[In the following excerpt, Ward discusses the inner city lives Dybek portrays in his Childhood and Other Neighborhoods.]

If this tone of apocalypse and condemnation is where Otto's work leaves off, it is where Stuart Dybek's Childhood and Other Neighborhoods begins. Where Otto's stories depend for their effect on his characters' complacency, Dybek's are stories of the inner city, a panorama of ruined lives overcome by the refuse of civilization. In these longer, carefully crafted stories set in the Chicago of the 40's, 50's and 60's, Dybek's technique is a no-holds-barred assault on everything we may have smugly assumed was reality. Though his characters appear to have vitality in a world they are forced to scrape a living from, in truth they are cripples who manage only to fend off the total impotence that bellies in on them. From the ragmen of "The Palatski Man" who each Sunday in their impoverished warren outside the city perform a strange communion composed of liquid blood red candy, generally used for the candy apples they sell, to "crazy Swantek," of "The Cat Woman," whose grandmother managed a meager living through drowning unwanted kittens in her basement washing machine, until Swantek took to hanging them out on the line to dry, it is Dybek's artistry to capture the fantasies of hope, the horrible black humor, and the details of ritual that carry these people through to their end.

This bizarre world creates for the reader an atmosphere where reality and imagination become indistinguishable; it is a confusion which Dybek takes full advantage of. In "Visions Of Budhardin" a homosexual outcast returns inside a huge mechanical elephant, and vents his wrath on the local Catholic church whose years of moral lies have made his inner landscape a ruin. Certainly, if we can accept the degree of the character's compulsion, the grotesque metaphor of a mammoth and mechanized nature does not seem so far fetched.

Yet in the profoundly achieved story "The Apprentice," the exigencies of life make the surreal even more difficult to separate from the real. Ostensibly, an immigrant ex-taxidermist and nephew ride the highways at night to support themselves by supplying a rather exotic inner city restaurant, named "Spanish Blades," with its gruesome fare. The uncle, who bristles with imagination and black humor fantasy, a vitality charged by paranoia of Nazis and other fascists he imagines are pursuing him, describes this unusual place:

"… An exclusive restaurant, a private club, for all those who'd been excluded and had finally made their way here, to this city of displaced persons. Displaced persons, DP's, who'd come from the corners of the earth evading politics and poverty; draft dodgers, deportees, drifters, illegal aliens, missing persons, personae non grata, refugees, revolutionaries, and emigré royalty, all orphans, mingling beneath the same ensign in a dining room where chandeliers rotated a crystalline light and blue poofs of flame erupted as waiters, tuxedoed like magicians, ignited food."

And what is on the menu of such a restaurant?:

"And the road littered with the driftwood of night. Animals whose eyes have turned to quartz in the hypnosis of headlights, streamlike souls still hovering around their bodies. Rabbits, possums, coons, squirrels, pheasants—like a single species of highway animal. Some crushed beyond recognition, even their pelts useless and so left behind. But most still limp, waiting to be collected with the other highway scrap—blown tires like lizard skins, dropped mufflers, thrown hubcaps, lumber, hay bales, deposit bottles, anything that could fall off a tailgate or blow out of a car window.

The reader scarcely notices that this restaurant, in which the nephew is promised he will someday be a waiter, is only some graffiti spattered on an alley wall, that at the heart of their existence is a fantasy born from intense reality. In their comic backyard rituals these two characters bury, then revive old dolls, "mufflers and transmissions,… broken radios, crates of magazines, animal bones…. Makeshift tombstones stuck up everywhere." Near the apocalyptic ending, where the uncle, nagged by a terminal lung disease, becomes increasingly frenetic and paranoid, we begin to comprehend the great gift being passed on to the boy—the ability to stay alive in a deadly world.

Indeed, this kind of immediacy becomes even more abbreviated and accessible in Dybek's recent book of poems, Brass Knuckles. As the title implies, these poems are meant to shock and hurt us, swelling from volcanic sources of anger. Through such images as a twelve-year-old friend murdered with a crowbar, and the incineration of a pet cat's corpse in a garbage can, the horrible texture of the inner city rubs against us. Interspersed between this cinéma vérité are prose poems and redefinitions of myths whose surreal social satire is wrenchingly accurate. For example, these excerpts from "Traveling Salesman":

He finds himself stepping off the bus in some burg he's already bored with. Picking his teeth for 200 miles—here's where he spits the toothpick out….

… Finally, he's signing the register at a funeral home where he knows no one, but is mistaken for a long-lost friend of the deceased, for someone who has dislocated his life to make the hazardous journey on a night when the dead man's own children have avoided him. Once again instinct has taken him where he's needed: where the unexpected transforms routine into celebration. He kneels before the corpse, striking his forehead against the casket.

But of all the techniques which Dybek uses to expose the sophisticated depth of necrophilia surrounding us, none is more successful than the contemporized refocusing of myths which for millenia have been the psyche's projection of the flux of life and death. In the tongue in cheek "Lazarus," no mention of God is made, unless it is the media which has transformed the resurrected man into a celebrity. In "Orpheus," the satire weaves threads of accusation, anger, confession and a lyric communion with all victims, as this latter day Orpheus leads us through the underworld of our own streets. In "The Rape Of Persephone," the longest and most complex poem of the volume, the explosiveness of revitalized archetypes reaches a crescendo. Death, who is initially described as "Death in the alley, prehistory, / drooling and slobbering, guzzling wine, / and mumbling his name over and over …" forces the young girl into a lurid rape whose climax is her lopping off of his penis with his own razor, "Persephone / running down an alley like a canyon / his scream has cracked through skyscrapers." It is not the cycle of the seasons that is emphasized here, rather it is the return of important Death transformed, "Sleek, in silks and velvets … his opera cape swirls … he drives the alleys in a black limousine … He hires an angel." "And Persephone, a woman now, / keeps meeting him …" because he is

     the one who makes her other lovers
     seem adolescent, who listens to her,
     who's interested in her soul, not just her body,
     who understands the dark scars of childhood.

He reappears alternately as "Her professor of French romantics, / including seminars in de Sade," as "the dentist who calms her terror of pain / through hypnosis; the psychiatrist / she chooses at random … in the phone book…."

If, in other writers, critics might brand this kind of vision as excessive over-statement, it is the highly crafted imagination, conscience and commitment of both Lon Otto and Stuart Dybek that will insure that their work must and will be read. As technology rockets us toward a future promising longer and better life, we see before us the possibility of an environment that may not be fit to live in. Our defense must be in the deepening resolve to comprehend ourselves. In the exploration of the human psyche, equal attention must be given to the biophilia and necrophilia that twist their complex patterns in each of us. As in the work of William Van Wert … we must observe all the action that takes place on the killing floor, where nothing has been decided yet. The blood that is put inescapably before us is our own blood.