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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
Crime novelist, horse racing junkie and former performance poet Maggie Estep talks about the Beats, touring with Lollapalooza and writing dirty fiction.
Oct 1, 2004 | I met Maggie Estep two years ago at an art colony where she and I were fellow fellows. When she told me she wrote crime novels I nodded politely and didn't ask to borrow a copy. Life is short. The list of books I'll never have time to read is long. I don't need to eat a corn dog to know I don't like corn dogs. For the same reason, I don't read crime novels.
Didn't. Until I picked up a copy of "Hex," the first in Estep's "horse noir" series, and was blown away by the gale force of Estep's talent. Her vividly drawn low-life characters, the wit of their interchanges set against the backdrop of their bleak circumstances, all ripped through the constraints of genre -- and my skeptical preconceptions.
Written in a chorus of six first-person narrators, "Hex" introduces the series' heroine, Ruby Murphy, a racetrack- and yoga-addicted, classical piano-playing, vegetarian drifter who has set down roots in Coney Island. Although each of the book's characters is satisfyingly strange, it's Ruby who elevates the narrative with passages like this one, describing her train ride home after a losing day at the Belmont track: "Where this morning's cargo was full of inflated hopes and swapped tips, now the mood is dour. Surly guys jab by, hurtling themselves to the nearest bar. Raspy older women set their mouths tight and disappear into the glaring burlesque of rush hour Penn Station..."
"Gargantuan," the second in the series, is just out from Three Rivers Press. This time Ruby Murphy has taken up with Attila Johnson, an apprentice jockey whose reluctance to fix races has landed him -- and Ruby -- in a vat of trouble. When Ruby is kidnapped by a sociopathic groom who stashes her in a remote cabin, offering only baloney sandwiches as sustenance, she upholds her vegetarian vow, feasting instead on the mangled volume of Balzac she finds in the trash. The New York Times Book Review called Ruby Murphy "such a ravishing original that it's love at first sight," and indeed, Ruby left me wondering if maybe I should try a corn dog after all.
While waiting for my next Estep fix -- "Flamethrower" is due out in 2005 -- I discovered that in her 41 years, Estep has lived many lives. Raised in France, Georgia, Pennsylvania and upstate New York by her nomadic horse-trainer parents, Estep fell in with the downtown poets' crowd in Manhattan circa 1982, then made the pilgrimage to Colorado to study with Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso at Naropa Institute, aka the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics.
There "Maggie Estep, performance poet" was born. Between 1993 and '97 she appeared on MTV and on HBO and PBS spoken-word specials, toured with Lollapalooza, performed at Woodstock II, opened for Hole, and released two spoken-word CDs featuring such cult hits as "Scab Maids on Speed" and "Sex Goddess of the Western Hemisphere."
In '97 Estep did what she'd been wanting to do all along: publish a novel. "Diary of an Emotional Idiot" (Harmony Books) was followed by a short-story collection, "Soft Maniacs" (1999), and then by contributions to several Susie Bright erotic anthologies, a steady stream of erotic crime tales on Nerve.com, and contributions to many other anthologies, including the much-heralded "Brooklyn Noir" (2004). Estep has just landed a deal for a nonfiction book that began as a biography of Kentucky Derby winner Smarty Jones and has, in the wake of Smarty's flameout, morphed into a history of 10 American racehorses and the era epitomized by each, due out from Miramax in 2006.
I spoke to Estep while she was reveling in her fourth residency at the artists' colony Yaddo -- conveniently located mere steps from the Saratoga racetrack.
Your life story is truly stranger than fiction -- even your own fiction. Let's start at the beginning. What kind of kid were you?
My parents were busy with the horses, and I was a wild only child. I ran away from home all the time -- not because I was unhappy, just because I felt like hitting the road. My first memory is of riding my tricycle to the end of the driveway and sticking my thumb out. Luckily, no one picked me up. When I was 7 my parents split up, my mom married a lawyer, and we moved to France, where I forgot how to speak English. When I was 12 we moved to the top of a mountain in Colorado and everything went all to hell. I started cutting school, shoplifting, smoking, drinking and reading Charles Bukowski.
Bukowski! Is that what made you quit high school, leave home, and move to the Lower East Side at age 17?
[Laughs.] That, and one of my dad's riding students who heard me blasting the Sex Pistols in my room every time she came over for a lesson. Somehow she knew that I needed to be rescued from my peculiar life. She got me a job at Arista Records. I moved to New York and got myself an apartment in the only neighborhood I could afford.
How did the Lower East Side treat you?
I loved it. It was so wild then. It was an open drug marketplace; there were guys with Uzis on every corner. It was a little scary -- I got a knife held to my throat a few times -- but the neighborhood people looked out for me. I became a debauched club-goer and got to know a lot of interesting people.
Including William Burroughs?
I met him at an opening [of a show] of his paintings. He was very gracious to me. He told me he was teaching at Naropa, so I moved back to Colorado, lived in my mom's basement, and started taking workshops with Burroughs, Corso and Ginsberg. I was a fledgling writer -- I'd been writing terrible guitar lyrics and sci-fi novels for years -- and those guys influenced me profoundly. They were intelligent people doing this great stuff that was accessible, not alienating and academic. It was really sexy. Allen, especially, was a great reader. I loved the relationship he had to his audience.
