This wasn’t necessarily a negative. Some very bad guys had very good taste. But as rhythm and blues began evolving into rock ‘n’ roll, even the Mafia developed a generation gap.
Christopher Chambers was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and has since lived in North Carolina, Michigan, Minnesota, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana. He received a degree in English at the University of Wisconsin at River Falls in 1984, and over the following ten years worked as a salesman, bus driver, meat cutter, farmhand, carpenter, journalist, photographer, bartender, dockworker, lifeguard, screenwriter, and editor. He taught martial arts in Minneapolis, high school physical education in South Florida, and writing at the University of Alabama, where he received an M.F.A. degree. His work has appeared in such journals as the Gettysburg Review, Washington Square, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Quarter After Eight, Notre Dame Review, Exquisite Corpse, Controlled Burn, Quarterly West, and the Carolina Quarterly. His short story collection, Aardvark to Aztec, was short-listed for the Mary McCarthy Prize. His short fiction has received four Pushcart Prize nominations, the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Literary Award for Short Fiction, and is included in the recent anthology French Quarter Fiction: The Newest Stories from America’s Oldest Bohemia. He lives in New Orleans, where he teaches at Loyola University.
“Aardvark to Aztec” was written on an old Royal portable, in the summer, as I recall. I was living in a cabin outside Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I dragged a wooden table onto the porch that overlooked a ravine that was overgrown and unremarkable most of the time, but became unexpectedly beautiful each spring with an abundance of dogwood blossoms, and on those summer nights when fireflies lit up like a distant metropolis. It was on one of these nights, on that porch, sitting at my typewriter, to a chorus of nocturnal insects, that I tapped out the first sentence. The writing began with the character of Miranda and her vague discontent, so I guess it should have been no surprise for me to discover in the end that it is indeed her story. The clown, like much of the story, came out of nowhere. There may have been a small glass of whiskey, and an inexpensive cigar on the table as well. Perhaps strains of Hank Williams drifting out through the screen door, the drone of the firefly beyond the ravine. I realized quickly that someone was going to die in this story. I didn’t know who, but it saddened me, because I was already coming to grow fond of each of these characters.
Christopher Cook lives in Prague, Czech Republic. He previously lived in France and Mexico but grew up in East Texas, the Bible-thumping South. The persistent pounding spurred escape and his incurable nomadism.
Cook decided early to become a writer but soon discovered he didn’t know how. To learn, he became a daily newspaper reporter in several southern states of disrepair. Odious bosses caused him to pursue subsequent work as a trade union activist. He later fell into a U.S. think tank, where he thought a lot and recognized that smart public policy is difficult to incite, almost impossible. Writing became his private refuge. Otherwise his life has been ordinary. There are unaccountable gaps in his biography.
Cook’s award-winning novel, Robbers (2000), was published in the United States and abroad, as was his second book, Screen Door Jesus & Other Stones (2001). He is completing a third book.
While living in Paris, and commuting on the underground Métro, I often wished for something interesting to happen, anything at all. Having my pocket picked, for example. Even better, seeing another’s pocket picked. Best yet, what if I became a pickpocket? I noodled the idea. But a jail cell is more boring than the subway. So I decided to become one in a story instead.
“The Pickpocket,” quickly completed, was eagerly rejected without comment by numerous magazines and literary journals in the U.S.A. In France, however, it won first prize in a literary contest sponsored by the Sorbonne University and Transcontinental Paris. That was 1995. It was finally published stateside in the Dennis McMillan anthology Measures of Poison (2002) after a biblical period in exile.
John Peyton Cooke was born in Amarillo, Texas, and grew up in Laramie, Wyoming. He is the author of five novels and several short stories and has collected the typical writer’s resume of odd jobs: literary book shelver, data entry operator, office assistant at the American Institute of History of Pharmacy, and police report typist with the Madison (Wisc.) Police Department. His current, and oddest, job is as editorial director of a medical communications agency in New York City. He lives in Ketonah, New York, with his partner, Keng, and their two dogs: Ricky, a toy poodle and petty thief; and Quilty, a whippet and occasional poet.
I would like to dedicate this appearance of “After You’ve Gone” to the memory of my father, William Peyton Cooke, author of mystery novels The Nemesis Conjecture and Orion’s Shroud, who died on January 16, 2003, in Amarillo, Texas. When I asked him what he thought of this story, he said, “I liked it. But of course I knew all along how it was going to end.” There is nothing like a father to keep egging you on to do better.
This story may be thematically similar to my novel The Chimney Sweeper, in that both deal with violence that erupts when their young male protagonists face sudden, unexpected sexual confusion. I would like to think that sex and violence in my stories are inextricably linked, so that you could not remove one without the other. Since I am not a violent person by nature, it is a mystery to me where this impetus comes from in my stories. However, it is almost certainly related to my own identity as a gay man, which developed during my adolescence, during which I was simultaneously indulging my interest in horror, fantasy, science fiction, and mysteries.
I grew up in Laramie, Wyoming, where the only information I could find about gay people like me was in the Albany County Public Library (where I worked as a book shelver) and at the Coe Library on the campus of the University of Wyoming. Laramie, as everyone knows, is the town where Matt Shepard was murdered because he was gay. Although I was out of the closet to my closest friends from the age of fifteen, I never felt personally threatened by my environment. Still, it gives me pause to consider that Matt’s murderers are fellow graduates of Laramie Senior High School. The violence they perpetrated on Matt was certainly gratuitous, and it is ironic to me that it is also representative of what I’ve written about — the unreasonable, unwarranted, and sadistic violence that can easily manifest itself when certain young men feel threatened by the very existence of someone who is sexually different from them.
“After You’ve Gone” is the result of numerous inputs, including those aforementioned. The initial spark was a passage in a story by Robert W. Chambers, “The Repairer of Reputations,” written in the 1890s but set in a future New York of 1920:
In the following winter began the agitation for the repeal of the laws prohibiting suicide which bore its final fruit in the month of April, 20, when the first Government Lethal Chamber was opened on Washington Square.
I wanted to write a tale in which a government agent of that weird future goes around helping people commit suicide. I was going to call it “The GAS Man,” with GAS standing for government-assisted suicide. This evolved into the rogue agent of “After You’ve Gone,” to whom I now needed to supply some kind of motivation. I got to thinking, naturally, about Dr. Jack Kevorkian, the death-obsessed pathologist who creatively assisted a number of suicides of the terminally ill and is currently in prison on murder charges. What if his own motives were not so altruistic? What if he, quite simply, got off on it? The many disturbing newspaper accounts of inexplicable police suicides (in New York City), usually by male officers who had not quite measured up, helped me develop the “victim” of my assisted-suicide fiend. Given my usual bent, sexual confusion (in one form or another) was bound to enter the story, and it serves here as a trigger for the violence (or whatever) is to come.