Noah Cicero Interview

‘The Collected Works of Noah Cicero Vol. 1’ is a collection of short stories and novels that Noah Cicero wrote in his early twenties, from 2003 to 2006.  I picked some of my favorite excerpts from the book and asked Noah to comment on them, and tell me some stories about what his life was like while writing these stories. 

buy a copy of The Collected Works Vol 1 HERE 

I feel sick here standing in front of the mirror. My stomach hurts so much, so does my back, my breasts are too big and it causes my back to hurt. My skin hurts too. I wish Jesus would take my pain away. I really wish he would. Oh, my stomach hurts. It hurts so much.

Nobody believes me when I’m in pain. Everyone accuses me of faking. I don’t know why they accuse me of faking. Don’t they know somebody in pain can go to work and be laughing and smiling and still be very sick? I’m so sick, I want to go the doctor. But I can’t because I have no health insurance. Well, it only costs fifty dollars to go to the doctor, but I can’t afford pills. And I need so many pills, I’m in such great pain.

- pg. 6, ‘I Clean in Silence’

I wrote that in 2002. I was living with my ex-fiance in a trailer. She used to always say, “I clean in silence.” I liked when she said it, how it sounded. She used to live in Eugene, Oregon. We both did actually. I lived in Eugene for a summer, basically with her. It was amazing: drunk all the time, crazy hippies, sex, skinny dipping in hot springs. That is why the part about Oregon is there. We ended up living together in a small trailer, trying to be in love. We had loved each other since high school, 7 years had passed. All my first stories were about her, she caused me a lot of emotions. I did something bad and we didn’t see each other for 7 years. Then a mutual friend, someone that lived in Oregon with us, tricked us into coming to the bar to see her, and for us to magically see each other. We saw each other, the first instant, was pretty intense. But we talked, and things went smoothly. Now, sometimes we talk at Dairy Queen. (I feel like, saying, “We talk at Dairy Queen,” makes no sense. But I’m from a tiny town of 2,000 and meeting at Dairy Queen makes a lot of sense.) 

A guy on the radio is talking about the war. 

Speculating.

Speculating.

Speculating.

He says in less than two hours, we shall fight to preserve freedom.

Freedom.

America wants to give another country freedom. That doesn’t sound that bad, or does it.

I hope the terrorists don’t attack. I read in the paper a couple days ago that the terrorists would fuck up America if we attacked Iraq. I hope they were just trying to scare us.

They probably won’t attack Youngstown, Ohio. There is nothing here of any importance. It will probably be New York again. 

- pg. 11, ‘The Human War’

I lived in my parents house when I wrote The Human War. I was kicked out of the aforementioned trailer. I was broken up with my fiance. Breaking up with her was really bad, I had basically dated her for 7 years, I was convinced she was “It.” She wasn’t. I lived in my parents' house, super depressed, writing on a laptop my friend Nicky Chiarella gave me. He eventually left to Santa Fe, New Mexico to run art projects. The Iraq War started, I had no job, and I didn’t care about anything. I sat in my bedroom and wrote all day for a few weeks till it was done. The girl Kendra in the book is the fiance. She really haunted those first things. I think at that moment, I started to “feel loss.” Like that early 20s, “there are a lot of things I have no control over” feelings.  

I love reading.
It’s the only thing that keeps me together.

I need books.

I need those dead man’s lines.

I need their truth.

I like writers who write out of necessity.

Writers who write because they have to.

Who are compelled to express.

They are driven by one thing only, and that is the written word.

I see books as the purest representations of an era.

When anthropologists a thousand years from now need to understand the psychology of the people of a time, they will look at their books. Not their bridges, computers, and skyscrapers.

- pg. 29, 'The Human War'

I think I wrote this in relation to Nietzsche’s blood writing thing. I remember taking a train from Youngstown to Las Vegas a little during that winter. My brother was moving from Las Vegas to Michigan and he needed his whole house transported, and he wanted me to drive his wife’s car. My dad bought me train tickets. I asked him why. He said: “Because you’ve never been on a train.” I took the train, that is where the last story in The Human War comes from. I read Spoke Zarathustra on the train. The line: “A Cold Wind Blows over the Lonely One," is from Thus Spoke too. I think if someone read Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Waiting for Godot and Nausea and the Collected Works in the same month, it would be a fun puzzle for them.

