Getting Stuck on “The Button”

This is an afterword I wrote about my short story, "The Button," which will appear in another little e-book I'm putting together, Through the Brightening Air. The e-book will also contain the poem "Red Lion in Winter" and "Last One Close the Door." What with the Red Lion building finally being torn down, and the passing of Andrea Dubnick, this has all become much more contemporary than I thought it would be when I started.

I first conceived of “The Button” as a kind of performance piece disguised as a short story. It came to me on one of those rainy, foggy nights depicted in the beginning of the story. The idea, as I saw it, was to tell a story that in some way encompasses the venue, The Red Lion Pub, as well as some of my own personal memories of hanging around and about on that stretch of Lincoln Avenue in 1969 and the early 1970s. It was to be like a ghost story you tell when you’re in an old place with a haunted history. And at the end of the story, you throw in a line like, “And sometimes, on certain nights, you can still see the Headless Brakeman, swinging his lantern, whistling in the pelting rain … ” Then someone way back in the room starts to whistle, and everyone screams.

At least that was the idea.

I wrote the story in haste, trying to complete it for a reading I was scheduled to do at the Red Lion – the scene of the crime, so to say. I grew up with the Twilight Tales reading series, up on the second floor of the pub. Twilight Tales and I go back a long way. That was where I first read “The Measure of All Things.” It was down in the bar where Marty Mundt said to me, “You know, that character, Axel, the dinosaur who won’t stop saying, ‘Hiya!’ – you should do something more with that character.” I had already been thinking of writing another saur story, with Axel at the center.

Andrea Dubnick and Tina Jens, the two movers-and-shakers that made Twilight Tales move-and-shake in those days, also encouraged me to write more about the saurs, Axel in particular. They went to the extent of greeting me with “Hiya!” every time they saw me.

Tina still does.

Marty’s enthusiasm sealed the deal. I wrote “Bronte’s Egg,” and then “In Tibor’s Cardboard Castle,” and I even got a lick in of “Orfy” as a work in progress on two occasions before the pub closed its doors in 2007.

The reading series had incredible staying power, especially for all the years (over a decade, if I’m not mistaken) it was held at the Red Lion. Tina Jens and her many minions worked hard to keep it going. Many readers of top caliber read there: Gene Wolfe and Algis Budrys at the top of that list, at least for me. Many writers got their start there, not only learning how to fine-tune their writing but how to fine-tune their reading of their writing.

We learned to play the room.

I’ve seen big-time writers, Hugo winners, read into their pockets with muttering, racing voices, like a reading was an endurance race. At Twilight Tales, you had an audience, and you learned to read to them. Some nights the audience was tiny. Some nights they filled the second floor all the way back to the upstairs bar.

On summer nights there was the patio in the back, with the big tree that grew right through the floorboards. According to Twilight Tales’ own book, Tales From the Red Lion, in some background contributed by writer/director/all-around-talent Lawrence Santoro, it was under that tree that Chicago’s Shakespeare Rep Company got their start with a production of The Tempest. With the right set of readers on the right night, that patio would be filled as well.

I read at all those incarnations and set-ups upstairs at the Red Lion. The ones I liked best were inside, with the “stage” set against a group of windows in the back of the place. The audience would sit at tables in the room. Someone would screw a high-power light into the ceiling to help the reader be seen (and for the reader to see what she or he was reading). If you were reading, looking straight out into the audience, to your right would be the wall that came against the wall of the building next door – 2440 North Lincoln Avenue. The same building mentioned in “The Button.”

Several times I wondered if, in a world if infinite possibilities, it would be possible to commingle the ghosts of the building next door with the ghosts of the Red Lion.

Yes, the Red Lion had a great history of being haunted, and people I knew who would never confess to a belief in ghosts (and what does it mean to “believe” in ghosts anyway?) said they experienced very odd, strange disturbing feelings and sensations up on that second floor. You can read more about it in Tales From the Red Lion. What’s important is that I knew about the ghosts – everyone knew about the ghosts, alleged or real.

Mate this knowledge with the crazy idea that ghosts may be our experiences of time travelers, and you see what I might have been getting at with “The Button.”

