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And now for the final chapter

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            Kate came by early in the Cougar. Ingrid got up to see me off. Lyle was leaving to go to work. Susan slept. Russell sat on his couch on the porch, drinking beer and watching early morning TV on the portable black and white. The house was peaceful, calm. Ingrid waved a tender goodbye from the door­way. All I had to do was get in the car and go.

            The moment of going provided a focus on the receding house. Inside the Cougar, reality and time were linked to no houses. The moment of go­ing extended outward into a prolonged transition, like one of those endlessly changing Dead jams that segue in a hundred different directions before the full surging power of the band converges on a single resonating chord that an­nounces the end of the song they were playing as it fades into the beginning of the next song, the next new song in the sequence. The music never stops.

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            My younger sister, Kate, often came by the house and parked in front when she went to the beach. She was dating a doctor who was also a Grateful Deadhead with an extensive library of live recordings, which I had been bor­rowing a few at a time for several months. Kate was excited about the upcom­ing tour. Through her doctor friend, Doc, she was connected to a vast network of other Deadheads. She herself was “a Dead virgin,” and looking forward with great anticipation to her first Dead concert.

            She had extra tickets for me if I wanted to go. Two shows, at Hamp­ton, Virginia and Morgantown, West Virginia.

            “It’s pretty much worked out,” she said. “We get to Charlotte and park the car. Pick up another ride there.”

            “That’s it?”

            “That’s it,” she said. “How do you feel about driving Gloria to Char­lotte? Think she’ll make it?”

            “If it doesn’t rain,” I said.

            “My car’s too small. So is Doc’s.”

            “It would be better if we had windshield wipers,” I said.

Part 3

Writing

Describe your writing process.  Where and when do you write best?  How often do you write, and how much do you write at a time?

I write best in the mornings.  I’m a morning person, generally, but late at night, also.  It all depends.  Lately, I’m a weekend writer.  When I’m working on something nowadays, I have to be adaptable.  At any moment, my daughter might want me to watch her stand on her head or something.  I try to comply.  I do more rewriting than writing these days, but when I’m working on something, I’ll stay with it for hours, as long as I can.

Who are some of your favorite writers?  Or who are some writers who have influenced your work?  In The Route especially I’ve detected plot elements that I might call “Adult Kerouac”: the sort of vagabond existence that Kerouac writes about, except in your work it’s tied to characters who still feel strongly about being involved in society, who still feel strong emotions for their families, who still feel like they want to accomplish something other than being a vagabond, exemplified by Pete in The Route.  How do you feel about this characterization?

I never think of Kerouac in relation to The Route.  Although he was an early influence, as he was on most of my generation, I soon found that I couldn’t write that way: the free-flowing, headlong rush into the midnight of a thousand crazy dreams kind of a thing.  Not for long, anyway.  Although what you call “Adult Kerouac” might well be a reflection of the aftermath of the beat/hipster lifestyle.  After the glory of youth’s debauch the piper must be paid.

I read the Beats in college and had every intention of following the same tracks, riding the rails, hitching, hoboing, writing my own vainglorious novel.  I did that and it’s safely tucked away in drawer where it belongs.  Along the way, I found a lot of writers I admired, but I found that I couldn’t write like most of them, either.

For The Route, I used, as a model for tone, Steinbeck’s Tortilla Flat.  That little novel, to me, is perfect.  I’ve reread it a bunch of times. 

First person narratives always attracted me, particularly what I call the “desperate narrative,” like James M. Cain’s Past All Dishonor, for example, in which a Confederate spy holed up in a cave hastily writes his story while the Union army closes in on him.  In these stories desperation rules.  The rock is rolling downhill throughout.  A man will do anything for love, even murder.  James M. Cain owned that genre. 

I went though all the hard boiled crime novelists.  I wanted to write those cheap paperbacks with bad men and sexy women on the covers.  I was determined to master the first person narrative but as time went by, I did a lot more reading than writing.  What I did write tended towards the personal.

The first writer who was my truest teacher of style was Andre Gide.  His novels, his notebooks, everything he wrote spoke to me of a narrative ideal: a personal, intimate tone that quickly establishes a confidential bond with the reader.   What he wrote about never mattered as much as the way he wrote.  But I was too young then to rely on style alone.  I needed a story to tell and I didn’t have one.

Current writers I greatly admire are Nick Tosches, whose In The Hand of Dante is the novel of a lifetime, James Ellroy, whose output seems to have slowed down of late, and Cormac McCarthy, whose work towers over most modern literature.

You have mentioned to me that The Route was based largely on actual events.  Why is it that you have relied on autobiographical events in your writing, and how has this differed from any writing you’ve done that was entirely fictional?

Louis Ferdinand Celine bowled me over with Death on the Installment Plan and soon after, Henry Miller swept me away on the sea of his stories.  I had tried to write pure fiction, but the writers I loved most were raconteurs, storytellers, personalities so strong they couldn’t be separated from their stories.  In college, a friend turned me on to Diary of the Seducer by Kierkegaard, a self-contained fragment all but hidden inside the tome, Either/Or, seventy stunning pages of wickedly honest narration.  I wanted to do that, write something so true you could not put it down.

I’d made up a few imaginary tales, but the stories and anecdotes I heard people tell, stories of real people’s lives were always the better stories, to me.  I came to the realization that I was not the kind of writer who was inclined to conjure up stories out of nothing.  Unless they were grounded in some kind of truth or reality, the stories I made up didn’t matter much to me.  Once I accumulated a few interesting experiences of my own, I tried to tell them the best I could.  By the time I had mentally filtered the experience, edited the dialog, changed the names, elaborated, exaggerated and introduced a point to an often pointless scenario, I felt pretty secure about calling it fiction rather than fact.  I never set out to write factual stories.  My view of fiction is: change the names and leave out the boring parts.

Along the way, I involved other people.  The Route was based in reality, no question.  The narrator, Peter Foster, was based on the actor and writer, Bruce Kerr.   I could never have written from Bruce Kerr’s perspective and called my narrator Bruce Kerr.  I’m not Bruce and Peter Foster is not Bruce either.  Peter Foster is a pale shadow of the Bruce Kerr I knew, a fictional approximation of a great friend.

Have you had any subsequent troubles due to including reflections of real people in your stories?

Not yet.  Time will tell.  Many characters in my stories and novels were drawn from real people.  Most of them, in fact.  Maybe they value their anonymity so much that they’ll point out to people, “Hey, that’s me in that book.”  No one’s ever likely to know who any of these characters are, or were based on, originally.  A lot of them are already dead, and eventually, they’ll all be dead.   I’m the only one who remembers them in my own particular way.  It seems doubtful to me that anyone is likely to sue me over mis-characterization.  Anyway, it’s a chance I’ve chosen to take.

Is there any advice you would give to young writers about the craft of writing?

Be sure to come back tomorrow to read the sixth and penultimate chapter of Doing the Dead – 1983, “Dawn of the Dead.”

We’ve also got a Christmas story by Michael Pitassi, Baptism By Ice Water: A Christmas Tale.

And, two poems in a series by Katie Friedman, First Date and Physical Love.