“I told the doctor I wanted to be free, so he gave me more medication,” Jimmy said.

“Is it helping?” Melissa said.

“I don’t want to be free anymore,” Jimmy said.

“What do you want to be now?” Melissa asked.

“Drunk.”

“I was drunk when they brought me here. I drank a bottle of whisky, then I went to Denny’s, and picked up everybody’s cups in the smoking section and threw them at this picture on the wall of this one man walking alone in the desert. Then I got up on the counter and took off all my clothes. Then I think the cops took me here.” Melissa said.

“What were you thinking about when you did it?” Jimmy said.

“I was thinking about the time my dad threw me into the wall for spilling a cup of Kool-Aid,” Melissa said.

“Why’d you take off your clothes?” Jimmy asked.

“I was going back to the primitive,” Melissa said.

“One time I stayed out in the woods for three days, until my parents found me and sent me here,” Jimmy said.

“One time when I saw my mother at the store she said hi to me. I went home and cut off my pinky toe. Look, I have no pinky toe,” George said.

- pg. 72, ‘The Doomed’

Melissa and the character from Bedroom Scene are based off the same person. She killed herself 3 years ago. She used to say crazy shit, get naked at parties, throw horrible tantrums, she was just out of control. She was manic depressive and sometimes, she would be normal and calm. But then you would see screaming, fucking everyone, blasted on coke, then a week later she would be fine again. I went to see her in the mental ward once, her hair was in a buzzcut. I remember petting her head while she lied on the hospital bed. One time we went together to my brother’s grave, she sat there and talked with me, the sun was nice that day. She hung herself with a bungee cord. Her toes were touching the floor of the basement. She used to call me and ask me to get a beer with her, we would sit and talk, but she doesn’t call anymore.

Jack took a cigarette from the pack on the floor. He put the cigarette in his mouth but didn’t light it.   

Angela stared at him. She let the covers fall, exposing her breasts, and she stared.

“Are you going to light that?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” he said, tight-lipped so the cigarette did not fall from his mouth.

“What if I said I loved you?”

Jack found a lighter and lit the cigarette, slow and deliberate, as if to postpone answering the question for as long as possible. Finally, he said, “You still have a chance to stop.” 

- pg 81, 'Bedroom Scene'

This story was from the dark winter of Ohio. This is the same girl who was Melissa in The Doomed and killed herself with a bungee cord. She lived in an apartment in an old house in Girard by where I lived. I would drive over and sit in the bedroom with her. I would show her some plays I had written. She liked to read my plays, she was always very supportive of my writing. She was always smoking weed. It was freezing outside, must have been 10 degrees, snow covering everything. I would listen to her talk and talk, I never knew why I went to see her, we were both lonely. We would have sex and then I would leave. Sex meant nothing to us, just a passing dot dot dot of nothingness. Sex, a dot in the nothingness.

Kathy sets her twenties out on the counter.

She has seven twenties.

She lives for those twenties.

She has no bank account.

No savings or checking account.

No Visa or Mastercard.

Just those seven twenties.

She counts them.

Holds them in her hand.

And laughs about those stupid bitches who work in restaurants and retail who don’t make shit.

She makes seven twenties barely working at all.

There is no time in Kathy’s world.

No future, just a timeless present.

Her life only stretches as far as her twenties, and how she can spend those twenties.

Kathy stares at those seven twenties.

She adds up how many twenties it will take to feed her and her son.

How many twenties she can devote to bills.

Then she will know how much she can spend on coke for the evening.

Clocks and calendars, long term goals, mean nothing to Kathy.

Only that she has enough twenties to get her to the next time she can get more twenties.

