Brandon Graham : Good For Nothing

Larry Brown once said, “You take what you're given, whether it's the cornfields of the Midwest or the coal mines of West Virginia, and you make your fiction out of it. It's all you have. And somehow, wherever you are, it always seems to be enough.”

Brandon Graham’s book, Good For Nothing, is an incredible read. Like Brown, he has an uncanny ability to sculpt his writing from the world he sees every day. His words are strong and drowning in truth.

Book Description from Amazon: “In Flip Mellis's recent past he had, by his own assessment, his feet planted squarely on terra firma. As a husband and father he was a consistent breadwinner. As a business professional, he was a go-getter. For twenty years he did all that was expected of him, if not much more. But a job loss in his middle years, in the midst of a national economic crisis, knocked Flip squarely on his big, soft ass where he has been wallowing for nearly a year. Over the course of one hectic week, replete with a cast of colourful characters, Flip is forced by circumstances of his own invention to finally get his life headed in the right direction. Like a pudgy, irritable toddler he carefully tests his balance and lurches forward, stumbling around absurd obstacles and grasping for any solid purchase. Good For Nothing is told with dark and sometimes macbre tone that is lifted by its fast pace and quick verbal wit. Ultimately a spark of human resilience locked deep within the core of this deeply flawed protagonist begins to spread. The question becomes: will Flip's best efforts be enough to lead him safely to redemption or will they merely lead to a futile, purely graceless and quixotic crash.”

Before we get into my review of his book we have to go back to the beginning. The reasons I bought his book in the first place and believe in Brandon as a writer. For me, everything starts a few years before Good For Nothing ever existed.

I got an email from Brandon introducing himself as a fellow writer. He had run across my bio on the web and read I had once interviewed Harry Crews. Brandon, being a fan of Crews, was intrigued by this and reached out to me. We exchanged a few emails back and forth over the next few days talking about Crews and other writers that had inspired us along the way. At some point I mentioned how I had first wanted to become a writer after discovering William S. Burroughs in the late nineteen eighties. He wrote back saying he once sat beside Burroughs in a Kansas City diner. A place where hardcore drinkers, homeless men, and drag queens have a big cheap short order breakfast. Brandon was there drinking loads of coffee around five thirty a.m. when Burroughs walked in and sat beside him. He would go on to say he had a second encounter with Burroughs. One of Brandon’s friends told him that during the first week of each month Burroughs would show up to a local convenience store where his friend worked and buy the newest issue of Guns and Ammo and Soldier of Fortune. Two months later Brandon took a chance and hung out with his friend at work. The second day, Burroughs came in, went to the Magazine rack and bought the titles his friend had described. Brandon walked over, told Burroughs he was a fan and that they had sat together at the Kansas City Dinner sometime earlier.

After looking over his bio, I knew Brandon had attended Columbia and was an educated man. Don’t get me wrong. An education is always a good thing for an author to have, but life experiences are equally important. After reading these stories about Brandon’s interaction with Burroughs, I was more than intrigued by the possibilities of what he might write. I knew if he was hanging out in a diner that Burroughs would frequent along with drag queens and homeless folks, Brandon would have plenty of interesting subject matter to work with. He would learn things about human behavior, things you just can’t be taught in school. Material that later in his book would become descriptive jewels that would outshine a lot of the literature printed today. 

I’ve always felt any good storyteller pulls from his or her own experiences to paint their picture. What they’ve lived through and been a part of. Like Larry Brown, Brandon is one of these storytellers. When you read his work you feel his words are heavy with life’s hard lessons. Yet, there’s another side to his characters that are so lifelike and caring, you have to remind yourself you are still reading fiction.

In Good For Nothing, Brandon’s character Dean was so wise and so hauntingly real I felt Brandon had more than likely written, and rewritten himself into exhaustion to bring him to life. He didn’t miss a beat with his descriptions of Dean. Not one thing was out of place. The main character, Flip was also spot on with his depression, his fears, his doubts, his addictions, and all of his self-loathing. Along with a cast of well thought out everyday folks swimming in a world hammered by a downturned economy, this book is truly a work of art.