 

When one works at the “art” of fiction, one sometimes wonders if it’s possible to break the wall between fiction and non-fiction that doesn’t fit the simple category of “lies.” We get plenty of examples of the latter every day in our media: in advertising, in advertising that tries to pass itself off as journalism, in corporate communications, in marketing – you know the drill.

It’s something else I’m talking about, something more akin to alchemy. It doesn’t call for the “willing suspension of disbelief,” but for the willing suspension of the rules of reality – or the suggestion of it. The idea, figuratively or literally, is to make a story that becomes real – or at least “real,” or in Philip Dick’s terminology, “apparently real.” When one thinks of it that way it seems Borgesian – “The Circular Ruins” revisited.

In other words, I wanted to see if I could make myself, and an audience, hear Rad Tate and Gideon Faust kick out the jams next door.

Well, I had my chance, and I blew it.

I had the venue. I had the gig. I had the story – mostly.

It was all in my head, and I wrote at a furious pace to make the deadline.

At the last minute, when I tried to print the story, it wouldn’t print. The document got locked up. I tried to retrieve the raw copy from the document and transfer it to an email, which I could send to my office and print out there.

It wouldn’t print out there. The email wouldn’t even open.

Every effort I made to retrieve and transfer my story hit a brick wall, lined with concrete and reinforced with titanium.

The thought occurred to me that I shouldn’t try to read the story, but tell it – I said I wanted it to be like a performance piece after all.

I chickened out. I read an awful piece I cobbled together at the last minute because I didn’t want to read anything I’d already read there. More’s the pity. The crowd was right. The moment was right. Even the weather was right – it was a tad chilly, and damp, and foggy, just like the weather described in “The Button.”

But I wasn’t ready to push myself and to trust myself to do the job of being a storyteller.

There was a thing I used to tell my short story students when they seemed to be caught and struggling in the mechanics of language and structure and their own expectations of what they should do: I’d say, or scribble on the board, or on their handed-in assignments, “Trust the story.” In other words, let the story lead the way; you follow.

Alas, I couldn’t follow my own advice that night, and I crashed. Crashed and burned.

It would be simple, and simplistic, to blame it on the ghosts.

You can always blame it on the ghosts.

It took me a while to return to the story. When I heard that Tina Jens was planning a new edition of Tales From the Red Lion, I told myself that this was the moment to get it down – to “do the thing” I hadn’t been able to complete before. I started the story from scratch, since I had nothing more than the notes I’d salvaged from my preliminary work. I made the deadline, and what you read here are the results of my walk down Lincoln Avenue one chilly, foggy night, when I thought I could see the rotating beacon atop the “Playboy Building” (as it was known in 1969), and I felt all the places that once stood on the street still stood there. Past and present and future were all there, intermingled.

 

I write this in the autumn of 2013. Since I first conceived the story, more of what I remember from days past has disappeared – physically.

A month or two ago, the building that housed the Red Lion was finally torn down. My friend, the author Wayne Allen Sallee, posted the photos he took of the hole in the ground where the Red Lion once stood.

Last month, Andrea Dubnick, who hosted many evenings of the Twilight Tales reading series and edited so many of the chapbooks that came out of that series, passed away.

And Delphyne Woods, a person who embodied “The Sixties” more than anyone else I ever knew, was found dead in her apartment in September. And she may have been dead for more than a week before she was discovered.

We live in a world of ghosts, but there’s nothing to be afraid of. Sometimes we meet the ghosts and sometimes the ghosts meet us.

And sometimes we are the ghosts.

 

Oh yes, one more thing – about that button.

The button referred to in the story was one with the fist drawn and designed by Frank Cieciorka. It was a pen and ink line drawing, or a woodcut, very bold and very distinct. Google the name and you’ll find an image. It’s iconic. Mr. Cieciorka, alas, died in 2008, another ghost in a world of ghosts.

Like the narrator of the story, I bought that button in the little head shop that resided in the same building that later became the Red Lion. That button got me into a lot of trouble. I had an Algebra teacher who was a fanatical Christian, who demanded I take the button off in her class.

