Tom Bradley talks about the real-life inspiration for his serial killing busboy character Spencer Sproul and gives advice on ways to get kicked out of China and how to tell if you are in Bizarro Land.
Please tell us that Spencer Sproul, your would-be serial killing bus boy, is a fictional character, and not based on someone who actually mops up cheeseburger residue in our neighborhood greasy spoon.
Sorry, but I'm unable to reassure you on that account. When I was a harpist playing my own transcriptions of Bach and Debussy in pretentious restaurants, I got latched onto by a bus boy who coincidentally resembles Spencer Sproul. He said he liked me because I looked like one of his gods, Albert Fish, "only scarier."
This guy had the universe's hugest collection of serial killer memorabilia. He knew everything about every nutty murderer who ever lived, including a few charmers from the nineteenth century who make John Wayne Gacy look like a Girl Scout cookie salesperson. We lost touch when I was forced to flee the Home of the Brave.
In the book I have downgraded this bus boy's place of employment, from a fancy-schmancy dining establishment where the occasional plutocrat tossed him a few bucks, to a cheesy family-style franchise dive. But I'm sure Spencer Sproul will love Lemur, assuming he can find someone to read it to him.
In what ways do you see your work fitting into the bizarro movement?
Bizarro writers love taking expected fictional situations and yanking them inside-out and upside-down. My bus boy arms himself with a pistol and duly reports to the local convenience store with intentions of shooting the clerk: a basic requirement for any psycho killer. When he winds up in the back room watching the clerk weep and spasm in religious ecstasy over the fatness of the customers, you know you are in Bizarro Land.
Spencer Sproul suffers so badly from oral dyslexia that he talks like this--You know the galling people over in Europeanesque lands? They enjoy impressing lots of exquisite filly-minions and things down a goose's neck. It makes his kidney extra fat for, um, like liverwursty-matter. You wipe it on your soda cracker. And it's majorly expensive. It's a required taste.
When such a guy winds up Merchant of the Month, you know the award can only have been bestowed by the Bizarroville Better Business Bureau.
Your life seems almost as colorful as one of your novels: working your way through high school as a rent-a-Frankenstein; wandering in total disorientation for months in the psilocybin-drenched jungles of Oaxaca; passing around pirated mimeographs of the Anarchist's Cookbook to students in Red China and being kicked out of the country; suffering exile in the Japanese imperial university where they used to vivisect our bomber pilots and serve their livers sushi-style at festive banquets. Does writing have a stabilizing effect on your life or a chaotic one?
Writing is the pole around which my external circumstances are knotted like snakes. I could never hold anything together without writing.
