Stranger Will

by Caleb J. Ross

  4. How has your authorly understanding of fatherhood changed since then, or since the birth of your son?

  I don’t know that my understanding, in terms of how I approach fatherhood in my writing, has changed much. I write the father figure often, and usually as a reluctant authority figure. That will probably stay the same.

  Stranger Will is, I believe, the only piece I’ve written—definitely of such length—from the perspective of the reluctant authority. Usually in my writing the father pops in for a few scenes as a device to highlight certain aspects of the main character, and then he drops away.

  If anything changes because of my own fatherhood I may begin treating the father figure with a bit more care. I understand the role in a way I never have before (side note: I grew up without a father, only me, my mother, and my two sisters). The father will always be a presence in my stories, and perhaps now just a more informed presence.

  5. Being a father, and writing several stories about fathers and sons how do you think your son will react in ten/fifteen years when reading Stranger Will? More importantly, what would you say to him, on walking in and finding him turning the last page?

  I’d say, “Wow, you got to the last page. It must not have sucked too much.”

  I think my son will react to my work in the same way he might react to any story; I don’t think the thematic weight will affect him. He loves stories, he loves books, and I think the separation of author from author ’s work will be a natural concept to him.

  Actually, I hope he cares enough about literature to confront me about the book someday. It would be amazing to be able to talk with my boy about my work.

  6. You mentioned in a blog post for Father ’s Day last year that your wife and son gave you a day to write. When faced with all that free time, though, you found yourself distracted and realized that you write better in short bursts. Two parts: Why do you think you function better that way (and is it a result of only having short bursts of time in which to write) and do you feel like you writing is shaped by this practice? By that I mean do you see your work as smaller sections built into sequences (similar to a screenplay) or as one longer narrative? Does that make sense?

  Writing is exhausting for me. I spend most of my waking time thinking about what I want to write. Only once I have a few sentences in my head do I sit down to write. Those sentences grow to a few paragraphs, sometimes a page or two, and then I am done. Two hours tops, usually. I’ve always done it this way, even sans-child, though I will say that now with a child I find myself hyper-focusing my writing time. I’ll take my 15 minutes of time and cram my two pages into it. My writing hasn’t suffered through the shift in habit, but it has changed.

  I have always written with the goal of producing smaller sections. I then weave these sections into each other as I draft out a novel. So, the finished product may not resemble the fragmented beginnings at all, which I suppose is the point of a novel; it should be cohesive, seamless.

  7. I have to say, Stranger Will is a finely cut novel, and reads like the obsessed work of a compulsive editor. How far from the initial drafts is the final copy? Do you find yourself revising more than writing?

  I actually really love editing, perhaps even more than the initial writing stage. So, yeah, I definitely revise more than write. For Stranger Will specifically, the final version is substantially different than the earliest drafts. Specifically, the entire first draft was written in first-person perspective. There is nothing quite as satisfying, for me, as re-writing an entire novel. The amount of focus I am forced to dedicate to such an undertaking is extremely revealing.

  8. You had a really interesting—and relevant (maybe frightening)—column on HTMLGIANT about writing for search engines. You’re also one of what I think is a new breed of novelist, one who is using the dearth of social media to both expand your readership and inform the author-as-person. Has this influx of creating content for social media cut into prose- writing? The two seem almost, I don’t know, dependent on each other. That you need the prose to back up the attention social media brings, and you need attention brought to the prose byway of social media. How do you make time for each? Do you find one eclipsing the other?

  Unfortunately, dedicating as much time as I do to engaging with readers and authors via online networks like Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and all the rest has sucked quite a bit of time from my fiction writing. Though, I got into writing not just to write, but to connect with people; novels just happened to be the best way for me to connect with people at length about a specific topic. Online social networking is the supporting converse to the length and intimacy of a novel. In a way, I have found it to be less a distraction and more of a necessary component to being a well- rounded author.

