The Cure for Depression: a melodrama of depression, madness, and the writing life

The tidal wave of darkness that totally floored me a few months back shows no sign of lifting. It lets up for a moment or two, and then floods in with a vengeance. I cannot take the weight of the sorrow. I did my best to accept my burdens with dignity and thought I’d made it. But now I’m facing something I can’t fully explain. All the years I spent ‘dealing’ like a good little girl have come undone. The depth of where I am is so incredibly far from light and hope that at some moments I wonder if I even exist, if I have finally unraveled.

Eight of Swords by L.C. Luzajic

I feel unhinged when I’m unable to pull it together and find my familiar toolkit- brash, sassy confidence, in small and sporadic but useful doses. None to be seen. I roll with the punches, more or less, I like to think, and though I seem to attract a great deal of chaos, I’ve always been kind of Tao about the whole of it, accepting my fate to bear witness to the wilderness of the human heart. I’m a rollercoaster of bipolar emotions- this is no secret so don’t call the paper! My friend Dimitri and I used to kvetch about the baggage fleet we had with us on our journey- bags, lots of ‘em, pink, frilly, cherry-scented Louis Vuitton. Garcon!

I’m unraveling these days, found myself crying on a stoop on Davenport Road today, and looking back at my impulsive seesaw life, and at myself sobbing in the street, I saw that I had more than a few things in common with Britney Spears- everything except her thighs and her money.

There was a brief light in this embarrassing public display of affliction- a woman on a bicycle stopped by, discreetly and without obtrusiveness, and asked if everything was all right. I was touched. But right after that, the tide took me in deeper, as I wondered how it is that a total stranger could see that I was hurting, but my closest friends have failed to notice? And that some of them never gave a damn about anyone but themselves and have betrayed me? And then I went right on feeling sorry for myself, wondering how it is that the dead friends call more often than the living.

Oh, trust me, I know: I analyze too much, stay awake puzzling together what went wrong. Often I come up with a big fat blank, and the truth looms impossible and stark: people just suck, really suck, even the very best of them, and in the long run, no matter how much you might care, it’s every man for himself. If I croak tonight, how long would it be before anyone noticed? How long would it be before anybody comes to feed the cats?

Good Lord, is this the mid-life crisis already? Hmm, I don’t know. Whether it’s a particularly bad flare-up of the umpteen mental diagnoses I share with my family members, unresolved grief, a brand new kind of madness, or simply defeat and despair after too many sorrows to bear, the situation is…critical.

It’s manifesting in the most irritating ways- poorly timed crying jags, temper tantrums, entire buckets of triple chocolate ice cream. Worse, “I see dead people.” I see them all the time. The other day I saw a dozen or more Zoes crossing the street all at once. I even waved. It was nicer to see her like that than to find her when I’m home alone, opening my closet to look for a shirt, and there she is, hanging among my peach-knit shawls. That’s the thing about losing someone to suicide. You can make as much damn peace as you want with it. But you can never get the macabre ending out of your head.

heading to the wake for zoe

When I was a kid, my dad used to drive for miles to avoid any passing trains. We were kids, we liked to see trains. But Dad would turn the car around and drive in the other direction, and Mom would start crying and crying. Later, I was old enough to understand why. Uncle J. jumped in front of one when he couldn’t take it anymore. Mom didn’t want to spend her whole day thinking about her brother. There were things to do. You can’t always just walk around sobbing. You have to occasionally make room for joy instead of just hurting. So you avoid the big triggers. You manage your life around them, and for the most part, you’re okay.

Thing is, lately I’m not okay, and though I know I will be- I’m a strong girl- right now I’m walking around like an open wound. More than two thirds of my support team is six feet under, and the dirt is still fresh. And practically everything I look at or see is a fucking trigger.

Regardless of how this horrible darkness happened- circumstance, or genetics, or both, I’m a person who feels everything. I could feel the pain of complete strangers. My therapist called it ‘empathic.’ Less kindly observers would call it overly sensitive. Sitting on a bus, I could feel the next person’s emotions and their life story would suddenly reveal itself. People came to me with their problems, as if I could do fat lot about it. But come they did, heaping their sorrows and crimes and chaos upon me. And I was s thin-skinned, as Mom would always say, “Toughen up, you thin-skinned ninny!” Indeed, I was practically transparent. You could see through the skin and watch my beating heart. I’m nothing but a bundle of raw nerves. Everything hurts. The only thing I could do to keep the pain at a dull roar was to write it down.

