CivilWarLand in Bad Decline: Stories and a Novella (21 page)

We billed our hours, and I would respond to any disrespect toward my person by declaring (in my mind, always only in my mind): “Thanks, a-hole, your project has just funded a Saunders grant for the arts.” And, for an edit that could have been done in an hour, I would bill that program manager’s project an hour and a half, then use the liberated half hour to work on my book.

This book.

“Capitalism plunders the sensuality of the body,” wrote Terry Eagleton, and that was certainly true of my body at that time. It was being plundered of its sensuality every day. I had an engineering degree but was working as a tech writer. I had earned a reputation as the go-to guy where document covers were concerned. I was good at taping figures into place on frame sheets. I spent a lot of time at the photocopier, producing copies of the reports I had just edited, so we
could send them to Kodak or the New York Department of Environmental Conservation, who, we suspected, often filed them without having read them. I was gaining weight, losing energy, had grown a consolation ponytail, would go home sore in my ankles and knees from walking what felt like miles on the thin carpeting that ran over our concrete floors.

There was a lot going on at home during those years, too. My wife, Paula, and I had gotten engaged after dating for three weeks. She became pregnant on the honeymoon, then went into labor at four months. She was put on total bed-rest and required to take a drug (since outlawed by the FDA) to suppress her contractions. This happened again during her second pregnancy. So, while I was writing this book, we had two baby daughters at home, each made doubly precious by how close we’d come to losing her. We didn’t have any money and were into our thirties and were (maybe, just a little) wondering how it was that we’d missed the boat in terms of this thing called upward mobility.

At one point our second car broke and we couldn’t afford to replace it, so I started riding my bike the seven miles to and from work, along the Erie Canal. As winter approached, Paula put together an ad hoc winterproofing ensemble for me: a set of lab goggles, a rain poncho, some high rubber boots that, as I remember, had little spacemen on them. Biking along the canal I’d be composing in my head, and might arrive at work with a sentence or two all worked out. Then I’d dash through the atrium, into the men’s room, and try to get myself cleaned up, while not forgetting those sentences. Ah, those were the days.

But seriously: those
were
the days.

Biking back into town after dark, past the cozy Colonial houses orange with firelight, I’d think: I have a home. I have people waiting for me, who love me. This is it. This is my life. These are the best years of my life.

2.

We managed to buy a house. It was small but sweet, and the four of us lived there, happily. What a thing it was, to suddenly have a real life happening to us, to be in over our heads but glad about it. The gratitude I was feeling nudged me to the edge of a thought precipice: Had others, loving this much, had it go wrong? Did that ever happen?

And I knew the answer was yes, of course, all the time, every day.

Which raised a second question, one that I now see as being at the heart of this book: Why is the world so harsh to those who are losing? Sensing how close we were to the edge financially (we lived check to check, were running up huge credit card debt), feeling ourselves bringing up the back of the pack in terms of what kind of life we were making for our daughters relative to the lives of their peers, I realized for the first time, in my gut, how harsh life could be and how little it cared if someone failed.

Don’t get me wrong: it wasn’t the Gulag. But I was puzzled by how difficult it was proving for me (a nice guy, an educated guy, a guy who loved his wife and kids) to put together a middle-class, or even lower-middle-class, livelihood for our family, and what it was costing me in terms of personal grace.

The realization that failure was possible, even for me, had the effect of increasing my empathy. If life could be this harsh/grueling/boring for someone who’d had all the advantages, what must it be like for someone who hadn’t? A thread of connection went out between me and everyone else. They, too, wanted to be happy. They, too, wanted to succeed. Maybe they had people they loved at home. They, too, were doing some weird uninteresting job in order to ensure the security and happiness of those beloved people of theirs, and yet…

And yet there were people sleeping on benches and muttering to themselves and getting fired, and there were nasty divorces and men slamming their fists into the sides of their cars when they thought no one was around.

It was as if I’d been driving along a highway littered with broken-down cars, blithely unconcerned, then heard a clunk from under my own hood.

What? I’d begun to think. Me, too, possibly?

