Hive Minds

Valentine Road is a documentary about the death of Larry King, a fifteen-year-old boy who liked to dress up in make-up and high heel shoes and go to school.  He was shot in the back of the head by Brandon McInerny, a fourteen-year-old peer, because of that, and also because Larry told him he wanted Brandon to be his Valentine.  This happened in 2008 in Oxnard, California.  I didn't remember this incident at all, but in Marta Cunningham's film she shows us the media taking on the issue (Ellen DeGeneres gives a wonderful plea on her show, among others), but that isn't really the point for Cunningham.  She's interested in showing us how these events are a lot more complicated than speeches on talk-shows can allow, more complicated than most people can even accept inside their own minds.

Watching this documentary I felt mystified a number of times by the overarching meanness and judgment in people's faces as they spoke about Larry and how he somehow caused his own death by his "eccentric behaviors," and I was also taken aback by the sweetness and sorrow in the facial expressions of the murderer and his immediate family.  It's a dizzying feeling, this movie, because while her heart of course is with Larry and what was done to him, Cunningham does not shy away from looking into the heart of darkness that helped to create the situation.  That darkness is located in many places within the context of the film, including school hall-ways, white-trash front-yards, middle-class dining rooms, foster-care facilities, and eventually a courtroom.  The darkness, in fact, is the point here.  It is a darkness so dark that it creates a sort of confusion that's masked as compassion in many people's hearts. 

Larry's desire for Brandon is constituted as a malfunction of a grievous sort by many of the teachers who used to teach Larry (one of the bitchiest ones in the documentary cites the fact that Larry was on an IEP and "behavior program" as evidence for his need for "correction" and "conversion"), and many others, including an evil older teacher stirring her iced-tea with a knife in her plush crucifix-decorated split-level, state that if Larry had been told how to act, and punished for acting out in high-heels, the situation, the murder, would not have taken place.  It's scary to think that these women (all of Larry's teachers happened to be women) and others lack the imagination and the moral apparatus to understand how Larry's love for a boy, and his happiness in both dressing like a girl and expressing that love, should not damn him to being shot in the head.  It's pretty easy math, even when it's overtly sentimentalized.  But something about Larry brings out the beast in people, and not just Brandon, but a whole society.

This society includes the jurors in Brandon's trial, which eventually ended up with a hung jury.  In Valentine Road we are privy to the after-trial thoughts of three ladies who were part of that hung jury.  These woman are heavily made-up, talking about how astonished they are at the low price of Cabernet at Trader Joe's as they swill it at a suburban dining table laid out with pastries and cheese and crackers.  An off-kilter chumminess has enveloped these three in a sort of tribal bitchiness as they talk about how Brandon really had no choice because of Larry's sexual harassment, how no adult stepped in to ensure that Larry would stop breaking the rules...  Their collective sympathies for Brandon, the killer, are breathtakingly nonchalant, as if they are discussing someone playing hooky.  It is both creepy and awe-inspiring, their lack of any kindness toward Larry.  They only see him as a thorn in Brandon's side, an obstacle to his future now.

Larry was a foster-kid.  Larry had no connection to the world outside of a few friends at school, and the one teacher in the film who felt compassion for him and who was actually with him in the computer lab when he was killed.  (She was summarily fired from her job because she gave Larry her daughter's prom dress to wear.)  Larry was an anomaly beyond abnormal to the majority of the people who were charged with educating him  His mere presence, however, fucked with their need to correct, control, convert.

Mary Gaitskill is one of my favorite writers, and in September she wrote a nasty takedown review of Gone Girl, a popular novel that's gotten a lot of attention.  In the review, Gaitskill talks about some of the same issues Cunningham gets at in Valentine Road.

