Also by Jonathan Evison
West of Here
The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving
This is Your Life, Harriet Chance!
Lawn Boy (coming April 2018)
For Lauren
Copyright © 2008, 2018 by Jonathan Evison
Foreword copyright © 2017 by J. Ryan Stradal
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the original paperback as follows
Evison, Jonathan.
All about Lulu : a novel / Jonathan Evison.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-59376-196-7
ISBN-10: 1-59376-196-1
1. Teenage boys—Fiction. 2. Stepfamilies—Fiction. 3. Los Angeles (Calif.)—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3605.V57A795 2008
813’.6—dc22
2007046761
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-59376-208-7
Cover design by Sarah Xanthakis
Book design by Neuwirth & Associates, Inc.
Soft Skull Press
1140 Broadway, Suite 704
New York, NY 10001
www.softskull.com
Distributed by Publishers Group West
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Foreword
by J. Ryan Stradal
I’ve admired Jonathan Evison for a long time, and for a long time I’ve wondered, How the hell does he do it?
I’m not talking about his prolific output, the natty suits, his ability to write great novels while being a family man, music nut, and peerless Seahawks fanatic, or even his performance style—among authors, he’s one of the top ten readers I’ve ever seen—but I’m talking about something even more difficult to replicate.
During the comparatively brief time I’ve been nurturing my own writing career, I’ve often been asked by aspiring writers if there’s some skill, habit, or trick they can unlock to further develop their own craft. To answer that empathy is involved may be a cliché, but I keep coming back to it, because there’s no better answer. Once I realized that Jonathan’s career is a master class on the utility of empathy in fiction, the success he’s earned from his enviable range of books makes perfect sense.
As fiction writers, our stock in trade is imagining the minds and emotions of our characters so effectively that the reader feels that they know this person, becomes invested in them, and feels emotions along with them. Whether such characters are “likable” in any sense is besides the point; regardless of the character’s mien or conduct, they must be human enough to hold a reader’s attention, and on this standard, Jonathan always succeeds. Within the book you’re holding in your hands, All About Lulu, Jonathan trains his heart on a wild, motley cast, including the intense, mysterious Lulu, an unlikely pair of Venice Beach hot dog entrepreneurs, a child bodybuilder turned teen goth, and, most prominently, the hopelessly lovelorn Will.
I know from experience the challenge of writing from the point of view of a much younger person—particularly with my own teenage memories dissolving into irrelevant nostalgia—which makes Jonathan’s success at characterizing Will, the kaleidoscopically heartbroken narrator of this story, all the more wonderful. Like many of Evison’s characters, he’s not merely a faultless victim or an outsider. His flaws and poor decisions brutally complicate his life as he evolves into a young man devoted to, and increasingly enslaved by, a consuming and futile obsession. There’s certainly a literary legacy of similar boys in fiction, and indeed All About Lulu’s opening paragraph itself is an impish play on a classic of the genre. In no time, however, both Will and the novel blaze a unique and moving new path, dominated early by Will’s father, who I would’ve thought of as an invention of magical realism had I never left my native Minnesota, but who I find wildly believable as an eighteen-year resident of Southern California. Most of Jonathan’s characters you’ll never completely agree with, and some you may cross the street to avoid, but it’s clear—and I adore it when I can perceive this as a reader—that he loves all of them. With this generous stake at the root of his narratives, Jonathan achieves that rare, wonderful hybrid—books that are both a soulful reflection of contemporary society and an entertaining respite from it.
From where I write this in mid-2017, our daily lives as Americans besieged by the thundering rumpus of the flagrantly narcissistic and self-interested, and I awake each day wondering what fresh hell awaits the vast majority of us not among the privileged, Jonathan’s work has never felt so timely. Though All About Lulu isn’t explicitly political, if mere empathy is now cornered into being a political act, the book is a motherfucking Molotov cocktail. It does more than launch a remarkable career; it opens us to the soul a writer of enviable heart who, helpfully, will also make us laugh. Among the dour dystopias and trifling distractions intended merely to further a didactic argument or permit our disengagement, his stories of how working-class people simply got by, amused themselves, tried to love one another, and survived the early twenty-first century truly resonates. Were that a thousand more Jonathan Evisons existed today, historians could look back on this era in a hundred years and say, maybe they were okay after all.
For now, as readers, we must be content to revel in the Jonathan Evisons that exist among us. We must support them where we see them, and learn from them what we don’t know already about what it costs and takes to be human. I’ve come to view his books as messages in bottles from an equally flawed but more hopeful world, telling us, like much great fiction does, that we’re not alone out here, and if these outsiders can pull their lives together into some semblance of understanding, peace, and even happiness, perhaps we also have a shot.
Finally, should you be lucky enough to meet Jonathan and see him read, and revel in the appreciation and kindness he has for both his characters and readers, please be kind in return. Don’t bring up the Seattle Seahawks unless they’ve recently won.
