Read a Book! March, 2017 Reading Introspective

If there aren’t four guys singing, straight razors swinging, and bloodstained bandages wrapped around a pole outside then it’s not a barber shop.

Authors who don’t read are like farmers who don’t eat. They are dead of starvation, all of their dependents perished for lack of food, and all of society collapses. Damn. Actually, that’s more of an analogy for how much more important agriculture is to society than art. Thanks farmers!

Okay, authors who don’t read are like barbers who don’t know how to use scissors or shave with a straight razor — which is every barber where I live. They just give clipper cuts. You can do that yourself at home! I bet they don’t even have a license. So yes, unread authors have the societal value of unlicensed barbers, placing them well beneath farmers and slightly below teenage car wash fundraisers in terms of absolute worth.

Read a book!

I did.

The best cover art conveys absolutely nothing about the story, evokes no emotion whatsoever, and uses central composition. Score!

This month, I finished Hunter’s Run by George R.R. Martin, Gardner Dozois, and Daniel Abraham. I wish I had quit reading a quarter of the way through, around the time when I first thought, “I hope this book gets better.” It didn’t get better. It was inspired by Tom Sawyer taking a river raft ride up a painful catheter insertion. The first is alluded to, the latter overtly mentioned.Then again, I learned an important lesson from this book, and the afterword, like most afterwords, filled me with an accustomed sense of grief and regret.

I write some despicable characters. I’m pretty good at it, because it is easier for me to express the worst and dread the best, as though acknowledging goodness is like asking for a refund. I’ve consistently been told that my characters could be more likeable, but I have taken that advice with a grain of salt.

You know you’ve written a stereotype when Rob Schneider plays the role in the screen adaptation.

Hunter’s Run features a Mexican protagonist, Ramon Espejo, on account of the authors having noted a dearth of Hispanic characters thirty-years-ago when they had first started writing the novel. It’s an admirable sentiment, except that the end result all of this time later is a walking billboard for Trump’s deportation policies. Espejo is a Quentin Tarantino-esque caricature of a B-movie Danny Trejo/Rob Schneider love child, ostensibly an antihero, but actually more of a schmuck whose dialogue reads like excerpts from Spanish Invective for Dummies. Sadly, he lives through the entire book, because a world without him would be a much more interesting place. The otherwise intriguing setting is so diminished by his involvement that it feels like going to the Oscars and getting seated between Carrot Top and a suicide bomber. Espejo is worse than an unlicensed barber.

It’s like Dennis Leary says, “Sometimes I park in handicapped spaces while handicapped people make handicapped faces. I’m an asshole.”

Hunter’s Run showed me that there is a point at which an antihero devolves from an unconventional protagonist into an irredeemable asshole. A character like that can’t even be considered a villain. He’s just the guy whose SUV takes up two parking spaces in a busy lot. Who cares about his backstory? He’s the doormat between good and evil, but it’s the muddy boot prints that I care about. A doormat is not the hero of its own story.

Somebody in my stories needs to be likeable. There needs to be an emotional connection on some level, which doesn’t necessarily have to reflect positive qualities but does need to be a congenial symptom of the human condition.  George Lucas botched that premise when he introduced Jar Jar Binks into a story about senatorial proceedings, monastic warriors infected with some kind of supernatural STD, and a mute villain named after a wood splitting tool. Binks was the light side counterpart of Espejo, a hero whose sheer obnoxiousness translates into the same sort of asshattery. They are the Yin and Yang of crap characters.

I couldn’t resist:  Darth Maul with his namesake weapon at a mall. He is meeting up with Darth Pasta Special at Olive Garden. The lady in the background is perturbed.

But the man is the world, as we see the world through his eyes and experience its subjectivity. If the man is not greater than the world around him — more vibrant, flawed, fragile, what-have-you — then the reader spends his time looking out the window, awaiting the next chapter, like road signs on a long car ride. That’s the escapism of literature, a world filtered through eyes that are not our own — eyes that perceive more than we do in our daily lives, and a mind that re-contextualizes what we mistake for the mundane. I can do better in this way.

The sense of loss that I felt isn’t something specific to this book. Afterwords are an opportunity for authors to reminisce and maybe grandstand a little. Their stories are often fascinating (not in this case), but they fill me with a sense of mourning for the life that I thought I would have and where I once thought I would be today. This book describes a collaboration between three authors spanning thirty years. This is the first book that I’ve read by any of them, so my only exposure to George R.R. Martin’s work has been seeing a few dragons and about two dozen pornos worth of boobies on HBO in his fantasy/medieval adaptation of marry, boff, kill, Game of Thrones. Reading about his accomplishments and the fraternity between these men brings to mind an exchange between Dave Foley (Dave Nelson) and Phil Hartman (Bill McNeil) from the show, News Radio:

Bill:  Did you know that when Dan Rather was 19 he was the youngest photographer for the Associated Press?
Dave:  Okay, well, what were you doing at 19?
Bill:  Drinking.
Dave:  Well, how about how hard it was to break into the industry? You know, all the struggles…
Bill:  My aunt owned a radio station. She hired me to try to get me to stop drinking.

Kind of like “Game of Thrones,” but none of the people in the background are fucking.

