only time and space, what you want to do versus what you have to do, and the attendant marketing.  But these are the ideas of someone who’s been working in a creative field for almost 30 years—not a 22-year-old in a fashion program worrying whether her top is culturally relevant.

As Hemingway writes in “The Capitol of the World,” about the young Spanish waiter who gets killed while pretending to be a bullfighter, “He died, as the Spanish phrase has it, full of illusions.  He had not had the time in his life to lose any of them, nor even, at the end to complete an act of contrition.  He had not even had the time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.”  That’s a perfect expression of what I saw in my recent conversation with four fashion students—they haven’t had the time to even understand that there are things they don’t understand.

It’s perfect except that I hope they live to somehow broker a peace between their illusions and the harshness outside their university incubator—if only because, like the young man in Hemingway’s story, they’re beautiful, noble, and so very ignorant in seemingly equal proportion.  And who doesn’t love that combination?

I also went to art school.  For me, it was an MFA creative writing program close enough to the black sun of the Manhattan publishing industry that the amount of status anxiety, absurd catty competitiveness, Machiavellian exploitation, desperation, and self-marketing (which, at times, seemed more like a highly intentional, entrepreneurial form of prostitution) met and exceeded anything I’ve seen in these fashion students.  That’s good, I suppose.  But, like a spouse, maybe you tend to get the person you deserve.  Nobody’s innocent.  If you marry a good person who can stand you, it means you did something right.  If you go to an art school that doesn’t kill you with marketing, maybe you’ll be okay.

There’s only time and space and how you choose to spend it.  I wish more people would choose to spend it making art.  I wish fewer people would spend it worrying about marketing themselves and whether they’re going to be able to get married to someone beautiful, travel to new and exotic locations, make their parents proud, attain true and lasting happiness, and be famous all before the advanced age of 30.  But maybe I haven’t had time to be disappointed in the Garbo picture which disappointed all Madrid for a week.  I’m not trying to be a bullfighter.  I know what life is all about.  Right?

I’m the Greatest Writer of my Generation

Bukowski wrote a scene in which Henry Chinaski attends a test screening of what would become the film, Barfly. He’s drunk and, fed up, starts shouting that he’s the greatest writer of his generation and don’t they realize this. I read it in my early 20s on a bus from San Diego to Iowa City because I’d gotten into the University of Iowa as an undergraduate and thought I might go to school there. Ultimately, I didn’t. But the week-long bus trip turned out to be an epic voyage unlike anything I’d experienced thus far in my life.

Large parts of it were also boring and gave me time to read Hollywood, Borges’ Labyrinths, a Dean Koontz horror novel, Midnight, and The Sun Also Rises. I didn’t know then that I was a writer; though, I’d already fallen into the habit of writing every day and had begun to form a sense of the literature I liked and that which I wanted to avoid. Years later, as a writing instructor, I’d come to see these two things as common traits in beginning writers—the need to write and strong preferences about reading. Interestingly, these qualities are not always present in students and scholars of literature, which is what I thought I wanted to be at that point.

And before you say, Really? Dean Koontz? with that look on your face, I’ll add that it’s good to explore what everyone has been bullied into agreeing is unworthy. I’ve read far more Stephen King than Dean Koontz. I think the former is a better pulp writer than the latter. But, even back then, I wasn’t going to allow myself to be shamed out of reading anything. Read everything. It’s not healthy to restrict yourself to the current, politically unassailable conversation-piece novels being extruded by the Big Six. That said, yes, Koontz is mostly a shit writer. But sometimes you have to excavate the shit to get to the good stuff beneath it.

I wanted to study English lit in the Midwest because it was far away from southern California, where I grew up and which I regarded as the locus of my teenage suffering. I hadn’t learned that the locus of one’s suffering is more ubiquitous and less tangible than merely the place where you did time in high school. Unfortunately, the early 20s are like that. You think there must be answers and that others must have them. How else could the world function? That’s one reason I still read fiction even though I know better. The search for nonexistent answers is a hard habit to kick.

So there’s Henry Chinaski, doing his enfant terrible routine in the back of a screening room in Hollywood, shouting with as much self-conscious irony as possible, Don’t you know who I am? Maybe Bukowski believed, at the time Barfly was being made, that more people should know about him and acknowledge his talent. But I suspect it was just the opposite: he felt that fewer smarmy media people should be kissing his ass while he nonetheless obsessively courted that attention.

In Starship: The Magazine about Science Fiction, Robert Anton Wilson describes this personality type:

Most of the characteristics which make for success in writing are precisely those which we are all taught to repress. These characteristics are denounced by religious leaders everywhere, by most philosophers, and by many famous psychologists. I refer to such qualities as vanity, pride, even conceit; to raw egotism and grandiosity; to the firm belief that you are an important person, that you are a lot smarter than most people, and that your ideas are so damned important that everybody should listen to you.

Wilson exaggerates to make a point about the necessity of getting past writerly impostor syndrome, which seems more prevalent in young writers now than ever before. Being a good, sanitary, moral citizen may be at odds with producing fiction that isn’t flaccid. Unfortunately, mannered writing is often rewarded by businessmen who think of books in terms of “units” and scholars who’ve exchanged their libidos for analytical abilities and an academic nihil obstat.

Nevertheless, it may be reasonable to say we’d like to write what we’d like to write.  And we’d like to feel less like impostors while we do it.  We might not need to indulge in Wilson’s “raw egotism and grandiosity” or, as Chuck put it in a 1964 letter to Ann Bauman, “New tenant downstairs knocks on her ceiling (my floor) when I type. This, of course, disturbs the thought context all to hell. Doesn’t she know that I am the great Charles Bukowski?” We would like the thought context, at least, to remain stable.

A few years after my fateful interstate bus odyssey to Iowa, I found myself standing in a one-bedroom apartment in Los Angeles with a Turk named Marat, both of us holding electric guitars plugged into enormous Marshall amps, which, if dialed up one or two more notches, would have disintegrated us at an atomic level.