Marko, the crazy sailor I married, was one of the biggest believers I’ve ever had in my writing. I’m grateful to have a few believers, both my parents, and my childhood soul-mate Japey, who, yes, is also fucking dead. I know my dear friend Sal is out there somewhere overseas, reading this and anything else he can find, and trusting more than I do that I’ll “make it.”  And then there’s the crazy Canadian eccentric, Crad Kilodney, and we’ll get to him later.

Marko’s infamous comment- “Girl, you are a good fucking writer,” – spurred me to the name The Girl Can Write. And losing him made me certain I never wanted to waste another day working in a mall, working anywhere at all but at my desk, writing. And though I worked hard at my writing since I was five, I have never worked so hard as I have in the past three years since I found his dead body on the kitchen floor. Stephen King, one of the most prolific and amazing storytellers of all time, who also writes about ghosts, said writing is a lonely business, and you need to have support. I’m grateful that I had someone who hung on to my every word.

happy times

King also said a writer should write for four hours a day and read for four hours a day. So I’ve been pretty much writing for eight and reading for six, trying to make up for lost time, trying to stay focused, trying to cheat death by doing everything I can to keep my spirit alive. I’ve been producing like a fiend, fine-tuning, branching out, trying new things, reworking, working, playing. There are several novels on tap, another collection of poetry under way, several full-length nonfiction treatises on the backburner, and umpteen projects that think outside the book. I’ve got short stories on the go, and dozens of these inspirational, personal experiences with literature or pop culture that my fans seem to want the most. I’m writing, writing, writing.

Despite the productivity and creativity I’ve proudly embraced in recent years, learning important tasks like how to write when you don’t feel like it (and hoping one day to learn other important tasks like how to focus on one project at a time and how to alleviate stress by finishing things way before the deadline), well, for all that, I admit that a big part of my current episode of depression is fear of flying.

You see, in the beginning, it was enough. I was a league ahead of the many, many ‘writers’ around me. There was nothing to fear. So many called themselves writers. They were going to write a book some day. One day when they had time. I never had this embarrassment. Whether I was stuck in kindergarten class, or stuck in an affordable rental crack house, or stuck in retail hell, or stuck on the side of the street begging your spare change, I was writing. I never had to be shy about calling myself a writer. You could argue whether or not it was good writing, but from my first seahorse poem, age five, to my first co-produced zine in second grade, The Sunshine Peanut, to age 12, when I began publishing, I was writing. I was doing a lot of other things, too, that I should not have been doing, or that I should have been more focused on… but when Margaret Atwood was autographing my copy of The Blind Assassin, and gave me that seething, freezing look she’s famous for giving- I’d been rude enough to thank her for her inspiration on my writing- I did not have to wither away because I was ‘posing’ as a writer. I was a writer. A published one, too. Sure, not many had heard of zines like Canned Phlegm or Minus Tides. But whatever- I’d appeared alongside frigging Burroughs and Bukowski- how’s that for chick lit? Eat my shorts, you boring bastards!

Following all that was the sheer high of quitting ‘the real world’ and pounding the keyboard in real time, not stolen time. It was twin terror that forced me to quit my ten year plus reign as one of Canada’s best booksellers- yes, I have a ‘certificate’ -that’s not something I would make up! While I had to occasionally use food banks though I was working full time, I loved the bookstore. I am so grateful for all that reading. But my physical health was very bad and I had to take a medical leave of absence, and at that same time my husband passed away. Needless to say, I had a nervous breakdown and it was absolutely impossible to go back to work full-time. And so I began to work at home, harder than I’ve ever worked before, in between shitty odd jobs. My heart got a bit better, but that takes forever. My body bloomed from the rest and the retreat from stress and from finally some real and treatable diagnoses. In three years, I’ve written more than I have my whole life before.

Somewhere in the schemata, tragic though it might be, I can even fit the quatruple-duple-zuple whammy of all the close friends dying these past few years. Oh, it hurts, believe me, everywhere I look it hurts. Not just trains, but, well, everything. Every thing I look at might remind me. Hospitals. Sofas. Closets. Baby toys. Love’s Baby Soft Spray Cologne. Abba. No matter where I look, something reminds me of AIDS, of cancer, of addiction, of suicide. Cars are okay, though. So far, miraculously, I have not lost anyone to a car crash! Statistically, I’m going to, and I wonder who will be next?

And while it’s true that I mourn, I never for a second take for granted those I love left living. Every single day I pray for you, think about you, thank God for you. And I spend a great deal of time in abject fear that you will die. Morbid? Maybe. But there aren’t enough candles in my chapel to go around each week when I go in. If you die, too, I will have to start bringing my own. (I could make my own film, “Sixteen Candles,” very different from the original.)

