Further Proof That He's Literary

When I got the news yesterday that my latest story was going to be published I couldn't help but thinking, Huh. That's interesting.

I thought it was interesting because it's one of those stories that was fueled by the Wily Republican--things he did, things he said, things he was. I wrote the story the week after I moved away from Minnesota and back to New York. It wasn't the greatest week I ever had, and it's important to remember that I spent most of that week pantsless and wandering around my childhood home thinking Oh my God oh my God oh my God. My mood was foul. My hygiene was questionable. My head was a mess. And when I sat down in front of the computer all I could think about was what I'd left behind, and the Wily Republican was one of those things.

While he was in college, the Wily worked at the nearby psychiatric treatment center, where the state threw the most despicable people it could dig up. He told me so many stories. There was a man who committed a string of rapes by first hitting women joggers with his car, knocking them down, taking away their only means of escape--their fast legs--and then he would get out, drag them off the beaten path and finish what he'd come to do. Another man was locked away because he'd kept his wife locked in a closet for days without food and water. Shortly after his arrival at the treatment center, he was beaten within an inch of his life by someone who had fashioned a heavy whip out of an old sock stuffed with batteries.

The Wily often looked tired when he told me these stories, and I wasn't sure how he--or anyone--did it, how they kept going back to a place like that without snapping, without taking these people up in their own hands and taking them apart little by little. Snapping bones, tearing out hair, snipping off fingertips.

So I wrote that. I wrote all of that. And I made the main character fall in love, a hard love that, when held up next to his life and work, made the people he watched over seem even more repulsive than they already were.

I like the story quite a bit, so I was happy to see it get picked up--especially because it got picked up by the first place I sent it to, and that's something that hasn't happened to me before. But what was more interesting to me was this: that's the second Wily Republican piece to go. Sometimes I think he and I lived our strange intersecting lives for three years just so he could feed me inspiration, just so we could run around town and do strange things that would eventually turn up in my writing. Sometimes I think the WR is a lucky charm. Sometimes I think that's worth all the times he made me cry, all the ways he made me crazy.

In the story that just got taken, there's a line the main character thinks the first time he sees his to-be-wife. He's looking and looking and looking at her. He can't stop. He doesn't know what it is exactly, but there's just something about her that takes away his ability to talk, breathe, move. He keeps on staring and thinks, Now that's someone worth knowing. That's one of my favorite lines of the story, mostly because I like to think that's what the Wily thought when he was first getting to know me. That he was watching me be quirky-strange-bumbling me and thinking, This is someone I'd like to know for a long time. I like to think this because I know that during those first few months we knew each other I kept looking at him and listening to him tell his stories, and I couldn't help thinking with almost complete certainty that this was going to be trouble, trouble, trouble, but I was going to go along with it anyway because it felt like it was going to be really good, really worth it, one of those things that would change the way I looked at the world.