Ben Tanzer "Repetition Patterns" virtual tour: fathers, sons and words

Tanzer virtual tour day 8

Ben Tanzer’s virtual tour visits the Examiner today to promote his story cycle, Repitition Patterns, offered online by CCLaP with a pay-what-you-can price tag. It’s Tanzer’s third book in as many years (the novels Lucky Man and Most Likely You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine), a level of production that's even more impressive since Tanzer is the Senior Director of Strategic Communications at Prevent Child Abuse America, a father of two young boys and a doting husband. "My kids and wife get my full attention."

Tanzer didn't come to writing until he was thirty so he feels as if he has a backlog of stories waiting to be told. "They're like planes stacking up on the runway. There's never a strain as to what I should work on next." He gets it done by writing at least 30 minutes a day, every day, sneaking in time at the end of the work day, or late night and early morning when the boys are still asleep. Rough drafts are written longhand on legal pad anywhere from the kitchen table to the L. Then he types it up, editing as he goes, sets it aside for a few days or weeks, then revisits it until “I’m either completely sick of it or there’s a little spark and I’m happy.” There can be 6 to 10 drafts and if he's ever stuck, he goes for a run. “The cheesy symbolic thing with running is you loosen up, get the kinks out. Running is a disentangling process both physically and mentally, so I can relax and the ideas flow.”
Tanzer weathered my technical stupidty to talk dads, Kafka, Dylan, High School Musical 3 and water bongs at a downtown tea den. Since Tanzer is such a dynamo we asked him to write a shortie triggered by our meeting in his daily half-hour writing time.   He was brave enough to share the roughest draft. Partial transcript of our high teatime word association is below, followed by the story draft .
 

The Waterlily Pond, 1897

Underwear: "My kids, and the little one’s obsession with his underwear now that he’s potty trained. He changes underwear 2-3 times a day. It’s a costume for him.”
Zach Ephron—“My eldest loves High School Musical(HSM) so last Saturday we watched High School Musical 3, where they finally graduated and I was bawling on the couch. I was a hot mess.”
Binghamton—“Home town. I love it though I’m not overly nostalgic. I would never go back to high school if I had the choice.  I love the bars, used to be the Pine Lounge but now its Thirsty’s(a setting for some of the stories in Repetition Patterns). I love bars. In Chicago it’s Old Town Ale House. “
You said you’re not nostalgic and you wouldn’t go back to high school but HSM made you cry—“HS musical triggers something as a parent, thinking about your kids growing up and accomplishing things.  And those are unresolved times for me. I don’t remember them as being hard times but there is something unresolved.”
Mickey Rourke- "I’m so happy for him. He represents something of my generation, this guy who’s too self- destructive to reach his potential and I’m taken by that."
Dream- "My mom's a pschyotherapist so I’m really into dreams. The downside of sleeping less is fewer dreams."
Falafel-"Here’s what I’ll tell ya about falafel. My parents were off the grid and would take us to the only middle eastern restaurant in Binghamton and we hated it but now it’s a love affair. So damn them to exposing us to something before it was cool."
B+--"Would’ve driven me crazy in college. I felt like I’d blown it in high school so I wanted to get it right in college."
Dirigible-"Are those like zeppelins?"
Bob Dylan-"That was the soundtrack in my house growing up. When my dad was dying we went and saw Hurricane and when we got home my parents still had the vinyl LP so we played it and listening to it was how I was like with HSM last weekend."
Kafka- "Oh God do I love Kafka-my honors thesis (Ben got undergrad degrees in English Honors and Psychology) was on Kafka’s father stories and my dad, who’s a painter, did the illustrations, which my peers liked more than the thesis. My dad became obsessed with Kafka, they had similar backgrounds, jewish, hard working blue collar artist who wasn’t respected in his time. Before he died, he did a whole series of paintings on Kafka. Kafka was like a doppleganger for my dad, so we talked Kafka for years, one of our first real bonding experiences.”
First Marijuana pariphenalia—“When we were living in San Francisco, my wife and I bought a water bong together and my uncle walked in and said, ‘Could we use that?’”
Your book about your dad-"That’s the one after the one I’m working on; its gonna be the one about the guy with the dying dad.
That was your first endeavor as a writer--"Good memory. I wrote what I thought would be a memoir and got great responses but everyone said they were done with memoirs, there was a glut. My wife still loves it. So I think I’m going to play with the material as fiction."
Dishwasher-"So happy we own one, it's akin to being paid for vacation days at work—who came up with that?  I’ll never get over those inventions. That and having a black president; my kids have no idea what it was like before-I’ll never get over that.”
Sons—“I have two and I rise and fall by them—a little pun for you, ya like that—and they’re really into penises.”