And at the event at the Aragon on December 29, 1969, mentioned in the story, I had to chase that button down. A guy I met had taken it off my shirt and, after inspecting it, put it on his own shirt and headed out of the ballroom. A joke. Hah-hah. I could have let him walk away with it (hey, weren’t we not supposed to be into possessions, then?), but I didn’t. I wasn’t sure why, but I liked that button and I knew it was important that I retrieve it from the casual acquaintance (who was probably one of those Joe Cool jerks, so impressed with his own slickness, he thought he could walk around and take what he wanted – a carte blanche socialist. In those days, in Chicago, most socialists were carte blanche socialists, I soon discovered).

Later, I put the button on my guitar strap, along with a dozen other buttons I’d gathered over the heyday (What Panther, Black Panther, Yippie!, the omega, the peace sign, a shiny little bug-shaped button that resembled a roach. The button stayed put for over thirty-five years, but I took it off the guitar strap when I wanted to use it as a prop for my reading/performance piece.

Almost immediately, I lost it.

It slipped it into a pocket, or under a stack of junk. It re-emerged after my fiasco at the Red Lion and since then I have lost it and rediscovered it several times.

It used to worry me – losing my “time machine,” but I don’t worry much about it anymore. It’s a time machine, as I said, and as such it’s probably getting around, returning to the scene of many crimes and a few triumphs. And wherever it’s gone to, it’s probably having some amazing adventures. But I have no doubt I’ll see it again.

It’s probably not true to say that nothing is ever lost, or that nothing ever completely goes away, but I can’t quite give up the old habit of hoping. The button is in the world – hope is alive.

Thank you, Frank Cieciorka. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you, Delphyne.

Thank you all.

The Perils of "Perilous" Tales

Wrote this as an Afterword for an upcoming (maybe) e-book pairing of my two "horror" (or Dark-something-or-other) tales.

Science fiction writers aren’t supposed to write “horror” or “dark fantasy” stories. If they cross any genre lines, they’re supposed to gravitate toward fantasy. At least that’s what I’ve been told.

Science fiction writer or no, I’m more attracted to emotions than to technological or magical systems, or traditional narrative structures.

And the first emotion I remember experiencing to any significant degree was fear.

Fear. Peril. A Google search on the latter brings this definition up first: “Serious and immediate danger.” Peril is what every story, to one degree or another, should have.

Truth is, and this may be truth for more folks than just weirdo writers like me, is that if I’m not in peril I feel a little, well,  neglected.

Some of my earliest memories are of awaking from nightmares, looking around the darkened bedroom I shared with my brother, and seeing the little images on the china lamp on a little stand at the far end of my bed – some sort of eighteenth century pastoral scene where the men wore powdered wigs and the women wore billowing skirts. I watched them move around, sometimes dancing, sometimes chasing each other. Pictures on lamps aren’t supposed to move. That’s scary.

In the dark, all sorts of inanimate objects came to life. Sometimes, the darkness itself came to life. And shadows took silhouetted shapes and approached my bed – until I started screaming. One or the other of my parents had to come in and stay with me until I calmed down or fell asleep.

I developed a healthy dread of the supernatural, though I was enough of a Junior Philosopher to wonder if the “supernatural” were not just the region of the real world we hadn’t quite figured out yet. I had trouble accepting a differentiation between the two. Reality was reality, and I didn’t – couldn’t – believe it could run on two sets of rules.

Which meant I was probably headed toward science fiction from the get-go, but before I arrived –

I watched all the creepy, mysterious television my parents allowed me to watch. Old Universal monster films, episodes of Thriller and The Twilight Zone, even when they kept me up all night.

I read all the monster magazines I could find. I read Creepy and Eerie. I read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Frankenstein, Dracula, and The Haunting of Hill House. I loved all the Hammer and Amicus films I was able to see.

And about middle school age I sought out books about “real” ghosts and other supernatural manifestations. I was hooked on Hans Holzer and Susy Smith and Fate magazine. At one point I was convinced I would become a parapsychologist.

I refused to look at a mirror in the dark, convinced that Mary Worth would come out from it and scratch out my eyes.

And that went on for some years – at least until I found myself more afraid of what the real world had in store for me than anything in the arsenal of the supernatural.

Even so, I have a healthy respect for ghosts. Not that I “believe” in them (What does that mean anyway? What does “belief” have to do with objective reality?), but in a universe put together the way ours is, you don’t have to believe in a thing to have it come out of nowhere and bite you in the ass.