- pg. 105, ‘The Condemned’

This is based off a dancer I still know. We don’t see each other as much as we used to, but we used to see each other all the time. I didn’t have any money myself at that point, I worked as a pizza boy and had no bank account. I would put all my extra money in a cup. I would just have 20s, only 20s. Sometimes I would sit with the Kathy character and she would have like 2000 in 20s. And she would hold them up and be so proud, like having 2000 dollars in 20s meant something. There is a whole world of people, where time doesn’t mean anything. Time only really means something if you have the money to plan for the future. Kathy had no money to plan for the future. Someone said to me the other day, “What is your dream, what do you want to do with your life.” He was from the middle-class, his parents are college educated, he is going to a private school. He is nice, he meant it sincerely. I replied: “You can only have a dream if your parents can buy it. Your parents buy your private education, then they buy your internships, and basically in the end they bought you a job. Most people don’t have someone that can buy them a job, so they try their best and call it their life."

Billy Jean said, “Pain is like a drug. It takes you away. It reminds you that you’re human, but at the same time makes you an object. No one can tell when you’re in pain either, you might be the one hitting me, and I’m making noise. But you don’t know if I’m in pain. Physical pain in a secret. You can only take someone else’s word for it. You can’t graph or do surveys on physical pain. It is the only thing that is left immeasurable. Physical pain also forces you to recognize that you exist. That you are on a rock, in an indifferent scary universe. And there is nothing metaphysical about that. It is real. When a person screams in pain, the actual pain is only half the noise they make. The other half is the terror of being forced to accept that they exist. All physical pain reminds a person of their own death also, they know even when they get a paper cut that someday some other part of their body is going to get hurt or give out like carburetors or axles do and their body and existence will come to a halting nothingness.” 

- pg. 145, ‘The Condemned’

I was having a sexual relationship with someone, and it was based off of sado masochism and all such things, and I was reading Wittgenstein and Sartre at the same time. Wittgenstein always talks about how you can’t describe pain and Sartre always talks about how people try to make themselves into objects (in-itselfs) because they are rejecting their freedom. I have never really enjoyed physical punishment inflicted upon me during sex, a girl scratched me once and I hated it. I feel like choking and slapping makes me happy. It makes the sexual act come alive. I keep thinking the word, “flourishes.” I feel like physical pain does remind us of our deaths. It objectifies us, it reminds us that we are objects.  We have this little conscious thing in the head, but overall we are meat objects condemned to die. Dying is not funny.

Let’s get personal.

I am one human among six and a half billion.

Like if you had six and half billion pieces of Pez, and you took out one piece and sat it next to the giant pile.

I would be that one piece.

I am one piece of Pez.

Yes I am.I live on Earth, in America. Red, white, and blue MO FO!

Inside the state of Ohio.

In a city named Youngstown.

I live in a house.

Remember this all comes from my heart.

You know?

The other day my shit was so hard and big, I had to cut it in half with a coat hanger to get it down the toilet. 

- pg. 159, ‘The Condemned’

This comes from a strange place. I was at a cabin with a relative who is a Christian-Republican, and he said evolution wasn’t true. And I said, “But we are 99% like apes.” He replied, “But that 1% is so big.” I thought, but did not say, “If we had 99 pieces of Pez and one piece of Pez nearby the large amount of Pez, that one piece would look small.” I did not say that out loud.  But I like Pez, and like the word Pez even more than the taste and texture of actual Pez. I don’t know why I said Mo Fo, maybe Mo Fo was popular then. I like that I wrote, “I live in a house.” That comes from my brother who killed himself. He was suffering from schizophrenia. He was on the porch at my parents’ house. I said something like, “Where do you live?” And he said, “I live in houses.” He was obviously nuts. And concerning my shit, one morning it was really hard and I had to actually cut it in half. I think I put that in to debase myself. See, I’m really Catholic, I wasn’t raised Catholic, but Christianity has corrupted me in many ways, debasing oneself is very important to me. The Collected Works is about the public debasement of oneself, the tearing away of temporary pop culture and leaving nothing but the raw human. I really wanted to achieve this raw human feeling, to go to levels of honesty that people have never gone to before. That was always my goal.