Brandon spared no expense when it came to pouring himself into writing this book. Good For Nothing is a well written piece of literature.

It’s a must read that will have you yearning for what will come next. Well worth every cent and then some. Get a copy today.

 

Harry Crews

A few days ago I learned Harry Crews had passed away. I wanted to pay tribute to the last of the great writers who had inspired me along the way of my long and difficult journey to becoming a writer. So, I’ve decided to post the rough notes, or rough draft from my September 10, 2010 interview with Harry… I’ve left it as raw and undisturbed as I could. I did cut the more personal stuff he and I discussed like his child drowning and other things that didn’t pertain to writing as much as it did to drinking and late nights with friends… The completed article based on the interview I did with Harry appeared in Our Town Gainesville Edition, Spring 2011. It can still be found online. Harry was a good man and welcomed me into his home when he certainly didn’t have to. He will be dearly missed…
　
　
Harry Crews Rough Draft and Side Notes.
　

A few years ago my friend Shane turned me on to the writings of Harry Crews. Shane had done some flooring work the summer before in Crews’ Home. My friend knew I was a struggling writer looking for inspiration. He suggested I open a Crews novel and see what it was all about. From the first word to the ending line, I was hooked. His raw honesty, unpredictability, and good sense of humor were things I thought had all but died in Literature.


So after reading everything I could get my hands on pertaining to Crews and or his work, I called him up to see if an interview would be possible. It was a surreal moment for me when his gruff Georgian voice answered the phone. After a few moments of explaining who I was and what I wanted, he said he’d fallen on hard times with an illness and had stopped doing interviews. We talked for a little while longer about his childhood years and I explained my father was a year younger than him and grew up in the same part of Jacksonville. I told him how my father had helped my grandfather log timber near the town of Alma, Bacon County, Georgia, the birth place of Crews. We talked a few more minutes about two rut dirt roads and chicken thieves. Then he said to come to his home the next day at three o’clock for an interview.

　
Walking up to the door of Crews’ place was intense. His heavily wooded Gainesville home could have easily been a setting right out of one of his novels. After pushing the doorbell I heard, “Come in.” Harry’s unmistakable voice rang out.


All the preparation, all the books, all the articles, all the You Tube Clips, all the interviews, and all the asking of everyone I knew who might have had contact with the man or had him as a teacher--all the months of work had boiled down to this moment.


As I opened the heavy wooden door I thought to myself, Sink-or-swim Jason, Sink or swim.



Sitting across from Crews was a little nerve racking. My eyes were going over his features, older now, more defined then the You Tube clips I’d watched and definitely more defined then any back cover shot he had taken years earlier. His eyes looked deep into the object or subject he was watching. His inner-elbow still wore the dark green ink of a tattooed cabinet hinge. A mark he awoke to find on his arm after a night of drinking while covering the pipeline being constructed in Alaska. A story I watched him tell on the Dennis Miller television show 18 years earlier. He seemed restless for it all to begin. But he made it crystal clear it would begin on his terms.


He started out by reminding me that my appointment was at three o’clock and that I was seventeen minutes early. He suggested, with a few expletives I’ll leave out, the next time I was granted an interview with someone that I should wait in my truck until one minute till, then ring the doorbell. I had done my homework and knew the first few minutes would be the hardest with Crews.



I could see Crews had, what I wouldn’t call a smile, but a satisfied look with the answers to the line of questioning he had just laid on me. He said “You got a smoke?” I replied I had stopped smoking years earlier. After looking for a loose pack in his desk and sending me searching through kitchen drawers, he said, “Come on let’s do it.”

　
My tape was rolling and the interview had finally started.



Harry Crews was born in Bacon County Georgia June 7, 1935. His parents, Ray and Myrtice Crews struggled just to survive. “Our main concern was finding enough food to keep our bellies from growing to our backbones.” Crews said, in the trailer of the documentary, Survival Is Triumph Enough. Being born in the nineteen thirties to sharecroppers in south Georgia, Crews learned early on the harsh realities of the deep south during the Great Depression. Harry’s father died in the middle of the night from a heart attack when Crews was only two years old. His mother did the best she could to raise Harry and his older brother.


