Thom Jones’ Writing Is From Deep Within the Pits : Literature: He went from boxer to mental patient to janitor to one of the hottest names in the slick magazines.

Writer Thom Jones is obsessing--about the broken dryer vent spewing lint all over the crawl space below his house, and how he’d rather sell the house than have to crawl underneath it.

He’s obsessed with his blood sugar, which is dangerously low, and his caffeine intake, which is dangerously high. He envisions himself dropping dead in the back yard while mowing the lawn, and calculates how long it might take to discover his body.

He lights another Kool, wondering if this is the one that finally gives him the cancer, and says: “Life is terribly sad.”

This from a man whose prospects have never been better.

His first book, “The Pugilist at Rest,” was a National Book Award finalist; the title story won an O. Henry Award. The magazines can’t get enough of him. A second story collection is in the works. So is a novel. But Jones isn’t thinking about that.

The contrast between his prospects and his outlook is by no means his only contradiction. He’s also an ex-Marine and former amateur boxer who thinks testosterone is destroying the world; a Christian who doesn’t believe in an afterlife; a writer who immortalizes himself in his fiction, the better to disappear in real life.

“When I write, I’m not Thom Jones anymore,” he says. “He goes away. If I didn’t write, I’d have to be Thom Jones all the time. I’ve always hated myself.”

He’s been a factory worker, an advertising copywriter, a high school janitor, a drunk. Now 49, he’s saved his boldest career move for last: transforming a Dickensian childhood, a boxing-related brain injury and a life of anguish into art.

“Writers as good as Thom Jones appear but rarely,” raved the New York Times Book Review after “The Pugilist at Rest” was published by Little, Brown & Co. in 1993.

“There was a reservoir of malice, poison and vicious sadism in my soul, and it poured forth freely in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam,” Jones writes in the title story, about a Marine who loses his best friend and his sense of self.

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Other stories tell of battles in boxing rings, cancer wards and asylums, against epilepsy, alcohol, madness. The common thread is pain: the pain of lost love, betrayal, disease and despair.

He has known them all, one way or another. His best Marine buddy was killed in Vietnam. His father, a paranoid schizophrenic, committed suicide. His mother-in-law died of cancer, his beloved grandmother of heart failure.

They are all there in his stories, along with the things that have saved him: fast cars, faithful dogs, German philosophers, boxing, the Doors. The photo on the book jacket shows a menacing hulk with taped fists and an insolent stare. It’s a misleading image. Over the last several years, diabetes has devoured more than 50 pounds of muscle and bone, leaving him with the limbs of a scarecrow and the face of a monk, all eyes and angles.

Sally, his wife of 25 years, and Jenny, their 11-year-old daughter, are off visiting friends. But Shelby, the boxer dog, fills the suburban ranch house with the boundless enthusiasm of her breed.

The family is getting ready to move to Iowa City for a year. Half-packed boxes are everywhere. A big house has been rented; the owner, perhaps in response to Jones’ violent fictional world, has demanded a huge damage deposit. The author is highly amused.

He’ll teach at the University of Iowa’s prestigious writing program, where he once was a student. Sally will take a year off from her library job at the same high school her husband once cleaned.

His metamorphosis from janitor to writer began in earnest less than four years ago, after a friend urged him to “write something so good they can’t reject it.” It was a new concept for Jones, who’d always assumed it was he, not his work, that was being rejected. “I thought I had to have a background,” he says.

Jones had a background, all right. He grew up in gritty Aurora, Ill., the son of a boxer who abandoned the family and later hanged himself at an Oregon asylum. “Whenever I did something wrong, my uncle would say, ‘That’s the Jones in him coming out.’ ”

Life was no better with his stepfather, Frank, an ill-tempered used car salesman who reminded him of a vampire. “The only way not to get hit by Frank was to divert his attention. There was such strain and fear I don’t know how I survived it.”