But yeah, you see, even in this tragic deathtrap that I seem to walk about in- my first published story by the way was Meet Me at the River, a story about death by a 12 year old girl- oh, and my first literary award in grade eight was for a poem called Marching to the Grave- I’m not making this shit up-you see, my theory is that everyone dies, so it’s actually not that unusual if it happens. And for whatever reason, total strangers write to me and tell me that I give them comfort with my crazy blend of morbid yet rapier wit when I talk about grief and loss. I have long believed that writers to some extent are channelers of the worlds we cannot see. I am a scribe, an instrument, one who gives the spirits their two cents worth. I freeze in time what has happened today by making a permanent record. One day, I will be dead, and this rambling piece about my mid-life crisis will still be floating around on cyberspace. Even my dad, who does not like such vague ghostly poetry talk about spirits (unless it is securely grounded in the poetry of the King James Bible) told me that my biography will be called A Life of Death. Awww, thaaaaaaaaaaanks, Dad.

But I digress….as usual. The crisis that’s materializing now is that hellish one that every writer must go through. For some, it underlies the whole of the writer’s life. Usually it comes in chewable doses that I can masticate and move on from. Lately it’s been a tidal wave. It’s hard to explain exactly what the crisis is, but if you read the following paragraph very quickly, and let it run around in your head over and over on high speed and high volume, you’ll get the general idea:

Is this any good? Why is it even important? Does anybody really read this stuff, and if so, why does it matter? Who says your thoughts are worth the trees? Shouldn’t you be out helping people? Why didn’t you study plumbing? Will the computer bill get paid this month? Next month? How will I work if it’s unplugged? What about the rent? You can’t stand anything you wrote before 2002- who says you’ll think this is worth the while in four years today? What if carpal tunnel cripples me? Do you really have anything original to say? Does it matter? Do I matter?

Yep, for all that brazen confidence I occasionally exude, I’m truly an existential worrywart. That little tape above, the one that zooms along on fast-forward and repeat, well that’s just part of a crippling terror that grips me in the night. And it goes something like this: WHAT IF I DON’T MAKE IT?

Sure, I’m blessed to have a voice all over the Internet, and in so many journals and magazines you open. Whatever. SHOW ME THE MONEY. I’m thrilled that Quarry Magazine listed me as part of a stellar lineage of Canadian writers topped by Atwood and Ondaatje, a torch I’m apparently carrying forth. They featured me on the cover and never sent the cheque. And I am incredibly honoured to be lauded by my spiritual teacher, Thomas Moore.

But I’m still scared that they might cut off my cable, and I need it to work online. I’m really scared I’ll have to get this tooth pulled if I can’t come up with the reconstruction fee. I’m not sure I can even come up with the extraction fee! I’m scared of running out of cat food.

It’s all very terrifying. WHAT IF I DON’T MAKE IT AS A WRITER? It’s the only damn thing I’m good at…and while I thank God for my gift without false modestly, let’s face it, I’m good, but not THAT good. I’m not BLOWING the rich publishers away, evidently. What will become of me if I don’t hold out for the long haul? Reading and writing are the only skills I have!

Crad Kilodney’s book, Putrid Scum, is quite possibly the most brilliant account of these fears. His entire life was the slow-track of the writer’s crisis. Early in the book, he sagely states that the very worst thing that can happen to a writer is early publication in a national magazine. This gives that poor sod false hope, and instead of moving on to a more sensible fate- say, becoming the cable guy, or a chiropractic assistant- the writer will believe in himself. Yeah, why the hell did I have to win that damn contest for Meet Me at the River, for crying out loud?

and sometimes a scar is just a scar by L.C. Luzajic

Then Crad goes on to say that every writer has a crippling philosophical struggle he must contend with. His, as is mine, is over the negligible importance of his perspective. You see, I’m flattered, trust me, that a few of you are amused or even touched, but in the scheme of things, are my comments on the literary life or why I love Johnny Cash really of any tangible importance in a world where children are dying of starvation and war? The most important job in the world is growing, serving, and selling food or water, in my mind. That shit job at Food Basics is, well, back to basics. The real stuff. Fuck me and my fucking intellect. (Yes, yes, for the most part, I know the word is what made civilization. That the word is spirit. In the beginning was the word and all that. I’m describing to you THE CRISIS, not the whole meaning of my life.)

It’s a bit of a tragedy that Putrid Scum got panned, but Crad Kilodney was pretty used to his books getting panned. Still, this one is so brilliant that no one should call oneself a writer until they’ve read it. So that they know what they are in for, all of it’s possibilities. Not everyone writes earth-shattering, world-changing literature that makes them rich. It’s more likely going to be something like Crad describes throughout this marvel.

