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Roll the Dice :
An Interview with Bart Stewart

by Adam Jack

      The abrupt shift in hot dry air to cool, moist air startles me as I walked through the doors into the El Chavez. Thirty years ago, El Chavez had been a top-notch casino, but now it clings to its existence by dirty thumbnails, clutching nickels and pandering to hardcore gamblers. Rows of slot machines in every denomination roll into the center of the casino, to the green felt tables. The place looks just like it did twenty-five years ago.

      As I walk along one row of machines, I notice that El Chavez doesn't have any digital machines; these are dinosaurs, hand cranked monsters that whir, click and flash. At least the ones with all their lights flash. Some of them brood, duct-taped and silent.

      My contact told me that the man I'm looking for will be here at El Chavez, but that's all I have. My best bet will be to find some shady punk and pump him for information.

      I walk around the tables, quickly glancing at the servers, dealers, the lucky and unlucky alike. A tired-looking woman asks me if I want a drink. She points me in the direction of the bar, so I walk, figuring it is as good a direction as any. The bar top is clean, which surprises me, and I order a whiskey sour.

      A guy who looks like Chevy Chase sits down beside me. “Hey, how's it going?”

      I nod and tip my glass to him. “What're ya drinkin'?” I ask. He doesn't look like someone with information, but I have money to burn and haven't met too many nice people since that guy gave me a ride through the desert.

      “Club soda. I don't drink anymore. In the past, well . . . let's just say I drank enough to lift the Nimitz from dry dock. On advice from medical professionals I stopped. It is amazing how easy it was to stop in my case. There were no cravings - nothing! I just quit. That was several years ago and I almost never drink now. I used to smoke marijuana to great excess in the 1980's. I think that may have been the only way I could get through that decade. I cut that out too, and now I get high on my imagination, which is a very potent joint.”

      I sip my sour and nod. “Imagination, huh? What, you some kind of artist?”

      “Writer.” He pulls out a book with a cat's head on the cover; its lips are covered in blood.

      “Oh, yeah? What's that about?”

      “It's nine stories that range widely in time and location. The common thread is a dreamlike atmosphere of the surreal in real world settings. The first story deals with a family who gets caught up in Orson Wells' 1938 War of the Worlds radio hoax. They are thoroughly convinced that the world is under attack by Martians, as millions of Americans were on that night. Now, that story is fiction about an incident that really happened. And there is another story in the collection that brushes up against real history. The other Tales are more in realms of fantasy, although there are no cliches of the supernatural. The events in the stories are fantastic and amazing, without any mysticism or other such hooey.”

      “Any good?”

      “This one webzine didn't think so, but my other reviews have been almost uniformly enthusiastic!”

      “Huh. What are you doing in a crummy joint like this? Gambling man?”

      “Of course! I am a writer in the United States! ... oh, you mean these casino games? No, those are for suckers. Give me Parcheesi any day. No, a friend of mine was comped a couple of tickets to the Incredible Mouse-a-lini, the Italian midget magician. Long story short, my friend dropped out, but I've got the tickets. You interested in joining me?”

      Maybe it's the alcohol, maybe it's Chevy Chase's mug grinning at me, but I can't resist. “Sorry, I didn't catch your name,” the writer said. “I'm Bart. Bart Stewart.”

      “Adam,” I say. “And sure, I'll go with you.”

      It is a mistake. I hate magicians. I hate little people. I hate Italians. About ten minutes into the show, I ask Bart for the copy of his book, and while Mouse-a-lini makes pun after pun about how being short sucked, especially for a magician, I read.

      I finish the book of short stories just as the magician does his big finish, changing his two lovely assistants into midgets.

