My downstairs neighbor, a beautiful black transsexual named Renee, constantly fought with me over her right to play Connie Francis albums on her deck beneath my bedroom window at 6 a.m., an argument ended when someone cut her throat, broke all her LPs, slashed her pretty blouses, and put bleach in her fish tank. These and other neighborhood tragedies came to occupy my attention, and I grew increasingly paranoid and unsound. The then-New York City mayor, Ed Koch, would once a month herd together a bunch of the most deranged homeless people in Manhattan and ship them over to Staten Island on a late-night ferry – his way of cleaning up the city. We’d wake the next morning to find a fresh crop of schizophrenics wandering the streets, talking to the CIA, to aliens, making phone calls to heaven. Most drifted back to Manhattan, but a few took up residence, including this one guy who was given a home by someone and built a life-sized, authentic-looking electric chair and every Fourth of July weekend would drag said chair out onto the traffic island on Victory Boulevard, strap himself in, and grin at the commuters. No one to my knowledge tried to stop him – it was as if the authorities accepted this as an appropriate commentary. To top it all off I began dating a businesswoman who appeared at the outset to be level-headed, stable, but three weeks into the relationship started breaking into my apartment to clean it and one night announced that she was a ninja and capable of starting fires with her eyes. We didn’t make it very long. In my mental state, the last thing I wanted was a woman who could incinerate me on a whim.
Good times.
Somewhere in the midst of all this was a dragon, but it seemed quite mundane when contrasted with the vivid weirdness of the gangster fantasy in which I lived.
LIAR’S HOUSE
For much of the ’00s I lived in Vancouver, Washington, essentially a bedroom community for Portland, Oregon, a gigantic strip mall with an endless supply of unprepossessing, unattractive people embarked upon the consumption of corn dogs and reality TV. This was my initial take on the town, at any rate, because, having grown up in a suburb, having steeped in its flavorless juices, I tend to loathe such places. But at the same time I firmly believe that the human species does not encompass a great range of intelligence, that the difference between an Einstein and an idiot is much less than we might imagine, and I am certain that people who are inarticulate and stolid and apparently thick often have interior lives every bit as complex and eccentric and rich as those of showier models. ‘Liar’s House’ received some criticism at the time of publication for the literate interior life of its ox-like protagonist. The criticism may have been deserved, yet this narrative tactic is not without precedent – there have been countless incidences of savant narrators throughout literature and, for my part, I’ve known plenty of uneducated people who were incapable of expressing themselves in precise language, yet had other means of self-expression and were extremely precise in their comprehension of the world, of what was going on around them. In any case, the character of my protagonist was informed by the people with whom I was surrounded. I suppose you might think of him as the personification of Vancouver, WA.
Even a paralyzed dragon must grow and change, and for this story I decided during the course of writing it that Griaule would want children – how then would he go about it? I assumed that he wanted children due to the natural desire to procreate, to create a legacy, but it might have added to the story if I had thought the matter through, because when I did so several years later I came up with an idea that would have made the link between this story and the last more apparent. I was tempted to go back in and rework the story, but decided to let things stand, figuring that it would be more honest, more illuminating as to how a writer’s style evolves, to let the story stand as written.
Then perhaps I was just being lazy.
THE TABORIN SCALE
This story was a premature attempt to kill off Griaule, but the odd thing about these stories is that each one seems to breed a multitude of possibilities . . . and even in the final story, especially in the final story, it seemed every few pages there was the germ of yet another story. It was as if the dragon didn’t want to die and was offering up intriguing possibilities, tempting me to spare him. Now I suspect that Griaule won’t be done until I am.
I began writing these story notes while saddled with an apocalyptic case of the flu, and so had no clear idea of what I was about . . . though it seems that a main thread running through the notes is the relationship of writing to environment. However, in the case of ‘The Taborin Scale’ I have nothing salient to say on the subject. I was living in Portland, Oregon, where I now reside. My life was basically untroubled, comfortable, the writing went easily, the story just popped out. The only thing remotely interesting about the story from a background perspective is the guy upon whom the main character, George, was based – a spindly punk rocker I knew casually in New York City who made a living by going to garage sales in upstate New York, searching for antique collectibles, which he then resold. This struck me as a very organized activity for someone who by night wore his hair in spikes and howled demonically into the mike and would spit up into the air and try and catch a loogey on his face. I’m going to have to assume that this is the way writers feel who have an office and a regular home and don’t leave their possessions in storage lockers scattered across the country – I live in constant anticipation of seeing my stuff on one of those reality shows that focus on a small group of auction buyers who bid on abandoned lockers, watching the winning bidder paw through my junk, gazing with perplexity at a Hugo or a Howard or some such, wondering about what kind of loser bothers to store empty cigarette packs in a box of scribbled-in books and dirty laundry.
Takes all kinds, I guess.
THE SKULL
One night I was playing pachinko in a crowded arcade on Avenida Seis in Guatemala City and, as sometimes happens, I got so into the game that I lost track of what was happening around me. When I looked up I discovered that not only was the arcade deserted, the proprietor preparing to roll down the metal door, but the street was devoid of traffic, with only a few frightened-looking pedestrians scurrying for cover – Avenida Seis was like Broadway in New York City, busy at every hour, and I knew something bad must have occurred to clear it so quickly. (Unbeknownst to me, a group of left-wing students and Indian activists had taken over the Spanish embassy, where an ex-president of Guatemala was being feted, and were holding him and the embassy staff hostage, their purpose being to initiate a dialogue on land reform.) I began running, heading for my hotel, seeing military vehicles (Jeeps, armored anti-personnel carriers, etc.) moving along the side streets – but my hotel was a long ways off and, since I was a gringo and paranoid, fearful of being picked up and beaten, or worse, when I saw a man slip into a doorway I ducked in after him and found myself in a gay nightclub. In addition to a lot of young guys ranging the bar, there were several dozen attractive women seated at the tables. They were all partying as if nothing untoward were happening out in the streets and so, feeling relatively secure, I stuck around for the next several hours, learning from the bartender that the women were ‘loritas’ (parakeets), upper class wives and mistresses who cultivated triviality as an armor against reality, and that their presence in the club served to protect the gay men from harassment. He went on to say that if I were so disposed it would be easy to get laid – many of the women were promiscuous to a fault – but there would be risk involved, since their husbands and boyfriends were mostly right-wingers and/or associated with the military.