For example: “In any case, happy or not, we are most of us destined to go to our deathbeds stupid and bewildered about life. Each generation repeats this proves: it has learned nothing from the previous generation and will have nothing to impart to the next.”

Or this: “It’s a great mystery how a life can divagate all over the map of possibilities, and it may be my bane as well as my consolation to believe that everything in my life is meant to be.”

“Books gathering dust. Me turning to dust. A whole life destined to become dust. And I thought of tall the book warehouses I’d worked in, with stacks and stacks of books gathering dust,” Crad muses. Continuing, he really gets to the heart of the crisis I’m trying to describe. “It must be a tremendous advantage to have such control over one’s emotions, but how could I become like that without becoming an entirely different person? It seemed to me that people were ruled primarily either by their hearts or by their heads, that this trait was fixed early in life, and that one could only alter the heart/head ration a little bit, if at all, as one got older. I envied people whose intellects were in control of their emotions, because they weathered the storms of life more easily; yet at the same time I often felt annoyed or repelled by them. They seemed unnatural somehow. I put out the light and got under the blanket. What is the correct way to be? How do you change what you are? What will become of me?”

Yep, I’m definitely one of those emotional ones, though I like to think my intellect has some fortitude here and there. I laugh now to think that when Crad drifted by fate into my life- as my mentor, but I didn’t know it then- that I told him in no uncertain terms that his bitter attitude had no place at my dinner table. His jaded comments about people from other genders, orientations, countries, and age brackets were all fine and dandy within his literature, but at a time in my life where I was learning to change that heart/head ratio, that little bit, I had to surround myself with people who didn’t mumble “burn your feminist books” or “what have the poor ever done for you?”

No mumbling, I told him. I’d impressed Mr. Kilodney in a story I did about his work because, as he said, there were no typos. In a world where most Canadian writers, publishers, and editors were lowlife idiots, my article had been refreshingly free of error.

I do not want to point out, looking back, that the little Idea Factory story actually DID appear with one (not very noticeable) typo. Oops. But it’s too late. It is nothing less than ‘meant to be’ that the most eccentric writer in Canadian history is my mentor. He hates this word, bristling at it, a man who doesn’t even think he’s a good writer. His work “is what it is,” he said when I asked if he thought it was good. He says my work is at least his equal if not superior, but ….well, I can’t agree. Crad’s already weathered the storms, and he’s also written over thirty books, whether or not you or I or he thinks they are good. And in some small way, a smiling light goes off inside his bitter head when I use the word, but I only use the word ‘mentor’ because it is true. I am not one to flatter.

I postponed an intellectual dinner hobnobbing with Mr. Kilodney this week because I was critically depressed. (You see, the story does all tie together despite my digressive habits.) I confessed to him that I’m in treatment at the loony bin, that I’m crying all the time, that I see dead people, that some people have hurt me so much I can’t believe they can live with themselves, and that no one ever bloody well rescued me when I needed help. That I had to figure shit out all by myself, that I’m in pain, that I’m not sure who to trust, and also that I’m not at all certain that a current project, which is moving painfully slowly, will ever see fruition, and I just can’t face it anymore. I JUST CAN’T TAKE IT ANYMORE.

The Valium wasn’t working, needless to say, and there was nothing ‘the professionals’ or anybody out there could say to the, well, the skeletons in my closet, eating me alive. No one, that is except for my dear Crad.

His email was not very wordy. When he’s not mumbling bitter expletives, he is a man of few words. He told me that I could read the entire Bible in a year at a rate of only four pages a day. This was very practical advice to someone drenched in creative and emotional chaos. I knew right then and there that the cure for this project’s incompletion was continuing consistency, and so I was already on the right path.

As for the rest of it all, no one has a way with truth quite like Mr. Kilodney. “The cure for depression is television,” he stated frankly. And he’s expecting me for dinner and sitcoms on Wednesday.

Lorette C. Luzajic’s poetry book, The Astronaut’s Wife: Poems of Eros and Thanatos, reflects on the weight of love and grief. Visit her site, www.thegirlcanwrite.net, for more cheerful selections.

The Astronaut

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Bored by Henry Miller

Like Jerry Seinfeld and George Costanza, I read Henry Miller in high school, when I was Baptist and virginal and also a voracious reader. I didn’t get it then. I remember the scenes of ‘the writer’ going from café to café and hooking up with women in between writings in his notebook. Nothing ever happened in the book, I thought, and there’s no way this jerk could possibly get all these girls, whores or not.

Henry Miller by artist Norbert Haupt.

I assumed I must have missed something, as inexperienced in both the physical and the intellectual joys and sorrows as I was back then.

