1) Where are you from? Why?
I’m fromWestern New York,Jamestownin fact, and I can’t really say why I’m from there, how my grandparents or anyone else ended up there. For that matter I don’t really know why anyone is from anywhere, how the hell anybody got to where they are, where all the shit started and where it all ends. That’s the sort of navel-gazing I do best to avoid. I start thinking too much about something, start pondering the imponderables, and it’s a sleepless night, me staring at the ceiling fan, mouth dry, heart beating hard, wondering if I should get up and take a baby aspirin or if I’m just imagining the tightness. It can go on for days. But it’s a good place,Jamestown, is.
2) Generate a relevant formula.
Take two characters, put them at a table and see what they have to say to each other. Later add another (add two or more if you’re feeling ambitious).
3) In your story “Hairless” you describe a screenplay that your main character admires. Where did that screenplay come from (both in the story and in your consciousness)?
While I can generally trace where in my consciousness most of the elements of my stories come from, the screenplay remains a mystery. I just thought “screenplay” and started writing and there it was. As far as why it’s even in there, I just really wanted to find a way to work the game of Smile into a story and I didn’t care how. I was determined to get that tale out of my psyche and it fit the unseemly nature of the narrator and the script he was reading. Plus I think Rosetta Stone is a good name for a character in a movie. As for the religious stuff in it, I went to Catholic school for ten years and certainly watching a bunch of middle school children act out The Passion Play, seeing a different schoolmate getting crucified every year, would take its toll on even the most disinterested of kids, and I certainly lacked interest. Getting to play Jesus was like getting to play quarterback. All Lent the Apostles were treated like The Beatles. Girls asked for their autographs. Bras were unclasped. I never rose above Roman Soldier level myself, which was almost as bad as stagehand, the equivalent of team manger in sports. I do wonder what went into the criteria for which girl got to be the Virgin Mary and which got to be Mary Magdalene. The priests picked Jesus and the nuns picked the girls. Considering the brutal efficiency of that regime I’m sure they got their picks rights. I bet every parent in town was thinking, Please don’t let my daughter be Mary Magdalene. Please let her be the other Mary, the good one. Let her be the virgin who has babies, every father’s hope for his daughter.
Maybe we did find the source after all. Mystery solved.
4) That story feels masculine to me. Do you have any thoughts or feelings about gender in literature? Do you see your own writing in any gendered light?
I’ve written a few stories from the female point of view and I like to think I pulled them off, but primarily my protagonists are horny, desperate guys, or in some cases, horny, desperate adolescents, interested in both breast size and shape, picturing every girl naked, the prospect of or at least hope for sex always hanging in the air, a lot of pot smoking, getting drunk, not that getting high is masculine or feminine, same with getting drunk, but generally I consider someone who wants to ingest every drug in the room and drink every ounce of liquor to be a guy, But here’s a contradiction. I just realized that that description of horny and desperate really fits most of my female characters as well. They’re always looking for some connection, a physical connection more often taking the place of an emotional one. And they too drink and smoke to an unhealthy degree. So much for that theory.
5) Iris Murdoch in “The Fire and the Sun” says that the line between fiction and philosophy blurs when one makes good art. Do you ever feel that line blurring in your work?
As a reader, yeah, it definitely takes on a deeper resonance than the words on the page indicate at first glance, the really good stories do, anyway. But that can’t be the point of it. The writer just has to tell a story, to lay it all out as if it’s happening right then and there, and if someone comes along and decides it contains eternal truths, well, good for them. As for my writing, there’s no hidden meaning, no secret message, not one in my head anyway. I doubt writers think like that. I imagine everyone’s just telling a story. Here are these people and this is what happens to them. Someone probably wants to fuck someone they shouldn’t be fucking. Introduce alcohol. Watch them fuck. Oh shit, I’d hate to be that guy. Reading is different. The reader gets to find all the stuff that the writer had no idea he left there, stuff of higher meaning. The reader knows way more about the words behind the words than the person who wrote them, I’d dare to think. It might be philosophy to them, but not to the author.
6) What is there and what should we do about it?
