My Storyville Weekend
Jeff VanderMeer
On the plane over, I finally read the little safety brochures
and was startled to learn that "the body expands slightly
while in the air"-which could explain why my thigh was using
the remote control embedded in the arm rest of the seat to
order movies and TV programming, because it certainly wasn't
doing that before I got on the plane. Before that, it was
a relatively technology-challenged thigh.
But the Storyville weekend didn't start with the plane flight
and the eight hours of listening to the hyena behind me chortle
at his entertainment screen while clapping like a wind up
monkey. It didn't start with the funny look that the passport
checker at Gatwick Airport gave me when he turned to the passport
photo and found a hundred dollar bill beside it ("I was just
trying to hide my money in different places," I told him unconvincingly.)
It didn't start with Mark meeting me at the airport. It didn't
start with meeting Rosanne, Liz, Trevor, and Garry at King's
Cross Station. It didn't even start when we boarded the train
to York, or when, onboard the train, Lawrence sought us out
to let us know he and Des were five cars up (Des, as befits
a king, deigned not to go tramping up five carriages just
on the off-chance of finding people he'd see anyway later-besides,
we were just pulling up to York.) No, the weekend started
with none of these things, nor with meeting Tamar, who picked
us up at York and drove us the rest of the way. At that point,
for me, everything was dreamlike and me a spectator wondering
how to become a participant.
No, the Storyville Weekend began for me when, winding our
way through rolling hills clumped with brown heather and,
far off in the distance, an odd triangular obelisk of concrete
(national security-related, of course), the car rounded a
bend and-breath caught, gaze caught, between heartbeats-there,
spread out before us, Robin's Hood Bay: the miraculous long
line of the cliffs topped with green, the dark blue of water
flecked with the white of waves, the line where the dark blue
met the light blue of the sky, and that point from which the
sun suffused the town of stone buildings, sheltered by the
bay, with an antique light. The light looked painted on, each
rooftop individually lacquered in rich tones of brown and
deep red. There was a collective gasp-it was so unexpected
and yet so complete, no slow revelation over time, but all
there, of a piece, and beautiful. I began to smile. Now it
was real even as it became unreal-what could be more perfect
than this place that looked like it had come out of an old
story, with cobblestone streets and grizzled sea-goers in
sturdy boats. Selkies and storms. Ghosts and tragic love.
Tamar drove Mark and me to our bed-and-breakfast, whereupon
a little of the beauty faded even as the mystery deepened:
Neither Mark nor I could open the gate to the place. We struggled
with it like we were auditioning for parts as the apes in
2001 until Tamar, Homo sapiens to our Neanderthal, got out
of the car, walked up to the gate, and opened it in about
five seconds. Mark and I hooted our appreciation and scratched
our armpits, knowing that we would not be consulted on the
opening of doors, wine bottles, or much else for quite some
time. Tamar and Trevor drove away to the main bed-and-breakfast,
Thorpe Hall, whilst Mark and I, quite chastened, set up digs
in our respective rooms. Of our bed-and-breakfast, I know
only these things: Garry stayed there too; it was luminous
with light that cascaded off the burnt-red wood of the interior;
it contained two spastic, crotch-sniffing black Labradors;
the walls were covered with pictures of the owner's family
in various pseudo-Victorian settings, almost certainly taken
at amusement parks in the United States; the bathroom was
bigger than the bedroom and contained several pieces of equipment
that were foreign to me; for some inexplicable reason, the
owner's wife told me she would bring milk up to my room, eliciting
from me as much of a raised eyebrow as if she had said she
would bring up a rubber chicken post haste; and the first
night, I discovered a large butterfly fluttering around my
room, its wings quickly losing luster, and grabbed a supposedly
empty box on the cabinet top, captured the butterfly within,
closed the top, opened my window, and cast the contents of
the box out into the night...from the sounds of things hitting
the pavement below, there must have been a whole division
of tin soldiers inside of it (but, in the morning: nothing
on the footpath below; had the proprietors protected me from
my own embarrassment or had the sheep that baaed outside the
window from across the street snuck over the gate in the night
and cleaned up?).
Refreshed, memories of the gate disaster fast fading, Mark
and I, joined by Garry, headed for Thorpe Hall, where everyone
else was staying. The weather was good, despite the forecasts
of doom-and-gloom. The shops, the houses, the green hills,
all smiled with light.
