1. Someone asked
me a while back what my writing was about and I said, "It's about
place: buildings, cities, parks." I claimed to be writing
about these places mostly, and that the people in my stories were just
there to amuse the readers and hopefully hold their attention long enough
to get from A to B. Even as I said this however, I knew I was tap dancing
blindly: giving an answer that could pass, but not really addressing the
core. Somehow the question had never come up before, but bullshitting
was more fun than saying, "Hell, I don't know." At any rate,
people in my stories do more than just decorate locations. If they seem
incidental, it's not that they're merely devices, it's because that's
how people often are in my life: ghostly, fading in and out of view.
2. A guy I travel four and half hours by train to see, in order to enjoy
his company, is deaf in one ear. His working ear recently started ringing.
An operation was performed to correct the problem, but the ringing persisted.
The doctors explained that this was the brain missing the old sound that
Was there long enough to become burned into memory. It was a reflex nostalgia.
Now he must wear a sort of anti-hearing aid, a device that makes other
Sounds in his ear so that the brain eventually, having one too many steady
patterns to deal with, will sort of drop them all and he can go back to
hearing just what is there.
This reminded me of the first story I ever wrote and read out loud. It
was about a woman who was in a car with her brother when the two skidded
off the road and into a tree. Her brother died in the crash, but his death
screams continued to echo in her ears. She was first treated as a patient
who was "hearing things" until finally they realized that the
sound vibrations were real and not imagined. Her ear drums were actually
recreating the vibrations of her brother's fear and pain, a scar of sound.
The problem was impossible to correct and finally the only solution to
Preserving the girl's sanity (for these screams were not something she
could get used to, indeed they became increasingly less bearable) was
to sever the small bone that connected the eardrums to the membrane of
the inner ear that translates vibrations to the brain as sound. The girl
was then deaf, but relieved of the greater problem of the phantom screams.
In fact those screams did continue to set the eardrum to vibrate, but
the sound began and ended there in the now dead canal of her
ear. Her brother continued to call to her, but could no longer make himself
heard.
It struck me then, that since this first story, nearly everything I've
written has been about memories: those ghosts that live inside us, for
the most part buried, but there.
3. In 1989 I took a series of psychiatric tests just to see if I could
slant the results. I heard of people doing so and being prescribed wonderful
mood altering drugs and legal excuses to never have to work again. At
the time, I wasn't much of a druggie, but I did have some romantic longing
for official recognition that I was nuts. Crazy people are sexy (more
so then, but I still fall for them) because they're different without
even trying. The normal world is something to be suspected, a
little too pat to be believable, and so it's difference that
I seek in my objects of desire. Looking at Rorschach's ink blots could
maybe get me on that team of others, certifiable, even if I had to cheat
on the exam. I gave outrageous answers to simple questions and, when asked
to tell stories about various pictures, made up elaborate tales dripping
with psychosis ... That is, if the person giving the test were as simple
minded as I, he could have made such an interpretation. Instead, when
I was given the test results, the doctor said I had an active, healthy
imagination ... and an extreme fear of memory loss.
4. I've written many stories since the first, and though the theme of
memory is a clear thread uniting theme, I hadn't recognized this thread
until my half-deaf friend's condition reminded me of that story with the
woman who survived her brother in a car crash ... a story which I had,
in fact, forgotten until that moment.
5. In my mother's last days in the hospital, she asked about various
friends of mine and felt frustrated when she forgot one of their names.
"See what happens when you get old?" she said. But the truth
is, she always had a terrible memory. Everyone in my family does. She
just forgot that she was forgetful.
6. Antuan, a guy I know in New York, recently told me about having sex
with Casey Donovan, one of the most famous porn stars to come out of the
seventies, back in the days before he was "Casey Donovan." Antuan
said that the pre-porn king, who was a doorman at a hotel at the time,
used strawberry flavored lube to fuck him with. I passed this story on
to yet another friend who said, "I love those sorts of details that
we hold on to, almost cling to, as a sort of proof to ourselves that these
events did indeed occur. Strawberry, perfect! Most of the time,
our mind alters things, and those details that are clearest are the most
likely ones to have been invented. But they help us to keep the texture
of the memory, even if it's a false texture, so that the memory can feel--and
remain--true."
7. When I was dumped by a guy last summer (a real nut case, so you can
imagine how head over heals I was for him) I didn't have it in me to hate
him, was too depressed to even try, even though clinging to love is what
fuels the depression. My best girlfriend told me I should imagine that
he was away on some sort of important sabbatical; that we were still together,
but I had no means of contacting him and would just have to live with
that.
I wrote a short short story that basically followed her instructions.
In it I already started to rewrite my lover as someone else, changing
all his details in order to start the process of forgetting. Though it's
possible that by altering the details, my true goal was to anchor the
story (the one I wanted to remember) in memory.
The story is titled Dust.
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