MBS: I get antsy talking about my own work.
JPG: I feel the same. I mean, when I initially wrote Literary Matters, I don’t even know what I was thinking. When I filled out that publicity form for Ploughshares, I guess at the time I thought this little cycle is over. And then in some part of my head, I was like, You can’t end a novella or whatever this is with, like, a car accident. You know, how many times have I specifically told my students a climactic moment of violence is not how to resolve tension?
MBS: What about “I’m pregnant?!”
JPG: Right, exactly! Or, “It was all a dream…” I guess, for a long time, the stakes seemed to be How much can this malignant figure ruin another person’s life? And then at some point, I also started to think about Brian—Wonder Boy—as something like the agitator in a washing machine, you know?
MBS: Wait, I just realized I don’t know how washing machines work.
JPG: I think what an agitator used to be— Or what it does for the five years that a washing machine actually works— is it’s this thing that distributes the cleaning material, in other words, that makes things interesting. You know, the other character, LJ, in this cycle, is kind of an Eeyore for a lot of “Wonder Boy,” for example. He’s just sort of mourning this death that hasn’t quite happened yet, but he can read the writing on the wall. And then there’s this guy who convinces him to do these really foolish things, but is also interesting and fun to be around at points. So I guess this is a roundabout way of saying at some point the stakes of the story also change. For me the question is no longer how dumb is the thing that LJ is going to do in order to impress this person that he’s attracted to?
MBS: Pretty dumb, it turns out.
JPG: Pretty dumb! But that question was settled I think even in “Wonder Boy,” which is the first story in the cycle. What then got interesting was to think about how deep is this friendship. There is a vulnerability in the way they talk to each other that was always kind of there, and I always sort of wondered about it, but I thought the story needed to go in different directions. The moment I guess I’m speaking about is, you know, LJ says, We should go camping one of these days. Like, We should do something other than get high together.
MBS: Which is also the lie he tells his dad.
JPG: Yeah.
MBS: It’s almost like a wish. Like, I wish we were going camping. We’re actually going to—
JPG: We’re going to smoke meth and drive drugs to Texas. So, at some point, that became the more interesting question, and then it was almost like cuttings from a garden. You know you have these little scenes that don’t quite make it into the final draft or whatever, partly because they were from other points of view? And I can’t do the Alice Munro thing, where I just sort of float around in different interiorities. So then those things started to get legs, and then I realized like at some point you gotta say what happens with this cop. So this thing that I thought was finished, this thing that I wrote, whatever, a press release for Ploughshares about, is not finished at all.
MBS: So just to clarify, you published “Wonder Boy” in LM some years ago. Chronologically, the first story is “Referral,” and then comes “Wonder Boy,” then comes a story called “Wonder Boy, Revisited,” and then the last story in this installment is “Tom Sawyer.” And that’s the one that was just in Ploughshares. And that’s where we get to the disaster.
JPG: Yeah, exactly.
MBS: The beginning of “Tom Sawyer” is:
It’s like how dogs get before an earthquake: pacing, whining, howling at the door. That’s me. Whole hours before the sky falls, I catch a sidelong view of the disaster, looming like rainclouds out of the north.
And that, to me, also felt like it was sort of what was happening throughout the whole cycle. We have a sense of this thing building, and we’re kind of fluttering around, almost like trying to avoid thinking about what we know is going to happen.
JPG: I’ve never thought more about the way stories come out—the forms they come out in—and how much that can shape the stories themselves. Even when I thought there might be a novel’s worth of action— That was sort of a ghost of an idea in my head. I just didn’t trust it. I was working on a novel at the time, that I guess I’m still working on. But part of why the tension is kind of reiterative, is these stories had to stand alone, when I submitted them. There was a journal that reached out and said Hey do you have anything? Gavialidae, which “Referral” came out in. And I hit send, and then it was sort of like, Oh, wait, there’s this other thing I want to write, and so they published that one as well.
MBS: It’s like writing a serial.
JPG: Basically. And I would love at some point— I mean, the way books are made and the way fiction comes out, I don’t know that anything gets serialized anymore, like Dickens-style, where you’ve got like, the first chapter—
MBS: The only way I think it happens is people serialize their own work on Substack.
