Interview: In Conversation with Willy Vlautin
Interview
subTerrain editor Brian Kaufman in conversation with author and musician, Willy Vlautin
Photo: Dan EcclesWilly Vlautin is the author of three novels, The Motel Life, Northline and, most recently, Lean on Pete. He is also the frontman for the alt-country band Richmond Fontaine. Lean on Pete was recently shortlisted for the prestigious IMPAC Dublin literary award. His work appeared in subTerrain #16 & #20. Willy lives in Scappoose, Oregon.
subT: You started off writing short stories and now predominately write novels and songs. Has this just been a natural progression or did you always intend to write novels? Do you still write short fiction?
WV: Ever since I was a kid I have always been a huge fan of the novel, that’s all I read. So I think I’ve thought in terms of them with my own work. Your right, when I first started I wrote short stories. At first I was too intimidated to write longer pieces but it was always my hope to eventually write a novel.
subT: All of your main characters—from the brothers in The Motel Life to Allison Johnson in Northline, to Charley Thompson in Leanon Pete—seem to be running away from their past. A troubled past certainly gives them something to be in opposition to, and also allows the reader to speculate on a history, to try to unravel a past that’s shadowed in some degree of mystery. Is this something you see around you in contemporary America? Did you know people like this when you were growing up? Or is this simply part of a good formula for complex, engaging characters?
WV: Ha, you know I never think of things in terms of character development or plot or formula. I never think of what people might like, I probably should! I began writing because it took a huge edge off of me, it was a way for me to analyze things that scared me or haunted me or hurt me. The hope was that if I looked at them long enough I would be free from them. That’s why you have characters like the Flannigan brothers, Charley Thompson, and Allison Johnson. Those characters are a part of me. I try my best to write with blood, to write with my heart, and write a story that keeps you up at night. My characters are either banged up or flawed in serious ways, most times both, because that’s the way I am. That’s the way I see the world, and those are the sort of people I’m interested in and who make me feel comfortable.
subT: You said somewhere in another interview that “there’s a price to be paid for being weak” … can you elaborate on that?
WV: If you base your decisions on weakness usually you end up doing things you don’t want to do, or often times it means you allow other people to make decisions for you. If you’re scared or unconfident, sometimes you’ll not take opportunities that you’re given, you won’t stand up for yourself. You try to just disappear. That way of thinking always has a cost. Maybe life is all about the fight, and if you don’t fight you shrink away from yourself, you give yourself away. And that usually ends badly.
subT: Your characters do not come from the privileged classes—hell, they don’t even come from the upper middle class. They are the working poor of America, people who haven’t had an easy go of things in the “land of opportunity” and are struggling to get by. Sometimes they’re dealt a lousy hand; other times Fate swings its heavy sceptre; sometimes it’s a few bad decisions and suddenly they find themselves at the end of a bleak street wondering what to do and where to turn next. What was your upbringing like?
WV: I had a very stable childhood, economically. I was raised by my mother. She worked the same job for thirty years. She worked with a lot of guys with rough pasts. We were raised to believe there wasn’t a huge gap between us and the guys she worked with, some of whom were bums living in motels or by the river when they began working at the same place she worked. She raised two kids and kept her head down and grinded it out for thirty years, all out of fear that she would end up losing everything if she didn’t play her cards right. So that way of thinking is in my blood. If you don’t have a family and you get some bad breaks you can easily end up in some pretty dire situations.
subT: Small acts of kindness seem to be important to you… the belief that there are people out there willing to go out of their way to help others with no expectation of personal gain. I’m thinking of Guillermo in “Pete” and the old bartender and his wife in Northline.
WV: Maybe it’s from being in a band for so many years. When you’re in a struggling band you rely on the kindness of strangers for places to stay, food, etc. I can’t even begin to tell you how many times people were nice to my band. The world can be harsh and unrelenting when you’re down, but people can be very kind as well. In my own life there have been a handful of people who have helped me up when I’ve gotten the shit kicked out of me. People that didn’t have to, but who did it out of kindness. So in my novels I’ve always wanted to show that side as well.
subT: To me, the most compelling aspect of your work is the voice. Even though the three novels are very different, the voice is consistent— an unembellished, straight-ahead narrative voice pushes the story forward. And it is not so much the conflict or contradiction in your stories that give them their power, but your characters’ authenticity. The character of Charley in Lean on Pete, where’d he come from?
