"the quack's back," squawks the headline of a local tabloid this morning. it's all about this quack cosmetic surgeon who allegedly murdered a pinay investment banker two years ago in a botched procedure.
you see, it's one big mess. this account. here's what i know, so far. we start with the victim: a devout catholic pinay immigrant who snagged an impressive job as a financial analyst with barclays a decade or so ago. she had been plagued with this benign but embarrassingly fuzzy black growth on her tongue which led her to commit a fatal mistake of going to the bogus clinic set up by this quack aesthetic surgeon on the lower west side.
then there's the alleged murderer: a pretty party boy who, in a total non sequitur description by the tabloids was described as an hiv positive patient himself. on what should have been a routine laser treatment, the impostor prepped the pinay by injecting her tongue with a seemingly innocuous anesthetic. but then, the pinay just went into a rare but ultimately fatal convulsion.
but our story did not end there. instead of calling for help, the quack surgeon apparently panicked and instead covered up his reported crime. two years after the alleged crime and a tip from a disgruntled ex-lover, the police found what happened to the dead pinay. her petite body was all crammed in a patent leather suitcase and then buried in a concrete slab in the garage of a new jersey home that the alligator loafer loving quack surgeon had surreptitiously sold.
pretty soon, the mountebank shanghaied himself in a posh costa rican resort. but after a year of feisty fight against extradition, the quack has finally been dragged back to the united states.
this weekend, a friend from work, one who can do 16 hour stretches of back breaking work with a song and a whistle at least five times a week, sort of berated me over a cup of stale coffee in his apartment for my insistence that fiction, the sweet reading of it and the more sublime art and mystery of writing it down, has no real productive function in our lives. bluntly put, poor immigrants like ourselves have no business with this bourgeois affectation.
he bought me lunch and i completely agreed with him. but this morning, reading this tabloid account, i couldn't help but chide myself for not standing up to him. oh the flattening power of free lunch.
as i put away the tabloid, i realized how fiction, and the conjuring of it on paper or the computer screen, is one of the most productive, if not therapeutic, things i could ever possibly do. retirement nest egg be damned. only if have the courage to fully commit to it. it is a life at its most free as annie dillard proclaims it to be.
take the tabloid writer's circumstances. despite his obvious imaginative reach, he is forever hemmed in by the constraints of the details of this account. but spare just a morsel of this story to even a middling writer and one doesn't require a binocular to see a yawning chasm of difference in their accounts.
let us just say, this middling writer happens to be one raised in a tropical island in the philippines. and in the island he grew up in, it was common knowledge that to have some black growth in the tongue would mean one is bound to be preternaturally loquacious. could you just imagine how this delusional writer would make good use of this particularly rummy, albeit corny, detail to further order his story? how about the dead pinay and her hoary tongue with their incessant squawking not letting the quack surgeon get a wink's sleep every night while on exile?
this is maybe why, despite growing up chronologically and looking shitty like it, too, i've tenaciously clung to the peter pannish charms of fiction and it's legendary legerdemain of bringing order to an otherwise naturally chaotic world.
quite ironically, let me quote a non-fictionist, one who was solidly discursive, to further my sophomorically argued case. that anti-social thoreau scathingly averred that "the mass of men lead lives of silent desperation." true, oh so true. whether he comes back from the dead and takes me out to lunch or not.
he also said that to create simplicity-which to him should be man's highest aspiration- one should "chip away at the unreal, the useless and the meaningless until, like michelangelo's david, you are left with a life that is breathtakingly beautiful."
to me, fiction is that chisel that helps me order things, that lets me chip away all the junk, all the unnecessary, all what is not meaningful in my otherwise charmless and chaotic life. and if you think this is but just one vaporous quackery, then by all means buy me a lunch.