Nobody cared.  People played loud music all the time in that neighborhood, mostly rap, which Marat hated.  Hence, his daily hour of deafening scales and perfect renditions of every song off his favorite practice albums, And Justice for All, Surfing with the Alien, and Seasons in the Abyss.  We could sometimes hear people outside on the street yell, “Turn that shit off!” or just “Fuck you, white boy!”  Those were more innocent times.

Marat was a fellow student at UC Irvine (my B-choice after realizing that Iowa wasn’t what I’d hoped it would be) and he had a record executive uncle back in Istanbul.  He’d supposedly gotten guitar lessons from Kirk Hammett and Eddie Van Halen.  Now, having established my worthiness, he’d decided to pass on the electric guitar darshan to me.  But I was hopeless.

He gave me lessons for about a month on equipment and instruments that probably three-fourths of Los Angeles couldn’t afford.  And I struggled to follow him through songs like “Always with Me, Always with You” and “Dead Skin Mask,” which Marat thought should be relaxing and teachable.  One thing he did tell me, though, which seemed extremely weird at the time but which made sense to me years later in a Bukowskian way, was “You’re holding it like a classical guitar.  That’s bullshit.  You have to hold it like your cock.”

Granted, he was as macho as he was romantic and he thought real artists should be willing to destroy themselves.  So, having listened to Marat’s aesthetic philosophies for almost a year, him saying I should hold the guitar like my cock wasn’t that outrageous. He could have just as easily said, “First, you have to dive off the roof and land on your face. Only then will you be ready for the arpeggios in ‘Eye of the Beholder.’”  Maybe so.  Maybe so.

I often think about this advice, something that could not be uttered publicly—if only due to its forbidden machismo, much less the fact that it wasn’t said by Lizzo, any post-1980s rapper, or a tranced-out John Fetterman. As such, it qualifies as an esoteric teaching on par with Wilson’s claim, in that same article, that society probably hates writers and wants them to fail if they dare believe in themselves:

The only thing most people hate more than success is self-confidence—a warning signal that you might be a success soon. This is not what they teach you in Sunday School, but it happens to be true: at any evidence that you might be a success, the envious will do everything in their power to destroy you.

Therefore, there is no chance at all that a high self-esteem will go unchallenged; it will be challenged on all sides, daily. On the other hand, if you have a low opinion of yourself, nobody will ever correct it. You will have it for life unless you correct it yourself.

Hold the guitar like it’s your cock.  Wave it over the crowd like a benediction. People will hate you.  Live, laugh, love. So goes the creative process, the harmonium of the spheres. You have the further option of staying up all night, drinking cheap wine, and listening to classical music on the radio, but that may be too much Henry Chinaski for comfort.

I don’t know what happened to Marat after he went back to Istanbul.  I like to imagine he became a rich music executive like his uncle before the record industry disappeared.  I still can’t play “Blackened” and I haven’t felt the urge to stand up and scream at groups of people that they should know who I am.  The sheer audacity of sitting down to write anything is enough for me.  It’s probably enough for people to hate me, as I discovered last year when a literary magazine nervously un-accepted a story of mine because I was openly critical of certain political figures on social media.

You are, however, encouraged to secretly regard me as the greatest writer of my generation.  I’ll do my best to hold the guitar properly and send you forth with writerly blessings.  Or perhaps with this thought from the opening of Bukowski’s “My Stay in the Poet’s Cottage”:

for those of you interested in madness, yours or mine, I can tell you a little about mine. I stayed at the poet’s cottage at the University of Arizona, not because I am established but because nobody but a damn fool or a poor man ever visits or stays in Tucson in the summer months. it averaged around 106 degrees during my whole stay. nothing to do but drink beer. I am a poet who has made it known that I do not give readings. I am also a person who becomes quite a jackass when drunk. and when sober I don’t have anything to say, so there weren’t many knocks at the poet’s cottage.

There’s never anything to say when you’re staying in the poet’s cottage.  Nothing.  No one knows you’re the greatest writer of your generation.  You don’t even know. It’s unclear how you got there and, goddamit, someone keeps tapping on the ceiling when you’re trying to work.  There are no answers and you feel confused about the questions.  Turn up the amp.  Land on your face. If you live, Rimbaud. If not, well, the thought context probably wasn’t right.  Too bad for you.  You’re in the poet’s cottage now, bucko.

Happy Birthday to Me and a Bunch of Ruthless Killers

Regarding certain meaningful coincidences in time.

The grand synchronicity of life is at all times mysterious. This morning, I slept in, as I usually do on my birthday, and I woke up around the time of my birth, which in this zone, comes out to be 6:10 AM. I’ve done this as far back as I can remember. Why does it happen? There’s a secret here that I prefer not to dismiss in terms of subconscious programming, context dependency, and pattern recognition because it’s more satisfying to think like a poet than like a reductive psychologistic materialist. It’s my birthday and I can engage in the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings and irrational, intuitive, a priori assumptions if I want to.

I subscribe to the Poetic Outlaws newsletter. So, of course, the poem today was “Growing Old” by Matthew Arnold, in which the author describes the subjectivity of aging in melancholy terms: “It is to spend long days/ And not once feel that we were ever young.” To this, I must respectfully answer, “That is complete bucket of tosh, Mr. Arnold.” Still, the synchronicity of receiving such a poem today is palpable and I should at least celebrate Matthew Arnold for wishing me a ghostly happy birthday.

But what is synchronicity? I’m using it colloquially to indicate ostensibly disconnected or only slightly connected events that seem to correlate in a surprising way. Deciding to sleep in and waking up at the approximate time of my birth on my birthday is curious. Perhaps it is simultaneously more and less curious that it seems to happen this way every year.

Receiving a poem by email the same day, entitled “Growing Old,” is even more curious. The strange feeling that accompanies synchronicity would have been even more powerful if I’d received the email at 6:10 AM. Unfortunately or fortunately, it arrived at 2:04 AM—no doubt, automatically scheduled by Erik Rittenberry, who runs Poetic Outlaws, and with whom I’ve never spoken. (Buy the man a coffee. He does good work.)

