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Where Words Meet

Killing Your Parents, One Way Or Another

by Brian Hodge

When Kurt Vonnegut died in mid-April, there were a few days in which you could see the tributes that we all hope would mark the loss of any writer of his stature. Except for the one from the talking head behind an anchor desk — I swear I saw this — who solemnly remarked upon Vonnegut’s importance to American letters for such novels as Slaughterhouse-Fire.

I kind of wish the typo were mine, instead of an institutional group effort. And didn’t know whether I should find it depressing or comically inevitable. If even a titan like Vonnegut can’t get the title of his most famous novel uttered accurately during a talking-head obit, what chance do the rest of us have?

Probably better to worry about that when I’m dead.

One of the more thoughtful examinations of Vonnegut’s influence characterized him as a writer that many readers discover in their youth, because he had a splendid knack for confirming, and expanding upon, what these young readers are starting to discover: that the world is a far different place from what it has appeared to be … and not in a good way. “The age of disillusionment,” the piece called it. By this audience, at least, he’s read voraciously, and then set aside … after which the reader presumably gets a little older, integrates further into the world, rationalizes the compromises necessary to hold onto what he now has to lose, and tries to make some sort of peace with that. And to read Vonnegut again would serve as an uncomfortable reminder of who that person used to be.

For better or for worse, I can’t claim that kind of relationship with Vonnegut. I didn’t get around to him until later, and other authors’ books played more or less the same role during the radiant dawn of disillusionment.

But that particular tribute did make me think of another relationship I’ve had with another writer, with certain parallels in where it stands today.

It doesn’t matter who the author is. Names would just get in the way. Every writer, I’d bet … hell, every dedicated practitioner of any creative endeavor … has someone like this in his or her background: an elder whose work isn’t just a diversion, but an electrified awakening.

Gotta call the writer something, though. So let’s make it C.M. This will make sense in a minute.

Now, I’d experienced a gravitational tug toward writing long before I ever heard of C.M. My earliest story was written in the second grade — augmented by a gallery of illustrations rendered in Crayola’s finest medium, to boot — and the inner drive to do so predated that by a few years, before I’d even learned the alphabet. I was trying my hand at novels before I was out of gradeschool, although at the time I couldn’t be bothered with such insurmountable challenges as research and logic. In the world of my sixth grade crime epic, you could transport millions of dollars’ worth of primo weed in a crate small enough to carry under your arm along a crowded sidewalk.

The point is: The urge, the need, was lodged inside from about as early an age as it could manifest. And during those formative years I read lots of books and stories that fanned the flame and opened my eyes to our world, and places in it that seemed impossible to get to any other way, and to worlds that were entirely the products of someone’s imagination, yet seemed no less real for it.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, I made other career plans.

But then along came C.M. I don’t know how or why the alchemy worked, and I don’t suppose it matters. Just the results: I hit Critical Mass. Hence the initials. Something about C.M.’s work sprayed a high-pressure jet of gasoline on those fanned flames. It crystallized distinct possibilities out of vague hypotheticals. I began to look at writing not as a dabbler activity, but as a path that was beginning to materialize out of the fog. C.M. made it all real and tangible in ways that it had never been.

Of course I lived the life of a devoted megafan. I sucked up C.M.’s backlist, and, in the town where I lived then, on the day C.M.’s latest book would come out, I was often the first person within the municipal limits to get my hands on it, if you didn’t count the clerk who’d unpacked the box in the town’s lone bookstore. And if I wasn’t the first to buy it, I still would’ve been more likely to shoot out my eyes with bottle rockets than fail to have several chapters read by the end of the day.

So I read and I wrote, the long lather-rinse-repeat cycle that goes with the territory. And because writers with their training wheels still on can be prone to modeling their work on the works of scribes they admire most, C.M. was my cornerstone as the sales began to come — first to magazines, then to anthologies, then books of my own.

Eventually, the weirdest thing happened. Although I still bought C.M.’s books, the urgency didn’t bear nearly so much of a resemblance to heroin addiction. One of them I’ve still never read, because early word-of-mouth on it was so discouraging. And the ones that I did read…? They weren’t holding me with that same magic spell. It seemed they could’ve used the attentions of an editor — I knew about these things now, from the inside — except this stage of the process had apparently been skipped.

In short: The covers were starting to feel too far apart.

Dismaying? A thousand times yes. I rationalized and bargained, and you’ve heard it all before:

“It’s not you, it’s me.”

“I’ve just been working too hard lately, I think.”

“Maybe … maybe we should get away for a while, just the two of us … so it can be like it used to be.”

Eventually it was decided that we should spend some time apart in order to save the relationship. Not reading C.M.’s books became a time-consuming habit that lasted for a surprising number of years. Periodically I’d hear about what I was missing, and think, Okay. Someday. Just not yet.

Then, one day last year, with no great fanfare, the moratorium ended. I picked up one of C.M.’s interim books, about which I’d heard a great many good things, and was ready for syrupy orchestra crescendos and swooning magic as we fell back into one another’s arms.

Except it was a real slog. Not a forced-march-up-a-muddy-hill-in-full-pack slog. Not that bad. Still, in my glossary, slog and magic are diametrically opposed concepts.

Far more illuminating was finding myself face-to-face with a menagerie of ornery bugaboos that I’d spent the intervening years trying to prune out of my own work: Like saying the same thing three times when once would’ve been enough. Or flippancy of tone in the wrong moments. And a tendency that one rejection letter for an early novel of mine, which soon sold elsewhere, rightly characterized thus: “…several jolly irrelevancies that are sometimes charming but more often than not just get in the way.”

Whatever constructive lessons I’d learned from C.M. — and there were many — I now had eyes only for the sins. Sort of like realizing your dad, who’s always been a good provider, cheats on his taxes … or your mom.

Although reading this novel was a miniature Age of Disillusionment unto itself, there was a brighter flipside: I would be hard-pressed to think of a time when I ever felt any freer of my early influences. At some point in the past I’d graduated, but never really opened the diploma for a good, satisfying look.

However bittersweet the moment, it must inevitably happen someday if you’re ever to be yourself: leaving the room and board that you’ve found in someone else’s work, with an attitude that says, “Thanks … really. Thanks for everything you’ve done for me. For taking me in and helping to raise me. Thanks for not laughing when I kept falling over on my face, and for pretending not to notice when I could’ve done better to make you proud…

“I’m sorry, too, because now I’m going to have to be an ungrateful shit and throw out half of everything you taught me. Maybe more. But maybe you’ll understand. Because maybe you had to do it too once.

“And, no, I don’t know if I’ll be dropping back by again someday or not. We’ll see. But if I do…? Don’t take it personally if you don’t recognize me anymore.

“Because how could you possibly respect me otherwise?”

Related posts:

1. We Are Our Parents Now
2. KILLING PEOPLE 101
3. The Suspense is Killing Me
4. THOMAS SULLIVAN: KILLING FLEAS & THE FACE ON THE CUTTING ROOM FLOOR

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