The Virtues of Venting
Sometimes it’s good to get angry. We get so enured to the constant barrage
of disturbing news – personal, local and global – that we become indifferent.
And the petty indignities that we suffer build up and we don’t even notice because,
“that’s just the way things are”. But the awareness of it all gets under our
collective skins and sometimes, like a boiler that reaches its failing point,
something’s got to give.
I’m not saying we should all fly off the handle at every perceived slight, but
sometimes it’s better not to turn the other cheek. Like that scene in Network,
where Peter Finch implores his viewers to go to their windows and scream into
the streets, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” A good
outburst like that can be cathartic.
What’s the point? As a writer, I always am looking for motive. I want to understand
why people do the things they do. But, if I do say so, I’m a pretty level headed
guy. I know how to keep my emotions in check. When I was younger I spent a night
in jail because I didn’t know when to shut my big mouth, and I got in other
kinds of trouble more than a few times mouthing off. So I’ve mellowed. But the
problem is that now I usually give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I always
assume that they’re operating from genuine good motives. I have a hard time
believing the worst of anyone.
That makes it hard to create good villains. If you’re always looking for the
best in everyone, you tend to make apologies for their behavior. I rarely get
down to cases and call people out for what they do.
The simple fact is that life is full of good and bad. Usually the bad’s not
something big and horrible like The Holocaust or John Wayne Gacey. More often
bad comes in small packages, like a betrayal or deceit. Sometimes it’s simply
caustic ennui. In this life you realize that, sooner or later, everyone will
let you down, even the people that you trust the most. And beyond that there
are just really rotten people in the world; people who don’t give a shit about
anything but themselves, people who would rather lie than tell the truth, people
who will say one thing and do the other. Rather than just taking that all in
stride, sometimes it’s good to get good and pissed off about it.
It’s those people, the casually indifferent, that I’m trying to understand,
not the really Evil People. I do believe that evil exists, and that sometimes
it’s heredity rather than environment, that some people are simply born under
a bad sign and that they’re “fated” to act out in terrible ways. It happens.
What I’m more interested in are the casual acts of indifference and cruelty.
Like the people who can watch while a person is mugged on the street outside
their window and do nothing about it. Or like the Wal-mart shoppers the other
day that trampled over the worker at the store on Long Island. Reportedly after
the death of the young man was announced, and shoppers were told to clear the
premises, they refused, shouting that they had been on line waiting to get in
so they weren’t going anywhere.
Is that crazy or what?
I’m not trying to throw a damper on the joys of this holiday season. I spent
Thanksgiving with my family in Sarasota; my brother in law and I fished on the
beach, we all ate ourselves silly and watched the kids play and everyone we
met was uniformly nice and full of the good energy of the day.
But still that specter of those Long Island shoppers haunts me. That’s what
got me started on this whole thing. I assume that if you took all of them on
an individual basis, you’d find the stampeders to be decent folk, certainly
not murderers. But they were so concerned that they be the first to be in line
to buy a big screen TV or a Wii that they killed a man to make that happen.
The report says that when the EMT’s arrived they had to fend off the crowd as
they attempted to perform CPR on the victim or the
EMT’s would have been trampled too.
That’s evil, even if it’s not with a capital E. And what those people were thinking,
feeling the bodies underneath their feet, keeping on toward the shelves while
a man lie dying, is what gets my attention. Those people who were there are
going to be sitting around the house on Christmas Day, playing with their new
toys. What are they going to feel? Will any of them go out and, say, work at
a soup kitchen or go to church because of what took place? Or are they going
to simply shrug it off and say it wasn’t their fault; that the guy was an idiot
for being where he was, or Wal-Mart should have had better policies about crowd
control or something like that?
I wonder. Because I have a feeling that the great majority of those people are
going to respond in a way that’s more geared toward apathy than apology. That
gives me something to think about when I’m thinking about character. It’s a
very expensive insight into how the world works and it makes me mad as hell.
I’ll use it and I’ll write about it, but other than that, there’s not a lot
I can do. I guess I just have to take it.
— Ric Hess, 1 day ago
What Would Hunter S. Thompson Do?
Last time I logged on I was rambling on about famous authors who were also famous drinkers. I started out with a list of some of the most obvious but I made a glaring omission; what compendium of notoriously alcoholic scribes would be complete without mention of the late, great Hunter S. Thompson.
