Chapter 1 was a festival of noir references; in Chapter 2, the allusions and insider jokes of Chapter 1 fade to the background and character development gets more serious attention.
The writing process for Chapter 2 was quite unlike the rest of the book. I added most of this material in 2010 after re-reading a previous version of the book and deciding that the narrator needed a back story. Much of the writing came out in a torrent in the summer of ‘10.
But there’s still some story-behind-the-story worth mentioning:
Paper mill factories and Checker cab plants. I actually did grow up in a Great Lakes town known for these things. Does that mean I’m Ace? No. It certainly does not. I think of fiction as an attempt to spin gold from straw, and the straw is the bits and pieces of my mind, a jumble of things read, experienced, inherited, and imagined. So, yeah, some stuff will look awful familiar if it’s laid down next to an authorial bio. What does it all mean? It means you should stop wondering about subtext and concentrate on the real text.
diving raft … some distance from the shore. You wouldn’t know it but this is a nod to John Knowles’ excellent novel “A Separate Peace,” which I read in 2005. That book was very influential as I worked on Stand Together in its third or fourth draft. There is a simplicity in the style and structure of that book—not to mention its short length—that influenced the composition of Stand Together. I also was quite taken with the way the story ties into a major historical event without being overwhelmed by it—proof then that what I wanted to do could be done.
“Make sure you don’t forget where you came from.” This is the first of many allusions to “The Great Gatsby.” This one’s pretty arch, I admit. The advice Nick Carraway gets from his father is to suspend judgment and understand others for what they are. In contrast, Ace is urged to consider himself first and understand that others aren’t necessarily as deserving. Ace is troubled by this advice even as he accepts it; his own inner conflict on this point pretty much fuels the entire novel.
Field hands were playing soccer while music rattled out of a small boom box. I may as well point out another autobiographical parallel. The town where I grew up was known as the celery capital of the world for a while. My best friend as a kid was the son of one of the last local celery farmers. That farm was the first place I encountered migrant workers. I have a fine memory of a parched summer afternoon when the workers recruited my friend and I for a pick-up game in a dry grass field nearby. Happily, no irate uncles interrupted our game. But we did take quite a beating—no habla Espanol and thank God as the workers had quite a laugh at our paltry skills.
In the spring of 1990…Located on the fifty-third floor of the World Trade Center. This note is a bit embarrassing. They say that at times “Homer nods,” meaning there are some places in the Iliad or Odyssey where Homer screws up—i.e., he nods off in his attention to detail. I’m no Homer, but I definitely nod here. The towers were hit twice by terrorists. The first time was in 1993, when a car bomb went off below the North Tower. Ace never mentions this event. If I ever do another re-write I’ll fix this by referring to Smoky’s pristine 1955 Cadillac Coup de Ville, a massive sky blue boat of a car with a white hard top and a huge engine that he loved to drive around despite its habit of backfiring—a car that John used to say callously was probably what actually caused all the smoke and fire in the parking lot under the WTC in the winter of 1993. Or something like that.
This was well before the current era, when Wall Street brainiacs brought down the entire economy. I finished Stand Together for the first time in 2006. Then it collected dust and I went back to revise it in 2010. I had to add in this language and revise a few sections about Wall Street in light of the 2008 meltdown. Thus giving me one more reason to publish this novel publicly and be done with it—so I stop making small tweaks to account for historical drift!
Smoky wore red suspenders and horn-rim glasses and liked to smoke cigars after six o’clock (no-smoking signs be damned). You never referred to him as Smoky to his face. You just called him sir. I worked at a brokerage firm in the late 90s. When I began writing this book, my Financial District days were over. A kind of sentimental patina had already spread over my pre-9/11 work experience. The character of Smoky is the device I used to keep my narrative terse and to the point and slightly harsh by working against the grain. In real life I had a boss who wore horn-rims and red suspenders and smoked in his office after hours. He worked us hard—I traded emails with him at 1 in the morning all too often. Smoky works just as well keeping Ace on his toes throughout the narrative.
My sense of self-worth was ripe for plucking [when] I encountered the subway ad that would change my life. This entire novel began with an advertisement on a train. In 2004, a mentorship program ran advertisements on trains searching for mentors in various disciplines. One ad showed a comic book illustrator showing the ropes to a teenager. The entire ad was laid out like a comic book panel. In the last frame, the mentor is thinking ‘This kid’s pretty good!’ while watching the kid sketch. I read alarm in the mentor’s face, though, as if he were afraid this kid would be too good—so good he’d take the mentor’s job. Later that night I started writing about a mentor whose protege steals the novel he’s working on. As a narrative, it was a long way from what this book became—but it was, as they say, a beginning.
JOHN LOGAN MARION. The name of Ace’s protege went through a few iterations but the character always had the first name of John. He became John Marion after I read the story of Johnny Marr, the anti-hero of Cornell Woolrich’s pulp noir classic “Rendezvous in Black.” And the middle name is a not-so-subtle nod to Wolverine—a comic book vigilante who needs no introduction nowadays thanks to a few major motion pictures.
