A Vacation from Being You

And the Blond Guy

Thank You to so Many People Who’ve Donated to Dove Lewis

Above is a card from the animal hospital. It seems that many of you have made donations in Egg’s memory, and I can’t overlook the idea that such donations are like writing: You have your best effect from a distance, helping people you’ll never meet, but that separation doesn’t matter. The act of storytelling is its own reward, at least it should be according to Tom Spanbauer, who preached, “If you’re writing to get rich or earn your father’s respect or get the money to buy a boat… you should not be here.”

Which brings us to the Blond Guy. Not long after I took a seat at Tom’s kitchen table¹, a blond young man also joined as a student: shoulder-length blond hair, handsome, a degree in philosophy, a job at Powell’s Bookstore. Maybe the next David Foster Wallace? Somehow he’d calculated that ten weeks and $200 in tuition would land him a bestselling novel and a career writing fiction. If memory serves, he didn’t last the ten weeks. Disillusioned, he dropped out — and went to a local newspaper, a tabloid called Willamette Week, where he insisted that Tom’s Dangerous Writing was a scam to steal the money of hopeful students. Tom’s workshop fell under the worst light possible, all because of one irked student. Sure, another thirty or forty students in the workshop finished novels, sold them to publishers and hacked out writing careers — a fairly stunning success rate for one teacher — but the Blond Guy bailed and blamed Tom in big public headlines. In a small city like Portland, that was damning news. Around this same time Tom threw a party, and I stood on his porch with Monica Drake, drinking wine and watching summer lightning blaze on the nighttime horizon, both of us so happy, unpublished but just happy to be at this house party of would-be writers.

You have to wonder what became of the Blond Guy with his Tarzan hair and his philosophy degree and high expectations. Where’s he at in life? Last week my dog died — Egg, “the beast,” my little bear — and I was crushed. This week I’ve started meetings with a successful show runner who’s crazy about next year’s sci-fi novel, and we’re laughing and pitching ideas for how that book can be adapted for a television series. Such is life, if you’ve got the patience and support.

Which Bring Us to “Voice”

During the peak years of the AIDS crisis, when I volunteered at a charity hospice called Juniper House, I eventually began to take fewer shifts. A doctor phoned to check on me. I told him that I’d discovered writing, and that the hours I spent doing so felt like a vacation from myself. My actual words were “a vacation from being me.” The doctor seemed to understand. This was the same doctor who led the group guided meditations, what would eventually become the “cave of your power animal” scene in Fight Club.

Bleak as any moment might look, it’s the writing that pulls us through. With luck our storytelling will ultimately help someone else endure a horrible period of time. Some reader we’ll never meet. Again, thank you for the donations to the Dove Lewis Velvet Assistance Fund.

Now For Your Vacation(s)

It only takes a few words — what Gordon Lish would call “a line of flight” — to put the voice of an entirely new person in your head. Please consider the following examples.

Look at how the context helps you decipher invented language. Look at how run-on sentences build tension, and how that tension is quickly buttoned with something quick and short. “Pardon me, brother” or And they looked.

From A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

So we scattered into the big winter nochy and walked down Marghanita Boulevard and turned into Boothby Avenue, and there we found what we were pretty well looking for, a malenky jest to start off the evening with. There was a doddery starry schoolmaster type veck, glasses on and his rot open to the cold nochy air. He had books under his arm and a crappy umbrella and was coming round the corner from the Public Biblio, which not many lewdies used those days. You never really saw many of the older bourgeois type out after nightfall those days, what with the shortage of police and we fine young malchickiwicks about, and this prof type chelloveck was the only walking in the whole street. So we goolie² up to him, very polite, and I said: ‘Pardon me, brother.’

From The Wild Life by Herbert Gold

Let me tell you first how Gracchus became a father to me.

There he is on the midway, Grack the Frenchie, talking for his countstore or his zoo while the loud-speaker clamored under his come-on with a hee hee hee and a ho ho ho. “Roly and Poly, the sole and o-nelly genuine Siamese twins from Siam in these great States – no adhesive sticking them together behind either, friends – and Little Bo Peep, the educated chimp, she’s no geek, speaks five African languages – I’ll translate for you, friends – move in there on the edges, you – lookee here at me, at , at my, at your friend Grack, friends,” – and they looked.