All of this made its way slantwise into this book, although I’m not sure how aware of it I was at the time.

3.

It was a weird world I found myself living in then, a world I’d been trying to avoid all my life: a world of paper shuffling and cubicles and a cheap little tie I would wear whenever “the client” was coming in, a world through which a burned-coffee smell would emanate late in the afternoons; a world of long white hallways and generic/minimal furniture (no art on the walls, no flowers in vases), a world of five-hundred-page reports with titles like “Long-Term Study of Possible Effects of Alleged Benzene Spill on Indoor Air Quality on Riley Street,” which I would write and/or edit in the small one-computer room I shared with my officemate, Dawn Wendt (and God bless you, Dawn, for all the times you sensed an edgy marital phone conversation coming on and left the office, and God bless me, for all the times I did the same for you).

Then, at the end of the day: the long bike or bus ride home, a precious hour or two with Paula and the girls.

I remember sitting in that office in my sad khakis, watching a storm approach—the darkening sky over the Rustic Village Apartments, the way the crap in the parking lot would start
skittering around. A tree in a planter in the indoor atrium would drop a few leaves now and then that would stay there on the tile, proof that the tree was real. We’d note the sapling on “our” berm (i.e., the berm just outside our window) turning gold in October: it was like a mini-autumn, and all of the usual fall associations would rise up in me, filling me with longing, and there I was, a former big American dreamer, reading and rereading a report in which I could summon up zero interest, except that most basic one: the interest that came of the knowledge that if I didn’t read that bastard again and again and fix all the mistakes I’d made, I was going to look bad, and if I looked bad enough times, I’d be gone.

Still, it was sweet work, being for the benefit of our family.

As you approached our office, which was in a place called Corporate Woods, you passed a T.G.I. Friday’s and a highway, and beside the highway was a swamp, and in the swamp reeds were usually a few snagged fast-food bags, and outside our tinted front door was one of those sand-filled ashtrays, around which the same two or three people from the mysterious company upstairs would stand smoking, always talking of someone named Sheila, who was making a huge miscalculation.

Our building looked something like a spaceship, a black glass spaceship, and out front of it—the one nod to aesthetics—was a sculpture, which we referred to as
The Snot
, because that’s what it looked like, a giant gray snot, a snot that, vaguely man-shaped, greeted us at the beginning and end of every working day.

Some days, coming in, I’d find myself mumbling, “Hi, Snot.”

In retrospect I was lucky—lucky to have my lame, black-and-white, museumish idea of literature, in which it was always 1931, denied me. This sent me in search (in spite of myself) of a prose style that wasn’t full of shit given the life I was leading, a style that felt truly American—that
took into account the Hemingway-Copland-Steinbeck-Ives America I loved (red, white, and blue bunting draped above a white-painted porch, a marching band playing in the distance) but also this new America in which I was just becoming a full participant: a place where paucity reduced a person, fear of failure produced neuroses, where everyone became a freak via material obsession, where there were no artifacts of previous cultures, no ancient ruins, just expedience-formed vistas (the old mill was now a Starbucks, and when the Starbucks kids went out for a smoke, they did so leaning against the fence of the pioneer graveyard, the shadow of a tall stone angel slicing across the parking stripes), a style as angular, comic, dorky, and heartfelt as the Rochesterians I saw falling asleep on the bus, or living up near Kodak Park in the shadow of the methylene chloride pipes, or plunking around in their snowy yards wielding roof rakes as I sped by on the canal path in my goggles and spaceman boots.

4.

I’d always loved Hemingway and all through grad school had been doing some version of a Hemingway imitation. If I got tired of that, I did a Carver imitation, then a Babel imitation. Sometimes I did Babel, if Babel had lived in Texas. Sometimes I did Carver, if Carver had worked (as I had) in the oil fields of Sumatra. Sometimes I did Hemingway, if Hemingway had lived in Syracuse, which always ended up sounding, to me, like Carver.

