[Listen]
[Intro music plays]
[Woman’s Voice]
This is Behind the Cut. The companion show to Not About Lumberjacks.
[Music fades out]
Christopher Gronlund:
Behind the Cut is a behind-the-scenes look at the latest episode of Not About Lumberjacks and likely contains spoilers of the latest episode. You’ve been warned…”
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John Irving doesn’t write a novel until he can work from the ending back to the beginning. Other writers plot out everything before they sit down and begin writing stories. These kind of people are called planners by other writers.
And then there are writers who begin with little more than an image that intrigues them. Haruki Murakami once said, “When I start to write, I don’t have a plan at all. I just wait for the story to come. I don’t choose what kind of story it is or what’s going to happen. I just wait.”
These kinds of people are called pantsers by other writers because they write by the seat of their pants.
I am a pantser. I was going to begin this episode of Behind the Cut talking about how the last handful of Not About Lumberjacks stories were started with no end in mind. But then, when I looked at the Quick List on the site containing all the stories, I realized almost everything I write is an act of discovery.
* * *
In the fall of 1979, one of my best friends introduced me to a little game called Dungeons and Dragons. As fifth graders, we were just realizing there was a subculture that played wargames, and something blurring the lines between that and telling stories intrigued us.
But in those first couple years, the stories were contained within the walls of dungeons. Players might figure out a different way through a challenge, but you were bound by the environment.
Then came an adventure module called The Village of Hommlet. Sure, adventurers eventually found a dungeon, but the first part of the game was wide open. Players could do anything! And I loved running friends through that adventure because not knowing what would happen next fascinated me. From that point on, I loved running games in open places where maybe I had an idea for the evening, or even a larger story arc, but if my friends wanted to do something else entirely, I ran with it and made up adventures in the moment.
It was great training for writing stories.
* * *
When I started writing the latest Not About Lumberjacks story, “Milkboy,” I only knew I would base it on a shitty thing a friend and I did to our best friend in, I think, 1990…maybe ’91. Before common access to the world wide web was a thing, if you had a geeky computer friend like my friend Mark, you might have hung out on a bulletin board system—a computer running a network people called to share messages and files. (Yeah, it was all pretty much on some person’s computer in, probably, some crappy apartment like Tim and Mark’s.)
Mark belonged to a BBS and eventually let his roommate, Tim, create a profile and access things. Me as well.
One evening, Mark and I decided to create a fake online persona named Milkboy and mess with Tim. The earlier parts of “Milkboy” are wholly true. The real ending, though, went something like this:
Tim did want to meet Milkboy in real life. Mark and I knew we had a problem.
One day Tim was so kind to take Mark and me to the Modern Museum in Fort Worth, Texas…and then to dinner at a pizza place on the way home. There, Mark and I told him that we were Milkboy. Tim was rightfully hurt, and Mark and I felt like shit. (To this day, we’re surprised Tim didn’t stick us with the bill and leave us stranded in Fort Worth. But then, you can probably tell, Tim was kind of a better guy than Mark and me.)
It’s a funny story to tell when hanging out and talking about stupid things done in one’s early adulthood, but it’s not worthy of publication. It needed something more.
* * *
I’ve talked about my love for the “What If?” game before. I enjoy looking at even a mundane situation and asking, “What if…” and seeing where it takes me. Often, as a storyteller, it eliminates storylines that aren’t very strong.
Not knowing where I was taking “Milkboy,” one of those “What ifs” was, “What if Tim found out the truth and fucked with us in return? What if Tim not only said he wanted to meet Milkboy, but was going to introduce us to him?” (Yeah, this person we made up.)
That’s an interesting turn, which led to figuring out how to pull it off.
And that’s what I ran with for “Milkboy.”
* * *
I’m proud of all the stories on Not About Lumberjacks, but the stories created for the show—not the stories I’d written before it started—impress me the most.
For a moment, though, “Milkboy” seemed like a story just going through the motions. It was good, but…if put against, say, the last five stories on the site, it would have definitely been a bit of a dip. It didn’t feel right—it needed something more.
* * *
There are probably more than a half-dozen quotes about sculpting attributed to Michelangelo with a gist of, “There’s something wondrful in that block of marble, and it’s my job to find it and make it real.”
I’ve read and watched interviews with other artists about how they know a piece is done, and most of them say something to the effect of, “I know it’s done when it feels right.”
“Milkboy” did not feel right…just as “Calling Out of Time” didn’t feel right until I reached the end. “A Deathly Mistake” as well…really most stories on Not About Lumberjacks.
“Milkboy” needed something more than, “Hey, let’s fuck with Tim. Oh, look—Tim turned the tables on us. Oh, wasn’t that funny?”
But what?
* * *
If you’ve listened to “Milkboy” you know it was released on Tim’s birthday. You know I’m still friends with Tim and Mark. So…I knew two things: the story needed another turn that put it into the realm of ridiculous…and, in the end, it had to be a heartfelt tale of decades-long friendships.
Enter Demon Milkboy…
* * *
Initially, I just thought it would be funny if Milkboy/Lance kept showing up. Turning it into a tale of obsession…either the guy Tim got to play Milkboy sticking with the role like a method actor, or…just being a bit off and obsessed with the three main characters.