But Thorpe Hall was empty. Mark and Garry and I knocked once,
twice, then entered...to find that our fellow Storyvilleans
had apparently been transformed into printed words: a Storyville
library was laid out in the window seat of one of the sitting
rooms. The lights were all on. The chairs gave the impression
of having been used recently. Mark and I looked at each other.
Somehow the nervousness of meeting Storyvilleans increased
with this silence. Leaving The Shining to itself, we walked
around back, where the crunch of gravel and the rise of voices
reassured us. And then it was greetings all around and the
first tentative words of hello. Dave, Phil, and Neil had not
yet arrived, but otherwise, it was a full convocation of Storyville:
Tamar, Lawrence, Garry, Mark, Dawn, Des, Keith, Rosanne, Liz,
Trevor, Iain, and myself. (Milling; indecisive; herdlike-yes,
Storyville in the flesh was a many-headed beast that in an
emergency would have died to the last word, but although many
jokingly remarked on the amount of time it took to make a
decision, this was not really the result of indecisiveness
but because we were all in continuous conversation; decisions
did not seem as important as communication.)
So, after some thought, Tamar led us down into Robin's Hood
Bay, dusk descending over the sea, dimming the light atop
the buildings. Rambling along sidewalks, through what appeared
to be people's yards (!?), up cobblestone streets, clomping
down steep stairs, we made our way to The Dolphin for dinner.
The Dolphin was, for an American like me, the prototypical
English pub-close quarters, dark wooden beams, an assortment
of chairs and red-topped stools, rows of beer cans (including
Monty Python Holy Grail beer), and solid food like fish-and-chips,
mushroom-and-steak pie, and blood pudding. In The Dolphin,
sitting at one long table with two small circular tables pulled
up as well, conversation that had been perhaps stilted at
times became natural, as we all seemed to relax and enjoy
the moment. Most Storyvilleans chose beer, but having experienced
a rather awful beer-related incident some eight years before
and still scarred, I chose cider (I had to be careful with
this, though-the sneaky Brits had made their cider as strong
as some beers, something I did not realize until, at dinner
in London Thursday night, I had four pints before noticing
that for some reason my legs were not working the way legs
were supposed to work, but more like the segmented dry twigs
of a praying mantis.)
Into this atmosphere of good cheer, we welcomed the appearance
of a traditional folk group: Monkey's Fist. Ironically, I
think we stayed longer than we would have just to get a glimpse
of them. Around 8:30 p.m., they and their hangers-on and groupies
entered the dining area. The Monkey's Fist numbered four,
their manager presumably being the thumb of the fist. All
four were large men with bellies of varying pedigree. All
four wore the Monkey's Fist uniform-a t-shirt with some sort
of monkey fist logo on the front and a series of what looked
like monkey pictograms of monkeys in various states of monkey
inebriation on the back. Two of the four Monkey Fists had
their eyeglasses shoved into the front of their -shirts. Disheveled
beards were prominent, eliciting a disgusted look from the
anti-hirsute revolutionary Tamar (who, having produced a beret,
a cigar, and a riding crop, had just the moment before been
delivering a manifesto against the production of hair upon
the chin). Promisingly, one Monkey's Fist had a guitar. I
have always been of the opinion that, just as Chekhov believed
a gun produced in the first act should be fired by the third,
a guitar introduced at the beginning of a set should be played
during the set. I hunched over on my stool, wedged between
an optimistic Trevor and Iain, waiting for the show to start.
As the tremulous notes broke over us, as the thunderous voices
wailed their ancient sea shanties, as the full weight of Monkey's
Fist crashed down upon us...I realized I wasn't enjoying it
quite as much as I had hoped-although it took awhile to understand
this because Des seemed to love it, which automatically made
me wonder if I wasn't missing something. The reason for my
discomfort? For one thing, most of the songs sounded remarkably
similar. For another, some of the lyrics-perhaps misunderstood
by my American ears-were...suspect. Something about hanging
grandmothers or tadpoles at one point. Monkey's Fist then
introduced a song "as in the Native American tradition," only
to subject us to yet another song in the same mode as the
others. I simply cannot believe that when Custer was making
his last stand, the Apaches taunted him with Old English sea
shanties. However, perhaps the biggest disappointment was
the lack of guitar playing. Except for one song, MF sung without
accompaniment, the forlorn guitar forgotten, slung across
the smallest MF's shoulder.