  From a marketing perspective, you are absolutely right. The two aspects—writing (the product) and networking (the sales)— are part of the same piece. A lot of authors, myself included, tend to stay away from terms like “marketing” and “sales”; books are supposed to be better than commerce, right? But the fact is that books only matter when people read them. I think of social networking not as selling but more of helping readers find me.

  As for time, I tweet a lot on the crapper.

  9. You’re right that, these days, the writing and the networking are just about equally important. You present a good case for this in the blog tours you’ve done (Charactered Pieces‘ Blog Orgy and Stranger Will‘s Tour for Strange.) How does I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin relate to Stranger Will? Do you see them as parts of an overall whole or two completely different books?

  The novels are similar only in that they both deal with parental abandonment in some way. Some readers have noticed this thematic trend with my work, even back to Charactered Pieces. The realization really came to me as more a revelation than a casual observation. I never had a father growing up, so having been forced to see my work as a product of a non-traditional childhood I have to embrace the circumstances. Though, I’m just the kind of anti-establishment hipster that chances are less and less of my work in the future will involve this same theme. In fact, I’ll probably go the polar opposite way and deal with a smothering of parental support as a character ’s main conflict. I’m the kind of guy that stops liking a song the moment he hears it on the radio, as irrational as that sounds.

  10. When are you going to write a vampire novel?

  I’m working on a novelization of The Lost Boys right now.

  11. Everyone is debating the rise of e-readers and their impact of the idea of books. I want to go beyond that. When will we be able to download books directly into our brains, or have some Strange Days-type shit? Also, as popular culture seems wont to do, there is the diametrically-opposed use of typewriters on the rise. Which press will be the one to top them all and get Gutenberg on our collective ass?

  If Steve, of Gutenberg fame, ever starts a press I think he would be a shoe-in. He’s got name and Police Academy recognition.

  The re-embrace of typewriters feels like a natural reaction to the rise in technology. It has happened with other mediums as well: vinyl records and film come to mind, two forms that most people outside musicians and moviemakers respectively don’t see much need for. I think the same about typewriters. Most readers don’t care how a book is composed, they just want the book. The return to a nostalgic medium is generally more a producer ’s response than a consumer ’s response.

  12. You talk about the human appendage trade in I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin and feature a fetus-in-fetu in the title story of Charactered Pieces. Are limbs symbolic of something bigger for you or is it more of a way to create a visceral reaction from the reader?

  This, like the parent thing mentioned earlier, is also a recurring theme that, until readers called attention to it, I hadn’t consciously acknowledged. Though, unlike the parent theme, I think limbs (their removal, their grotesqueness, and their metamorphosis, as in the case with my upcoming novella, As a Machine and Parts) are probably less a product of my upbringin
g and more just morbid fascination. However, if I continue the trend, I hope readers will continue to play the role of my couch- side therapist and clue me in to a Freudian correlation. That being said, the image on the cover of Charactered Pieces is a foot…just a foot.

  13. Both novels take place in highly specialized worlds. What kind of research did you do for each?

  Stranger Will is composed primary of images pulled from my experience growing up in a small town. The fields, the isolated environment, it felt natural to me. I don’t think Stranger Will would have worked if set in a larger town; a small town offers a sense of contention, of not being aware of the larger world, that made Mrs. Rose’s behavior believable. In a big city, she would have been found out much sooner.

  I Didn’t Mean to be Kevin has some of the same small town imagery, but has too some settings pulled directly from my college days, which is still a small town but much larger than my hometown. The beef packing plant, the Laundromat, and a couple of the bars all come directly from Emporia, KS (IBP, Norges Laundry, and Town Royal, respectively).

  I think fiction, more than anything, has allowed me to embrace and really own my small town upbringing. At one time I resented it. But now, it is more a part of me than any forced environment ever could be.

