Mouthquake
Page 14
The threat of taking your deaf jokes away, and you’re already acting out. Let’s go home.
I can’t. I’m busy.
Doing what? It’s late.
I’m going for fries with my mom. There’s a song she hasn’t heard in a long time.
I walked beside Eric as a believer. The future would not always be tainted by the smell of the past, the unheard screams into air vents. We were not Catholic, but we prayed to the icicles on the dome of l’Oratoire Saint-Joseph in the shape of crutches no longer needed, we prayed to the frost on the cross on the mountain, to the snow on the wings of the angel statue, to the muddy slush holes in perpetual construction sites on Boulevard Saint-Laurent. We projected onto precipitation the uncertain construction of our lives because we knew that, at some point, it would melt, and we would be free of it.
AFTERWORD: Lost and in Trouble Somewhere
Sarah Schulman
An open-hearted boy becomes a dog he saw on TV and sloshes through the Montreal snow to catch the next bus. There he meets the mysterious stranger, a man whose touch is like “being bashed by a warm, raw steak.”
Reading Daniel’s books has always been like reading a well-made movie; there are fade-ins, split screens, and dissolves. With Mouthquake, his fourth novel, the movie has become a soundtrack. We now hold something abstract that floats through air, filled with substance, sustenance but not reliant on materiality. You know, like sex and music.
He helps us understand our own experiences by softly bringing detail to life. Thaw matters and marks time. Ice melts to reveal loss. Quebec is seen through the real and imagined lens of icons domestic and imported: Buffy Sainte-Marie as an actual Saint, Craven A’s and Export A’s, clean-cut baseball becomes bored Expos fans raining garbage on the field. Freddie Mercury, two years before AIDS, declares himself an “anti-monarchist” unless he is the monarch. Marilyn Monroe never actually comes through except in men and women’s hearts. Truth interspersed with some facts becomes reality, that thing no one wants to face.
In the tradition of Gail Scott and Jack Kerouac and Robert Glück, Daniel slices open the experience of experience, sometimes with insight, sometimes with threat. The dog becomes a boy who becomes the object of a police interrogation on the subject of his relationship to this man. Who is the predator? The man? The cop? The boy? The publisher of this book? Someone wants something they are not supposed to have. So many questions in the reader’s lap. It’s scary. Telling the emotional truth means being accused of lying about the facts. Daniel communicates to us through this child “how easily the kind people of the world are destroyed.”
Good writers ask important questions of readers, but rarely do they literally write, “How come you don’t practice the techniques you learned in therapy?” The priority, of course, is, “How come?” the Why, indifferent to specifics of “technique.” Hearing and facing tough questions is so enriching, it makes evolutionary thinking more possible. And through this growth process the reader turns into the writer. The stutterer. And is welcomed to enter his voice.
Mouthquake tells of childhood in Quebec, of a boy in danger. It’s a story of the streets, the stade, the weather, of what was on the radio, of memory. Of the teenager who listens to the Violent Femmes, has his own band, goes out, becomes a man, moves in with others his own age, drinks Baby Duck red wine, and learns about the “luxury of opulent squalor.” Living with his friends, he learns how to take care of himself and others by coming home to each other, talking over their day with each other, and dealing with the art of autonomy, the language of their own responsibility to try, and also to try to figure life out actively. Mutual witnessing is the necessary intimacy of young people leaning through each other, and writers capture this mid-air. Really living is, after all, the greatest inspiration. That’s the start of understanding. Becoming an artist is not something you wait to do. Just like becoming a man. Postpone for too long and you never learn how to give, only to take and to waste time, wait, and eventually stop talking big. Being is doing and doing is becoming. That’s what stories are all about.
By living with others he becomes a man and finds a boyfriend whom he can recognize is the better lover, “more thoughtful, more responsible, more forgiving.” The narrator stutters, Eric is deaf. Sex produces its own imagination, and the knowledge of desire creates more desire. Eric tells him things he doesn’t want to face, and yet those things are true and show the narrator to be both seen and loved. People will kill you for seeing them and loving them, for believing they can be what they crave and can have what they can’t dare to want beyond a whisper. The narrator is smart enough to let it change him.
Art both tells and transforms life. And it is through the juxtaposition of evocative, surprising language with intellectual awareness and the sharing of open consciousness that this process is conveyed with soul, as long as the form emerges from the emotional center of the work. Daniel finds these connections and innovations within himself, partially through commitment, partially through instinct. It’s that thing we call talent combined with the hard work of honest feeling, the self-reflection that reveals new selves when a person finally stops defending and decides to understand.
— New York City, 2015
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Limitless gratitude goes to:
My mother, for a lifetime of love and protection that is the gold standard that I learn from and strive to apply.
Mark Ambrose Harris, for the inspiration of your edifying work and outlook on the world, for believing, for your help with the book, for pushing me forward when the sounds were hard to articulate, for teachings in love and music, for everything. Where would I be without you?
Sarah Schulman, for a body of work that has taught me how to write differently, for your endless justice work, for lending amplification to those who need it, for creating freedom and empowerment and bonds that didn’t exist before, for your afterword. Your strength carries me and many others.
The gang at Arsenal Pulp Press: Brian Lam for coaxing shape into my work over the years, and for being a solid champion of texts that others are afraid to publish; Robert Ballantyne for your perception and wisdom; Susan Safyan, my editor, for your exquisite touch. How many times have I sailed off the flat world and into your hands? All books are a collaboration between writer and reader and publisher and editor, even when the editor tries to erase her footsteps; Cynara Geissler, for your genius on how to address a book outside of its pages; Gerilee McBride for a gorgeous design and stunning cover; unseen proofreaders, for your care.
Thomas Waugh, Amber Dawn, John Greyson, and Anakana Schofield, for your jaw-dropping work and the paths it has opened, for your friendship and guidance, for your willingness to inhabit the fringe especially when it’s a dangerous place, and for your sweet endorsements.
Francisco Ibáñez-Carrasco, David Rimmer, and Marcus McCann for your brilliance and for helping me hear the sound of my voice.
Natalija Grgorinić and Ognjen Rađen for so warmly welcoming me to the ZVONA i NARI Library & Literary Retreat in Ližnjan, Croatia, and for our ongoing collaborations on either side of the Adriatic blue. How thrilling to experiment with you.
Jordan Coulombe for publishing part of the chapter “Coprofagia,” in a different form, in Crooked Fagazine, Issue 2. You rock.
David Homel for your jeweller’s eye.
Alison Slattery for the portrait and for not letting me evade the lens.
The Grand Antonio for letting your weirdness shine.
The Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, whose financial support made the writing of this book possible.
And lastly, to all who bravely interact with sounds that are strange and new, when you don’t exactly know what they mean. Sometimes we have to broadcast on unused frequencies to signal to each other the loudest.
You are all a sonic boom.
Love,
DAC
PHOTO: Alison Slattery
Daniel Allen Cox is the author of the novels Shuck, K
rakow Melt (both Lambda Literary Award finalists), Basement of Wolves, Mouthquake, and the novella Tattoo This Madness In. He co-wrote the screenplay for Bruce LaBruce’s 2013 film Gerontophilia. Daniel is a 2015 writer-in-residence at the ZVONA i NARI Library & Literary Retreat in Ližnjan, Croatia, the first Canadian writer to be invited. He lives in Montreal, where he is vice president of the Quebec Writers’ Federation.