About The Flesh Statue
They say that someone’s first novel is the most autobiographical. Who they are remains a mystery to me but it doesn’t mean they’re not right. The Flesh Statue is clearly the most autobiographical piece of fiction I’ve written. I took a piece of every part of my life and found a spot for it in this story.
People have asked me if I was my main character Langley Jackson, and all the while I’m thinking that I’m all of my characters, and if I’m not them then they represent something or someone in my life. So Langley is not exactly me, but Grandpa, okay, now we’re really close to real people…sort of.
At some point I lived with my family in Los Angeles somewhere. I was like 10 years old or something. Maybe eleven. I was in elementary school. Madison Elementary in Long Beach. I think we got a break on the rent if we took care of aging Great Grandma Allen. Grandma Allen, the same woman who once gloated that her late husband never used a curse word, years later, she also threw feces at her bedroom walls, crapped in the closet and thought she was a child back in Kansas. I found out about most of her condition long after she left us. I really can’t think if she died while we lived there or not. I often wish I were a different person then. A little older. I would have asked a lot more questions. A simple regret of mine, not being a different person at choice times in my life.
Not that it was my fault but another regret is the death of my Grandpa Leon, which the L in U.L. Harper is associated. The U is for Uriah and L is for Lejan. The Le part being from Leon and the jan part being from his second wife Jan. Hence Lejan. Aronald Uriah Lejan Harper. The first. The one and only.
When I heard Grandpa Leon had a stroke and couldn’t walk anymore I simply never talked to him again, and this was by far a man that shaped me in ways I’m still learning about. At the time, I couldn’t build the courage to speak with someone who I perceived to be so weak who was once so strong. It’s not that he was weak, keep in mind. It’s that he had become weak. It’s like your favorite hitter striking out fifty straight times. You just don’t want to look anymore. I kept telling myself that I’d call him the next day. Now he’s dead so tomorrow will never come. So when someone says there’s always tomorrow you go ahead and tell them that there’s always today and regret is a real thing with formidable and accurate possibilities. So one day my mom calls me right before work and says he died. Somewhere in the next few hours I figured out that I lost part of myself. At the same I time discovered that one day my world would be sad beyond my readiness. So there’s that.
In The Flesh Statue I simply mixed my great grandmother and grandpa Leon together to make one really screwed up person that our hero—Langley Jackson—has to deal with. To make this work I had to use as much of the emotion from then as possible, from both situations, which happened about 16 years apart. See, I never liked Grandma Allen, even when she was healthy. She always seemed distant from me for no reason. Mean. A bitch of sorts. To this day I don’t have a fond memory of her. Whatever. Facts are facts and you have to accept the facts or you become…tired, brittle-boned and small-minded. And the fact is I never really liked her. On the other hand, Grandpa Allen was my childhood. He gave me the nickname Little Bear. My older sister’s name was Nanook. He even nicknamed the pinto, Puddle Jumper, and the other pinto was Bumperding. That was the meat of the story arc, letting Langley discover his grandfather so that he didn’t dislike him.
Although Langley originally lives in Rossmoor, California—and if you don’t know where that is, it doesn’t matter where it is, because although there are good people there the place just sucks at its core—the house he lives in is my old house in Los Angeles. The real reason I did this, whether I knew it or not, was so that whenever I had to think back to Grandpa I would be sincere and not clumsy.
With all that said, from my perspective this story is about grandpa. It’s about small moments of regret. It’s about the starved bull. Well, amongst other things.
--I said that
People have asked me if I was my main character Langley Jackson, and all the while I’m thinking that I’m all of my characters, and if I’m not them then they represent something or someone in my life. So Langley is not exactly me, but Grandpa, okay, now we’re really close to real people…sort of.
At some point I lived with my family in Los Angeles somewhere. I was like 10 years old or something. Maybe eleven. I was in elementary school. Madison Elementary in Long Beach. I think we got a break on the rent if we took care of aging Great Grandma Allen. Grandma Allen, the same woman who once gloated that her late husband never used a curse word, years later, she also threw feces at her bedroom walls, crapped in the closet and thought she was a child back in Kansas. I found out about most of her condition long after she left us. I really can’t think if she died while we lived there or not. I often wish I were a different person then. A little older. I would have asked a lot more questions. A simple regret of mine, not being a different person at choice times in my life.
Not that it was my fault but another regret is the death of my Grandpa Leon, which the L in U.L. Harper is associated. The U is for Uriah and L is for Lejan. The Le part being from Leon and the jan part being from his second wife Jan. Hence Lejan. Aronald Uriah Lejan Harper. The first. The one and only.
When I heard Grandpa Leon had a stroke and couldn’t walk anymore I simply never talked to him again, and this was by far a man that shaped me in ways I’m still learning about. At the time, I couldn’t build the courage to speak with someone who I perceived to be so weak who was once so strong. It’s not that he was weak, keep in mind. It’s that he had become weak. It’s like your favorite hitter striking out fifty straight times. You just don’t want to look anymore. I kept telling myself that I’d call him the next day. Now he’s dead so tomorrow will never come. So when someone says there’s always tomorrow you go ahead and tell them that there’s always today and regret is a real thing with formidable and accurate possibilities. So one day my mom calls me right before work and says he died. Somewhere in the next few hours I figured out that I lost part of myself. At the same I time discovered that one day my world would be sad beyond my readiness. So there’s that.
In The Flesh Statue I simply mixed my great grandmother and grandpa Leon together to make one really screwed up person that our hero—Langley Jackson—has to deal with. To make this work I had to use as much of the emotion from then as possible, from both situations, which happened about 16 years apart. See, I never liked Grandma Allen, even when she was healthy. She always seemed distant from me for no reason. Mean. A bitch of sorts. To this day I don’t have a fond memory of her. Whatever. Facts are facts and you have to accept the facts or you become…tired, brittle-boned and small-minded. And the fact is I never really liked her. On the other hand, Grandpa Allen was my childhood. He gave me the nickname Little Bear. My older sister’s name was Nanook. He even nicknamed the pinto, Puddle Jumper, and the other pinto was Bumperding. That was the meat of the story arc, letting Langley discover his grandfather so that he didn’t dislike him.
Although Langley originally lives in Rossmoor, California—and if you don’t know where that is, it doesn’t matter where it is, because although there are good people there the place just sucks at its core—the house he lives in is my old house in Los Angeles. The real reason I did this, whether I knew it or not, was so that whenever I had to think back to Grandpa I would be sincere and not clumsy.
With all that said, from my perspective this story is about grandpa. It’s about small moments of regret. It’s about the starved bull. Well, amongst other things.
--I said that
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