Tanzer's story cycle at CCLap

HERE'S THE STORY:

    When my dad was diagnosed with cancer he assured me he was going to be fine, but I didn’t believe him. It wasn’t that the kind of cancer he had wasn’t curable, it’s just that the cure as described didn’t seem likely to succeed. And so I laid there on the floor in our old apartment, the one before the kids, the one he helped us move into and decided right there that if he was going to die, I needed to see him as much as I could before he was gone.

    We all live with regrets, the women we didn’t sleep with, whether we could have or not, the concerts we skipped, the paths we might have taken, less travelled or not, and they loom there, like a low-grade constant pain, just below the surface, always present, but not so much that we notice it unless prompted to do so. I decided that not seeing him, and not trying to soak-up as much of him as I could before he was gone, was not going to be one of many regrets. At worst, he would live and we would have spent way more time together than usual, and at best, he would be gone, but the what-ifs would be minimized.

    Weeks after the diagnosis we pulled up to my old house and he was on the front porch trimming the trees around the window, the trees he had planted with his own hands, so the neighbors couldn’t look-in at whatever he thought they might want to look in on. He seemed so elegant, despite his ratty jeans, aged Cape Cod sweatshirt and Dylan hair, an upstate NY Monet, tending to his garden, trying to maintain a semblance of control in a world otherwise out of control. He may not have been a Monet or even a Dylan, but he was an artist, a wonderfully complicated artist, quick to lecture, with a suppressed rage that could emerge at the merest slight from a friend or worse, the oppression of the other and the voiceless, but was rarely directed at this children.

    This is not to say there wasn’t conflict. The artist never believes he has enough time, to create, and to think, time is amorphous and always short, closing in at the least opportune moment even when seemingly endless at the start of the day. Children are the worst kind of drag on the artist’s time, children with their endless needs, which is only more the case when that artist’s spouse willingly embraces being the breadwinner, leaving you all the time you want to create and dream and wander as long as the children are fed and off to bed, picked up after practice and off to the various appointments parenting entails. Imagine then if you want to embrace both roles, the conflicts are endless, ever more so if you are already tortured by the endless rejections and the inability to sell as much you want to, place your work where it deserves to hang and receive just a little of the recognition you think you are due, but just never quite seem to get. And yet, this is just one picture of the man, this high school drop-out who painted his way out of his neighborhood when he wasn’t shooting pool and delivering hats. He loved the songs "Rocky Raccoon" and "Everybody Has a Hungry Heart", Scorsesi movies and the stories of Kafka, the most other, other of all, the conflicted Jew as artist who knows little success during his lifetime and dies much too young to achieve the greatness that may very well await him.

    And yet again, I have gotten ahead of myself haven’t I because that day on the porch he was still strong and to him anything seemed possible. He was always a fighter, even if always fighting didn’t always serve him. He was ready to go to any and all hospitals, and try any and all treatments. At times of course there was hope, test results would spike, a new drug trial seemed promising, his energy would re-emerge and it was a celebration. One night we went to see The Hurricane with Denzel Washington and afterwards we went home and listened to the LP Desire. Dylan warbled "Hurricane" - “That’s the story of the hurricane, But it won’t be over till they clear his name, And give him back the time he’s done. Put in a prison cell, but one time he could-a been The champion of the world”- and I thought, selfishly of course, that being sick like this, that’s like a prison too, isn’t it, and my dad better keep swinging, right? And he did, he was always swinging, right up until that last trip to the hospital, and up until that last labored breath that only I was around to hear. At the end, he wasn’t awake anymore, not even hallucinating, but there was a moment, a moment of lucidity before the very end when he looked at me and said, "You’re going to get me out right?"

    I said, "I don’t think so, Pops." And that was that.