The Dragon Griaule

THE MAN WHO PAINTED THE DRAGON GRIAULE

The seminal idea for Griaule occurred to me when I was stuck for something to write about while attending the Clarion Writer’s Workshop. I went out onto the campus of Michigan State University and sat under a tree and smoked a joint to jog my brain. I then wrote down in my notebook the words ‘big fucking dragon.’ I felt exceptionally clever. Big stuff, I thought, is cool.

The idea of an immense paralyzed dragon, more than a mile in length and seven hundred feet high, that dominates the world around him by means of its mental energies, a baleful monster beaming out his vindictive thought and shaping us to its will . . . this seemed an appropriate metaphor for the Reagan Administration, which was then busy declaiming that it was ‘Morning In America,’ laying waste to Central America, and starting to rip the heart out of the constitution. That likely explains the political content carried in one degree or another by the stories. So in a sense, the Griaule stories concern two mythical beasts, a dragon and an addled president whose avatar is an undying monster . . . or vice versa.

I don’t know what it is that has brought me back so many times to Griaule. Generally speaking, I hate elves, wizards, halflings, and dragons with equal intensity. Perhaps it’s because I saw a list once of fictional dragons ordered by size and mine was the biggest. This caused me to think that I might make a career of writing stories about the biggest whatever. The biggest gopher, an aphid the size of a small planet, a gargantuan dust bunny, and so forth. Fortunately I never followed up on the idea.

When I returned home to Ann Arbor from the workshop I asked my brother-in-law, James Wolf, an artist and the guitarist in my band, if he would make me a drawing of the dragon – I wanted something to meditate upon while working out the story. I expected something rudimentary, but he did the dragon in water colors on flimsy, oversized sheets of paper and taped them together, thereby creating a rendering eight feet long and three feet high, complete with all the vats and ladders and etcetera that were part of my conception. I tried to preserve it as best I could, but eventually it became tattered and unsalvageable. Anyway, I stared at the painting for a year or so, endured a thoroughly unhappy love affair that formed the emotional core of the story, and eventually wrote it all down.

THE SCALEHUNTER’S BEAUTIFUL DAUGHTER

This story had its genesis in the notion that Griaule might be infested with parasites. It was an interesting notion and I envisioned the plot to be more-or-less an excuse for doing a taxonomical survey of the dragon’s interior, something that would have suited a more novelistic approach to the subject. Indeed, ‘The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter’ was initially intended to be a portion of a novel, or rather a series of stories linked by excerpts from fictive works about the dragon, but I soon realized I had little desire to read such linkages and even less to write them.

Then, too, I wrote the story during a stressful time. My mother was dying and I was living in her cramped Ormond Beach condo, assisting in her care, a grim business. The movie theater in the mall close by showed nothing I wanted to see (Yentl had played there for more than a year). I had no friends in the area – I was the youngest person in the condominium by three decades – and I had no money to speak of, no car, nowhere to go for a break except for the Denny’s down the street. Thus I was inclined to write a sunnier story (by my lights, anyway), more of a straight-ahead escapist fantasy than I might have done otherwise.

I roughed out the story while drinking coffee at Denny’s, usually in the early morning hours, writing in bursts of fifteen, twenty minutes and then running over to the condo to check on my mom. Not a lot of happy people come into a Denny’s at three o’clock in the morning, at least this was my observation. Most of the ones who seemed happy were drunks whose happiness would be short-lived, and the rest were loners, addicts, insomniacs, hookers, cops, sour-looking old men who’d had a bad night at the dog track, and losers of various stripe.

The star of the graveyard shift at this particular Denny’s was Fred the short order cook, a swarthy black-haired guy about my age who cracked wise-ass jokes through the serving window and carried on a sardonic and often amusing dialogue with the regulars. When cops stopped by for take-out he would surreptitiously mimic their radio calls – he did this with such authenticity, static and tinny voices and all, the cops would grab their walkie-talkies and respond. One night two cops went back into the kitchen and gave him a stern talking-to. Thereafter the fake radio calls ceased and, possibly as a result of this restraint upon his comic stylings, Fred’s commentary grew increasingly hostile and embittered. He started yelling at customers and soon was let go. He was rehired a couple of months later following a breakdown and a stay in a mental health facility, or so I was told. Whatever the facts were, he had lost his edge. His jokes provoked polite laughter, not legitimate mirth, and he took to offering advice that was patently the product of time spent in group therapy and was not well received.

The world of Denny’s became my world and, as tragedies like Fred’s (seemingly minor compared to my own) played out around me, I sat there drawing dragon heads on napkins, scribbling in my notebook, canoodling with one of the waitresses, living as best I could in the jaundiced light . . . the kind of light that might have shone from a cracked and dusty lantern that illuminated some claustrophobic and hermetic fissure deep within Griaule’s mountainous bulk.

