Rust and Bones
An Interview With Author Craig Davidson
by Nate Green

Most guys don't read. Perhaps it lies in the fact that knowledge just doesn't seem to be that cool anymore. Or maybe being force-fed crappy books in high school and college left students with a bitter taste in their mouth.

Whatever the case, T-Nation readers aren't most guys.

Nate Green tracked down up-and-coming fiction writer, Craig Davidson, whose stories come with a pair of testicles attached. Brawls and boxing matches, dog fights and hookers, all interwoven with a boundless sense of humanity.

No matter how you slice it, Davidson's writing has balls.

Author and T-Nation reader Craig Davidson

Nate Green: Thanks for talking with us, Craig. Word on the street is you're a pretty big fan of T-Nation, yourself. How'd you happen to come across the site?

Craig Davidson: I came across it sort of by accident. I do Internet research from time to time, finding information for my stories and whatnot, and it seemed like so often, when I went to Google and typed in my search words, I was invariably led to T-Nation. Information on bodybuilding, steroids, that great Gregg Valentino article...so you could say that T-Nation has been a great research tool for me, and that information I've read on the site has found its way into my work.

NG: That's pretty cool! Well, after reading your collection of short stories, Rust and Bone, I came to the realization that your writing style seems to parallel with T-Nation themes, core values and vice versa. What do you think?

CD: Yeah, I'd definitely say so. When I'm reading T-Nation, I feel like I'm in the company of like-minded people — guys whose outlook on life, interests, and so forth closely mirror my own. As I said, it's a great research tool for me as a writer, and it also gives me hope that there is an audience for the sort of stuff I'm writing.

"These dogs truly believe they are invincible. They believe they will never die. It's beautiful to watch two pits at the end of a hard roll, lying in the pen's center or pressed up against the wire, slick with blood, blind and exhausted, licking one another with a shocking tenderness. The simple fact of their existence is its own beauty: there are creatures on this Earth upon whom the human frailties of pain, weakness, self-doubt exert no bearing."

NG: Rust and Bone certainly seems to have Testosterone coursing through its veins: boxing, dog fights, bar brawls... basically you have real men doing real manly things. It's quite the juxtaposition to the current state of world affairs and the media friendly "modern man." Tell me, where oh where has all the Testosterone gone?

CD: Well, I think it's still around; it's simply taken on other forms. It's my feeling that today, in our society, there aren't the typical male outlets, or, I would say, real opportunities for a man to test himself, to know himself — no wars or society-wide poverty, plus technological advances have made it so less hands-on.

NG: So what are our tests? How do we really know we are men, so to speak?

CD: Our grandfathers and fathers lived in poverty, fought in wars, toiled so that our generations could have things easier. Which is great, it's really noble and all, but I can't help thinking: Is there a point where life is made too easy? And if so, how does that affect us?

Here's an example, to me, of how things have changed:

My grandfather was a B-17 bomber navigator during WWII. He flew five miles above Nazi Germany through flak so thick you could walk on it, bombing railyards, munitions factories, and research centers.

He once showed me a photograph from his service days. He and his young crewmates posed on the airstrip of the Deenethorpe airbase, near Northhamptonshire. All of them were shirtless, due to the day's heat and the stuffiness of their flight suits. Their bodies hold the natural variation you would expect: most are of average fitness, though some are pudgy and others skinny or undeveloped. But all of them are smiling unselfconsciously. There is no sense of bodily shame — no real awareness of their bodies at all. That they were men was implicit to their very circumstances; it was proven in the fact they had faced death and would do so again. They were men who needed no further verification.

The other day I came across a website (www.NJGuido.com) dedicated to providing dance club information for New York City; it featured photos of young men and women partying at various hot spots. The men all look the same. They are muscular — some obviously the result of steroids — and tanning-bed tanned, their hair gelled; they sport tattoos and piercings and wear wraparound sunglasses in dark nightclubs.

Many go around shirtless, and if not wear wifebeaters that read Free Petting Zoo (with an arrow pointing at their crotch) or Vagina: Tastes Great, Less Filling. Their poses are aggressive and proprietary; they flex without making it look as if they are doing so. There is a meticulousness to their appearance — every hair in place, every muscle group heavily-trained, every inch of flesh bronzed. The same guys can be found in Toronto, LA, Miami, Vancouver...

