Illustration from Razorcake #44 by Brad Beshaw
Mexico is nothing like I expected it to be. I had a collage in my head of Mexico, pasted together with images of Zapatistas in Chiapas; Jack Kerouac sweating out dysentery in a Mexico City hospital; Jessica Abel trying to fuse back her identity in La Perdida; various PBS documentaries about U.S. corporations blazing a trail of toxic waste and labor outrages across the Mexican desert; and soap operas on Univision that I can only understand about every third word of. So I guess that’s what I expected to find: revolutionaries, artists, hipsters, corrupt businessmen, desperate poverty, and full-figured women with generous displays of cleavage. And, in a sense, I’m sure all of that is here; it’s just not front and center.
So what is front and center? Wine country.
I didn’t even know Mexico had wine country until Jim and Nuvia decided to get married down here. Now, I’m three days deep into it.
The wedding is over. I remember it. I remember the conversations I had and the last drink I ordered and the ride home and going to bed. Nothing too crazy. If, ten years ago, you told me that Jim Ruland was getting married and having an open whiskey bar, I would’ve counted on drinking way too much, sliding into blackout, waking up the next morning not sure how I got home, and wincing when I heard stories about how I made an ass out of myself and generally ruined the festivities. Now, I make a rule of not drinking whiskey like that and definitely not drinking whiskey when Jim Ruland is around. So here it is, the morning after his wedding, and I’m feeling fine. Healthy. I woke up early. I had a glass of Mexican tap water already and even that isn’t bringing me down. It’s time to get to the matter at hand.
I grab my book and a chair and head out to the balcony. It’s a little chilly out here. I’m a couple thousand feet above sea level. The mist from the Pacific Ocean forms into a cloud, drifts east for several miles, and settles in this valley. The mountains are completely engulfed in fog. The grapevines below drip with dew. It’s May in Mexico, I’m wearing jeans and a hoodie, and I’m still a little cold. I don’t pay much attention to this, though, because I’m at the end of a long journey here.
My book is in my lap. Really, at this point, it’s a manuscript. It’s called Train Wreck Girl. I printed it out a few days ago. I punched three holes in each sheet of paper and stuck them in a three-ring binder. On the drive down and during lulls between wedding parties, I’ve been reading back through it. I’ve made little notes, added small paragraphs here and there, and addressed issues that my editor asked me to address. I’m down to the last few pages and it occurs to me that this is it. When I type these changes into my computer, the novel is done. Done done. The changes I make this time are the last changes I’ll make to this book. After this, it goes to the publisher, to the printer, and to bookstores. After this, it’s fixed, set in type. It no longer belongs to me. It belongs to the reader. Is this a scary feeling? Yes. Is it a great feeling nonetheless?
Fucking-A.
Patricia Geary once told me that writing a novel is like getting involved in a long-term relationship with someone. Writing a short story is like having a one-night stand: it’s fun and wild and you are emotionally invested, just not that much. Writing a novel, though, is agreeing to get serious with that person. You’re going to start dating regularly. It’ll be fun and exciting. Pretty soon, it’ll start absorbing all your time and thoughts. It’ll get intense. You’ll wonder what it is, exactly, that you’re doing. You’ll wonder if it’s worth it. You’ll go through rough patches that you need to work on. You might even break up for a while. But there’ll be something there that you just can’t walk away from. You’ll go back to it, again and again, it doesn’t matter how many times and how much it consumes you. You’ll make it work.
The difference is, when you get involved with a person long-term, there’s a chance that you can make it last for the rest of your life. With a novel, sooner or later, you have to break up with it. So that’s why I brought this novel down to Mexico with me: to tell her, “I think I gave you all I could, but we’ve gone as far as we can together. It’s time for you start spending time in other people’s imaginations.”
More images flash through my mind. I first started flirting with her back in 1999. I was working as a construction superintendent, spending huge chunks of my day driving from job site to job site, dealing with the stress of work by losing myself in daydreams about barely-formed characters. As those daydreams increased, I realized that things were getting serious. Something needed to be done.
In February of 2000, I quit my job, started teaching part-time at the local community college, did some freelance tractor work when it was looking like I wouldn’t make rent, and spent five or six hours a day for about six months typing away. I wasn’t sure where the novel would go, but I let it do its thing.
I was surfing a lot in those days, so the ocean seeped its way into the novel. I rode my bike most places around town, so the main character got a bicycle and started riding. I read a lot of crime novels—Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, Dashiell Hammett, Chester Himes—so a novel about sunny Cocoa Beach adopted some noir elements.
