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I was a boot fetishist at age three. Something about the way they hugged a leg made sense to me. I wrote stories about fairies who lived inside a star. The fairies loved go-go boots and getting naked. Sure, they solved crimes, but in reality, I was looking forward to the inevitable point in the plot where I could strip them and make them mud-wrestle. It is only as I approach middle-age that I have thoroughly transformed myself into the spitting image of the fairies I visualized mud-wrestling when I was three.Perhaps none of this will make sense unless I give my cosmic disclaimer: I was raised to be the perfect shut-in. My mother and grandmother were devout Catholics who believed that Soviet spies were rifling through our garbage, and the Mafia had our lines tapped. In response to this, I developed a rich inner world. I wrote, read, and listened to music obsessively.
Even when I wanted to fit in with other kids, or with society at large (upstate New York society in the 1980’s) I was hopelessly out of place. I was an underweight nerd who was driven to and from school by her grandmother. I begged her to let me go to libraries and record stores. In such temples of culture, I would absorb everything I could about philosophy and sex.
In a sense, I was an alien trying to figure out the species I had accidentally been born into. I’d pick up on other aliens—voices that made sense to me: Flannery O’Connor, Kurt Vonnegut, Mark Leyner, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby, Dostoevsky. I got into the Irish and Welsh lyrical writers, especially Dylan Thomas. I mail-ordered Kabbalistic porn from a guy named Jacob Rabinowitz in Providence, Rhode Island. My grandmother had no idea what I was getting into those little yellow envelopes! I loved the movie Midnight Cowboy, which I watched on PBS when I was fifteen—back when the station showed that kind of thing. I read rock journalism obsessively and tried to imagine myself in Andy Warhol’s Factory.When I turned seventeen, I met my biological father for the first time. I already had the idea in my head that I was going to run away from home, from “virtual” life as I knew it. Visiting my father was the first time I got to live unsupervised. I spent two weeks on the French Riviera being a party-toy to Norwegian swingers. It was simultaneously boring and fantastic.My influences are everywhere. It is hard for me to discount anything, even a burned piece of toast. Bathroom graffiti, Suffering With Scabies chat rooms, expired salad dressing. I listen as closely as I did to the wind in trees when I was a kid. I listen to necrophiliacs and people who suffer from Pica, the disease that brings its sufferers to compulsively eat non-foods, like tubs of borax, laxatives, weed killer. I’ve had a lot of death-defying experiences along the way because of this philosophy.
The swingers aren’t in Death Confetti; that’s for another book. But in Death Confetti,you will meet a lot of Portland characters, exposed with my vaudevillian scalpel. Each of us is flawed…and in flaws, I see a glorious poetry.
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