Following my Hemingway/Babel/Carver years, I embarked on a few James Joyce years, and then a Malcolm Lowry half year, during which I wrote a book called “La Boda de Eduardo.” The title—which I believe translates roughly as “Ed’s Wedding”—will give the reader some idea of the literary power of the work itself. It is the story of a wedding—Ed’s wedding, to be exact—that
takes place in Mexico. Lots of people come to the wedding and are described in Joycean/Lowryesque prose, which, in my hands, meant: as few verbs as possible, so as to ensure that nothing appeared to be happening, and if something inadvertently did happen, it didn’t happen with any clarity. To make up for the scarcity of verbs, I utilized lots of compound words. There was no drama at the wedding except that my friend got married, and the novel reflects this. The novel was seven hundred pages; I cut it back to a very efficient 250, rendering it even more difficult to understand. Then I gave it to my wife to read. All of these months I’d been assuring her that our long familial time in the desert was nearly over. She was “sitting on a gold mine.” I gave her the manuscript, then promised to be gone all afternoon. Minutes later I peeked in, as any writer might have done. She would have been on about page 10 by then. Was she rapt, were tears of joy running down her face? No. She wasn’t even reading anymore. She was just sitting at the table, head in hands, in a posture of total defeat that seemed to be saying: All of those hours, for
this
? Honey, where are the verbs? Are they in a separate document or what? And what’s with all of these compound words, this wordbanter, this disclarifying clapplemuddle?

A bad couple of days followed.

But I knew she was right. I hadn’t loved that book either. It was surprisingly easy to put “La Boda de Eduardo” in a desk drawer, where it still resides today, furiously exclaiming that the tortillasmell is rising from the mudhuts, the bridegroom is approaching in his dustsuit, redfaced, loveslumped.

5.

One day not long after the collapse of “La Boda de Eduardo” I was asked to take notes during a Radian conference call. There weren’t many notes to take. With nothing to do, I started
writing these Seussian poems, which I would then illustrate. They were despondent and minimal and gross and, for a change, funny. I wrote maybe ten of these and, when I got home, threw them down on the dining room table and went off to mow the lawn. When I came back in, Paula was … laughing. With pleasure. Real pleasure. It was the first positive reaction to my work I’d gotten from anyone in a long time. She wasn’t saying the poems were “interesting,” she didn’t have that workshoppy look on her face, the look we all get when we are trying to think of something nice to say about something that has left us cold. She was happy, she was experiencing pleasure, she even seemed to want to read more.

Suddenly it was as if I’d been getting my ass kicked in an alley somewhere and realized I’d had one arm behind my back. All of my natural abilities, I saw, had been placed, by me, behind a sort of scrim. Among these were: humor, speed, the scatological, irreverence, compression, naughtiness. All I had to do was tear down the scrim and allow those abilities to come to the table.

And writing might be fun again.

That was the day I started this book, essentially.

Many years before, I’d written a story called
“A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room,”
which was set in one of those highway “Mystery Spots.” I sold the story to the
Northwest Review
and used it to get into Syracuse—and then put it aside as an aberration. It wasn’t “real,” it was silly, Hemingway would have hated it, etc., etc. Somewhere around the time of the conference room revelation, my friend Pat Pacino came to town and, in a burst of candor, told me that this story was still the best thing I’d ever written, all those grad school stories notwithstanding.

That hurt. But it also rang true.

So I dusted that story off and resolved to do a stone-cold plagiarism of it—or, let’s say, a
reworking
of it—with the same basic plot but set in a different theme park. The resulting story, “The Wavemaker Falters,” was the first one I wrote for this book. Working on it was
fun:
for the first time in years, I knew what to do. I had no idea what it was “about” or what it was teaching or espousing or anything like that. I just, at every turn, had some feelings about how I might make it better. As goofy as the story was, as far-fetched as its premise seemed, I could feel and see the people in it as real people, and I cared about them. What a relief that was: to work with certainty, toward fun, just for the hell of it.

6.

I set foot in my first theme park in 1969. It was Six Flags over Texas, outside Dallas. I loved it so thoroughly that, all the way back to Chicago in the car, I conspired with my sister to build a scale model of it.