June 2017
Introduction
Jell-o Shots,
Hot Dog Cakes, and
Enduring Gratitude
When All About Lulu was originally published by Soft Skull in the spring of 2008, I was a thirty-nine-year-old marginally employed landscaper with a checkered and fabulously unfocused employment history, which included (but was not limited to) caregiver, landscaper, gas-meter checker, bartender, rotten-tomato sorter, auto detailer, purveyor of sausages, and telemarketer of sunglasses. I had seven previous novels under my belt before Lulu, all of which were conspicuously unpublished. Some of them were actually pretty good. Most of them were not.
My wife, Lauren, was pregnant with our first child at the time of Lulu’s release. We were broke as hell and eating a lot of Swanson’s pot pies and spaghetti, as we worried about providing for our future. I wasn’t exactly on any kind of career track. My mom, God love her—long-suffering provider, single mother of five—was bestowing fifty-dollar Safeway gift cards on us twice a month. I wasn’t a terrible person, but my prospects were not bright.
Soft Skull was run out of a single room in Brooklyn in those days, and Richard Nash, the editor who saw what twenty-odd other editors in New York did not see in All About Lulu, wore a lot of hats. Richard was Soft Skull. He was a mad, irrepressible genius with a theater background. A pure, indefatigable spirit with a Gaelic charisma and lilt of speech that left you spellbound
, and always made you believe in whatever it was he was talking about. And Richard Nash was almost as broke as me. He was also every bit as passionate and dogged and bat-shit crazy. He believed fiercely in the books he championed. He never stopped pushing to get them recognized: to booksellers, reviewers, mavens, as well as to random people in line at bodegas and subway stations. What Richard lacked in resources he made for up in passion, presence, savvy, and elbow grease. Having grown up in punk bands in early ’80s Seattle, I totally connected with Richard’s DIY approach to publishing; it allowed me to be myself, which was pretty much the goal.
I spent my entire advance on the first book tour, which was a humble and depraved traveling circus that me and my buddies Brooksie and Justina operated out of my ’76 Dodge motor home. Think burnt-orange shag interior. Three farting men. Bad ventilation. We made two hundred Jell-O shots at every stop, from Seattle to Portland to San Francisco to Los Angeles to Bakersfield and back. The goal was to get somebody drunk enough to eat the hot dog cakes we baked nightly. Somebody always did.
Along that tour I got to meet some of my first champions: in Portland, Gerry Donaghy from Powells; and in L.A., Carolyn Kellogg, back then a blogger of books at Pinky’s Paperhaus, now the book editor at the Los Angeles Times. Having written in a vacuum for twenty years, launching All About Lulu was a revelation. Up until that moment, my life as an artist had been entirely insular. I didn’t know any other writers, and very few readers, for that matter. I just plodded along in isolation, having very little facility, and few opportunities to discuss books, mine or anyone else’s. Then, overnight, all of that changed. Every night I met new independent booksellers who stole my heart with their love and commitment to books, even little indie books written by marginally employed landscapers, published out of small, cluttered rooms in Brooklyn by mad Irishmen.
It’s not hyperbole to say that booksellers, book bloggers, and readers changed my life, or that Soft Skull delivered me to my destiny as an “author,” which is way fucking better than telemarketing sunglasses or checking gas meters, let me tell you. For twenty years, I had been writing novels that nobody was reading—not even my mom. Then suddenly, owing to good fortune and the enthusiastic advocacy of an incredibly dynamic and passionate species of mostly underpaid and underappreciated souls, I was connecting with thousands of readers.
By the time our son Owen was born, I’d earned out my tiny advance for Lulu and received what was for us, at the time, a life-changing royalty check. That was followed by another check six months later. By 2009, we were able to ditch the Swanson’s pot pies, and the Evisons moved to the upmarket Marie Callender’s version (bigger, better, triple the price!). FYI, the key to not burning the crust isn’t tinfoil around the edges; the key is to thaw them out a bit beforehand (#authorprotip). The first bite will still burn the fuck out of your mouth, though. That’s just science.
All of this is to say that I was humbled by the unlikely success of All About Lulu in 2008, which set the wheels in motion for my life as an author after seven false starts, a shit-ton of rejection, and dozens of uninspired jobs (along with a handful of inspired but low-paying ones). I’m equally humbled that a decade later people are still discovering All About Lulu and finding it relevant. The publication of this book—my first novel to not fall stillborn into the obscurity of drawer, basement, or total oblivion—provided me with the greatest opportunity I’ve ever had as a writer: to be read, to finally connect with somebody at the other end, to know that in some small way I was bringing laughter and recognition and comfort into their lives. Ten years, three kids, and five novels on, I’m still counting my blessings every day for this opportunity. So thank you, Soft Skull; thank you, bookseller, and blogger, and dear reader for making my dreams come true.
Johnny Evison
Sequim, Washington
2018
The World Is Made of Meat
First, I’m going to give you all the Copperfield crap, and I’m not going to apologize for any of it, not one paragraph, so if you’re not interested in how I came to see the future, or how I came to understand that the biggest truth in my life was a lie, or, for that matter, how I parlayed my distaste for hot dogs into an ’84 RX-7 and a new self-concept, do us both a favor, and just stop now.
