Lars Eighner Profiled

by Jeremy Reed

Austin writer Lars Eighner is having a raise-money-for-the-rent party, and I am invited. Eighner lives in Hyde Park along with his dog, Lizbeth, whom he tells me will be 11 in March. It was in the early Nineties, with Lizbeth as a traveling companion, that Eighner made national headlines and the cover of the New York Times Book Review with the autobiographical story of a homeless, gay man on the road with his
dog. He is back with a new novel, Pawn to Queen Four.

"This was actually written before we went on the street," says the 47-year-old writer, referring to his most recent book. As Eighner explains it, "When we lost the little shack over on Avenue B, which has now been fixed up and has lawyers in it, I lost all of the copies I had of the manuscript (of Pawn to Queen Four). But, there was one that was out to some publisher, who lacked foresight, and returned it eventually. But when it came back, we were gone and the people that were there had no idea who we were. They opened it, and they read it, and they liked it well enough to drill and put it in a binder and pass it around among their friends."

This passing-around process continued for a couple of years while he and Lizbeth were homeless and living in California. The manuscript had what could be described as an "underground" success, and so when Eighner and Lizbeth returned to Austin, they tracked down the current owner and their lost copy. At the time, they were still living on the streets, so Eighner decided to leave the manuscript with the editor of The Austin Chronicle, Louis Black. Pawn to Queen Four sat, forgotten, once again, while Eighner received praise and royalties from Travels With Lizbeth.

I ask Eighner about Travels With Lizbeth and how much of his original manuscript finally made its way into the book. "I had this huge manuscript that I knew wasn't a book. I knew there were like two or three different books in it," says Eighner. He then asked his publisher which book they wanted, to which they replied, "`the homeless book.'"

What about the other two books, what were they about? "I wanted to redo States of Desire from an underclass perspective. I didn't really have that much material on that. Ed White [the author of States of Desire] did his traveling around in the Sixties, mid-Sixties, late Sixties, as an Ivy League graduate taking stock of the gay communities in the country. But I have a feeling that you get a different perspective, if you're a young guy who has just graduated from Harvard or wherever and you're flying into town to do a story on the community there, than the perspective I had on these communities 20 years later when everything is very different and I'm a very different kind of person."

And the other story? "I didn't have much experience in the porn business [having written a few scripts for gay porn], but I wanted to do something about how porn is actually made because lots of people just don't get it." Eighner still makes some of his income writing porn scripts and gay erotica.

With the success of Travels With Lizbeth came international book tours and a chance to meet and see things he normally would not have been afforded. As he explains about meeting director/actor Paul Bartel (Eating Raoul), "Turns out he's a big fan. He loves signed first printings. So we exchanged work and stuff like that. I got to go to his house. It's a beautiful place. `It's the house that Eating Raoul bought,' he refers to it as. I get cuts of his flicks on video and stuff like that. I got a copy of Shelf Life which will never be released." The success has also made him the spokesman for the homeless population -- something he never felt comfortable with, as he wrote in the introduction to Travels With Lizbeth, "...I do not pretend to speak for the homeless. I think no one could speak for all the various people who have in common the condition of being homeless. I do not know many of the homeless, but of the condition of being homeless I know something, and that is part of what I have written."

Eighner, who also reviews books, says that, unfortunately, about all he reads these days is literature regarding the homeless. "The fact is that I'm working so much that I read almost nothing except for review copies for assignment," says Eighner. "I get what the Statesman and the Observer will send me to work on. That usually means I get all the homeless books in the world. I usually get stacks of homeless books. `Oh it's a homeless book. We'll get Lars to review it,'" he explains in a voice mocking an editor. "It's just natural. And frankly, I don't want to be writing, to be dealing with that material for the rest of my life." And so enters Pawn to Queen Four -- a light comedy centering around drag queens and the religious right in the deep south. It is a subject and follow-up the public and the press have not readily accepted.

Pawn to Queen Four came on the heels of Travels With Lizbeth, a book that was regarded as "great literature" about the current situation of the homeless. With his new book, Eighner's intentions were not to make part two of Travels With Lizbeth, but rather to publish a frothy, comic novel that he had written during prior time in his life. "It was supposed to be a light vehicle capturing... people... I really thought were going to be wiped out by AIDS when I was writing it," explains the author. "I was writing on this in '83 and '84 when it just looked like everybody was going to die and now it looks like everybody is not going to die. Things are going to keep going on at this level."

In fact, it was those similarities to reality that kept this piece of fiction on hold for some time. In Pawn To Queen Four, there is an anti-gay professor named McThacry, who finds himself, towards the end of the novel, succumbing to his repressed homosexual tendencies. And because the character and a former UT professor shared many of the same qualities, a few at St. Martin's Press, Eighner's publisher, worried about the threat of libel. To which Eighner defends himself, while sporadically laughing, "Well, this is a novel. It's all fiction. It's all made-up stuff. None of these people could possibly be real, but
evidently he [one of the people at St. Martin's] did take a course from this guy. The guy has
since died."

And just so there is no confusion about whose character is loosely based around Eighner himself, he is eager to point out, "I'm not Agnes [a 300-pound, 6'7" drag queen in charge of the gay governing party, the Imperial Court of the Jade Chimera]. I'm Crumbelly Croissant [the `Original Lavender Blues Man,' a musician who lives in a `fleabag motel' and plays blues for scotch and tips at the local gay bar, the Reservation]." Adds Eighner, "Agnes actually resembles the producer I worked for in Hollywood, but was written before I met him. That's happened to me several times. It's really kind of weird when you do somebody in fiction and then you meet them in real life and didn't know they existed." He goes on to compare Pawn to Queen Four to The Fantasticks, in that most of those characters are parodies of people who actually existed at the University of Texas at the time it was written.

Lars Eighner and I sit on his front porch for a few hours talking about everything from the question of exploitation in porn to rental prices in Hyde Park. As I mentioned earlier, I am there to help raise money for their rent. Odd, considering Lars and Lizbeth will forever be immortalized and remembered for their story. Eighner, once again, is left to question their future. It's been 10 years since Lars held his last job (working at a state hospital) outside of writing. Currently, he is developing his own gay entertainment Web Page, but, as Lars explains about writing, he's not sure what's next.

"If I decide that this is not working... okay, what do I do? What do I do? There is a lot of stuff I can do. I have a lot of skills. That is one of the things that this Web Page is supposed to demonstrate. Why would anybody hire me to do that kind of stuff when they could get somebody right out of college, who will work for nothing, who they can hope to still have 30 years down the road when I'm not going to be alive? I don't see many choices. If this doesn't work out we," he says, as he pulls the good-sized Lizbeth up onto his lap, "will be on the street again. That's all there is to it."

Lars Eighner is one of Austin's great fixtures, a writer who proved with Travels With Lizbeth that
the romance of the road and the bond between a dog and his friend is just as important when talking about the homeless as dumpster-diving and the many scared nights sleeping outdoors. Eighner's current work, Pawn to Queen Four, is selling at all major bookstores and, for the time being, for sale on the front porch of a house in Austin. n

Jeremy Reed is the editor of nothing shocking literary magazine and regular contributor to The Austin Chronicle. His work has also appeared in Detour, SOMA, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.