Nicholas Tyler Bibliography II

Graveyard Dancing
I'm up late. I haven't been awake past three in the morning for years. Coffee and cigarettes used to help me last until the birds warmed up and the buses started to run, but they aren't enough now. I don't love the night anymore--I just kiss it and say, Not now, baby, I'm too tired.

I'm driving an old pickup truck down Collier, past the dog-food factory and the darkened office parks. Close to the graveyard, I see Anthony walking along the road's shoulder. There is no sidewalk. I slow the truck as I roll toward Anthony. He moves away from the pavement as my headlights catch him. I stop the truck and say his name through the open passenger window. He leans closer to the door--he's tensed like a squirrel on a patio. I snap on the dome light to show him that I am not Rick, or Brian, or Stephanie, or even Carrie.

It's late but I'm practically vibrating with the thrill of knowing that I can push this over, that I can finish it. I've been following these kids for so long, living their choices as if they were my own--tonight, it ends. Tonight is all I wrote. If I get Anthony into this truck, then I can make something terrible happen. I'm going to enjoy it.

This one is the mack daddy of unfinished Nick Tyler novels. I started it in '96, as a screenplay (this portion of my life, the "Maybe Hollywood" portion, has been swept neatly under the rug of discretion, and I would like you all to please forget that I mentioned it), and then recycled the screenplay in '98 as my next project after Seven Time. It went well for about six months, and then my personal life became ridiculous. The key themes of GD are infidelity, violence, and revenge, and when my girlfriend started dating (that is, fucking) a friend of mine, the rumor that I was an abusive boyfriend got started (by who? Who knows?), and all I could think about was killing her, him, and myself, I could not separate my fiction from my life. GD has sat for five years with a complete outline. What the fuck is keeping me?

Sad Songs & Waltzes
Michele's old house was empty, unlit, and open. I climbed the fence and stepped into the house through the ragged hole in the kitchen wall. The interior was being remodeled. The bare wood, de-tiled floors, and a new wall through the back bedroom made me feel lost and old. I ducked through the saw-horses in the hallway and looked in the room that had been Michele's. I tried to cover the peeled paint and dusty floor with what I remembered of her bedroom. She had black curtains, and gothic iron candle-holders were nailed to the walls. Her closet had overflowed with jeans, skirts, dresses, boots, and corsets, almost every item black. On the night stand were more candles, handcuffs tossed casually into a wicker basket full of barretes and hairpins, books with titles like Beauty's Promise, or The Vampire's Kiss, and the always full ashtray. Her bed was usually covered with incongruously cute stuffed animals, most of them named Sarah.

I walked down the hall, out the front door, and onto the porch. It was empty, scrubbed clean. No couches, no glass-topped table, no empty beer bottles, no paint splatters, no Michele. I needed a drink.

Last October, I had this to say:

If I were to write a poem about how our friendship ended, I would call it The Death of Cleverness. I would write about how we were so careful to be always sharp, always interesting, always ready for the wicked word game. I would write about clues and in-jokes and insults we used on others that only we could understand. I would write something simple and blunt, and I would never show it to anyone.

I am going to write a novel about it. I should call the novel The Death of Cleverness, but I'm sticking with the original title, Sad Songs and Waltzes. I call it original, but it's actually lifted from Willie Nelson, by way of Cake. The title will stay the same, even if the book keeps changing.

SS&W began as a laundry list of offences received from Meredith, Michele, and Virginia. Then it was a "road trip" book that would include a laundry list of offences received from Meredith, Michele, and Virginia. Then it was a book about a guy trying to write a book that would include a laundry list of offences received from his exgirlfriends. And now it's something else.

It's a book about doubling, and ghosts, and getting lost in the woods. It's about typing in a shotgun house and drinking on porches. It was once about creating a clever machine that would confound meaning and make structure interesting, but I cut all that shit out. I like it much better without the cute things: chapters named by activities, each which would be the central theme of the particular chapter; three sections per chapter to mimic the waltz beat; each section having a specific style and self-imposed constraints; and a rearranged timeline.

To paraphrase Jeff Buckley: "All these little tricks are bullshit. Really big, big bullshit."

The Untitled Emmett Menzelew Novel
I know a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy, and I don't know whether his story is true. I know there was a census, and I know there was a Holocaust, but all this guy told me was a story. I think I got it right.

The first American census took place in 1950, as a direct result of the baby boom. No. The first census takers started knocking on doors at the end of 1890, up and down the coast, symbolically re-uniting the North and South. No. The first American census, ordered by the Constitution, questioned and categorized almost four million citizens and seven hundred thousand slaves who had only just begun to accept their new country, new government, and new graveyards, in 1790.

Where are the numbers from the first census? Locked away somewhere, maybe. Imagine a book on the top shelf of a humidity-controlled room in the Library of Congress. You could pull it down (if you wore gloves) and trace the ornate script on a leather cover: The Careful and Accurate Assessment of the Population of America in the Year of Our Lord Seventeen Hundred and Ninety. It might exist, but even if it does, most of us will never see it. So we'll have to find the numbers elsewhere.

This one is my ace in the hole. This one is my dry powder and my extra pair of socks. I'm not going to write about it, just yet.

Beat Down Jazz Group
I want to tell you about Bradley Underhill and what happened to him on his twenty-fifth birthday. I want you to trust me when I write what you think must be a lie. If I sound a little desperate, a shade unreliable, it is because I am the only person who can tell this story. Bradley isn't around to tell it and I'm sure that no one else paid attention to him that day. Events much bigger than Bradley went down on his birthday.

The quote I used for this one is a little disingenuous. BDJG is five novellas which interlock, so using this excerpt (from "Like Swimming") to represent the boook is like offering a green bean as representative of Thanksgiving dinner. "Beat Down Jazz Group" is a phrase I used in Seven Time to describe Morphine (if you don't know this band, please please please do yourself a favor and check them out). Later, in a fit of self-indulgent defense against all the "Seven Time is so short!" comments, I outlined (very loosely) the structure of BDJG, using the titles of five Morphine albums for inspiration. The novellas: GOOD, the story of one day in the College of Architecture, including a love square, a fire, a broken nose, and a really sexy tattoo; CURE FOR PAIN, about three different men and three different nervous breakdowns; YES, the long version of the wedding story; LIKE SWIMMING, about the hottest day of the year, a sober alcoholic, and a riot in downtown Atlanta; and THE NIGHT, in which we follow ten people who end up at the same bar after ten separate strange experiences, including a confession in an empty post office, a party on the roof of an abandoned factory, a last-minute flight to Atlanta, and ill-advised, tequila-fueled group sex. Note that each plot is subject to immediate change without notice.