WV: Thanks for that! I’ve always wanted to write simple stories written with blood. When I started I wanted to write a novel that a guy could read after he got off work. A novel that could keep the attention of a tired working-class guy who’d rather watch TV. A novel that just laid it out clearly but with intensity, with life or death at stake. I still try to do that, ’cause those are the novels that move me the most. Novels that keep me up at night, that make me feel less alone in the world, those are the books that make me want to write.
Charley Thompson is a kid I’ve written about half my life in one form or another. He was in The Motel Life, he was cut from Northline but he was in there as well for a while. I have a handful of songs about him, and a few novellas. I wrote about him and never really thought about why until Lean on Pete.
More than anything that kid was always there because I didn’t like being a kid. When I was sixteen and had access to a car and could make my own money, that was when my life began in many ways. From then on I knew I could make it on my own if I had to, I could get by without relying on anyone. It gave me a great sense of stability and safety. Charley is on the edge of that, he’s almost sixteen, but in the novel he has to rely on his father/ adults, he isn’t yet able to control his own life. The problem is he doesn’t have anyone looking out for him.
He’s one of my favourite characters, he’s like a saint to me, a gift. He is who I want to be, he’s resilient and kind, he can get beat up day after day and still he’ll get up and try. He got me out of bed for a couple years, and Lean on Pete was the most fun to write. And now whenever I’m having a hard time I just think, ‘Charley Thompson wouldn’t be bitching, he’d just do it.’
subT: Who are the writers that have influenced or inspired you?
WV: The guys that I think about the most are William Kennedy and John Steinbeck. Both, I think, write with great kindness, both are dark but they see the other side too. They are great storytellers and they have characters and worlds I want to disappear inside. I think they have written important working-class novels. I have a lot of influences, but those are the guys whose pictures I have hanging in my house.
subT: Lean on Pete recently made the shortlist for the IMPAC Dublin Award, the world’s most valuable annual literary award for a single work of fiction published in English. First, what did it feel like to receive that news? And, second, how do you feel about literary prizes in general?
WV: I mean it’s always nice when something good happens to one of my novels. I work so hard on them and I worry about them. I want them to do all right. Things like the IMPAC shortlist help Lean on Pete and that’s all that matters to me. I think prizes are important because they get people to read the novels that win or are shortlisted. I don’t think about them outside of that, I don’t get into the politics of those things, I just feel lucky as hell that Lean on Pete was given a boost, that Charley Thompson and Pete are given a new little lease on life.
subT: What are you working on, what’s next?
WV: I’m working on a novel about nursing that I almost have done. I also am working on a collection of related stories that I hope to have done in the next couple of years. The band just got done with a long touring cycle so hopefully if I don’t fuck around too much I’ll get some work done. »
Excerpt from
The Motorcycle
by Willy Vlautin
Bill stopped the engine and got off the motorcycle. Leon handed him a can of beer. “I’ll
throw in a helmet too. I won’t need it if I sell the bike,” he said and then got up from the sidewalk and went to the trailer. He came back with two old white helmets.
“And it’s yours?”
“I got it from my dad brand new,” he said. “I never found the title but it’s mine.”
“You’ve kept it all these years?”
“Yeah,” he said.
Bill looked at the ground for a time. “All right,” he said finally. “It’s a deal.” He took five hundred out of his wallet and handed it to Leon. “I’m sorry you have to sell your bike.”
“It’s all right,” Leon said. “But if you get rid it, let me know first, okay?”
“Of course I will,” Bill said.
Leon counted the money twice and put it in his pants pocket. “I got to go inside the house and give them their rent or I’m in deep shit. But after that, would you mind giving me a ride?”
“I don’t mind.”
Leon disappeared into the house. When he came out again he was wearing a worn leather jacket. They each put on a helmet and Leon got on the back and Bill drove them down Virginia Street. The whole time Leon talked about the motorbike. About what to watch out for, about what little tricks there was to it, how the tires were only a year old, and how he had a guy rebuild the carburetor last year, and how to be careful not to lug it too much and to make sure to keep it out of the snow and rain and direct sunlight.
“Will you remember everything I said?” Leon asked. “I’ll try,” Bill replied.
They parked it in back of the El Borracho Mexican restaurant where Leon worked as a dishwasher. They sat at the end of the bar near a cigarette machine and drank draft beer and the bartender, a black man named GG, gave them the reject drinks the waitresses brought back.