My name is William Miller Jr., and my father is Big Bill Miller, the bodybuilder. Suffice it to say, I was never called Little Bill or even Little Big Bill. I was always called William, or Will. I bear my old man no grudge for this. Sometimes the fruit does fall far from the tree, and sometimes it rolls down the hill and into the brook, and sometimes it’s washed downstream, or gets caught in an eddy.
My younger brothers, Doug and Ross, are identical twins. Moreover, they stuck close to the tree. They are the image of Big Bill: the aquiline nose, the blue eyes, the turgid smile. And, like their father, they are bodybuilders—tireless self-improvers striving for physical perfection. Not me. If I look like anybody, I look like my mother.
In spite of my status as a ninety-eight-pound weakling and my total lack of athleticism, I’m nothing short of an expert on the subject of bodybuilding. I grew up in gyms, primarily the original Gold’s Gym in Venice and World Gym in Santa Monica, just minutes from the Muscle Beach of my father’s youth. I know the muscle groups, the training regimens, the language, the poses. I can even tell you who won the 1979 Mr. Olympia or the 1983 Mr. Universe, because I was there. I know a great set of abs when I see them (Frank Zane), or calves (Chris Dickerson), or traps, or pecs, or deltoids. I know the acrid odor of sweat-soaked rubber mats, the iron clang of clashing weights, the tingle of sweaty back skin ripped from vinyl, the heaving and grunting and chest pounding. And none of it holds any romance for me.
My earliest memories are of meat. Enormous lamb shanks mired in beds of hardened grease. Giant carbuncled sausages, reconstituted from the vaguest of mammalian origins, glowing garish orange in the light of the refrigerator. My infant brothers were consuming meat before their teeth broke. It was not uncommon to see them padding about the house in disposable diapers, dirty-faced and slack-jawed, gnawing on drumsticks or cold hot dogs the way other kids gnawed on binkys.
I became a vegetarian in 1974, at the age of seven. My father was outraged.
“How can you not eat meat? The whole world is made of meat! Birds, cows, dogs, cats, they’re all made of meat! Even fish are made of meat!”
“Well, then,” my mother said. “You’ll have no objection to cat for dinner.”
My mother had a way with Big Bill. It’s not that she outsmarted him—I could’ve done that—it’s the way she outsmarted him, the way she did everything, like she was dancing with life and let life lead, doing everything life did, only backwards and in heels. Nothing seemed to disrupt her balance or upset her equilibrium. She absorbed whatever came at her.
For weeks after my avowed vegetarianism, Big Bill insisted on heaping meat on my plate.
“It’s not meat, it’s sausage.”
He’d plop it on my mashed potatoes, park it on top of my Jell-O, but I never touched it. If I’d inherited one trait from Big Bill, it was his willfulness. And so I grew up on a steady diet of powdered mashed potatoes. Once Big Bill forgave me this eccentricity, he began to chide me about it, taunting me with pork chops, bonking me on the head with bratwurst at the dinner table.
“You are what you eat.”
“I see, Bill,” my mother said, with a wink for me. “You’d rather your son be a bratwurst?”
My father wasn’t a bad guy, he just had a low threshold for weakness. Once, in the driveway in front of the Pico house, Big Bill and I watched a swallow with an injured wing mince and flutter in semicircles, flapping its good wing to no effect.
“What’s the matter with it?”
“Hard to say. Something with the wing, I guess.”
Watching the little thing labor stupidly with no possibility of success moved me for the first time to a desperati
on separate and distinct from my own. Couldn’t it see it was condemned to futility? Couldn’t it resolve itself to the cold, hard fact that it had no future, that it was doomed, grounded, finished? The answer was apparently yes. Eventually, the bird gave up, spent and bewildered. Its little eyes went black as obsidians, as though the light no longer penetrated them.
“What happened?”
“Cutting her losses, I guess. She’s beat.”
“How do you know it’s a she?”
“I don’t.”
She hardly moved at all after that. She just stood there dazed minute after minute like she was asleep standing, or she’d made up her mind never to move again. But I knew there was life beneath those shiny black eyes, because I could feel her little pulse beating inside me as if it were my own, and I could see her tiny breast beneath her keel feathers puff out convulsively now and again like she wanted to throw up. I’m telling you, I knew that bird’s helplessness.
“What can we do?”
Big Bill gave the bird a little nudge with the toe of his sneaker. It didn’t budge. “Not a whole lot.”
The last thing that bird saw, or maybe she didn’t see it coming at all, was the business end of Big Bill’s shovel. There wasn’t much blood. There wasn’t much of anything. She was just flatter, and kind of twisted, and there was definitely no life left behind those black eyes. Big Bill scraped up the remains and tossed them to the curb. Life seemed at once fragile and inconsequential when you pulverized it with a shovel.
But cancer doesn’t hit like a shovel. And while Big Bill continued to build his carcass up to world-class proportions, cancer began carving up my mother. It arrived in a terrible flash one rainy afternoon. She came home from the doctor’s office and stood by the window deep into the night. Big Bill burnt frozen fried chicken for dinner.
In the night I padded down the stairs to the living room, where she was still at her post by the window. Tentatively, I approached her in the terrible silence, and she pulled me fast against her. I clutched her about the waist, and she ran her fingers through my hair as she gazed through the window into the night.
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