In Synchronicity: an Acausal Connecting Principle (taken from volume eight of his collected works, The Structure and Dynamics of the Psyche), Jung describes it as “the occurrence of a meaningful coincidence in time.” He adds that it can take three forms:

a) the coincidence of a certain psychic content with a corresponding objective process which is perceived to take place simultaneously.

b) the coincidence of a subjective psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision) which later turns out to be a more or less faithful reflection of a “synchronistic,” objective event that took place more or less simultaneously, but at a distance.

c) the same, except that the event perceived takes place in the future and is represented in the present only by a phantasm that corresponds to it.

Whereas in the first case an objective event coincides with a subjective content, the synchronicity in the other two cases can only be verified subsequently, though the synchronistic event as such is formed by the coincidence of a neutral psychic state with a phantasm (dream or vision).

Phantasms, dreams, and visions. This is why I love Jung. For me, the most significant language comes from the first item on his list, the quality of perception in the person having the synchronistic experience. This is because, in order to write this blog post and have it be meaningful to you, it first has to be meaningful to me. I have to look inward and, much like Guy de Maupassant’s character standing before the grave of his loved one, say, it’s curious what I felt. Back to Arnold’s subjectivity, if not his melancholy. Back to the self, suggesting that synchronicity may depend, to a large extent, on whether or how much we’re paying attention.

Jung died in Küshnacht 12 years before I was born 5,973 miles away in San Diego. I find the fact that he can speak to me across time and space also profoundly mysterious—more so than current A.I. reconstructions of dead intellectuals from history. I try to read their works, where the real intelligence rests. Nothing more artificial than a book is necessary. But no matter how much I read and how many synchronistic experiences I have, I wonder whether there is some first cause, some transcendent unity in which all synchronicities could be reconciled.

In his critique of Schopenhauer, Jung dismissed this idea, noting that the former “thought and wrote at a time when causality held sovereign sway as a category a priori and had therefore to be dragged in to explain meaningful coincidences. But, as we have seen, it can do this with some degree of probability only if we have recourse to the other, equally arbitrary assumption of the unity of the first cause.” In other words, grand unities are baseless suppositions. So let’s not start talking about god unless we’re reading Lord Byron.

But what about DNA? If we go back only a few generations, say 300 years, we have thousands of ancestors. We all know this, but looking at online charts that approximate the average size of a 10th ancestral generation is sobering. Given the range of genetic diversity it implies, doesn’t it seem at least somewhat likely that perceptual states (and, by extension, the depth and breath of synchronicity in one’s life) might emanate not from god but from heredity? Another baseless supposition, maybe, but one that might be a little more persuasive and more than a little unsettling.

This is especially true when I think of my Welsh, Italian, and Armenian ancestors. I suspect they didn’t survive to reproduce and pass on their genes because they were noble and loving children of the cosmos. I think it’s far more likely that they survived because they were tough, many of them ruthless, hard-edged killers (especially on the Welsh side), able to persist, generation after generation, through war, famine, plague, persecution, imprisonment, transportation, exile, and genocide. This gives me pause and makes me wonder who I am, in a genetic sense, and whether, if I were to meet one of my 10th-generation grandfathers, I’d live through the experience.

DNA cannot replace god; god cannot replace uncertainty; and uncertainty seems to be at the root of synchronicity. This morning, before I sat down to write, I looked at the news and saw an image of Pope Francis paying his respects to the remains of Padre Pio at Santa Maria delle Grazie.

You will not find a more quintessential Catholic image. But without an a priori grand unity, it’s just a preserved corpse, just another Lenin. Maybe so. And without either a metaphysical, genetic, or somehow transcendent cause, maybe birthday synchronicity is nothing more than subconscious programming, context dependency, and pattern recognition, nothing mysterious about it at all.

Thank goodness I’m a fiction writer and not a scientist. I get to rely on the spontaneous overflow of inner feelings (instead of inner plumbing), speak with angels and the ghosts of poets, even the ghosts of scientists, and make the mysterious great again. So happy birthday synchronicity to me and to all those who survived so that I could say, it’s curious what I felt.

Closer to Fine

 

A story that floats by, into the sun.

Kelsey sent me an email from Saint Louis, said did I want to come out there and do drugs.  She didn’t mention what the drugs were, just did I want to come out there and visit her and, by the way, there were some drugs.  It was fine and I could stay with her.  And the implication was we could do the drugs together.  Coming from Kelsey, that was just about a protestation of love.

But I didn’t want to do some drugs.  I also didn’t want to hurt her feelings.  I would’ve liked to have stayed with Kelsey for a couple months, fuck a lot, get up late, eat fancy breakfasts, and pretend we’re Seriously Involved With Each Other the way we’d done once or twice in the past.  But drugs made me nervous.  She didn’t say weed.  She didn’t say smoking in the oblique stoner way that meant mellow days and hazy good times.  She came straight out with it: There’s some drugs.  It’s fine.  Fine is the worst word in the English language.  Fine means trouble and misery.  It means bad shit.  Whenever there’s some drugs, it’s always fine.

She was staying with Grant, who I knew from Kansas City, and Denise, who I didn’t know, but who I’d heard of.  And I can say that both of them were fine.  So fine I might go far out of my way to ensure that I never encountered them in a house or on the street or in a bar or in the office of an attorney, all of which nearly happened back in KC but didn’t.  Not ever doing some drugs with them ensured that it wouldn’t.

But part of me might have still been in love with Kelsey.  Or, if not in love, then in a feverish kind of lust and affection that made me overlook things like her history of minor offenses and her ODing in my bathtub three summers ago and trashing the place because I said she couldn’t have a cat.

“What’ll you feed it,” I asked.

“I’ll feed it whatever.”

“No,” I said, “you’ll give it cheese puffs and then forget all about it and it’ll die or it’ll try to eat your ear off in your sleep.  And then I’ll have to kill it because it’ll have become a menace.  And once I kill it for your own protection, you’ll blame me.  And this’ll come up again in like a year and I’ll never hear the end of it.  So no.  You don’t get a cat.  Do you want a burrito?”