“My mom and dad had a bar in Carson City,” Leon told Bill. “It was downtown, called The Diplomat. They used to sit me on the bar in a little crib. I grew up in that place. We had an apartment above it. But then my mom left us… And then, shit, I was sixteen when my dad died. I was in school and when I came home the bar was closed. It didn’t make sense. I went inside and saw him lying on the ground, stiff. I called an ambulance and they came and carted him off. He had a brother who was a Mormon and lived in Spanish Fork, Utah and he came out. Turns out the bar was doing all right. It was easy to sell. My uncle stayed there until we got things sorted. I was to get fifteen thousand dollars out of it. There was a shed in the back and I didn’t have the key for it. When we were cleaning the apartment we busted the lock off the shed and inside was the Honda. Jesus, it was a nice looking bike back then. It had a red bow around it and there was a card wedged between the seat and the gas tank. Inside was the key to it and a card saying, “I know you’ve been wanting this for a long time. Happy birthday, your best pal, Pop.”
Tears welled in Leon’s eyes as he sat at the bar. He picked up his beer and said, “Let’s give a toast to Pop, okay?” Bill nodded and picked up his glass.
“It about killed me when I saw that bike. Pop and me shared a room together and at night he’d ask me questions. ‘If you could be anywhere in the world tonight where would you be?’ I’d always answer with some place like Japan or Iceland or Hawaii. Any place that I could remember from school. And then I’d ask him, ‘If you could be anywhere tonight where would you be?’ He’d always answer the same thing, ‘I’d be right here with you above this bar.’ Then he’d ask, ‘If you could have anything in the world, what would you have?’ I’d always answer the same thing. ‘A Honda motorcycle.’ My dad would be in the bed across the room from me and he would always move around a lot in the bed so I could never be sure if he heard me. But always he’d answer, ‘Why not a Harley Davidson? I’m talking you can have any bike in the world.’ ‘A Honda’s good enough for me,’ I said. ‘Why do you like Honda’s so much?’ he’d ask. I’d always tell him the same thing, ‘’Cause I like the way they look.’ Well, then I’d ask my dad the same thing. ‘If you could have anything in the world, what would you have?’ He’d always wait a long time and then he’d say, ‘I sure would like to get a new beer cooler. One that kept the bottles one degree above freezing. And a new floor in the bathroom, the linoleum is coming up. A new floor would do me all right.’ He never picked anything that wasn’t for the bar. Never picked anything just for himself . . . And then, hell, he was just gone and the bar was too. We loaded up the bike and my things and my uncle drove us to Spanish Forks.”
“You like Utah?” Bill asked.
“I was only there a couple months. He had a bunch of kids, the oldest one was about eight. His wife was all right, it wasn’t a bad place, but it was crowded. Then I got that check for fifteen thousand dollars. My uncle took five of it right away and that sort of got to me and then I had to go to church twice a week. I had to go to classes on how to be a Mormon. I didn’t do good at school. I was never good at it, but at my old school in Carson every one knew that. This school was different, plus they were all bible eaters. I missed Pop. There was eight people living in a two-bedroom house. So one morning I didn’t go to school. I just got on my bike and went down to the bank and took out my money. I went to a store and a bought a backpack and one of those sleeping bags you can make real small and I put all my clothes in the pack and ran off.
“But shit, I didn’t know where to go so I went right back to Carson City and rented out the apartment above The Diplomat and got a job cleaning the bar. The guy who owned it was a great big fat guy named Cornell and every one called him Corny. He liked me all right and I stayed with him until he died. I was almost thirty by then. But I was never good with money. I’d blown through every cent I ever had. Corny’s wife got the bar after he was done in and she shut it down and moved to Laughlin. So I came to Reno. I got a job as a bar back at the Old Reno until they closed, and then I worked at the Fitzgerald until they closed and now I’m just working here.”
“What about the trailer in the back of that house?”
“What about it?”
“Is it yours?”
Leon nodded. “I bought that from a black guy named Carlo. He told me he once rode a motorcycle all the way down to the end of South America. He carried a machete with him. People were scared of him. He was a huge guy too, the size of a football player. He rode a Gold Wing, which is a pretty good Honda bike. His wife used to work at the Fitzgerald but I don’t know where she is now. The trailer sat unused in his driveway for ten years so I got it for nothing. I figured if I bought a trailer then I’d always have a place to live. But man it gets cold as shit in there in the winter. I got a space heater but I’m always scared it’ll catch on fire when I fall asleep so I never hardly use it at all.” »