I stood in front of the stage.

Some has-been preppy was singing an Elton John song. 

I think it was “Tiny Dancer.”

I like “Tiny Dancer” so I listened.

The guy was singing his heart out up there.

He was a good singer too.

He hit the notes and didn’t fuck up at all.

I started to sing along with it.

A lot of people were.

There were like eight people by the stage singing and dancing a little.

As I stared at him, I realized why there are karaoke and open mic nights.

It’s because during school people are given all these chances to play sports, sing, act in plays, be in the band, all kinds of shit. But then they graduate it’s all over, so many chances are taken away when a person graduates. A lot of fun is just cut off.

I started to cry a little when the guy started singing the chorus.

I knew at that moment there wasn’t much difference between that has-been preppy’s singing and my writing.

He just wanted to take a break from the shit of the world and express himself, have fun, and share his talents with other people, even if only eight other people cared.

- pg. 190, ‘Burning Babies’

This story is totally true. I saw a guy sing Tiny Dancer. I was in my mid 20s when I wrote that, and I felt like, the whole high school thing was finally over. There is such a lag of talking about and thinking about high school with Americans. I remember when I first started dating my girlfriend, she was 22 and I was 28, and her and her friends talked about high school all the time. Because strangely high school is great, you go to this building, you know everyone, there are sports to play, high school newspapers, singing and music classes, there is theater, you have friends, homecoming and prom. You can wear really stupid clothes and everything just writes it off as being young. Then it slowly fades, if you don’t go to college, it ends pretty quickly. But if you go to college and especially a local one, there is more of a lag, because there are ways you can prove yourself in college, but not as many. Adult life offers very little in terms of fun group activities, it is really sad. As each year passes after high school, you slowly realize that adult life is really boring, unless you are super proactive about your life and willing to take risks. High school doesn't require that you are proactive or take risks, it is all proved for you, your parents pay a small fee or you throw a bake sale. But if an adult wants to make their life not boring, it requires a lot of effort. Personally I sang several times in Korea at the Norea Bang. Usually when I sing, I sing Elvis.

For the month I worked there, I worked with about seven different people because the Grand Canyon fired people constantly.

When I first got there, the head of the dish tank was this deranged old wastoid named Chuck.

He was about fifty years old.

He had a handlebar mustache.

Had worked at over five national parks.

He once said this to me: “I remember one of my past lives. I was a slave master in the Old South. I remember being in charge of a huge plantation.”

I looked at him and said nothing.

He would talk like everything he had said would be life-altering and earth-shattering, which is common among people who don’t know shit about anything.

The guy wasn’t miserable though.

He loved living in beautiful places and having new experiences.

Which isn’t bad.

I knew a lot of people way more intelligent than him back in Youngstown, but they never had the balls to be happy.

Even though Chuck was dumb as shit, he always found a way to live in beautiful places.

Then after a shitty day of work he could walk to the edge of the Grand Canyon or to the hot springs of Yellowstone and smile.

- pg. 204, ‘American Sketches’

Chuck is still here, I see him everyday. He works the transportation desk at one of the hotels. He still has a mustache. He has put on some weight. He doesn’t recognize me. There is only one person that has recognized me, and that was my old roommate. I went to the Grand Canyon  two days after I graduated high school. I went because my dad told me it was a good idea. I worked as a dishwasher and would drink on the Victor Hall porch every night. Victor Hall is this 80 year old dorm made of stones. I was so excited about life, I was 19 from a small town of 2000 white people, and there I was surrounded by Costa Ricans, French Kids and Kiwis. I was so excited, so energetic about life. I wanted to talk about everything, I wanted to feel everything. After only a month I got fired from the Grand Canyon, and then I went to San Diego and lived for two months in a small room with a Kiwi. It was completely insane, and I spent all my money, and the behavior was horrible. And I had so much hope about my life, I really thought at that moment and for the first 3 books that I could have been a writer, as in a person that writes books for money. I was convinced that if I was really original and hyper intense, I would succeed. I didn’t succeed.