This week’s story, “Civil Disturbance,” is about a young couple who, three days before a mayoral election, is out canvassing on a cold night. They’re going door-to-door on behalf of the main challenger to the incumbent. When did you first think about political canvassing as the subject for a story?
Honestly, I can’t remember, Cressida. I wish I could, but sadly it’s been lost to history. I started writing this story years ago, probably eight years ago, and it was a section in a much longer piece about a father and his young daughter living in an unnamed metropolitan area that was in political disarray. Quite a few of the elements that now appear in this published form were not there when I first began. For one thing, the narrator was an aspiring poet, not a former high-school baseball player who works at a fitness center. And, when the couple was eventually invited inside by one of the residents of the neighborhood, it was an elderly woman who served them tea—not the narrator’s high-school classmate Bryce, who gives them a brochure for his third-party candidate. Perhaps most significant—in the climactic moment of the initial draft, the narrator, in a flash of moral probity, chose not to throw the brick through this woman’s window. This, incidentally, would have been a total cop-out on my end, particularly if I should claim to have any ability to look down the barrel of society without flinching.
But, back to your question, I’m always figuring out ways to portray societal forces on an individual level. I have Molly, the narrator’s girlfriend, utter the classic feminist line “The personal is political,” which could double as my literary mantra. I’m doing my best not to lecture and theorize in my writing. I’m trying to portray and dramatize. Or, to put it another way, I’m trying to figure out how to turn the macro into the micro so that readers might have some sort of window into the psyche of the characters they’re following, and, by extension, society. I grew up in a Marxist-Leninist household, where we saw the world only as a variety of large, amorphous entities, which were then reflected in the language that we used: “the masses,” “the workers,” “the proleteriat,” etc. The only people who got to be individuals in my household, with names and backstories, were our heroes: Trotsky, Castro, Malcolm X. As a little boy, I would campaign with my mother at election time, eliciting support for our socialist candidate which was mostly received by the “workers” with disinterest. “They cannot be won over,” my mother would tell me, which is a line that I have Molly quote almost verbatim. I suppose that my approach in this story is to bridge that divide in my childhood, so that I can depict how the personal and political conflict and intersect. A couple canvassing in the winter, at night, to a mostly hostile or indifferent “populace”—to use Molly’s broad expression for human beings—seemed to offer a ready-made way to do this. Maybe this all comes down to the question of how to write about politics while keeping a reader’s interest.
Molly, who is wielding the clipboard full of names, is the expert of the pair, “socially engaged and crunching numbers.” The narrator is, as you mention, a former high-school jock who now sells memberships at a fitness club. If not for Molly, would he be knocking on doors? Why did you want to make him a salesman?
At one point early in the story, the narrator mentions that, before he met Molly, he was “somewhere between apathetic and clueless” when it came to politics. So, no, he would not be knocking on doors. In fact, he would most likely be the one having his door knocked on. This raises an interesting question for me that might be undergirding many of this story’s themes: how close is the narrator to having been a victim of the violence that he perpetrates later? He describes growing up in a neighborhood that’s similar to the one where they’re canvassing, and he seems to have a deeper understanding of the people who live there than Molly does. She’s from the suburbs, after all. But, even though the narrator has a familiarity with the people he’s engaging with, including his old classmate, Molly’s the one with the poli-sci degree, and, in this relationship, her formal learning trumps his experience. I wanted to create a portrait of a couple that was imbalanced when it came to political engagement, and some of the conflict in the story is how much the narrator has bought into this dichotomy. He knows that he would not be able to see the big picture without her, but he’s also troubled by how she lacks real-world experience. “Ipso jure the surcharge,” he says mockingly, as a way to use Molly’s intelligence against her. When it comes to actually interacting with the people she purports to know what’s best for, her own apathy and cluelessness is evident.
Which brings me to why I made the narrator a salesman: I wanted him to be skilled in the art of persuasion—read: cunning—never mind how naïve he often appears to be. He’s so frustrated that they haven’t been able to give away a single one of their candidate’s brochures that he suddenly, without any forewarning, reveals a talent that Molly does not have. Perhaps this could be considered the narrator’s superpower, something that lies latent in the hero (or antihero?) until it must finally make itself known. While the residents of the neighborhood can, for the most part, see right through Molly’s performance—her “welcoming smile,” the “script in her head” that she reads from—when the narrator takes over, they can’t tell they’re being manipulated. This is what he does for a living, of course—persuades customers to buy the product he’s selling. Later, he does this with Bryce at the fitness center, knowing full well that he’s trying to get Bryce to buy something that he doesn’t need and can’t afford. But suddenly the narrator’s vacillating about what he’s doing, his conscience is plaguing him, and in that moment he has a brief glimpse into the totality of his life.
In earlier drafts, the narrator was a car salesman, and the car that they’re sitting in at the beginning of the story was a perk from his job. One of the things I attempt to do when I write is to consolidate as much as I can—space is at a premium in a short story—and I liked how I was finding multiple layers and connections within a single “prop.” But the car ultimately did not bear as much fruit as having the narrator work in a fitness center, where he would be confronted with his past athleticism, his present masculinity, and the painful end to his aspiration to be a baseball player. “Have you ever considered a career in the fitness industry?” his coach asks him at the end of his senior year. This pretty much sums up his life.
As the story opens, the couple is sitting in their car when a man—“probably a police officer, or maybe paramilitary,” the narrator thinks—asks what they’re doing. The narrator’s afraid, but it turns out his girlfriend has known the officer since she was a child growing up in the suburbs. He tells the man there’s a bag of bricks in the back seat, but they’re soon forgotten when Molly and the officer embrace. Do you want the bag to function like Chekhov’s gun?
