Why I Wrote Crushed Trachea Blues

MMA comedy noir? Ok.

Life's the study of dying

And how to do it right

__Song for the Dead, Queens of the Stone Age

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Overachievers love to encapsulate all that they can. They want to hoard as many adjectives and superlatives as possible in a bid for grandeur. Revolutionary and often delusional statesmen do it. Schizophrenic musicians do it. I guess I'm no exception.

My first novel, Our Lady of the Hypercube , is best described as chick-lit meets quantum physics meets Mommie Dearest. My second novel brings together my love for all things Middle Eastern and all things cyberpunk. It's The Arabian Nights meets The Matrix. Being an auxiliary Gnostic, I never cared for the Wachowski vehicle, but you get me. Giving the novel the title Angels With Engine Failure only doomed it further to commercial suicide.

What's a synthesist to do? I must contain multitudes; cant help it. Will I ever write a straightforward American novel? Probably not. There are tons of people for that.

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I wrote my new novel Crushed Trachea Blues over a six-month stint, time during which I vowed to keep it simple, stupid. While I didn't come away unscathed, I did manage to keep it down to the marriage of only two genres: literary fiction and hardboiled mystery noir. I knew it could be done because my favorite writer Thomas Pynchon had done so with the brilliant Inherent Vice.

What I most loved about that novel was the long cast of characters. I've always believed that novels, films, and television series with tons of characters hold more credence to their stories. It's easier to suspend your disbelief when the story you're consuming has at least a hint that the main characters aren't in a snow globe and are part of the big wide world.

I first noticed this while watching The Simpsons. Pynchon is known for his multitude of characters, as is David Lynch. I tried watching Peaky Blinders and didn't get past the first episode. There seemed to be less than a dozen characters. Pair that with the fact that it all looks to have been filmed in a studio tunnel and I'm just not interested. I don't care how stylish you make slo-mo trenchcoats pop in the wind or how loudly you play anachronistic bagpipe punk. Sorry, mate. I'll take my Guinness elsewhere.

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Just before writing the novel, I was coming out of a Raymond Chandler man-crush rabbit hole, bouncing an imaginary fedora on a real knee while cracking wise at anyone who’d listen. He showed me one could write within a genre while still retaining the character-driven pathos of literary fiction.

With all this multiple-personality genre-hopping, I've had problems marketing myself and my books. My style and voice, if you'll humor the conceit that I have any of either, feel like will-o'-the-wisps, or poltergeists tripping over category boxes, not wanting to check any. (It's a miracle I'm married.)

Of course I'm influenced by literature. I bleed Thomas Pynchon, Salman Rushdie, Italy Calvino, Jorge Luis Borges, Alvaro Mutis, John Barth, Philip Roth, Donald Barthelme, Edgar Allan Poe, Stanislaw Lem, Philip K Dick, Angela Carter, Raymond Chandler, Anthony Burgess, HP Lovecraft, and Henry Miller.

But I'm inspired by music. Coming hot off the Pynchon and Chandler mysteries, I scuffed up against Queens of the Stone Age’s Songs for the Deaf and came away with serious existential road rash. If that landmark album is a trip from LA to the Mohave Desert, then so is Crushed Trachea Blues. And that's what all good novels should be—internal and/or external gauntlets run by the protagonist, from the beaches to the arid wastes, from dive bars to high-rises, bumping up against all different kinds of people squirreled away in their compartments, their cubicles, their Laurel Canyon mansions, their ghost towns, their MMA cages, their dingy second-story walk-ups.

Private detective Paisley Fuentes is the sort of anti-hero we identify with only because we ourselves rub elbows with all sorts of weirdos, degenerates, and stalwarts who come with their environments like lampshades inside furnished apartments.

To wit:

I’d done business in these houses half a dozen times. Every time provided a bigger headache than anything on offer from the common folk down the hill. The longer I had to wait in the high-ceilinged foyer for the interviewee to traipse down the staircase, wine snifter in hand, the more unsettling the silence became. All that whiteness. All the minimalist living rooms and playrooms and vestibules, with not a molecule of décor out of place. Yet somewhere behind one of those white walls, someone was bleeding miserably from the throat. It was like ancient Roman statuary cursing the echoing halls of a colonnaded building, threatening the white uniformity with an accusatory tsunami of blood. All the money in the world could not banish away the fact that man was an incorrigible sow.

Paisley is the typical noble lost soul. Is he a divorcé, a confirmed bachelor, or a meta-incel? No, no, and hell no. He does ok with the ladies because he's charming and sarcastic. The sarcasm is palatable only because of the follow-up charm. It's like the bit of salt and lime after the tequila shot. And he's not to be bothered by doing what society tells him to. He's a born rebel, an iconoclast who won't burn six calories in destroying idols, electing to ignore them altogether. Who doesn't want to follow around a chap like that for 250 pages?

To wit:

“Volkenrath’s manager’s about as chatty as the Sphynx after a tonsillectomy.”

And:

Cute as she was, her armpits kicked with the odor of over-exertion. Her hair smelled like nicotine. I got to thinking: Does one hippie’s funk cancel another’s out, allowing for interaction without olfactory annoyance? That would be the last of your worries, for there would be certain remnants from lack of washing that bear the name of renegade fruit and would cause a hard-on to go Hindenburg in a heartbeat.

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Writing this novel was also done during the time that I took up jiu-jitsu. They say write what you know. While I didn't know all that much jiu-jitsu at the time, I did know that drilling guillotines is painful business. Most guillotine variations are blood chokes, or technically, strangles. The actual choke version is the trachea-crush version. After Coach Cho had us drilling such abominations, I had crushed trachea blues for three days straight. (As I write this, I am nursing bruised ribs and a bad hamstring. They don't call it Murder Yoga for nothing.)

If jiu-jitsu is a three-dimensional crossword puzzle of violence and the spiritual path is a word search with invisible ink, then trying to tell a good yarn is watercoloring in the dark. I don't know if Crushed Trachea Blues checks all your boxes, but I sure as hell enjoyed writing it.

b

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***A special shout-out goes to AP Murphy from The Strangeness Kit. This uber-talented fictioneer provided back cover blurb material that was more than kind. He writes a wide variety of stories with a polymorphic, impeccable style. ¡Gracias, compadre!***

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Crushed Trachea Blues is available in paperback and e-book.

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Paisley's Playlist:
"Song for the Dead" by Queens of the Stone Age
"A#1" by Desert Sessions
"Nenada" by Desert Sessions
"Radio Mecca" by Brant Bjork
"Whole Lotta Love" by Led Zeppelin
"Strange Days" by The Doors
"Crack Hitler" by Faith No More
"Long Snake Moan" by PJ Harvey
"Mr. Green Genes" by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention
"Gimme Shelter" by The Rolling Stones