In your story “I Am Pizza Rat,” a man in his early fifties, who is struggling to succeed as a writer in New York, goes home to California to help care for his widowed father after a fall. When you started writing the story, did you have just this premise in mind or did you already know where the story would go?
I took the basic outline of “I Am Pizza Rat” from an unproduced play of mine called “Great Lives,” written in 2016. In the play—which takes its title from the BBC podcast, which is also name-checked in the story—a middle-aged, failed writer moves home to the West Coast from New York City to take care of an ailing father. The father has dementia or Alzheimer’s—it’s not yet clear which; at any rate, it’s his mind that’s failing.
That outline got me started. Almost all of the elements that followed—the Falling Naturally class, “The Mikado,” the Cameroonian nurse Bun, the son’s pot smoking—were discoveries I made in the process of writing the story.
I should say that “I Am Pizza Rat” is an iteration of a kind of story that I wrote a lot when I was younger, but which I haven’t attempted in many years: a tale of sad sacks. Like the characters of Barbara Pym (one of my two favorite novelists), these are people who are in retrenchment from the Great Flow of Life, and now stand to the side and simply make observations about Life’s Major Characters. The narrator in “I Am Pizza Rat” has an “awakening” late in the story, when his writing ambitions are revived, but till then he’s a pot smoker and a piddler-about.
The father and the son have a somewhat difficult history together, and they each seem to have ambivalent feelings about the other. And yet the father asked the son to come—and is even paying him to be there, and paying his rent back in New York. Why? Was he hoping to improve their relationship? Was he trying to help his son without seeming to?
The father-son relationship in the story is probably a case of “who you’re stuck with” or “the only person who will have you.” That said, it’s interesting for me to discover, as a writer, that so much emotion and depth of feeling can be mined from what are essentially the becalmed energies of a story of rapprochement. When I teach, especially playwriting, I don’t always resist peddling that hoariest of clichés: that a plot requires “conflict.” Though I do a soft-shoe around it by using other terms for what is essentially the same thing: “stress,” “heat,” “the color red,” “a heartbeat.” Still, it’s useful to encourage beginning writers to avoid hemming and hawing, and to get—another hoary cliché—“right to the action.” In light of this, it’s an unexpected pleasure to find that, as a writer, I can move the story many years past the “heat” and “the color red” of a tumultuous father-son relationship and still have vital elements to dramatize.
The story has a somewhat grim setup, but is full of humor—a shared humor between son and father (especially when it comes to Gilbert and Sullivan!). They don’t speak a lot, but they communicate. How tough is it to convey the unspoken emotional subcurrents when writing a story like this?
For me, not very tough. Gruff fathers and recalcitrant sons, grumpy old men and damaged young men: these are recurring characters for me. Even when I was a twentysomething, I was writing about grumpy old men. There are bedraggled, embittered fathers in two early plays of mine: one who deserts his family and is discovered, years later, having hanged himself in a flophouse, in “The Chang Fragments”; and an old Filipino who is traced by his abandoned son to a home for aged Jews, in “Swoony Planet.”
A note about “The Mikado”: it’s my favorite Gilbert and Sullivan, as it is for the father in the story. For some time, I’d held on to this idea—an Asian-American father and son who unrepentantly love the racially problematic operetta—as the main plot of a short story, but I lacked a second idea against which it would spark; I worried, also, that the subject was too on the nose. But as one small thread in a story, as it is in “I Am Pizza Rat,” I think it works.
As for the humor, I credit it partly to a Times article about Dutch seniors who are learning the “correct” way to fall, which was the inspiration for the Falling Naturally class in “I Am Pizza Rat.” Because that part of the world ably handles such issues as health care and senior care, the tone of the article was somewhat buoyant, though the subject matter was not. And the seniors profiled in the story were full of good cheer: this was instructive.
This is the second story you’ve published in the magazine that involves someone taking care of a stubborn, ailing older man. (In the other story, “The Monkey Who Speaks,” it was a professional home health aide.) What draws you to this situation?
Not long ago, I worked as the assistant to a retired professor, a woman. I accompanied her to various doctors’ visits, and, though the term “patient advocate” was never used to describe my duties, I believed I was that for her. I asked the doctors questions about her medications, questions that she sometimes forgot to ask. I wrote notes summarizing what they said so that she could refer to them.
This experience moved me more than I thought it would.
Throughout the story, there’s a motif of falling: falling has been the main sign of the father’s failing health; his son takes him to a class on how to fall without hurting himself. Should we read something more metaphorical into that?
On the one hand, per Samuel Beckett: “No symbols where none intended.” But, on the other, who am I to say, really? Knock yourselves out.
Why is New York’s infamous Pizza Rat in this story? How did a rat pulling a slice of pizza down some subway steps become the title figure in this narrative?
I love Pizza Rat. I am Pizza Rat. There were a few years in the not-too-distant past when I was feeding myself entirely with leftovers from mixers at a university where I was an adjunct and a temp. I would go in with Ziploc bags after these events and shove any food that was available into them. Interestingly enough, a lot of these food items were slices of pizza. But that’s not why I am Pizza Rat. Sometimes inhabiting a character helps me to feel the shamelessness necessary to pull off undesirable tasks. So my mantra on those food-hoarding days was: I am Pizza Rat, I am Pizza Rat. I would recite the line on a loop in my head. And, lo and behold—I didn’t care who saw me walk away with bags of food, because would Pizza Rat care? And when it came time for an analogue and an avatar for the narrator in the story—who has the same underemployed, underpaid life that I did then—who should suggest himself but my old friend Pizza Rat? ♦