One night, I’d been writing until about two in the morning when I reached a point where I couldn’t go on and I couldn’t sleep. I decided to hop on my skateboard and ride around the neighborhood until I was tired enough to go to bed. I kicked around the vacant streets for a while, full moon shining down on the warm summer night. A rental sedan pulled up next to me. A middle-aged businessman rolled down his window. He was drunk. Clearly. He asked me if there were any hot spots to check out in Cocoa Beach.
“It’s two-thirty in the morning,” I told him. “Everything’s closed.”
“What about women?” he asked.
“What about them?”
“Do you know where I could find any?”
I realized that, in his booze-addled mind, he thought perhaps he’d run into a skateboarding pimp. I told him, “Yeah. What you want to do is go home, sober up, go to work tomorrow, and ask out the woman in the office who you’ve had a crush on for the last six months.”
The guy told me to fuck off and drove away. I went back to riding around the vacant streets, wondering if a skateboarding pimp would make a cameo in the novel.
He didn’t.
In late 2000, I finished writing the novel. I titled it Crazy Broads and Dead People. I proudly printed up all 350 pages of it, put it in a three ring binder, and read the complete draft for the first time. When I was finished, I was struck with the realization that this novel—for which I’d quit my job, on which I’d spent several months working like mad—completely sucked. I mean, it sucked bad. I almost deleted it. That might not have been a bad thing.
I spent the next few years trying to fix it. During that time, I did other things. I had a bunch of one-night stands with short stories. I wrote enough of those to put out two short story collections. I also helped found this here magazine. And in the midst of it all, somewhere in late 2003, I made the executive decision that Crazy Broads and Dead People was bullshit and we were broken up for good.
During the summer of 2005, I went on two tours to support my short story collection Barney’s Crew. A brutal heat wave hit the northeastern U.S. Joe Meno, Mickey Hess, and I did a reading in the loft of a Pittsburgh bookstore. It was about a 105 degrees. No one bought a book from any of us. The next night, we read in New York City. It was so hot inside the art gallery that we decided to take the reading outside. I went first. It was New York City: loud, hot, smelly. An ambulance raced down the street, only to be blocked by a double-parked car. I stood on the sidewalk for three minutes, mid-story, waiting for the parking violator to move his car so that I could be heard over the blaring horn and sirens of the ambulance. In Boston, two people showed up to our reading. That’s it. Just two. In Montreal, after another hot night of readings, the drunken owner of gallery where we did the reading told me that I needed a shtick. He told Mickey to try to incorporate more props into his reading. Mickey and I went across the street and got drunk.
The next morning, I lay in the back seat of a rented Toyota Echo, wallowing in the hangover brought on by those four readings and a tour that was turning into a bummer. I felt bad for bringing Mickey and Joe into this mess. I felt bad for the tens of thousands of miles I’d traveled and the hundreds of readings in dozens of cities. I felt bad about the wall of apathy and silence that greeted my new book. I felt bad for everything.
But self-pity is the lazy indulgence of emo kids. I needed to snap out of it. I listened to Mickey and Joe, who seemed undaunted. They talked about writing, their new projects, and what their favorite writers did that worked. As I eavesdropped, it occurred to me that the one person who could pull me out of this malaise was Danny McGregor, the hero (or anti-hero) of Crazy Broads. I went searching through the alleyways of my brain, hoping to find him.
He was there.
When I got home from that tour, I started working with Danny again. I wrote every morning for five or six hours, using the same basic plot and characters from Crazy Broads, but writing a whole new novel. I didn’t even dig out my old copy of Crazy Broads. Why should I? It sucked.
Within a couple of months, I had the rough draft of a whole new novel. And this one, I liked.
Within a couple of years, I’d gone through a dozen revisions, sold the novel to Manic D Press, worked with the editor there to clean things up even more, scrapped chapters and added chapters, and read through everything one last time down here in Mexico.
And now, here I am. It’s late May, 2007. I’m ready to say goodbye to the writing of Train Wreck Girl, ready to hand her over to my publisher, to printers, and to you. It’s an Annie Hall kind of break up. I wish her the best. I’m better for the time we spent together. But, as the sun burns away the fog and the panorama of Mexican wine country opens into another day, I’m ready to move on.
Author’s note: This is the thirteenth chapter to a collection of Razorcake columns I wrote. It originally ran in Razorcake #44. For more information about the collection, read this post.
Sean Carswell 