One way or another, it’s a perilous world. And one way we try to work our way through that peril, that fear, that uneasy sense of danger, is to lay it out in a story.

Turns out that every so often the sense of peril isn’t confined to the story and its world, but becomes part of the process of writing it.

*     *     *

“Surfaces” started when my wife and I lived in a little apartment in Rogers Park, on Albion Avenue. The previous tenant had run a little day care center from the place. We found crayon scribblings around the edges of some of the walls. Other walls had been painted by the tenant – no professional painter or decorator to say the least. One night, while sitting in the bathroom (yes, and on the most obvious object one sits upon in the bathroom) with no reading matter, I stared at the walls – the uneven application of paint, the shaky brushwork – and I imagined a few squiggles of paint looked more than a little like a hooded figure. I was brought up with thick paint and texture – my dad was a painter, the sort of painter who openly admires the thick application of pigments. He was more happy painting with spatulas than brushes. And he taught me to look closely at paintings, to notice how the complex figures could often be broken down into a network of simple lines and curves.

It was possible to look at an apartment wall as one big Rorschach  Test. From there, the scary part became figuring out the limits of obsession: how far can you follow the madness before it consumes you?

Writing a story about obsession can become an obsessive act in itself. I went through many drafts, with many casts of characters and many different outcomes. And once I settled in with my narrator, her sister, Wilford and Patrick, it still took many more drafts before I had sorted out my story.

In those days I had a friend, a former college instructor of mine,  who liked to take me to galleries on the Near North Side of Chicago after lunch. At that time, the whole “River West” neighborhood was booming, and part of that boom was measured in little art galleries. It seemed to fit in with a story where the main threat was created by a person with no “artistic” pretensions whatsoever, and yet what he painted came to frightening life. In contrast, I was looking at plenty of paintings that were void of any life.

It was about then that I also took note of how certain trends always created a coterie of experts. People who went to galleries learned to talk a good “art game,” just as later they learned to talk basketball while the Chicago Bulls were winning championships, or learned to talk hockey when the Blackhawks earned their first Stanley Cup in ages. Now, they talk about food and cuisine. But in each case, these aficionados don’t really “know” a thing about their subjects. They talk the talk, but can’t walk the walk.

Another aspect of the story that was important to me: I wanted the gay relationship between Wilford and Patrick to be just a matter-of-fact detail – an acknowledgment that there are gay people in the world, but that their gayness doesn’t bring about their outcomes in this story, either fortunate or unfortunate. I wanted to depict gay characters as being as much a part of the world as heterosexual characters, and to do so without it seeming that I was pointing it out to the world. “Hey! Look! I’m including gay characters! See how open-minded I am?”

The explosion of the house was inspired by a real incident. The owner of an apartment building blew up his building by trying to fix a gas leak on his own. It was less than half a mile from the building Pam and I were living at the time. I heard the explosion and felt the concussion – the saw the black smoke rising from the rubble. A few other homes were taken out by gas leaks around this same time. One fiction editor referred to my explosion scene as a “cop out.” I saw it as a simple Chicago fact of life. 

At the time I wrote “Surfaces,” I believed (and still do, though manifest in different ways) that truly subversive writing was (or should be) invisible. I want to subvert the use of the “supernatural” in a dark fantasy story. I wanted to write a female narrator that didn’t sound like a man pretending to some great knowledge of female psychology. I wanted the “real” places to be fully integrated into the unreal circumstances. I wanted the narrator’s intellectual questions to reflect her emotional insecurities and fears. And I wanted a reader to get through the entire story without being aware of any of it.

And after sending the story to dozens of places, and after getting some energetic feedback from editors scrawled on their printed slips, Gordon Linzner sent me a simple letter with a contract, saying that he was taking the story, that it should appear in such-and-such issue of Space and Time, and the check would be arriving shortly, which it did.

I never heard much in reference to the story after that. The magazine came out, I read the story at the dear, lost, fondly-remembered Twilight Tales reading series at the Red Lion Pub. And that was it.

At least until I met Jonathan Vos Post who, at the time “Surfaces” was published, owned Space and Time magazine. He said he thought it was the best story they had published during his tenure. I’m sure he was exaggerating, but I appreciated the exaggeration and was in no mood to contradict him.