As I write this, it being Election Day, it’s even more appropriate to pay tribute to the Guru of Gonzo. In rants that ran a wide gamut – exposing everything from the fascist machinations of Tricky Dick Nixon to rabid, incisive attacks on George W’s weak-minded, criminal incumbency – Thompson was never one to shy from a fight. That he was invariably spot on in his observations was just a little icing on the cake; gravy you might say. He saw our country veering into the abyss of unfettered greed and ham-handed country club cronyism long before it became the popular drumbeat of the present day sheep who pontificate on the public stage.
I never had the pleasure of meeting him, but I miss the animate idea that Hunter S. Thompson still exists out there in his enclave at Woody Creek. His presence in the world was, to me, similar to the existence of the original Billy Goat Tavern, down on Hubbard Street, or Rosa’s Blues Bar out on Armitage – both storied institutions here in Chicago. I don’t go to either place often enough but I love the thought of them, I’d miss them if they were gone. I miss the fact of Hunter S. Thompson being alive on this earth.
I first read Thompson when I stumbled upon a copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the year that I turned eighteen. I was living in a roach infested apartment on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas with three drug addled M.I.T. reprobates who had come seeking relief from the brutal recession that was strangling the northlands. That I’d ridden a Greyhound Bus for twenty-eight dismal hours, straight into the humid clutches of a Texas summer, looking for work, gives you an idea of just how hopeless things were amidst those first, dying spasms of the automobile industries’ demise, a cataclysm that had staggered the small Michigan town where I’d grown up. That that town had put each and every one of their fragile economic eggs into GM’s unsustainable basket gives you an idea of the lack of foresight and imagination that I grew up with; I had to go.
Evidently, things were no better in Massachusetts. Down to my last ten bucks and taking whatever work came my way, I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of one Ed Stolar, his friend Bear, and another drunken affiliate whose name now escapes me. We stumbled upon a camaraderie, as sometimes happens, rented our one bedroom apartment and furnished it with a single kitchen table accompanied by two chairs, and a straggling marijuana plant we coddled in the bedroom where we slept in a haphazard row, in sleeping bags on the floor. One of the lads had Fear and Loathing in his personal effects and I sat, on my scattered days off, beside a languid pool under a blistering Texas sun, guzzling Coors and laughing my ass off. A love affair was born.
After that I read everything that Hunter Thompson wrote. And I can’t help thinking today how much he would have loved all the nonsense that has been this year’s political slapstick. God alone can imagine what caricature he would have made of Sarah Palin’s lipstick smeared pit-bull effigy. Tina Fey’s interpretation is kind; Hunter would have had no mercy. A longtime advocate of weaponry of all calibers Hunter would have hauled out the big guns that Sarah likes to talk about and blasted her into oblivion.
John McCain is a good man, I have no doubt about that, but it’s time to look to something new. No disrespect intended. In fact McCain had my serious consideration until he selected a running mate. It’s hard to beat up on a veteran who’s devoted his life to public service. But the specter of more of Dick Cheney’s big oil money buddies running the show, with their futile and useless refinery platforms stretching out across the Gulf of Mexico would have given Thompson a platform of his own, and Hunter would have been on his way. That would have been an odyssey worth reading.
Hunter’s gone; he blew his head off in the office of his Colorado cabin, when the circumstances of his life got more weird and twisted than even he could bear. These last eight years in the United States have seemed almost unbearably bizarre to me. As we’ve spent countless billions of dollars to invade places we have no place being, killing people – the majority of whom whose only sin was to be born in the wrong place and time – in a fruitless pursuit of an evil minority that would never have bothered us if we’d not interfered with their lives in the first place, it’s time to reassess. It’s quarter past nine on a warm Chicago night and it looks like Barack Obama, a man of African descent, is our next president.
When I was born, even if I don’t remember that era, there were still white and colored designations for drinking fountains in the south. Today a black man has been elected to our nation’s highest office. President Obama probably won’t be able to do half of what he wants to do. And he’ll probably get shut down by selfish, vested interests when he starts to work on the other half – but so what? For a little while the country is infused with optimism. For a small space of time the people are engaged. Will that be enough? Of course not, but it’s a start.
Hunter S. Thompson died on the 20th of February in 2005. His ashes were fired from a cannon over the town of Aspen, Colorado and mingled with the crisp, mountain air. But in his time he took personally the small insults that we all live with every day; he never let the indignities that are fostered upon us go without notice. And even if his methods were sometimes crude, they were never boring or without passion. If there is one thing that we should all aspire to it is to make our passions a part of our lives. There is always the anticipation that new possibilities lie just around every corner, that hope is always a part of every moment of despair.