There is a naked woman stepping out of a shower at a hotel room; steam is everywhere. The guy waiting for her on the bed is not her husband. He has a bad cough. Her husband is home with the kids. He’s probably stoned. He smokes a lot of pot. He grows it in the garage. Chances are he fucks around too. Maybe he doesn’t even have a job. She’s their sole support and just as long as he doesn’t know about what she does and where she goes, he doesn’t care. He’ll accept any plausible reason for her frequent absences; what he won’t accept are excuses so poorly constructed that even the kids don’t buy them. That’s what there is and what we should do is write a story about them, about those people, try to figure out why they even go on living when each is so profoundly alone in their own way.
7) This is the visceral question. Make us feel something.
That’s kind of like shoving a deck of cards in my hands and asking me to do a trick. Or putting a guy in a room with a strange woman and telling him he has less than forty seconds to make her cum. You’re asking me to move you and I really don’t know how to do that. I know what moves those around me, but that’s about it. And the only reason I know that is far too often I’m the catalyst for many of the more visceral displays breaking out in my vicinity. There’s some universal stuff, I guess, stuff that brings every person to at least the brink of emotion; dead babies, women unable to conceive, lingering illness, disfigurement, heartbreak, kidnap, murder, car accidents, drug overdoses, pool drownings, child-size coffins, the shit that keeps people up at night. Wishing for someone to die in a car wreck so another kidney becomes available. Listening to police scanners, hoping for it to happen.
Sometimes though, a person is faced with the task you’ve handed me. Make you feel something. Well, I know a couple of stories involving chimpanzees and humans that always seems to get a rise out of my students when we’re evaluating “Which would be the best wild animal to be killed by?” There is some debate in the class about what constitutes a wild animal, so we have to define that term. Of course, some students think if a giraffe meets the standard that somehow it would be “cuter” to be killed by one, that the cuter the animal the less vicious the death. I doubt that be a truth. Chimpanzees have a pretty high cute quotient; they can be a very funny animal, yet . . . . I have to stop myself. I was just ready to go for a cheap score, describing a chimpanzee attack where a chimp tears the testicles off a man and then eats them, cock, balls, and all, along with his every finger, toes, nose, ear and eyeball. He eats every item one at a time. First one finger and then the next. When he’s done with one hand he moves to the other. It’s taking forever and still the guy won’t die. All over a piece of birthday cake.
I guess I’m left to just saying what moves me. The smell of my daughter’s hair when she climbs out of the pool. How much she reminds me of one of my sisters when she was that age. Lifting weights with my boys. The sound of my mother’s voice on the phone. A day when the ocean water doesn’t feel quite so cold. A girl with an easy laugh and a crooked smile. A summer rain. My father smoking a cigar. Tan lines. And then there’s this: The idea that even though people are generally assholes to each other, it’s still pretty good that we manage, for the most part, not to just start killing each other. That’s what moves me the most. Yes, I know, we have wars and genocide, but that happens in other countries. It’s good, I rejoice, that people in one state don’t sit up one day and say, Those assholes in the next state are really starting to piss me off. How dare they let queers get married? You see how much dope their kids are smoking? Why the fuck are their taxes lower than ours? Or how about Those people in the next town over are real cocksuckers. Not only do they have better property values, their women don’t get as fat as our women, and why the fuck are they so tan? It’s not like the sun is any different over there. The only reason they’re better than us at sports is because they cheat. Why won’t their daughters fuck our sons? Their sons fuck our daughters all the time. That makes me happy, that we don’t suddenly get up and start acting out our darkest thoughts, that we don’t wake up one day and start to take all the shit we say to each other literally, that we don’t all start to believe what a number of propaganda outlets on radio and TV would have us believe. If people truly believed what they say about each other, they’d be sharpening their axes. I’d be sharpening my axes. Does that make you as happy as it makes me? That we don’t have to sharpen our axes? Or at least we don’t need to sharpen them yet.
Tom Bonfiglio’s stories have appeared or are forthcoming in over a dozen publications, including, Fiction, Northwest Review, The Florida Review,Lake Effect, The Literary Review, Wag’s Revue, Unlikely Stories, Flatmancrooked and Fringe Magazine. He won the Robert C. Martindale Prize in Long Fiction, and has received Special Mention in the Pushcart Prizes: Best of the Small Presses. His work also appears in the forthcoming anthology from Mixer Publishing, Of Life and Death: Heartburn, Headaches and Hangovers. He lives in Paradise Valley, Arizona with his wife and three children.
