Month / May 2007

by Richard Grayson

Window on Main Street

When I was 10, my favorite TV show was Window on Main Street. On CBS, it starred Robert Young, post-Father Knows Best, pre-Marcus Welby, as a widowed novelist in his late fifties who returns to his hometown, rents an apartment over one of the stores on Main Street and basically just hangs out and interacts with the townspeople, writing a new story about a different person every week.

The show was a flop and didn’t even last the whole 1961-62 season.

I’m writing this from the Starbucks in Dumbo, Brooklyn, sitting at a table in front of a window that overlooks Main Street. But Brooklyn’s Main Street is so short and nondescript that I lived the first 28 years of my life here and didn’t know it existed.

The neighborhood Dumbo didn’t exist back then either. For those who don’t know, and there’s no reason some of you should, it’s an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass.
The Manhattan Bridge overpass is about a block in front of me; to my right, out the window on Front Street, I can see the Brooklyn Bridge overpass and cars going in both directions on the multilevel Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. Those on the upper level are going east to Long Island; those on the lower level are going west to America.

The most provincial people I’ve ever met in this country are lifelong New Yorkers.

Like Robert Young in Window on Main Street, I returned last summer for a temporary stay in my hometown. I’m a writer in my late fifties. Except I’m far from the only writer in Brooklyn, as Robert Young was in Millsburg. Sometimes it seems everyone in Brooklyn is a writer. Last fall the New York Times had an article by Sara Gran, a Brooklyn native like me, who now lives elsewhere, about the multitude of authors in the borough, which it termed “Booklyn.”

So I’d like to welcome Ed (odd, to welcome one’s host but this is Blogland as well as Brooklyn) to the ranks of Brooklyn writers. I don’t know if I really am one, though. I moved out at 28, and except for four short sublets in Park Slope, Sheepshead Bay, and the Williamsburg house where I’m currently living, I haven’t been a Brooklyn resident since 1979.

The past ten months have been an amazing experience. I recommend that everyone solve her mid-life (mid-life? I don’t expect to live to 112!) crisis by moving temporarily back to her hometown.

My friends and I at Brooklyn College in the early 1970s mostly couldn’t wait to get out of Brooklyn. We thought it was horrible in many ways, an embarrassing place to live. Nearly all of my friends moved away as soon as they could — to California, Florida (as I did), Boston, Seattle, Long Island, New Jersey, Manhattan.

The first line in the first story I ever published, in the undergraduate Brooklyn College literary magazine, paraphrased Norman Podhoretz in Making It: one of the longest journeys in the world is the one from Brooklyn to Manhattan.

Seven years ago this week, I was standing by the magazine rack in the Borders in Plantation, Florida, puzzled to read a line in the Publishers Weekly review of my book of gay-themed stories: “Grayson knows New York City, where many of these stories are set, inside and out.”

Huh? The title of the book was The Silicon Valley Diet and I thought I’d set the stories everywhere but New York: San Jose and San Francisco and Los Angeles, Miami and Gainesville and Tallahassee, Chicago and Philadelphia, Atlanta and Wyoming (yeah, I published a gay Wyoming cowboy story the same year as that other one).

But then I reread the book and saw that New York was everywhere: in the characters’ pasts and somehow even in the ones that never mentioned New York or Brooklyn.

My last book was different: a deliberate Brooklyn book. The Kirkus review began, “The dynamic cityscape of Brooklyn serves as the backdrop in this” blah blah, and the Philadelphia Inquirer started with “Richard Grayson is a funny guy from Canarsie, Brooklyn…”

Actually, I’m from Flatlands, East Flatbush and Old Mill Basin — parts of Brooklyn where there are still very few writers. My childhood in the ’50s and ’60s wasn’t quite A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, not quite Last Exit to Brooklyn, and in my writing I’ve always tried, often unsuccessfully, to avoid strolling down the sticky paths of Stickball Street and Eggcreamery Lane.

When I was a kid, I used to collect Brooklyn bus transfers, which meant I had to ride every bus line in the borough. Since I’ve been back, I’ve been trying to replicate my childhood feat. Now, as then, I’m often the only white person on the bus. There’s a lot of Brooklyn that you don’t find in the mass of “Brooklyn” literature today.