Along with the loss of his father, Crews endured incredible hardships as a child. At age five, he became ill with infantile paralyses and spent almost two months bedridden. A high fever and leg cramps caused his body to pull his legs up into a kneeling position. The doctors and adults around him weren’t sure if Crews would ever walk again.


Determination has proved more than once to be a strong asset for Crews. He would eventually learn to walk again, pulling himself along a fence line, using it for balance, Crews was not willing to give up.


“I needed something to hold onto, hold me up, because my legs wouldn’t do it. So, I held on to the fence and learned how to walk again by holding onto the fence, staying on it, my hands got bloody and cutup and shit, but I didn’t care. It didn’t hurt bad. I just did what I had to do, holding onto the fence line…” said Crews.


He went on to tell me that he believed he now had post polio syndrome. That it came on much like polio did when he was a child. I could visibly see the pain he was in when he tried to cross his legs during his explanation. He finally ended his polio story by saying, “My legs are gone. I couldn’t walk from me to you if you had a forty five to my head.”


A few years after his fight with polio, Crews was burned severely. While playing a game with childhood friends he fell into a kettle full of boiling water being used to scald hogs. Crews was burned over most of his body.


A few years after this incident, Crews wrote his first story. Around this time is when he believed he started his journey in writing. For me, as a writer I’ve always wondered what made other writers go down the same path I chose. A path that a lot of the time is not rewording at all and is full of constant struggles and disappointments. But for me there was a turning point when I said there’s no turning back. This is what I’m going to do even if it breaks me. So, if I only had one question to ask him it would be that. So I asked, “When was your turning point Mr. Crews? Was it a book or a writer that started you on your journey of writing?”



“I understand what you’re saying. Writers often have a book that is a turning point or a book that leads them into what they are doing. I could pick out things that turned me toward writing and the rest of it. But the thing is, long before I could do anything, long before I could write, I was a writer. I said that’s the way I’m going to do, that’s what I’m going to do with my life, my whole life. The first novel I ever wrote I was about ten, ten or eleven liven on a dirt road in Bacon County Georgia. And I wrote a damn sort of detective story, what else would I write. And, this little boy was a detective. He had firecrackers in his pocket, he couldn’t have a gun so he had firecrackers. He was after some crooks. He would pull out his firecrackers and light them, Bang, Bang Bang. Ok, come here.”
　

“That’s the kind of shit I was writing. But that’s what young writers do. They write dreadful things so they can write better things. They write another dreadful thing then they do it again, then they write another dreadful thing. And all the badness and terrible shit that young writers then go ahead and write always have joints that need to be tightened. Always has, just like a carpenters points need to be honed off or scraped off whatever. All that shit. That’s what the young writer does. Eventually if he’s lucky he meets writers that will help him. Writers are probably the most generous people in the world with their time. Nobody else would do this kind of shit. Finally they get to where they can trust their own ear.”
　

Crews paused for a moment deep in thought, then continued.

　
“I supposes, Graham Greene in England, was my main most man. I read him through and through, forever. Can’t read all of Graham Greene, there’s too much of it. But I read [him] forever. And ultimately, I met him in England and he read a manuscript of mine, said this won’t do, but it’s almost there. What you need to do, and I tried to do it, but I wasn’t successful. I kept writing, and kept writing, and kept writing and kept writing. First novel I ever published, I was thirty one years old. That was the first novel. But after that I publish one at thirty two, thirty three, thirty four, thirty five, and a whole river full of magazine articles…
　

From there I asked Crews about his time writing for Playboy. Crews seemed genuinely happy with his time spent with the magazine and was happy to have done the work he did with them.


“Yea, I wrote a lot of shit for Playboy. Hugh Hefner was really good to me as he’s been to a lot of writers. There’s a bunch of writers and I’m one of them that if they needed some money, they picked up the phone and said, Heff, I need to do some shit and I need some money, quick. You know you can make six thousand dollars by doing one story, that’s generally what he pays for it, one of those things. The hard part is going out and doing the research, hell you can write one of those things in an afternoon and you can write another one another afternoon, six thousand dollars, six thousand dollars a crack. And let him know you’re a good writer, you don’t try to publish shit in two magazines. Or other shit like that. Crooked stuff. You don’t want to do that. The guy’s got to know he can trust you.”

