Miracles Ain't What They Used to Be

  What I thought.

  Why does this particular miracle never occur? Maybe because this one can’t be rationalized. Someone dies on the operating table and then lives, they can claim it’s God’s will. But for God to do an all-powerful and perfect miracle, like having a leg grow back … Whoops.

  How many people who have lost an eye have grown that eye back?

  Kind of a short list, huh?

  But here’s the real test. Let’s have one of God’s representatives come to a veterans’ home and see all those maimed and wounded men, and with a wave of their hand call on God for a miracle. Let’s see their burned and mauled faces, their missing hands and arms and legs, reappear in good form and fine working order. Have them all get up refreshed, repaired, and ready to go home.

  That would be a true miracle, and easy for God to perform. Remember, he is all-powerful. God doesn’t need no stinking doctors.

  Better yet, God, end war. You have the power to do it, right?

  No?

  Yeah, I know. Every day is a miracle. Birds sing in trees (when the hunter who loves Jesus isn’t shooting them) and babies are born, and the season’s change—

  Stop it.

  Let’s do a real miracle, not some bullshit substitute, like Santa lives in your heart. Get real.

  Signs in yards often say prayer is our only hope, so I assume those people are praying. Are they praying only for the little things, like, Please let me pass this chemistry test. “Oh, God, if you will make sure Janey isn’t pregnant, I will be in church every Sunday from now on until I die, and I will never, ever have sex again without a rubber.”

  A new car in your driveway, or getting a raise at work, is not a miracle. Stopping global conflict would rate higher. That we could call a miracle.

  Yet, God seems more interested in attending to petty needs while the larger issues of genocide, war, disease, rape, and murder go wanting. At sight of those atrocities, God seems to decamp in the night and slink off to keep a tree from falling on your used Buick.

  But let’s take this a step further.

  So God brings you back from the dead. You’re one of those who have seen the white light. Died on the operating table, and God brought you back.

  Glad you’re here with us, but you should thank the doctors and nurses.

  Let’s pick somebody who has been dead for several days and is starting to stink. The stinky dead, like Lazarus surely was, or was beginning to be. Let’s pick some poor bastard who is found dead from some disaster. People crushed by falling buildings during an earthquake that you allowed, God. People drowned in a hurricane that you allowed, God.

  Bring those dead folks back.

  Have one of your representatives do it, if you feel it’s too vulgar to do yourself.

  Make the dead walk. You don’t need doctors and medical care, God. You deliver miracles.

  Call them out of their deadness and set dinner for them and start the coffee.

  What? Too much for the all-powerful God? He only does that shit in the Bible, doesn’t he? Or so it’s claimed. Yet you’re not one bit suspicious?

  I know, there are birds singing in the trees, and babies are born, and these are God’s miracles …

  Go screw yourself.

  I want these God-given miracles I hear so much about, not some weak-ass substitute. I want some of that witchy supernatural stuff.

  Pull out of the bag that godly magic and put it in the light.

  None of that “I saw Jesus’ face in a tortilla” stuff, or in an assortment of flies on a screen door. Not so long ago it was claimed there was an image of Jesus in a grilled cheese sandwich.

  Come on, God. Is that all you got?

  Wait just a damn minute, here’s something. This would solve all the problems of the world and religion in one fell swoop.

  If God is all-powerful, why doesn’t he make this a perfect world? I’m not talking a good meal, a perfect cup of coffee, and a fantastic bowel movement.

  I mean more than that.

  Make it perfect. Be kind to your creations. Oh yeah. You got better with that Jesus thing, but you know, you got a past, man, and I have a long memory.

  But the perfect thing, that hasn’t occurred to God? He’s too busy giving us tests, checking his books to see who’s been naughty, who’s been nice, who killed whom, and who has gone over to the dark side by being for gay marriage.

  God, if you’re all-powerful and all-loving, and not just a thing in our heads, do it. You could prove your existence in an instant. You would have a revival to end all revivals and lots of people would be falling in line with your existence. Dancing in the streets would occur. Unless you’re against dancing. Opinions on that are mixed.