      After the show, I hit the head. Bart joins me about halfway through, shutting off my waterworks. Despite my decades in prison, I still haven't ever broken my stage fright. “You like science fiction?” he asks. When I don't answer, he says, “I acknowledge that true science fiction should involve science. Real, hard science. I call my book fantasy. The problem then becomes that I have to explain that it is not a bunch of elves and dragons and sword and sorcery stuff, which is not my bag. I admire someone who can produce true science fiction. I am not sufficiently educated in the sciences to do it. Oh, I guess maybe with enough research I could try my hand sometime. I once thought about writing a story set at a point in the future so far away that it would bear no resemblance to our world. Think about ten thousand years into the future. You could not retain any of the present world, really. Even our bodies would be radically different. It would be a very challenging story to write, to do it justice.”

      He washes his hands and leaves, and I'm able to finish pissing.

      I join him out in the bar.

      “You hungry?” he asks. “I know this great buffet right around the corner.”

      I nod, and we leave El Chavez. “Is it hard to get published, writing what you do?” I ask. The sun was below the horizon of tall buildings, filling the air with a gray light that didn't match the intense Nevada heat.

      “The market for fiction in general is very close to impossible, especially for new writers. It has been said that it is easier to break into professional sports than to make it as a writer of fiction. I am sure the number of professional athletes far exceeds the number of people who make their living writing fiction. It is the toughest business there is, hands down. And that is a tragedy not just for the new writers who will never be known, but for the culture of this country. We don't read any more. We chase pixels on a screen. That is the extent of our intellectual lives and our emotional lives. There will be consequences for that. I like webzines, though. They're g-r-r-r-reat!” He does an impression that I don't get, thrusting his hands into the air.

      We go into the buffet, which is actually just part of another casino, and Bart gets us a table. “So Adam, you read much SF?”

      “SF?”

      “Science fiction. I have read my weight in it over the years. Unfortunately I am an omnivorous reader with not much of a pattern to what I read, except that I try to avoid the lightweight stuff. I remember reading Richard Matheson's Third from the Sun as a kid. And I have read many of the bigger names, like Vonnegut, Heinlein, Bradbury, and Ellison. I like science fiction that has well developed characters, and some literary merit apart from just the science. I read Michael Crichton's Timeline, and the characters were kind of two dimensional, and there were even some clunky, cliched phrases in the writing. I hope his other books are not similarly afflicted.”

      I agree. I read some of those authors in the big house. “Who's your favorite writer? Serling?”

      “What a tough question. I always say that, in terms of describing human beings, nobody has topped what Truman Capote accomplished with In Cold Blood. By the end of that book you felt like you had known all those people all your life. If any of your SF readers out there have never experienced In Cold Blood, I wholeheartedly recommend it. I think George Orwell's 1984 is an extremely important book. I even read the strange Russian proto-science fiction novel that influenced it, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin. The great fiction writers are all dead. In terms of non-fiction I recommend Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine, who has written some stellar books. Visit Skeptic.com sometime.”

      Computers. They're everywhere now. When I went to prison, they were for games and doing math. Nobody knew how they worked. They were magic. “Hey. Are you one of those authors who will tell what really happened in a story?”

      “Yes and no. I like to leave some unresolved gray area. This is the Twilight Zone, Jack. That's the sign post up ahead.”

      “I noticed that Twilight Zone feel in your book.”

      “I credit that show with getting me interested in writing when I was a kid, and all these years later I still sometimes come up with stories in that style. Tales of Real and Dream Worlds was certainly influenced by Serling. Actually it was HG Wells who said take a realistic setting and inject one fantastic element. So the Twilight Zone style is really the HG Wells style, and I discovered both Serling and Wells around the same time in my long gone youth. I have a thing for the old classics. The fact that something comes from a past era does not necessarily turn me off at all. I watch a lot of Turner Classic Movies, too.”

      “Okay, so the cats. The statuary cats. Where'd you get that idea?”

      “I don't usually admit this because it makes me sound like a nut case, but I actually had a dream one night with a lot of the imagery that appears in that story, the first story of the trilogy. I basically dreamt it all but for a few scenes. I have pretty far out dreams. I hung a fig leaf of rationality on the story when I put it into writing. In the book they are just weird animals unknown to science.”

      “You gonna tell any more stories about them?”

