Bible Verses

 

The other day a really nice guy I know told me he had just read my book of stories Next to Nothing, and he seemed taken aback and perplexed.  He said that the characters in the stories were really the bottom of the barrel.  Really, he emphasized.  He said that back in the day characters like the ones I write about didn't seem so nasty.  All the drugs and sex and alcohol, he said.  I mean, they're just sad.  No way out.

 

So why do I write about those kinds of people?

 

Really. 

 

Why?

 

I don't know why I write these stories except that the bottom of the barrel has been a focus since I started taking writing seriously.  That's because for most of my life I have had proximity to the Nothing people, direct access through working with them, being related to them, and being one of them.  I write what I know:  gay, working-class, Appalachian/white-trash, etc.  And while I'm not a dope addict or anything, I still am often coded as that because of the gay, working-class, Appalachian/white-trash-ness.  So the bottom of the barrel I write about is not titillating or stylized or embossed with disgust or conveyed with a distant splendor or even love.  I convey the lower level of human existence (for those who think in levels, and I guess that's all of us) without any sense of judgment or disdain or weepy sense of social justice.  The debauchery is just there, like anything else about people.  Therefore the debauchery gets blanched into banality.  Maybe that's what is so horrifying and depressing to a lot of people (the few that actually read what I write)?  That sense of scrambled morality, that in that universe I write about and from, "sin" is just another element of character, not a code of destruction or a broken commandment.  It's just life.

 

When I was a kid I always went to vacation bible school in a backwoods Baptist church, and one summer I memorized the most Bible verses than any other kid.  I was awarded with a construction-paper crown and a giant candy-bar.  The verses still come into my head sometimes, Jesus non-sequiturs that actually provide possible clues into what and why and how I write those bottom-of-the-barrel short stories.

 

Here's one that is often on repeat inside my skull.  Suddenly I'll just be driving around and ka-boom:

 

"Judge not, that you be not judged. For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you."  Matthew 7:1.

 

Could that be the reason the stories I produce come out the way they do?  They are born outside of judgment.  When I was a kid, just about the only intellectual stimulation I got outside of school was going to church, and I took that church stuff seriously, construction-paper-crown and all.  I wanted to find meaning in those verses.  I'm still trying.  When you try to be moral or whatever, morality sinks you.  But when you try to figure out how morality works without using morality as a map, when you're all on your own out there, imagining a world bereft of meaning so that feeling usurps reason, then suddenly you can look at sin and sadness and drunkenness and perversion (maybe all those should be in quotes?) without cringing and without wanting.  And then maybe the Bible verses become flashlights? 

 

You just see the human in that beam, and once you see that the horror shrinks into comedy and then a sort of love might inconspicuously sneak in.

 

So I write about freaks and low-lifes and perverts and so on, and while they never transcend those earthly statuses they do become truly human I hope, not disconnected from those bottomless-pit identities, but also not condemned by them.  Just living that way.  God help them.  And God helps us all. 

 

I'm not judging.  I'm just seeing.  And the only judge at the end of the day is God, and I have no fucking idea who or what God is.  I just know that I'm not God in any way shape or form.  I do know, however, that these people I'm writing about are somehow God's own.

 

Another verse that keeps coming back:

 

"For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God."  Romans 3:23.

 

One of the stories in Next to Nothing I like the most is called "How to Get from This to This."  It's about a raging alcoholic's last day of life on earth.  He basically has degenerated into what he has feared most about himself.  And he's drinking himself into the oblivion that he craves.  Even though I never intended it, the last few lines of the story read like a series of Bible verses to me now:

 

"This is the secret nobody ever tells you:  there is so much happiness when you finally give in, a kind of happiness you can't imagine until you hit the very bottom.  It's a magical pond you slip into headfirst, drowning quickly, though you take your time.  There's quiet, and then there's not even quiet.  It's just like that.  And you're grateful."

 

I followed that poor guy to the end, and I kind of found out, at least in my imagination, his end wasn't about torture or damnation or the gnashing of teeth.  It was about a freedom he was grateful for.  What we're all trying to chase outside of ourselves, anyway we can.  



Manifesto

I wrote "The Wedding of Tom to Tom" about 13 or 14 years ago, inspired by my years working in group-homes, especially by the people I worked with and supported.  There were all kinds of memories and images in my head, and when I came up with a story to go along with them I was kind of overjoyed.  This story still sticks with me.  It is sort of my manifesto.  The plot's very simple:  two direct-care staff in a group-home assist two gay men with developmental disabilities to get married, against both the rules of the group-home and the rules of the state.  The two "Toms" have been friends and lovers since they met each other in an institution years ago, and their love truly is how they separate themselves from a fucked-up world.  The main character is a woman who has an ex who just got out of jail, and she turns the secret wedding planning into a version of saving her own soul. 