  Hell, you don’t have to come down here yourself. Send Jesus, or the under-used Holy Ghost. (What the hell is he up to? Is he mostly the janitor in Heaven?)

  To give it all weight, I suggest you or your son come down. “Here I am,” says Jesus. “Everybody be happy. Everybody be perfect. Pull up your sagging pants and turn off that rap music. There you go. Now I’m back to the house. The climate change problem has really warmed this place up.”

  We’re talking God-given perfection, which this all-powerful being is supposed to be able to do, other than give us all a lifetime of moral exams, putting obstacles in our paths, having many born without obstacles, some handsome, some born maimed or mentally deficient, some with good parents, some with terrible ones. In other words, God doesn’t give us a fair playing field, but expects the same thing from everyone, no matter how hard and disadvantaged some of his creations might be.

  God, being jealous and irritable, condemns the best non-believers to Hell alongside murderers, rapist, mimes, and Barry Manilow fans. To go to Heaven, you have to believe in God, not merely be a good person. You have to be willing to beg and plead for his acceptance, while a horrid child-murderer in prison can talk to a preacher, admit his sins, and be given life eternal.

  Of course, we nonbelievers neither believe in celestial punishment or reward. It seems obvious that the all-knowing, all-loving God is little more than a celestial bully.

  Look, I know there are plenty of Christians who practice the better aspects of Christianity. They know how, like a crow, to pick the corn kernels from the piles of cow shit. How to choose the better elements of their religion from the sludge pile of narrowness, hate-mongering, and shit-smoldering mounds of stupidity contained within.

  I can go along with these folks, silly as I think their religion may be, if for no other reason than that they have a positive design. I respect their right to believe in something I don’t, but I don’t respect the religion. I don’t respect any religion. I can respect the person, however, if they try to live by a good ethical code and actually practice kindness and forgiveness.

  Not being a Christian, I don’t do those things for a bunk in Heaven, but I do them because I think they are right and positive. I may fail, but I sincerely try. Not because I live in fear of offending an invisible, nonexistent being, but because that’s how the best of humans should act. Not so you can hang out in Heaven with the Christian God, or have the Islamic male reward of seventy-two virgins (which frankly I don’t remember actually being in the Quran, but maybe it is). But all belief in God or gods comes from the same source: self-delusion. And I will add this—virgins are not as much fun as you may think.

  Sure, someone has to put that quarter under the pillow when you lose a tooth, or buy presents come Christmastime, or leave brightly colored eggs in the yard amidst chigger-infested grass. Someone has to teach you how to be a good person. But it isn’t always someone of the religious ilk.

  Desire for a life beyond this one is strong in our mortal flesh, but in the end, all of us are a blink in the “eyes” of the Universe, and all of us will be forgotten. It would be nice if the best of us received a reward, maybe a nice collection of soaps and shampoos, and the worst of us were punished. But the Universe has little interest in what happens to us.

  Wh
at it boils down to is this:

  There is no God.

  I can live with that easily.

  My rant is done.

  “THAT’S HOW YOU

  CLEAN A SQUIRREL”

  JOE R. LANSDALE INTERVIEWED BY TERRY BISSON

  Where does East Texas end? (And don’t say the Louisiana line.)

  It doesn’t stretch as far as Dallas, heading west, since that is what used to be called The Plains, though today The Concrete is more accurate. Simply put, if you go west and the trees disappear and the dirt gets black, you are not in East Texas anymore. Going north, it dies out before the Red River by some distance. Go southeast to Houston and you have gone too far. Houston is in the Coastal region, which though similar is still different.

  East Texas has lots of shade, running water, and a meth problem.

  Everyone (Hollywood included) agrees you have a gift for dialogue, but I think it goes deeper than that. There’s a vein of indirection and understatement in all your prose that I identify as a southern thing. Just saying.

  I think that’s true, but East Texans can be very direct. It’s said that we drawl, but if we do, we drawl fast. We speak faster than most southerners, and our culture is more southern than southwestern; and though those two overlap, we are more farmer types than rancher types.