That sums up about ten years of my life. While these three guys were building their careers, getting published, and making connections at workshops, “there I was… watching it on TV in my dorm and drinking.” I can live with that, and I nearly moved past it. But now I am faced with a nearly equivalent span of idle years, wondering if I could have better balanced a writing career with my caregiver duties were it not for some deficiency of character, if those years of drinking to avoid pain had been devoted instead to laying a foundation that could weather the hard years ahead. I kept my daughter alive (yes, you did too, but the odds were against us in this case). That should be enough, but it is an isolating and all-consuming experience, so that reading about the accomplishments of successful authors leaves me feeling like Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters, slamming his hands against the pane of glass that separates him from a room of fine diners while his own personal demon lurches up behind him.

Wearing a Green Shirt: When Writers Embrace the Ugliness of Their Villains

If it doesn’t melt Nazi faces then I don’t want to wear it!

In my bachelor days, I had a theory about fashion, which I am sure was fatally flawed, wholly fallacious, and almost as detrimental to my dating life as my near constant state of inebriation. Wear something ugly! My most memorable find was a chartreuse, long-sleeved shirt that had been relegated to the deepest discount section of the clearance rack. The final, damning touch was that it matched the 1970s-era velour upholstered furniture in my parent’s Arizona home. By-golly, that was the shirt for me! I was in the market for something that would melt the face off a Nazi as surely as opening the Ark of the Covenant. Ugliness grows on you. You can come to love it.

I was reminded of that shirt while running a character development exercise for a writer’s group several years later. Each participant was shown an image of a person (snagged semi-randomly from the Internet) and was tasked with finding their subject’s voice. Having established their personas, the group engaged in a dialogue between these fictitious characterizations of real life people. It was a polite version of an old people watching game that I used to enjoy with a friend, sitting at the second-story window of a downtown bar — me, wearing my hideous green shirt. We supplied the passing pedestrians with invented dialogues and monologues, delivered in the shrill squawk of Terry Jones and John Cleese in drag. Good times.

And the award for Most Congenial goes to Rev. Henry Kane!

Among the assorted photos of hobos, goths, ravers, and . . . more hobos was a portrait of Daniel Franzese, an actor in the film, “Missing Person,” taken during the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. None of us knew who he was at the time, but one glance at the smarmy smirk on his face and hipster outfit topped off with a hunter’s cap was enough to engender instant contempt from everyone in the room. One member of the group was particularly aggravated by the cut of Franzese’s jib, and this contempt became a roadblock for his imagination. He couldn’t find a voice. Franzese was his green shirt. I emailed him the picture. “You have to write about this man!”

When writing fiction, the green shirt represents the repulsiveness in which you must clothe yourself to fully realize a character. It is the person who you don’t want to write about but are compelled to anyway. The wrongness, the vileness, the absolute depravity of this character stares back at you from the page, but you can’t turn away. Quite the opposite, you are there to be fitted by his verminous tailor. The sound of each keystroke is a footstep in this horrible being’s grimy shoes, as you walk together that last dreadful mile down tenebrous alleys that you had never before dared to tread.

I’ll autograph your copy.

My most memorable green shirt character is still Lon, the antagonist in a short story called Fast Learners, first published in issue #9 of Murky Depths. Reviewers characterized him as “a loathsome individual” and “a complete waste of flesh,” which I can’t argue with. As Daniel W. Powell put it, “he takes what he wants, relegating those around him — human or not — to mere objects,” or as Lon would say, “I never slept with anyone who I thought was a person”Fast Learners was rejected by the first two publications that I submitted it to on account of its brutality. I couldn’t help but agree, and I was worried that I would never find a market for it — or if it should even be published.

Like Steve Martin’s career, my story took a turn for the worse.

From the very first paragraph, I knew that Lon would be disgusting and obnoxious. “His polo shirt doubled as a napkin, grease stains running perpendicular to the faded green stripes.  His microfiber slacks were creased in all the wrong places . . . The overblown pimp ran a hand over his scalp, dislodging flakes of dandruff.  Whether it was pomade or body oil alone that kept his hair in place, Enid couldn’t guess.”As the story progressed, he became something far worse. I was fascinated by his wickedness. Holding my hand, Lon guided me in a direction that I had never meant to go. He gets his comeuppance in the end, but this is merely my petty revenge on him for hijacking my story with such sinister ease. As I wrote those final paragraphs, I dreaded what he would inevitably inflict upon my protagonist. There was no happy alternative. This had to happen, and I felt sick to my stomach as I wrote, “and if you hit me again — if you move even a little, I am going to bounce your head on this floor until it splits like a melon — you hear me — and even that won’t stop me from fucking you.”

I had never written a rape scene before. I don’t want to again, but I know that this green shirt is still in my closet. I wore it again a few months later when I wrote an unsettling story about child abuse. I’m looking at it now, feeling the fabric between my fingers, thinking about all of the awfulness in the world, inside of me, and feeling like if I can commit some portion of that to paper then maybe the most minuscule fraction of it will remain imprisoned there. So much of fiction depends upon the reader’s suspension of disbelief. The green shirt, on the other hand, is part of a reality that we desperately want to disbelieve, knowing all the while in the back of our minds that it is all too real and may even lurk in our own wardrobes.

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[This is a revised version of my article, “Writing a Green Shirt,” originally posted on the Bedford Writer’s Group blog.]