  Appendix D

  Strippers with My Son

  Expanded from “Even Strippers Bleed Red” originally published at Undie Press

  I can safely assume that I am the only person to have ever sat alone in a Hooters restaurant reading Lisa Zunshine’s Why We Read Fiction, an exploration of, among other things, how the human brain has trouble distinguishing the world of fiction from the world of reality. I am certainly not, however, the first person to have sat alone in a Hooters restaurant suffering the book’s thematic confusion. Despite what my textbook academic luggage may imply, I too play the ‘are they or aren’t they’ game any time I am approached by a set of boobs, especially a set of boobs with tip money on the line.

  A good friend of mine was set to be married in less than one week. I arrived at this endowed bachelor party starting-block about half an hour early forcing me to decide, should I be the creepy gentleman sitting alone reading a book at Hooters? Or should I be the creepy gentleman sitting alone eating food at Hooters? I opted for the former, though plenty a kindred loner around me chose the latter, chewing alone, gawking alone, treating the experience as a cheap substitute to the $20-cover strip clubs that pock the Topeka peripheral. One of which, The Outhouse, was scheduled as our stop number two and we were, as one bachelor party member stated (once our group finally coalesced in the Hooters parking lot), “running late.” I respected this man’s desire for punctuality, though was no less confused by it, and helped usher the group to our awaiting van. Leaving Hooters, I turned back to the solo men, wished them well under my breath and almost invited a particularly sad looking gentleman to join us. He licked hotsauce from his fingers, his table plate-less, silverware-less, and mug-less, leaving me to assume his wallet empty and his shame non-existent. But what’s sadder, leaving the relatively sanitary pseudo-peep show that is Hooters or dragging a stranger down with us as we aimed our half-chubs toward a strip club famous for its touch-all-you-want and BYOB business model? I left the man alone and reserved all pity for ourselves.

  The veteran of the group, a man named Terry—father to in- tow bachelor ’s friend and cell phone game enthusiast Nathan— warmed our group with a loose joint and equally loose conversation. Terry and I had never met. Nathan and I, however, have been much acquainted over the years. He often made the drive from Wichita to Emporia, Kansas to party with us. Generally, our gatherings consisted of Doug (the bachelor), me, and the handful of bored coeds we could trick into attending. It takes a special type of party-goer to cross the transom from comparatively sterile outdoors Emporia into our all-but-condemned college house, with sticky floors—sticky kitchen, sticky living room, sticky bathroom, and sticky bedroom floors—and perpetually flooded basement, home to crawfish and slugs familiar enough to have nicknames and backstories, being not points of embarrassment, but somehow, points of pride. If you bonded in our house, you bonded for life. Which is why repeat visitors were so welcomed. And Nathan, though he kept his face to the always- current handheld video game system during much of these parties, was repeat enough to practically be a brother. Now, having met his father, and factoring in what I would later learn of him throughout the night, I can assume Nathan’s pilgrimages were more escapist than communal.

  Terry passed the joint around asking each of us simple questions, focusing on me, as we were the only two members of the entourage not formerly acquainted. “Doug tells me you have a son. How old?”

  “Just a few months,” I answered between coughing fits. I tried to steer the conversation toward less awkward topics. “I hear The Outhouse has a fuck room.”

  The father ignored me. “That titty milk tastes like regular milk, just with lots of sugar,” Terry said. He offered the information casually, like one would to a stranger on an elevator. This elevator, apparently en-route a pediatrician’s office or alt food seminar on the benefits of disgusting eating habits. Years later, when TIME Magazine would start a cultural war by showcasing a 4-year-old breastfeeding child on its cover, my first reaction would be, “I’ve heard of older. Much older.” The rest of the boys, perhaps calmed either by the smoke or by their long associations with Terry, reacted apathetically.

  I asked, “Why would you know that?”

  “I had a baby once. The kid didn’t stop us from having sex. When you got a mom’s titty in your mouth, you end up tasting a bit of it.”