Tomorrow I’ll be at my house in Apache Junction, Arizona, where the Starbucks on Apache Trail, not far from Old West Highway, has a hitching post. For horses. No horses here on Main Street: just a 24-hour parking lot, Fed Ex trucks, and a guy in a blue jumpsuit with the John Doe Fund logo sweeping up.

Because my arthritic knee is bad today, rather than walk to the nearest subway stop 6 or 7 blocks away, I’m going to take the B-25 bus. It goes along the Fulton Street Mall; over forty years ago I worked there in my uncle’s clothing store. I’ll get off by the G train stop next to the stage door entrance of the Brooklyn Academy of Music; over thirty years ago I stood there after a performance of Gorky’s Summerfolk to get the autograph of the play’s star, Dame Margaret Tyzack, whom I adored.

When she finally came out, I handed her my playbill and a pen and blurted out something about how much I loved her in The Forsyte Saga, The First Churchills and Cousin Bette. I guess I went on too long because this is what Dame Margaret said as she took my pen:

“Dear boy, it’s really very nice to hear all that, but you know, it’s sometimes good to know when to stop talking.”

Welcome to Brooklyn, Ed. I’m out of here.

leaving-brooklyn-sign.jpg

by Erin O'Brien

Meeting Larry Brown

During the black months after my brother John died I desperately wanted to get closer to him. Not yet ready to revisit his writing, I did the next best thing and reread books he had given me: Frederick Exley’s “A Fan’s Notes,” Richard Ford’s “The Sportswriter.” I reread “American Psycho.”

It wasn’t enough.

So I listened to Bob Dylan again and again as John once advised me to do. I flailed, searching for an answer or a clue or something.

Anything.

Eventually I exhausted words and music and still felt empty. I picked up his novel “Leaving Las Vegas” and tried to reread it, but literally could not. It was like trying eat in the days immediately after John died when the world was surreal and impossible. I’d look at the food on the end of the fork, but couldn’t put it in my mouth, couldn’t chew it, couldn’t process it. It was the same with “Leaving Las Vegas.” I couldn’t absorb or process the words. Bewildered, I snapped the book shut. Then I turned it over and regarded the blurbs on the back cover: authors saying nice things about the book. Now here was something new–a handful of authors who admired John.

There are tiny gifts in profound grief. They are hard to find. You must look carefully. You must recognize them and pick them out of the black soot that surrounds you. Discovering Larry Brown’s name on the dust jacket of “Leaving Las Vegas” was one of those gifts.

I was immediately taken with him. In the short story “Julie: A memory,” a violent rape is contrasted against the frantic passion of youth. In “Boy and Dog” a child’s gentle tears over his dead dog are shed moments before a terrible car fire takes a man’s life. In “Dirty Work” a woman is scarred and burned, but still capable of loving and being loved. That is what finally touched me in those dark days: the way Brown managed to find tenderness and humor and humanity in the bleakest landscapes.

I already had begun my own writing and was flattened with awe. I devoured all of Brown’s work. The more I read, the more it fueled my curiosity about him and his relationship with John. Two and a half years after my brother punctuated his life with a single bullet, I wrote Larry Brown a letter.

A month later, I pulled a standard white envelope from the mailbox.

“I did know John, and he did know my work,” Brown wrote. “Just keep faith in yourself and keep on writing. That’s what John had to do, too.”

Thus began a six-year correspondence. I was the neophyte; Brown was my mentor. When the harsh reality of writing would crush me, I’d write him.

“Much as I’ve written, I’m still scared of it in some way until I sit down and start doing it again and then all the fear goes out the window and I feel safe,” he wrote once.

In all, Brown wrote me five letters, and I wrote him 10. Our unique relationship included one face-to-face meeting. In September 2003, driven by an undeniable urgency, I took a frenetic 700-mile road trip to hear him read at a bookstore in Louisville, KY.

He looked tired. There were about 20 people there, a surprisingly staid group. He did his reading and answered mundane questions. “Yes,” he assured one woman, “I write every day.”

People lined up to have their books signed. After everyone cleared out, I approached him. “It’s Erin,” I said. “I’m Erin.”