THE FATHER OF STONES

I remember little about the creation of this story, mainly because I was under the influence of the neighborhood where I wrote it. I lived during the early and mid-eighties in the Georgetown area of Staten Island, the neighborhood closest to the ferry terminal, on Westervelt Avenue, a street that aspired to be a crime wave and was populated by drug dealers, hookers, smalltime monsters, a few brave souls who considered themselves the vanguard of a movement toward gentrification and would talk rebar with you for hours, and, oddly enough, a handful of genre folks: the horror writer Craig Spector, Beth Meachem and Tappan King (at the time, editors at Berkley and Twilight Zone respectively), me, and Maureen McHugh, all living within a block of one another.

Two townhouses down from me was a crack house, its front yard littered with rusted lawnchairs and motorcycle parts, run by a fake Rasta guy from Brooklyn, Nicky, who had dropped a dime on someone higher up the food chain and in exchange had been given carte blanche by the cops. Every morning the schoolkids would stop by for their rocks and sometimes the cops would pass the house and wave to Nicky, who – the soul of expansiveness – would return the salute. He also ran an illegal taxi service and maintained a string of hookers who operated out of the abandoned cars along New York Bay, and most nights would get into screaming fights on the street out front of my house. Drug dealers wearing Just Say No T-shirts made plaintive cries beneath my window at every hour of the day. I hand-wrote most of a novel called ‘Kingsley’s Labyrinth,’ stopping only when I realized I had filled eleven notebooks with an indecipherable script that resembled seismograph readings, and I hung out with people whom I would normally run from – Uzi-toting Cubans and so forth. There were frequent gunshots and each morning when I walked out, my footsteps crunched due to the empty crack vials littering the sidewalks – it was as if a kind of glassine hail had fallen during the night.

My downstairs neighbor, a beautiful black transsexual named Renee, constantly fought with me over her right to play Connie Francis albums on her deck beneath my bedroom window at 6 a.m., an argument ended when someone cut her throat, broke all her LPs, slashed her pretty blouses, and put bleach in her fish tank. These and other neighborhood tragedies came to occupy my attention, and I grew increasingly paranoid and unsound. The then-New York City mayor, Ed Koch, would once a month herd together a bunch of the most deranged homeless people in Manhattan and ship them over to Staten Island on a late-night ferry – his way of cleaning up the city. We’d wake the next morning to find a fresh crop of schizophrenics wandering the streets, talking to the CIA, to aliens, making phone calls to heaven. Most drifted back to Manhattan, but a few took up residence, including this one guy who was given a home by someone and built a life-sized, authentic-looking electric chair and every Fourth of July weekend would drag said chair out onto the traffic island on Victory Boulevard, strap himself in, and grin at the commuters. No one to my knowledge tried to stop him – it was as if the authorities accepted this as an appropriate commentary. To top it all off I began dating a businesswoman who appeared at the outset to be level-headed, stable, but three weeks into the relationship started breaking into my apartment to clean it and one night announced that she was a ninja and capable of starting fires with her eyes. We didn’t make it very long. In my mental state, the last thing I wanted was a woman who could incinerate me on a whim.

Good times.

Somewhere in the midst of all this was a dragon, but it seemed quite mundane when contrasted with the vivid weirdness of the gangster fantasy in which I lived.

LIAR’S HOUSE

For much of the ’00s I lived in Vancouver, Washington, essentially a bedroom community for Portland, Oregon, a gigantic strip mall with an endless supply of unprepossessing, unattractive people embarked upon the consumption of corn dogs and reality TV. This was my initial take on the town, at any rate, because, having grown up in a suburb, having steeped in its flavorless juices, I tend to loathe such places. But at the same time I firmly believe that the human species does not encompass a great range of intelligence, that the difference between an Einstein and an idiot is much less than we might imagine, and I am certain that people who are inarticulate and stolid and apparently thick often have interior lives every bit as complex and eccentric and rich as those of showier models. ‘Liar’s House’ received some criticism at the time of publication for the literate interior life of its ox-like protagonist. The criticism may have been deserved, yet this narrative tactic is not without precedent – there have been countless incidences of savant narrators throughout literature and, for my part, I’ve known plenty of uneducated people who were incapable of expressing themselves in precise language, yet had other means of self-expression and were extremely precise in their comprehension of the world, of what was going on around them. In any case, the character of my protagonist was informed by the people with whom I was surrounded. I suppose you might think of him as the personification of Vancouver, WA.

Even a paralyzed dragon must grow and change, and for this story I decided during the course of writing it that Griaule would want children – how then would he go about it? I assumed that he wanted children due to the natural desire to procreate, to create a legacy, but it might have added to the story if I had thought the matter through, because when I did so several years later I came up with an idea that would have made the link between this story and the last more apparent. I was tempted to go back in and rework the story, but decided to let things stand, figuring that it would be more honest, more illuminating as to how a writer’s style evolves, to let the story stand as written.