“No, I want a cat.”

“You don’t get one.  You may have a burrito.”

“Fuck your burrito.”

Then she proceeded to break all our windows, screaming about how she wanted a cat and fuck my burrito.

I could overlook all those episodes with Kelsey, all those fine moments, like when she tried to turn a party of horny Air Force helicopter pilots against me by flirting with each one of them because I had a cold and wanted to go home.  She didn’t want to go home because there was a lot of booze in the Air Force’s kitchen and, at the time, we didn’t have any in ours.  So many fine moments that almost ended in a fistfight or a car wreck or jail.  But still, still.  We all have those people who affect us like some drugs, and Kelsey had that effect on me.

So she was out in Saint Louis and there were the drugs and Grant and Denise and it was all just fine.  Kelsey thought I knew something about something.  She thought I could come back into her life and say this is good; that’s not; do this; don’t do that and everything would work out.  Like I exuded the gravity of a small moon.  It wasn’t much, but it could keep her from floating by, into the sun.

I bought a train ticket from Hauberk, Missouri, to Saint Louis’ Gateway Station.  I could have driven to Saint Louis in about three hours, but Grant and Denise were in my thoughts.  I wouldn’t have trusted either of them with a rusty bicycle, much less my ancient Dodge Dart.  My neighbor had a shed.  So I paid him $50 to keep the car locked up in there for a week and we shook on it.

Kelsey would eventually tell me Grant and Denise were deep into ketamine instead of oxy, if that makes a difference, like saying so-and-so is a Lutheran instead of a Catholic.  Different culture, different furnishings, same facial expressions, same doom loop.  Addicts, like expert oenologists or bespoke flügelhorn valve artisans, will disagree that it’s all the same.  They’ll see a world of differences between certain wines or horn valves.  But I’d been clean since the bathtub incident three years ago.  That was three years of meetings and calling my sponsor twice a week.  I didn’t want to think about one drug versus another.  I found myself thinking about it anyway.

In Grant and Denise’s case, and maybe Kelsey’s too,  I’d have guessed oxy or DMT or even old-school valium, because coke was definitely out of their pay grade.  But it didn’t matter.  They’d chosen ketamine.  They looked completely out of it when I arrived.  And I knew they wouldn’t not be out of it anytime soon.

I was sitting on the sofa, drinking a cup of instant coffee with Kelsey and Byron, who had a guitar instead of a shirt and gave off the powerful vibe of a person who sells some drugs, when Byron’s boyfriend, Petey, walked in wearing a yellow WWI gas mask and nothing else.  Grant and Denise were on the other sofa, sleeping again.  Byron strummed the same chord over and over.   Kelsey had her head on my shoulder and I thought she might also be asleep.

Petey had no body hair.  He presented himself in the middle of the living room.

“Nice,” I said.  “What are you, naked apocalypse guy?”

“Is it nice?”  Petey’s voice sounded tiny and flat from inside the gas mask.

“It’s nice,” said Byron.  “So nice.”  He strummed his chord.

Petey did some body builder poses.  He was skinny and had the rubbery look of someone who assiduously waxes and moisturizes, all sharp angles, smooth planes, veins, and stringy muscles.

Then Denise sat up.  She coughed, worked her tongue around her mouth because she’d been sleeping with it open, and gave Petey a look.  “Do us a favor and put on some pants, okay?  I don’t want to see that.”

“This?”  Petey thrust his hips at her.

“Yeah.”

“Why not?  You racist?”

I thought Denise was going to overcome the pill-head stereotype and physically throw Petey out the door.  She was a big woman, pretty and Midwestern-solid in spite of the T-shirt, sweats, and tangled hair.  She looked like once, long ago, in a galaxy far, far away, she might have had her life together.  Maybe before she hooked up with Grant in KC.

“Don’t say dumb shit in my living room.”

“I’m Portuguese.  You can’t handle that?”

“Get going, Petey.”

He looked at her through the gas mask, then padded down the hallway and slammed the bathroom door.

“Can you get him out of here?” she asked Byron.

He stood up and nodded, slung the guitar across his back.  “Namaste,” he said.

I spent that first night far from any lust and affection or even conversation.  Kelsey said three words to me before she passed out: “Shit, you came.”  She’d gotten so high before I arrived that the sense of her as a human being was totally absent.  Her body was now a hollow thing, mind and soul elsewhere.  I carried her to bed.  Then I lay down next to her, listening to her breathe, looking at the tree-branch shadows on the wall.

The next day was better.  Kelsey’d sobered up and her usual wary look had returned.  She’s not telling me something, I thought.  Something’s messed up and she doesn’t want me to know.  Then I laughed.  Of course.  What did I expect?  Everything was fine.

Grant and Denise didn’t answer when I knocked softly on their bedroom door.  So Kelsey and I took the bus to the university to see Byron read his poems.  Byron had discovered a T-shirt and looked high and his poems were bad.  But everyone I knew seemed like they were high so often it had become an empty designation.  Byron frowned and said:

You are literally trembling.

I didn’t mean to be cruel.

That doesn’t mean you were kind.

Then he strummed his guitar a few times.  Nobody in the audience clapped or even moved.  It went on for 45 minutes.  There were a few professor types checking their phones, a few fidgety kids who might have been on a high school trip, and what were probably the students from Byron’s creative writing class—all sitting up front with shrewd, critical expressions.  Petey was sitting with them.  Without the gas mask, his shaved head gleamed.  When he looked back at us, I saw he had a bushy gray mustache.

Kelsey put her hand on my leg.  “This is killing me.”

“We can go.”  I put my hand over hers but she pulled away.

“No.  We have to be nice to Byron.”

I took a break to get a drink at the crusty water fountain in the hall.  The university auditorium was enormous but attendance was low.  I was surprised there were people milling around in the hallway outside.  But then I wasn’t.  They all looked the same: unnaturally thin, glassy, twitchy, like their train was about to leave the station but they didn’t have a ticket.  Ah yes, I thought.

