(Photo: Jenna Marotta)
Christoph Paul‘s latest book — Love Spandrel, a collection of 90 poems out today — is a Valentine’s gift for his girlfriend. But don’t let that fool you: his next one will be titled Tits From Hell, and he describes it as “Rosemary’s Baby meets Nip/Tuck.”
Since publishing his first book, The Passion of the Christoph (and giving it a fake review from Jonathan Franzen), the 30-year-old freelance editor has become a rising star in bizarro lit, a Portland-based genre that he compares to cult films. He’s familiar with the world of B movies: in D.C., he worked at a specialty video store while taking online classes toward his creative writing MA. “I wrote a lot at the porn store,” Paul laughs. “I’d be like, ‘Here’s Ass Parade 34, good job’ and then I’d get back to writing.”
(Photo: Jenna Marotta)
When we met at Gruppo last week, Paul sported pink leopard-print eyeglasses and a modest faux hawk reminiscent of the Triceratops in The Land Before Time. Under his Queens of the Stone Age hoodie was a t-shirt emblazoned with a Gordon Gekko-like cellphone dialing “1985,” and a clock necklace the size of a Jawbreaker. As approachable as he was, I couldn’t help but be in awe — and a little freaked out — as he summarized stories from his fourth book, Demons in the TV: the one about the masturbating vampire, the one about Pasquale the Pigeon Pimp of Tompkins Square Park, “The Little Drone That Could.”
Then there’s the book he co-wrote with Brody Thomas, about a shark rampage against our highest-ranking leaders. In Great White House, China exacts revenge on the debt-owing American government by controlling the weather. “They have [programmed] a tsunami to take genetically-modified great white sharks out of the Potomac River, and PETA met with Obama earlier and put shark pheromones into the White House,” he recapped. “Biden is the first one to die.”
It’s absurd and very readable, with plenty of so-bad-it’s-good dialogue. (“‘Don’t commit shark suicide!’” shouts the Nicorette-chewing president.) Paul hopes that he and Thomas can adapt it into an animated feature film.
But all of this begs a question: “Have you done any drugs?” I asked meekly.
As it turns out, the answer is yes — and we’re not talking about joints at the roller rink. At military school — where Paul was sent as punishment for failing ninth grade — he and his classmates had to resort to guitar cleaner and gasoline. “I would get freaked out because I’d huff the gas,” he recalled, “and I was like, ‘Fuck, I need to smoke a cigarette but what if my head will blow off?’” Eventually, after four or five years of sporadic abuse of inhalants, he went to rehab.
“Some people find Jesus, some people find AA; you know, for me it’s definitely art,” he said. “Writing weird shit keeps me sane.” While his mother will not read his books — “I think it’s better that way,” he wrote in an e-mail — his girlfriend believes in what he’s doing, even if she was displeased with “The Masturbating Vampire.”
Paul still has occasional pangs that he’s not “Mr. Literary Novelist,” like some of his favorite writers (Paolo Giordano, Mohsin Hamid). “I have a literary novel that I still wanna try again. I’m like, ‘That’s my Freedom, that’s going to be my Dostoevsky.’” However, he realizes that his strengths are humor, satire, and anything strange. “Anything that you’re not supposed to talk about on a first date, I want to write about,” he said. (That, of course, includes religion and politics: the self-described “disenchanted liberal who now probably is more Libertarian” studied politics at the University of Central Florida and considered a future run for office.)
On his way to authorship, Paul began getting Saturday brunches at Odessa with Stephen C. Mitchell, the director of Talihina Sky: The Story of the Kings of Leon, who steered him toward books like The Art of Dramatic Writing and Making a Good Script Great. “Documentary guys are so obsessed with structure and three acts and making them tell a story,” said Paul.
If he has his way, Paul will write 100 books, publishing many under his newly formed press, The Only Rx (the name was recycled from a band he used to play guitar in and sing in). Till then, he’ll keep performing at places like KGB Bar and Bushwick’s Goodbye Blue Monday. You can hear him read an assortment of his work tomorrow night at Freddy’s Bar, at 9 p.m.