Leah Bailly is a Canadian fiction writer currently working on a PhD at USC in Los Angeles. Lately, her fiction has appeared in subTerrain, Pank, Hobart, Diagram and in the anthology of Las Vegas fiction Restless City. "Born Again" is from a collection of linked stories titled The Vegaboy Chronicles.
Her story "Born Again" appears in Issue Forty-One of The Collagist.
Here, Leah Bailly speaks with interviewer Melissa Goodrich about Vegas, rebirth, and the urge to move relentlessly.
1. How did you begin this particular piece from The Vegaboy Chronicles? Where does it fall in the chronology of the other linked stories?
There are five principal characters in these chronicles: Vegaboy, his girlfriend Slots-a-Fun, Bosscat, Captain Rick, and this narrator, a nameless man I hardly knew. I started this piece thinking I would finally write the seedy back-story for Captain Rick, former military pilot and pusher of speed up on Nellis Air Force base. The original title for this story was “Captain Rick is Born Again.” But Captain Rick barely showed up…. Instead I was stuck with my protagonist, a runaway not yet ensnared by the junkie world, an outsider in a band of outsiders, and a scaredy cat. I got to know him, I guess. This story comes early in the collection; it is one of the few in which they’re not striving for a ‘handsome ransom,’ but my narrator’s in deep with this gang after this. It was kind of a cross-the-threshold moment for both of us, my narrator and me. Now I call him Jimmy.
2. Your opening paragraph feels supremely biblical, mysterious, full of pause and premonition – can you speak a little towards placement – why lead this way, departed from the story’s primary affect?
Las Vegas is a profoundly religious place. People are praying all the time, on free cable, in front of the slots, in the thousands of churches all over. I wanted that pentecostal power to sort of seep into the text from those first words— I wanted signs, suspicion, sideways luck. Because Las Vegas gets to invent everything again (Paris, the Pyramids, etc) it reinvents religion too, in the form of casino chapels and Criss Angel shows. Jimmy wants to see stallions and flaming torrents, but really he’s just watching a cop on a horse, or melted foam dropping from the roof of the Monte Carlo. This says a lot about Las Vegas; people want Sin City to be magical, a place where God could deliver a miracle at the blackjack table. But no. Jimmy’s miracle is divined by Vegaboy of the Desert, and it comes in the form of crystal meth.
3. What are these characters’ relationships to denial/autonomy/“Mind Erasers”/inevitability? I’m struck by the stacking of lines like “There is no magic in this. There is nothing pastoral” and “I’m the only one who is stuck in this life…incapable of being born again as someone new.” How much free-will-mobility do you want your characters to possess? Even the speaker, at the end, himself seems surprised (and yet not) to realize it was his car burning in that lot, that he did it. Are these characters – as addicts, as creatures vulnerable to the elements, to love, to themselves – helpless because they’re hapless, or is some Higher Power wielded over them? Which interests you more?
You are so totally right about this: Junkies are vulnerable to the elements, to love, to themselves. Like the grimy trunks at the bottom of the pool, they are moved by “invisible currents pushing them around,” but the ebbs and flows are unromantic and difficult. They want drugs, money. They quest after these things, they yearn for them, they get them, they want more. Jimmy is not so jaded by the junkie life, not yet, and he wants very badly to see a higher power in the drugs, in the colors in the sunset, he wants to ride palominos with Wayne Newton. Jimmy wants to be reborn as someone better, or less hurt, than himself, but he doesn’t understand the rules: don’t get Pastoral, don’t eat the hot dogs. He makes all the right mistakes and lets his desire drive him around, from score to handsome ransom to filthy kitchenette. So yes, he’s hapless and helpless both; he wants a higher power but he’s stuck with free will. Imagine being so fucked up that you wreck your body, abandon your family, burn your car. The Mind Eraser (served at the Stakeout, a violent, delicious drink) is the perfect medicine for that kind of hurting.
4. What do you look forward to reading this New Year?
Some guaranteed winners for me in 2013 will be new novels from Jonathan Dee, Alissa Nutting, Peter Orner and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and new stories from Sam Lipsyte. Also, some of my favorite Canadian authors will have books out this year, Lisa Moore and Lynn Coady. And the art critic super giant Dave Hickey is putting some of his essential essays into anthologies. These people are all mad geniuses.
5. What else have you been working on? How are the other Vegaboy Chronicles coming?
I feel tremendously lucky and happy to be working on a PhD in Los Angeles now, a dream city, after a few years drifting between Las Vegas, West Africa, Scotland and Vancouver. The Vegaboy Chronicles are going well; I recently won an arts grant from Canada to turn the stories into a kind of art-book/graphic novel with my tweaked out photographs from Las Vegas. My other big project is a novel about a runaway celebrity who shows up dead in West Africa; it’s big and sprawling and scary, it traverses six countries, it’s about fame and following. All of my characters move relentlessly, as a means of curing some strange restlessness I see a lot in our generation. Shockingly, I’m doing the opposite here in LA; finally, after many transient years, it will feel very good to stay in one city and work.