"So why is Gone Girl scary rather than kooky? Primarily the characters’ apparently everyday behavior—their motivations and how they view one another. Amy and Nick [Gone Girl's main characters) do not resemble actual people so much as grotesquely smiling masks driven by forces of extreme artifice, and it’s exactly that extreme artificial quality that’s frightening to the point of sickening.  What I mean by “artifice” is social language, styles, and manners, a public way of being that is by necessity coded, fixed, and hard, and which has become even more so through the emergence of the virtual world. In physical life, the hardness and (frequent) deceptiveness of such language is offset by the deep, doggishly honest presence of the body; in the virtual world, such animal presence is either absent or faked. Gone Girl doesn’t compare to other books so much as it evokes flipping through TV shows (including the news) and glimpsing face after chirping face, all with only slight variations on the same manner of speech and “smart,” high-speed delivery common to Facebook, texting, and tweeting; that is to say, the book evokes (impressively, one might argue) a hyperartificial, hive-minded way of relating, combined with what has become a cultural ideal of relentless feminine charm tied to power and control."

The teachers and jurors in Valentine Road who use Larry as a cautionary tale to any other freaks out there thinking they have a right to dress weird and tell people they love them are hive-minded and hard-faced, diligent in obeying some need to keep things static and coded and fixed and artificial.  That's what makes them "scary rather than kooky," and gives Valentine Road a moral imperative and its deep beauty.  In the middle of the movie, while they are chattering about "behaviors" and "sexual harassment," Cunningham cuts quietly to a picture from Larry's autopsy. 

She shows us the two bullet-holes in the back of his head. 
 

Regular, Medium, Famous

This is the author "photo" from by book of stories, The Smallest People Alive.  Antonio Adams drew it.  Not sure what it means, but I kind of know what it feels like. 

This summer I went to the Sewanee Writers Conference at the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee.  It was sort of an ordeal, but not really, and yet it was.  That's the only syntax I can use to describe it.  I wanted the experience to reacquaint me with the magic I used to find when I wrote stories.  I also wanted to finish a draft of novel.  I didn't understand what was about to happen because I didn't really think this thing through.

I'm weird.  No two ways about it.  I'm socially awkward and a great big freak.  So when I get into embarrassing and/or awkward situations I retreat.  And by "retreat," I don't mean being quiet and going on with my day.  I mean I pull back to the point I eventually just have to vacate the premises. 

When I arrived at the conference, I drove around the campus and it felt like deja vu.  Fifteen years before, when I was 32, I took a chance and attended the Kenyon Review Writer's Workshop at Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio.  Back then, I was four years out of grad school, and truly did not know what the hell a writer was supposed to do.  At Kenyon, I met a writer named Nancy Zafris who changed my life.  Her teaching style was what I needed somehow:  she hurled complicatedly great writing prompts at the workshop attendees.  You'd have to write in class often and read what you wrote aloud.  This fusing of exhibitionism with something you always do in private really somehow freed me up, and I wrote several stories, and even the beginning of a novel that eventually would be published by Knopf in 1999, thanks to Nancy introducing me to her agent.  The book is titled The Life I Lead, and it was not a success, although it got some okay reviews, along with some very mean-spirited ones. 

The whole experience, of going to Kenyon and getting somehow touched by the writing angel, and then publishing a novel with a big publisher and then having the novel come out and nothing really happening, was soul-crushing and brain-expanding.  Again thanks to Nancy, I got hired to be a teacher at the Kenyon conference in 2000.  I taught in 2001 and in 2002, but in 2002 I was feeling this eerie disapproval in the air, coming from Nancy, as well as from the starchy, prissy director of the whole gig.  Because my novel was not a big deal, and because I was seen as sort of a country-bumpkin-weirdo who lucked into having his novel published but then didn't have the talent or will-power strong enough to make the damn thing a success, I got the feeling they wanted me to just go away.  Nancy kept hinting around about how the workshop needed "big names" to keep the people coming in.  I could have been the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop mascot, but basically I became a fired janitor in the end.  I left a day or so early, sick of the whole crappy ordeal.  Haven't spoken to Nancy since, or anyone there.

No two ways about it.

