The Last Dog Boy

August 9

“To Tim, the last dog boy.”

That’s what Lee Smith, author of Oral History and Fair and Tender Ladies (among other things) wrote in my copy of her collection News of the Spirit. She had, just a day or two before, chosen me as the winner of the Truman Capote Literary Trust Prize, based on the strength of two stories submitted (she seemed more taken by “Dog Boys” than the other one). That prize paid for my last year of college. It’s a big award, oddly enough (odd because Appalachian State University, my alma mater, is not a big school). The other schools who award it are (if I’m remembering rightly) Chicago and Iowa State, and I think at those places it’s for graduate students. I’m glad to have won the thing, certainly, but I’m not here to trumpet about that (it is, after all, rather old news), but to talk about the story... about the Dog Boys.

Lee’s choice of inscription is interesting, and I can (and will) make more of it than it probably means. Without going into detail (I’d hate for the guys at Deep Outside to think I was ruining the value of the story they just bought by giving everything away), I will say that the eponymous Boys are definitely villains, and (relative to my usual work) quite unambiguous ones. I wouldn’t consider myself one of them, certainly not the last.

And yet... it wouldn’t be a stretch to identify me with that story’s protagonist, a young boy named Michael. Nor would it be a stretch to say one of the ideas that sparked the story is that old chestnut of Nietzche’s, the one about gazing into the abyss. The one about monsters, and becoming what you hunt, might have something to do with it, too, though not in a direct-ratio kind of way. If I’m the protagonist of “Dog Boys” (and that’s a rather gross oversimplification, even for me), maybe I am the Last of the Dog Boys... or could have been, if I’d been a little weaker or angrier or more afraid.

Not everyone who’s abused grows up to become an abuser... but lots of them do. The story’s about that, a little bit, too.

(To stop any speculation right away: I was never abused as a child, physically or psychologically, by my family. We didn’t have much money, but for a long time I didn’t even know that. My parents were good at juggling, I realize now. I did, however, go to a junior high school notorious for it’s violence (and this was in the days before guns and knives at school were commonplace). It was the kind of place where you held your bladder all day rather than risk going to the unsupervised bathrooms, and where you went the long way around the grounds to avoid certain dangerous corridors and hallways. Even those precautions usually failed. That’s the literal genesis for the story)

I wrote “Dog Boys” in college, in a sort of heat, ignoring my math professor in favor of scribbling away all morning, writing on the bus, eventually skipping my classes entirely to finish. I had just read “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” and “A Good Man is Hard To Find,” and I wanted my story to possess the same sort of compression and complexity that I saw in those two stories. I don’t think I failed totally, though the prose in that first draft was often pretentious and muddy.

Upon completion, I felt as though I’d exorcised something, or at least dealt with it. Whether the story succeeded as a story or not, it had done its job, and cleansed me of some dirty things-- sympathetic magic at its best.

I’m glad the story’s being published at last. It was a turning point for me, a pivotal work, the first story where I lowered some of my masks and really let the lava and bile and acid flow. It’s a dark story, unrelentingly so, and while I seldom write anything so bereft of hope these days, I don’t think the story would have benefited from being toned down. That would only have compromised it.

I performed it, once, at a Book Warehouse reading (and even got to see my name up on their marquee, which was a thrill). After I put down the pages, swam up from that dark pool where I’d been, and remembered the audience, I noticed that some of them were crying. The emotion in my own voice probably got to them, more than the words themselves... or maybe they were just dog lovers... or maybe they saw something of their own pasts in the words I wrote. God, I hope that’s it. I hope they saw something they recognized, saw a path they’d avoided, saw a road no one should ever have to take.

I hope so. Because what else is a writer for, if not to show people things like that, and remind them to be thankful?