[posted by Alice]
Luis Garcia’s first published collection, Missing, contains thirteen stories, most of which give us complex and sympathetic descriptions of characters who, let’s say, don’t live straight-edge lives. Missing was brought out in 2017 by Jitney Books, a small publisher focused on the work of “Miami-based authors writing about Miami in Miami.” The cover art, with its commingled faces and almost cubist shifts in perspective, is by Luis Valle, a muralist and fine artist who has long been part of the Miami art scene. Luis Garcia is trained as a fine artist, too, and his descriptive prose tends toward showing the reader rather than telling the reader, to coin a phrase.
In my comments on Ian Seed’s work, I said that if a writer doesn’t challenge or startle me at least once within the first few pages (or present me with something irreal, but more about that later) I tend not to read on. From the beginning, Luis Garcia challenges the reader with his strong language and his insistent reminders that his characters are complex personalities with complex motivations and lives that are not simplistically determined by their drugs of choice. As a result Garcia grabs and holds the reader’s attention in ways that leave us a bit breathless and disheveled at times. And though some of the descriptions of the lives and lifestyles in Missing become almost too intense at times, they are always challenging.
In an interview posted on the Jitney Books site, Garcia says that he took “a forced, state-funded vacation” for eight and a half years, during which time he read Pynchon, Joyce, and Burrows, among others. He also wrote many pages of prose which eventually made up this volume. In his work I can see hints of the grotesque images Pynchon packed into Gravity’s Rainbow, combined with elements from the phantasmagorical Circe episode Joyce included in Ulysses, as well as influences from Burrows’ outrageous hallucinogenic imagery in Naked Lunch, yet Garcia is very much his own man. He creates well-drawn characters who inhabit the Little Havana he describes with empathic clarity or who live the demimonde South Florida lifestyle he skewers so thoroughly.
As coeditors of The Cafe Irreal, G.S. Evans and I have received a fair number of stories that describe drug experiences and the unusual thoughts and/or events that result from these experiences, and their authors present these stories to us as irreal. But they’re not. Yes, we know that drug experiences don’t coincide with what most people perceive to be reality, and the user’s speech and thought patterns and behaviors can be highly unusual. We also know that a wide range of people, from shamans using peyote to Coleridge waking from his opium dream to write “Kubla Khan,” have had their creativity enhanced and their insight deepened and their pain eased by a variety of hallucinogens and narcotics. But descriptions of their experiences don’t undermine reality in the way irreal fiction does because what’s going on in the story takes place in the mind of the person using drugs and not in the world around them. And I’ll show you what I mean by taking a closer look at two of the stories in Missing.
“Master Printer,” is about Manny, a student who is also a patient at a Methadone clinic. Manny needs to find a job and at first a gig as a giant taco advertising a local restaurant seems to be his only option. But when he begins to work as a printer at a photo lab, he starts to think like an artist and begins to curate the found photo art that’s all around him. Garcia shows us the moment at which Manny discovers his artist-self:
And all these happy accidents, cameras going off unintentionally: A dog’s blurred mug pawing the shutter. A kid’s-eye-view of a mom’s spectral figure giving chase.
And I have feelings I’ve never felt.
My heart an egg boiling in water.
Falling almost in love.
A sort of Peeping Tom.
I am.
I forgot to say that Manny is usually high on the job, but one day after he’s been working at the photo lab for a while he drops acid and goes to get his Methadone and then goes to work. And because he’s so high he begins to print photos with great speed and intensity but with some unusual results. At the same time his view of his place in the cosmos deepens and broadens:
Here I am.
Creator of memories in color of color.
The means by which we stop time’s coil, the only means to take short breaks and just…look.
Time’s breather.
Where time’s out of Time.
Proud to be here, part of it, tinkering around, making it all happen…
Though Garcia’s compelling prose keeps us interested in Manny’s artistic awakening, everything strange in this story takes place in Manny’s head and not in the photo lab around him. What then happens to Manny involves humor and pathos in equal measure, and “Master Printer” is a great story. It is, however, more real than irreal.
The title story in Missing also hints at irreal possibilities and again takes its strength from a drug experience. There is so much in “Missing” that grips the reader – starting with the opening description of the ocean at night and a sleeping pod of dolphins:
You can see in silver light seven dorsal fins huddled together abob in the black water. In the water’s divots dance sequins of reflected stars and the occasional filigree of one shooting across the sky. There is no moon, only stars, and the stars’ points are sharp. They hang up there without twinkling and, down here, a negative sort of wind sucks air for complete stillness. The air is clear, and the only sounds are the purl of seawater on the dolphins’ backs and the plosive push and breathy who from their nostrils, their blowholes.
