THE ARSENIC LOBSTER: A HYBRID MEMOIR
Flatmancrooked is pleased to present an excerpt from Peter Grandbois’ memoir, The Arsenic Lobster: A Hybrid Memoir, which you can purchase in its entirety here.
LESSONS 7-9
Your first memory of writing is the dragon research paper for Mrs. Highland’s sophomore English class. Sure, you took second prize in the Halloween story contest in third grade, but as far as you remember, you’d simply adapted “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.” The dragon research paper is something altogether different; you made up all your sources, complete with quotes and in-depth citations. You were writing Borges fictions a quarter of a century before you would ever read him. When Mrs. Highland hands back your paper, you’re shocked at the large, red “D” and the note to see her after class. You’ve always gotten A’s in English. It’s your favorite subject. She asks how you can write a research paper on something that doesn’t exist. You tell her what better way to understand a fictional creature than through fictional research. Besides you say, if dragons exist in your imagination, doesn’t that make them real? She’s not convinced.
To write is to put yourself into the world. To read is to breathe the worlds of others, to take their worlds in as you would take in a lover. Each breath, each ounce of their seed carries with it the worlds of countless others—and so, in your early teens you’re ravished by Tolkien, Bradbury, Stephen R. Donaldson, and LeGuin. You nearly die when you read Orwell’s 1984—the little death of the French. Maugham’s Of Human Bondage licks you awake, and John Irving’s The World According to Garp gets you hard. Then Faulkner kills you over and over again with As I Lay Dying, The Sound and the Fury, Absalom, Absalom, and Light in August. You still feel his fetid breath, his body heavy about you, and, like any lover to whom you have lost yourself, you probably always will.
Shakespeare, Chaucer and the Beowulf poet baptize you in the waters of the word—the potent alchemy of language. Then John Gardner slays you for good, rips bone from sinew as Grendel tears the limbs from the men in Hrothgar’s hall. And now, you are eternally trapped in the breosthord. Wandering lost in a swefna cyst from which you never want to escape.
And so you rise at five in the morning and write. Science fiction stories at first. But they’re harder than they look. Then “literary fiction,” whatever that is. Stories based on your travels. It’s easier to write exotic stories of other worlds than face your own banality.
Flashes of light and dark as you wind your way through the medina in Marrakech. Black, goatskin tarps shade the alleys to darkness. Suddenly you cannot see. Bodies push past. Women in haiks. Men in flowing djellabas. The impossible smell of excrement and pepper. Orange blossoms and urine. The musk of mule. You inhale it deeply and feel the rush of blood, the pounding of your pulse. Slowly, you make your way past doorway after doorway, looking for the exit. Stay close to your wife, your sister-in-law. But then how easy it would be to lose yourself in the crowd, to slip down a winding passage into darkness. What’s to stop you from taking on another life? Live somewhere else. Love someone else.
The cry of the muezzin calls to you from the tall minaret. Allaha Ackbar, Allaha Ackbar, Ashhadu al-la ilaha illa Allah. You gaze out through the wood shutters of your stifling hot hotel room at the edge of the Sahara. The sands of the Erg Chebbi float before you, an endless sea. Shut your eyes and sleep.
Hide in the car after the trip to the grocery store. Take extra time in the bathroom. Pretend to go to sleep, then get up and write. Don’t let anyone see you. And maybe, just maybe you can squeeze into that dark hole, that space where you feel the slow distillation of time. Hold there while the phone rings, while your wife calls you, while your children jump through the room. Reach your hand out. Can you feel it? That moment that slips through your palm, that brief instant when you are a god?
Suddenly, mornings before work no longer provide enough time to write. You enter the darkness but can’t get out, stumbling helplessly down the wrong tunnel. You recall the decomposed bodies of rats in the sewer of your youth. And there is only one way out. So, close your office door, turn the monitor away from the window, forget about finding jobs for others and work on saving yourself.
Lesson Seven: Betsy
Setting: The woods at the edge of the world in Bennington, Vermont. Your shirt sticks to your back, the sweat circling under your arms. The droning insects drown everything. At night, they almost do you in, creeping through the broken window screen of your dorm. Your sheets stained with blood in the morning. Even now, as you talk, you can’t quite get comfortable. You scratch your ankles, your neck, sure they are coming for you. And yet the woman sitting on the lawn chair before you seems unbothered by any of it, or worse, marks time to the music.
