"HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY" Matthew C. Funk

HOW I CAME TO WRITE THIS STORY

by Matthew C. Funk

Unlike many of my characters, Stagger Lee didn’t sneak into my stories. He was no crossbreed of literary theme and plot device. He shouldered open the door and just started talking in an outdoor voice. Reality has a way of doing that.

I’ve never met Stagger, but the other day he called my friend. On account of her sleeping late, he left a message:

“If you’re working on your beauty sleep,” rushed the gravely bluegrass voice, “it ain’t happenin’. Call me.”

Half of the swaggering, country boy outlaw that roams my Stagger Lee stories is just an homage to the legend of the blues song—a tall tale figure fueled by impulse and driven by cunning that, in New Orleans fashion, I slipped across racial lines from black to white when I placed him in my favorite city.

The other half of my Stagger Lee actually filled those boots and walked that tall. The more felonious of Stagger’s stories are just drama of my own warped invention, but many of them were lived and suffered and laughed over by a real dude. I get them secondhand and decades old from our mutual friend, but they burn so damn bright I have to give them their due and brand a blank page with them.

Stagger Lee is the soul of the South for me, and that soul lives in a flesh-and-blood fellow. We’ll call him Davey. But make no mistake—though he may not share a name with the original African-American folk anti-hero, he’s a legend to his friends.

My Stagger Lee gets his background from Davey in many ways.

Davey floated between the upper-crust, white-tie world of the Kentucky Derby’s box-seat set and the underworld of East Kentucky good old boys who buried bullion in the acreage of their hillside shacks. He dined with pink-tanned golfers at the Lexington Club one evening and laid traps in his farmhouse the next. He outfoxed, out-charmed and outran the law on many occasions and never was turned away from a party with sterling silver settings on the table.

I also got a fistful of Stagger Lee’s stories from Davey. Stagger’s bravado in the face of danger comes from Davey’s easy bravery in the face of angry, gun-toting hillbillies. Stagger’s outsized generosity—like in my upcoming novel, City of NO, when he bought up scores of sets of silverware for his friends in Jamaica because he’d heard they had a shortage down there—is inspired by Davey’s actual purchases. Davey threw the first punch for the sake of his friends, Davey fell prey to painful pratfalls with the same devil-may-care attitude and Davey partied like he was in a drinking contest with the Gods.

That’s all pure Stagger Lee, because to me, it’s pure southern—a stretch of country that still lives as if thought comes from flesh, not from high ideals or dusty pages.

I invent a lot based on this schematic of the southern spirit. Davey walked too tall to be confined to one group of people, but Stagger breaks the bounds of reason and decency like the song that inspired his name. Where Davey would swing a fist, Stagger would pull a gun. While Davey kicked back with a questionable element, Stagger thrives as its beating heart. Davey may have skirted the law, but Stagger lives at war with it.

My Stagger Lee, as my newly completed rough manuscript about him defines, is the model of the ancient hero in modern cast—the hero that endures and inflicts terrific suffering solely for his own ends—the original hero of human kind, the outlaw hero. Davey is the outlaw spirit, the outlaw voice, the source of wit and wild tales that his friends still can’t keep bridled in and have to let gallop out of them.

In many cases, I’m sad to know my stories come from real people and real events. It’s a sense of duty to cast some light on where they’re suffering out of sight that compels me. In the case of Stagger Lee, I have a story that makes me smile almost every time.

Part of my joy is the appeal of Stagger Lee as an unchained ego. Call him Stagger or Hercules or Peter Pan, the outlaw superman draws us in because there’s an adolescent in us that never grew up—that still wants to kick down doors and knock about the china shop of civil society, breaking speed limits and sacred cows.

The other part of my joy comes of knowing that such a man lived so wild and came out of it with a smile on his face too.

It lets me rest easier under the mire of routine and hypocrisy and materialism to know that those constraints are just as mythical as Stagger Lee—that a dude can go through his entire adult life without working a day and still end up richer in a way than the rats in their race.

I’m glad Stagger Lee is alive in Davey. It reminds me that there’s a whole lot more to being alive than making a living.

Legends are true. Some of us come alive through them. Some bring them to life.

Matthew C. Funk won the 2011 Spinetingler Award for Best Short Story on the Web. TIMES PAST was featured at Alec Cizak's top All Due Respect.