White Trash Families, Hankie Codes, Toilet, and Happy Endings: A
Conversation Between Martin Pousson and Thomas Woolley
Suspect Thoughts Press authors Martin Pousson (Sugar) and Thomas
Woolley (Toilet) have been friends for many years. After Thomas' recent
visit to New Orleans, they got together to discuss—among other things—the
newly released updated edition of Thomas' cult favorite, Toilet.
Martin Pousson: Hey, sugar. It was great seeing you here
in New Orleans on my home turf. Make that swamp. We both needed a bath, apparently:
you in a mudslide, me in a dirty Cajun martini. So I gotta ask, what do you
make of Louisiana and the Cajuns?
Thomas Woolley: I've always had a fantastic time in Louisiana.
Of course, when the trip is over I'm so stuffed with gumbo, cracklins, and
boudin sausage that I'm constipated for like a month, but it seems well worth
the misery for the pleasure my mother-in-law gets from seeing me eat it. And
with cigarettes just three dollars a pack, it's definitely a destination vacation
for me and the Cajun! Lordy—you know I'm married to one. Those damn blue
Cajun eyes...they could hypnotize me good enough to beat a nun dead.
Pousson: So do you think the Cajuns are anything like
the Portland white trash families you write about in Toilet?
Woolley: The trash runs deeper in Portland, because they're
meaner in Portland. The lovely trash of Louisiana has this family thing going
on. Aunts and uncles and nieces, cousins—they all get one another and
rally good or bad. In Portland it's just a bunch of pissed-off low-grade redneck
survivalists. The heart of Portland is a lonely hunter, doll, and they're hunting
for faggots, believe me. Though, I think your experience is opposite, isn't
it? In your novel, No Place, Louisiana, and your new collection of
poetry, Sugar, you imagine, sketch, and then paint with glorious and
awful color what it's like to have grown up there. I guess hometowns are always
the core of evil for each individual.
Pousson: You said it, baby! I thought we'd start at
the end. Both of our books end with "the end." What the hell is
that about?!
Woolley: Hey, a story is over when I say it's over, plus
it's a device to lock down the darkness of the character. It is the end of
the book, yes, because I've stopped writing and the next page is blank, but
for the character, it's also very near the end of something bigger than a 128-page
book called Toilet.
Pousson: I can't tell you how many times I've quoted
your aphorism about how bad movies are good for the soul. Only you could've
coerced me into seeing Legally Blonde I and II back to
back—or at all. And I'm not sure if my soul's recovered since. Seen
any good bad movies since I left New York?
Woolley: You know, I've been buying seventy-nine cent canned
beans with pennies and nickels, so movies are off my financial schedule. Plus
as psychotic and A.D.D. as I am, sitting for epics, even the worst/best kind—like
the heroic Legally Blonde series you fondly recal—is difficult.
I have to keep moving.
Pousson: It's crazy, in a way. You serve up a rich plate
of coq au vin in your stories, but you go home to a bag of Funyuns and a
can of Fanta—or cheap beans. You feast on fast food but you cook up
a deep mean stew for everyone else. A gumbo, really, of disorienting collisions
and delirious—make that delicious—tremors. There's a homophobic
homo, a naïve and hesitant hustler, a tricked-out trickster, a sadist
in a summer-weight frock. So, baby, I gotta ask, which part do you think
Reese Witherspoon will play?
Woolley: Reese? Producer. Ryan Phillipe, however, as god
awful as he is, may have a part if he plays his cards right. That would be
a nice comeback after that shit Cruel Intentions fiasco, wouldn't
it? Ryan Phillipe crucifying a trick on his bed. Is that NC-17 or what? Hot.
Pousson: While we're talking about movies, I thought
I should tell you that I've decided if Toilet were filmed, it would
have to be directed by Peter Greenaway. Only he could throw the purest, brightest
light on the darkest corners, like that scene in the restroom in The
Cook, The Thief, His Wife, & Her Lover. Everything everywhere else
is so grim and gruesome, but when the entire party walks in to find the toilet,
the light sears the screen. The white burns into your retina until it's permanently
altered. You can never quite see the same way again. That's how I see Toilet.
Were you trying to blind the reader? Did you want to change the way your
reader sees the world?
Woolley: I wanted readers to feel comfortable in the character's
skin. I wanted readers to get the marriage of horror and nostalgia. To get
that, though that skin is mighty tough externally, the internal dialogue and
experience is one of total sadness. And I've found that they do. Get the dichotomy,
I mean. Surprisingly, a broad range of readers are capable of empathy towards
a character so extreme, it's almost incongruous to the tale that he has survived.
But he does. In that way he's heroic. And while most people's end result is
not heroin addiction or prostitution, there's room in there for people to sit
comfortably with their discomfort.
Pousson: Sounds like Greenaway would feel right at home,
then. Okay, if he directs, you've gotta let him use that Franz Ferdinand
song, "The Dark of the Matinée." It reminds me of how in Toilet you
say the really interesting show is not onscreen but in the darkest part of
the theater, where your characters not so passively sit. Have you heard the
song?
Woolley: Yes—but I don't know the words. I can't listen
to lyrics because they get obsessively stuck in my head on auto-replay. I can,
however, hum a lot of melodies.
Pousson: Hum away, sugar! One of my favorite things
about this book is the way in which you pack it with paradoxes. You suture
dichotomies so that they're no longer split. The sadist in the summer frock
lifts his dress to find a whole party going on underneath. Female and male
pronouns and organs are swapped as easily as a pair of logger boots for some
satin pumps. The Charlie Brown kid who craves candy and a pumpkin patch ends
up riding the white horse with a bag of Red Devil. The tone of the book is
sexy and sad all at once. Will Suspect Thoughts Press sell the book with
a double-sided hankie?
Woolley: You talking about those antiquated hankie codes
again? Martin, that's so pre-AIDS.
Pousson: And you're as nasty as ever! When I first read Toilet,
the structure seemed wickedly and fantastically Byzantine, lurching in one
story alone from a mixed-up meeting with a john to a blind-date fantasy to
a troubled first love to letters exchanged with a girlfriend about an irritating
shrink. Gender-blurring and elision, sadomasochism, young love, and AIDS
collide with A Flock of Seagulls and the Go-Gos. But reading it again, the
connections become more electrically apparent. A small mention of Karen Carpenter
in one story triggers a meditation on body dysmorphia and plastic surgery
in the next. Then that line bleeds into a story about a seven-year-old would-be
star with an iron-on T-shirt and a death-wish. And in the first edition,
the whole collection somehow manages to end right at 100 pages even. I've
gotta ask the cook, how'd you do it? How much was conscious and how much
unconscious?
Woolley: The first part of the writing process for me is
to vomit and vomit and vomit and then laugh. I rarely cut my work once it has
fully saturated the page if some part of it makes me worried and some part
of it makes me giggle. That it works is luck.
Pousson: I still have the old roughed-up first-edition
copy I had to sacrifice a gold tooth and a Lee press-on nail for. Sugar,
that thing was too hard to find for too long! Copies were going for ridiculous
prices online as this whole cult grew around the book. It's great that Toilet is
finally re-released. Maybe this will trigger an even bigger cult and you'll
have to release that novel you've been hiding in your closet, The Prince
of Shit? How about it, sugar? After Toilet, will you let us
see some new shit soon?
Woolley: Prince of Shit is going to be novel length,
so I'm taking my time with it. I've been a short-story teller for so long;
it's so much a part of who I am, I have to learn not to shoot my load in the
first five pages. It's excruciating. For the moment, I've put Prince down
and have picked up another in-progress novel-length tale called Portland. The
murder scene in Portland is so sickening and ingenious. Can I say that about
my own work? Student actors will be doing that scene in monologue class for
ages.
Pousson: Will you, in the tradition of hustlers and
backpage massage therapists, give us a happy ending?
Woolley: You know, probably not.
Read an excerpt from Toilet
For more information
on Toilet or Thomas Woolley, visit: suspectthoughtspress.com
Martin Pousson was born and raised in Acadiana, in Louisiana Bayouland.
His acclaimed first novel, No
Place, Louisiana, was a finalist for the John Gardner Award
in Fiction and has been translated into French. He has taught at Columbia
University in New York and at 826 Valencia in San Francisco. He now
teaches at Loyola University and lives in New Orleans. Sugar is
his first book of poetry.
