Over Our Heads, my first book, has just been published by Penguin Ireland. Its 15 stories are my favourites of the three or four or five times as many I came up with while learning how to write and deciding what to write about. The oldest was workshopped at the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing in early 2008; the newest, a reworking of the story that got me accepted to that workshop in the first place, I finished on a visit home for Christmas 2013.
In between, I lived peripatetically, in eight apartments in four cities in two countries, some for as little as three months, none for longer than a year. And although I hadn’t thought of the stories while I wrote them either as autobiographical or as linked together in any sophisticated way, someone who’d read the book recently told me that he felt they all were obsessed with places and journeys, which makes me think that maybe they do add up to a narrative at least parallel to my own – they’ve certainly been following me around.
I started out sketching ideas on a room service order pad in the fifth-floor mise-en-place area of a chain hotel at Dublin Airport. On the overnight shift, the fifth floor was a good place to hide, with a narrow window through which you could watch the planes coming in to land and a lost-and-found box full of paperbacks, not all of them terrible.
Aside from delayed flights, hen nighters and honeymooners, the hotel counted among its regulars a teenage gang from west Dublin, who took a suite each Saturday to count money and hoover coke, and a displaced Scottish engineer, who commuted to Dubai twice monthly and attempted to persuade me every time I saw him to stay and help him drink the three bottles of pinot grigio he always finished alone. We also got musicians fresh from stage at the Point or the RDS. I delivered a burger to Brian Wilson once; he sang to me, didn’t tip.
That summer, I spent a fortnight in Seattle at my friend Charlie’s house while he and his wife rode bikes across Europe. To get to Seattle, I took an Amtrak from New York City, a four-day continental crossing which I spent writing in my tiny seat (I couldn’t afford a sleeper) and playing dominoes in the observation car, where I met a Canada-bound soldier AWOL from the second tour of Afghanistan he owed the army and an amateur butcher from Montana who hunted bears and cured their meat for jerky. In Seattle, I wrote by day and went to movies by night, including a 1am showing of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas where everyone wore Hunter Thompson costumes and howled like ghouls at the screen.
I wrote scads of stories – some good, some bad, some woeful – in the fourth-floor walk-up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I sublet the following winter from a chef we found on Craigslist, who was on his way to Goa “to see how they do things there”. The girlfriend was working for a magazine, long hours; it was far too cold to go out, and I was broke having recently been fired from an Irish pub in Midtown for reading Moby-Dick behind the bar in full view of a table of execs from the Discovery Channel while their drinks went unrefreshed. The books on the chef’s shelves included The Great Railway Bazaar and a collection of David Foster Wallace essays. The radiators had these bullet-shaped steam valves; he showed us how to beat them with a stone carving of the Buddha, to stop them whistling.
There is one story I have no memory at all of writing – no distinct, emplaced one anyway. But I do remember recording it, during a year of MA study and PhD application back in Dublin, for the editor of the small magazine that published it (and then promptly folded after a single issue) in a quiet room of the Irish Writers’ Centre on Parnell Square, where I wasn’t totally certain we had permission to be. The editor had, I think, a MacBook Pro equipped with Garageband and a set of massive headphones-with-a-mic-attached like helicopter pilots wear. I never heard the recording, don’t know what became of the editor.
Quite a few stories I started in my windowless basement office at the University of Massachusetts and finished between spates of grading Freshman Composition papers in graduate student housing in North Amherst, or – when my upstairs neighbors’ footsteps got too loud, my downstairs neighbours’ cooking or weed smoke got too pungent – in a green vinyl booth at The Harp, an Irish pub beyond the lumberyard, whose owner, Harpo, taught medieval Irish history at the university and spotted me drinks in honour of my accent. The doors to The Harp’s bathrooms said mna and fir. The Tuesday-night session musicians all were married, none of them happily. On St Patrick’s Day, frat boys wearing Boston Celtics jerseys arrived before noon, ordered pitchers of Black-and-Tans, and tore the place apart.
Some stories I worked on between classes – aside from Comp, I taught Gender, Sexuality, Literature and Culture and, six months after landing, American Experience – on a set of steps by a lake outside the UMass Fine Arts Building. The wall overlooking the lake had an upside-down image of Friedrich Nietzsche stencilled on it, so that the philosopher’s mustachioed reflection glowered back at you right side up from the water. Nearby was a green space where students played Humans-Versus-Zombies with Nerf rifles or a real-life, earthbound version of Quidditch involving a soccer ball lobbed about in random fashion and a broom clamped tightly between the knees.
Weekends, I did a lot of editing on the 400-mile round trip between Northampton and New York City, where my then-fiancee-now-wife was studying. You had to change buses at the Springfield terminal, where people bought and smoked meth in the toilet cubicles and someone, one week, was shot and killed. One time, the journey took seven hours instead of the usual four, the driver having become lost more than once on the unlit routes of rust-belt Connecticut. By the time we made it to Ninth Avenue, the traffic was bumper-to-bumper; the passengers were out of their seats, marching the aisle, threatening violence; and the bus driver, wailing “It’s my first day!” was close to tears.
And there were other places, where other bits and pieces got accomplished: my mother’s house in north Co Dublin; the Tyrone Guthrie Centre at Annaghmakerrig; academic conference hotel rooms in Madison, New Orleans, Chicago, Boston; the WEB DuBois Library at UMass, the Rose Main Reading Room of the Public Library on Forty-Second Street and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Library at NYU; the subway, on my phone’s Notes app; many, many Starbucks; and my apartment on a quiet stretch of Twenty-First Street, whose lease I recently renewed – the first time I’ve ever done so – and where, over the past year or so of publisher’s lead-time, I’ve written maybe 80 per cent of another collection and a good half of a novel.
Very few of these places made it physically into the stories. And the places that did, I wrote largely from memory or with the aid of Google Images aligned with Google Maps. I probably got some wrong. Quite a few I made up. What I learned from writing Over Our Heads is that it's not necessarily the places themselves that are important but the inchoate, internal spaces one inevitably brings to them: the spaces between feeling and language, between idea and execution, between first draft and final revision, between the last keystroke and the next.
Over Our Heads by Andrew Fox is published by Penguin Ireland at €14.99