  I think one reason I do pretty well with dialogue is that we are storytellers here, or at least have been in the past, and that’s a southern tradition. If the story has to do with somebody dead and their body tossed down into an old water well, or something dark in the woods, then all the better.

  I always loved to listen to the older folks when I was growing up, how they talked. It impacted my writing by quite a bit. My parents were older when I was born, and they had gone through the Great Depression and therefore had a different viewpoint than the parents of many of the other kids I grew up with. My personal culture overlapped that of earlier periods, the Great Depression, and that of the fifties and sixties; in our family I was probably the only counterculture kid, so I have that to draw on as well.

  My father had a lot of great sayings from having been born in 1909 and having heard as he grew up sayings from the 1800s. His relatives, many of them, had fought in the Civil War. My grandmother on my mother’s side was close to a hundred years old when she died. Came to Texas in a covered wagon. Saw Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show when she was a child and was forever enraptured by it. My father had boxed and wrestled a little for money, riding the rails to fairs to fight. He couldn’t read or write, though at the end of his life he got so he could read a little—newspapers, comics, simple paperbacks. But he could never actually be called literate.

  My mother was a great reader when I was growing up and encouraged me to read. So did my dad. He knew how hard it had been for him not being able to read or write.

  I often hear that story, of how southerners are all storytellers. Sometimes I think it’s just one of their stories. But let’s move on. Horror and humor seem closely linked in your work. Does one drive the other or are they just fellow travelers?

  I think they are fellow travelers, though it can work the other way as well. A lot of the old frontier stories my dad told were both horrible and funny. People of his era could slap their knees and laugh over some pretty horrible stuff, but they were also kind and helpful people. I think they had to laugh at the horrors as a way of survival. It was rough-and-tumble humor, the sort of thing people today would be aghast at. Rightfully so, I guess, but when Dad told those stories they tickled the shit out of me.

  Mark Twain said there’s no humor in Heaven. Meaning, nearly everything we think is funny is based on the misfortune of others, as well as ourselves. Bad things can be funny, mostly in retrospect. As a character in my novel The Thicket said, “Everything in life is humorous, except your own death. But others will laugh.”

  You often mention Edgar Rice Burroughs as a “sentimental favorite” and an inspiration. Yet your writing hews much closer to noir and modernist realism. Who were your first actual models, that you imitated, knowingly or not?

  Burroughs inflamed my desire to write. He was the writer I originally imitated, and I think his headlong pace has stayed with me. I was already writing before I read Burroughs, mostly inspired by comics, The Jungle Book, The Iliad, and The Odyssey, Edith Hamilton’s book of mythology. We also had the Bible and Shakespeare, and my mother gathered up books here and there, so I was always reading. But Burroughs set me on fire.

  Later on my influences were legion. Lots of science fiction inspired me, writers like Philip José Farmer, Cyril Kornbluth, Fred Brown, Henry Kuttner, and a little later Ray Bradbury. And then Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Steinbeck, plus a little bit of Faulkner. Flannery O’Connor was major. I really didn’t care for the Beats so much, but I learned a lot from reading Jack Kerouac, especially On the Road, which I liked. William S. Burroughs (the other Burroughs) put me to sleep, and I had to work to hard to get anything out of his cut-up style, which seemed more gimmick than story. I think at heart I’m a storyteller, and I want my style to accomplish that, which doesn’t mean I can’t be experimental.

  I was also heavily influenced by Chandler, Hammett, James M. Cain, tons of noir writers, and many who wrote for Gold Medal. Those Gold Medal novels were mostly short and swift, and you could easily read one in a few hours. On weekends I used to devour two or three after morning martial arts practice, which is something I’ve also done for a long time. Over fifty years.

  If you were to pick one book or story that “launched” you, what would it be?

