“Because it’s trouble.
Trouble is something we shouldn’t talk about. I guess we can’t help ourselves if we think about it, but that doesn’t say we have to talk about it.”
- David Goodis, The Blonde on the Street Corner
Two years ago we had to rebuild 60% of our home. We bought a lemon. A few weeks ago, because of a brand new spate of home time, I finally finished my writing room. My new office, our old bedroom. Big and ready for all my books. I unpacked Charles Bukowski’s Factotum and read it which put me in mind of David Goodis’ The Blonde on the Street Corner which I hadn’t read since I was much younger than I will be tomorrow. I started rereading. It takes place during The Great Depression and everyone has rips in their clothes and holes in their shoes and money is tight and the future’s uncertain unless you are certain you don’t have a future and
Shit.
Edna Daly’s plea - the quote up at the top - kicked me hard where a guy tends to notice. Because we are in a pandemic. A fucking pandemic. Like when I sat in a movie theater and watched Dustin Hoffman in Outbreak and they had a very clever scene in a movie theater where somebody coughed and you went, “Holy crap, people are coughing in this movie theater; am I gonna die?” and now we are living that stupid moment and
Shit.
I haven’t been talking about it because it’s trouble. I write a lot of trouble straight out of my head because I dig it, because I create it, but writing non-fiction has never been my thing. I’ve meant to do a whole lot more blogging, but I always end up writing more fiction when my fingers sense keys. Same with poetry. I read both voraciously, have favorites among both, can guide a student or client through writing either like gangbusters because I understand and celebrate how each works, but as far as my writing, they’re just not my thing.
The pandemic hit
Worlds imploded and we sat
But drink carried on.
Okay, I do like haiku. I like fiction most, though. Way by far. Crazy, funny, violent, profane, surreal, gut-wrenching, heart-shifting, ethos-exploding, destroying, deconstructing, defining, dividing, divining storytelling because I love the art of it. I just don’t write about real trouble in specifics with full orchestration and five-part harmony. I didn’t write about my finances collapsing with my house because I didn’t want to be some sadsack using his words to bemoan his lot. No, I’m just here to have a good time with occasional gobsmack.
When I got married, I was in the midst of my “big break.” This seems like a hairpin turn in this essay and it is. I told you. I don’t like writing non-fiction, so just take this as it comes. Anyway, I was about to arrive. Big time, all over the place. I’d secured a gig with a film director to co-write a sequel to a well-received indie in the time when indies were hot and Harvey Weinstein was cool, a trusted hero to the unsung and artful. A time facing the wrong direction. My wife and I were freshly betrothed and I was gone every weekend because this was the big one. I missed her favorite cousin’s funeral. I had to write.
It didn’t pan out.
You know that scene in that movie where the heroes cover themselves in the guts and goo of zombies so the other zombies will think they’re just other zombies?
Yeah, that’s my plan.
But still I write. I am a storyteller, a creator of weird and joyously cankerous worlds and this brings me glee and gratification. I am a college professor and professing pleases me profoundly. I am unknown except where I am not. Those who find their art through some help of mine give me perhaps the most happiness, at least tied with writing myself. I am the husband to the wonderful wife who agreed to eschew her honeymoon years for my dreams and a father to three life-giving children – 1, 3, and staring hard at 8 years old – and here’s the thing: never have I spent more time with any of them. Never have I been happier. I am rediscovering my place as more than contributing winner of wheat products. I am a full-time co-disciplinarian and playmate. Everyday I wake up, stumble downstairs with them for breakfast, then slide into my office to remotely interact with my students.
We talk, debate, discuss, deride, debunk, laugh, struggle, rise, succeed and laugh again in now-online classes. I miss being among them, but we just keep trucking, though they know nothing of trucking or why one would want to keep it. (We worshipped our forebears’ culture; they do not.) The joy of the classroom is still there.
In fact, not only am I still doing everything I love, I’m now doing it almost exclusively. I’m not dying here, not feeling trapped or isolated. I’m happily hanging with my people. Just not my sisters, their people, my parents, my in-laws, our friends, their children and
Shit. We’re in trouble.
Tonight, fired by Charles Bukowski into David Goodis, one of my absolute heroes of abject, cold print despair, I read about a jobless man standing on a corner coveting the awful spouse of his brother-in-suffering’s suffering brother and asked Alexa to spark my whiskey-worn memory as to which years were The Great Depression only to be reminded there were eleven of them.
Eleven years of Trouble.
“Alexa, how long did the Spanish Flu last?” I asked before I could check my idiocy.
“Blah, blah, blah, blah that started in 1918 and ended in 1920.”
Two whole years of the deadly, dripping, invisible, suffocating, loved-one-snatching Trouble.
I’m really happy at home, but at the concept of two years trouble I feel an unbearable yen to go to a store sans prophylactics, to order, touch, carry food absent of worry, to get my mail in seconds flat without utilizing new gold standard disinfectants. Tonight, Goodis and his great depression on the desk beside me, tapped bottle of Dickel rye in the kitchen behind me, I realize writing about it doesn’t make me some sadsack bemoaning my lot because it’s all our lot. Maybe Goodis is right and sometimes we need to talk about trouble if we want any chance of surviving it. Maybe even write about it. Big or small. Ours or ours. Fiction or non-fiction.
I mean, at the least it owes us a good story.
- Christian De Matteo, 4/22/20