Again, it was a good turn, but it still felt small to me. But as I started writing the scenes where Lance started following us, it started getting creepy. And…because, along the way, I realized I was writing a gift to Tim for his birthday (and a gift to Mark, as well), I knew it would end up being heartfelt no matter how far I chose to take it.
My goal was to make Tim and Mark laugh by how ridiculous the story would become (like something out of an old GURPS one-shot role-playing game night), I knew if the story could be a love-letter to our friendships, all the better!
* * *
I will go to my grave laughing every time I think about Demon Milkboy singing his version of the happy birthday song to Tim…particularly, the “Milkboy will never leave you…” line. It works better with the demon voice. [Demon Milkboy Voice] “Milkboy will never leave you…” See? Anyway, there are plenty of laughs once Demon Milkboy drops from the sky in front of Mark and me on the access road to I-35 in Denton, Texas (the town where I met Tim). But Tim and Mark, and many other friends, helped me battle my own demons. We’ve all helped each other through so many rough times over the decades, so…I figured out Demon Milkboy needed to become a symbol of the hard things that shaped us all before we even knew each other…but also a symbol about how the three of us are still alive because there were times we all thought about ending everything…and kept going because we had each other’s support.
* * *
There was still one problem with “Milkboy”—I felt bad for killing Lance.
Something I’ve mentioned to no one until now: Lance is based on a guy Tim and I worked with in our early 20s.
Like I said, Tim and I met in Denton, Texas when we both answered a newspaper job ad as door-to-door salesmen. We were to sell a sort of encyclopedia set-slash-learning system for kids.
Weekends found us traveling around Texas and Oklahoma, trying to sell our wares to people near military bases, middle-class neighborhoods, and they once dropped me on a reservation in Oklahoma. It was a shitty job, but I kept it because I liked Tim…and this guy named Jeff.
To see Jeff, you’d think he could own the world. He was handsome and fit; talented and kind. He had every reason to be a narcissist, but he was more interested in other people than himself. He had a way of making you feel special in his presence.
One night in Oklahoma, I was wandering the edge of my sales territory and saw Jeff across a highway in his. We both sucked at being salesmen, so we decided to hang out. That’s when Jeff confessed to me how much he struggled with life. He told me he hadn’t eaten in days because he was broke. (I at least had a second job on a sprout farm, so I at least had free access to garbanzos, adzuki beans, and other forms of protein. And, God—plenty of greens!)
We scrounged up enough change to get Jeff a hotdog at 7-11. I have no idea if they still sell hotdogs based on all you could fit into the little cardboard hotdog containers, but at the time…if you could cram that thing full of food and close it, you could have it for a flat price.
Jeff packed every space around the hotdog with chili. He could barely close it. I reached into his pocket and dug change to pay for it because the container was about to fall apart in his hands.
We wandered to a school yard, where Jeff planned to sit on a swing and eat his first bit of food in days.
He dropped the hot dog in the dusty dirt below the swingset…and then he broke down in tears.
He plopped down on the swing with his stomach, hovering inches over the exploded chili dog on the ground. He sobbed like he’d just lost a loved one…it was a mournful howl.
A passerby might have thought, “It’s just a chili dog, dude,” but there was soooooo much more behind those tears: feelings of failure, shame, and who knows what else?
When Jeff’s crying slowed, he looked up at me and said, “Would you think any less of me if I ate this thing out of the dirt?”
Of course, I wouldn’t—and I watched someone who looked destined for greatness I could only imagine eat a cheap chili dog off the ground, dirt be damned! Later that night, he told me about how he had a hard time making friends; how he felt like a failure in his family’s eyes; how he had so many aspirations growing up, but how life didn’t turn out the way he always thought it would.
Like I said, we all have our demons…
* * *
I didn’t want “Milkboy” to be a self-indulgent story full of inside jokes that wouldn’t appeal to a wider audience. I wanted it to be relatable to everyone, even though it’s perhaps the most ridiculous story I’ve shared on Not About Lumberjacks. (If I never wrote and shared “Booger,” I’d say “Milkboy” is definitely the weirdest story on the site, but people still tell me about how much the sounds in “Booger” got to them…)
Anyway…I went into “Milkboy” not knowing where it would end up, and, in the process…ended up writing one of my favorite stories ever.
Stepping into the unknown is never easy—whether it’s a story or life itself—but if you do it enough, preferably with the company of a handful of loved ones, sometimes the ending surprises you in the most wonderful of ways…
* * *
Thank you for listening to Not About Lumberjacks and Behind the Cut. Theme music for Behind the Cut is a tune called “Reaper” by Razen. Visit nolumberjacks.com for information about the music, the episodes, and voice talent.
In November, the annual tradition continues as I share the most NOT Not About Lumberjacks story of the year, in honor of the show’s sixth anniversary! What’s the story about, you may be wondering? Well, two deadhead loggers find something remarkable in the Piney Woods of East Texas, putting them at odds with a large timber company.
Until next time: be mighty, and keep your axes sharp!
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