Between “Then and Now” and Now - An Author Comments

Seeing my story “Between Then and Now” posted, reading it for the first time in 9 years, I feel that some commentary may be necessary. Consider this like those director’s commentaries on DVDs, you may read it or not, depending on how interesting you found the story.

First, this was written on November 11, 1999, my son Andy’s fifth birthday. I had been a student in the Nonfiction Writing Program at the University of Iowa for a little over a year, a very prestigious program at which I was failing miserably. I was due to workshop a story the next day and had nothing prepared. I spent the day at my job, then setting up, managing, and cleaning up after Andy’s party. When everybody else was asleep I took a shower, went out on the porch as I did every night before I went to bed, smoked too much and wondered what the hell I was going to do in class the next day.

Then I began to write this story. I’d smoke and freeze, come in and write and warm up, go out and smoke and freeze, come in an write and warm up, etc. etc. etc.

The next day, with no sleep, I workshopped the story. The other students savaged it. Too sentimental, too nostalgiac, and way too heterosexual. For two hours fifteen of the finest young writers of their generation told me what a crappy writer I was.

At the end of the semester I left the program and went to work for an advertising company. If you don’t count radio advertisements, I didn’t write anything creative again until last month.

So I know somebody is going to ask, “How much is Truth?”

Well, everything about my street on a November night is absolute documentary. The names of the trees, how many rose bushes Mr. Price had in 1999, it’s all literal Truth. But I know some people don’t care about rose bushes.

So as for the rest: Yes, I smoked opium with a hill tribe queen, but so did every other tourist on that lousy trek. A grandson of a Kuomintang general pointed a gun at my head, but only because I locked myself out of my room at his guesthouse at 3 AM and pounded on his door to be let back in. Everybody in the hills over Chiang Rai claims descent from a Kuomintang soldier, and they all keep guns in the bedroom. In the Mergui Archipelago a Burmese soldier did try to trade arms for cigarettes, and I said no. Another tourist on that trip said yes. Over the years I did write obituaries for three friends, and you can read the obits in my books.

The Australian Olympic swimming coach, anorexic Japanese preschool teacher, Peace Corps volunteer from Texas, Reuters Moscow correspondent and former Miss Manila were all just lonely guests who stayed at the hotel I worked in. While my face, or at least a cartoon charicature of my face, did appear for two weeks on billboards in Bangkok (“Read Steve Rosse on Sundays in The Nation, Thailand’s Dave Barry!”) that’s not why these women slept with me. They were just lonely. Two of them were only using me to get back at their husbands for screwing bar girls. Anybody who’s ever worked in a hotel in Thailand knows these lonely women. When my ex-wife and I were having problems I took some comfort there, as the poet says.

The Canadian graduate student was actually a 50-year-old Canadian housewife who wanted me to read her journal, which could have been published under the title “I’ve Recently Lost My Only Child to Leukemia And Now I’m Living In a Tree Barely Clinging to Sanity.” She didn’t want me to proofread the document as much as she wanted confirmation that she was indeed going insane. She certainly was, but she was also a very sweet, loving, gentle, beautiful woman who had a bag full of wicked Laotian marijuana and the desire to hold off mortality by screwing any man she met, and I thank her for four wonderful days and three awesome nights. She did teach me how to whoop like a gibbon.

The incident with the Swissair Stewardess and the Ovaltine executive is described exactly as it happened, word for word. Except that there was another journalist sleeping on deck that night, a guy from California named Bob, and he was listening to us and laughing at me the whole time.

In 1993 I was hired by a boat motor company to be Master of Ceremonies at a fishing contest in Indonesia. It was on a little tiny island just off Singapore, not in Jakarta, but a girl was provided for me by the company, much as described. However, her name was Weewin, a perfectly normal Indonesian girl’s name, I suppose. The “girl named furniture” is a character in an old movie called “Soylent Green.” The Sikh gem merchant was the president of the Lion’s Club chapter on Phuket. I just always wanted to use him in a story.

Everything about “her” is accurate, except the last time I saw her was in a restaurant on Phuket, not at the FCC. But she did marry a successful Brit journalist, move to Hong Kong, then to London. I actually found her through an ad in the Phuket Gazette in 2004. We exchanged Christmas cards and photos, a few letters back and forth, then fell out of touch again. She’s very happy with the guy and apologized for the way she left me.

The way I met and married my wife is described exactly as it happened. My feelings for my kids are described with absolute honesty. The reasons I live in Iowa now are described honestly as well.

So, is the story “True?” Does it deserve to be called “nonfiction?”

I don’t really care what it’s called, and would not mind if Cent listed it under “Fiction” or “Adult” or “My Hovercraft is Full of Eels.” But just for the sake of the inevitable argument I do think it could reasonably be called nonfiction because the story is not about Japanese preschool teachers or Indonesian call girls. The story is about whether or not we keep the promises we make to ourselves when we’re young. It’s about whether or not we ever become the men we hope to become. It’s about whether or not we ever get over the girls who break our hearts. It’s about whether we ever get something worthwhile in life without paying a price. It’s about growing up and taking responsibility and, like “King Lear” and the cave paintings at Lescaux and virtually every artistic endeavor between them, this story is about facing death. (My fellow grad students lashed me hard for the ham-fisted snow metaphor.)

The story is about me, and anything I reveal in this story about myself is absolutely, without qualification, “true.” As Montaigne said when he made the literary world take notice of this form, that’s all the personal essay ever needs to do. So yes, it’s Truth. Every word.

© Steve Rosse. All rights reserved by the author.

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