I wrote “Benny’s Narratives” during a transitional time in my life. I was finishing my BA in English and I was trying to get into an MFA program. I was studying with a certain professor who assigned interesting readings and some of them helped influence the story, especially those about outsider art.
I have some training in visual art, having gone to FIDM a long time ago. Also, drawing was something I have always enjoyed, long before I started to write stories. As a child, I was fond of drawing images and scenes, making up my narratives as I went along. Later on, when I was in my teens, I loved the work of Andy Warhol and the other Pop artists. They took the commercial images and appropriated them for their own use.
I appropriated an image. When I was in this course called “The Design Fundamentals of Visual Presentation,” one of the assignments was to go to a department store window and copy it as a painting. I went to a Nordstrom window with a bald-headed gold mannequin. Little did I know that years later, she would become Benny’s Gold Lady.
When I was an undergrad English major, I became intrigued with William Blake. His poems were as much works of art as they were poetry. He created his images and prose, and they go together.
Adolf Wöfli was another influence. First, he was insane and so is Benny. More importantly, he drew pictures and the words and music swirled around them. He created vibrant images and found sanity through art.
“Benny’s Narratives” was different from the other things I’ve written in the past. I’ve written short stories about Japanese teenagers, some science fiction, and the style was fairly conventional. I scribbled the leaves (Feuilles or images) quickly, late at night, because it I had to. I didn’t have much time between my studies and the job I hated. After I played around with some collages, such as “Money Future,” I drew the Gold Lady and the Man with the 4-Way Hips on the quick. I then scrawled what the Benny had to say about her and the Man. Of course, all the images and the text have a sense of urgency.
Later images and text would be drawn and written more carefully, but they all have the fractured language that’s uniquely Benny’s voice. As the Gold Lady is a Pop artifact, Benny’s language has been influenced by various pop songs, such as Tom Tom Club‘s “Genius of Love” and Madonna‘s “Music” in “Benny’s Narratives.”
The events in this first installment of Resplendence are the darkest. My approach was to write with a dark sense of humor, especially since Benny describes the medical abuse by Dr. Marcus in such innocent terms. The story ends with Dr. Marcus being dismissed for his sexual misconduct, but it isn’t quite the end for Benny, even if I intended “Benny’s Narratives” to be a self-contained short story. The rest of Resplendence deals with the aftermath of what happened between Benny and Dr. Marcus, along with Benny trying to become sane on his own terms.
Coming tomorrow is the first post from “My Bald Avenger,” where Benny dreams up the ultimate revenge against Dr. Marcus. The Gold Lady is back as his avenging angel and she is more fabulous than ever, the One Supreme Being who is a Saint and much more. Stay tuned.