The men in the dance club photos are bigger and stronger than the airmen in my grandfather's photo. And yet I'm left wondering:

Put all those men in a cage together — who do you figure comes out alive?

NG: Your writing has been compared from everyone to Hemingway to Chuck Palahniuk who is said to 'write books for men who don't read books.' Between these and, say, Oprah's Book Club, where do you fall?

CD: Ah, the comparisons. Once you publish a book, you'll find that is something your publisher rushes out to do — connect you to some other writers. I was once talking to Thom Jones (great writer, now a screenwriter; his collection, The Pugilist at Rest, is brilliant), whose first book had a lot of fighting and battle-scarred characters and manliness, and so of course his publisher compared him to Hemingway.

Every guy who's written a boxing book, or a war book, or a book that takes on masculine themes, has been compared to Hemingway. It's an easy, though not particularly original, comparison. And the Chuck Palahniuk comparison is just a modern update of the Hemingway comparison.

I say this only to note that, for a new writer like me, those comparisons scare the shit out of me. I'm not Hemingway, one of the greatest novelists of all time; I'm not Palahniuk, a brilliant satirist who penned one of the most culturally significant novels of the past thirty years, Fight Club. For better or for worse, I'm me, Craig Davidson, and while people may be reminded of Palahniuk, or Bret Easton Ellis, or maybe Thom Jones while reading my work, in the end I think I fit into my own slot.

NG: And as for Oprah?

CD: If something I write is ever picked up by her book club, I promise I will chew off my own arms.

"A prizefighter is a freak. He's got maybe ten years in the roughest business in the world, a business ruled by a strict hierarchy: winners and losers. He's not a paperhanger, a lawyer, a beancounter. He doesn't put on his galoshes, grab is briefcase, catch the trolley, the same daily grind for thirty, forty years. He gives it all now, or never."

NG: Now, have you actually done any of the things you write about? Any shady boxing matches or illegal dog fights? Don't tell me you've had your package explode while on a porno set like one of your characters. That happened to me once — worst sex of my life...

CD: Well, Nate, the truth of the matter is this: a writer's life is very, very dull most times. You sit in front of a computer, thinking your thinks, for 5-6 hours a day. So, for me, if there's an opportunity to go out and live some aspect of the characters I'm writing about, I take advantage of it. I like to think of it as Hunter S. Thompson-style participatory journalism.

For example, the novel I just finished, THE FIGHTER — the main character, Paul Harris, takes up boxing. So I took up boxing, trained as a boxer. I was 28 at the time, which is way too old to start serious boxing training — at least, it was for me. The experience kicked my ass. It was great, I enjoyed it and I learned a lot and I think I imparted some of that knowledge into the book.

Paul Harris also gets mixed up with steroids. So, dutifully, I took steroids. I gobbled little pink Dianabols, injected myself with Equipoise (originally created to promote lean mass in beef cattle) and Testosterone Cypionate. I'll tell you this: the fucking stuff works. I blew up from 210 to 240 pounds, and all my workout max's shot through the roof. But I had all the side-effects, too: a freaky case of bitch tits for a few weeks at the beginning of my cycle; my prostate gland swelled up so I was pissing 20 times a day; muscle knots, scar tissue, and a hugely painful abscess I had to drain myself; my balls shriveling up so they felt like a pair of pickled figs in my nutsack. Actually, I'm writing a non-fiction piece on the whole experience, which I hope to sell to a magazine to coincide with the publication of THE FIGHTER.

Anyway, I do as much as I can in terms of aping what my characters go through. I think it adds a level of reality to the work if the writer has gone through certain things himself. That said, I can't do everything my characters do — if I did, I'd be in jail right now, or dead.