JPG: Yeah, and I’m too much of a luddite to do that. I mean, I love that idea, the idea of David Copperfield coming out a chapter at a time.
MBS: Brothers Karamazov did the same thing.
JPG: Yeah, exactly, so that would be a great way to compose a novel, but the publishing landscape sort of necessitated these being standalone stories. In some ways it felt like I was constantly hitting rewind. But there were things I was discovering, where it felt like Oh actually these are, together, a novel. Or whatever this is. But they also really need to be shorts.
MBS: And these stories are all circling this specific crisis. The smash car. I want to say it’s not standard practice, but like, some criminals do do this.
JPG: Yeah. I had this story out of somebody I know.
MBS: It’s a horrifying plan. Like, it almost only works if nothing happens and it’s just an idea in the back of your head. But then it of course works particularly badly in this case. What it reminded me of was The Misfit, like as soon as the idea enters the room, something becomes inevitable.
JPG: You know, stories have their own logic. I think the thing that interested me…
MBS: We should say: What is a smash car?
JPG: So, a smash car is basically a car that follows five or ten miles behind another car that is carrying weight of some kind.
MBS: And by “weight” you mean…?
JPG: By weight it might be weed… The story this was sort of based on, it was weed. This was Colorado in the ’90s.
MBS: Something illegal.
JPG: Something illegal in the car in front. And the idea is if they get pulled over, the car in back is meant to somehow distract the state patrolman. You know, you clip him, or just rear-end him, or whatever. But you somehow inhibit the state patrolman’s ability to follow the car in front. And ideally, they have enough time to ditch the drugs or just to drive off.
MBS: The idea at least in this story is that you’re gonna rear-end the statie and basically disable the car. Hit it hard enough that it can’t follow.
JPG: Which, if you know anything about cop cars, that’s really— They’re reinforced steel, they’re built to make that hard to do.
MBS: It’s a good way to kill yourself.
JPG: Exactly. So the interesting thing, when I heard about this scheme or whatever— You know what gradually kind of dawned on me is that really the only thing it does is sort of tone down the nerves of driving drugs. Like, if it’s scary to you to be driving drugs across state lines, the idea that you have some insurance policy, some Plan B, is the only thing that’s going to keep you from having a nervous breakdown as you drive down the road.
MBS: If it actually goes into effect, it’s hard to imagine a good outcome.
JPG: And the things it demands in terms of trust—and friendship, honestly—
MBS: Because basically if you’re the smash car driver, you’re saying, OK, you would be going away for decades for drugs in your car. Instead, I’m just going to rear-end a cop, and then, presumably my car will also be disabled. You drive away, and I deal with whatever happens next.
JPG: Exactly.
MBS: And the character of the guy whose idea it is, does not inspire a lot of confidence.
JPG: Yeah, and I think LJ knows that it’s a con, and he knows from the jump, but for a certain kind of person, that’s kind of fun. I’m thinking about this road trip I took, that didn’t involve drugs or anything with this person. We had this idea, and I remember thinking By the end of this roadtrip, I’m going to want to kill you. But that’s kind of why I went on it. There’s this magnetic power of a certain kind of person that is really all I’ve ever wanted to write about.
MBS: Alan Shapiro has a good poem about the “Grasshopper,” like, the guy who’s just effortlessly cool, who’s attractive, everybody loves him, he walks into a room and it lights up. He’s the guy who, whether it’s legitimate or not, it feels like when he walks onto the job site, he already knows how to do everything that you keep fucking up. And I don’t know, sometimes that’s a really lovely guy who has an unnaturally well-developed character. But often, at least in my experience, that guy is bad news.
JPG: Yeah.
MBS: And yet, I’ve always found it very difficult to avoid being drawn to someone like that.
JPG: Well, they keep things interesting. And I think on some level— I’m thinking of a certain Romance Languages PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins while we were there, who shall go unnamed—
MBS: Rings a bell.
