A Sick Gray Laugh Read online

  Neither is humanity. My neighbors and I represent various different races and backgrounds (African-Americans, Caucasians, Latinos, Muslims); and yet, there’s no zest to be found in this diversity. The faces may be colorful, but they aren’t Colorful. Everyone is connected to one another all right, but only in the sense that we’re mutually attached by a network of thick strands of Gray soul-snot.

  As a result, my neighborhood has taken on the burden of a boring, coiled-up heaviness. It’s as though the Gray Air has congealed around everyone and everything, like chilled animal fat, thus making people, animals, and objects move in slow motion. The only things my neighbors ever scream at are their children and sports teams. No one screams at the Grayness. No one screams at the unfairness of it all. No one screams at funerals. No one screams into the mirror. No one screams at morons. No one screams simply for the sake of screaming.

  In Gray Towns, life is something less than life, but everyone has found a way to adjust. I have to think that my more sophisticated neighbors probably suspect they’ve been cheated—handed a life that’s worth only sixty cents on the dollar. But they never speak of their suspicions. Instead, they endeavor to decrease their intelligence, by contorting themselves to fit some political or religious orthodoxy. That way, their suspicions don’t ignite in their heads too often. There isn’t enough mental oxygen in the cramped space of orthodoxy to fuel mental fires.

  Or perhaps they sublimate their thirst for adventure by taking the family on a vacation to one of the theme parks owned and operated by media conglomerates (or a theme park for adults, like the Vegas Strip). Or they go on Twitter and shake their fists at their supervisors (or their employees), Democrats (or Republicans), Scientologists (or Terrorists).

  Meanwhile, my less sophisticated neighbors revel in the architectural clutter of my town’s main drag. The grease-stained limestone. The dented aluminum gutters. The poorly zoned clutter of dollar stores, churches, and dive bars. They visit the payday loan rackets and rent-to-own establishments. Or they go on Twitter and shake their fists at their supervisors (or their employees), Democrats (or Republicans), Scientologists (or Terrorists).

  The thick, sick Grayness—that’s what I see outside my window. It corrodes life until all that remains is rust. It corrodes rust until all that remains is dust. It’s the genius loci of unsafe factories, shady nursing homes, overdose funerals, abandoned railroad tracks, and grubby little strip-mall churches. There. That’s it. I said it. That’s what I see outside. Every. Single. Day.

  Of course, I’m the not first writer of bleak, transgressive texts to notice the Grayness. In The Confusions of Young Törless, the early twentieth-century Austrian writer Robert Musil not only mentions “the sea of grey sensations that crowded around… day after day,” but goes on to describe gloomy rural mist as being like “a slimy trail” that “clung to the newly ploughed land and lead-grey turnip fields.”

  Nor, for that matter, am I the first writer from the Midwestern United States to notice the Grayness. Essayist and short story writer Susan Neville has opined (somewhat whimsically) that “[i]t’s well known that midwesterners have over one hundred words for gray.”

  William H. Gass’s short story “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” takes a more severe approach. Gass deploys the word “gray” eleven times in a single paragraph to describe a desperate little Indiana town. Here’s a partial sample, so you know I’m not just making this part up.

  Streets, sidewalks, faces, feelings—they are gray. Speech is gray, and the grass where it shows…. Everything is gray: hair, eyes, window glass, the hawkers’ bills and touters’ posters, lips, teeth, poles, and metal signs—they’re gray, quite gray…. Horses, sheep, and cows, cats killed in the road, squirrels in the same way …. all are gray, everything is gray, and everyone is out of luck who lives here.

  You may be saying to yourself: Now, Noelle, given that other writers have already written about Grayness, why don’t you pick another subject? Is there anything more to be said about it?

  There is, indeed. You see, Musil, Neville, and Gass did nothing more than simply acknowledge the existence of Grayness. I suppose they deserve a thimbleful of praise, but that’s it. When the history of Grayness Studies is written, they will no doubt be seen as the first crude explorers of the subject, whereas I will loom large.