　
Not being able to find much about Crews’ high school years I ask what he was doing at that time period. Was he writing?


“I wasn’t associating with any people but I was writing. I was writing through the whole thing. No, I knew how bad I was and it’s a great gift to know how bad you are. But if you know that you won’t go out and show a bunch of bad, bad, terrible shit to people and have them think, my God what is this guy thinking? You do your homework first…”


The interview then drifted into his belief he now had Post Polio Syndrome. I asked if the motorcycle accidents Crews had been in over the years could have contributed to his legs being so messed up. The answer gravitated more toward his advancers on his year and a half journey across America on a bike. Which I couldn’t blame him. Why talk about leg injuries when there were adventurers to be told.


“I left here on a motorcycle Six Fifty CC Triumph Twin Champion was the bike I was riding.” He went on to say he went to Wyoming, then to Montana, then into Canada, then to Salt lake City, then to San Francisco to Texas, then Mexico, and finally back to Gainesville. “I finally got back here, purified and holy.” Crews said with a smile. “I wrote out of that for years.”
　

In the intro to his book Classic Crews he wrote about his time on the road, “During that year and a half I was jailed in Glenrock, Wyoming; was beaten in a fair fight by a one-legged Blackfoot Indian on a reservation in Montana; washed dishes in Reno, Nevada; picked tomatoes outside San Francisco; had the hell scared out of me in a YMCA in Colorado Springs, Colorado, by a man who thought he was Christ…”


When asked about the films that Crews had appeared in over the years, he summed up his thoughts on the matter by saying “I like to be in them, I like to write them.”


I then told Crews that I liked the way he kept the rich flavor of the south alive in his writings. From crosscut saws to mules pulling a plow line there wasn’t many writers left that grew up this way then went on to hang out with Hollywood types like Madonna, Charles Bronson, and Sean Penn.



“There probably ain’t a guy within a radius of fifty miles of here that could gear up a mule. To know they had a collar with a pair of hames with chase chains hooked to the hames, go back to the back then and hook to a single tree. One mule one single tree; And he might have a scrape and scooter if it were one guy, one mule, be siding and shit. Nobody knows anything like that. it’s a lost art.”


I then asked him about Charles Bukowski.


“He’s gone now but I knew him. He hadn’t been dead all that long. Seems like everything behind me is dead. He could tell you some shit; he could tell you some shit that you need to told, so you get it where ever you can. That’s what you do, Charles Bukowski.”

　
I then asked Crews about the late author Larry Brown who in many ways was considered to be in the same group of writers as Crews, and Bukowski.


“Larry Brown was a great, great, friend of mine. He sat right where you’re sitting.” Crews said pointing to me.


“When he first started he came to see me. Well, I went to see him first. I looked him up and read some of his shit. I thought this is good. So I called everywhere and I finally found him. He came and visited me and I got him a gig out at the school. Paid him about fifteen hundred dollars and expenses so they flew him down here and he spoke at the University. It was a great thing for him cause he could make some money.”


Crews paused for a moment as he recalled his friend.


“Larry Brown was a hard-knuckled-roust-about. He was something else… He was a very honest writer. Of course you know he died rather suddenly nobody was expecting him to die. He looked great but he drank considerably.”


I told Crews I had gotten what I came for. I didn’t want to overstay my welcome. The interview had gone well, and I was appreciative that he had taken the time with me.


“Ok buddy, well from one writer to another, I hope you find something that helps you get over the hump. I tell you man, it’s a hard, hard, task. But once you get a grip on it, you start seeing what it is, you might publish one or two stories, you’ll be alive, you’ll be alright but it’s hard to get the first things published.”


I agreed saying, my wife thought I was crazy for getting up at four in the morning to write before walking out the door to work construction. I would simply say, “A shovel is the greatest motivational teacher I know.”


With a smile Crews said, “I know, I dig it man, it’s true.”

Harry Crews and Jason E. Hodges  9-10-2010