Preface to Creation

My father called me in 2018, shortly after the publication of my pseudo-memoir, Body to Job, a book that read as both a sincere account of my career in pornography and a violent piece of auto-fiction.

I believed that my father had seen none of my prior work and had no interest in discovering what I’d written on the subjects of sex, identity, and money. Yet, I’d told him of my new book and that it had received some positive reviews. I suppose I’d wanted him to be proud of me.

He purchased Body to Job as a gesture of support and flipped through, as one might do with a book one owned but found unreadable. Then, he came across a sentence I’d placed somewhere near the end: “I heard about my father’s death on the first day of my new job.”

My father’s voice was quiet and filled with hurt. He asked what I meant by all of it, the story I’d written that blended fiction with reality, that carried facts about my life, my father’s interests and his failings and also many lies.

I tried to explain that I’d meant no affront against him (false) and that I worked in a tradition spawned by artists I admired. He listened while I spoke of my minutiae. When I was done, he laughed, as if to say he understood. “You just like complaining.”

I thought for a moment and decided what he’d said was true. My writing was the sort befit by grievances. I was of my time, a millennial writer. I penned books about my sexual exploits, scorched-earth relationships, lack of money, and dreams of unearned grandeur. Early on, I’d likely blamed my unhappiness on capitalism.

I laughed with my father and made a joke of the whole thing. Yet, I couldn’t help myself from turning back toward my addiction. I wrote myself into another novel and wrote my family too.

My father called again in 2018 to say that he had cancer. I went to visit him and talked by his side while he lay on his deathbed. It seemed cruel and also wonderful that we saved our best conversations for the end.

He passed something on to me in his stories, the way he lived, perhaps his blood: his belief that the profound existed just beyond his grasp.

My father was prone to yearly revelations. “I’ve been looking for this all my life,” he’d say about a new discovery in his work, a spiritual philosophy, a way to relate to men or to his wife. The next year was the same; the past held disappointment; there was hope in something new.

I made fun of him behind his back for repeating his own patterns. Then I became a man entrenched in cycles that felt impossible to flee from.

How could I fault him?

He was searching.

I, his son, was searching too.

In compiling my texts, a collection of a book titled Creation, I came across some great embarrassments. Patterns emerged, at least these two:

1. I wrote mostly about myself as a dumb hooker.

2. My characters were often those closest to me – my family, friends, and foes. At my worst, it seemed a joke to paint them purely awful.

What did I mean to fantasize about my father’s death while he still lived? I couldn’t say. But in his absence, I loved him. He remained a hole inside my chest.

I went on stacking stories for the book, adding essays too, repeating to myself that what I’d written had much to say on art and violence, subjects that seemed dear to me despite my lack of clear position.

Sex work was a theme that wove through all but a few. Because I’d been a pornstar, hustler, and camboy. Sometimes proudly, on a soapbox, claiming I’d earned some kind of freedom. Though, time had clouded every nuance that I’d labeled ‘good’ or else ‘political.’ In retirement, I learned to let my body rage and seize. My memory of porn was like an ocean, vast and punishing; at times, there seemed serenity or an exploration of the deep that few had shared. All in all, I felt myself a piece of driftwood, thrashed about without control.

Yet, I found, at the periphery, some meaningful connection. A young-woman-in-the-making visited a porn set as an extra. She approached and then befriended me. Her name was Luka Fisher.

Luka was an artist, shapeshifter, and force-in-action. She enmeshed herself in the life I had as a writer and musician, a person who existed beyond his cock and hole.

I wrote stories, not for her, but because she asked me to fill a page inside a zine. We made films together, music videos, and art-infused-with-blood.

Luka worked her way into my fiction. Yes, in cruelty. I wrote her as someone dead. But I also imagined how she might become greater than she was, like all things I admired, incomprehensible to me. The story turned into a novella titled The Most Important Part. It would be the first piece inside Creation.

How would anyone understand Luka, my friend, after reading all my garbage? Did it matter? I’d made no attempts with anyone else – friend, lover, family – to preserve their true identity, at least my observations, beyond the caricature I’d put down inside a book.

But I felt a need for change. It didn’t suit me any longer to write my auto-fiction, to go on complaining, to exploit the life around me.

I gleaned that some new writers were practicing sincerity, believing joy and candor to be more difficult, transgressive, than numbness, pain, and violence. I had mostly sex and bloodshed, imagined and for real, and perhaps art as a container to promote my narrow vision of the world. I thought to use Creation to practice something new, and so nestled a few essays that told of my relationship with Luka.

The book became a narrative beyond what I’d intended. In the beginning, there was Luka. At the middle, she turned up again. It made sense to find an ending that she would be a part of. Otherwise, I’d started down a path only to stop beside a tract I found familiar.

Luka suggested I explain that our work was like a puzzle. One piece we’d done together was linked to several more. But I was hesitant to start a book by giving it away. And even if the maze of our entanglement wasn’t obvious, I could make a plain suggestion: “Disregard the rest if it’s too boring or if life has given you few hours to read Creation as a whole.”The essays on Luka were most important. If a reader’s energy was directed to the collection at all, I would ask that they at least take time to learn about my friend.

Lastly, a brief note about the title:

Creation was not meant to be about the state of artists making work. Rather, I was drawn to that beyond what I could fathom.

“Where was thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Tell Me, if you have understanding.” (Job 38:4, The Bible, KJV)

Therein lay some mystery that allowed one thing to be another, when “the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.” (Genesis 1:2, The Bible, KJV)

Creation.

How frightening and wonderful it seemed to allow for transformation.