Mark and Keith had been whispering to each other, their backs
to Monkey's Fist as they hunched over on their stools. Suddenly,
about halfway through the set, as a song ended, the band's
manager stood up and pointedly asked them to please be quiet
during the performance. If Mark and Keith had been quiet before
this, they were positively funereal thereafter. They stared
down at the floor in melancholy embarrassment as if all hope
had left them. They could not have looked more depressed if
they'd been ghosts hovering over their own corpses. Which,
of course, made them immensely amusing to the rest of us.
As soon as we could politely do so and still find out who
had won the raffle we had been gang-pressed into, we slipped
out of the dining area, down the stairs, and into the night,
there to laughingly incorporate Monkey's Fist into the Storyville
mythos. (We did see Monkey's Fist again, not two blocks from
The Dolphin, on Saturday, performing in front of some fishing
boats. I had a sudden flash of paranoia, scenes from the movie
Wicker Man playing out in my mind. Perhaps we were doomed
to encounter them on Sunday, too, from even farther away,
our fate by then decided, the inhabitants of Robin Hood's
Bay having woven us into the flammable surface of some immense
monkey, symbolic of a May Day celebration postponed just in
case fourteen or fifteen obnoxious writer/artist-types showed
up in October.)
As penance for our mockery of Monkey's Fist, the walk back
proved to be a Bhutan death march of a trudge, up an incline
I could have sworn had been less steep on the way down. Conversation
died away as everyone concentrated on one more huffing breath,
one more trembling step. The night was cool but not cold,
the light of lamps and stars diffuse. The taste of sea air
invigorated us with its energy.
More and more, the weekend would began to seem like some
sort of twisted exercise course intended to whip all of us
Storyvilleans into shape. Down that hill, up this mountain,
through this person's yard, always steep descents and steeper
ascents. My quadriceps quite approved even as my lungs told
me there must be a way to install escalators in this place.
At the next pub, Neil and Phil showed up after a five-hour
drive from Glasgow, Phil in a trademark colorful shirt of
the type I used to wear when I didn't work for a tie-and-suit
business and Neil his usual unfazed cool self. While Neil
talked to Tamar about her novel, I quizzed a suddenly inscrutable
Des about Nemonymous. "Who's in it?" "Don't know." "Will you
be advertising it?" "No." "Will you be sending it out to reviewers?"
"I was thinking about it. Possibly." For the record, Des also
claimed not to be a writer, despite over a thousand stories
in print. My questions might have irritated someone else,
but Des was gracious enough to take it in good humor.
After the pub, we all walked back to Thorpe Hall, there to
talk in the sitting room until midnight, whereupon Mark, Garry,
and I went back to our digs, hoping to get some rest in preparation
for Saturday.
***
Saturday...the day of greatest Storyville Joy and the day
of what some dubbed the Great Schism. I woke in a state of
intense restlessness, almost a panic. There were a couple
of reasons for this. The first had to do with the forced march
of almost fifty thousand words of new fiction for an Ambergris
collection, completed the day before I had boarded the plane.
Over ten weeks, there had not been a day that I had not typed
or scrawled words, many times opening a vein in my wrist to
do so. I was still shivering and shimmering with the echoes
of words. My fingertips tingled with the imprint of letters.
Somehow, finishing the material had not satisfied the lust.
I was still writing story fragments in my head, too exhausted
for it to make any sense-literary heat lightning.
The second reason was that even by Friday night I had become
acutely aware that the weekend was already slipping by-that
there were only so many hours left to spend with my fellow
Storyvilleans, many of whom I might not see again for years,
depending on finances and circumstances.
That morning, it seemed tragic that there would be two separate
Storyvilles: one for those who wanted to putter around the
beach looking in tidal pools and flying Phil's kite and one
for those who wanted to hike up to the cliffs and only then,
gluttons for exercise, descend to the beach below. Although
it meant some would experience events and conversations the
others could only guess at, it also meant some small measure
of security: it seemed impossible that both groups could be
snuffed out, given that splitting Storyvilleans into two groups
gave each more speed in reacting to emergency situations...
