Lee Houck and Charlie Vazquez two New York City-based writers, satdown in July 2008 to talk about their lives as outsiders, their process of creating compelling, original fiction, and blowjobs in expensive cars.

(This interview originally appeared in Issue 3 of BigFib.)

Lee: How are you today? Are you coming from work?
Charlie:Yes, I’m good. The summertime here is so crazy. There was a homeless guy with pink hair-curlers in a terrycloth bathrobe directing traffic in the middle of Eighth Avenue. I had to stop and watch for a few minutes—he almost caused a few accidents, but by Port Authority you can expect just about anything crazy.

Lee: I love summer in New York. It’s a very public city, everything happens out on the sidewalk. I’ve always wanted to ask you why you moved away from here.
Charlie: I was born and raised here and left in 1988 for Oregon, where I had family at the time. It was very escapist. It was also really necessary for coming to terms with sexuality and ‘what am I going to be when I grow up’—which back then was a rock star. I was there for 17 years and then did six months in Baja and Southern California, which was cool. Then I lost two grandparents really close to each other and that was really hard on my mom, so I came back in 2006. Writing in New York brings out the strongest of my writing, I think. It’s my home and it’s impassioned—for good or bad. I can’t hide here like I did on the west coast—I’ve become comfortable with myself, more honest. And that’s great for writing. When did you get here?

Lee: January 1, 1998. I didn’t go to college.
Charlie: I didn’t go to college, either. Were you writing at the time?

Lee: No. I had always written, but it never occurred to me that a writer was something you could be. It was just something that I did. I was in a theater group that had done some work in Tennessee, where I grew up, and here we were in New York City, trying to do the same kind of theater, with the same kind of easy opportunities. Basically what happened next was that we grew up. We had known each other, some of us, since we were very young. It was really about finding a way to divorce from each other. When the theater stuff started falling apart, I had all this creative energy that needed an outlet. That’s when it started, actually writing for the sake of writing, writing consciously. I was 20, maybe 21.
Charlie: And how old are you now?

Lee: I will turn 30 in September.
Charlie: So, almost ten years.

Lee: I found that writing really spoke to what I wanted to say about the world. Writing is something I can do alone. I don’t need an ensemble.
Charlie: That’s funny, we have very similar histories.

Lee: And then I fell in love with it.
Charlie: I also did a lot of collaborative work on the west coast, in the Portland music scene, starting in 1989, for about ten years and I got really sick of working with people. I was always adept at making other people’s ideas better and no one really wanted to support me on my ideas, so I moved on. Plus, I was cosmically stoned for thirteen years and couldn’t have done it had I tried!
Oregon was a great place to start writing because it’s not a place obsessed with realism, to any degree. People go to the opera stoned, wearing fairy wings. People are freer in Oregon than anywhere else I’ve been to in this country.

Lee: What were you playing?
Charlie: In the electronic bands, electric guitar, keyboards, samplers. In the acoustic projects I played accordion and ethnic percussion. It was really creative, but I wasn’t getting a certain kind of charge from it. So I had a friend who was a real top-notch jeweler and I became his assistant. He taught me how to set gems and I’d help him with wax casting. It was a very alchemical, very mysterious process. And then I sat down in a café—this sounds so corny, but my options were so limited, and I was like “I’m going to write a book.” When I look back on it, it’s very embarrassing (laughs). It’s embarrassing subject matter. But to be able to assemble words on pages and to give that to someone who can read it and tell you what they got out of it—I find it so magical and I think it’s like cave painting.

Lee: In that you’re starting from nothing.
Charlie: Some days nothing happens.

Lee: But I think that’s the process, too.
Charlie: Input, output. I have long periods [of non-writing] before I start writing something new and I get more ideas from non-fiction than I do from fiction. It’s weird.

Lee: I just stop, for however long it takes to get going again. Maybe it’s not the best habit, and it’s why I’m so slow, I guess. And as I discover other things that are interesting to me, I need it less. I need the immediacy of writing less.
Charlie: I read an article about how different writers like different shit around them while they’re writing—like music, candles and so forth.

Lee: I’ve been writing at a computer since the beginning. Since the fifth grade I’ve been typing on a keyboard. I can’t even read my handwriting anymore, because I never use it. I hear about certain writers working longhand, and I can’t even imagine. From the beginning I’ve written and edited all on the screen. You can change things on the computer quickly, you can change the order of the sentences without allowing them any time to settle. Endlessly for three hours. I hear writers complain about that. But I think that’s where my work comes from, the ability to change things really, really quickly. So for me, I have to be at the computer, that’s when things happen. I make a lot of notes, but nothing ever gets assembled until I’m at the computer. And then I always have to have music on.
Charlie: So you do listen to music?

