The Strip Teen Dream Journey

Essay

The Strip Teen Dream Journey began before I knew there was going to be a novel.

At Catherine’s first-year fall MFA show at NYU, work by undergraduate students was also hanging in the hallways. Among it was an ordinary sheet of paper, approximately eight and a half by eleven inches. Someone had cut a woman from a pornographic magazine and placed her on the page on all fours, with her rear raised. Across it, by hand, were the words: Somebody bring her a unicorn.

I do not know who made it.

That image and sentence stayed with me. Some years later, while I was living in a windowless studio near the Morgan stop in Bushwick and supposed to be working on a philosophy master’s degree, I began writing songs around it. They were dirty country songs at first. I was reading Hegel and other philosophy, living with Georgie, and spending a great deal of time doing something other than the work I was supposed to be doing.

Most of the songs that eventually became the companion album already existed before I began writing the novel in prose: High and Tight, The Car Crash Sorceress, Amphetamine Queen, Toward the End of Her Lay, Childhood Bed, Somebody Bring Her a Unicorn, and Motorcycle Mary. Almighty Almighty and Odessa Goodbye came later.

The song Somebody Bring Her a Unicorn is slow and almost lullaby-like. Henrik plays a heavy organ part. At the end, a large chorus of voices sings wordlessly. The music remains tender while the language does things that tenderness is not supposed to accompany. I became interested in that coexistence. The joke does not necessarily end when the horror begins. Obscenity does not have to withdraw when theology enters. Several registers can occupy the same event at once.

The novel grew out of that condition.

Its premise is simple enough. A Vietnam veteran walks into a desert strip club called The Sanctuary. He takes a drug called gravity, orders whiskey from Nadine, looks toward the stage, and begins approaching a red-haired dancer.

The book is what happens during that approach.

The Vietnam in the novel is not documentary Vietnam. For me the Vietnam War was already a movie I had grown up watching in the 1980s and 1990s. Apocalypse Now is present throughout the book alongside the music of the 1960s and 1970s, sometimes explicitly and sometimes after it has been broken down into something else.

That is also how the music works.

The music has been metabolized.

It does not function as soundtrack or cultural reference pasted onto the prose. Recorded music, radio language, automobiles, bodies, military speech, popular mythology and the machinery of American adolescence are digested into characters, objects, phrases, scenes and causal structures. Marc Bolan eventually appears in the book’s closing movement because by that point the distinction between the world of the novel and the rock and roll that helped make it has become difficult to maintain.

One of the book’s recurring problems is the teenager.

Dead Mack announces the invention of a new category between child and adult. The invention is commercial. If this intermediate being can be distinguished, it can become a market. The Ford Mustang follows. A word becomes a way of organizing bodies, desire, products, time and expectation.

This interested me because the teenager feels so natural after the fact. It can seem like a biological stage that was simply waiting to receive its proper name. But a category can become real without having been inevitable.

Made does not mean unreal.

Words can become machinery.

Once a distinction has been installed deeply enough in institutions, markets, families, law, clothing, music, schools, automobiles and expectations about time, people can actually live inside it. The novel is full of things like this: words, images and distinctions that cease behaving like descriptions and begin producing consequences.

There is quite literally a map in the book.

The first appears on the bar at The Sanctuary. Joe puts his head down on the mahogany and calls the grain a map of the journey. The history of the tree remains in the wood while scuffs, dents and cuts alter it. He takes a knife to the surface, and landscapes, highways, corpses, war and desert begin appearing in the marks.

Much later, another map appears on a boulder.

The roads represented on it seem more real than the road the characters used to reach it. The landscape represented inside the map seems larger than the landscape surrounding them. A grain of sand indicates where they are. The map itself appears within the map. Looking more closely reveals the interior of a mountain: corridors, rooms and staircases. The narrator follows one of those staircases, approaches a door, opens it, and enters the next section of the book.

There is no announcement of the point at which looking at a representation became walking through a place.

The map promises orientation and then incorporates the person looking at it.

Its detail is what swallows you.

This is close to how I think about the novel now. I have called it a mess. I mean that affectionately and literally. It is the kind of mess you do not necessarily want to clean up. You lose your car keys and begin searching. After a while you realize that you have lost your sense of where you are in relation to the mess. You are moving through it rather than looking at it from outside.

The mess has swallowed you.

You are part of it.

The writing itself changed while I was making it.

After Bushwick I moved to Paris with Catherine, and later to Toronto. In 2016 I returned to New York and recorded much of the album material. Around that period I wrote much of the first hundred pages of the novel. Those pages remain unusually dense. They are engulfed in dreamtime.

Then I stopped for a couple of years.

