My Friends, We Are Fucked

The Last Bender

OK, for the next few months I’m going to post a chapter a week of Last Bender. The Last Bender is my second complete novel. After I finished Specimen Tank I had no project. There were some little, fruitless ideas that I was batting about but nothing ever came of them. Then on New Year’s Day, 1992 I wrote what would be the last chapter of my unfinished second novel, which to this day has no title. It is about Ed and Dorothy. Ed is writing a dissertation on Vietnam and goes mad. He hallucinates an alternate universe in which Vietnam mutates into Champa (Champa was a medieval kingdom, or collection of principalities, in central Vietnam, which Vietnam spent several centuries conquering), and in which the Kingdom of Champa, populated by The Champs, is something like Kansas or Upstate New York. The Yuens are intervening in a Champ civil war and attempting to impose Confucianism on the recalcitrant, distinctly Merkin population. He is also a terrible alcoholic. The novel begins with Ed fleeing Ithaca for New York. His wife Dorothy then tries to track him down. I wrote about a hundred pages of it and got overwhelmed by life and research. Finally, the negative reactions of my then writing group so depressed me I stopped working on it. Two years went by, an age of terrible woe. Then I wrote out the what-if scenario that became The Last Bender, after reading Chandler’s The Little Sister and Ellroy’s The Black Dahlia. I started to work 1-2 hours a day writing the novel out in composition books. I decided there would be no compositional rules, because I wanted to finish something without that deadly self-censorship that can set in when the editor’s hat remains on the writer’s head. I became fascinated by surrealism and Beat stream of conscious maximalism. It became psychedelic and satirical, dare I say Pynchonian. In my bubble (this is pre-Tarrantino) I felt like noir, hard boiled, crime work in America, whether it was films like The Godfather, or Out of the Past or Gun Crazy or Bonnie and Clyde, or in literature, like Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford, or in music, like The Sex Pistols and The Velvet Underground, were my private treasure trove, my own enthusiasm and obsession. I had not read Philip K Dick yet (though I would before I reached the end of LB). I didn’t know that every other man in his thirties in America was obsessed with The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. How could I not know? I was totally cut off from the world. I worked all day shelving one of the largest collections of Asian and South East Asian books in the world. I had two young children and a girlfriend who lived 225 miles away in NY. I had gone a couple of years without cable TV, and without friends, except for twenty-something lesbians and a few eccentric, borderline personality type poets. It was easy not to know things. I still live in a shocking state of ignorance. It accounts for a lot of stuff, good and bad.

A couple of years later I knew what I wanted to do with it. Cut everything that wasn’t hard boiled. Make it into a mystery, the detective story it was at heart. Satirize the world, yes, but be gentle with the hard boiled tradition. No self-mockery. No reflexive post mortemistic irony. Get rid of the bullshit.

The first hand written draft was 1097 pages. I whittled that down to 650 typed pages. By then it was 1996 and my 3rd daughter was born. I sent the mss around to some
friends and it was, as my cousin Oskar said, ‘A wild ride….but inconsistent.’ I was
reading chapters aloud here in Ithaca. People liked it well enough, but I put it in a drawer. It was totally unfocused. I was trying to do too much.
By 1999 I had a manuscript that was a little more muscular, if still a hodge podge of genres, and started to submit it to agents. My query letter elicited a lot of requests. One of the first was from an agent who ultimately rejected it, but the whole episode gave me an invaluable education in the literary agent world. The agent, now out of the business, was Bill Clegg. He requested the whole mss. I was thrilled. I packed off the monster, taking a day off from work to finish editorial changes I had assumed I would have plenty of time to make. A week later I realized a horrible thing had happened: there were eight missing pages. I had not checked the Xeroxes. I had to Fed Ex the missing pages with an apology. Some time later I got a very friendly letter of rejection from his assistant. She especially liked the very sexy scenes. Oh, it was the nicest rejection I ever got. She said it was good but not Bill’s thing. Bill preferred literary works and poetry. The Last Bender, she said, was not literary. But she liked it quite a bit and was sorry to disappoint me. I wrote back thanking her and requesting the return of the manuscript. Half of it arrived in two weeks time. Stuck between the title page and the first page was an interoffice memo asking Bill if she should write the rejection letter. She made a joke about Chapter Three. No doubt Bill didn’t like Chapter Three at all, not at all. Chapter Three is what makes the book the kind of book it is: indigestible, unpublishable by anyone. In it the protagonist and the possible love interest go to a unisex glory hole. It’s about 24 pages into the story. I peed on any parade that was left after the first 24 pages. I’m still doing it today, proudly.

The memo made me feel like they were laughing at me, which actually does violate a rule. Agents don’t ever flatter you. They don’t (or shouldn’t) compliment you unless they mean it. Most just reject with a slip of paper or a form letter. Any comment, any personal touch is taken by every writer to mean a heightened level of interest. So if they were laughing at me, they’re total shits. I think he was and she wasn’t. I think she left that memo in there for me to see, so I’d have an insight into the business. I wanted to send the actual rejection letter and the memo to Poets and Writers. But I was too afraid it would ding me forever in the agent world. Self aggrandizement! Oh cruel ego! But this is how oppression in America works. Internalized fear. Now it all just seems peevish. With or without Chapter Three he was never going to represent me or any of my books.

I’ve rewritten it twice since. I now see it for what it is. A hard boiled detective story set in the future about an inane, incompetent, and cruel police state in which the citizens have lost their ability to articulate or even know a moral sentiment. It’s about the nation of Inania in which the only commonly held value is the pursuit of maximum short term profit and prosecuting the wars necessary to such an ambition. But the nation is dying. It is in a state of total physical, moral and spiritual decay. It’s a novel about America. My friends, we are fucked.