Not too long ago, “Surfaces” was presented on a podcast that old friend and author Larry Santoro hosts, Tales to Terrify. Whoever handled the production did a great job, as did the woman who read the story, though the voice in my head that’s supposed to be Cath’s doesn’t quite match hers. A small matter. When I sat down and listened to the podcast, it was the first time I’d heard the story in years, and I didn’t squirm half as much at my bad writing as I thought I would.

*     *     *

Flannery O’Connor wrote: “St. Cyril of Jerusalem, in instructing catechumens, wrote: “The dragon sits by the side of the road, watching those who pass. Beware lest he devour you. We go to the Father of Souls, but it is necessary to pass by the dragon.” No matter what form the dragon may take, it is of this mysterious passage past him, or into his jaws, that stories of any depth will always be concerned to tell, and this being the case, it requires considerable courage at any time, in any country, not to turn away from the storyteller.”

In “The Ambiguities,” Billy Elkrider became one of my most formidable dragons. He’s based on a “real” guy (or two, or even three), as much as you can consider anyone like Billy “real.” Yeah, he’s pretty much like I described him in the story – and I say this in the present tense because, for all I know, he’s still out there. Older, maybe, but out there.

Way out there.

The comments about the Melville book were pretty much from the guy’s mouth when I encountered him on a CTA train heading for Howard Street from Wilmette late one stormy winter afternoon.

The “Joe Bazooka” story has not been especially embellished. I saw the guy with the busted, swollen hand pass out from pain at the bus stop on Devon and Clark Street as the big guy accompanied him to the nearest hospital.

Like most of my stories, it started out one thing and turned into another. I think I first tried to write it for a webzine Larry Santoro was launching at the time. I fumbled my way through it and took way, way too long working out a storyline with no strong resolution. By the time I turned it into Larry, he’d moved on to other things. Larry knew plenty of horror writers, so he wasn’t hurting for good stories. I was relieved he never got around to using it.

A similar thing may have occurred with a project Bill Breedlove was working on. I started revising the story, but the project fell through.

Then, in Madison at the World Fantasy Convention in 2005, I ran into Roger Trexler, who told me about an anthology he was co-editing, Hell in the Heartland. It sounded like an interesting project, and I knew a number of the authors who would also be contributing. I took out “The Ambiguities” again and decided to give it another try. I said, “I really want to make it into this anthology. Do . . . or die trying!”

The two big problems I had to solve with the story were 1.) presenting Billy’s humanity without diluting his scariness, and 2.) coming up with an ending that wasn’t nihilistic but not soppy or compromising. Of these two, the hardest by far was the latter.

Objectively, I can look at the older versions now and it's perfectly clear that my narrator’s encounter with Billy might have been an episode, but it didn’t make for a story. In my work, since I use a number of protagonists over and over again, I can’t just kill ’em off. And I don’t do the sort of stories where some poor schmuck makes a bad decision and pays the ultimate price, like a very literary version of an EC comic story. Other writers are much more successful with that strategy. It doesn’t work for me.

Not that I was consciously thinking of it at the time, but in retrospect I can see fairly clearly that I solved the problem of the ending (if I solved the problem at all) not by concentrating on Cath’s immediate problems (dealing with Billy, making her airline flight for the job interview), but by backing up and taking in the problem that’s at her core – at the core of many of us – making bad decisions as a way of life and, eventually, dealing with them.

In the earlier drafts, I wrote her scenes, thinking, “What does she do wrong? Where does she take the wrong step?”

In the later drafts, my concentration shifted to “What does she do right? And . . . does it matter?”

Of course it mattered. I just had to figure out how it mattered.

So, how do you pass the dragon in the road?

Some may view Cath’s nearly magical transport to her flight at O’Hare a deus ex machina. Maybe it is. I don’t see it that way. Billy may be the means by which she makes the flight, but only after Cath earns Billy’s respect. She acknowledges him (the most important thing), she deals with him honestly and ultimately she chooses to trust him – not without cost. She may have chosen to trust the Devil; or she may have chosen to trust a Jesus in disguise. Is Billy the former or the latter? She can’t know, but she still has to choose.

And thus the ambiguities.

