bookfraud

I’m trying to get back into things. I only have eight more installments of the "Why I Really Write" epic series left. All of them laughably bad.

Imagine a library.

It contains the greatest works of Western literature, from the Bible to Shakespeare to the present day. There are volumes from some of the planet’s greatest philosophers — from Plato to Nietzsche, Aristotle to Hegel. The library also has a compendium of LPs featuring music by Beethoven, Bach, Schubert, Mozart, Chopin, Brahms, and Wagner. On the walls hang reproductions of da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Monet, among others. 

Now imagine a group of men who partake of this library’s treasures. They read the books, listen to the music, and study the paintings. They discuss with each other the meaning of these works of art, what each writer or musician or painter was trying to say, and what their work reveals about human nature.

They take all of these discussions very seriously, as it represents one of their few opportunities for leisure.

So I ask you, as Mr. Wicklund, my high school AP English teacher, asked our class 25 years ago, does all this reading and listening and studying and thinking make these people better human beings? Are they more evolved? More sophisticated or smarter? Think hard before you answer, my teacher warned us. This place actually existed.

We might have been 18 and stupid, but my classmates and I were smart enough to know that it was a trick question. And it’s a good thing we didn’t answer. This library, our teacher told us, was for the commanding officers at Auschwitz. 

I don’t know if the Auschwitz library actually existed, but Mr. Wicklund’s aim certainly hit the mark. I’ve been semi-obsessed with the place ever since, as it turns on its head the very idea of civilized society. 

Library or not, there were certainly Nazis who were well read, who were musicians, artists, and philosophers. How could people partake of great art and debate the nature of humanity while committing one of the most barbarous acts in the history of humanity? Talking about dialectical materialism and the Brandenburg Concertos as human carcasses burned. As Eisenhower said when his troops liberated Dachau, it beggars explanation.

You can make a straightforward argument of actions trumping thoughts, but remember, the Nazis had developed philosophical rationalizations for their actions.

I’m not mentally equipped to get too far in depth about this (I’m just not PhD. material, boys and girls) but the fact that supposedly evolved people can be animals permeates my thinking. It makes me want to write about them.

And if I don’t write about monsters disguised as college-educated aesthetes, I can’t stop creating characters who are not what they seem, who hide behind facades, who justify their actions with rococo rationalizations.

Does living the literary life make one a better person? Think hard before you answer.

I’ve been bad.

My son has been really bad.

And my job has been really, really, stinkingly, ridiculously bad. As in, working at nights, early in the mornings, during lunch, and, through the miracle of wireless fidelity, also known as "WiFi," just about any wonderful place I can carry my computer.

The precious little downtime I’ve had has been spent in slothful pursuit (reading, television, and other forms of brain wanking), and my little baby boy has discovered the magic power of the full-throated yell when he is ignored for more than three seconds. But it’s really been the job — due to a computer system malfunction making it run as if designed by a team of Chilean sea bass, one essential part of my work is taking about four times as long as normal. Until the programmers/sea bass fix the problem, I’m basically screwed.

I’ll try to do better. I’ll try to visit all the blogs I know and love. I’ll try to post something more than once a fortnight. I’ll try not to slowly lose my sanity in the fiery caldron of my job.

 But I can’t promise.

And now, for something pretty much the same as everything else. Yet another entry in listing the reasons I’m a masochist writer.

I was all of 19, home in Memphis for the summer in an unpleasant 1984, and in a perpetually bad mood. For “home” was a city where I hadn’t lived for seven years, knew not a soul, and had to take two jobs to pay off my freshman-year debt. That entailed about 80 hours or more of work a week, which left very little time for fun. Bookfraud was a dull boy indeed.

One of those two jobs was a government “internship” with the county government. My job was to sit an a car and help catalog tax-lien properties. It paid minimum wage, offered nothing in the way of personal fulfillment or actual experience to help in the job market, and entailed driving into parts of town that were less-than-savory.

My partner in crime was an older man, a man whose name I will not reveal here except that it is so perfect for a character, it’s a shame I can’t use it. I will allow that he had been a colonel in the Air Force, his nickname was “Bubba,” and that Col. Bubba was so over-the-top that if I were to make him up as a character, you would never find him plausible.

He was about 65, stood about 6-5, and would have weighed 650 pounds if he’d had his beloved pork barbeque sandwiches every day for lunch. Suffice to say he probably tipped the scales at 250. He wore houndstooth jackets and fine leather shoes, shiny silk ties that looked like they’d served time since the 1960s, and his combed-back hair looked like he’d cleaned out the local Walgreen’s of Grecian Formula.

Col. Bubba sounded like a stereotypical southern sherif: “Boy…” he would start sentences when addressing me, managing to stretch “boy” into three syllables.

He loved to give me a hard time about my attendance at a college north of the Mason-Dixon line — “This here boy goes to a Yankee school, but we’ll forgive him for it” he’s say by way of introduction to others, not to mention my relative ignorance of the ways of the opposite sex.

“Boy, lemme tell you, when I was runnin’ my own oil company, I had all the poontang thrown at me I could shake a stick at. But most of them was married women, and I never do it with a married woman. I’d rather beat the meat than do it with a married woman” — which, in Colonel Bubba’s world, was worse than dying a virgin.