Two girls leaned against the bulletin boards on either side of the hallway and stared at me without turning their heads.  The third, a guy farther down, was announcing board notices like it was his poetry reading, too: “University alterations.  A stitch in time saves nine.  Military discount.  Hey, a Navy recruiter’s gonna be here next week.  Do something with your life, son.  Human subject pool.  You can make twenty bucks.  Farmer’s market in Lot B.  Shit, vegetables.  They’re fresh.”

I got my drink of water and one of the girls came up to me.  She had a black mini-skirt, bright green rubber sandals, and a gray zip-up hoodie with a faded emblem of Garfield the Cat.  Her curly brown hair looked damp.

“Hey.”  She smiled.

I nodded.

“So you know Byron?”

“Who?”

“Byron.  You know.”  She looked at the auditorium door.

“I don’t know,” I said.  “I’m just a poetry aficionado.”

“What?”

“I’m Professor Burke.  Edmund Burke.  At your service.”  I extended my hand and she tentatively shook it.  Hers was clammy and, for some reason, made me think of Florida.  This is how they shake in Florida, I thought.  People need to catch a train.  But first they need to find Byron.  They’re nervous.  They’re trying to join the Navy and get some vegetables.  Parts of their bodies that should be cool and dry are warm and moist.  Their hoodies don’t match their green rubber sandals.

“Oh my gosh!”  She smiled again.  “A professor!”  I caught a little contempt in the corners of her eyes, thought of her smiling like that while thrusting a broken beer bottle.  “We’re friends of Byron.  The poet.”

“Ah, the poet.”

“Can you introduce us?”

“I thought you were friends.”

Confused for a moment, smile fading, she looked back at the other girl, who was still watching with her eyes but hadn’t decided to turn her head.  The guy farther down the hall continued reading: “Therapeutic massage.  Psych 463.  Learn about emotions.  Mousetrap at the Wilson theater.  Bagels.”

“Bagels sound good right now,” I said.

“So can you introduce us?”

“I’m a professor.  My job is not to introduce.  My job is to profess.”

“What?”

I went back in but the reading was over.  Most of the people had filtered out.  Petey held an unlit cigarette while he gestured at a very tall man with a gray bowl cut.  Kelsey stood by the podium talking to Byron, her face an inch from his.

In order to avoid running into Byron’s customer base in the hall, I went out the side door by the stage and then through a maze of stairwells and windowless passages.  Just when I was beginning to despair, thinking I’d have to backtrack and confront Petey’s gleaming head, I emerged in the lower lot.  This is it, I thought.  This is the hero’s journey.  I’ve gone through the underworld.  I’ve faced the minotaur in the labyrinth and survived his shitty poetry.  I’ve spoken to the fates in their rubber slippers.  Now it’s time to make the voyage home.

I took the bus back to Grant and Denise’s.  It was good that I did, since Kelsey went somewhere that afternoon with Byron and didn’t come back.  A party.  But a party at Byron’s house was what?  The K-hole and naked Petey in his gas mask?  We have to be nice to Byron, she’d said.  Sure, sure, we’re friends of the poet.  I got it.  I knew that kind of nice.  I watched downtown Saint Louis pass and thought about when I used to live there.  The bus went down some streets where certain things had taken place in which I hadn’t presented my best self.

Grant answered the door in a narrow black suit and a jade bolo tie, his hair slicked back.  He looked like a small-town mortician from the 1940s.  He didn’t recognize me.  “Hey, we’re really not interested.”

“It’s me.”

A look of confusion crossed his face, then anxiety.  Denise came up behind him and whispered something in his ear.  Grant murmured okay, nodded.  He had a long face and a chiseled jaw, but years of abuse and crime had taken a toll.  Being drug-thin made his head look too big.  He had a habit of squinting and sucking in his cheeks, like he’d swallowed something bitter.  Grant got confused a lot.  A far cry from the old days when he ripped people off on real estate deals and drove a big gold-rimmed Escalade.  His crimes got smaller over time and his drugs got bigger.

Denise waved me in, pointed Grant to the bedroom.  He obeyed.

“You want a cup of tea?”

“Okay.”  I never drank tea.

She brought out two ceramic mugs of bright red tea that smelled like chemical roses.  When she smiled, I noticed the dull gold tooth on the left side of her mouth.

I wondered if she was married to Grant, but I didn’t think so.  That’s not how the scenario went.  What was the point?  Marriage says you can stay with someone through various circumstances, that your decisions are strong enough for something like that.  It says you won’t need to change your personality, have to leave your job, have to sleep in some other place with someone else, or have to listen to someone’s shitty poems.  Those are things you do when some drugs are making the choices.

“This town’s getting tedious.”  Denise sipped.  I felt like I should take a sip, too.  It tasted like sweet hot perfume.

“I’m thinking of making a change,” she said.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.  I got a friend down in Texas.  She needs a boyfriend.  You ever visit Texas?”

I said I hadn’t.  Then, “What about Grant?”

She smiled, took a long sip of the poison perfume.  “Who?”

Then she put down the mug and stood.  Denise had on a polyester rainbow muumuu straight out of the 70s.  She let it drop around her feet and stepped in front of me in nothing but her bra.

“You into vagina?”

“Sure.”  I felt like I was on automatic, like I was reaching the natural outcome of my visit and I didn’t have the willpower or options for anything else.  Denise’s thighs were enormous and pale. Her gut made a crease over her shaved pussy.

“Kelsey’s never gonna fuck you,” she said.  “She’s all dried up.”

“I think she’s with Byron.”

She grinned, leaned down, and kissed me on the lips.

The next morning, Kelsey still hadn’t returned.  Weeks later, I’d discover that Grant had decided to use up the last of his secret heroin and that he’d shuffled off to eternity in the middle of the night.  Or, pill-head gossip being what it was, maybe it happened the next night or a few nights after that.  Or didn’t happen at all.  When I heard about it, I remembered Grant answering the door dressed like a mortician with his hair slicked back and that jade bolo around his neck.  And I thought that’s how he probably wanted to go, dressed as well as he could manage, dressed to the nines or, in his case, to the fives.

