How I Got Here

• After all, Plato did like to go from Top to Bottom in his Republic, if I recall. But Life isn't straight forward at all. Why should a picture of a life-drawn in words, and at least 'one-remove'--from reality--be any less confusing? Certainly a chronology helps us grasp something about the person in question--the 'Historical Context' of their life if nothing else.

  But do you really know any more about an artist's work when you lay his or her personal, and usually dry, personal facts neatly down on the Arrow Of Time, end-to-end, like a game of dominos? Was (my childhood hero!) Hemingway's great anti-war novel The Sun Also Rises just about Ernest at the time he wrote it? Hardly. And who exactly was Ernest Hemingway when he wrote it? A young writer? A soldier? A disgruntled ex-pat with a domineering and 'successful' father? A man fated to, tragically, and many years later, commit suicide, just as his father had? Pretty confusing, right? But Ernest's novel by itself stands as a perfectly clear moment. The exact opposite of confusion. Is that the definition of Art? A moment of sublime clarity in the face of chaos. That can be transferred, partially, anyway--depending on the skill and empathy of the writer/artist--to future readers? I think so.

  The point is that my life, like yours, if you really try and tease out what is you--well, it just seems to keep on moving away; hiding. A real Puck. Always sticking his tongue out at you; never caught. Confusion, ironically, is one of Art's main hiding places. Then suddenly, she races out at us and we get a novel, or a painting, or a movie.

  Did you really write all those novels, Kent?--going on nine, now? Did you really fall in love with that particular beautiful girl from Oklahoma? Did you really almost die in a gunfight on a high school playground in Oakland. Did you once-upon-a-time live in Spain? Did you loose distant family members in the Holocaust? Did you almost join the Spanish Foreign Legion in a small town in Andaluc’a? Were you actually an alter boy? Did you enter a military school in California at the ripe old age of nine? Did you speak Spanish before you spoke English? Did you, and do you still love Paul Gauguin's paintings done in the Marquesas Islands? Did you, at fourteen, ride a train that ran through a jungle in Central America, standing precariously free astride a coupling between the cars? Are you a "real" novelist? Does it all seem like, as the Buddhists claim, a Grand Illusion? Yes, to all of it. But is that what we're looking for? Perhaps. But have I/we caught Puck yet? And will he divulge, finally, to the reader, what they want to know: What is Kent Harrington about, and why should or would we possible care.

  All these are questions that I'm sure my fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Beronio--who tried her best to teach us how to write English well--would ask me now, as I write this. (Seemingly, our best teachers in life are always with us!)

  I do remember the moment that I decided to write my first novel-perfectly. I was riding in my funky Datsun pickup, crossing the Richmond bridge over San Francisco Bay around two o'clock in the afternoon. My cerebral cortex still okay after having taken a lot of LSD when I was younger; luckily (apparently!) undamaged by playing football in high school; or by various raps on the head I received for free at different times just growing up. It wasn't unheard of for players on my football team to drop acid and go out on the field and play well! I fell off a barrel-racing horse at a rodeo once when I was twelve and hit my head pretty hard, and it doesn't seem to have mattered--maybe that sets the bar pretty low to be a writer, let alone an "artist," eh? Or perhaps I'm just naturally thick-skulled, which is a good trait for a writer to possess, both physically and psychologically. I felt very ALIVE that afternoon on the bridge. I remember that, quite clearly. I was ready to grab that lightning bolt aimed from Valhalla at me-- age twenty-four.

  Did it matter that I was on a bridge high above the bay when it happened? I am a Libra an "air sign", after all. Maybe there's something in that: I know I've always felt best living near the ocean. I was born a few blocks from the Pacific in San Francisco, where it all started for me in a very proper middle-class home near a street-car stop. By the time I was born, the house was paid for; no mean feat for my father, who was a traveling salesman in the schmatta business. Is that it, Ms. Beronio? Have I got it--the narrative, Kent Harrington--going, finally, now?

  A year after the lightning bolt hit I'd written a bad first novel. I don't dare read it now. However, I did finish it! I wrote that first-and forever unpublished and unpublishable-novel (there are actually two of them!) in a trailer parked at the side of my girlfriend's house in San Rafael, Marin County, California. I was born a second time there, in that mid-fifties time capsule. The little trailer belonged to my future father-in-law, who I grew to love very much. He understood what it was to be young man and to want to try something different. Love is a component of all my work. It is the unexplainable, predominant force in all of our lives. I love certain places, people, songs, houses, countries, friends, books, restaurants, shotguns, paintings, and writing novels. You cannot love too much. I have learnt, like Zorba the Greek, to embrace life's "whole catastrophe." What else can you do and stay half-way sane?!