Lee: Yes, constantly. It has to be something that I kind of know. I don’t want to listen to a new record.
Charlie: Does it divide your attention?

Lee: I’m not sure. I need to know what’s going to happen in the music, do you know what I mean? I’m a control freak, I guess.
Charlie: (laughs) Uh-huh.

Lee: I want to be able to sense the moods that are coming up. I don’t want to be surprised.
Charlie:That makes sense. You have to control your environment.

Lee: A friend of mine likes to put his iTunes on shuffle, which is like my nightmare, just having some random song happen. It’s a bit ridiculous. There are worse tortures. But that one is pretty huge for me. Having some song come on that you don’t want to come on. Because once it happens, it’s happened, and it’s in your head, and you’re somewhere else.
Charlie: I think lyrics interfere with the synthesis of language. I can listen to opera, and I love boys’ choirs.

Lee: Operas in other languages?
Charlie: If it’s another language, I can’t scrutinize it. If it’s English or Spanish or French it divides my attention.

Lee: Opera to me never sounds like language. Even an opera in English sounds to me like….
Charlie: French I can almost separate because I don’t know it as well. You know—classical music or nothing. It depends on the project, too. So you can listen to rock music?

Lee: It comes down to ‘I want to listen to music that I like’. I only listen to things that—I’d go hear the band in concert. And my OCD is such that I want to hear the same record five times in a row. I’ll put a record on repeat and listen to it all night long. If these were CDs I was listening to, they’d be broken by now. Speaking of language, your story “In the City of the Dead” takes a lot of personality from the language, the narrative is very much hand-in-hand with the language, both informing each other, how do you arrive at that?
Charlie: As a Latino, there are times when you use English and others times Spanish. This comes through in that story, for sure. I tried to evoke the mood through speech, through word choice, length of sentences, the thoughts of the narrator. In “In the City of the Dead” you have this narrator who’s figuring out the details of his hallucinogenic existence, so there’s an element of caution and mystery at first. But by the end he’s fully aware of his sexual attraction toward the strange black man that has—essentially—brought him back to life. So yes, there was a conscious effort to match the speech with the atmosphere—which is the South Bronx of the 1970s—injecting it with mystery, mysticism and an abrupt sexual realization. Do you write for long stretches?

Lee:(laughs) No, because writing for me is, you know, I sit down, I write a bit, then I decide that I have to vacuum, and then I sit down again, and then something needs adjusting on the bookshelves. I might be writing for five hours, but I’m really only writing for two hours or so. It’s this elaborate, ridiculous ritual about my headspace. Another reason I work that way is, I think, the entire development of my writing style happened while I had a day job. So I was writing while I was answering the phone, filing things, answering emails. Part of my initial process is about setting the groundwork, and also remaining unhinged a bit. Letting your focus be slightly somewhere else. I like to stumble out of bed and immediately start writing. Through the day you’re like “what the fuck was I thinking?” But you can really find some interesting things there, when your brain is sort of—
Charlie: Fresh. Nobody’s on your nerves, you haven’t talked on the phone.

Lee: Right, there’s this sort of subconscious thing happening. But it’s not often that I actually get to do all that. If I do write something down on paper, I find that I write these really baroque, really long sentences, and then when I sit down at the computer, I just want to chop them up into little curt-sounding—
Charlie: There is something about a computer that sort of—

Lee: Well—the laptop screen is only going to show me a certain number of words at a time. For long projects, I try to break out of that, try to see the work as a whole somehow. There’s no secret to it, you know, you just figure out how to do it and then you do it. People tell me ‘I try to write and nothing happens.’ And I say ‘that’s it, you’re doing it (laughs).
Charlie: There’s this urge to want to express something, or to invent something.

Lee: And it’s the medium. Writing is about periods and sentences, and about reading what you’ve written and thinking: that’s the pinnacle of the expression of that idea. It’s not music, it’s not opera. It’s words on paper, and that’s the experience you’re reaching for. I love writing because I’m a control freak. I want to deliver the words to the audience in a very controlled environment. You sitting with the book in your hands. It’s a very direct experience.
Charlie: So your first novel’s finished?

Lee: Yes, it’s called Yield. But it’s not published. Sections of it have been published in a bunch of different anthologies. It’s been through the wringer with many publishers who, for various reasons, aren’t interested in it—the style, the themes, the state of publishing in general—a million other issues. I have this idea for recording it as an audio book, and releasing it via iTunes. I’m going to do that in the fall. I’m mainly interested in that as a project—to see if I can do it and do it well. An anthology of my work, Collection, is out there, you can get it via my website. It’s primarily a selection of my non-fiction. The book is built to fit in your back pocket, with short pieces that you can start and finish on the bus, or train or what have you.
Charlie: And in Yield, in the opening scene, the narrator is giving a blowjob in a BMW?