I decided on the hike, along with Tamar, Garry, Lawrence,
Mark, Neil, Rosanne, Iain, Keith, Rosanne, Lawrence, and Liz
(did I leave anyone out?). The weather, again, was profoundly
perfect, the sky a reflected bowl of blue above a bay at low
tide, strips of rock and sand stretching out well into the
sea. The ascent to the top of the cliff consisted of a murderous
aerobics once again, the steps muddy and steep. Lawrence and
Tamar led, good naturedly disagreeing on the composition of
the stones beneath our feet and the amount of time it would
take for the foothills beyond the cliffs to become proper
hills. The rest of us followed behind in little gaggles of
groups, tromping over rocks and grass, over farmer's fences
(although Mark and I did have a little trouble with the gates,
of course), through areas where interlocking bushes formed
a tunnel with a door of light at the end. The vegetation had
a depth of green not found in washed-out semi-tropical Florida,
where all plants appear as if they have been in a life-and-death
fight with the sun. The wind off the ocean sustained us. At
one point, Mark posed by a farm gate like some designer-clothes-clad
avant garde farmer, doing a series of absurd accents for our
amusement.
Defeated by the welter of gates and by warning signs posted
by farmers, Lawrence and Tamar eventually brought us back
to the sea, our path lowering to the Boggle, where we lost
Mark, Liz, and Keith to the appeal of the beach. By the time
the rest of us made it back down to the beach, around 11:00
a.m., we were four: Tamar, Lawrence, Iain, and me. I took
advantage of the low tide to walk out as far as I could, staring
down into the tidal pools as I shuffled along: sea anemones,
tiny writhing red worms, limpets, dark green kelp-like seaweed,
oddly-shaped stones. The sky enormous above me, the sea restless
and sly. The cliffs seemed small from that vantage. The town
of Robin's Hood Bay had been reduced to a few patches of brown-red
roofs. I kept walking, driven by nothing in particular except
the need to keep walking. There's something about the natural
world, when you can make a case for being all alone, that
brings up emotions that have nothing to do with words. One
of my purest, most pleasurable memories of growing up in the
Fiji Islands is of walking out on to the reefs for hours at
a time, sometimes a mile from shore. Any time I can come close
to that experience, I am beyond happy.
After awhile, remembering a distressing Storyvillean utterance
about fickle tides and being cut off from shore, I walked
back to where Lawrence, Tamar, and Iain were looking for shells
and fossils. Lawrence had found a fossilized mantle of a creature
that is the ancestor of the squid and was kind enough to offer
it to me. A fossilized squid! I couldn't believe it. On any
other day, that would have been the highlight.
We slowly made our way back to town, where the beach-dwelling
Storyvilleans plied us with stories of Phil's breakdancing
kite. Back at The Dolphin for a much-needed lunch, we found
that a sub-Schism had developed: Dave (just arrived), Mark,
Neil, and Keith intended to dig in to their position opposite
the television and remain there until after the conclusion
of the England-Greece game. The rest of us wandered Robin's
Bay during this time-although Lawrence and I could not resist
ducking in for the last 30 minutes of the game, managing to
see three of the four goals scored-not knowing that, really,
all of it was just preamble to the night. During this interlude,
we visited bookstores and cafes. Des found an anthology that
contained one of his stories. I found a treasure trove of
novels by the long-forgotten mid-80s writer Stuart Gordon,
whose Smile on the Void is one of my favorite books.
By mid to late afternoon, I found myself disengaging from
my companions on-and-off for a few hours, content to just
observe conversations, to notice a turn of phrase, a mannerism,
faces. A sense of melancholy overtook me, a sense that it
would all be over soon and knowing that I had rarely been
in such enjoyable company. I found myself thinking of everyone
with a general deep affection, from Des and his owl eyes to
Neil's subtle flashes of amusement to Tamar's continual hint
of almost-smile, to...just the way the community in cyberspace
had so seamlessly formed a community of the flesh. Dawn describing
her latest work to me. Liz talking about her parents' reaction
to her novel. Rosanne on Doris Lessing. Iain describing his
novel in progress. Garry on Eastercon. Phil and I discussing
Robyn Hitchcock. Lawrence explaining fossils, talking about
his book A Cottage on the Moss. Keith and I comparing old
publishing scars. And a hundred other little moments as well.
