On 1997, Ronnie Lane died, and as you expect, I went back to listening to his stuff again. Ronnie was the bassist for the Faces and the Small Faces.
Anyway, I was writing a short story at the time and I called it "Ooh La La" -a Ronnie Lane song title.
The story was told in two parts. The first part took place in a Diaspora New York City, I based roughly upon the Harlem of the crack epidemic days. There was a very addictive, very illegal wrecking hell on the unnamed Island. Possession was immediate jail and rehabilitation. Selling it meant death. What it did was make you very self confident and the withdrawal alone could kill you or cause you to kill yourself.
An addict gets out of jail and tries to rebuild his life but is soon using again. He moves in with a prostitute who is also using. Meanwhile, he falls in love with a woman way out of his league but the drug is screwing up his perception of reality. The prostitute gets pregnant but the baby is stillborn because of the drugs. He leaves her for the other woman but the other woman is a no show. he rushes home but the prostitute has left him.
End of part one.
Part two happens maybe 60 years later.
It is at a resort like the Catskills.
a fifteen year old girl is obsessed with a teenage boy. She narrates the story. She pursues the boy and the day before the boys vacation is over, she shares her first kiss with him. "Ooh La la" she says.
The next day the boy leaves and the girl is very upset and she asks this old lonely man who sits alone all day looking at the sea. She asks him what she should do about the situation and he says she should consider that all life is is masses of atoms which share proximity from time time. And when they don't share proximity they are elsewhere.
And that was "Ooh La La".
Nobody liked it, but nobody ever does.
What was on my mind was absence. I'd had a date with a girl and she had stood me up and it inspired the story. What interested me was the difference between atoms being close together and atoms being far apart. I had also been working on the only novel I gave up on. The novel was to have been about catastrophic illness and how it takes you out of the world of the living. Essentially, it puts you elsewhere and in that sense you as a presence, in a presaging to death, are defined by your absence.
In the story the two lead characters are defined by absence.
My friends thought between drug addiction and dead babies and loneliness, "Ooh La La" was completely miserable. But I didn't see that at all. I felt it was only there to expand upon a theory: that life is happenstance matter interlocking in time and space.
For me, I don't see my own fiction in terms of happy or sad but more in terms of am I connecting an idea about what I think on a subject well.?
Ooh la la indeed.