  I say this because they seem to be of the belief that Grayness is relatively mundane in origin—the result of a nasty confluence of meteorological, socioeconomic, and psychological factors. It never occurred to any of them that Grayness is, in fact, soul-snot that’s slathered over everything, saturating everything. It never occurred to any of them that it’s a DISEASE. (To be clear, I don’t mean that it’s a mental disease; no, I mean something far worse. Grayness is a disease afflicting the souls of the land and all those who inhabit it.)

  And what an Epic Disease it is! When I look outside my window, things don’t merely look “gray,” they look Gray. The capitalization is necessary to convey the ominous nature of the infection. If I gaze out that window for too long, I feel infected. I get itchy. Nausea seizes hold of my stomach and esophagus. I feel as though the Grayness wants to grab me out of my chair and slam me through the window. It wants me outdoors, so I will commune with it. It wants to assimilate me.

  2

  You may be wondering why I don’t just lower my office mini-blinds so I don’t have to look at the world outside my window. Well, you see, I have a cat that has destroyed the mini-blinds to such an extent that they no longer lower. Come to think of it, she’s a gray tabby cat. Could it be that she’s secretly in cahoots with the Grayness? That she destroys the blinds intentionally so I have no choice but to gaze at the Grayness slathered like snot over the world outside my window? This is a silly idea, of course. Just a joke. I’m fully aware my cat is not conspiring against me.

  The fact is that, even if I was able to lower the blinds in my office and block that particular vantage point, I’d occasionally have to venture outside to go to the grocery store or to the doctor or to a bookstore or even just to a softball game. And then I’d have no choice but to look at the awful Grayness firsthand, without even my office window to buffer its assault.

  So what can I do? I simply resist the pull of this oppressive Grayness with all my heart, soul, and mind. I’ve built up tough mental defenses against it—defenses constructed throughout my childhood years, when I intuited that there was a malevolent force in my desperate little town that saturated both Nature and Industry; a force committed to suffocating my soul and the souls of everyone I knew. I envision these defenses as a series of shells around my brain, protecting it like a multi-layered hull. They resist assimilation. They make living in a Gray Town bearable.

  You see, despite the wanderlust I felt as a teenager (dreams of seeing the pyramids, dreams of backpacking through Europe), I’ve never traveled too far from the sort of desperate little American towns most susceptible to The Gray Influence. From my earliest years I’ve seen it coughing out of corroded exhaust pipes and ejaculating from smokestacks. I’ve seen it staining the hair of anyone over thirty and churning in the eyes of their children. I’ve seen it on Main Streets, in long-abandoned concrete storefronts. In forests, on the bark of dying trees. At cut-rate funerals, on the faces of corpses that have been given only minimal aesthetic preparation before being displayed.

  However, this most recent window-gazing spell was the first time it dawned on me that it is a disease, and the first time I realized it could possibly serve as the inspiration for a book. I should have considered it well before now. My work has always been driven by my obsessions, and you can no doubt tell that I’m obsessed with the Grayness outside my window. Moreover, the fact that Grayness is a disease implies that, through hard work, I might be able to discover a cure. The search for this cure would provide a solid, easily understandable narrative structure for me (and the reader) to follow.

  That being said, I didn’t just dive right into things. I had to overcome
a couple of doubts first. As you might imagine, I wasn’t at all sure the Grayness would be a sufficiently strong commercial hook upon which to hang a work of nonfiction. I mean, it’s too vague a nemesis, right? What’s the worst it can do? Mute the colors of trees and grass? Inflict an ambiguous sickness (a boring, coiled-up heaviness) on certain Midwestern towns?

  These are not the ingredients of a bestseller.

  A bestseller—even a nonfiction bestseller, about a medical discovery—requires action-packed, aesthetically simple storytelling. The narrative must be adjusted ever so slightly, like a bonsai, to bring out its beauty. There must be heroes, villains, good, evil, stylized sex, stylized violence, high stakes, and a clear idea of what constitutes victory and defeat. This is why so many authors have been called out for embellishing their memoirs to the point that they cease to be memoirs. You know, James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces and all that. People want melodramas, preferably set in New York, L.A., or Chicago.