When my good friend Crad Kilodney’s book Putrid Scum lamented how no new writers have heard of Henry Miller, I decided to give it a go with my added 20 year experiential tapestry. While I see Miller’s influence on Kilodney, I also see clearly that Crad’s a far better writer, and Miller’s even worse now that I can actually read and write.

I mean, come on, who praises this kind of drivel? Believe me, I’m not offended by the word ‘cunt’ -though there’s no real need to use it more than ‘the’ in any context. But I venture out on a limb to criticize the ‘great writer’ who went before me. After all, if anyone sent out a manuscript today as self-involved as this one, they’d soon be living at the Salvation Army or working at Tim Hortons. You need a plot, you need some prose, you need paragraph breaks, sentences, and an occasional glimmer of wit.

Worse- any book about this much sex, about writers and lesbians and hookers and drinking and sleazy cafes in Paris- any book, no matter how horribly written, couldn’t possibly be boring. Lurid, crazy, raw, intriguing, perhaps, but not boring. Miller manages to make a perfectly slippery erotic-noir underworld of artists into a complete and utter bore. Now that’s an accomplishment.

Miller doesn’t disguise the autobiographical fantasy here. He wants to be/is a writer in France. The time frames jump all over, but don’t worry about getting mixed up: nothing happens. He meets some other jerks who treat women like shit. While this is not earth shattering or unusual, usually there should be a context, a literary device, a character development behind the scene. Here Miller imagines that all women are gaping wounds throwing themselves at his unwashed body, helpless against the charms of his balding head and the prick he’s always taking out in alleyways.

How is this different than the average masculine fantasy? Well, for one thing, most men recognize that it’s a fantasy, and most don’t think their tripe should go down in the annals of great literature.

The funny thing is, 70 plus years after the book, how clear it is from here: Miller fancied himself a worldly man with a deep understanding of women, how they worked physically and psychologically. But he did not have an iota of understanding. He was not even able to interpret the possible scenarios that transpired. While it was maybe vogue to talk about whores spreading their hoohas and picking bed bugs from their hair in a world that was yet to go mainstream with porn, it’s clear the poor guy’s virility was a complete sham. And with a teacher like Anais Nin, the most sensual and kinky writer a man could hope to bed, he still had no idea about women. And worse, no idea about writing.

Karl Shapiro called Henry Miller the greatest living author (when he was living). “I do not call him a poet because he has never written a poem; he even dislikes poetry, I think,” Shapiro wrote. No kidding. The man had absolutely zero ear for language. I agree with Camille Paglia that Miller should be taught in school- if only to rid ourselves of any sentimentality and to contrast the good writers with the bottom feeding posers of Paris.

My apologies to Normal Mailer, who wasted a great deal of his time reading Henry Miller. His critical examination, Genius and Lust, heralded The Tropic of Cancer as one of the top 10 novels of all time. Ummm, excuse me?

Club International has better literature- and at least there are pictures.

I’m sure an unknown, unimportant writer like myself will get in plenty of trouble from fans and academia for blasting this ‘erotic masterpiece.’ For I couldn’t possibly understand the intricacies of the sexual imagination and the finer points of literary pacing. Here are some of masterful quotables so you can judge for yourself without wasting too much time reading the damn book.

“Of them all the loveliest Jew is Tania, and for her sake I too would become a Jew. Why Not? I already speak like a Jew. And I am as ugly as a Jew.”

“There is a bone in my prick six inches long. I will ream out every wrinkle in your cunt, Tania, big with seed…I know how to inflame a cunt. I shoot hot bolts into you, Tania, I make your ovaries incandescent.”

Hmm, what are ‘incandescent ovaries?’ And does any lady, no matter how inflamed, want them?

Moving along:

“And the more I looked at it, the less interesting it became. It only goes to show you there’s nothing to it after all, especially when it’s shaved. It’s the hair that makes it mysterious. That’s why a statue leaves you cold. Only once I saw a real cunt on a statue- that was by Rodin. …It’s an illusion! You get all burned up about nothing…about a crack with hair on it, or without hair.” (This particular gem goes on in a paragraph that is two pages long.)

“Even as the world falls apart the Paris that belongs to Matisse shudders with bright, gasping orgasms, the air itself is steady with a stagnant sperm, the trees tangled like her hair.”

“Why do I suddenly recollect the Passage des Thermopyles? Because that day a woman addressed her puppy in the apocalyptic language of the slaughterhouse, and the little bitch, she understood what this greasy slut of a midwife was saying. How that depressed me!” (Wow- deep thoughts, deep thoughts.)

It’s hard to take these ‘out of context’ when there is no context. There is no plot, there is no insight. I mean, stream of consciousness is one thing, when there is actually a stream or some consciousness.