I hope that the President elect, Obama, can bring a sense of unity back to a country deeply divided. And I hope that there will be someone like Hunter Thompson to call him on it if his bullshit starts to overrun his ass. That’s the thing that keeps me optimistic, keeps me writing. The idea that there’s always a chance to make things better, whether it’s in the narrow focus of my life or the huge stage of what affects us all. And if at the end of the day, I have a few loved ones standing by to shoot my sorry ashes against the horizon – well that’s not a bad way to let the final curtain fall. It’s what Hunter would do.
It’s ten after ten and all the major polls have just declared for Barack Obama. For President of the United States. It’s our future and it’s an historic night. Let’s Roll.
— Ric Hess, 28 days ago
Writing (and Reading) Under The Influence
The association between writer’s and drinking is infamously a part of our literary heritage. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Bukowski, Kerouac… The list goes on and on. Reading these legendary sots and of their equally legendary exploits, you wonder how anyone of them ever got any writing done. In The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett’s hardboiled tale of Murder in Manhattan, Nick Charles, the novel’s narrator and protagonist is drunk more than he’s sober. He rises around noon, declares that eleven AM is too early for breakfast, and wouldn’t think of starting his day without a drink. You get the idea that Hammett’s weaving a little personal experience into his work.
My favorite novel of Hemingway’s is The Sun Also Rises. I can, and have, read it again and again but it’s not a novel for proponents of sobriety. These characters roam around from Paris to Spain in a drunken spree where the party never ends. Or rather it crescendos into a boozy bullfighting brawl and then ebbs back in quiet, stunned retreat, but though the drinking may slow it never disappears altogether.
The characters of these novelists all drink, a lot. They drink because their creators drank. In Old Havana there is a classic bar, The Floridita, where Hemingway spent many an hour, hoisting his favored double daiquiris. Hemingway, like me, preferred a seat at the end of the bar with his back to the wall where he could watch the entire floor, and where he only had to concentrate in one direction when holding conversation. Hemingway’s barstool is now preserved behind a velvet rope. No one else is going to take Papa’s place, not ever again.
I’m in the bar business. I know all about drinking. For me, it started in high school because I wanted to do things I wasn’t supposed to do, and because I was so stifled by the back-ass ignorance and lack of imagination of my little town. My friends were my buddies that I played football with; for the most part they didn’t have much imagination either, but they knew how to party. My other drinking companions were a family that became my close friends, the sons of our local doctor. We all drank. None of us had much money then, so our drinking was limited to cases of cheap beer consumed in basements and while roaming about the country roads in our cars. Today, we’d probably all be in jail, for drinking and driving, and the good doctor as well, for casting a blind eye when a group of teenagers were grouped around the keg in his basement. Today you can go to jail for leaving your kid in the car when you run into the store for a gallon of milk. I get the dangers of all the above but society’s gone a little overboard. The people who make laws forget what it was like to be a kid. We weren’t delinquents, we were just killing time, waiting to escape to the rest of our lives.
In those days drinking was fun, a part of the exuberance of being young. And it was also a counter to the frustration of being hemmed in by small minds that led small lives and tried to impose their beliefs on me. But as time goes by it’s not as much fun as it used to be, or not often. As the saying goes, what once were vices now are habits.
Alcohol’s a funny thing. Since I’m not much for drugs, I don’t know of anything else that can pick you so far up and then drop you so far down the next morning. Hemingway called it the giant killer. I think I know what he meant. Writers spend a lot of time in solitary contemplation. If you let yourself really think about the big issues that the world faces, and about how brief our time is here, it’s hard not to get overwhelmed or feel a little despair. You need something to take the edge off. Like Frank Sinatra famously said, “I feel sorry for people that don’t drink; when they wake up that’s the best they’re going to feel all day.”
Standing at various bars I’ve amassed a stock of stories that I mine in my own fiction. Drinkers are good storytellers and they get themselves into situations that are, although perhaps not at the time, good fodder for comedy and drama. Part of the whole journey is being able to laugh at ourselves. Drinkers tend to give themselves plenty of opportunity.
Why is hitting the bottle the theme of this installment? At Columbia College, Chicago, I met a lot of good people. And I bent many an elbow with them, talking about our projects and bitching about this and that. A few years ago, a group of those people got together and formed a group, Reading Under The Influence, dedicated to celebrating all things literary and alcoholic. On the first Wednesday of every month, you’ll find them at my bar, Sheffield’s, reading themed selections from various authors and original works, and chasing it all back with a shot or two. You can learn all about the event by clicking through to their website. R.U.I. is an event that some of the storied drinkers of yore would be proud of. And it’s a good way to spend an evening among people who know their way around a bar. If you’re in the neighborhood stop by and check it out. And since you’re there, you might as well have a couple of drinks.
