Salvatore Pane is the author of the novel, Last Call in the City of Bridges, and the chapbook, #KanyeWestSavedFromDrowning. His work has appeared in American Short Fiction, Hobart, The Rumpus, and American Book Review among many other venues. He is an assistant professor of English at the University of Indianapolis and can be reached at www.salvatore-pane.com.
An excerpt from Last Call in the City of Bridgesappears in Issue Forty of The Collagist.
Here, Salvatore Pane answers questions "in the form of excerpts" -- with further excerpts from Last Call in the City of Bridges. Enjoy!
1. What is writing like?
2. What isn’t writing like?
Kanye opens His mouth. He booms.
“The Kanye cometh! Ye have bequeathed your spiritual birthrights. I have naught come hither to save you. I have travelled the stars and have returned to tell you this: Ye have failed. The dearth of your anonymity astonishes. No one knows you. The world is not aware of your names. Thou art one in a crowd of billions. Because of that, thou doth not matter, thou doth not exist.”
Electricity cackles between His open hands. Then a solid yellow light. An explosion that blows everything back for miles, the endless porch decimated, the machines caved in, the rocking chairs shattered. Bodies everywhere. The dome explodes. We are blown into the emptiness of Martian space. Kanye returns to His chariot and rides toward the burning black tentacles of the zombie sun.
3. When you do it, why?
I tried to think about all the bad things, but the good times were so much more vibrant. Laughing through Terminator 2. Going to Pirates games. Dinner parties that ended with us driving through snowstorms singing unembarrassed at the tops of our lungs. Making love to Ivy and feeling led into a world of endless possibility. So many nights in the Squirrel Cage talking and feeling so safe and so loved. All those moments we shared. All of us, even Keith. Didn’t they accumulate? Weren’t they worth something even in the face of Oz’s undeniable doom? Didn’t they add up into something good, an algebraic equation of life and death tipped in favor of hope?
4. When you don’t, why?
If you’ve only casually played video games, then you can’t truly comprehend the inner depths of their joys. You don’t know what it feels like to give yourself up so completely to another you, a better version of yourself. You become the avatar. Super Mario, an Italian plumber tumbled through the looking glass. Link, the boy knight on a magical crusade to rescue Princess Zelda from the terrible Ganon. Samus Aran, the intergalactic bounty hunter tracking down alien eggs on a world ruled by Mother Brain. When you are represented by an avatar, you are no longer Michael Bishop, a skinny boy with a broken arm and sharp ribs that push against your polar bear t-shirt. You are not weak and loathsome and eternally frightened that some threat lurks around every corner existing only to dismember you.
That summer I played and played and played, and over time, this electronic world of bright colors and sprites began to feel safer, realer, better than the actual world I knew, an unpredictable place where a crazed van could send my whole being into a tailspin. In Super Mario Brothers, there was repetition and safety. The enemies always appeared in exactly the same place responding in exactly the same way. I lost myself in those games for hours at a time, refused to leave the safety of my house and instead began my descent into microchips and immateriality. I feared forests and lakes and birds and wind and most of all people.
The digital!
My first true love!