A bad couple of days followed.
But I knew she was right. I hadn’t loved that book either. It was surprisingly easy to put “La Boda de Eduardo” in a desk drawer, where it still resides today, furiously exclaiming that the tortillasmell is rising from the mudhuts, the bridegroom is approaching in his dustsuit, redfaced, loveslumped.
5.
One day not long after the collapse of “La Boda de Eduardo” I was asked to take notes during a Radian conference call. There weren’t many notes to take. With nothing to do, I started writing these Seussian poems, which I would then illustrate. They were despondent and minimal and gross and, for a change, funny. I wrote maybe ten of these and, when I got home, threw them down on the dining room table and went off to mow the lawn. When I came back in, Paula was … laughing. With pleasure. Real pleasure. It was the first positive reaction to my work I’d gotten from anyone in a long time. She wasn’t saying the poems were “interesting,” she didn’t have that workshoppy look on her face, the look we all get when we are trying to think of something nice to say about something that has left us cold. She was happy, she was experiencing pleasure, she even seemed to want to read more.
Suddenly it was as if I’d been getting my ass kicked in an alley somewhere and realized I’d had one arm behind my back. All of my natural abilities, I saw, had been placed, by me, behind a sort of scrim. Among these were: humor, speed, the scatological, irreverence, compression, naughtiness. All I had to do was tear down the scrim and allow those abilities to come to the table.
And writing might be fun again.
That was the day I started this book, essentially.
Many years before, I’d written a story called “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room,” which was set in one of those highway “Mystery Spots.” I sold the story to the Northwest Review and used it to get into Syracuse — and then put it aside as an aberration. It wasn’t “real,” it was silly, Hemingway would have hated it, etc., etc. Somewhere around the time of the conference room revelation, my friend Pat Pacino came to town and, in a burst of candor, told me that this story was still the best thing I’d ever written, all those grad school stories notwithstanding.
That hurt. But it also rang true.
So I dusted that story off and resolved to do a stone-cold plagiarism of it — or, let’s say, a reworking of it — with the same basic plot but set in a different theme park. The resulting story, “The Wavemaker Falters,” was the first one I wrote for this book. Working on it was fun: for the first time in years, I knew what to do. I had no idea what it was “about” or what it was teaching or espousing or anything like that. I just, at every turn, had some feelings about how I might make it better. As goofy as the story was, as far-fetched as its premise seemed, I could feel and see the people in it as real people, and I cared about them. What a relief that was: to work with certainty, toward fun, just for the hell of it.
6.
I set foot in my first theme park in 1969. It was Six Flags over Texas, outside Dallas. I loved it so thoroughly that, all the way back to Chicago in the car, I conspired with my sister to build a scale model of it.
Well, that never happened. But I still remember the baffled joy I felt on leaving the place, thinking: Wow, someone did this, someone made all this, some grown-up sat down and designed the little Mexican back alleys and cowboy boardwalks, the fake bird sounds.
In a sense, these stories were that scale model, much delayed.
But also, while working on “The Wavemaker Falters,” I noticed something: if I put a theme park in a story, my prose improved, the faux-Hemingway element having been disallowed by the setting. Placing a story in a theme park became a way of ensuring that the story would lurch over into the realm of the comic, which meant I would be able to finish it, and it would not collapse under the conceptual/thematic weight I tended to put on a so-called realist story.
I loved making these places up, and even now will still flash on certain vistas within them, vistas that never existed except in my mind, for a few months, back then, at Radian.
7.
The book formed slowly, one or two stories a year over seven long years. Entire office eras started and ended, managers came and went. Whole rooms at Radian were emptied, repurposed. A corridor got lopped off and reframed and absorbed by our neighboring company, a mob-related outfit that claimed to sell penny stocks and whose president once fired a guy by beating the shit out of him in the vestibule near The Snot. People married, cheated, remarried. World Series were played, communism vanished, somewhere the Internet was invented, our kids worked their way up the grades, learning to read, catch, sing. Who can remember what was actually going on?
Mostly I was using whatever story I happened to have going at the time to get me through the day and give me some minimal sense of control and mastery. They were a secret source of sustenance. If I got a few good lines in the morning, that made the whole rest of the day better.
That much I remember.
8.
When I was in my twenties I had this plan to go to El Salvador and write about the experience. I had no money, didn’t speak Spanish, but this was “my dream.” I stopped by one day to see a friend of mine but found only his father home. I’d never spoken to this man before, not really. He was a truck driver, a father of eight, always went around in a white T-shirt and a pair of Buddy Holly glasses. But this day, we talked. I told him about my El Salvador plan, expecting him to find it indulgent. But instead he said, “You know what? You have to do it.”
“Yes,” I said, with the force of revelation. “I do. I really do.”
“And you know why?” he said. “Because you know who you’re going to blame if you don’t?”
I did know.
“Myself,” I said with a knowing smile.
“Bullshit,” he said. “You’ll blame your wife and kids.”
I often thought of this conversation when I was stealing time from Radian to write this book. If I didn’t, I told myself, I was going to become a bitter old-fart version of myself, blaming Paula and the girls.
So I stole like a mother. I wrote in the bathroom, I printed using the company printer, I turned away from my Kodak report to jot things down, I edited while waiting for an offsite groundwater remediation system to purge, I sometimes blew off a full afternoon when I was feeling ripe, although usually, when that happened, I’d take work home, just to be fair.