I got to Gateway Station early and drank multiple cups of coffee before the train started boarding.  I had a powerful urge to get drunk, which, I knew, would lead to worse things.  Kelsey’d thrown me over for some drugs.  Denise threw Grant over for me and a road trip to Houston.  Moving to Texas might have actually been a good idea, but not with her.  The effort something like that would take seemed enormous.  As for me, I’d thrown all of them over after a two-day visit that was supposed to last a week.  I knew, deep in my heart, that my days with Kelsey were done.

The train moved through a rock-filled gully and came up into Missouri farmland.  I watched the landscape go by and tried not to think.  In my haste get out of there, I hadn’t showered and I could feel Denise on me.  I could still taste the rose-flavored tea.

The conductor came by and punched a hole in my ticket, looked at me for a moment, said, “Had a good time in the city, huh.”

“No.”  I said, “I went to a poetry reading.  I’m a friend of the poet.”

“Right-o.”

“Yes,” I said when he handed the ticket back, “Namaste.”

Less Than Smoke

It’s hard to quantify psychological abuse.  For years, I felt sure it wasn’t real.  I didn’t believe in things like emotional intelligence, the critical inner voice, generalized anxiety, ego depletion, and how these can lead to high-risk behaviors and addictions.  I also didn’t believe you could inherit any of it down through the generations.  But I believe now.

For most of my adult life, I’ve been more persuaded by my mother’s idea that with enough willpower, you can overcome anything and that if you seek help, if you identify yourself as being weak, troubled, or different, you will be put on a list.  Then you’ll never know whether you failed in life because you weren’t good enough or because you voluntarily admitted it and people decided they wanted nothing to do with you.  Admittedly, young people don’t worry about things like this anymore.  Now it seems everyone has their own pet defect or preferred victim category.

My mom was a brilliant, gifted artist and a very good person, but part of her lived in perpetual fear that I wasn’t clever enough, tough enough, industrious enough, and that I’d let people push me around for the rest of my life.  She wanted me to be like Michael Corleone but worried that I was more like Fredo.  And I was ashamed when I tried hard to be the former but more often embodied the latter.  Little did I realize that we’re all Fredo.

In Blue Nights, when I read Joan Didion’s famous advice to herself, “Do not whine. . . . Do not complain.  Work harder.  Spend more time alone,” I felt validated.  It became my mantra, my personal statement.  Here was one of my favorite writers, someone I’d actually had the benefit of briefly meeting when she came to read at the University of Missouri, articulating exactly how I felt—a relief because I could never find the words.  I wanted to be a creative artist and therefore ostensibly privileged subjectivity and emotional authenticity, but I couldn’t express what really mattered.  I couldn’t admit that what I really wanted was to be numb inside.

Instead, I escaped into work.  When I wasn’t working to exhaustion, I drank.  No one was going to criticize me for that as long as I kept my mouth shut and didn’t cause trouble.  And Didion’s writing proved that someone better than me felt the same.  Granted, she was being a little ironic when she wrote those lines, but I never wanted to think in that direction.  I wanted something I could point to and say, in the voice of my mother, “See?  I’m fine.  Now get off my porch.”

Millennials and Gen-Zs would find these attitudes strange.  They probably don’t realize that many Boomers (my parents’ generation—I am Gen-X) came of age in the late 1950s, which was when their social attitudes and cultural values solidified.  My parents, for example, despised the hippies as being too lazy, entitled, and self-indulgent to accomplish anything of substance.  I have a feeling I would have despised the hippies, too.

Every generation thinks the next is too soft and entitled.  They haven’t gone through what we’ve gone through and their immaturity puts us off.  But they have their own struggles, things we will never intimately experience and therefore won’t really understand.  And, just as with our generation, some of them won’t survive for long—at least not long enough to “make it,” which is to say, become the sort of peak consumers our parents unthinkingly brought us up to be.

Still, I wonder what my parents and their contemporaries accomplished with all that willpower, paranoia, workaholism, and despair.  They and their Boomer friends died (and are dying) anyway.  No one remembers their names.  My mother died and maybe less than ten people remember her.  She worked harder than anyone I’ve ever met.  When I’m gone, it will be as though she never existed.  As Eric Maria Remarque asked in All Quiet on the Western Front, “What use is it to him now that he was such a good mathematician at school?”

What use is it that my parents didn’t talk about how they were mistreated and abused as children?  What use is it that I was warned not to speak of my own psychological problems and what my parents passed on to me?  Why all the quiet desperation, drinking, fear, and resentment?  What will be the use of everything we thought and did and felt in a particular decade of our lives if all it meant was that we had to keep our mouths shut and spend more time alone?  All the things that seemed to matter so much, all the things we had to keep hidden to avoid being put on a list, will be less than smoke.  Soon we will be, too.

I think we should say how we feel now, while we can.

 

Feudalism of the Soul

You will never escape yourself.

I could write a long story about my unavailable father, how he did about three things with me as a kid and those only after knock-down drag-out fights with my mother, how he complained to her constantly about his own comforts and inconveniences while she was in hospice, and after her horrible lingering cancer death, how shameful he became, indulging in emotional abusiveness to a degree far beyond the excuse of grieving. Much of it was directed at me. And I suspect he hasn’t stopped being an asshole; though, we haven’t spoken in years. He found his true calling late in life.

My father, in short, was an emotionally stunted, highly manipulative, self-obsessed, cruel, dishonorable man, who liked to pretend otherwise—sometimes to himself, but always to non-family. He liked to lie. Still, I knew him and I’ve been on guard for most of my adult life because of it. I didn’t want to become like him. I worried that, because he was my father, I was somehow destined to devolve into an approximation of him in an Appointment in Samarra sense—that no matter how hard I ran in the other direction, I was just running headlong towards some kind of genetic destiny.

