Sam J. Miller Interviews Tom Cardamone about his debut novel The Werewolves of Central Park

Sam J. Miller: So... are you a werewolf or a faun or a centaur? Or some other freaky thing entirely?

Tom Cardamone: Hmmmm. I think I started out as a werewolf and ended up a faun. But I expect that will change. I think one of the more interesting aspects of sexuality is the ability to transform, and why not? As long as you don’t end up looking like Michael Jackson.

Miller: What's your own Ramble participation level?
(a) Addict
(b) Occasional
(c) Observer
(d) Folklorist

Cardamone: E. Accidental. I was on a date, years ago, we went to the Museum of Natural History on a Friday night. At the time I lived in East Harlem, so we decided to cut across the park at night, just for kicks. I’d heard of the Ramble in a round about way, and we just walked right into it. I was surprised by the number of men. And it was so dark, this one guy was like right up on me, shirtless and really pumped up and I really got the vibe that he was straight. There was a feral atmosphere. After we stumbled out, I was like “there’s a story in there.”

Miller: Talk to me about the classical heritage you're mining here. Obviously the mythological grounding is huge, and you have quotes from Ovid and Marcus Aurelius scattered throughout. Why is that? And how does Iggy Pop fit in? I love the quote from "Some Weird Sin," that’s one of my favorite Iggy songs.

Cardamone: Well I love classical literature, and if you think about it, Martial and Catullus are The Cure and Love and Rockets of their day, minus the gothic aspect I guess, but as poets they functioned as pop figures in their time, in their own way, so I liked mixing up quotations, things that Iggy Pop sings about aren’t new, they aren’t limited to just the modern era. Plus its fun to do things that seem incongruous but actually aren’t.

Miller: Are there any modern books or writers you were riffing on? Required reading for anyone who reads WOCP and wants more?

Cardamone: Oh definitely Guy Endore’s The Werewolf Of Paris. It’s a great pulpy novel. It’s not too new and I haven’t read it in years, and didn’t want to re-read it while writing The Werewolves Of Central Park—I didn’t want to be overly influenced. And I was also going for something original, gay writing has so many places to go, we all need to be wary of telling the same story over and over.

Miller: Frankenstein and Dracula and even invading Martians all have classical literary sources, but not the werewolf. They're like zombies--creatures of the cinema. Why is that? Are werewolves hard to write?

Cardamone: That’s actually one of the reasons I wrote this book, or at least gave werewolves such a prominent place in the story. Werewolves are mentioned in both “The Satyricon” and “The Golden Ass,” the only two extant novels of the Roman era. It really surprised me, and I thought it would be worth addressing in a story, the modern cinematic image of the wolfman has obliterated a very real mythological origin.

Miller: Is there a critique going on here? Like any aspects of modern gay life you wanted to celebrate and/or challenge?

Cardamone: Well at first I just wanted to have fun. I think every book is an answer to a question, sometimes a very simple question. So I asked myself “what would sex without consequence be like?” And the answer hit me. “It would be a fantasy.” And so I just started assigning mythological characters to gay stereotypes, twinks became fauns, your all-purpose Chelsea tops became werewolves, but sadly trolls remained trolls.

Mostly I’d written some very serious stuff and wanted to take a break, so pure erotic fantasy seemed like a fun vacation. But serious stuff seeped in. There’s an element of “thinning,” a theme in fantasy novels where magic is on the wane. I think there’s a fear in the gay world that the more we assimilate the more we have to loose rather than gain. I’m not sure I buy into that myself, but it was an interesting theme to play with.

Miller: You said once that all you want on your tombstone is an ISBN number. Now that you've got one, are you making any new life goals?

Cardamone: Yes! To write more books and die with an obelisk of numbers, something that will really screw with visiting alien archeologists eons from now.

Miller: How much did the book change between when you submitted it and when it went to print? Was it a struggle to keep certain elements in, or out? Did the publisher want less sex, more Ovid, vice versa?

Cardamone: Oh, they wanted it longer, and gave me free reign on what to add. At first I was pretty frustrated, like I thought it was long enough! I write short anyway, but the publication date was a ways off, so I put the manuscript away and came back to it with the question: where did I get tired? Like what places in the text did I leave off simply because something more interesting was happening somewhere else? It was an interesting way to come at it, and I ended up adding one crazy sex scene simply because it belonged there, it was the only moment in the original manuscript where two characters met and didn’t fuck, so obviously that wasn’t right!

Miller: While preparing for this interview, I tried reading your manuscript at work. Not such a good idea. Let's just say it left me marooned in my seat. There's a ton of sex in this book—did the constant sex make it slow to write, because you kept having to... um...[INSERT EUPHEMISM FOR MASTURBATION HERE]?

Cardamone: Well I definitely learned to type with one hand.

Miller: Some of the sex scenes get pretty rough... there's a lot more blood here than I'm accustomed to seeing in erotica, although, admittedly, there's a lot more werewolves here than I'm accustomed to seeing in erotica. What's that about?

Cardamone: What are you talking about? Dude, if there’s not blood on the walls then you aren’t doing it right. I didn’t know you were so vanilla, Sam.

 

Read an excerpt from The Werewolves of Centeral Park

Sam J. Miller is a writer and a community organizer. He lives in the Bronx with his partner of six years. His work has appeared in numerous zines, anthologies, and print and online journals—including this article about getting arrested in the Rambles of Central Park on an un-werewolf-related charge:
www.clamormagazine.org/communique/communique55.pdf
Drop him a line at samjmiller79@yahoo.com.