JPG: I can remember becoming friends with this gentleman, and knowing, like, Oh, this is a godawful idea. This is the guy who can and will and did break a Le Creuset mixing bowl like within a couple days of knowing him. I hope I’m not unique in the sense that I’m occasionally willing to hang out with awful people for a good story. Because these grasshoppers are really popular and really socially active… until they’re not and they have to move on to the next group of saps.
MBS: But also there’s always a new one. To that point, only when you used a masculine pronoun did I realize you were talking about a different poisonously charismatic Romance Languages PhD candidate at Johns Hopkins during the time we were there.
JPG: Yes! Oh, God, yeah.
MBS: You know Nietzsche has that line about how an Achilles could not have written Achilles. I was never an especially bad kid. But I was always friends with bad kids. And I feel like there may be something writerly about that. It was either Maugham or Greene who said a writer is someone who can go to anyone’s party. Even in these stories, I don’t think there’s any reference to anything writerly. Well, no, isn’t there…? There’s a notebook.
JPG: Yeah, I think it’s mentioned that it’s the shrink’s idea or something.
MBS: But LJ has a little bit of that placeholder role of, like, if the writer ended up doing construction (like when I did construction briefly) you fall into that role, like, you are the goober on the job site. But you also are to some extent the static point around which chaos revolves, and who then sometimes gets drawn into it.
JPG: When I was working construction, I remember my first week, my boss Eric had subcontracted with somebody else, and their crew was working with our crew, and two things I learned really quickly were, like, the other green guy was making five dollars an hour more than me, and I remember thinking Well that’s kind of weird, I guess I should try to get a construction job on this other crew, but I also remember the foreman—or he would have been the contractor as well—turning to my boss and going, “He’s pretty verde, man.” But that didn’t discourage me. I actually remember clocking, like, Oh, that’ll be a fun story to tell. Also I remember talking with that contractor at lunch that day about books and shit. I totally did not belong on a construction crew, just as I didn’t belong in high school on a soccer team.
MBS: Yeah, same here.
JPG: But, like, I was there. And I got along with people, even if I wasn’t particularly good at the job. And I did enough! That was the other thing. I think I knew how to do exactly enough not to— I wasn’t going to nick a natural gas line, I wasn’t going to break a window. I knew exactly enough not to get fired. I do think that, whether it’s a personality trait or just something as writers we develop, we’re just stuck on the periphery, and we can’t really get beyond that.
MBS: I was thinking there’s another way to frame the smash car almost as like the opposite of a conscience round. The conscience round in a firing squad is one blank. And among the five guys who are doing the shooting, one of them has a blank, and none of them knows which one. So each one can tell himself that he was the one who kept his conscience clean. And the smash car is almost like the opposite. Because as you were saying, the only real function is to calm the nerves of the guy in the front car. But maybe the other function is to convince the guy in the smash car that he’s really part of it. And that is often how I felt, hanging out with guys who were, like, doing petty crimes, but also just living more interesting lives. And I would feel as if I was riding along for a while. But, like, I’m not really part of it. When the shit hits the fan, I’m going to drive by and be a rubbernecker.
JPG: Right, right. Sorry, you’re gonna have to deal with that!
MBS: I think there is something about being a writer, where you’re fundamentally a vampire and to some extent a traitor.
JPG: In this set of stories, it works as a sort of slow con because Brian is basically trying to find somebody to drive his drugs for him—
MBS: The Tom Sawyer trick.
JPG: —and take on zero risk, but still get half of the $15,000 payout. But another way to look at it is, as you say, it sort of like creates this illusion—and LJ is into this—that LJ is part of, you know, moving in the world in a certain way. That it’s not so hard for him to be like Brian.
MBS: Is it Oxy they’re smashing on the dashboard with a ball-peen hammer? There’s a moment where they’re doing that at sunup, and I imagined being LJ, and I could just feel, like, my teeth and the back of my head and the sun in my eyes, and imagine thinking, Let’s see if there’s a little more dust I can rub on my gums!
JPG: Yeah.
MBS: I could feel the self-recognition. Like, This is me doing this? Like, This is no longer just for make-believe. You talk about doing the drugs as a way to get through the workday, and then it quietly becomes an all-the-time thing. There’s a degree to which LJ feels sort of like he’s LARPing, until he’s not. He is becoming this kind of guy.