  They don’t want introspection, or swampiness, or rumination on what it’s like for a writer like myself (who has, for most of her career, only been published by small presses) to look out her office window at a blue-collar subdivision in southern Indiana and see a snot-like Grayness slathered over everything, congealing over everything, permeating everything.

  But I eventually got past that concern. I remembered that, after all, I’m no stranger to forging ahead with books written for a cult audience of Giggling, Grimacing Outcasts. So it’s not like I’m James Patterson impulsively deciding to go slumming in the aesthetic of Henry Miller. Buying my books has always entailed walking into the sketchier neighborhoods of Amazon.

  There, you’ll find me shivering on a street corner, selling my wares. A Cincinnati Reds cap rests supine on a grimy sidewalk—barely escaping ensnarement in a wad of gum. Readers plunk their hard-earned cash into that hat. In return, I guide them past the litter of used syringes, rubbers, and whiskey bottles and into an old canvas tent that reeks of mothballs. (I’ve set it up on a nearby vacant lot.) In this tent, I whisper stories into their ears and thus hypnotize them into feeling intense discomfort. I am compelled to be such a hypnotist, and my readers are compelled to undergo such hypnosis.

  This is the kind of writer I am. This is the kind of writer I’ve always been. Why should my switch to nonfiction change that? The story of Grayness is indeed factual (not fictional), but it is nonetheless one of intense discomfort.

  Why am I committed to making you, constant reader, feel intense discomfort? Am I a literary dominatrix? Do I want this discomfort to be so intense that it triggers your own personal descent into madness and squalor? Am I being intentionally cruel?

  No. Not at all. It’s just that the most intense moments of my life have been absolutely marinated in madness and squalor. (Honest madness, not the typical pulp horror fiction stereotype of madness. Honest squalor, not some JT LeRoy hoax of squalor.)

  How, then, would I describe myself? I am a literary drug dealer. As I see it, this is a far more ethical calling than that of the literary dominatrix. A dominatrix endeavors to create fresh pain in her victim. I, on the other hand, use words to wake up the pain already sleeping in the reader’s psyche.

  No. Wait. I misspoke.

  I’m not waking up pain. Or at least, what I wake up isn’t confined to pain. There is, of course, madness and squalor, too. Not to mention the oddness of the outcast. The giggling. The grimacing. Let’s sum it all up by saying that my drugs (books) wake up the latent Foulness (both physical and mental) already lurking inside my readers.

  Foulness will never be a bestselling theme, but it’s the only drug I’m capable of creating. And this isn’t, in my opinion, such a bad thing. By focusing exclusively on Foulness, I can corner the market on Foulness addicts. Who knows? With the right publicity, I could become renowned throughout all literary history as “Miss Foulness,” the Foul writer of Foul books for Foul readers.

  Yes, there’s a unique kinship between myself and my readers that the James Pattersons and Bill O’Reillys and Jennifer Weiners of the world will never have with theirs. They don’t have to meet their readers on the filthy backstreets of Amazon. They don’t have to set up a smelly old canvas tent in a vacant lot. They don’t have to help their readers negotiate the path between used rubbers, syringes, and whiskey bottles. As you might imagine, this shared time together creates a connection. I get to know my readers, but—more importantly—my readers get to know me.

  You see, after coming to patronize my tent on the vacant lot multiple times, my readers inuit that I, too, am a giggling, grimacing outcast. If anything, a rational, market-driven adherence to my author brand (which is, if you haven’t already guessed, Miss Foulness) requires that my books continue to serve as mad, squalid carnivals where you, constant reader, can giggle and grimace along with me.

  Therefore, the fear of commercial limitations didn’t stand for very long as an impediment to the completion of this book.

  No, what gave me greater pause was something far more visceral: the aforementioned fear that this obsession with Grayness proved I wasn’t as far along in my mental health treatment as I’d originally believed. Yes, I’m no longer suicidal. That much is true. But what if my perceptions of the world are doomed to be forever stained by morbidity and a weird sort of civic hypochondria? (By which I mean an irrational, implacable fear that desperate little towns such as my own suffer from an irrational, implacable disease.) Carrying such strangely dark notions around in your head, decade after decade—is that any kind of life at all?