Like he said to me once about not wanting to be Catholic: I said, “I have a list of problems with Catholicism and, honestly, I don’t consider myself a Catholic at all. I’m not one.” He laughed at me and said, “You got baptized and were raised Catholic. There’s nothing you can do about it. You’ll always be a Catholic.” That made me angry. But that’s all he wanted.

He made a big noise about being Catholic my whole childhood. And then, when it suited him, he gleefully helped an unimpressive, desperate woman at the back end of unkind middle age into a state of abject adultery, which I believe is a grave, mortal sin according to the church. But whatever. It’s just one example of many. He didn’t actually take Catholicism seriously all those years. Acting righteous and upright just fit his brand.

But this isn’t really about my father. It’s about the myth that we become our parents, usually in the most disagreeable ways. There’s supposed to be a moment of clarity, perhaps sometime in our late 30s, where we pause and declare, horrified, that I’ve become my mother! Cute, but no, you haven’t unless you made a conscious effort to make her same bad choices. Even then, you wouldn’t really be her in any meaningful way. You will never escape yourself.

Certainly, character is influenced by upbringing. But such influence can only be one developmental consideration among many. You are you. Celebrate that. You are an individual, and neither facile social constructivism nor the ancient mythology of blood can take your individuality away. Those are nice ideas to play with. Maybe they make good stories or seeds of stories. But you are not without unique agency. When you look in the mirror, one person looks back, not your ancestors, not your parents, not your extended family. Just you. And you are more than the sum of those parts. Of course, that perspective implies a certain degree of responsibility on your part.

People love to flirt with powerlessness. It’s freeing to feel like you can’t make a mistake (because you can’t make a real decision when everything about you is already fixed). You’re a known quantity. You’re traveling on rails. So relax. You don’t have to change. Growth is a myth. Ethics? Don’t make me laugh. Self-initiation into a better way of life? Don’t kid yourself. Just make the same lousy choices you’ve always made because that’s what your parents and maybe grandparents did. It’s fate, baby!

One day, all this will be yours.

This train of thought gets applied to the good things, too. But it’s just as ill-conceived. Maybe grandma was a saint (unlikely, but let’s say). How’s that working out for you today? If you consider yourself something of a genetic reincarnation of her, you might feel very superior to your fellow dirt ape. But if you still happen to be standing in front of the mirror, you may want to ask your reflection what happened. Isn’t grandma a direct ancestor in your bloodline? Between us, your halo’s missing and your pumpkin bread leaves something to be desired.

Was Uncle Bob a pedophile? Are you having tendencies? No? Did Aunt Phoebe run a dance company for the blind for 30 years all by herself? Nice! Then why is it that you can barely hold down a crummy office job and you’re afraid of your manager? Aunt Phoebe and 100 blind soldiers of the Nutcracker shake their heads at you from ballerina Valhalla.

These old myths seem like rationalizations for economic injustices at best, for path dependencies in coercive cultures, for systemic brutality, for the angst of staying where you are, staying who you are, maintaining the microcosmic and macrocismic status quo, and never risking change.

If things “run in the blood,” what use are you if you discover your ancestors were awful? You’re good as a slave, maybe. You’re good as a consumer, as an addict, as a drinker and a fiend. Just like dad.

Feudalism, for all its romance, is actually fucking brutal—on the mind, on the self-conception, as well as on the body, on generation after generation. And in many ways, feudalism is alive and well today in the myths of the old world that we’ve unthinkingly inherited.

Assistant chief Starlink engineer when ordered to fall on his sword.

In the 1980s, we learned about the zaibatsu system, which seemed a whole lot more Tokugawa than Datsun. In the 1990s, we had the rise of multinational tech conglomerates, which we don’t have to say much about along these lines, since they’re now up in our orifices 24/7.

Those were the easy feudalisms. But there’s a deeper, more spiritual vassalage at work: call it feudalism of the soul. And it says the liege lord is there by virtue of divine right. You are here by the providence of that same organizing principle. And if your life is nasty, brutish, and short, well, it’s just who you are.

But it really isn’t. You still get to choose.

Learning to Write Fiction

Things to do.  Books to read.

Vincent Price holding cats is better than a stock photo of someone trying to write.

Garbage

I’m still learning.  I hope you are, too.  If you’re struggling with wanting to write a story but feeling intimidated by it, you might start by attempting a three-page short short (about 1050 words) as poorly as possible.  Make it the worst story you’ve ever written and see what happens.

Quit trying to be interesting and brilliant.  That’s your ego at work, the same thing that subverts your writing process in lots of other ways.  Let it go.  Write trash.  Don’t be afraid of making garbage.  Just pay attention while you’re doing it.  You’ll learn a lot that way.  More importantly, you’ll have a moment in which you’re creating without anxiety, without the need for permission, which is a rare and wonderful experience.  Such moments are our greatest teachers.

This is part of the considerable inner work of being a creative writer.  The publishing industry doesn’t have blogs that talk about this because you can’t monetize inner work.  Even writers, so adept with words and images, can’t explain it, aren’t sure it’s real, and wonder whether they’re simply distracted when they have creative inner experiences.  They aren’t.  The inner work is ubiquitous and undeniable.  They’re merely trying to contend with self-doubt which comes from living a society that calls everything other than monetized productivity stupid and delusional.

You do your best creative work not through trying to impress your ego, which is worried about how acceptable you seem and about whether you’re going to survive, but through dropping those aspirations and getting to the unadulterated creative impulse that first called to you.  For a fiction writer, the way to a powerful creative state is not by going up into the light of concepts, ideas, and social approbation, but by going down into the darkness of urges, emotions, and impulses.  You can civilize your writing later, in revision.  For now, be a savage.  And write garbage first.

Books You Don’t Have to Read

Of course, there are books you could be reading.  Think of this as part of the “outer work.”  What books are these?  Only you can say, because your work, your artistic project and path belong to you—not to some voice on the internet preaching about life hacks and best practices (which is what most writing advice amounts to).  All of that is, as Ecclesiastes might say, vanity.  Or is, as we might say, marketing.  But here are some suggestions nonetheless.