  For me it was a one-two-three punch. In 1986 The Magic Wagon come out, and it was reviewed well and treated like a literary novel, which gave me those creds (for whatever they are worth). Dead in the West, a pure pulp novel, came out the same year and started a sort of underground or small-press run that continues along with my mainstream publishing run to this day. “Tight Little Stitches in a Dead Man’s Back,” though it was not my first short story, got me a lot of attention and a nomination for the World Fantasy Award, which it didn’t win (though I see places where it says it did). I’ve been nominated for World Fantasy many times, but no wins, so I’m correcting that confusion here. That story gave me my short story credentials. I also sold a nonfiction book that year that didn’t come out until years later. Anyway, I made some money that year, and I started a three-pronged career in prose that’s continued until this day.

  I was introduced to your work by The Drive-In. Is there a drive-in in Nacogdoches? Did you ever wonder what happened to all those little pot-metal speakers?

  I have wondered about those speakers. Once they switched to the radio, it was never the same again. I loved drive-ins. I don’t know how much I would love them now, the heat and mosquitoes might not be too appealing these days. We had a drive-in in Nacogdoches, and we went often, but most of my Texas drive-in viewings were in Tyler, Kilgore, and Longview.

  Back then they had movies made especially for drive-ins, things you couldn’t see anywhere else. Most were terrible, but many were perfect for the young mind in search of horror, female nudity, and gratuitous violence. They also gave us a private place for sex, and talking about the sex we weren’t getting. The popcorn wasn’t too good. Always tasted like wet cardboard.

  Your “Miracles” piece is pretty hard on religion. I get that. Were you raised as a Methodist or a Baptist?

  Baptist. I actually am not against religion itself, but when people use it to justify bad behavior, or when they show how hypocritical they are, I always wonder if they’ve read the Bible they love to quote and shake. To justify some of the things many Christians justify, by quoting it selectively, irritates me. I don’t believe there is a god, outside of the blind, uncaring power of nature. I don’t mind Christians who try and live by the better attributes of their religion, but it seems to me, especially in the South, that most of what they get from the Bible is just the bad stuff. Reason for that is, it’s mostly bad stuff.

  The New Testament
has its more positive side, but basically if you believe Do unto others as you would have them do unto you and know the Beatitudes, you can forget both books and, for that matter, Jesus. Thinking some guy who died over two thousand years ago is coming back is not much different from older religions that we now think of as mythology. So, yes, I can be rough on it.

  Who taught you to drive? To write?

  My dad and mom both taught me to drive, mostly my mom. My uncles a little. I taught myself to write from reading. I never had a course in creative writing, though I’ve taught a few, and am writer-in-residence at SFA [Stephen F. Austin State University]. I don’t think you can make someone a writer. You can assist them and open a few doors, but it’s always up to the person. Some people just have It. Others may know the alphabet, excellent grammar, and spell perfectly, but they seem to be trying to light a match underwater. It’s just not there. I don’t know why that is, but it’s usually that way. Now and again someone, like Robert Johnson, who couldn’t play the guitar worth a damn, will go off and come back a virtuoso, but that’s rare.

  Were you a fan of Bruce Campbell before Bubba-Ho-Tep? Do you ever have any say in the casting of films from your work?

  I was a fan. My son Keith was a fanatic fan. He loves him some Bruce. He begged me to get Bruce for Bubba. I told him that wasn’t my call, that was Don’s call [producer, director Don Coscarelli]. Don called me one day and asked, “What do you think about Bruce Campbell?” and I laughed out loud.

  Keith and I went on the set and met Bruce and Ossie Davis. We already knew Don and the other actors and people working on the film. Nice experience.

  Bruce and I have been friends ever since. He’s like the Elvis of B movies, but the thing is, the man can act. I’ve never thought he got his due. Bubba, in my view, is his finest performance, and Don’s best film so far.

  I was fortunate enough to meet Neal Barrett Jr. and even hung out with him (in Greenwich Village, of all places) but we never worked together. How’d you get so lucky?

  Neal Barrett Jr. was a brilliant and neglected master. He wrote some survival stuff, but the best of his work, like The Hereafter Gang, is amazing. He and I were close friends for nearly forty years. I actually sought him out for advice when I was a young writer. He asked me, “Do you write regularly?” Yes. “Have you sold anything?” Yes. “Then why in hell are you asking me for advice? Keep doing it.” Only writing advice I ever had (except a bit from Bill Nolan).