  Let’s be frank. What kind of person peeks out her window and reports that the first thing she sees (the first thing!) is “an overwhelming Grayness that’s slathered over everything like a thick coat of snot”? Especially right after publicly disavowing the tactic of “dipping a ladle into your own mental effluvium and distilling it into [a book]”?

  What if the problem isn’t with the world outside my window? What if the problem is with my own sick brain, which insists on superimposing nasty bodily fluids over harmless—some might even say “wholesome”—scenery? What if the Grayness is a snotty discharge from my own psyche? What if my continued championing of madness and squalor isn’t an indication of rational, market-driven devotion to my author brand? What if, instead, I’m so mentally ill that madness and squalor are the only things I’m able to see (and therefore, the only things I’m able to depict)?

  For many months, such worries incapacitated me. I began to look on all my books (past, present, and future) as the deceptively alluring blooms of a poisonous flower named Foulness. I worried that my mental illnesses had forced blinders onto me, and that these blinders concealed all that is pleasant, kind, and beautiful from view. By writing fiction, I was foisting this poison on my readers, inflicting the same blinders on them. I was enabling them to worship at the altar of Foulness.

  And yet I could find no other topic to write about. Every day I glanced outside my office window and saw how Grayness contaminated all that should have seemed healthy and bright. That foul, fucking Grayness! Neither solid or liquid, but a snotty state in between; dripping onto leaves and soaking through leaves and crusting over leaves until my eyes became so revolted they bulged ever so slightly out of their sockets (as if trying to escape). How could I possibly ignore this phenomenon, which shook my nerves more than any sexual titillation, political upheaval, or publishing industry kerfuffle ever could? How could I not write about it?

  Of course, you already know that I moved ahead with the project. You’re holding it in your hand. I decided that, even if the Gray obsession was a sign of madness, the fact that I was tackling it in a nonfiction project meant I’d be forced to remain clear-headed. After all, I’d be relying on the relatively objective tools of memoir and (even better) systematic academic analysis. Even if some measure of Foulness would be involved in the project, the use of rigorous, objective research techniques would curb its excesses.

  So the book you hold in your hands is a work
of history (both personal and regional). Even more so, it’s a work of civic epidemiology—that is, an objective description of the incidence, distribution, and possible control of Grayness. (At least, that’s what I think. I understand that you may leave unconvinced of the reality of Grayness, and therefore believe that any objective study of it is impossible. You may come to the conclusion that this notion of Grayness is a delusion fomented by my still not-quite-well brain.)

  Perhaps it all boils down to one question: “Am I sick, or is the world outside my window sick?”

  As I wrote that last sentence I felt a quiver down my spine, as though I had accidentally grazed against one of the great themes of literature. (Which has a greater claim to sanity: the individual or society?) Such a theme seems to ooze gravitas from its very pores.

  But now, upon further reflection, I’m mortified I wrote it. It’s a navel-gazing sentence and—even worse—a meaningless and inconsequential one. “Am I sick, or is the world outside my window sick?”

  What difference does it make? In either case, these pages will be marinated in disorder, pestilence, and blight.

  3

  What, exactly, makes a town vulnerable to Grayness? Earlier I said that desperate little towns were “most susceptible to The Gray Influence.” Why would that be the case? This is the most important question of all, pregnant with consequences for both theory and practice. If we know the causes of Grayness, we can begin to find a cure.

  Surely, isolation is one key factor. Just as a wolf is cunning enough to target the sheep that’s farthest from the center of the herd, so too does Grayness most frequently strike isolated towns. Some would say this explains everything.

  But the world is seldom as simple as that. If Grayness comes about from isolation, we then must ask: “How does isolation comes about?” After all, it’s rare to find an isolated town that was intended to be isolated, from the moment of its founding and forever after. Few people actively seek to live far away from hubs of commerce and the comforts that often accompany them. Even Thoreau’s famous cabin on Walden Pond was only two miles from Concord. Some even say he went home from time to time so his mother could do his laundry.