“You’ve got to let yourself fall in that hole, Peter,” she says, her thick Tennessee accent belying the import of her words. “You need to walk through the darkness to find the thing that shines.”
At first you don’t want to listen. You’re a child of science, or at least science fiction. A skeptic by nature, you value only the rational mind. But she sends you totems in the mail. First, a simple rock, then another with a fossil in it. She writes you letters telling you to hold the totem in your hand as you begin your stories. You try it, and your stories change. You don’t know if it’s the result of the totem, but you’re no longer writing Carver or Hemingway rip-offs. And then she begins calling, leaving poetry on your answering machine as your brother had once done.
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting…
To write is to forget the self (or selves), to resurrect the spirit. But how to say what needs to be said when you are a coward?
You do not have to be good.
You skulk through your fiction, slither through poetry.
You do not have to walk on your knees…
Habitualization devours us. It’s the old you who filtered your feelings through others, said what others wanted you to say. Right? That’s how you’ve led your life so far. Let yourself be defined by the definitions of others?
Do you solemnly swear to love, honor, and obey the definitions imposed on you by your parents, your family, your spouse?
I do.
Better to hide within the page than to face the self. The only thing more frightening is never to have written at all.
“These stories aren’t true,” she says the next time you meet in the café in Bennington. “What I mean is, they aren’t true to your spirit. I read them, and they sound good, but they dance around the hole. When are you going to let yourself fall in?”
Her blue eyes pierce, and there is nowhere to run.
Lying, as defined by St. Thomas Aquinas, is “a statement at variance with the mind.” It is therefore possible to lie without making a false statement or without the intention of deceiving others. Lie, fucker, lie. Write and lie.
Lesson Eight: Heda
“You must have compass,” your second flamenco teacher says, and by that he means you have to feel the rhythm. You’re both crammed into a small practice booth above the music store. There are no pictures. Only the cream colored walls that remind you of the womb, you mean your home. He turns his guitar over and pats out the rhythm on the back. “Now you.” These two phrases are the only ones he seems to know in English. You want to respond in Spanish since it’s your only foreign language, but that’s no good either. He speaks Farsi. Rhythm is the only form of communication left to you. He pounds out the rhythm again. And again, you hesitate. What’s blocking your synapses? You can hear it. Why is the signal not going from your ears to your hands? What is it the brain cannot translate? You concentrate so hard it hurts. It won’t come.
And yet, though you don’t understand each other, though you barely understand the music, something of its rhythm seeps into you so that by the end of the hour you have a language—a dream language that starts to fade the moment you leave the eight by eight practice booth. Desperate, you run to your car in the downtown parking lot. Take your guitar out of its case, sit on the bumper —yes, cling to the last pulse, grasp the last fleeting remnant before it fades.
Writing is another form of rhythm. As Flaubert said, “The human tongue is like a cracked cauldron on which we beat out tunes to set a bear dancing when we would make the stars weep with our melodies.” You write to beat your self into the world. Like some magician of the black arts, some succubus conjured from a dark and ancient world, you want to send your spirit into the body of another, to possess that other completely, to force them to feel the contours of your being, the shape of your very soul. Is it purely a masculine yearning? It is certainly sexual. A joining with another. And if writing is masculine, does that make reading the feminine? We read to let the other in. The search always for the book that will ravish you, take you over completely. There’s a reason those books are few and far between. Great lovers are rare. And so, we are all hermaphrodites, each searching desperately for the half we already contain.
He is so different from your first guitar teacher. Slender. Long wiry hair. Fine features. His manner is different, too. Softer. And though he never seems to grow impatient with your bumbling attempts to imitate his playing, he pushes you hard, much harder than the gypsy from Granada, who in the end gave up on you, never asking you to play anything more than the notes. Never again mentioning rhythm. Style. Passion. What it means to play music another human being will hear. Heda forces you to play—over and over. He’ll only repeat the phrase twice—three times if it’s particularly hard. Then he will not play it again. He will set his guitar down, cross his arms, bring one hand up to his face and rest his chin in the crook between the thumb and forefinger. He’ll sit and wait with the patience of a sadistic lover.
“Can you play it one more time?” you beg.
He doesn’t answer.
All you ask for is a flash of awareness. A moment. But the television static sounds in your head. And you can’t adjust your set because you can’t find the remote.
