Since college I’d carried the story of a good friend who’d tried “sounding”—look it up—with a rod of wax while masturbating. The bills for emergency surgery had ended his academic career. A decade later a drunken friend had told me about buying all the ingredients for a carrot cake, plus Vaseline. He’d ditched the sugar and flour, but had gone home to peg himself with the carrot—look it up—while he masturbated. Two good anecdotes with a common theme, but still not enough to craft a story from.
Finally, while researching my novel Choke, I met a man who’d almost died while pleasuring himself in a swimming pool. Here was the third element I needed. It took a Vicodin for me to write a draft in one marathon sitting. The first time I read it in our weekly writing workshop my friends laughed. It got a couple of groans, but nobody keeled over. In regard to a line about the dog, Greg Netzer said, “Thanks for the big laugh at the end.”
The story, I called “Guts.”
On the surface the story is shocking, but its power lies in how it depicts the alienation we feel as our budding sexuality alienates us from our parents. After it was published in Playboy magazine and in the Guardian newspaper—which lost numerous subscribers for showcasing the story in its Sunday supplement—a man wrote to tell me it was the saddest, most moving story he’d ever read. It’s always heartening when someone looks below the surface.
Its first public reading took place at Powell’s Books in the top-floor Pearl Room. That was a warm evening. I heard after the fact that a young man at the edge of the crowd had fainted. No one sets out to write a story that makes listeners faint.
The following night, at a reading in a Tigard, Oregon, Borders bookstore two people dropped where they were standing.
By Cody’s Books on Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley I knew what to expect. The auditorium was packed. From the podium I could see the tension on people’s faces, the irked look that comes from being too crowded together. Strangers were pinned shoulder-to-shoulder with strangers. Everyone resented one another for the overall discomfort. The heat and dankness and lack of personal space.
The local publicist, David Golia, had witnessed the faintings in San Francisco bookstores, and he swore they were triggered when I read the words “corn and peanuts.” In Berkeley, when we arrived at corn and peanuts I noticed a young man sitting in the center of the audience. His head flopped to one side, and he slumped against the girl beside him. To judge from her expression they were strangers. Her face snarled in disgust at the physical contact. His torso toppled across her lap, and she cried out as he slid to the floor.
Her scream brought the focus to her. And I stopped reading as the rows and tiers of people all stood to get a better look. People clutched their hearts and cupped their hands over their faces. Clearly they were all concerned. As far as they knew he was dead. Those immediately around him lifted the man off the floor but there was no room for him except across the lap of the young woman who’d screamed.
From the podium the scene was a strange pietà. The seemingly dead man lay draped across the young woman’s lap. Also present were elements of the Last Supper as the flanking people and everyone surrounding them, they all reached forward as if to help. Four hundred expressions of despair and empathy.
I looked at David Golia. We both knew what would happen next.
The fallen man blinked awake. Finding himself the center of attention, he blushed. People gently helped him to sit upright in his own seat.
And the crowd…they went nuts. Weeping. Applause. They’d forgotten I was even there. To them they’d just witnessed a death and resurrection. Lazarus. The tension vanished, and in its place was this warm sense of unity. They’d forgotten their resentment of each other and had become a community bonded by the experience. Already, they were telling the story to one another. Their shared horror and relief made them a family.
With the stricken man’s permission I’d eventually finish reading.
In city after city, in England and Italy and wherever, it almost always followed that same pattern. Corn and peanuts. I quit counting the fallen when they reached a total of seventy-three, but I continued to read the story. Several times people fainted in line, silently reading it. People told me about fainting on subway platforms while reading. Recently, at the 6th and I Historic Synagogue in Washington, DC, five people passed out and were ministered to by a doctor in the audience. As I reached the end of the story the stained-glass windows were flashing with the red and blue lights of the ambulances that had arrived.
That’s the story about the story. To date, hundreds have fainted.
I think Shirley Jackson would approve.
Process
People ask, “Where do you get your ideas?” Their question should be so much bigger.
Sometimes the premise occurs first. Other times, a single sentence or phrase is the genesis of an entire story or book. Once, a friend at my day job said, “I see the way you think things are.” Such a wonderful-sounding sentence, full of echoes and ambiguity. I repeated the sentence at workshop that night and writers fought over who would use it first. On tour in Kansas City with Todd Doughty, beloved Todd, the greatest living publicist, he and I asked the ticket agent to check all of our bags under my name. I had a business-class seat so there would be no extra charge for Todd’s bag. The ticket agent shrugged, cheerfully saying, “I’ve never done it that way. Let’s see what happens.” Again, such a wonderful sentence, so filled with curiosity and anticipation. It became the title of a story in my coloring book Bait, illustrated by the fantastic artist Duncan Fegredo. Process:
