Shatterday

Introduction: MORTAL DREADS

With a touch of quiet pride the Author states that he has watched the Johnny Carson Show only once in his life. (The single blot on an otherwise exemplary record occurred when I was pressed, one night, into sitting through consummate dreariness to reach the moment when Robert Blake, a friend of many years even though he’s an actor, was to sit and talk to Orson Welles, one of my heroes despite his hawking of inferior commercial wines. It was a moment I wish had been denied me. Bob, a good and decent and talented man, clever, witty and articulate, perhaps driven mad by the fame and cheap notoriety of having become a television cult hero for several seasons, proceeded to insult Mr. Welles in a manner I suppose he thought was bright badinage. It was a maleficent spectacle in overwhelming bad taste, culminating in Bob’s passing a remark about Mr. Welles’s girth.

(Welles sat silently for a moment as the audience—and I—winced in disbelief and horror. Then he said, very softly, very softly, “My weight is correctable only with enormous difficulty at my age, but I live with it comfortably; as opposed to your bad manners.”)

There should be benign deities who would send ravens to pluck out one’s eyes so such sights could be avoided.

I did not need to see my friend make an ass of himself. And I sat there thinking, for a wonder, is this what a vast segment of the American viewing public truly accepts as “the rebirth of conversation”? This endless babble and confluence of self-serving “celebrities” who warm studio sets with the indispensable intelligence that they’ll be doing Pal Joey at the Country Squire Dinner Theatre in Lubbock, Texas from June 12th to 18th?

And I could not contain my sorrow that my friend had been driven mad by television, to sit there having been gulled into thinking he was having a “conversation” before so many millions of moon-white eyes in darkened bedrooms. But this time I will not inveigh against the Monster Video; that was the fulmination that served to introduce my previous collection of stories, Strange Wine.

No, this time I would speak of conversation; of speaking to the true and universal darkness that fills so much of our souls. Of mortal dreads and the value of such terrors as I present here.

I do a considerable number of college lectures every year. It helps pay the freight so I don’t have to write television ever again. From my lips to the ear of god…or whoever’s in charge. And frequently I will say something about the human condition that seems perfectly rational and proper to me, because I know we all share the same thoughts. Invariably, some feep in the audience will attempt to pillory me with the stunning accusation, “You only said that to shock!”

My response is always the same:

“You bet your ass, slushface. Of course I said it to shock you (or wrote it to shock you). I don’t know how you perceive my mission as a writer, but for me it is not a responsibility to reaffirm your concretized myths and provincial prejudices. It is not my job to lull you with a false sense of the rightness of the universe. This wonderful and terrible occupation of recreating the world in a different way, each time fresh and strange, is an act of revolutionary guerrilla warfare. I stir up the soup. I inconvenience you. I make your nose run and your eyes water. I spend my life and miles of visceral material in a glorious and painful series of midnight raids against complacency. It is my lot to wake with anger every morning, to lie down at night even angrier. All in pursuit of one truth that lies at the core of every jot of fiction ever written: we are all in the same skin…but for the time it takes to read these stories I merely have the mouth. You see before you a child who never grew up, who does not know it’s socially unacceptable to ask, ‘Who farted?’“

Thus I try to codify in noble terms the obsession with Art and the inability of the writer to stop writing, to get along with others, to view without rancor the world as a gem, at once pure and perfect. But that’s flapdoodle, of course. I write because I write. I can do no other.

It is the love of conversation.

I am anti-entropy. My work is foursquare for chaos. I spend my life personally, and my work professionally, keeping that soup boiling. Gadfly is what they call you when you are no longer dangerous, when the right magazines publish your work and you don’t have to seek out obscure publications as homes for the really mean stuff, when they ask you to come and discuss matters of import with “celebrities” on the Johnny Carson Show. I much prefer troublemaker, malcontent, pain in the ass, desperado. As I’ve said elsewhere, I see myself as a combination of Jiminy Cricket and Zorro. Thus do I ennoble myself in the times when all the simple joys I’ve forsworn rush back on me as chances lost, and I’m left with only the work and something Irwin Shaw said: “Since lam not particularly devout, my chances for salvation lie in a place sometime in the future on a library shelf.”

Why is he telling me all this?

He’s telling you all this because the feeps thought they were getting off a hot one when they accused him of merely writing to shock.

That’s my job. To stir the soup, to bite your thigh, to get you angry so you keep the conversation going. Don’t invite me to parties for pleasant chat. I want to hear the sound of your soul. Then I can translate it into the mortal dreads we all share and fire them back at you transmogrified, reshaped as amusing or frightening fables.

Look, it’s like this: I was in Utah doing some work for the Equal Rights Amendment late last year, and I said some things like this during a radio interview. So the interviewer, who was a very bright guy, pushed at it a little. He asked me to explicate some of these “mortal dreads” that we all share, that I thought I was illuminating by writing such weird and troubling stories. I thought about it a moment, and then in a fit of confession that passes for honesty I told him about writing the title story of this book, “Shatterday.”

“I was sitting in a hotel room in New York in the middle of a January snowstorm in 1975,” I said. “I had to have the story finished by 7:00 that night so I could present it at a reading uptown at 7:30, allowing myself time to get a cab and find the auditorium…and I was writing furiously, hardly thinking about how the story was creating itself —”

The interviewer looked at me oddly.