Does that mean I chose Melville’s novel deliberately to reflect that aspect of the story?

I didn’t choose Melville’s novel. Melville’s novel chose me – with an assist from Billy – or the version of Billy I encountered on that CTA train. Pierre was the book I was reading, the one I had in my hand, when a giant guy in a Frankenstein jacket sat down next to me and asked, “Whatcha got there? Dirty book?”

In that moment, I had the story. It just took a mere two decades to figure out that’s what I had.

That’s what I love about writing. It’s on-the-job training until you die.

What They Teach When They Teach . . .

As promised, here's the sidebar to the article I posted yesterday. Michaela Roessner, Tina Jens and Amy Sterling Casil on what they focus upon when teaching their writing classes.

Michaela Roessner

Campbell and Crawford award winner; novelist [Walkabout Woman, Vanishing Point, The Stars Dispose, The Stars Compel]; instructor at Gotham Writers Workshop and Western State Colorado University.

 

I’m a huge advocate of teaching across the genres. And I believe that none of us should disrespect any of the other genres or subgenres; we all have important lessons to learn from all of them. Especially when I’m teaching non-speculative fiction writing students, the benefits that I present to them that we Spec. Fic’ers bring to the table are: #1 – Worldbuilding/Using Setting to Multitask; #2 – We’re a literature of ideas, so we have that plus all the other narrative elements to play with; #3 – Related, that allows us to go more wild and crazy than the other subgenres – we can take more chances; #4 – Because we don’t share the same kinds of standards and benchmarks as the other subgenres we have to borrow from them (so we have SF mysteries, fantasy romances, slipstream thrillers) – we’re pretty much perfect Borrowers and Thieves already!

Tina Jens

Author of The Blues Ain’t Nothin’; editor of The Book of Dead Things, Spooks!; originator and guiding spirit of the late, lamented Twilight Tales reading series in Chicago; currently host of the Gumbo Fiction Salon reading series; instructor of the Fantasy Writing Workshop at Columbia College Chicago.

 

Some students know very little about fantasy beyond Harry Potter, Twilight, and Worlds of Warcraft. It is my job to introduce them to the basic fantasy tropes; various sub-genres and story forms; and general foundations and expectations in the field, while simultaneously steering them away from the clichés and overused paths. I require them to write, revise, polish, and submit at least one story after we’ve done our market research unit. I stress that originality is a key component to making a sale early in their careers. With the publishing goal in mind, I strongly discourage them from writing about vampires and zombies, or anything set in a medieval castle. I stress that yes, stories like these are still being written and published, but they aren’t likely to jump a new writer out of the slush pile.

 

In the beginning of the semester, I have the class write a shared fantasy encyclopedia, choosing topics from lists I’ve compiled for the unit that week. First they do monsters or unusual creatures—there are no unicorns or European dragons among the choices. Next they do gods, but again the list includes cultures and mythologies seldom tapped, or the lesser-known gods from the Greek, Roman, Egyptian, and Norse pantheons. Other units vary depending on whim and class interests, but they often include Historical People, Magical Items, and Divination Techniques, among others.

 

I have them brainstorm potential story ideas based on each of their encyclopedia topics, with an emphasis on figuring out the fundamental rules of their fantasy element, then deciding how to use those rules and quirks in plotting a story. Hopefully, among the many story ideas they have to rough out as they practice integrating the fantasy element throughout the plot, they’ll hit on an idea they want to flesh out into a full story. That will then go through multiple rewrites, revisions, and finally, submission to a pro or semi-pro fantasy market.

Amy Sterling Casil

Science fiction writer (Imago and countless short fiction); author of more than 20 non-fiction books, MFA in Creative Writing, Chapman University, 1999; English and creative writing teacher at several schools including Chapman University and Saddleback College; former SFWA treasurer; nonprofit executive for the Beyond Shelter charitable organization in Los Angeles.

It’s been a long time since I’ve specifically taught SF writing. But it has to begin first with the idea.

Everything else comes next. That is the biggest difference between SF and any other genre. Also, first, second, and third thoughts have to be considered and discarded. It’s a virtual guarantee that someone’s first, second, and third thoughts—especially if they haven’t read a lot—will be someone else’s ideas, often ideas readers are familiar with.