Two friends, Victor and Brian, take a boat out into this starlit night to celebrate Victor’s birthday with fireworks and other pyrotechnics. They talk about dreams, and Victor tells Brian about the way dolphins sleep, with half their brains awake at any point in time, and they experience the ocean at night as a fearsomely beautiful place. And of course some things are so unexpected that we think they can’t be real, and some things are so beautiful they can be almost phantasmagorical. In this story beer and some other mind-altering substances help to ramp up the impression of strangeness and beauty:
Brian gets up and goes to the Igloo’s ice for another DT and uncorks it and takes a nice, long, pull, standing before Victor smoking in the captain’s chair. Brian’s pretty tanked. He sways like the ocean but the ocean is still. Brian’s always taken aback by the Atlantic’s 360° blackness, its desolateness. He swivels his head from shoulder to shoulder, slowly, considering the space of sea, the googol of stars above and below, the how fucking far from everywhere they are.
But what happens next, though unusual and unpredictable, is not impossible and is not irreal. Which isn’t in and of itself a bad thing, but for us the irreal is the holy grail of the reading experience. And though the story is a good one, I’m always searching for the undermining of reality that signals an irreal story. So I’ll take a closer look at two other stories in Missing to show you what I mean.
In the story “Burping Birds,” which was published in Issue #60 of The Café Irreal, we find a mix of the painfully real and the irreal. As the story opens the narrator says he is “reluctant to explain to you why I am back here,” and we begin to read the story as a letter, wondering who it’s intended for. We learn that the narrator reads and re-reads Chapter 33 of a book whose purpose he’s unable to determine and which contains a sentence fragment he wants to use in a story. The narrator presents details of his life piecemeal and after he has described his situation, he says that four months ago he began burping birds, sparrows to be exact, and he asks if his intended audience would believe him if he reported this. We take from this that he is an unreliable narrator of sorts, though there’s nothing impossible about much of what he describes, even when he says that he reads the King James Bible outloud in a mock-Monty-Pythonesque British accent or that some of the inmates keep mice and spiders for pets. But he insists that he used to burp birds which “come out alive and well and apparently unharmed and hop happily onto my finger, ruffle their feathers, look at me quizzically, but then soon fly off, for they are by no means tame.” Then back to a more familiar reality as he describes a cell mate and a prison preacher. He also talks about other possible writing projects that include “cobbling together a story about a reality show about the making of a documentary about a family addicted to watching the reality show about the making of the documentary of themselves” and “a story about a footlocker mouse” to let us know in that he is a writer, albeit one with an unusual imagination.
Later on he says his “passerine eructations” stopped as soon as he got to his current cell and he hasn’t burped since. So were the burped birds “real” or were they hallucinogenic? The narrator says, “Burping birds? You think it is difficult for you to believe?” Of course it is, but he returns to this notion more than once as he tries to communicate his feelings. Even if this story describes an all-too-real scenario some of the time, near the end when the narrator says, “But still you swim from dream to dream in me. In this way you have gained access to my most sordid corners. And there, I am not sure which words, which images are yours and which are mine,” we think we might be reading an irreal love letter, which points to what we don’t know, undermines what we think we know, and works to keep its narrator balanced in an unsettling present moment.
And then there’s the very short piece called “The Boy Who Wanted to Make Things Fall Up,” which is a sort of irreal fantasy. Because he wanted to do what the title indicates, the boy studied both science and the occult and had some unusual successes: “Once he got a maple leaf to crawl across his desk. Another time he got a matchbook to hover inches from his palm.” But the boy grew into a “round-faced, double-chinned, doughy man, a magician who lost control of his powers,” and though he succeeded in doing exactly what he set out to do through application of his magic, he still managed to fail as a magician. This undermines our expectations of the way a magician practices his art, whether we’re thinking of the show biz magic of Harry Houdini or the wizardry of Harry Dresden/Harry Potter. And in the short span of this story we come to empathize with a failure which seems to be personal and not the result of Faustian bargains gone wrong. The ability to signal this kind of complexity in such a small story is a further example of Garcia’s range as a writer.
You can hear Luis Garcia reading from his work at Jolt Radio on the third Tuesday of every month. In the first episode, you can hear Garcia talk about his life, including his time in prison, and then hear him read “Master Printer.” In the second episode, he reads “Beautiful People,” which he calls a bedtime story for adults.
You can buy Missing at Jitney Books.
[In this time of trigger warnings, I should say that this collection contains enough material about drug use and sexual situations that I believe it’s really not for kids — or sensitive adults.]
The Irreal Cafe 