"... as a feeling of absolute peace floods through me, ecstatic well-being of a sort experienced by Buddhist monks and perhaps tiny infants — enlightening peace. I'm beset by these heartwarming thoughts toward this woman, dreams of a good life and healthy future, happiness and love but this mini-satori is fleeting and I'm overtaken by a sense of futility known to a few on earth, brought about by the inconceivability of these dreams for this woman or myself or anyone really, staring through the windshield at a night sky spread with stars, the conceivable worlds couched in those dark sprawling spaces between the light host to alien lifeforms possessed of such nobility and decency as I will never even fathom, and this sense of incalculable desolation draws about me, I who remain so trivial, insignificant, tenuous and speck like."

NG: Word on the street is that you're into weightlifting and the overall 'bodybuilding lifestyle' yourself. What got you into training? Someone call you a Poindexter because you liked to read or did you just want to look good naked?

CD: I've been working out maybe ten years now. I guess I started because I was a fat load in high school and got sick of it. I still don't look good naked, I'm afraid. I keep it up because by now it's just become part of my life; if I haven't hit the gym in a few days I start feeling a bit guilty. I'm never going to be a huge guy, it's just not in my physical makeup — although on 'roids I can fake it.

I think being a big-ish guy, looking the part of a semi-tough individual, has kept me out of a lot of scrapes (I have an awful habit of finding myself in powder-keg situations from time to time, though I'm not totally sure why). And I think a lot of guys go to the gym and bulk up as a defense mechanism — y'know, if you look big, look tough, people won't mess with you. Which is probably true, maybe even 99% of the time it's true. But the worst beatings I've ever taken (and I've taken a few) are from those really, really tough guys — guys who aren't muscled, just straight-up tough guys — who see right through the muscles, see it's all a sham; and guys like that can give you a beat down far more severe than the 99% of guys who look the other way.

I guess what I'm saying is, I work out now out of habit. I've long ago surrendered the idea of being a "tough guy," or that being muscularly big and being good at defending yourself are one and the same. I can take a good punch; I just can't give a particularly good one.

But, on a better note, a lot of the characters in my stories get the shit knocked out of them. So at least I know what I'm writing about in those scenes!

NG: Along the lines of not having a cultural 'rites of passage', it seems like most guys stop learning altogether after they finish high school or college. Is stupidity, or worse, learned helplessness an epidemic in your eyes? Why the hell are people so afraid of books?

CD: Well, there is a definite skew between the amount of female readers vs. the amount of male readers, at least when you're talking about fiction. Men tend to read a lot more non-fiction, which makes it tough writing books like I do, about boxing and dog fighting and typically male pursuits: tough because I can't really expect women to buy my books, no more than Helen Fielding should have expected guys to line up to buy BRIDGET JONES' DIARY.

So, yeah, I wish more guys read fiction, because it would make life for a lot of guys like me, guys who write books for guys — -and not sissy "lad lit"-type shit, guys mooning about their shit jobs or, y'know, why their girlfriends don't respect them or bullshit like that — -it would help us build a career.

As for why people are afraid of or don't like books...I honestly don't know. It's strange, you look at a lot of MySpace profiles, you'll see people will go on and on about the music and films they dig, but they leave the books section blank, or else put in some book they read in school because they had to. Maybe that has something to do with it — -because all of us have reading thrust upon us at a young age, are forced to read Shakespeare and what-all in school, and get sick of it. I don't know. It's nothing to do with intelligence; I know lots of people smarter than me who aren't keen on reading. Of course, it pisses me off, because I'm trying to make a goddamn living out here, you know!

Sometimes it feels like I've opened up a butcher shop in a town full of vegetarians. Anyway, it's something I love to do, so I'm gonna keep writing regardless.

"... steps forward on his lead foot, left hand sweeping in a tight downwards orbit, flecks of blood flying off his brow as his head snaps with the punch. I come forward on my right foot, stepping inside his lead and angling my head away from his fist but not fast enough, tensing for it while my right hand splits his guard, barely passing through the narrowing gap and I'm torquing my shoulder, throwing everything I've got into it, kitchen-sinking the bastard, and, for a brilliant split second in the center of that darkening ring, we meet.

NG: Thanks for answering our questions, Craig.

CD: Thanks for setting this interview up, Nate, and thanks to everyone at Testosterone Nation for taking the time to read it.

Craig Davidson's Rust and Bone can be picked up HERE and you can check out his rants and other entertaining and informative happenings at his website, http://www.craigdavidson.net.

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