  So I suppose all the above comments make me a 'Romantic'. There, I've said it. I've confessed. And yet, I'm known for my down and dirty "genre" novels--with a certain literary flare--about men who are seeking redemption and appear almost totally unlovable. There is Puck's footprint: my most well known character of that type is Vincent Calhoun in Dia De Los Muertos, a 'classic noir' set in Tijuana. Is it also a love story? I think so. Puck, are you there in Tijuana? Finally, we catch a glimpse of Puck drunk in a shit-hole bar. And there, he is again, off this time to the Napa Valley, where I fell from my horse that afternoon, age 12, riding in the local rodeo. I got up and dusted myself off while the crowd clapped, hoping I hadn't bashed my brains out. I pulled myself back up onto the horse and finished the event, everything still blurry.

  My first published work, Dark Ride, I wrote by hand on a clipboard while serving on the battlefield called East Oakland. The soundtrack was intermittent gunfire, of various calibers. You could distinguish them after a while and react (or not) accordingly. Call me the Queequeg of East 14th street. And yet the novel I was writing was set in Napa in a small town--why was that? I now frankly admit that I don't fully understand the thirty-something Kent Harrington who wrote that book. I see him sometimes on the dust jacket looking out at me, someone I once knew . . . maybe. Some gangsters at the time asked me if I wanted to join their gang. It was a compliment, and I've never forgotten it. I was down and out back then, and could have used the money I would have made working for them. Those young men saw something of the soldier in me, I suppose-all those years of military school must have had their effect and shone through to those guys, no matter how much I tried to distance my later life from them-as theirs was a rough business and had no room for love in it. All artists are soldiers of a sort, though, aren't they? Don't we, too, have to 'attack' the objective? Or die trying? Like the Foreign Legionnaires who must never surrender their weapons. The French Legionnaires wear the Kepi Blanc, as does Vince Calhoun in D’a de los Muertos. Should you read Dark Ride, you'll let me know what it says about being down and out in your mid-thirties in the USA. I'm sure there are many today living/feeling it just as I did back then.

  Red Jungle is about my mother's country, Guatemala. It's a very complicated place, and I'm proud of that book. Although when it first came out, it was difficult for me to deal with, as it was about my own family, and in many ways I felt the weight of all that Family Stuff pressing down on me. I don't feel it so much anymore-thank god. I did start Red Jungle there in Guatemala on a perfect morning in my uncle Tony's house. I'll always remember that beginning when I sat down to start it. Red Jungle marks an end to a part of my life. All my books seem that way to me now, each a step 'forward' of some kind.

  Time passes, and I moved on. The Good Physician: Love, Torture, Doctors, Women From Other Countries; and Mexico. I have to stop a moment here to say that I love Mexico and always will. Despite what's happened there in recent years. I remember it the way it was before all this . . . ghastliness and senseless mass murder. My grandfather was a Mexican. I fell in love in Mexico. I've been happy there like perhaps no other place on earth. It has a magical quality that you should experience for yourself if you ever get the chance. Although that might not be possible, these days, in many of the places where I experienced that magic in years past. But I did have those experience back then and they effected my writing and my life. The best memory I have is of water skiing on a lake. A Mexican kid--maybe fifteen--piloting the speed-boat. My young wife looking so pretty watching me from the back of the boat. God, life can be so good without wars, or meanness, or small-minded, vicious people trying to create their idea of "order" and impose it by force on everybody else. My other books are newer and closer to the "me-of-now," so I walk by them like a one-eyed cat in a seafood market, as the song goes--wary that I'll be caught-out with no explanation for myself or what I've done with my life. As a writer I've always felt a little like James Baldwin while he was living in Switzerland: a stranger in a strange land. Very odd, that feeling. I think that, if most people ever experienced it, they might treat each other with a little bit more kindness: there wouldn't be as much "us" and "them" to hang meaningless hates and wars on; or as much "getting a leg up on the other guy" and its concomitant Religion of Greed, which is exactly what today's world runs on, and not very well, as anybody can see.

  Please accept these musings as a 'biography of the mind', and perfectly incomplete. I haven't finished yet. And when I am finally "turfed-out" as the English say, I hope it will have been a very full life. I hope it has a perfect beginning, a magnificent middle, and a very funny end--but not quite yet!

  I hope you enjoy these novels in their new e-editions. Maybe you'll experience a few of those quiet moments where the electronic pages light up a comfortable room and suddenly you're off with me-somewhere South, perhaps. You-the-reader might glance out of a small plane's window onto an as-yet-unvisited landscape of dreams, with men and women very much like parts of me . . . whoever 'me' is. . . .

  
  

  All the Best,

  
  

  Kent Harrington