Two years ago, I embarked on a novel to represent me as a middle-aged writer. Ugh. Fuckin’ middle-aged.
Until then, age was a joke I wouldn’t confront. Forty-seven was thirty-seven was twenty-four, insignificant leaps of math. I’d viewed myself for decades as a wunderkind prodigy in a permanent ’90s — that my “style,” as such, hadn’t gone stale. Eventually, I accepted that times had changed and that to another generation, guys like me were frosted-flake relics. Plus, the dark, abundant hair in my reflection was disappearing, my beard an unrepentant white.
The writer in my novel was not like me, while otherwise being me completely. I’d surrendered my youth for journalism and stability; at 23, he produced the era-defining statement I never finished: Ham on White. Its main conceit, in both real life and this fictional dance, was as a love story between two people who never actually meet yet sit within a single booth of each other at a local bistro every weekday. Pretentious shit, I tell you what.
Of course, it bore fantasy parallels to my own life in 1995. There was a bank teller at my downtown branch, and I was crazy about her. Being a penniless artiste in my early 20s, I thought the quickest way to crack her bewitchingly taciturn resolve was through humor and pseudo-cleverness. I talked to her — I mean, I had to open with, “I’d like to withdraw $10 from my savings, please” — but I can’t say we ever met. She was way beyond me, a guy still wearing 1991’s “You Got the Right One, Baby, Uh-Huh” tees and ’93’s Reeboks, living off a restaurant tab. Our restaurant.
My doppelganger suffered no such debilitating pangs of conscience — initially, anyway. His Ham on White was published in 1995 through a fictional small press in Portland and hailed by critics as a generational manifesto, in tune with a Van-Dyked period of frigid basements warmed by microwaved Ramen, pot smoke, and albums by Modest Mouse.
Yet what minimal success he enjoyed was brief. There were no follow-ups, resulting in haphazard chains of jobby-jobs. Between shifts, he jammed notebooks with thoughts he never expanded beyond single sentences.
When my book begins, he’s a 47-year-old cashier at his hometown Lowe’s. Ham on White’s long out of print; in fact, its publisher never reached the New Millennium, their offices overtaken by specialty stores and, eventually, overpriced apartments. He himself occupies a tiny hovel on the town’s south side. The first chapter finds him dangerously overweight and balding, waddling sleepily toward his kitchen sink to puke.
That was me at 47, riddled with apnea and acid reflux after years of a poor diet. Otherwise, I was somewhat more successful, a solvent writer/editor at my hometown newspaper. Yet I dreamed of that novel and some form of recognition, no matter how fleeting. I feared I’d abandoned my aspirations for a more anonymous, yet infuriating existence. At least dude got his shot.
Anyway, enough about that asshole. In 2020, his novel’s rediscovered by a young metropolitan writer for a Gawker-like website. While compiling a piece on forgotten authors of the ’90s, she finds a frayed Ham on White for six bucks on ThriftBooks and reads its cover Willamette Week blurb about so-and-so being the loud, vital voice of a dismissed generation. Intrigued, she reads it, likes it — while blanching at its timeworn ’90s depiction of the central woman as Nathan Rabin’s “Manic Pixie Dream Girl” — and adds its creator to her sadness menagerie.
She tracks him down in Portland, and the book becomes a series of interviews where he attempts to charm her with his primitive customs and well-worn sound bites, which she expertly deflects as cheap theater. He can’t believe anyone’s curious about his work, though he does resent her opinion of its perspective as an outdated male fantasy. Ever the competitor, he also doesn’t like that she’s younger, better, and smarter, with a firmer grip on the cultural zeitgeist.
A comic twist I no longer find as amusing is the author’s repeated suicide attempts, which he never follows through on because he’s never satisfied with his note. He discards drafts by the hundreds, replete with crossed-out passages and shaky lines connecting to alternate adjectives. He worries about his penmanship; what if the Willamette Week misreads “bitter” as “better”? He agonizes over grammar and spelling, shuddering at the inevitable “[sic].” But if he typed it out, would that make it seem impersonal? Which font best reflects despondence? What makes it a singular document? Is it worth the effort if the Oregonian won’t run it in its entirety? If he could only remember that great closing line he came up with at the Plaid Pantry the other day; why didn’t he write it down? So, because it’s not good enough, he lives.
Then, at the end, he dies, anyway. By his own hand. Sort-of. His failing body gets the last laugh. The girl’s feature runs in tribute but generates no interest in his oeuvre. Ham on White never sees a second printing. Life, without mercy, continues.
I saw the book as a eulogy for my generation, the prototypical ’90s slacker beyond “grown up” (a point the pundits thought we’d never reach; who’s chortling in our Metamucil now, motherfuckers?), with his cynicism and misguided dreams. It was the darkest I’d ever been, because I was in a dark place both emotionally and professionally.
I’m not sure I would write it today, though some of those feelings linger as I near 50. It’s become increasingly more difficult to make a living as a professional writer in 2022. At times I wonder if these passions I’ve embraced forever are the best-forgotten passions of a younger man, that I should have abandoned them by now for something more secure. After every unanswered email pitch — no one bothers with form rejection letters anymore; they “ghost” before the relationship — I worry that I no longer produce anything worthwhile, or maybe that I never could.
Yet I remain steadfastly Gen X. I’ll write, anyway. It’s the life I chose. Fuck it. See you soon.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Psych. That was actually brand-new.