This is a great question. It’s the key element on which everything in the story hinges, and it took me a long time to get it to work. Unlike Chekhov’s gun, however, the reader does not know for sure if that’s what’s really in the Walmart bag. And, even if the narrator is telling the officer the truth, then is he also telling the truth that he’s been cleaning up the city? There’s some murkiness in this exchange between the two men, and I didn’t want the reader to be absolutely certain about what they should think. But it all comes down to your phrase “soon forgotten.” I had to bring just enough of the reader’s attention to the Walmart bag without bringing too much attention to it. I needed it to lodge long enough in the reader’s mind so that they would be able to recall it when it is revealed in the last scene. If I lingered any longer, the reader would get suspicious, they would begin speculating, and then they would get ahead of the story. I couldn’t afford for them to see what was coming.
Actually, you and I talked about the exact opposite situation with my last story in the magazine, “Nondisclosure Agreement,” which is about an employee who works in a mail-order-catalogue business while being romantically pursued by his boss. In that instance, I completely gave away the ending in the opening line, “There must have been some sort of defective wiring in the early-warning system of my brain, because by the time the owner put his hand on my thigh I was already in way too deep.” But, before we can see that line dramatized, we first go back in time to discover how the narrator has ended up in this situation. My goal was to have the reader always be one step ahead of the character and to know what was going to happen to him before he knew. That’s where the tension of the story lies—i.e., with the reader waiting for that moment to be realized, the inevitability of that moment—because the story has promised that that’s where it’s going to lead.
But, with “Civil Disturbance,” I wanted to effect surprise, not tension. There are other kinds of tension in this story—who will win the election, will the relationship survive—but the Walmart bag needs to recede for the reader. In an early draft, the narrator told the officer that there were fruits and vegetables in the bag—an outright lie—but this wasn’t enough because, when the bricks finally came out at the end, the reader would be mostly confused by what was suddenly happening. Why are there bricks in a Walmart bag? Where did they come from? Why is he throwing them through the window? I had to make the decision to risk giving away the ending, by allowing the narrator to tell the officer precisely what’s in the bag, and to turn the volume up even more with the phrase “political intimidation,” and then to reintroduce that idea in the following scene when the narrator mentions how in previous elections voter turnout had been reduced slightly by “neighborhoods of burned hedges and broken doors and stolen satellite dishes.” I was hoping to communicate with the reader’s unconscious: I have told you, subliminally, that violence is coming, but you’re not fully aware of it yet. At the end of the play, the gun goes off, just like Chekhov said it needed to.
The city is run-down, and Molly sees any improvements that the mayor—now on his sixth term—may make as cynical interventions to bolster his own power. Do you think she believes her candidate will do better?
Yes, I think she does. If anyone is a cynic in this story, it’s the narrator—the professional salesman—who is aware that he pushes products with dubious results. As for Molly, she’s Machiavellian in her approach to the election, but she wouldn’t necessarily categorize it that way or consider that she’s involved in anything immoral. She’s doing what’s best for the city, of course, and, if the citizens don’t know this yet, they need to be convinced otherwise—or have their windows broken, which comes to the same thing. In her mind, they’ll thank her in the end. This is the political philosophy that I grew up with: we wanted equality and justice, but, before any of that could happen, the working class needed to be made aware of the reality of their capitalist oppression. We were the ones who were going to do the educating, because we knew better than anyone else, which we referred to as “class consciousness.” Sure, eventually there was going to have to be violence in the form of a worker’s revolution, there was no way of getting around that, but then everything would be great and perfect. Whether we admitted it or not, we were looking forward to the violence.
As you’ve mentioned, it turns out that an old high-school classmate of the narrator’s is living in one of the houses they canvass. Does Bryce have genuine faith in his third-party candidate?
He’s as genuine in his beliefs as Molly is in hers. I intended for him to be the moral compass of the story. He’s an alternative to the narrator—or a doppelgänger: they’ve attended the same city school, they’ve lived in the same kind of “modest neighborhood,” they even work near each other. But he’s skinny, he’s unathletic, he’s been the victim of the narrator’s bullying. In early drafts, Bryce supported the incumbent outright, rather than a third-party candidate, but I liked introducing a twist that throws the couple for a loop. Perhaps this is Bryce’s superpower? If things had been different, the narrator might have ended up living like him. He understands that the tragedy of his former classmate’s life is that he had the misfortune of being a straight-A student in a city without many opportunities. (I once worked at a supermarket in Pittsburgh with someone who had been the valedictorian at his high school.) In my first answer, I said that one of the ideas lurking beneath the surface of this story is that the narrator might not be too far from the violence that he perpetrates against others. If he had a bit more awareness—“class consciousness”?—he might notice his kinship with Bryce, and he would choose not to break Bryce’s window. But, before you think that would make for a happy ending, consider that this story does in fact end on an optimistic note: their candidate wins the election.
At the end of the story, the bricks are thrown with the intention of discouraging turnout, since Molly and the narrator’s candidate is still behind in the polls. Do you want us to read the story as any kind of analogy for national politics in the U.S.?
I’m an American and America is my subject, and there will obviously be analogies with this story. Whatever they are, I’ll leave that up to the reader to decide. I mentioned that I began composing this story about eight years ago, before Trump was elected, before January 6th happened, and so it was not inspired by those specific events, per se. I’m cautious about being “a prisoner of the moment,” to use a phrase often heard on sports talk shows. But when I said that the genesis for “Civil Disturbance” has been there since I was a little boy, it means that the politics of my childhood are as germane as ever. Maybe I’m a prisoner of those moments. Now I was able to use some of them for this story. ♦
