STORY NOTES
THE MAN WHO PAINTED THE DRAGON GRIAULE
The seminal idea for Griaule occurred to me when I was stuck for something to write about while attending the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. I went out onto the campus of Michigan State University and sat under a tree and smoked a joint to jog my brain. I then wrote down in my notebook the words ‘big fucking dragon.’ I felt exceptionally clever. Big stuff, I thought, is cool.
The idea of an immense paralyzed dragon, more than a mile in length and seven hundred feet high, that dominates the world around him by means of its mental energies, a baleful monster beaming out his vindictive thought and shaping us to its will . . . this seemed an appropriate metaphor for the Reagan Administration, which was then busy declaiming that it was ‘Morning In America,’ laying waste to Central America, and starting to rip the heart out of the constitution. That likely explains the political content carried in one degree or another by the stories. So in a sense, the Griaule stories concern two mythical beasts, a dragon and an addled president whose avatar is an undying monster . . . or vice versa.
I don’t know what it is that has brought me back so many times to Griaule. Generally speaking, I hate elves, wizards, halflings, and dragons with equal intensity. Perhaps it’s because I saw a list once of fictional dragons ordered by size and mine was the biggest. This caused me to think that I might make a career of writing stories about the biggest whatever. The biggest gopher, an aphid the size of a small planet, a gargantuan dust bunny, and so forth. Fortunately I never followed up on the idea.
When I returned home to Ann Arbor from the workshop I asked my brother-in-law, James Wolf, an artist and the guitarist in my band, if he would make me a drawing of the dragon – I wanted something to meditate upon while working out the story. I expected something rudimentary, but he did the dragon in water colors on flimsy, oversized sheets of paper and taped them together, thereby creating a rendering eight feet long and three feet high, complete with all the vats and ladders and etcetera that were part of my conception. I tried to preserve it as best I could, but eventually it became tattered and unsalvageable. Anyway, I stared at the painting for a year or so, endured a thoroughly unhappy love affair that formed the emotional core of the story, and eventually wrote it all down.
THE SCALEHUNTER’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER
This story had its genesis in the notion that Griaule might be infested with parasites. It was an interesting notion and I envisioned the plot to be more-or-less an excuse for doing a taxonomical survey of the dragon’s interior, something that would have suited a more novelistic approach to the subject. Indeed, ‘The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter’ was initially intended to be a portion of a novel, or rather a series of stories linked by excerpts from fictive works about the dragon, but I soon realized I had little desire to read such linkages and even less to write them.
Then, too, I wrote the story during a stressful time. My mother was dying and I was living in her cramped Ormond Beach condo, assisting in her care, a grim business. The movie theater in the mall close by showed nothing I wanted to see (Yentl had played there for more than a year). I had no friends in the area – I was the youngest person in the condominium by three decades – and I had no money to speak of, no car, nowhere to go for a break except for the Denny’s down the street. Thus I was inclined to write a sunnier story (by my lights, anyway), more of a straight-ahead escapist fantasy than I might have done otherwise.
I roughed out the story while drinking coffee at Denny’s, usually in the early morning hours, writing in bursts of fifteen, twenty minutes and then running over to the condo to check on my mom. Not a lot of happy people come into a Denny’s at three o’clock in the morning, at least this was my observation. Most of the ones who seemed happy were drunks whose happiness would be short-lived, and the rest were loners, addicts, insomniacs, hookers, cops, sour-looking old men who’d had a bad night at the dog track, and losers of various stripe.
The star of the graveyard shift at this particular Denny’s was Fred the short order cook, a swarthy black-haired guy about my age who cracked wise-ass jokes through the serving window and carried on a sardonic and often amusing dialogue with the regulars. When cops stopped by for take-out he would surreptitiously mimic their radio calls – he did this with such authenticity, static and tinny voices and all, the cops would grab their walkie-talkies and respond. One night two cops went back into the kitchen and gave him a stern talking-to. Thereafter the fake radio calls ceased and, possibly as a result of this restraint upon his comic stylings, Fred’s commentary grew increasingly hostile and embittered. He started yelling at customers and soon was let go. He was rehired a couple of months later following a breakdown and a stay in a mental health facility, or so I was told. Whatever the facts were, he had lost his edge. His jokes provoked polite laughter, not legitimate mirth, and he took to offering advice that was patently the product of time spent in group therapy and was not well received.
The world of Denny’s became my world and, as tragedies like Fred’s (seemingly minor compared to my own) played out around me, I sat there drawing dragon heads on napkins, scribbling in my notebook, canoodling with one of the waitresses, living as best I could in the jaundiced light . . . the kind of light that might have shone from a cracked and dusty lantern that illuminated some claustrophobic and hermetic fissure deep within Griaule’s mountainous bulk.
THE FATHER OF STONES
I remember little about the creation of this story, mainly because I was under the influence of the neighborhood where I wrote it. I lived during the early and mid-eighties in the Georgetown area of Staten Island, the neighborhood closest to the ferry terminal, on Westervelt Avenue, a street that aspired to be a crime wave and was populated by drug dealers, hookers, smalltime monsters, a few brave souls who considered themselves the vanguard of a movement toward gentrification and would talk rebar with you for hours, and, oddly enough, a handful of genre folks: the horror writer Craig Spector, Beth Meachem and Tappan King (at the time, editors at Berkley and Twilight Zone respectively), me, and Maureen McHugh, all living within a block of one another.
Two townhouses down from me was a crack house, its front yard littered with rusted lawnchairs and motorcycle parts, run by a fake Rasta guy from Brooklyn, Nicky, who had dropped a dime on someone higher up the food chain and in exchange had been given carte blanche by the cops. Every morning the schoolkids would stop by for their rocks and sometimes the cops would pass the house and wave to Nicky, who – the soul of expansiveness – would return the salute. He also ran an illegal taxi service and maintained a string of hookers who operated out of the abandoned cars along New York Bay, and most nights would get into screaming fights on the street out front of my house. Drug dealers wearing Just Say No T-shirts made plaintive cries beneath my window at every hour of the day. I hand-wrote most of a novel called ‘Kingsley’s Labyrinth,’ stopping only when I realized I had filled eleven notebooks with an indecipherable script that resembled seismograph readings, and I hung out with people whom I would normally run from – Uzi-toting Cubans and so forth. There were frequent gunshots and each morning when I walked out, my footsteps crunched due to the empty crack vials littering the sidewalks – it was as if a kind of glassine hail had fallen during the night.