His favorite (actually, his only) topics of conversations were sex, his adventures in the Korean War, his life in business, and the 1942 University of Tennessee Volunteers football team, “coached by the great General Neyland, undefeated, untied, and unscored upon,” on which he played defensive end.

There was plenty of time to talk. We would usually catalog three or four properties by noon, finding them on unnamed and deserted streets, and drive around for the rest of the day. I can still hear him reproaching me, saying, “Boy, we’ve already done three for the day. If we do five or six, bossman will expect us to do that every day.”

He occasionally used the word “nigger” in these conversations, as in “There’s a nigger on Lamar Avenue that makes some fine barbeque.” I would tell him it was wrong to use that word, and he was genuinely surprised — “I don’t mean anything bad,” he would say, and he was as perplexed at my protests as I was of his use.

Don’t pick a fight with the Colonel

But he seemed to know a lot of black people — in the office, at restaurants, at the stores and shops we’d frequent while wasting time. He would embrace them, figuratively and literally, treating them with dignity, and if he didn’t think of them as his equals, he didn’t act like it.

I daresay he was an oddly complicated fellow ("three-dimentional," as they say in workshop) and far more intelligent than he let on. One minute, he would tell me ribald tales of encounters with Korean prostitutes, and the next, he’d be quoting A.E. Houseman. He was funny and witty, but bitter as well, twice having lost money, once in oil, the other in his own airline company. Or so he said, which was why he had to suffer the humiliation of working at a government job when he should have been retired.

There is a reason for reavealing all this, and it’s not to explain away Col. Bubba’s use of the n-word or his casual sexism. It’s that perhaps you get to know perhaps two or three real-life people like him in your lifetime. They’re burned into your brain as if you were cauterizing a wound. No matter how you feel about them, there is no getting rid of them.

In the end, all one can do is immortalize them. And if you don’t or don’t want to, you probably have better things to do than sit before a keyboard and summon the muses.

After ignoring the obvious, I tackle it with brutal honesty below.

I’ll just get right to the point. One reason I became a writer is that I thought it might help me get laid.

I didn’t consciously plan it that way, of course, because doing so would make me a very stupid person indeed: there are about 10 billion better ways to chase girls other than sitting before a typewriter, alone, unshaven, undressed, and depressed.

I could have tried making a lot of money. Or learned to play the guitar. Or bothered to actually ask someone out once in a while.

But men aren’t the brightest bulbs in the world when it comes to Little Elvis, in more ways than one. Without going into deep, ill-informed flights of Darwinian fancy, let’s just say that I, like 100 percent of the rest of the male population, have sought status in one form or another, and one of the main byproducts of status has been access to more than one ladyfriend, so to speak. And for me, status-seeking comes in the form of the written word.

The most popular scribes among us — those who are male, that is — have often found themselves surrounded by groupies, lit bimbos, and other ladies caught in the swoon of genius. A fellow Chicagoan and novelist once said Saul Bellow had "two hobbies. Philosophy and fucking."

Bellow was an extremely famous writer. There appeared to be no shortage of willing victims.

Or take Salman Rushdie. OK, he’s witty, brilliant, charming, a fantastic novelist, a would-be jihad victim, and one of my favorite writers, but he isn’t going to be modeling anytime soon. I don’t think he would have gotten Padma Lakshmi had he been less than famous, or merely an adequate novelist.

There are lots of ways to get status, of course, but I never fancied myself a financier, was never going to be a successful jock, and as far as guitar playing is concerned, I sound like Andre the Giant picking at a ukelele.

I never really thought of myself as handsome, for that matter. If I was going to get attention from the ladies, it would have to be through some other means, and though I can be accused of being a mite charming, demonstrative I am not. It’s not as if  I could hang a sign outside my house that said, "Ladies, Line Up Here for a Good Time With a Hot Guy" and expect any action save for a dog taking a crap on the doorstep.

It was rather pathetic, to be honest: like the a pizza-faced teen nerd that I had been, I secretly harbored a fantasy that my writing would show the world and the beautiful ladies inhabiting it the real me, which was funny, smart, brilliant, and worth a shag or two.

Once in a great while, my lust for words and my lust actually intersected. Once, I met an older lady at a party — I was 22, she was 33, and when she walked up to me, she threaded a finger through a ringlet of my hair and twisted it lightly, so I imagine she had other ideas than just debating the merits of Camus versus Sartre.

Sex? Yes, please

However, before the festivities began, I was forced to enter into conversation in which I revealed that although I had a boring job at a boring company, I was actually working on a novel. Which seemed to suit her just fine, though it was not a topic of post-coital conversation (which was as awkward as the sex was bad).

I dated another lady who, if not enthralled with my writing jones, demanded some form of creative expression from her men, which seemed to fuel her jets. 

And then there’s Wife. If I had not been a writer, I would have never met her, though it had nothing to do with my actual skill or status as a writer other than the mere fact that I wrote, since we met through graduate school, even if they were different graduate schools (long story).

But I imagine that it didn’t count as sex, since we got married.

I mean, that it didn’t count as merely sex. Sex and marriage. It’s a beautiful thing.