The Life I Lead came from a prompt in Nancy's class involving merging your intimate sensate childhood memories with the consciousness of a reprehensible character.  Nancy gave a great example of how the writing should look and feel:  Eudora Welty's blistering short story about the dude who shot Medgar Evers, "Where Is This Voice Coming From?"  I had an uncle in my family who molested his sons, and who it turned out had been molested as a child.  He was always mentioned in whispers around the house.  I decided to try to "figure out" my uncle's situation by using Nancy's prompt.  So basically from that little exercise came a full-on disturbingly in-your-face novel about a child molester and the child molester who molested him.  It was told in voices, that way Eudora told her story.  Writing it was liberating.  I didn't feel morally repulsed at all.  I felt spiritually enlightened, to tell you the truth, because I felt as I wrote it I was getting to know people who everybody else would like to have executed.  I had access to the human part, as well as the monster part.  It's in that eerie realm of castigation and curiosity that I think a lot of great writing happens.  

And when the book was published and it didn't exactly set the world on fire I felt slighted and pissed, but I moved on.  I wrote short stories, one of which got published and was awarded an O. Henry Prize, "The Smallest People Alive," which I bundled with a bunch of other stories and was able to get published through Carnegie Melon University Press because Sharon, a teacher I taught with at Kenyon, was the editor there.  That book got published in 2004, and it was a better experience, even though it didn't really cause that much of a stir either.  Except it was a favorite of one Donald Ray Pollack, who in 2008 emailed me that he liked my work, and that he was publishing a book of stories called Knockimstiff, and he wondered if I had an agent.  I did, but she hadn't really been able to do a lot for me.  So he introduced me to his agent.  I went with the new agent, sent him a new collection of stories I was working on.  The agent sent it around to multiple publishers.  No deal.  Wrote a novel in 2010.  He sent that around.  Nobody wanted it.  Started working on a new novel in 2011.

And now, here we are:  Sewanee Writers Conference, 2012.

That's the backstory I need to include so I can make sense of the experience, mainly for myself.  Once I arrived and toured the Gothic-building-dominated campus at the University of the South, got my nametag and my dorm room key, unpacked and walked around a little, I wound up at the dining hall.  The place was jumping with all kinds of writerly types.  I know how stupid "writerly types" sounds, as if I truly am the country-bumpkin-weirdo like those other writerly types thought back in the day, but that is exactly what I was confronted with.  Lots of horn-rimmed glasses, prematurely-balding pates, librarian sweaters knotted over pale clavicles, NPR tote-bags, khaki shorts and university tees, eccentricity and preciousness personified.  Stereotypes, I know, but damn there they all were on display, just like on the Sewanee Writers Conference website and you think when you look at the website no fucking way, but yup. 

And the overall atmosphere was so chummy and cliquish it made me want to retreat automatically, even while I wanted to join the ranks.  I wanted to use that atmosphere to get inspired.  I wanted to, well, get into a time-machine and return to 1997, if you want to know the truth. 

It was an Indian food buffet, of course.  I made a plate and sat down with a bunch of prematurely balding, horn-rimmed-glasses-wearing gentlemen.  They were talking about teaching, writing, their poet-wives, great writers they knew, where they teach, how they got their teaching jobs, who they know here, etc.   They were networking.  I tried to converse, but everything that I thought about saying sounded goofy and egotistical and pathetic in my head, so basically I just ate and nodded, until one guy who was a dead ringer for Jason Schwartzman saw my nametag and said:  "Keith Banner.  You're the guy who wrote that one story.  'The Smallest People in the World,' right?"

He was being nice.  I felt thrilled in a way but mainly just terrified, like an impostor except I was impersonating myself and that never goes well.

"Yeah," I said.

The guy said that he was in a class that Mary Gaitskill taught, and she used my story as an example of greatness. 

"Thanks," I said.

I guess I was supposed to feel more comfortable now, but I didn't.  Then it got around to me having to explain what I do for a living.  I teach creative writing sometimes at Miami University here in Ohio, but mainly I'm a full-time social-worker for people with developmental disabilities.  So I said that.