When I returned to the manuscript I was living in the California desert, although the book had already been set in a desert before I lived there. During the 2020 shutdown I worked in a small shed in the backyard and wrote steadily. I began dividing the work into trimesters and imposing more discipline on the action. I wanted less explanation. Strange things did not need to be followed immediately by prose explaining that they were strange or what they represented. They could simply happen.

The formal position of the narrator also became unstable.

Around the middle of the book the soldier undergoes a bodily exchange with a tree. The tree ages while he moves backward through man, adolescent, child, fetus, seed and spark; then the process reverses. Soon afterward the Amphetamine Queen first appears as a voice he recognizes as his own. After he takes the pills, her voice is in him.

From there, first person becomes transmissible.

One woman tells a story in the first person. Another woman inside that story can become the next I. The narrating position passes from voice to voice while Nadine and The Sanctuary continue to intrude from outside these interior narratives. The soldier passes through these voices as well. The book does not simply alternate between first and third person. The first person itself becomes migratory.

Later he gives birth to a Triumph Trophy motorcycle.

I mean this literally.

The motorcycle is born from his body, cold metal in birthing fluid, and the scene possesses an odd filial warmth. The book then returns to third person.

Another scene that now seems related to later ACID imagery involves a glass vessel containing seed, a brass support, fire, wood cut from a singing tree, minerals used in making glass, and refracted light entering the vessel. I did not write it as a prophecy of anything. ACID did not exist. But encountering that scene again after the Church’s later vacuum-tube imagery produces the peculiar experience of discovering that an earlier thing was already there.

A great deal of autobiographical material also entered the novel, although I do not think the book is usefully described as autobiographical. Around the beginning of 2020 my journals themselves had become one of the compositional sites. I could begin writing something that had happened during the day and, without marking a boundary, find that I had moved into the novel. Fiction and fact were not reliably separated in those notebooks.

Part Three emerged from a different period in my life, when I was doing a great deal of astral projection and related practices. Some of what happens there draws on experiences I understood differently at the time than I would necessarily understand them now. I do not feel any need to resolve that discrepancy retrospectively.

What is strange to me now is not something produced by the years separating me from the writing.

I was surprised by the novel while I was writing it.

Much of the time I did not know where it was coming from then either. I did not once possess a complete view of the book and later lose it. Its dimensions already exceeded my view of it while I was making it. The interval since then has not diminished that surprise or made the thing substantially more explicable.

Its expansiveness was present from the beginning.

Bringing a significant work to completion usually comes at considerable cost. Financial cost is only one kind of payment the muse requires.

The cost of this book included a marriage. It happened to be my fourth divorce. The end of the marriage itself came as an enormous relief. More difficult was the conflict that followed over our daughter and the question of who would raise her and under what conditions.

There was another kind of cost as well, though I am not sure cost is exactly the right word for it. Finishing the book completed something in my movement from New York to the desert.

I lived in New York for about ten years. New York was a place where I could not honestly pretend that I did not know what was real. I could entertain metaphysical doubt. I could read philosophy about doubt. I could imagine other possibilities. But somewhere underneath those activities I still believed I knew, in the deepest sense, what kind of world I was living in.

What I wanted was a place from which not knowing would no longer be a performance.

In New York, not knowing what was real would have been a fiction for me.

I do not know exactly what happened in the desert. There was no single revelation. The change was gradual. Certain inherited certainties began to erode. Things I had been told were settled ceased to feel settled. Distinctions I had treated as fundamental became less secure.

The world did not become unreal.

It became less exhausted by the explanations I had inherited for it.

The Strip Teen Dream Journey had imagined the desert before I lived there. By the time I finished the book, I was inside that landscape. Something similar had happened to the distinction between the imaginative and the real. I could no longer maintain it in quite the same way.

There is a map in the novel that becomes so detailed that the person looking at it eventually finds himself walking around inside it.

The movement from New York to the desert did something similar to me.

The Manifesto came afterward. I do not think that makes this novel proto-ACID or converts it into a doctrinal text after the fact. The sequence is less orderly than that. The conditions under which the novel could finally be completed also made another kind of inquiry possible.

Near the end of the book, almost everybody returns.

The Great Rabbit Fight, which had been promised for a long time, finally occurs between two actual desert cottontails. Marc Bolan and the accumulated rock and roll of the book are there. The spectacle becomes brutal. Then the final image places the defeated rabbit on the barroom floor.

The Sanctuary has returned.

Perhaps the book never really left it.

Years ago my friend Nick Soderburgh called me and told me that he had been reading the novel aloud to his girlfriend. I remember how strange and moving that was. A book I was not yet sure anyone would ever read had already entered another room and acquired voices that were not mine.

Talking about the book again has made me want to let more people inside it.

That probably means it is time to publish it.

Not to clean it up.

To put up the map.