— Ric Hess, 34 days ago
Win Some, Lose Some
So this year isn’t next year. Again. The Cubs wound up the regular season with the best record in the National League and then blew the playoffs in three straight losses to the Dodgers. What the hell? It just goes to show you that nothing in life is a lock until the final curtain falls and the money’s in the bank. But the Cubs will be back next year and I’ll be at Wrigley on Opening Day, just like always. Sooner or later they’ve got to break this thing open.
The Tribune Company’s got more problems in their portfolio than the Loveable Losers postseason play. Staggering under the incredible debt load that Sam Zell’s imposed on the company, the newspaper debuted a new format last week. It is, to put it succinctly, a disaster. The stories have been dumbed down, the layout is disjointed and confusing and the content is more ad than article. It’s sad to see what was once a respectable major city daily turned into a comic book version of USA Today. Chicago is a significant national force in art and business and it’s disappointing that our hometown paper makes us look more like a Second City skit than the true Second City.
Turning to writing that is decidedly not bush league, you may have noticed the link on the right side of this page, announcing the publication of the new Chicago crime anthology Sin. If not, scroll back up and notice it. Click on the link and read about the book, or, better yet, buy it. I was introduced to the group of writers that comprise the Sin collection at Columbia College, Chicago. Patricia Rosemoor, the author of dozens of novels, teaches at Columbia and she’s assembled a group that she felt would benefit by sharing their stories and resources through monthly meetings. Sin is a product of that group’s collaboration; one of Patricia’s stories is included. We get together, read new work and provide feedback to each other. It’s a great association of writers and the interaction really helps. So I have a story in this collection, which is good, but my novel remains unsold. One step at a time.
While I’m still negotiating with publishers over Opening Day, another project that I had put on the back burner is moving up to the front of the pack. The story of Diamond Joe Esposito, a Chicago crime boss as told by his daughter, Jeanette, is going to get full attention. I’ve retained the services of New York Time’s bestselling author and literary agent, Wendy Rohm to help me sort out the hours of interviews and video that I’ve collected. Not having much experience in non-fiction I decided that I needed the guidance of someone like Wendy to get the project through to completion. After lunching with her late last week, I decided that I didn’t need someone like Wendy – she was exactly the mentor that I needed to get the job done. So I’ve got a lot of work to do and now I’ve found someone who will make sure the final product will be something that will get a publishers attention.
Jeanette Esposito Braun is a firecracker, 93 years old and she’s still sharp as a tack. Her story about her life with Diamond Joe, his violent death and the ensuing plot she hatched to extract revenge from his killers makes for compelling story telling. Jeanette wants to make a movie about her father and I told her that the fastest course to have that happen was to publish a book about the events and then use that to attract the attention of producers. Jeanette was not initially enthusiastic about this approach.
“No one fucking reads, anymore!” She told me, holding up a wizened finger to command my attention.
It took a while to convince her that writing spec screenplays is largely a waste of time. She agreed to try it my way but she still has her reservations. After seeing the new Tribune, I’m afraid that Jeanette isn’t far wrong in her assessment of the state of the public’s attitude toward reading. After meeting with Wendy I’m more convinced than ever that publishing a book first is the correct approach.
That’s one of the peculiar things about this business; there isn’t any right or wrong way to achieve results (although some ways are more right than others). You have to chart a course and stick to it. Like the Cubs, you just have to keep chugging along, waiting for the breaks to come your way. And hope that you don’t drop the ball once they do.
— Ric Hess, 50 days ago
Watching the Wheels Go Round
Last time I wrote about the need for an author to have faith in his reader’s intelligence. I also touched a bit on the touchy area that separates religious faith from organized religion. Predictably, I tread on a few dogmatic digits. The responses I get from entries like that make it tempting to yank a couple of chains every time I write; the nuts come out of the trees and it’s fun to watch them fall.
But I’m not doing this simply to entertain myself or to piss people off; although that is a little side of gravy. Those who read rather than simply react will note the premise that I set forth early on in that particular essay; that dogma is very different from faith. Faith is the fundamental belief that there is something greater than all of us pulling the big strings of the universe. Dogma is the mindless observation of established routine, in spite of common sense or personal observation. Faith is metaphysical; whether it’s founded on unjustified hope, fear, or a primal response to things intuited but unknowable is a matter for debate. Dogmatic adherence to tradition and convention, on the other hand, is just plain silly.
