The Chronicles of PJ and the Dangler

The Chronicles of PJ & the Dangler is a novella which became a feature screenplay, The Island of Misfit Toys. It’s the first piece of long fiction I wrote; and wow was my head on fire at the time.

Behold the lovely cover art by Tara Ann Clayton, designer of all my book art. Find her at https://www.taralynnclayton.com

It’s all my shrink’s fault. He mused once on the fact that since early childhood I’d been obsessed with torture. I’ll give some credit for that fact to the…warm and nurturing environment I did not find myself in at home, but it was really having teachers at my various Christian schools read Fox’s Book of Martyrs to us after lunch and recess that gave the whole field of ‘Torture Studies’ the imprimatur of institutional approval for me.

When my shrink suggested that I sit down to write ‘the ultimate torture story,’ the first obstacle I hit was the fastidiousness of my own daydreaming/fantasy life. In keeping with lots of my fellow GenXers, my entertainment as a child came mostly from in between my two ears. Fantasies might nit be real, but for the love of all that’s good and proper, they’ve got to make sense and have internal validity.

Come on, people. When you’re making shit up, you can’t just make that shit up.

So who would one torture? I mean, it seems like a grim business that would stick around in the memory with some degree of unease, torturing someone does. You’d want to know in your own mind that they deserved it.

Fast forward a few years and the entire notion of folks ‘getting what they deserve’ has just deflated itself completely in my mind, beyond the reach of even the most heroic doses of Cialis. The last thing I want is to ‘get what I deserve.’

But I came to that stance precisely because I wrote this story. I decided that a pedophile priest would be the best kind of target.

I mean, even if PJ were to get caught, he’d be a celebrity in Cellblock D. Who knew Andy Warhol could be so right? Everyone will be a celebrity one day.

But what would be the point? PJ had to have a point; like I said, characters have got to earn their keep in my imagination. He can’t just be a maniac; he’s got to be a maniac with a crackpot idea.

PJ’s notion is that if he could just get the pedo priest to see what he’s been doing, and to see that his target is a fellow human creature the same as he, and that what he’s done to the boys he’s hurt is no different that what PJ is doing to him, then he’d merely…not be able to do it any more.

Those two ideas sit side by side in my mind as a result of this project: The fierce desire for vengeance, and then also an overwhelming awareness of pain and damage I have caused my fellow creatures, almost always because I failed to see myself in them.

It was also around this time that I began to maintain conscious awareness of my own experience as a survivor of child sex abuse. The details have nothing in common with the fictional characters and situation in this project, but the dynamics are the same.

PJ is humpty dumpty, a man blown to bits, trying to put himself together again, trying to get all those characters down there in the basement to come together as one man.

If that ain’t me, I don’t know what is.

Day of the Dead

Day of the Dead is what I’m calling an “erotic memoir.”

I dunno, I love it and I cringe to death at it. That seems about right to me. I wrote it under an easy penetrated pseudonym, but then put out the audiobook under my own name. I was ambivalent, but people have sexuality, and this book is about that.

As my analyst tells me, “Sex and Death, Ben, that’s all there is. And Death is only really a problem because it interrupts the sex.” I’ve learned not to argue with the old codger.

I’d been having a very intense BDSM affair, and I wrote this as it was slowly disassembling itself. The plot continued after the end of this book and was a catalyst for a rugged period of personal growth which involved a stark choice between embracing the reality of who I was and what this affair had really been, or sinking back into a reflecting pool of my own dreams. I opted for reality, and man did it suck.

Despite the various lovely people involved, I was mostly having an affair with the inside of my head, and my ideas of love, and my quest to find that technicolor girl again.

I recorded the audiobook at Voice Over Vermont.

Finding the Pearl in the Storm

Finding the Pearl in the Storm was a pandemic project. I’d planned on having a long-term persuader gig, but it was Corona’d, and I had a month in an AirBnB cabin I couldn’t get a refund on. So I decided to clarify my thoughts on how these unions organizing campaigns I’d been around for so long actually worked. I had a lot of instincts and scattered bits of strategy, but I’d never tried to put it all together systematically.

I wanted to communicate what these wild campaigns are actually like in real human terms, and how to understand them on that level. What became clear to me was that these campaigns are in fact politics in the most real, visceral way, and at a scale which really resonated with me.

In college I focused on the worlds of Ancient Greece and Rome. There are first hand accounts of the politics of the era, written by the players, and we have many ancient historians whose work give a real flavor of the times. In the Athens of Pericles, there were something like 30,000 voters* divided into ten wards. Let’s assume that maybe ten percent of the voters are leaders in their communities and will sway the rest. That’s three thousand influential voters, divided into ten wards. These are numbers that Bill Clinton or Barack Obama would have been able to cope with instinctively. When my time machine arrives I’ll be hanging out a lot in the Agora, getting a hand on how the political hacks did their job. I’m guessing they weren’t much differnt from the political hacks I’ve met. People are people everywhere you go and everywhen you go.

Union organizing campaigns are like this. They are real, actual politics among voting citizens on issues that effect their lives far more directly than abstractions and slogans and walls and tariffs. You see formal ‘leaders’ who definitely are not leaders of any kind, and informal leaders that whole shifts would follow into a storm. You see what’s what among the voters, and more to the point for someone in my line of work, how the two organizations are behaving. It’s gratifyingly complex.

I’ve leaned on various Chinese strategists and their heavily Taoist-inflected way of seeing the world. It meshes with my experience, and the lifestyle of being a wandering Ronin of a campaigner. My work involves essentially air-dropping into a new organization with people and processes that are unknown to me in their specifics, just as the voters and the union are unknown to me. After a time, one sees patterns and dynamics repeated over and over until the whole thing seems like a Hindu myth involving reincarnation and Kali counting ballots for all eternity. Humans are humans, and we behave similarly in similar circumstances. If you can see what the patterns are, you’ll be well on the road to actual understanding of the complex and dynamic world of union organizing campaigns, where everything is always the same, and yet still nothing happens the same way twice.

I hope you like the book! I recorded the audiobook at the incomparable Voice Over Vermont studio.

*The actual number of inhabitants was perhaps ten times as high, but voting and thus full citizenship was limited to men meeting certain socioeconomic criteria. This sticks in the craw of the modern reader, and why shouldn’t it? When you study these things, you’ve got to reckon with the parts that stick in your craw. As it was taught to me, the history of western political philosophy is essentially the history of an expanding notion of what it takes to be counted as a full and noble human. Presently we’ve mostly landed on the notion that all it takes to be counted as a human is to be a human and that each one of us is as good as the next and should live by the same laws.

Fury & Grace

Fury & Grace is a memoir written when I was quite fresh out of the union. I’ll wager mortgage money that the ‘Fury’ part comes shining through. The ‘Grace,’ well….that’s aspirational for us all, I think. The stories seem to change into different stories as I change into a different man, but am always still the same man.

I sometimes think I might just re-write that book every five years. Keep the chapter divisions, but make new epigrams and tell the same events through the lens of whatever psyche I have in my head at that moment.