“It was creating itself?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I was just the machine that was putting it on paper. That story came out of secret places in my head and ran at the paper without regard for my breaking back or the deadline. It created itself. Well, I finished it barely in time, got downstairs, shoved an old lady out of the way to grab her cab in the snow, and just got uptown in time for the reading. I didn’t even have time to proofread the copy.

“So when I was in the middle of the lecture, reading the section where the lead character is having the argument with his alter ego about his mother, I realized for the first time that I wanted my mother to die.”

The interviewer looked uncomfortable.

“No, wait, listen,” I said hurriedly. “I didn’t mean that I wanted her to die, just to be gone. See, my mother was quite old at that time, she’d been extremely ill off-and-on for years, and in that eerie way we have of exchanging places with our parents when they grow old, I’d become the parent and she’d become the child; and I was responsible for her. I supported her, and tried to keep her comfortable down in Miami Beach where she was living, and that gave me pleasure, to play at being a real grownup son, and like that. But she was just a shadow. She hadn’t been happy in a long time, she was just marking out her days, and I wanted to be free of that constant realization that she was out there. I loved her, she was a nice woman. I didn’t have any rancor or meanness in me…I just had to admit that I wanted her gone.”

The interviewer looked really uncomfortable now.

“Well, oh boy, that was some helluva thing to have to admit to myself. ‘You slimy sonofabitch,’ I thought, and I was still reading aloud to the audience that had no tiniest idea what monstrous and hellish thoughts were tearing me up. ‘You evil, ungrateful, selfish prick! How the hell could you even consider something as awful as that? She never did anything to you, she raised you, put up with your craziness and always had faith in you when everyone else said you’d wind up in some penal colony or the chipmunk factory! You sleazy, vomitous crud, how can you even think of her being dead?’ And it was terrible, just terrible. I thought I was scum unfit to walk with decent human beings, to harbor these secret feelings about a perfectly innocent old woman. And I remembered what Eric Hoffer once wrote: ‘What monstrosities would walk the streets were some people’s faces as unfinished as their minds.’

“But there it was, in the story.I’d written it and had to confront it and learn to live with it.” It was like the line out of another story in this book, “ All the Lies That Are My Life,” where I mention the ugliness of simply being human. But I hadn’t thought of that line then. And the interviewer didn’t quite know what to say to me. What the hell can you say to some dude sitting there copping to wanting his mother to pass away?

Well, it was one of those call-in radio shows, and we started taking calls from Salt Lake citizens who were pissed off at an “outsider” coming in to tell them that Utah’s not ratifying the ERA was a sinful and mischievous act. And then, suddenly, there was a woman on the line, coming over the headphones to me in that soundproof booth, with tears in her voice, saying to me, “Thank you. Thank you for telling that about your mother. My mother was dying of cancer and I had the same thoughts and I hated myself for it. I thought I was the only person in the world who ever thought such an awful thing, and I couldn’t bear it. Thank you. Oh, thank you.”

And I thought of that heartrending scene in Jack Gelber’s play, The Connection, where the old Salvation Army sister who has been turned into a medical junkie by inept doctors says to this apartment full of stone-righteous street hypes, “You are not alone. You are not alone.”

I damned near started to cry myself. I wanted to hug that nameless woman out there in Salt Lake City somewhere, hug her and say you are not alone.

That’s why I tell you all this.

You are not alone. We are all the same, all in this fragile skin, suffering the ugliness of simply being human, all prey to the same mortal dreads.

When I lecture I try to say this, to say most of the fears you invent—atomic war, multinational conspiracies, assassination paranoias, fear of ethnic types, flying saucers from Mars—those are all bullshit. I inveigh against illogical beliefs and say that the mortal dreads are the ones that drive you to crazy beliefs in Scientology, est, the power of dope, hatred of elitism and intellectual pursuits, astrology, messiahs like Sun Myung Moon or Jim Jones, fundamentalist religions. I try to tell you that fear is okay if you understand that what you fear is the same for everyone.

Not the bogus oogie-boogie scares of Dan O’Bannon and Ridley Scott’s Alien, slavering creatures in the darkness that want to pierce your flesh with scorpion stinger tails and ripping jaws, but the fear of Gregor Samsa waking to discover he isn’t who he was when he went to bed; the fear of Pip in the graveyard; the fear of Huck finding his dead father on the abandoned houseboat. The fears to which we are all heir to simply because we are tiny creatures in a universe that is neither benign nor malign…it is simply enormous and unaware of us save as part of the chain of life.

And all we have to stand between us and the irrational crazy chicken-running-around-squawking terror that those mortal dreads lay on us is wisdom and courage.

That is why I tell you all this, and why I write to shock you and anger you and frighten you. To tell you with love and care that you are not alone.

These stories are about the mortal dreads.

Each one is a little different from all the others because, to fall back on words of Irwin Shaw again, “…in a novel or a play you must be a whole man. In a collection of stories you can be all the men or fragments of men, worthy and unworthy, who in different seasons abound in you. It is a luxury not to be scorned.”

And so, with the serious warning that you not try to pick out the pieces of the Author that went into the writing of each of these little cautionary tales, I give you another year or two of my life’s work, all of which say, with love and care, and the intent to anger, shock and frighten you…

Honest to god—or whoever’s in charge—you are not alone.