Oh, and Henry? I’m sorry to break it to you…but six inches, while serviceable enough, is not something to write home about…

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

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In Which the Author is Blown Away by Crad Kilodney’s Putrid Scum

I was a kid when I read Putrid Scum by Crad Kilodney, and it might even be one of those books I just thought I’d read. Too bad half of my voracious reading years went in one ear and out the other- the plague of stoner’s short-term memory loss. I remember little of this one, and yet, in a vague, ethereal way, it is so totally familiar. And either way, I’m just stunned. This is just brilliant. It’s insightful, astonishing, blunt, and utterly psychotic.

I’m not a longtime Kilodney fan- I enjoyed him in a roundabout way through a close friend who was. I didn’t read all of his books, but some passed through my hands. Some I remember- The Charnel House of Bad Poetry is classic noir. The guy’s titles are their own art- I was vaguely jealous of the random insanities he would blatantly allow on his covers. Overall, my friend was a big Henry Miller fan, and I admit I could never get through a Miller, and didn’t care much for his watercolours, either.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Crad Kilodney is a Canadian cult figure. Not everyone has heard of him, not by a long shot, but he has his peeps out there, those who were somehow transformed by his strangeness. Crad sold his own books on the streets of Toronto for years, living on pennies but determined to do nothing else with his life. He was a fixture of Yonge and Isabella, something of a prankster, and a fellow who gave meaning to the old writer-ly descriptives like ‘curmudgeonly, cranky, grouchy, and cantankerous.

Of course, Crad blames his depression and misery on the stupidity of the human race, taking pride in his bird’s eye view of the populace from the front lines. It’s a fascinating close-up of an artist standing right in the thick of it all, yet somehow completely invisible. Crad has spent his life, however, refusing to see beyond himself- and this would have been his ticket into a small sense of contentment instead of contempt. I wish it for him in his older age. Millions, after all, endure the same shit, different pile, and not nearly as interesting. I can think of worse things, like retail and prostitution and ice fishing. And I cannot think of a single thing cooler or more interesting.

In this spirit of positivity, I could criticize the outbursts of murderous rage that pepper Putrid Scum. However, they are uproarious and gutbustingly funny. If I were an honest writer, which I try to be – so did Henry Miller, but he concluded that it’s impossible to tell the truth, for truth is always changing- I would have to admit that I, too, had the solace of fantasies of strangulating certain members of the public. I confess to frightening daydreams, explicit in their gore, born of frustration and psychotic duress. Humanity’s sick greed and foul grubby soul has made me weep and dream of muder. But man’s heart of darkness is nothing new, and writers have been experiencing it and recording it for thousands of years. Indeed, it is our job.

(It seems Crad knows this, given an exchange he relates late in his book: a man with a pipe says to the writer, ““Let me say something to you, young Mr. Kilodney who wishes to be a writer…Bitterness and cynicism are so common that they have no value for personal redemption, and suffering in and of itself is not ennobling. One must comprehend misery, yes, but one must rise above it, by which I mean that you must have a sense of gratitude as well…Be grateful that you have any books at all. Be grateful that you’re not crippled…Don’t expect me to feel too terribly sorry for you, because you have no idea what things there are in this world. You claim to admire Henry Miller. But Henry Miller rose above all his miseries. He was perpetually grateful….you’ll never really be great until you’ve evolved spiritually…and that means having all the shit knocked out of your head so the light can shine in.”)

Putrid Scum lets you look right into that head, devoid of light, for anyone who has wanted to know something of Crad Kilodney. And for all his outrageous grumpiness, this truth-drenched diatribe is all about ‘happiness writes in white’ and ‘the heart wants what it wants.’ This one is brilliant. It’s simple, quotidian, and psychotic. This is Crad, 17 years before he met me, yet he’s looking into those writer’s terrors that are striking me blind.

The great thing is, now that Crad and I have clandestine ham and pink wine encounters in his garret, listening to Debussy and playing Scrabble, I’ve got him for backbone. Our friendship was accidental, yet absolutely fated. There was just no way a do-it-yourselfer like me could have as a mentor the poetry-circle professor type, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

You’ll never forget the not-so-merry prankster who tape-recorded the conversations of Yonge Street idiots while wearing a placard with changing adverts for the books he was hand-selling. Lesbian Zoo Stories. Esoteric Phlegm Stories. The man was not exactly approachable, but if you did risk it, he was affable enough and maybe you picked up a few unforgettable titles like Gainfully Employed in Limbo, Foul Pus From Dead Dogs, Simple Stories for Idiots, or my own personal favourite, Lightning Struck My Dick. Of course, Crad’s press was called Charnel House. Look up the word ‘charnel’ if you have to. Lovely.