Faith is a big part of any writer’s life. First of all you have to have faith in yourself. You have to truly believe that, out of all the other writers in the world – secreted away, pecking at their keyboards – you have the right combination of talent, ambition, instinct and luck to stand out. If that’s not a leap of faith, I don’t know what is.
You can get all mystical about the journey involved – pursuing a dream or tapping into the collective conscience or the synchronicity of effort meeting expectation, but the fact is that most writer’s have to write, a lot, before they get to the point where they’re adept enough at the craft to be worthy of publication. That you can invest all that time without any tangible reward along the way simply reeks of faith. Or insanity, but the line between art and the insane is notoriously fragile.
It’s been raining here. I have a home in Northwest Indiana, near the Michigan border. Most weekends, on Saturday evening or early Sunday morning I make the transition from Chicago to the country. It’s a good place to write. On my secluded five acres, hidden on a hill in the midst of the northern woods, is an explosion of creeping, crawling, scampering, bounding life. Turkey, deer, fox, badger, squirrel, chipmunk, cormorant and vulture – every imaginable song bird, scavenger and rural critter, all going about their seemingly mindless ways. Coyotes stalk rabbits and hawk glide on the thermal breezes, watching for the quaking leaf that betrays their prey. For the last three days rain has come in unending buckets and barrels, forcing everything to the surface; burrows overflowing and marshy deer beds turned to teeming ponds. The entire land is on the move, displaced and wandering.
In the city we see life in big, hulking masses. There are people, of course, millions of people and all of their machines and constructions. And aside from people and the pets they gather, the city has a profusion of adapted wild life; squirrels and pigeons, the furtive, contemptible rat. Among all that the great host of little creatures are lost or ignored. Either driven from an inhospitable environment or unable to reconcile themselves to the constant and overwhelming din, they disappear and the ponderous, large things take over.
Here the small things roam. And especially now, when after the rain they are all on the move, I am amazed at the sheer volume of their numbers. I keep a bird and a small mammal guide on my desk and the pages are crammed with scraps of paper, noting all the species I’ve identified.
One of the things I wonder, watching them all through the tall glass windows that separate my office from their meanderings, is where are they all going? Is there some sort of plan or is it totally random motion; were ancient wheels of fate set in some utterly complex arrangement so that the meeting of the vole and the garter snake was preordained? Are the patterns larger but more random, so that a certain overall destination is inevitable but the course is happenstance? Or is it completely a directionless frenzy, put into motion at some unknown point long ago and raveling down to some distant unknowable, ungoverned end?
In the city we are too close to each other to appreciate the mystery of our own patterns. And we are too occupied by our own hubris and assumptions of autonomy to imagine that our impulse and effort are inspired by anything other than personal design. But here, watching the small creatures outside my door, I wonder what we look like from a similar vantage point, and if our machinations are any less unfathomable and mysterious to an independent observer.
Writing is about trying to assemble pattern from chaos. We select words that convey a certain image and we string them together to tell a story and then we share that collection of images with our readers. The best writers do this in a way that resonates with some universal chord and makes the common journey of our lives less solitary. Through it all, we carry inside us some notion of destination, of purpose. We believe that we know where we’re going. Watching the haphazard parade that careens past my windows, I wonder if that’s the case.
Fitzgerald said it best: So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past. If there was ever a perfect ending to a novel, Gatsby’s got to be at the top of the pack. We don’t know the future, the past is a memory and what we’re left with is a moment that forever eludes us, trying to assemble coherence from chaos. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our philosophies, and the big questions are the same for writers today as they were when John Donne was scratching about men and islands with his quill pen.
We survive by faith – in our abilities, in the perseverance of good over evil, in the illusion of the dollar – in something. But of course, there’s always the chance that there is no point, that it’s all totally random and the whole ashes to ashes thing is quite literally the end of the ride
When I write a story, convention has it that I must construct a beginning, a middle and an end. That the characters must experience transitional arcs that please the reader and offer a symmetry that they respond to.
And as beginning writers we are told to tell our stories in that manner because we assume that that style reflects reality, that good fiction is a snapshot of the order we impose on our lives. But could it be that we just pick out the parts that fit the illusion and ignore the rest? Sometimes I watch the menagerie cascading past the glass and I wonder.
— Ric Hess, 78 days ago
