The novel L. O. V. E. was the easiest for me to write. I came to it a year after finishing from The Prairie Dancers, my first novel, where I had to invent my way through conceptualizing what a novel is, can be, and how a novel works. I had my fresh graduate degree in English letters but reading what others have done is completely different I learned from inventing one’s own form, substance and methodology. Some don’t invent, they use templates or simply do one easy as taking a shit. I knew I wrote too well for that, and was far too heretical to simply ape an established genre and style. That made my first novel demanding beyond anything I’d attempted in life. It was a wickedly mad plunge into the wild unknown of myself. It was far more than merely trying to conjure up the process of becoming a writer. More than ego or ambition it was self creating.
If I had known then of the despair and self doubt to come down through so many years would I have continued. Yes. The Devil Drives.
The experience of New York in the 1970s was such an extreme LSD experience, the city so uproarious and evil, that soon after arriving I began to bloat with its imagery, its people, the raw fear of it mixed with its sexual beat, pulsing and undeniable. Often just walking its pavements for hours, a lone and lonesome young adventurer, the sheer frightening voluptuousness of New York gave me an erection. Like having eight million people sweaty and hot swarming against my naked skin. An erection I could not help, do nothing with, or for.
That murder in my tenement, the horror of it up so close, so visceral and contrary to my own Kansas parsonage peace of mind, set me into a febrile intensity on L. O. V. E
Like the city itself the novel about the city became a nightmare both repellent and addictive. The strangeness of the whole New York experience led me sometimes to actually jacking off as I wrote. Arising utomatically, autonmically like the writing itself. Bizarrely turned on, from the sheer total excitement of where I was and what I was doing.
Without access to a washer and dryer like many New Yorks with the same predicament and too short on time and energy to do it myself I took my dirty clothes to a laundry service located nearby and on my route to work. This was The Second Avenue Laundry, corner of 10th and Second Avenue, directly facing the old fieldstone church of Saint Marks in-the Bowery.
I assume the woman taking in the laundry bags and doling back the clean laundry managed the place. She was a horsey woman, thick wasted, dirty blond hair, blue eyes and no makeup. Washed out. Not bitter, just tired. Short broad hands with stubby fingers always caught my attention with crude
L. O. V. E. tattoos across each knuckle, both hands. I was too shy to speak to her, and she had little time for that. Everyone was ‘honey.’ No one was a friend. Nobody caught her interest. Anything humanly possible occurred beyond the plate glass windows of the Second Avenue Laundry. She seemingly remained indifferent.
This character gave me my main character, Magda Ott. I made her from Kansas, from a Mennonite family run to drugs and a jazz musician in New York. I decided she’d have a mixed race kid and live a couple floors down in my own building at 608 East 9th. Her one friend would be a gay guy, some what like the one murdered in a recent post.
To survive the dissipation, despair of East Village I had her selecting a few customers to write to, sending her notes back unsigned and secretly in their clean laundry, messages about her life. The story builds on from there. Unashamedly a mix of Damon Runyon and O. Henry, but with an ominous plot, it
evolves going on the run from an invisible nemesis, racing from derelict building to derelict building, sometimes attacked by an army of bag ladies. Unbelievable, a New York East Village through the looking glass which I liked very. Enjoying what you write raises it from a task, a drive for fame, to another level. You simply write it to make it, a good BLT with lots of mayo squeezing onto your fingers.
Besides my monumental Mennonite my other characters were a plump gay man in his late 60s, Homer. Izzy, cut diamond beauty of a bitter black woman, a sex act performer in a Times Square arcade. Samson, a middle aged Irishman from Queens who works in a Vanity publishing hours on Union Square. A man of sorrows without a life or friends, eccentric and brilliant, so lonely he can barely speak to others. He toils his middle years away on an endless novel, “Ambulance Drivers of The Spanish Civil War.”
This writing was sour sweet. The novel shocked me, elated me, dumbfounded me in turns. But New York City was perched right on my fir escape, so close to my working that I could touch it.
I feel I hit my stride in language with this novel. Sentences just poured like cheap beer.
For sure I was young. That kind of strong coffee made the novel jump out of my mind, wet and bawling. Is it any good? I wonder but think so. Some people who I respected read it then and found it se. Good in its own odd way.
I did have some reinforcement. I was invited to read twice from the completed manuscript of
L. O. V. E. on WKCR, Columbia University radio. It was a Sunday evening program called ‘In Our Time.’ I was so agitated my voice trembled.