Pawn to Queen Four
by Lars Eighner
St. Martin’s Press, $21.95 hard
Long after Grapes of Wrath, long after establishing himself as one of
America’s greatest storytellers, John Steinbeck took a vacation. At the time,
somewhere around 1960, Steinbeck was happily married and highly praised as an
author. But that summer, Steinbeck decided to leave his wife and hit the road
with a trailer in tow. He chose, as his road companion, a large female poodle
named Charley. And from Steinbeck and Charley’s journey, came one of America’s
most beautifully written narratives, Travels With Charley.
Near the end of the Eighties, another writer, Austinite Lars Eighner, found
himself on the road, traveling from Austin to Los Angeles and back again,
sharing the experience with his dog Lizbeth. And from these “three years on the
road and the streets,” came Eighner’s autobiographical account of those times,
Travels With Lizbeth. But where Steinbeck left a happy marriage,
literary cocktail parties, and traveled in the luxury of a trailer, Lars was
gay and homeless, finding himself searching through the dumpsters for his and
Lizbeth’s next meal. It was not long after its release that Travels With
Lizbeth became “Editor’s Choice” of the New York Times Book Review.
Eighner’s style of writing was described as “grandiloquent and simple,
alienating and compelling.”
And now it is 1996, and Eighner came back last fall with a new contribution,
Pawn to Queen Four. This time, Lars goes under the tag of fiction — and
does he avail himself of the freedom of the genre.
As the novel opens, we are introduced to the Imperial Court of the Jade
Chimera and its leader, the six-foot-seven, 300-pound drag queen Agnes. The
Court’s purpose is to protect the general interests of the gay population. As
Agnes explains, “Dogmatist come. Dogmatist go. Some hate blacks and queers.
Some hate capitalist and queers. Some hate Jews and queers. Some hate
communists and queers. What they all hate, we think, is to be free, to be free
like the truly queer.”
Their current order of business is Brother Earl, the evangelical leader of
Holy Word of God University and Technical Institute located in Osage, Oklahoma.
Like his real-life counterparts Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker, Brother Earl has
certain unethical sexual fetishes. The former radio preacher likes cheap sex
with men, something about which he spends a great amount of time and money
preaching against.
At one time, the court had pictures, which have since disappeared, depicting
Brother Earl and a young stud in lewd, graphic sexual positions. The court now
decides to send a youthful, handsome man to retrieve, or, if needed, re-enact
those positions — to get film at whatever cost. And along the way, scandals
surface and plots cross.
Eighner is at his best when he is writing about the scenes in a gay bar, the
Reservation. This is a slice of the underbelly of life like the “Original
Lavender Bluesman,” Crumbelly Croissant. The musician is a neighborhood
fixture who makes his way down to the Reservation from his room in a “fleabag
motel” to play for tips and more than a few scotch and waters. Eighner
describes the trip, from room to bar, beautifully — “He plodded on, past the
three-balled pawn shops, past the barred storefronts, past the alarm striped
windows of the credit jewelry store. Past the hanging-out guys supporting their
boomboxes with hypertrophied arms, the early hookers still yawning and
stretching, the old paddy snoozing in his cherrytop, the cluttering of dishes
and the smell of burning grease, the barking dog stationed for the night in the
gun shop — Crumbelly walked on.”
Lars Eighner is a good, powerful writer, a writer whose reputation was quite
possibly over-inflated with his first major work. When Travels With
Lizbeth was first published, critics were amazed that a homeless person
could compose a work of real literary merit. Pawn to Queen Four may not
be up to the high standards of Travels With Lizbeth, but it suggests
that, homeless or not, Eighner is emerging as an important literary figure. —
Jeremy Reed
This article appears in February 16 • 1996 and February 16 • 1996 (Cover).