There's really no way to capture such things in print.
That evening displayed Storyville at its finest, everything
slipping into present tense. Having sequestered ourselves
in the Charter House's main sitting room, along with several
dozen bottles of various types of alcohol, we begin by reading
from among the books, magazines, and manuscripts left by the
window seat: the Storyville library. And a rich, varied library
it is-as wonderfully chaotic as Storyville itself. As I read
through the materials, I am amazed by the depth of it all.
After much playful and clever conversation, I experienced
a bit of embarrassment when it turns out Tamar was just joking
about wanting to see baby pictures, etc. "Tamar," I say, "you
left off the emoticon! No emoticon! I didn't know you were
joking." Tamar has brought photos of her husband, her dog,
her house. I have brought sixty plus photos of various Vander-chagrin,
from baby photos to high school photos to current photos of
me dressed up for Halloween as Don King. I'm in diapers in
some photos, dammit! I'm sure I'm turning red. As Tamar passes
them around, I hope hopelessly that no one thinks I'm an arrogant
bastard, but it's probably too late. "I was coerced," I want
to say. "There was no emoticon!"
As preamble to the rest of the festivities, Trevor does card
tricks with the help of a kingly finger puppet. The tricks
are excellent and the puppet surreal.
Then comes the storytelling, beginning with the idea of each
person in the circle composing a sentence of a story. This
becomes quite hilarious, but is hard to follow and so we decide
to try a story where each person just contributes the next
word. The story that slowly takes form from this involves
characters named Trevor, Duane, as well as squid, a hamster,
and sex change operations. Des surprises by mostly contributing
words having to do with sex. Liz sits back in a corner of
a couch and produces an unrelenting list of strong verbs and
nouns. Garry goes for the more obscure approach and contributes
many byzantine words that cut hilariously against the simplicity
of other entries. Iain, to my right, puts me in a bad position,
seeing as I have lost any imaginative capacities I might have
had sometime earlier in the day, with a series of strong words
that force me into a "bridging" capacity-I think I say the
word "through" at least thrice, which makes for tough times
to my left, where Keith sits, staring up at me in my chair,
a smile on his face as he hopes I'll give him something better
to work with than "an" or "the". Over time, this drives me
nearly insane with laughter. I'll stare down at Keith and
Keith will know exactly what's coming-yet another retarded
Vander "through"-and, though long-suffering, will devise some
suitable revenge in the form of a brilliant response...which
Neil will then run through his exceedingly devious Scottish
brain and transform with his next work into another context
altogether, followed by Garry's OED word, followed by Rosanne's
vibrant variation, Dave's analysis prior to adding his own,
Lawrence, Trevor, Tamar, Dawn, Phil, and so on...At one point,
we are debating the viability of such terms as "sarcastic
wank" and "ironic wank," although I cannot remember if this
occurred during the single word story or before or after.
The room's spinning a little from the motion of all these
words going around the circle.
Eventually, dizzy with the horrible and incoherent travails
of the characters Trevor and Duane, convinced we will never
be able to explain any of this to non-present Storyvilleans,
we stop. Somewhere around this time, I believe Liz gifted
me with a pink mouse or "clanger" from a BBC children's show-much
to my enduring delight. I must again officially retract anything
I might have conveyed in email form indicating a dislike for
clangers. Clangers are marvelous creatures.)
If the word-by-word story had been sublimely silly, then
the story reading was seriously sublime. I'm not a big fan
of extended readings-I have the attention span of a vole-but
there was something magical about that evening where everything
seemed to work, each story commenting on the next. I sat back
with my wine and let the words wash over me, trying to fix
readers' faces in memory. What impressed us all was the quality
of prose that was, in each case, substantially different,
underscoring the diverse strengths of Storyville. Dave, Mark,
and Lawrence read stories by those who did not want to read
their own and did a magnificent job. It was one in the morning
before we finished and I know everyone was tired, but story
by story, the readings had been the perfect capper on the
evening. As Neil said, "I am full of words." Glutted on them.
A few of us soldiered on after most of the others had gone
to bed, tired, intoxicated, but unwilling to let it end, until
not one word was left to be said.