JPG: You know, I didn’t want to write a book about writers and I didn’t want LJ to be a stand-in for the narrative intelligence, if that makes sense? I didn’t want him to be the camera with its shutter open. Isherwood in Berlin, right?
MBS: He definitely doesn’t feel like he carries the wisdom of the stories.
JPG: OK, good, good.
MBS: We see things through his eyes, but he is to some extent a very sympathetic idiot.
JPG: That’s kind of what I was hoping for. I get so impatient with a thoughtful narrator that never quite dips into the action. In other words, he can’t be me.
MBS: He can’t be bowling with bumpers in the gutters.
JPG: Yeah, there need to be real stakes. But I guess, as I conceived of them, there is this piece of me—talking of writers—that, I don’t think I’m capable of really committing to something like alcohol or hard drugs.
MBS: You’re not really capable of blowing your life on hard substances.
JPG: Yeah, I have too much self-regard! And I think at the same time, I have kind of LARPed in those circles. You know, they fascinated me as a kid, and they still, in memory, they fascinate me. I think, LJ is starting to kind of sense the beginning of addiction. And obviously with his dad’s illness, he’s got this feeling like I’m a worm in charge of a barrel of apples. But I think you are spot-on in that as much as it starts to be an addiction, there’s always a piece of him kind of removed. If it’s about anything it’s about fostering his sense of a friendship.
MBS: There’s a scene—returning to it, it’s both this very erotic moment and strangely touching and incredibly sad moment, where Brian… Brian has this beautiful—sort of like a grasshopper-girlfriend—this beautiful, elusive girlfriend Lucy.
JPG: People like Lucy, they have this energy and attraction that’s much more benign and much more… I think it’s a force of good.
MBS: She does have a little more wisdom and perspective than Brian does, and she can sort of see that this is trouble. But she’s also drawn to it.
JPG: In my head she was always going to be drawn to this kind of character.
MBS: She’s this dizzying sexy presence in the bar, and then there’s this scene where Brian tries to— It almost feels like he’s instructing LJ, like, Here’s how you kiss a girl. Here’s how you touch a pussy.
JPG: Yeah.
MBS: In the last story of this cycle, “Tom Sawyer,” when the smash car plan comes into effect—and goes about as badly as it possibly could—it reminded me of when I have been in bad car accidents, or like the first time I saw a girl naked, where you have a moment of like, This isn’t really going to happen… Oh! This is my life now. And I think you really capture that:
I’m still hungering after the confession, that orange glimmer of a reckoning on the near horizon. But now Statie’s gone. So is my side-view mirror. And when I lean from the window, her cruiser’s cherries flicker on a wide, jagged gash along the bed and driver’s side door. I know what’s happened right away. I know, and I don’t want to. It’s only a counterfeit shock I feel when I turn the key in the ignition, switch on my headlights, and see Statie twisted up on the shoulder like the worst idea you ever had. Like roadkill.
This is the moment, I’m already thinking to myself: this is the moment everything changes.
He’s already re-writing the end of the story. He’s already saying Actually I really want to just tell her what I’m doing. I want a civilized ending to this story. Like, I would be done. Even if I’m going to jail, I’d be done with it. And then he doesn’t even get the opportunity to witness the thing happen, he just sees “now Statie’s gone.”
JPG: Yeah, and whether he would actually follow through with that is another question, but there is a kind of— I don’t know. It’s a really twisted thing to say, but I can remember a period in my life of just utterly irresponsible, reckless, silly behavior. And on some level what animated this was, like, I knew basically from books and movies that adulthood begins after some kind of traumatic experience. My best friend was housesitting this house, and the house was full of pills. And it just was like a totally nutso summer, and even at the time I kind of knew, like, I’m waiting for something to shake me out of this funk. And I never quite found it, but I think LJ is sort of… When you have people who are sick who are close to you a similar logic takes hold.
MBS: His father is dying.
JPG: Yeah, and the logic is like, Well this is bad, maybe I can do something worse. That’s a really destructive way to be, but there’s also something seductive about it.