Geist Magazine said there were ‘few rewards’ in Putrid Scum, and though they conceded that he’d written some interesting short stories over the years, he ‘bottomed out on this one.’ I couldn’t believe my eyes because it’s clear that the Geist staff didn’t get this book at all. Because it’s Absolut Crad. It’s the treasure trove where we see his softer side- seriously! – the one I think I glimpse occasionally across the table at Swiss Chalet. A remarkable man. He is not a painter or a southerner (though he did dabble in collage and comes from Queens) but in a way, Crad’s our northern Outsider Artist. He did it his way. He got to be a lot more famous than the hosts of journalism grads, the nameless minions like myself with stories of the week: Cats and Secondhand Smoke. How to Market Your New Marketing Pamphlet. Phil Butrimskly Plays Guitar at the Rivoli. Remember us? Of course not.

Putrid Scum is the autobiography of every authentic artist, misfit, miscreant, and hopeless hopeful. If you are not a real writer, you’ll know by the end of the book, and you’ll be saved from a merciless existence by smartly heading back into community college and learning about plumbing or bus driving or any other perfectly respectable if not memorable trade. For as Salmond Rushdie said, there is no good reason to be a writer unless you absolutely must. There are enough books.

If nothing else, you’ll be frightened away by Crad’s hideous sex stories, which awkwardly arise throughout the chapters, as naturally- or unnaturally- as they might in life, I suppose. You will cringe by the blunt frankness of terminology and by the woeful understanding- in youth, of course-of women, by the fumbling mechanics of what he observes is ‘the most natural act in the world.’

But then, if you’re trying to tell the truth, you can’t make up stories about the perpetually sex-starved Playmate who really understands you. (What ladies do you know who want to climb into bed with hardcore porn rags on the first date? I’m sure they’re out there….)  Crad probably grew up visualizing something along the lines of the brilliant and poetic sexpot Anais Nin dishing out to Henry Miller- and funding the printing of Tropic of Cancer. But reality was far more banal and awkward affair.

Finally, I conclude with a few of my very favourite passages. These ones echo thoughts I’ve had a million times:

“Another middle-aged man told me to get a job. In fact, a lot of people told me to get a job…A job…If a rich eccentric paid you $500 a week to stand in a vacant lot and pick your nose for eight hours a day, you’d have …a job. You’d be a productive member of society. You’d pay taxes.”

“Every writer must face his private demons, and one of mine was The Futility of Words.”

“Later, I put on a record that I knew would depress me and lay down in bed. I looked at the ceiling and imagined swords running through me, like the Ten of Swords in the Tarot deck, while angels in heaven looked down in pity. I reached over to the bookshelf beside my bed and felt the accumulated dust on the shelves and on top of the books. Books gathering dust. Me turning to dust. A whole life destined to become dust…I put out the light and got under the blanket. What is the correct way to be? How do you change what you are? What will become of me?”

And finally, my favourite, the one where Crad Kilodney’s fate, his life’s work, his truth, his persona, his past, his destiny, and all of his writings come together in a single summation. “When I got home, I took out a diary, and a revelation came to me, which I set down at once: “Now I understand! My life is a satire on the life of a writer!””
Crad cracks a smile! Pictured here with feline friend Justice!
Putrid Scum
by Crad Kilodney.
Charnel House, 1991.

Visit reader and writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.

Crad Kilodney for President

The handwritten letter I receive from the legendary curmudgeon Crad Kilodney is bundled carefully with a bunch of logic puzzles and some maps of stocks I might care to invest in. The author of Blood-Sucking Monkeys From North Tonawanda and Simple Stories for Idiots among a whole lot of others, Kilodney is something of a cult figure for Toronto. Up until the mid-nineties, he was a permanent fixture on the streets, rain or shine, hawking his own books. Though he studied astronomy and earned a Bachelor of Science, he wanted to be a writer. So he did what few would-be writers do: he wrote. The man wrote over 30 books, and he hand-sold them personally on the streets. Oh, and once he lived in the same apartment building as Madonna when she was majoring in dance studies at the University of Michigan.

Kilodney’s public mythos is something of a cantankerous, angry, half-starved writer, and the titles of his self-published works only further that reputation. Works like Lightning Struck my Dick, Bang Heads Here, Suffering Bastards, and Terminal Ward make Bukowski and Hemingway look like cheerleaders. Though literati snobs point out that Kilodney published very little outside of his own press, Charnel House, do-it-yourselfers everywhere hail him as Lord of the Underdogs. Kilodney’s dour perspective on the Canadian small press’s waste of paper and supplication of government money is well known. Though he retired in 1995, he occasionally cracks his caustic whip in pieces for his own web site, Dead Man Talking, at www.cradkilodney.net. I asked him if giving up writing has made him less depressed.