Then perhaps I was just being lazy.

THE TABORIN SCALE

This story was a premature attempt to kill off Griaule, but the odd thing about these stories is that each one seems to breed a multitude of possibilities . . . and even in the final story, especially in the final story, it seemed every few pages there was the germ of yet another story. It was as if the dragon didn’t want to die and was offering up intriguing possibilities, tempting me to spare him. Now I suspect that Griaule won’t be done until I am.

I began writing these story notes while saddled with an apocalyptic case of the flu, and so had no clear idea of what I was about . . . though it seems that a main thread running through the notes is the relationship of writing to environment. However, in the case of ‘The Taborin Scale’ I have nothing salient to say on the subject. I was living in Portland, Oregon, where I now reside. My life was basically untroubled, comfortable, the writing went easily, the story just popped out. The only thing remotely interesting about the story from a background perspective is the guy upon whom the main character, George, was based – a spindly punk rocker I knew casually in New York City who made a living by going to garage sales in upstate New York, searching for antique collectibles, which he then resold. This struck me as a very organized activity for someone who by night wore his hair in spikes and howled demonically into the mike and would spit up into the air and try and catch a loogey on his face. I’m going to have to assume that this is the way writers feel who have an office and a regular home and don’t leave their possessions in storage lockers scattered across the country – I live in constant anticipation of seeing my stuff on one of those reality shows that focus on a small group of auction buyers who bid on abandoned lockers, watching the winning bidder paw through my junk, gazing with perplexity at a Hugo or a Howard or some such, wondering about what kind of loser bothers to store empty cigarette packs in a box of scribbled-in books and dirty laundry.

Takes all kinds, I guess.

THE SKULL

One night I was playing pachinko in a crowded arcade on Avenida Seis in Guatemala City and, as sometimes happens, I got so into the game that I lost track of what was happening around me. When I looked up I discovered that not only was the arcade deserted, the proprietor preparing to roll down the metal door, but the street was devoid of traffic, with only a few frightened-looking pedestrians scurrying for cover – Avenida Seis was like Broadway in New York City, busy at every hour, and I knew something bad must have occurred to clear it so quickly. (Unbeknownst to me, a group of left-wing students and Indian activists had taken over the Spanish embassy, where an ex-president of Guatemala was being feted, and were holding him and the embassy staff hostage, their purpose being to initiate a dialogue on land reform.) I began running, heading for my hotel, seeing military vehicles (Jeeps, armored anti-personnel carriers, etc.) moving along the side streets – but my hotel was a long ways off and, since I was a gringo and paranoid, fearful of being picked up and beaten, or worse, when I saw a man slip into a doorway I ducked in after him and found myself in a gay nightclub. In addition to a lot of young guys ranging the bar, there were several dozen attractive women seated at the tables. They were all partying as if nothing untoward were happening out in the streets and so, feeling relatively secure, I stuck around for the next several hours, learning from the bartender that the women were ‘loritas’ (parakeets), upper class wives and mistresses who cultivated triviality as an armor against reality, and that their presence in the club served to protect the gay men from harassment. He went on to say that if I were so disposed it would be easy to get laid – many of the women were promiscuous to a fault – but there would be risk involved, since their husbands and boyfriends were mostly right-wingers and/or associated with the military.

The left-wing group holding the embassy was reacting to the fact that when the owners of immense ranches in the north of the country found that Indians had settled on their land and lived there long enough to establish legal rights, they did not take the matter to the courts, where they were certain to lose, but simply hired the military to massacre the Indians and destroy their settlements – the left-wingers hoped by taking action to initiate a dialogue about land reform. The government’s reaction was to firebomb the building several hours after the takeover, killing everyone inside, including the Spanish ambassador and the ex-president, and thereafter to shut down Guatemala City for a week, closing the airport, burning all the buses that attempted to leave or enter the city, making a show of power. It was an extremely nervous time, people jumping at the least unexpected sound, a heavy military presence on almost every street corner day and night. I’d been planning to leave for Honduras the following day and, prevented from this, I spent a good bit of time at the nightclub during the week. Though I wasn’t as adventurous as my protagonist with regards to the women who habituated the place, I did have a number of conversations with some of them, and it was on these that I based the character of Luisa Bazan and the dynamic that serves a key plot point in the story.

Of all the Griaule stories, this is the most grounded in my life experience and in the political realities of Central America, a place where I’ve spent a considerable amount of time. Temalagua is, of course, a scramble of Guatemala, and the Party of Organized Violence was an actual Guatemalan entity, very much on the ascendancy when I was first there. I could point out a dozen other correspondences between fiction and my Tru-Life Adventures in this piece, but that would be overkill. The important thing, at least to me, is that writing ‘The Skull’ returned me to my original motivation in writing about Griaule, and if there are to be further stories about the dragon and his milieu, I think they’ll be more focused upon the central theme, the political fantasy, than those that preceded it.