Link to the story:  "The Wedding of Tom to Tom."
Link to a discussion of the story by students in a Disabilities Studies class:  "Dis/Lit Discussion."
Link to the original images I used for the "Tom to Tom" collages:  "Tom to Tom" images.

One of the major images of the story that continues to haunt me:  "This big hanger building," Dad says, from the podium. Tom and Tom are right there in front of him. "Pink light, like exploding roses. The red-light district. Ha ha. No. A stampede. You gotta hear it. A thousand-plus feet. I am on the other side and I look up and all these shaved-headed people are running right at me in the red light. It's like they just got freed, you know? Like the concentration camp just opened its doors and they got out and they're running. They don't know where they're going or nothing. They're coming right at me. And I want that to happen. I want them to run me over."

What I wanted to do with these collages is reinvent the way I visualized the story by thinking about the totems I used.  I wanted to back away from the story and see it in my head as a sort of silent movie, black and white and solemn and strange.  I did 22 collages in all, on index cards.  I took images from the internet and Xeroxed them, so that there's no color, only a sort of paper-cut contrast. 

Here goes:

Where I Live

So this is what you see where I live.

Not much to shake a stick at.

But I feel this weird connection to it, a landscape made from overgrown weeds and litter and asphalt, with a backdrop of worn-out apartment complexes where overworked people try to find a way not to feel overworked.  This is Forest Park, Ohio.  I drive from and to it everyday.  It seeps into my head like White Castles coffee into carpeting. 

There's a mystery here that really does not need to be solved, just lived.  I know it's every body's story, but I have this landscape stripped of itself, X-rayed and mordant and broken and raw.  It's the way I like things.  Everything I do -- writing, making art, living, thinking -- all comes from that ugly bark and those odd arthritic half-asleep branches. 

When I was in high school I hid from pep rallies.  Didn't go to dances.  I barely made it to and through school.  I spent most of my time trying to write things down or make art.  Trying to escape by realizing what I was escaping from.  I lived in a crappy little brick house in a family that was always falling apart, in a house that was too. 

And I wound up here.  I'm not sad at all.  Not regretful.  Because this is where you end up anyway, no matter how hard you try not to.  This place without a sense of place, and yet it's the only place you'll ever know.  A little under a mile away is the cavernous dead mall.  And down the street the shut-down Hollywood video, and in front of that the Mexican restaurant no longer open either.  We'll go for walks in the neighborhood and all the houses and apartments feel closed up too, but you know people live there because there are cars and porch-lights and dogs barking. 

This sense of place is what you try to understand when you write stories and poems.  You don't glamorize the atmosphere and you don't make it worse.  You just stare it down and know it for what it is.  You make meaning out of it because you have to.
 

Lovesick Dishwashers

I have a stockpile of collages I've made over the years.  Thousands of them, dating back to 1997.  Jesus.  Most of them are in black three-ring binders.  The process I went through to make them in every phase is pretty easy to explain.  For the ones featured on this post:  February 2009, I took lots of photos with a disposable camera of absolute nothingness as I drove around doing my job.  Got the photos developed at a Wal-Greens in Hamilton, Ohio.  Took the photos home and had a big box of Xeroxes and old books and other pieces of litter and would piece each collage together from whatever was there.  I wanted the photos to be the magnet, and all the detritus the steel fragments.  I glue-sticked and Scotch-taped each collage together, usually atop the glossy disposable-camera photo, so they are all uniform, 5" X 8".  For this suite, I didn't use a black three-ring binder.  I bought see-through envelopes and each one is stored in one of those. 

No titles.  Just images.  I was writing a novel as I did these, so I think I was trying to escape the monogamy and monotony of novel-writing with these little short bursts of nothingness and beauty.  I was trying to find an aesthetic I can live with.  Still am.  I'm 48 almost, and every time I try to find beauty in the world I crack up laughing:  strangeness and meanness are always what I'm after really because I think beauty and joy are always accompanied by those nasty little henchmen, and if you want beauty and joy without meanness and strangeness I think you're probably not really looking for anything but the arrogance of thinking you know something.  In these dumb little collages I find vast amounts of gorgeousness and also a sense of stupidity so deep and wide I can crawl inside it and pretend I'm on a cruise.

In the end I keep making these things because words don't mean enough, and aren't mean enough.  Images that just link together because you want them to become symbols of anarchy and insouciance and desperation, all words I love, all meanings I love.  I'm returning to these things I made (and still make) because I need to right now.  I'm writing more, trying to figure out how to write more.  These images allow me to creep out of my hole long enough to be absolute and absolutely dumb.  And dumbfounded.  I find all the people I want to write about in these images/interregnums.  They are all usually lovesick and lonely, exhausted and trying too hard, washing dishes, pumping gas, buying beer...  In the end I'm just trying to find who I am too. 

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.