Get a library card and read a lot of what you want to write.  No one writes without influences.  So locate your influences.  Originality exists, but fixating on it, such that the idea of “finding your voice” becomes a restrictive, overly romantic obsession, is another obstacle.  Instead, saturate yourself with anything you like and be honest with yourself about it.  It could be trashy (get away from literary status anxiety—read what you want to read, anything that speaks to you).  It could be classic literature (works in translation count, too).  It could also be the latest socially acceptable novel being pushed by Penguin Random House.  It absolutely does not matter.  Just immerse yourself in whatever stimulates your imagination.  And read vigorously.

Creative writing programs and English departments have a problem with this.  They’re in the business of stratifying, articulating, and hierarchizing products of the imagination.  So there will be an implicit bias there, usually coming from the careers, anxieties, and assumptions of the professors.  But repeat after me: “I will read what draws me, what stimulates my imagination, not what I am being implicitly or explicitly told is marketable and therefore preferable.”

I’m not bashing art school.  I believe in creative writing programs the way I believe in The New York Post.  It’s entertaining, often darkly absurd, and provides material for lively conversation.  MFA programs rarely amount to more than an interesting form of literary journalism—talking about writing and talking about talking about writing.  You can learn a lot from all that talk.  I believe the arts and humanities do matter and do offer a valuable education, in spite of what the misguided STEM fetishists may think.  But the MFA industrial complex is not where you discover the inner imperative that makes you want to create.  That comes from experiencing art and then attempting to create it.  All the talk (and discursive essay writing) in the world can’t make you an artist.  Only art can.

I rarely enjoy reading lists created by actual journalists, even by the journalists I like and think are smart.  What journalists consider new, important, and a “must read” (I hate that clichéd expression) is never important to me, since I’m the one that matters in this process.  Remember: my project is to go down into the darkness of my inner self and find that raw, creative impulse.  News publications focus on social tensions, explanations of current events, cultural trends, laws, politics and, when talking about art, how it relates to those things.  Good journalism is essential for a free, capable, concerted citizenry, but it does not understand art.  Some journalists are artists, but many more have no concept of art or how to think about it.

Tiresome Theory and Craft Books

Remember to keep the “you should be reading this right now” lists in perspective.  That includes the lists I’m offering you here.  You shouldn’t necessarily be reading any of these things right now (or ever).  But I recognize that in our culture of life hacks and best practices, we will inevitably go seeking authoritative methods.  I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I’ve read these books, too.  Besides, there are so many awful ones in the Self Help for Writers category.  The following craft books are less awful than most, in my opinion.

  1. Gentle Writing Advice: How to Be a Writer Without Destroying Yourself, Chuck Wendig.  Wendig is smart and he cares about writers.  In spite of the title, he’s not engaging in nauseating Julia Cameron hand holding.  He’s not doing a ridiculous “tough love for writers” Robert McKee performance, either.  Wendig’s in-between those extremes.  His advice is sane and even-tempered.  But he likes to be cute and thinks he’s funny.  That can be aggravating if you don’t share his sense of humor.  It doesn’t bother me and I actually find myself smiling a lot, especially when I read his footnotes.
  2. Writing Fiction: a Guide to Narrative Craft, Janet Burroway.  Useful, neutral advice.  By “neutral” I mean what I meant with Wendig’s book, but also that Burroway never seems to be lying, boasting, or to have an agenda other than describing a range of technical options.  Her example stories are great (at least in the third edition, which is the one I have) and she uses them like a gifted creative writing instructor to demonstrate what she’s talking about.  Her writing exercises are not boring and I’ve relied on a number of them in my own teaching.
  3. Narrative Design: Working with Imagination, Craft, and Form, Madison Smartt Bell.  Read this after Burroway.  Think of it as the intermediate sequel to her book.  In my opinion, Bell is a good fiction writer and much of what he says here comes from his firsthand experience.  I return to this book more than any others.
  4. The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts, David Lodge.  His excerpted examples are wonderful and he uses them to good effect in his discussions.  His opinions are solid and not beholden to any particular school, voice, or movement.

Read these four books and you will have a bellyful of exercises and theories about fiction writing, more theories than you ever wanted.  But you might also come away with a new repertoire of examples and references, which can be helpful.

I used to recommend McKee’s Story to people, but honestly you can get what’s good in his book from the four books I list above and skip his absolutist bluster.  I also don’t recommend John Gardner’s The Art of Fiction, not because it isn’t good, but because it’s very closely aligned to a particular fiction writing aesthetic.  And I think taking that as a guide can create counterproductive stylization in beginning writers.

Fiction

Saturating yourself with fiction you like is far more important than looking at craft books.  Here are some things I’m reading now, which may change at any time.  I follow my creative impulses above all else (i.e. I read permissively, not like a scholar).  If you don’t know where to start or what to read, you could start with these (why not?), but you should quickly diverge from this.  The value of starting here is as much based on not liking these books as it is on liking them.  Find out what speaks to you.  You can do this by starting anywhere with any reading.  Starting’s the thing.  Read multiple books at once if you feel that’s the way to go.  Or look at them one at a time.  There are no rules.

  1. Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El Saadawi.  Not sure what I think about this novel yet, but the voice intrigues me.
  2. Murder Most Serene, Gabrielle Wittkop.  This writer has no fear.  If you read her novel, The Necrophiliac, you know what I mean.
  3. The Collected Stories, Mavis Gallant.  I’m just getting into Gallant, but I already feel she has things to teach me.
  4. The Savage Spear of the Unicorn, Delicious Tacos.  You may find this one extremely offensive and valuable in that respect.

This list is idiosyncratic.  How could it be otherwise?  If you don’t like the look of these, compile your own list.  The point is to involve yourself with fiction that stimulates you.  There is no time to waste.

Final Thought

The world doesn’t need more artists.  It also doesn’t need more people trying to prove their worth to mom and dad.  It also doesn’t need more kids in law school, STEM worshippers, venture capitalists, or any other thing.  The world needs more introspection and individuality.  The rest follows.  My way should not, actually cannot, be your way.  And that is a beautiful thing.  Find your way.