Learn It, Forget It, Use It

No Skill Fully Disappears

From The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby by Tom Wolfe…

More specifically, from Wolfe’s essay Las Vegas (What?) Las Vegas (Can’t Hear You! Too Noisy) Las Vegas!!!! circa 1964. The opening paragraph:

Hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, HERNia; hernia, HERNia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, HERNia, HERNIA, HERNia; hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, eight to the point, the point is eight; hernia, hernia, HERNia; hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, all right, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hard eight, hernia, hernia, hernia, HERNia, hernia, hernia, HERNia, hernia, hernia, hernia, HERNia, hernia, hernia, hernia, hernia.

“What is all this hernia hernia stuff?”

What Wolfe’s depicting is the patter of a card dealer in a Vegas casino. Like auctioneers, poker dealers have “fill” words they repeat to create tension, to hold attention. To amp up adrenaline and goad players into taking action quickly.

I first read the Wolfe essay while in middle school, around the age of 12 or 13, and I’d never given it another thought until rereading the book this past week. In a flash, I can see how the card dealer’s patter lingered in my brain for the past fifty years. More recently I’d written here about auctioneer calls, which had also fascinated me. Now it seems no conicidence that my last book included long sequences of:

Avocado, avocado, avocado, avocado; avocado, avocado, avocado! avocado, Avocado, avocado, avocado, avocado; Avocado. Avocado, avocado, avocado.

It’s clear that since 1975 that strange paragraph by Wolfe has been festering in my head. Reinforced by the song Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone, in particular the repetitition at 0.55 of “I know, I know, I know, I know, I know…” All those cases of repetition resonate with mantras. On a personal level, they resonate with a long car ride through the desert when I was very young: the record playing over the AM radio station began to “skip,” repeating the same phrase, and we all realized the disc jockey had gone to use the toilet. A chaotic few minutes passed as everyone in the region pictured the panicked DJ trying to wipe his ass and scramble back to the broadcast booth. The longer the record skipped, the more we laughed. During that time, the sensible, rational world seemed at risk.

For decades my subconcious has been waiting to recreate how Wolfe had recreated the patter of a Vegas dealer.

All of These Influences Stay with You

My theory is: Learn it. Forget it. Use it.

Don’t feel as if you have to keep all storytelling techniques front and center all the time. Please trust that if you explore a technique and become fully aware of it, that technique will bubble up in a strange, innovative way when you need it. Even fifty years later.

For years I’d little idea where my use of choruses came from — Sorry Mom. Sorry God. — but then someone pointed out how Vonnegut had used similar choruses in Slaughterhouse 5. Yet another book I read at the age of 13.

So if I hit you with a lot of tricks and techniques here, don’t worry about remembering them. Good techniques seem to remember themselves.

If you’re looking for fun, fast reads, check out the essays of Wolfe, written from the early ’60s through the ’80s. None are plotted like stories. Each is more a slice-of-life or a “color” sketch. But Wolfe takes enormous license in his storytelling, as if he’s pushing the language to see how abstract and intuitive he can write while still being understood by the reader. The language tends toward jargon and lists. Lots of long lists. It’s very chatty and “insider” with its snide references. Thus each essay has some trick you can steal for your own evolving voice. And he’s great at submerging the “I.”

It’s a let-down that he couldn’t carry this same robust experimenting to his fiction. At present I’m reading The Bonfire of the Vanitites, and it’s 600 pages of close third-person point-of-view. He’s always rigidly in scene, and each chapter takes ample time to achieve its plot point. All in all, it’s rather dull and thudding after reading three decades of his vibrant essays.

Next? I’ve never read the new journalism of Gay Talese.

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P.s. Thank you, Cassandra, for the Christmas package. I’ve yet to unwrap the severed deer leg. The one you cut from road-kill? It haunts me.