The Jason Schwartzman guy smiled and said, without any sense of irony at all, just pure sincerity:  "Oh yes.  That kind of work is important and hard."

The tone was a little hushed, a little pointed somehow.  It felt like a joke, even though I knew he had not meant it to be.  The other Jason Schwartzmans at the table moved on to talking about David Foster Wallace's The Pale King.

It was as if they were pitying me and then forgetting me, kind of confused by my presence.  Why was I here if I wasn't a Professional Writer wanting to network with other Professional Writers?  What the hell? 

That dinner experience threw me for a loop, and for most of the rest of my time there I hid in the dorm room and in the computer lab at the library on campus.  I never went back to have my meals at the dining hall, even though the cost of tuition covered those.  I was just done with it all somehow.  That little stupid conversation, completely meaningless, was an epiphany for me.  I don't get a lot of those, so I'm writing this post to figure out what the epiphany actually means.  I think it's time for me to figure out how to keep writing without feeling like I don't belong to the Writing World, like I'm always a transient in a roomful of residents, the homeless guy who agitates everyone because he does not have a house, and they all have mortgages and property taxes out the ying-yang. 

I don't know how to act.  I don't know what to say.  It's always been this way, and I'm sure I'm not alone in these functional deficits, but because of the way I end up feeling and acting I always am alone.

For two weeks at Sewanee, I hid from people.  I would go to the class I signed up for (taught by the sweet and very intelligent Alice McDermott who gave one hell of a lecture that I still cherish), but ran away from other participants after the last word in class, always back to the basement of the library, typing in my novel, working on a story.  Even sometimes in class I would feel the urge to talk, but mainly I would hear what I was about to say in the recording studio inside my soul and it would sound either horribly lackluster or mordantly stupid.  Throughout my tenure there at Sewanee I also attended a lot of the lectures given by incredible writers, and would be inspired, but then I would sink back into seclusion.  The inspiration was calming, but still felt a little sad. 

I wrote this in my journal, explaining how the whole ordeal felt while I was there in the midst of it:

That loneliness today.  A heady blast of it, a knowledge that no matter what you do you're still what you are.  Everybody here is nice, and since I want to be invisible to them they are kind enough to let me.  Do I hate them?  No.  I just don't know how I am supposed to act.  I keep thinking back to Kenyon 1997, 15 years ago, drafting my novel from a Nancy prompt.  It's not like that here.  It won't ever be again anywhere.  Something happened as I got older?  But I've always been like this:  overjoyed and too passionate and scared and mean.  How do you move forward?  I guess I needed these weeks here to learn how to proceed and basically all I've come to is this:  you don't belong here.  I'm half-way into my life now, oh hell more than half-way, and no easy answers.  No answers at all.  I just don't know.  That loneliness is a quake of air.  It's where words limit themselves to the point they become insects hitting a window.  It's that burnt-looking dog walking around Wendy's I saw yesterday as I ate in my car because I didn't want to go to the dining hall and bull-shit with all the bull-shitters.  That dog listless but full of hunger, dumbfounded but also always on the lookout for whatever it can find.      

I finished the novel at Sewanee.  Sent the novel to the agent.  The agent did not like it, and basically said it was time to end our professional relationship.  I emailed back:  "Totally understand.  Thanks for everything you've done."

So now I'm here.  January 1, 2013.  The epiphany at the Indian-food buffet at Sewanee I think was this:  you just do what you can.  You're free; you may be a mangy, half-dead mutt in pursuit of god knows what, but still you are free.  And it's not terrible or wonderful to be free; it's just what it is.  You write if you want to write, and you keep trying to get it published.  Or you don't.  Nobody gives a crap either way.  And whether or not you can network with the Jason Schwartzmans of this world or not truly is unimportant.   

Just keep trying.  That's what the mutt does.  Keeps sniffing out whatever it is he can find and is probably happy with it when he finds it.  Possibly even overjoyed.