  Nathan, displaying what I assume to be a calloused tolerance to household father-on-titty conversation, focused on a late-level game of Angry Birds. I was beginning to understand his infatuation as one that began young as a familial bomb shelter but later expanded to a social one as well. Those images I have of him, ignoring drunk girls at 1309 Merchant Street in Emporia, Kansas in favor of the latest Mario Bros. game, became sad in a completely different way.

  After a quick pit-stop for our B-rations in the BYOB equation, filling our cooler with enough beer to kill a stripper, we continued the drive, locking our throats and hotboxing the van until we collectively expressed second thoughts about our ability to maintain composure at the impending promise of lap dances and cold sores. We were little qualified to sit in a chair, let alone actually be a chair for stripper asses. But we persisted, each in our own way. Me, I overcompensated for any perceived uncertainty by offering the doorman $10 to cover both myself and the bachelor, falling way short of the required $20 per boner-toting wiseass. Doug, he compensated by lending me the money without calling attention to the gesture. To this day, borrowing $10 from my friend during his own bachelor party to get inside a strip club ranks high on my list of embarrassing moments.

  The Outhouse is unlike any strip club I’ve experienced. Beyond its sketchy location (35 miles east of a dead tree in some forgotten wheat field), The Outhouse is famous for its aforementioned BYOB policy and touch-all-but-the-boobs etiquette (yet the vagina is mysteriously absent from the no-no list). To keep the sadness theme going, the club has opted to go sans-DJ in favor of a sad jukebox attached to a sad rear wall into which the sad strippers put their own sad money for their sad, sad five minutes of stage time.

  Terry, familiar with the club, helped us navigate the erections to find an accommodating table in a dark corner. I immediately took to the beer. The others took to the strippers. Within minutes, the opened alcohol had opened their wallets. I’ve never been comfortable at a strip club. I would love to claim otherwise, as I already lack the social prerequisites for manliness—I hate sports and I don’t like steak—but I simply can’t play an adequate pervert. So while the rest of the group bathed in glitter and shame, I drank. And drank. And drank.

  Inebriation allows me to remember four specific events: 1) me stealing Doug’s attention away from his own saddled stripper to show him cell phone pictures
of my son; 2) the near-empty cooler with only a few bottles floating among remnant ice; 3) me attempting to twist off the cap of a bottle only to injure my hand in a way that wouldn’t become apparent until twenty minutes later when, after being gifted a lap dance, I notice the stripper, spotted with blood like she’d suffered a machete injury whacking her way through our erection jungle. Suddenly, my own hand throbbed. I looked down to find my arm more red than white with a bottle cap shaped slice in the meat of my thumb. For the rest of the night I sat silent, mentally preparing myself for feigned shock and awe should the trail of blood be tracked to my chair.

  Or worse, the trail doesn’t lead my way, and the poor stripper gets fired for a faulty tampon. That’s a dialog I’d love to hear when work history inevitably comes up during future job interviews.

  Event 4) Terry being cock-ridden while his son looks on without a stripper of his own. Let me not understate the visceral poignancy of this image. They sat adjacent to one-another, Terry just a few gross dry-thrusts from explosion and Nathan, wishing not for a stripper of his own, but for his Nintendo DS.

  The next morning, we re-grease our emptied stomachs with a diner breakfast. Mid-meal Terry steps out for a cigarette. I follow. The logic of the previous night escaped me, so I wasn’t going to let the rationale of glitter-dusted father-son bonding go unquestioned.

  Seated at wooden bench just outside a window looking into the others, still eating, Terry asks again, “How old is your boy?” I tell him again, three months. He says, “If I can give you one piece of advice, it’s this: do everything you can with him. Go to all of his stupid events and all of his boring games. You won’t want to—in fact you’ll think of every excuse not to do it—but you can’t get those times back. You’ll be tired and pissed at yourself for even having him, but do it anyway. I missed a lot with my boy,” he glances in through the restaurant window at Nathan, who sits quiet with his nose to his cell phone screen, “but I’m making up for it.”