Lee: How funny that you’d remember that. Simon, my narrator, is remembering some things—about his childhood, and other things—and setting the scene. And the reader discovers that he’s giving a blowjob in an expensive car. Simon is a hustler. So he gets around. (laughs).
Charlie: Oh, I wouldn’t know anything about…getting around. (laughs) Did you ever do that?

Lee: Oh, I’ve given head in expensive cars and broken down wheelbarrows (laughs). But, really? No, no blowjobs in cars. Some handjobs while driving (laughs). I was never driving at the time. For the record.
Charlie: I know I did, I’m trying to remember the exact scenarios—

Lee: Things become blurry…
Charlie: Especially back then, I was drinking a lot. But I really had a lot of fun and I don’t regret any of it. And I got all this material, for all this erotic stuff. Writers are essentially thieves, aren’t we? The more places we explore, the more textures, characters, backdrops, motifs and dramas we can explore in our writing, right?

Lee: Yes, and much of the sex I write about is completely stolen from The Leatherman’s Handbook by Larry Townsend. There were all these ideas in this book that approached S&M from a very organized, very clinical standpoint.
Charlie: There’s a strict code of ethics.

Lee: There are limits, yes. Not just physical limits within sexual behavior, but like, okay, here is a list of boots. These boots are allowed. And you get a sense that other boots are not allowed (both laugh). At some point it becomes a kind of performance of itself. I was interested in that. I couldn’t really invent some of those scenes for Yield, I had to steal them from somewhere. There’s a scene where Simon, the narrator, is pissing in ice cube trays so one of his clients can save it for later. I knew someone who actually did that.
Charlie: That’s the beauty of writing—you take someone from the real world and make them more of what they are. I worked at a sex-toy store [Spartacus Leathers] for six months and had already been exposed to leather. I spent way too much time at the sleazy Portland Eagle and got into a lot of trouble. Working at Spartacus was really amazing because I’d help a gay male couple with tit clamps or whatever and then a lesbian couple would come in and I had to know all about how lesbians have sex, what their needs are, what their allergies are, the materials. There was a great book section, I’d say, “Read this.” Everything from underground BDSM novels to how to inflict cock-and-ball torture. And I read all those books because that’s how we were taught to sell the merchandise.

Lee: Someone asked me whether my boyfriend got turned on by my writing. I asked him.
Charlie: And what did he say?

Lee: He said no. (laughs.)
Charlie: I’ve never asked John [Charlie’s boyfriend - Ed] but John reads everything I write.

Lee: Well I think that sex in my work, it’s meant to draw you in. It’s not supposed to turn you on. I try to use sex as the entrée into the things I really want to talk about, which are intimacy and closeness and the lack of that between people. Here I have this whole novel about a hustler trying to find somebody to care about him. But people have said to me that they found parts of it erotic.
Charlie: Well I think erotica’s changing and I think that queer writers have been writing for so long…

Lee: You know I don’t feel this post-gay identity theft that everybody’s always talking about. We’re queer, we eat each other’s assholes and suck each other off in BMWs. That is never going to change, you know? There’s this idea that we’re past our sexual indentity…the marriage issue…
Charlie: There’s this desire to de-sexualize us. And I like being on the other side and saying “right back at you.” That’s proof to me that this whole gay assimilation thing is—I want to see where this is in ten years. There’s a political-correctness about it that I don’t trust.

Lee: It’s about masking.
Charlie: They’ll de-sexualize us—like on TV, literature.

Lee: It’s frightening.
Charlie: It is frightening. Even with my mom who’s accepting of queers—I can see her vibrations warp when I discuss anything about gay male sex—and I sterilize it for her.

Lee: Even with this gay marriage thing—I mean I’m all for gay marriage but it’s not something I care about. I think that if gay people want to get married they should—but I also really don’t care about it. What I really think should happen is that the government as a whole should stop rewarding partnerships of any kind. They should abolish all benefits for marriage regardless—straight or gay.
Charlie: Amen! Listen to what grouchy old men we sound like—let’s talk about hustling some more.

Lee: (laughs.) My hustler friends have all said that people touch the way they want to be touched. You know, like during sex, you can feel the way the other person is touching you and that’s how they want to be touched.
Charlie: “How to blow Narcissus.” Narcissus and his reflection in 69.