Finally, it was just Mark and me heading back to our lodgings,
me directing Mark out of the way of several cars that, although
stationary, seemed to be giving Mark some problems. It had
gotten very cold (at least for me) and the stars were hard
and bright. I was relishing the chill, enjoying the way the
few streetlamps spread their shadows, amused by the small
tufts of white on the dark green fields that signified sheep.
It was that part of the night that you never really want to
end, the part where silence is a companion and, after a night
of literary stimulation, your mind works at a hundred miles
an hour. You're energized by the company of others and you're
full of images and memories that you keep replaying, but even
that is not enough. I seriously thought about returning to
Thorpe Hall and convincing someone to come back down from
their rooms and walk the streets, the cars touched by shadow,
the cobblestones dark with shadow, the fields sighing under
the light gasp of wind, our breath appearing before us. I
wanted desperately to do something. I wanted to write. I wanted
to pour that sense of companionship and solitude onto the
page.
At first, it looked like the garden behind the bed and breakfast
would be a good place to sit and write-Mark said he'd sit
with me awhile, although I could tell he needed sleep-but
the moment we stepped out onto the garden, flood lights came
on and spoiled the mood entirely, making us laugh.
So for hours I sat in bed with a notebook and pen and wrote
fitful sentences that in no way did what I wanted them to
do. The best of the worst of it was the following:
He sometimes had a strange longing for another life-a
life he received inklings of in the small hours of the night,
in a stray sentence of conversation curling around the corner
from him on the subway. A chance meeting on a crowded street.
A life that we never truly find our way to, too enraptured
or entangled in the life we have already chosen or that has
chosen us.
After awhile, I snuck out for an hour or so, prowling up
and down the streets, not looking for anything, but trying
to find a way through to write what I wanted to write. A way
to rapture. It never came, just left an ache that still has
me wanting to write-feverishly.
***
Sunday went even faster than Saturday, as we drove into Whitby,
there to explore the Dracula Experience. Neil won the unofficial
Vanderprize for best reaction to the masked man paid to step
out and scare us all amongst the dusty plastic exhibits: he
simultaneously took a step back and forward, arms held out
ahead of him in a classic martial arts defensive move that
I have to think was subconsciously learned from some film.
We also walked up to the Whitby Abbey, with its strangely
weathered gravestones (one last bit of Storyville exercise).
Perhaps the funniest thing on Sunday was watching Neil's face
light up as he crafted a story around the idea of the wild
hamsters of Scarborough (with additional fabrications from
Keith, Mark, and me), Whitby's major landmarks eventually
incorporated into the myth.
After the abbey, we had lunch in Whitby and talked about
the "war" on terrorism. Iain left us during lunch, headed
for the train station, first of the many disappearances that
day. The rest of us eventually headed for the cars and York
station, there to disperse to our various trains, Neil and
Phil back to Glasgow by car. One last drink in the station
café-holding the clanger up to Tamar's ear like a seashell-and
then into the station. Dave, Mark, Trevor, and I were on the
same train. The rest had left, except for Tamar, Keith, Lawrence,
and Des. I shook hands, exchanged hugs, said, "I'll miss you."
I was distraught. I was still working through these feelings
of needing to write...something...and the thought that I might
never see these people again was just too much. I couldn't
deal with it. As I walked to the train, I looked back, hoping
to hold some semblance of Storyville in my head, in the flesh...and
then they were gone and we were on the train, heading back
to London.
Storyville reduced to four: Mark, Trevor, Dave, and me. Then
just Mark, Trevor, and me. Then just Mark and me, as the journey
had started, leaving Trevor on a rain-soaked train platform
as we made for the last stretch of the journey. The weather
on the way back was horrible-rain lashing the train windows,
skies black as night. As Mark's wife drove us home, I kept
having this daydream that could not at first be dislodged.
In it, I write at a desk by an open window and through the
window I can see Robin's Hood Bay. The wind is chill off the
sea. The waves lash the rocks. It is my room. I am renting
it. And all across the town, other Storyvilleans have rented
other rooms, so that we can always be Storyville in the flesh,
not just an electronic ghost reanimated into flesh every so
often.
These are the kinds of thoughts you have after meeting wonderful
people. They are by nature bittersweet. They take awhile to
fade. If you're lucky, you write them down before they disappear
entirely.