From Wallflower at the Orgy by Nora Ephron

Women’s Wear’s writing style meshes perfectly with its messages: It is catty, breathless, loaded with shorthand expressions and non sequiturs. SENTENCES ARE CAPITALIZED FOR NO APPARENT REASON AND SEEM TO SNAP AND CRACKLE RIGHT OUT OF THE PAGE. French expressions punctuate the prose, no doubt sending many Seventh Avenue manufacturers thumbing through French-English dictionaries. “Annie is not going to become brisee by success,” WW wrote of the unbroken French starlet who had made it big. “Les hotsies” and “Les locomotives” they christened two groups of fashion-conscious young women who scamper through the paper regularly and whose every activity, no matter how trivial, is detailed. “Je m’en fous,” said an apparently blase French actress in a recent interview, to which Women’s Wear retorted: “IF SHE DOESN’T CARE, WHY DOES SHE BITE HER NAILS?”

From Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

The sweat wis lashing oafay Sick Boy; he wis trembling. Ah was jist sitting thair, focusing oan the telly, tryin no tae notice the cunt. He wis bringing me doon. Ah tired tae keep ma attention oan the Jean-Claude Van Damme video.

As happens in such movies, they started oaf wi an obligatory dramatic opening. Then the next phase ay the picture involved building up the tension through introducing the dastardly villain and sticking the weak plot thegither. Any minute now though, auld Jan-Claude’s ready tae git doon tae some serious swedgin.

--- Rents. Ah’ve goat tae see Mother Superior, Sick Boy gasped, shaking his heid.

From Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine by Tom Wolfe

“Dja do da chem-yet?”

Dja do da chem-yet?

--- this being the voice of a freshman on the campus of C.C.N.Y. at 139 Street and Convent Avenue the other day asking the question: “Have you done the chemistry assignment yet?” The irony of it is that here is a boy who will probably do da chem and God knows how many other assignment extremely well and score about a 3.3 academic average over four years and then go on to law school at N.Y.U. and get his LL.B – and then for some reason he can’t quite figure out, he never does land the great glistening job he was thinking of at Sullivan & Cromwell or Cravath Swain & Moore. Instead, he ends up in… the neighborhood, on the south side of Northern Boulevard in Bayside, Queens, in an office he shares with a real-estate man, an old friend of his from here in Bayside – which some of the local wiseacres call Brayside, because of all the “Brooklyn” and “Bronx” accents you hear here in Queens now---

Whaddya mean it’s his voice? He’s upgraded the da with a the by now, hasn’t he? And he’s replaced the r’s he’s been dropping all these years – well, a few of them, anyway: “This is the first house we evuh owned. We have a gahden an my wife is the gahdneh…”

… here in Brayside…

From Goodbye and Good Luck by Grace Paley

I was popular in certain circles, says Aunt Rose. I wasn’t no thinner then, only more stationary in the flesh. In time to come, Lillie, don’t be surprised – change is a fact of God. From this no one is excused. Only a person like your mama stands on one foot, she don’t notice how big her behind is getting and sings in the canary’s ear for thirty years. Who’s listening? Papa’s in the shop. You and Seymour, thinking about yourself. So she waits in a spotless kitchen for a kind word and thinks – poor Rosie…

Poor Rosie! You could find me any time in a hotel, uptown or downtown. Who needs an apartment to live like a maid with a dustrag in the hand, sneezing? I’m in very good with the busboys, it’s more interesting than home, all kinds of people, everybody with a reason…

And my reason, Lillie, is a long time ago I said to the forelady, “Missus, if I can’t sit by the window, I can’t sit.” “If you can’t sit, girlie,” she says politely, “go stand on the street corner.” And that’s how I got unemployed in novelty wear.

Now, you, get such a voice in your head. Let that voice tell the story you have in mind.

A Quick Note to Shane

You missed the deadline for the anthology, please don’t sweat it. There’s a great phrase: “Getting published isn’t the biggest hurdle. It’s The First of many bigger hurdles.” My wish is that someday you’re on the phone with a crack show runner, discussing how to adapt your latest book. For now please appreciate the house party and the summer heat lightning blazing on the horizon.

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Otherwise, stay tuned, and I’ll announce three more Baby Talk winners later today.

1. In 1990.

2. Decades ago someone explained the writer China Miéville’s name to me. It’s cockney rhyming slang. China = Plate = Mate = Friend. In effect, his first name is “Friend.” Since then I’ve been tickled to show up as a character in his work.