“It wasn’t writing that depressed me,” Kilodney says. “It was this city full of awful people. Retiring has definitely improved my emotional state because I don’t have to go out on the street any more and deal with hostility and bullshit.” At least the man isn’t starving anymore. Investing in mining stocks has treated him to some easy money. “Girl, if only you knew…” he says when I ask how much.

.

“I came back to the earth plane to be a writer because I didn’t get to be one in my previous life. If you don’t believe in reincarnation, too bad. I’m going to tell it as I know it, even if I can’t prove it. I lived before, roughly from 1900 to the 1940s. I was a rich idler with vain literary pretensions. I loved books but never had the literary career I wanted. I died rather young, from some sort of accident. When my soul went to the spiritual plane…I was unhappy because I had not done anything in my life to be remembered by. So I asked to come back. The deal was that I would have a literary career that would be unique in human history, but for this privilege, I could expect to pay a high price. All of this has happened. Writing never made my miserable….In public, I’m afraid I am rather cantankerous. I feel that I’m constantly surrounded by idiots and freaks. No, I don’t see a chance at happiness. Not everyone gets to be happy.”

I know that writers are a funny breed- I’m intimately acquainted with the heady delusions that seem to follow us, the disappointment and frustration and the poverty that most writers experience at least for awhile. Perhaps Kilodney’s whole career was a kind of performance art about writers, a parody of the desperate interplay between the publishing industry and the jokers who write for it. He was something of a prankster, after all, pushing buttons no one else was brave enough to. I recall getting flack in university literature for failing to find any grandeur in a few of Irving Layton’s dirty old poems. Guess I wasn’t the only one.

“There were two hoaxes I did…the first one was aimed at the CBC Radio Literary Competition. I sent in stories by seven different famous dead authors, disguised as the work of unknown writers. All seven were screened out by the preliminary readers. The following year I sent a manuscript of poems by Irving Layton- disguised as the work of an ex-Ugandan army officer- to 26 different publishers, including McClelland and Stewart, Layton’s principal publisher. The only two who caught on were two of the smallest literary presses. Editors are stupid. There are no formal qualifications to be an editor. Look at J.K. Rowling’s experiences with Harry Potter. It was rejected by all the big London publishers.”

Kilodney also suffered the indignity of being issued a ticket for vending his own books without a permit. “This led to a protracted legal battle with Metro,” he says. “We were in the court of appeal, and Metro wanted to drop the whole thing and I wouldn’t drop it…I had no fear of those bastards, and I made sure they knew it. In the end, the case was moot because the law was scrapped by someone else’s case.”

Kilodney also “ran” for President of the United States in 2000. “What America needs is a President who is a mean son of a bitch, and I’m it. Therefore, I am asking American voters to write in the name ‘Crad Kilodney’ on their ballots in November.” He cited his perspectives on several pressing issues. “Immigration will be based on physical beauty. What’s the point of letting in a lot of short, brown, ugly people who look like toads when there are millions of hot Russian and East European babes eager to emigrate to the West?” was one example. As a candidate, he also had some stellar ideas on solving homelessness and poverty. Poverty is relative. “If you say the poverty line is $10,000 a year for one person, you have so many poor people. If you lower it to $1,000 a year, you have a lot less. Anyway, the fact that they’re still alive means they’re getting money from somewhere, so forget about it.”

There was also the stint at Rustler magazine, where Crad “would write crackpot letters and sign them with the names of real people.”

The guy will indeed go down in history as a bitter rabble-rouser, and maybe that’s just as it should be. Kilodney seems certain that he came to live his fate, and that that is what he did. I hope his work garners at least some of the attention that his persona has: now here is a man who never ran out of titles or out of wry observations about the weirdoes that surround him. The sheer tenacity to live your fate so fully only to do a 360, disappear from the streets, and show up in a suit and tie in the stock world, is something I can only admire.

I would say Crad’s got the last laugh, but in my final analysis, I ‘m not sure he was really laughing at anyone in particular at all, just doing his thing in the world. So I ask him if he thinks he is a good writer, if he feels he was successful.

“My writing is what is is, and my life is what it is. I came back to be a writer, and I had a literary career. Posterity passes judgement, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.”

Hey, I know who’s getting my vote in the next election!

www.cradkilodney.net

Try www.abebooks.com to source Crad’s books.

Visit writer Lorette C. Luzajic at www.thegirlcanwrite.net.
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