Reno, Nevada, a place where, during the Depression era, state laws prohibiting gambling and prostitution were lifted in order to generate revenue, and divorce restrictions were relaxed to six weeks’ residency with the intention of enticing rich married folk looking for a quick get-out.
The result was a sort of proto Las Vegas; over the next couple of decades motels sprang up like mushrooms within a hundred mile radius of downtown precincts. But by the 1970s the corporations had moved in, expanding the casinos and building their own hotels for the high rollers and tourists, forcing the mom-and-pop motels to rent out as weeklies, their new clientele being mainly gamblers, rakes, drifters and all manner of people hanging on by their fingernails.
This is the backdrop to Willy Vlautin’s first novel The Motel Life, and if the title unintentionally echoes Sam Shepard’s Motel Chronicles, it’s a fair indication of the terrain. Vlautin – frontman and songwriter with well respected roots-rock outfit Richmond Fontaine – conjures roominghouse madrigals neon lit by swinging traffic lights and Bud signs, the kind of terrain previously mapped by Bukowski, Fante, Denis Johnson and Nelson Algren, moved to a hostile Fargo-like climate.
“When I lived in Reno you’d see all these weird guys living in those motels,” says Vlautin, a solid and friendly 38-year-old. “One of my best friends growing up, when he was 19 he would live that life, he just kind of dropped out of society, wouldn’t tell you where he was staying, moved once a week. Granted, he was a drug dealer, but more than that I think he just like to hide out and be his own man. I used to hang out with him in these hotels, so a lot of the idea for the book was from him.”
Rock ‘n’ rollers brought up in hicksville generally can’t wait to blow out of town ‘Born To Run’ style; writers tend to stay put or eventually return to old stomping grounds in order to do justice to the voices of the people they grew up around. Although he now resides in the rather more writer-friendly city of Portland, Oregon, Vlautin still belongs to the latter camp.
“I’ve always liked writing more than being in a band,” he admits, “but every good thing that’s ever happened to me in my life is ’cos I was in a band: friends, I met a girl, somewhere to go on a Friday night. The cameraderie of being in a band is my favourite thing. Other than that, I was a shy guy, I just wanted to go home.
“There’s a guy named Dave Alvin who was in The Blasters, they were a big influence on me. And he was a really good poet, a better poet than musician even, and I asked him why he didn’t spend more time writing fiction or poetry, and he says, ‘I can sit in a room by myself for two years and maybe one guy will buy me a drink, maybe I’ll get laid, but then I gotta go back in that room for two more years… but I can be a horrible musician, learn dozens of songs, go down to the local bar, get free drinks all night and have tons of girlfriends.’
“But for me, I never wanted to leave Reno. I lived there until I was 27, and it was like pulling teeth to get me to go. I really was a failed musician, I never could get anything going, but I loved the town, I had a really easy life there with guys I’d grown up with. But then I saw some bands come through from Portland, and I wanted to be in a real band that played real shows and drove around and I knew I couldn’t do that in Reno, it’s a pretty non-artistic redneck sorta town, four or five hours from San Francisco, off the beaten path, there are no real bars to play, cover bands are the norm.
“But I was dating this girl and she wanted to move to Portland and I just tagged along with her. I wasn’t very courageous, I tried to move back half a dozen times but I’m always so scared I’ll end up being the guy I was when I left. I’ve always wanted to come back better than I was, but I’ve not yet made it that far.
It won’t be long, methinks. The Motel Life is the work of a careful and conscientious writer, the tale of two brothers, Frank and Jerry Lee, whose lives go from bad to abominable when the latter flees a hit and run accident while under the influence. Vlautin, like his musical equivalents Tom Waits and Shane MacGowan, manages to render pathos without sentimentality in prose whose tone is downbeat, fatalistic and hangdog. In other words, not a book for the lachrymose-intolerant. The premise might be a classic rock ‘n’ roll Beat idea: two guys get into a car in search of escape, but the reality is a guilt-edged nightmare, the drinking a form penitence rather than celebration.
“The thing that’s kinda interesting is there is always that dream of escape, but there is no place to escape to, you just run into yourself,” Vlautin observes. “These guys had that beaten man idea about themselves, they automatically assumed that they were wrong. They made bad choices because they didn’t think much of themselves, took a bad hand and made it a lot worse. Him hitting that kid… the idea of ruining somebody else’s life ’cos they’re alive is just too much.”
Consequently, the book’s atmosphere is akin to Sam Raimi’s much overlooked film A Simple Plan, in which two brothers, played by Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton, make one bad decision and the whole thing spirals downward.
“I never saw that, I’ll check that out. Did you ever see that Irish movie Cal? That movie stuck with me for the fact that I thought that guy was a decent person deep down, but he could be easily swayed. He couldn’t get a job ’cos he couldn’t stand the sight of blood and his dad worked in a meat packaging plant. But that guy, the bad things he did just ate him alive, and I really like the way that guy was portrayed, he was a sweet person that just got in way over his head.
“As far as Irish writers, I’ve been reading this Galway writer Walter Macken lately. And the difference between Frank O’ Connor and Brendan Behan in the amount and the quality of work… I mean, Frank O’ Connor’s really a master of the short story. I don’t understand why in the US you go to these Irish pubs and instead of him they have James Joyce and Brendan Behan and all those guys on the wall.”