This week’s story, “Jack, July,” is about a twenty-two-year-old, Jack, who’s coming down from a meth high on a hot July 4th in Tucson. Did you have Jack’s voice in your head when you started working on the story?
For me, a story always begins with a voice. Often, the first few paragraphs or pages arrive in my head—a kind of music or rhythm, which I then follow, in an attempt to discover what’s on my mind. I like to stay dumb, as a writer, especially in the early stages of creating a story. I’ll trip myself up if I try to control things or pretend that I know more than I really do. In many ways, “Jack, July” started with body language as much as with voice. I could absolutely picture Jack’s way of moving down the street—and I realized pretty quickly that I was dealing with a person reeling from some kind of intoxicant. In Tucson, you’ll often see someone marching down the road or standing at a bus stop with this very odd, twitchy behavior. Of course, meth is everywhere in Arizona. The neighborhood in which I live slides quickly from working class to something a little more provisional. Sometimes I run into these jumpy, jangled individuals at the Safeway, a supermarket not far from my house. At the Safeway, you get to see the real Tucson, not the bubble world of Whole Foods. Many Tucsonans are poor, really struggling. Coming from a working-class family, I find myself drawn to these sorts of characters: characters who appear to have less armor and artifice. Somehow their exhaustion seems to unmask them.
The story opens, “The sun was a wolf. The fanged light had been trailing him for hours, tricky with clouds.” The sun—and its heat—is almost another character in the story. How do you capture the relentlessness of the desert sun without becoming repetitive?
I suppose, after living in Tucson for many years, I’ve come to know the sun pretty well. It’s a constant companion, often inspiring: crystalline light and skies of della Robbia blue, storybook sunsets. But, of course, during the summer, the sun is a monster. From May through September, the heat is tremendous. And there can be a bleakness to the light; it’s like an X ray, penetrating everything. Plus, there are all these disorienting reflections and glares. You absolutely can’t drive without sunglasses; you’ll crash. Sometimes even with sunglasses you can barely manage. The light is mythic, overpowering, truly blinding. In the story, when Jack loses his sunglasses, it’s no small thing. In Tucson, you just don’t casually go out for a stroll midday in summer. A hike in the desert that time of year, without a hat and water, might be the end of you. Every summer, there’s a news story of someone having had too much alcohol by their swimming pool, and then falling asleep in the sun and dying. It’s crazy.
Of course, a great many people in Tucson manage to avoid the sun and heat completely, moving from air-conditioned cars to air-conditioned offices to climate-controlled homes. But there’s a whole other Tucson that lives without such comforts. How well people are able to escape the heat is an interesting way to look at class distinction. You might break the Tucson population into two camps: those with air conditioning and those with swamp cooling (which, for those who don’t know, is a system of evaporative cooling—basically a big metal box on the roof that blows air through wet pads). It’s horribly loud and not incredibly effective, especially when the late summer brings humidity. I would say that over half the population of Tucson lives without A.C. When I first moved to Arizona, I had a crummy old Toyota whose A.C. was always on the blink, and I recall driving and praying—absolutely praying—that I wouldn’t hit a red light and lose the breeze blowing through the open windows. In the story, Jack doesn’t even have a car, and sometimes he lacks enough money for the bus. He has to walk through fire.
Jack has a shaky grasp on time and language—events could have happened days ago, or years, or a word can easily slip free of its meaning. What does that kind of indeterminacy offer you as a writer?
It was wonderful, actually. I seem to prefer characters whose lives, and minds, are close to the edge. As I said, I never know where I’m going when I begin a piece, and in this story, since I’d stumbled upon a character who also had no idea where he was going, both physically and mentally, his state perfectly mirrored my own. Because of Jack’s heightened state of mind, I felt free to go a little crazy, to edit myself less as I wrote—and, in doing so, I ended up in some unlikely places.
Since I come from playwriting, I’m always interested in crafting a story with a solid dramatic arc, and with vital, character-driven action; but in my fiction I’m also keen on crafting an equally strong dramatic arc for the character’s thoughts—finding ways to raise the stakes of a character’s inner voice, in such a way that it becomes just as suspenseful as the physical action of the piece. In tandem to “What will Jack do next?” is the drama of “What will he think next?” What might he be able to penetrate and understand of his own life? Of course, this has to be crafted delicately, to leave room for the wildness and the mystery of consciousness. In this story, there are things revealed that Jack would probably never talk about with anyone, terrible things from his childhood that absolutely define him but remain locked inside his heart. No one would ever be privy to these things. Fiction is the only way in.
For Jack, the “stuff” he’s taken is “a precious substance whose unadvertised charm was love.” He’s outraged by the idea that the public is only ever warned about skin lesions and rotten teeth. In the story, you maintain a delicate balancing act by both showing Jack as he sees himself and revealing how he’s seen by others. Was this hard to pull off?
First of all, I have to fall in love with my characters to be able to keep writing about them. Perhaps it’s the writing itself that makes me come to love them. I think that’s why fiction, both the writing of it and the reading of it, is such a civilizing thing. To love those who are not you—and, ideally, not only to love them but also to become them. Fiction as the ultimate virtual reality.
For me, it was easy to get inside Jack. I feel like I know him, could be him in some alternate world. Like Jack, I’m an oversensitive plant, nervous by nature, prone to moodiness. I completely understand the vibration of mania, of extreme, almost uncontrollable reverie.
In regard to how other people in the story see Jack, I didn’t think too consciously about trying to craft this. You set a story, a character, in motion, and then you sort of stumble upon other characters, and you let them react as they will, without censoring them. There’s no shortage of judgment in the world; just as I see people like Jack all around me, I also see at the Safeway the people whom he horrifies.
It’s mostly an intuitive thing, but I love arriving at a place where all the characters in a story reflect off each other, where multiple perspectives complicate and enrich the narrative. Though I didn’t consciously design this, the story ended up having all these images of mirrors and reflections and, of course, crystals, which, now that I look back at it, seems very fitting.
The story gradually provides more information about Jack’s childhood and adolescence. Did you ever think about leaving this out? Of making Jack a character without a past?
It seems impossible to discuss real sorrow without the element of time. The trick, of course, was how to let Jack’s past manifest itself in a very alive, present-moment way without disturbing the flow of the story. When you fall through the floor, it should feel effortless.
I love stories that have extremely compressed time (perhaps because I come from the world of playwriting). I often write stories that take place in single afternoon. This piece does that; it’s sort of a little travelogue of Jack’s day as well as a road trip through his mind. All he does is wander—try to find a bathroom, visit an old girlfriend, raid his mother’s pantry—but the frustrations of these encounters evoke memories. The old stories come out.
The beginning of this piece rides on an absurd, almost comic wave. Then time enters the picture, and the story opens to its true intentions. Jack’s intoxication and eventual crash mirror the story’s journey from a kind of aching zaniness to a deeper heartbreak. I always knew that something unhappy was near, but, like Jack, I circled it, hovered above it, for as long as I could, until the weight of it had to intrude.
I often wish, when I’m writing a story that starts out with some humor, that it will stay that way, and I can be Noël Coward or something—but I always seem to fall into the void.