If you can do it in writing, you can do it in music. And so, you push through the fact that the country you come from knows nothing of the rhythms of flamenco—its twelve beat rhythms so different from blues, rock, or jazz. You push through your own DNA’s resistance to playing on the off beat. You push through your own limited musical ability—though you’ve played guitar most of your life, you’ve never progressed beyond bar chords for the most basic of rock anthems. And you push through your fear that all this is for naught, that you’re fooling yourself to think you can ever play something so complicated, something made only for people who grew up on the syncopated crack of guitars, the rasqueados that scrape the back of their necks as they sit at the guitarist’s feet. You push through every bit of resistance, force your hands to beat out the rhythm, falteringly at first, the second try not much better, working to scratch the beat in your memory. No. Deeper. Dig that well deep. Pray to strike a pool, some ancient memory of rhythm. And, as always, you sweat. The air conditioning in the practice room could be running full. Hell, it could be snowing and you’d still sweat.
Can you explain this need to your wife? To your friends, your family? How explain the need to make art of your life when no language exists? It’s in the white space, within the caesuras, beyond the end-stops, in the space between words. Places that can only be intuited—and then, even then, you must be willing to sit and wait for meaning to come. Only stillness keeps the static at bay.
You’re after immortality, but not the kind that comes in books. Not the kind packaged and sold at a fifteen percent discount in Walmart. Eternity is found in a well-honed sentence, a perfectly executed rasqueado, or finta in tempo. It’s gone the second you realize it’s there. If you look, it’s too late. Leave that to the critics and posers. Meanwhile crawl into your hole, stare down the darkness. If it blinds you, so much the better.
When you’re done, Heda says the only other English phrase he knows: “It’s good, but you must practice.” It doesn’t matter. You go on hoping that maybe you can step out of your white bread, middle class, suburban life and set your foot in the world of the roma, the gypsy.
Before you pack up your guitar, you share a glance, and you know he lives in the space between words. It nearly kills you. After, you carry your guitar down the residential streets lined with pre-fab houses, past trees planted—one in each yard—to give the neighborhood an older feel, and you believe you carry something older still.
Lesson Nine: Rikki
From outside, the house looks like any other. Open the door and your nose is overwhelmed: orange blossom, sandalwood, and myrrh. She greets you in long, flowing robes. A kiss on the cheek, then she escorts you inside. The graduate students sit around a dark, Quaker table near the kitchen. Several pots of tea boil on the stove. At least four or five cakes add cranberry, lemon, and cinnamon to the concatenation of smells.
She serves you, waits until you’re full. You remember the story of “Hansel and Gretel” and are on your guard as she sits at the head of the table. She sifts through the pile of manuscripts, her face betraying nothing, then makes her pronouncements:
“This is crap.” She takes the top manuscript from the pile and throws it on the floor. “We’re not going to waste our time on it.”
She takes the next manuscript, peels back the first page. “This is crap.” And it, too, falls to the floor.
Again, “This is crap.”
She comes to your manuscript. Looks over the first page, peers at the second, moves as if to toss it aside, then stops. “This is so bad, it’s almost not worth discussing.”
She then spends the next hour talking about how awful your piece was.
“Yet, there is something,” she says.
You listen between her words, search for a hint of what she means.
“Sliver of imagination…”
There it is. You heard it, or think you did. You try to catch more but come away with nothing.
Nothing, except the fact that there was something.
Your next piece is better. She’s actually curious about it, wondering at your use of the Billy Goat as an alter ego for your protagonist’s desires. She speaks of the alchemy of language, the need to move beyond the simple definitions of things, to bring the dream to life.
That you understand. You live a waking dream, never sure exactly where or who you are.
You make an excuse to go to the bathroom, but really you need time to be alone, to feel your way through the forest. Down the stairs and to the left. You pass a dark room, the door slightly ajar. You can’t help but peer inside. Her artwork covers the walls, a half finished piece still on the easel: a yellow fruit, split open upon a red background. The paint is still wet. You breathe it in. The damp wood smell. Turpentine. Take it all in so that you won’t forget, can’t forget. Stay as long as you dare.
You create your own space in the basement, line it with books, shut the door and lock it. Here there be Monsters! It works! Your children are afraid to come down, sure they’ll be gobbled up.
You cover the walls with art, play music at full volume, recite poetry to yourself—anything to push out the external world, to give you a chance to fall into the hole. And there you discover your own deep banality.
