The Dragon Griaule

Two townhouses down from me was a crack house, its front yard littered with rusted lawnchairs and motorcycle parts, run by a fake Rasta guy from Brooklyn, Nicky, who had dropped a dime on someone higher up the food chain and in exchange had been given carte blanche by the cops. Every morning the schoolkids would stop by for their rocks and sometimes the cops would pass the house and wave to Nicky, who – the soul of expansiveness – would return the salute. He also ran an illegal taxi service and maintained a string of hookers who operated out of the abandoned cars along New York Bay, and most nights would get into screaming fights on the street out front of my house. Drug dealers wearing Just Say No T-shirts made plaintive cries beneath my window at every hour of the day. I hand-wrote most of a novel called ‘Kingsley’s Labyrinth,’ stopping only when I realized I had filled eleven notebooks with an indecipherable script that resembled seismograph readings, and I hung out with people whom I would normally run from – Uzi-toting Cubans and so forth. There were frequent gunshots and each morning when I walked out, my footsteps crunched due to the empty crack vials littering the sidewalks – it was as if a kind of glassine hail had fallen during the night.

My downstairs neighbor, a beautiful black transsexual named Renee, constantly fought with me over her right to play Connie Francis albums on her deck beneath my bedroom window at 6 a.m., an argument ended when someone cut her throat, broke all her LPs, slashed her pretty blouses, and put bleach in her fish tank. These and other neighborhood tragedies came to occupy my attention, and I grew increasingly paranoid and unsound. The then-New York City mayor, Ed Koch, would once a month herd together a bunch of the most deranged homeless people in Manhattan and ship them over to Staten Island on a late-night ferry – his way of cleaning up the city. We’d wake the next morning to find a fresh crop of schizophrenics wandering the streets, talking to the CIA, to aliens, making phone calls to heaven. Most drifted back to Manhattan, but a few took up residence, including this one guy who was given a home by someone and built a life-sized, authentic-looking electric chair and every Fourth of July weekend would drag said chair out onto the traffic island on Victory Boulevard, strap himself in, and grin at the commuters. No one to my knowledge tried to stop him – it was as if the authorities accepted this as an appropriate commentary. To top it all off I began dating a businesswoman who appeared at the outset to be level-headed, stable, but three weeks into the relationship started breaking into my apartment to clean it and one night announced that she was a ninja and capable of starting fires with her eyes. We didn’t make it very long. In my mental state, the last thing I wanted was a woman who could incinerate me on a whim.

Good times.

Somewhere in the midst of all this was a dragon, but it seemed quite mundane when contrasted with the vivid weirdness of the gangster fantasy in which I lived.

LIAR’S HOUSE

 For much of the ’00s I lived in Vancouver, Washington, essentially a bedroom community for Portland, Oregon, a gigantic strip mall with an endless supply of unprepossessing, unattractive people embarked upon the consumption of corn dogs and reality TV. This was my initial take on the town, at any rate, because, having grown up in a suburb, having steeped in its flavorless juices, I tend to loathe such places. But at the same time I firmly believe that the human species does not encompass a great range of intelligence, that the difference between an Einstein and an idiot is much less than we might imagine, and I am certain that people who are inarticulate and stolid and apparently thick often have interior lives every bit as complex and eccentric and rich as those of showier models. ‘Liar’s House’ received some criticism at the time of publication for the literate interior life of its ox-like protagonist. The criticism may have been deserved, yet this narrative tactic is not without precedent – there have been countless incidences of savant narrators throughout literature and, for my part, I’ve known plenty of uneducated people who were incapable of expressing themselves in precise language, yet had other means of self-expression and were extremely precise in their comprehension of the world, of what was going on around them. In any case, the character of my protagonist was informed by the people with whom I was surrounded. I suppose you might think of him as the personification of Vancouver, WA.