His feelings of worthlessness survived too. “At Christmas, I was always depressed. I always thought, ‘You don’t deserve it.’ The awards and attention make me doubly depressed. Each story takes six months off my life.”

As a child, his misery was eased by his grandmother, a grocer who fed the hobos even as she struggled to pay off large debts left by her husband, a womanizer who died after drinking bad prohibition booze.

“She loved me more than anything in the world,” Jones says. “She told me that I would grow up and make something of myself--show everybody. She warned me about the futility of life and prepared me as much as anyone can.”

What she didn’t teach him he learned at the gym. “Boxing taught me how to proceed with courage in a situation loaded with fear. You also learn discipline; to get up every morning, do more miles, more sit-ups than the other guy.”

By 19, he’d amassed a respectable record. Then he entered the ring, drunk, with a fellow Marine who proceeded to knock him into the middle of next week.

“I had seen stars before from big punches; I had seen pinwheels; but after that shot to the temple I saw the worst thing you ever see in boxing--I saw the black lights.”

The injury landed him at Camp Pendleton’s neuropsychiatric facility. His headaches, double vision and strange spells were eventually attributed to a lesion on his left temporal lobe. To this day, he retains a grudging respect for the epilepsy that shares his skull, viewing it as a necessary evil. Without it, he says, he wouldn’t be the writer he is today.

“I had been a blue-collar guy destined for a blue-collar life.” If the seizures left him edgy and depressed, they also deepened his hunger for knowledge of literature, philosophy and religion.

He discovered the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, whose bleak pronouncements about the futility of life soothed and consoled him. In the fleeting insights that sometimes preceded his seizures, Jones came to know why the disease of Dostoevsky, St. Paul and Joan of Arc is sometimes called “the sacred disease.”

“I can’t explain it, I don’t understand it--it becomes slippery and elusive when it gets any distance on you--but I have felt this down to the core of my being. Yes, God exists! But then it slides away and I lose it,” he writes.

“You take enough drugs to drop an elephant,” a neurosurgeon scolds the epileptic narrator of “The Pugilist at Rest.” So does Jones. The top of his refrigerator is cluttered with the prescribed tablets and capsules that get him through each day.

Though he no longer experiences grand mal seizures, he vividly recalls “the terrible sense of shame” that accompanied them.

After his injury, Jones was discharged from the Marines. The rest of his platoon went to Vietnam, where all but one of them died. At the time, Jones was disappointed at not getting to go.

His military career over, he enrolled at the University of Hawaii. His writing showed promise. Atlantic magazine came close to publishing one of his stories but declined after Jones refused to make the requested changes. He went on to the University of Washington, and later to Iowa, where his fellow students included journalist Tracy Kidder.

Years later, Jones came home from the night shift and plopped down with a six-pack to watch TV. There was Kidder being interviewed by Tom Brokaw about Kidder’s latest best seller. There was Jones, still in his work shirt, with the words “Thomas” and “custodian” on the front. The contrast was painful.

Soon after, Jones spent three weeks at a detox center. He hasn’t touched alcohol since.

One winter night 3 1/2 years ago, he again came home from work and turned on the TV. This time, sober, he watched a Gulf War military briefing that left him agitated and disturbed. “What is wrong with males?” he thought. “Why do they run the world?”

He turned on his computer and started to write, interspersing his brutal tale of a Vietnam War hero with a tribute to the ancient gladiators and an angry commentary on contemporary American life.

He finished in one sitting. That done, he fixed himself a fried-egg sandwich, printed the story, and mailed it to The New Yorker, America’s premier showcase for quality fiction.

What happened next still seems like a miracle. The story was rescued from the magazine’s mountain of unsolicited manuscripts and published to great acclaim in December, 1991.

No one was more amazed or more afraid than Jones.

“If I made a full commitment and came up short, the dream would be over,” he says of his writing. “This time, I made a full assault. I told myself it would be The New Yorker and the prizes or nothing. I would work hard to free the truth that’s within me and make it art.”