      “There is a screenplay on paper for the first story in the trilogy, but I have not yet turned my attention to peddling it. Still promoting the book ... which by the way is Tales of Real and Dream Worlds by Bart Stewart, available from Barnes and Noble and Amazon.com ... Will there be any further Statuary Cats stories? No, just the three in the book.”

      “What are you writing now?”

      “That waitress's phone number . . . seriously, though, I have a novel that is 90% finished. It is entirely different from the surreal Tales of Real and Dream Worlds. This one is all about real life, and if you are a creative person you will see moments from your life in it. I want to write in different styles, always changing. It would be smarter I'm sure to stick to one formula and always be a predictable product for a marketing department, but I can't do that. This novel will have a lot to say, but it may be a year before it appears. The title is not yet finalized, but the author will be Bart Stewart.”

      We stuff ourselves on macaroni and shrimp cocktail, joking about the waitresses and people at the other tables. I haven't had a good shrimp cocktail since I was arrested all those years ago. There's an obese woman with a small dog in a cage with a handle at one of the tables. The dog looks at me like it knows me. I ask Stewart, “What's the weirdest thing you've ever seen?”

      “Apart from trying to deal with the American publishing industry, I would have to say it would be certain great coincidences that I have had over the years. I love a really choice, one-in-a-million coincidence, and we all have them. Dreams that seem to come true, thinking about someone and then meeting them, that sort of thing.”

      “Scariest thing?”

      “That recent Republican Party debate was fairly spine-chilling. Oh, and I almost drowned once at Jacksonville Beach. Got caught in a rip tide.”

      I laugh at the first part.

      The sun has gone down, and the buffet crowd was dying down. We go for one more round, my plate stacked high with fried potatoes and steak strips. “What are you reading right now?” I ask, trying to keep the conversation going.

      “I found these poetry books by a guy named Hayden Carruth, and I have to tell you, they are fantastic. I am not usually into poetry, but consider this imagery. "TERRA - Tundra, the distant marches. And wind veering, clatter of steely grasses; Steady tramontane pummeling eye and bone. Between hummocks, the ice-shell, glinting, Splintered under our tread, slashing our shoes, the papery leather flaking, crumbling.”

      “I'm not a poetry man myself, but that's pretty . . . pretty?” I shrug and we share a laugh. “Well, Bart, I'm sure you have a wife and kids to get back to. Can't spend all your time farting around a buffet with the likes of me.”

      “Not married. In the past I never particularly wanted to get married. In recent years the idea is more appealing to me, but it would take a special woman. I would not want it to end in divorce. She would have to be able to put up with a creative type. I will never be a corporate cog. I have no kids that I am aware of. Pets? I have had some cats in the past. At present I have only a sea monkey in a glass of water. And the sea monkey can wait.”

      “You? Cats? I can't imagine.” I chuckle. “Well, I have some business to attend to at El Chavez.”

      “I'll walk you back.”

      “Shame you can't see the stars,” I say. In the desert, the stars were particularly dazzling. “Believe in aliens?” I ask.

      “ Yes, just not that they have visited us.”

      “Good answer. Has a feel of honesty about it. You a religious man?”

      “I am a devout Frisbeeterian. We believe when you die your soul slides under a van and you can't reach it.”

      “Alright, Bart. I appreciate your company. And the book.”

      “Here. Keep it. Maybe whoever you're meeting likes SF.”

      “Dead bodies don't read much. Not in my experience.”

      Bart looks at me for a moment and then says, “A cab driver was shot to death in the parking lot of my apartment complex in Las Vegas late one night back in the 90's. His cab rolled to a stop right in front of my patio. What am I saying? Good-bye, Adam.”

      We shake hands and part ways. I walk back into El Chavez, the cool, moist air startling me once more.

"Same shit, new millennium." -- Bart Stewart, 2001.

Tales of Real and Dream Worlds can be purchased at Amazon.com, BarnesandNoble.com or any Rabies' Rusty Meat Books.

Atomjack would like to thank Bart for a great interview, the original, uncut version of which can be read here.

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