Working Man’s Blues – Kevin Killian
August 3, 2006
I’ve never met Wendell Ricketts, but I have long admired his writing, and the tremendous power of his own writing in many genres he now brings to an editorial project which must have seemed daunting at the start, but which winds up, in his able hands, a terrifically rewarding anthology. It’s not your typical book of working class porn, where middle class designers drool over the mechanics perched under their Mercedes. Nor is it precisely a book of agitprop urging the proletariat to armed revolution by any means necessary. James Barr’s long story, “The Bottom of the Cloud,” which must have been written a good fifty years ago, has everything but period charm, thank God. It might have been written today, and only some of its circumlocutions tag it as the product of an era in which Henry James was widely read, even by John Fante types whose labor is of the dust. Barr’s story (from his collection DERRICKS) is amazing on a sentence by sentence level, even if you don’t know what exactly is happening to our hero, Robin, and his anguished pilgrimage through the gray areas of “Central City.” Barr was able to rewrite John Bunyan for our own time, and out of a fiery, almost blindsided gay sensibility. Torment, bruises, bondage and pain abound, and he takes you there. Keith Banner’s story “How to Get from This to This” shares some of Barr’s bleakness of vision. Two gay brothers, Danny and Lucas, argue it out from either side of a tavern that might itself be mistaken for a class marker, and from either side of alcoholism itself. Lucas is pulling himself up by the bootstraps, edging himself into a higher class status, while Danny, at age 33 (Christ’s age) is sinking deeper into a nickel and dime pit. “I see my apartment the way it truly is, a mouse-bit bag of bread, Old Crow bottles, old textbooks I never sold back to the bookstore. The magical couch with no cushions.” He doesn’t have much self-esteem, as we say here in California. But maybe that lack keeps us honest. Not all of the stories are as hard hitting as these, but in general there’s a rock-solid thrust to them that feels good.
Ricketts has taken this material and made some hard sense out of it, in a long, engaging afterword that serves as a sort of Apologia pro Vita Sua. Are there working class people in gay literature? Or is working class “contra gay”? Ricketts’ thesis is a tough one, but he asserts that his own best experiences of bonding with men have occurred not in gay contexts, or even in the context of gay sexuality, but while working shoulder to shoulder in prisons and union hiring halls with other working class guys, even murderers. You may meet some dangerous scum there, but at least they’re honest about it, unlike the coiffured and manicured men about whom, and by whom, so much of gay writing is being written. The working class gay man receives nothing but confusion and shame when he attempts to enter the bourgey world of “gay community.”
He may say this, and he may believe this, but paradoxically enough, the stories he has collected here tweak his own definitions of what they portend. Fiction is volatile, like nitro. It doesn’t do exactly what you think it will do, and it works different on everyone who comes in contact with it. “Only connect,” E M Forster wrote, and the great thing about Ricketts’ book is the attention he bears down, with his great brain and heart, onto proving and disproving that way dated dictum.