He inflated with recognition. “Oh, Erin,” he said, “after all these years.” A genuine smile spread over his face as he stood to embrace me.

Brown and O’Brien

The letter I wrote him after that trip was funny and sad and honest. “I am the only O’Brien left,” I wrote. “I cling tenaciously to the fine threads that connect me to the ones to whom I’ve said goodbye. I think of you that way, a subtle and significant tether between John and me. That I can read your words and write you letters and drive to Louisville to verify that, yes, you are alive and real and breathing are not things I take for granted.”

Brown died about a year later.

Upon hearing the news, I gathered all our letters and reread them chronologically. I expected to get teary reading Brown’s installments but instead found myself crying over my own. There I was, vulnerable and immature and getting thrashed around by life. And there was Brown, taking on the role of older brother with sensitivity and indulgence.

“I went through the same thing, felt the same things, and I do know how tough it is,” Brown wrote in April 2002. “I’ll bet John’s advice to you would have been along the lines of just telling you that if you wanted it bad enough, to just keep at it. I know that don’t sound like much, but that pretty much sums it up.”

There was the letter I wrote Brown after Dad died. “I know you don’t deserve to get some miserable piece of shit letter like this, but it’s just that you wrote that story (“Julie: A Memory”), and it made me feel a certain way today. Amid the rejection and death and shit, there was still that marvelous story that marvelous, wonderful story”

Brown replied. “I’m sure sorry to hear about your father. I lost mine quick like that, overnight actually. I know how hard that is. I was sixteen then … Okay, well take it easy and hang in there. I write all the time and once in a while I finish something.”

The men to whom I desperately wanted to prove myself died before I had the chance.

Uncomfortable with absolutes such as heaven, hell and the insidious purgatory, I instead have constructed an egocentric Dead Guy Theater, wherein my life is the constant feature presentation. John and Dad sit there along with all of my grandparents and a cousin who died at 33, as well as the occasional guest such as Larry Brown.

My dead guys watch me with rapt attention and grandly nod their heads in approval of my every move. They were there on the day I pulled the first copy of my novel from the box and held it in my hand. They saw the glow rise in my face the day a newspaper editor bought me a beer and asked if I’d be interested in writing a regular print column.

They are there as I type these words. I know they are there.

John O’Brien was born 47 years ago today.

“Julie: A Memory” and “Boy and Dog” are part of Brown’s first short story collection, “Facing the Music.”

This post was authored by Erin O’Brien

by Edward Champion

Yet More Bat Torrents

Another quick little offering:

Torrent Packs #4 and #5 of The Bat Segundo Show have been released to The Pirate Bay.

Pack #4 contains Shows #61-80, and features interviews with Alison Bechdel, Daniel Handler, Tommy Chong, Nora Ephron, Scott Smith, Richard Dawkins, and many others. You can download the torrent here.

Pack #5 contains Shows #81-100, and features interviews with David Lynch, Mary Gaitskill, Kate Atkinson, Francine Prose, Nina Hartley, Richard Ford, Christopher Moore and many others. You can download th torrent here.

There will be a sixth pack, once time can be found to complete more shows.

by Patrick Stephenson

As Easy As Breathin’

Finally you have returned, John Rambo. Where have you been?

At first, this trailer appears to advertise a serious drama. The Goldsmith score, the Christian prayer, the debate about whether to interfere in a genocide until a pretty American blonde is killed. By the end, it looks like it’d easily belong sandwiched between PLANET TERROR and DEATH PROOF.

The way craggy-faced ole Sly says, “John” and “long time” at the trailer’s beginning breaks my heart. JOHN RAMBO and ROCKY BALBOA are obviously his double aught attempts to deconstruct his iconic, superheroic characters from the ’80s. They’re equivalent to THE WATCHMEN, in a way. Rocky’s now a gentle old man, managing a restaurant and wearing his huge spectacles and cute hat to the supermarket. Rambo’s still the loner, caressing his cross in solitude, but older now, more pacifistic. UNTIL, a horrific act occurs that rips him from his peaceful life and forces him to become a decapitating, throat-ripping badass. To which I say, YES.

And I will be there for the midnight screening. Fourth row center. You can count on me, Stallone.