Waiting for the Mail : A novel of life at a YMCA along the Mexican border : THE LAST KNOWN RESIDENCE OF MICKEY ACUNA, <i> By Dagoberto Gilb (Grove Press: $21; 218 pp.)</i>

As most readers know, good fiction is often like good conversation. Chismes. Bromas. Mentiras. Scuttlebutt. Jokes. Lies. When a little bit of art is applied--including full-bodied characters, intriguing and original dialogue, well-layered story lines, and whatever poetry one can possess--this can be dangerous on the dance floor.

Dagoberto Gilb’s novel “The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna” is good talk throughout. It feels like a beer-joint seance. Like a coffee klatch. Like two compadres across the picket fence tearing into mutual associates while hanging the wash.

The novel is set around a period in the life of Mickey Acuna, a mysterious character, whose instincts, demeanor and voice are all too typical. He could be the local bar junkie. The seemingly always unemployed neighbor. Your brother-in-law.

But something is going on with Mickey. He settles into a YMCA room in El Paso, along the Mexican border, where lives converge, conflict and generally cave in. He awaits mail, who knows what kind, but it’s the thing Mickey’s most deathly concerned about--alongside women, Ping-Pong and getting blasted. Maybe it’s a check. A love letter. An imaginary inheritance. Regardless, the mail becomes an important issue in the book, a life-and-death matter for the kind of people whose lives end up spinning around mail.

Having stayed in similar habitats, including the former YMCA hotel on Wabash in Chicago, and ragged motels and SRO residences in and around Los Angeles, I can attest to the kind of people who emerge out of the revolving doors in Gilb’s Y: The blind man who plays accordion over the yells of a group of men watching a TV boxing match; the reverend with a smile, and deathly fire behind his eyes; and the ex-Marine porno-nut who lives to one day beat Mickey at Ping-Pong.

Gilb has entered a category of writing championed by such writers as the late Charles Bukowski, John Fante (whose L.A.-based stories and novels of life-at-the-bottom still resonate to new generations of readers) and Knut Hamsun, the Norwegian writer whose book “Hunger” may have been the modern daddy of such literature.

Here’s Gilb’s description of Mickey, Ping-Pong and the Y: “He played at night with the guys who groaned about the medicine smell of the TV room where the senior residents clustered in front of the blurred gray reception, where a faded tint of green light, a shade or two less than the polished floor tiles in every room and hall, squinted in from the opaque windows high above the basement-like room where metal folding chairs--usually a full ashtray next to one, an aggressive curl of smoke worming its way upward--arced around the corner, where the wooden console inhaled so much dust that you’d swear the raspy voice coming through its speaker, its mouth dry and nose clogged, would sneeze.”

Mickey eventually gets a job at the YMCA desk and falls for the clerical help. The book has a leisurely pace as the characters begin to take shape over the course of relating to Mickey. One of them, Butch, is a quiet, barely audible ex-con. His presence is mostly as scenery, background to the other more vocal, crazy or violent characters. But near the end, Butch ends up with one of the longest monologues, as he explains buying presents for his children and ex-wife, perhaps as a means to a reconciliation. We end up knowing more about him in that talk than we do about other characters in the whole book.

Gilb deftly moves the novel at a storyteller’s pace. Not too fast, not too slow. However this is both a strength and weakness in the book. The possible rationale for Mickey’s stay at the Y is brought to a head in a single scene near the end of the book. I say possible because it’s not quite sure what Mickey’s involvement is in the explosive incident that closes the novel. But it takes a long time to get there. The book often appeared to me as a drawn-out short story, taken to longer lengths then it needed to. But, then again, it also was the length that allowed the various characters to come alive; the book to find its structure.

I could also do without the obvious archetypes in the novel: the drunken Native American desk man, the big-breasted horny daughter of the clerical lady, the crazy black dude who eventually gets arrested, the fast-talking, high-energy white guy with a cowboy hat.

Yet Gilb’s gift is in telling stories of regular dudes and dudettes, common folk and working-class fools who are actually wise, intelligent and closest to the human emotions others try to escape from. He tells their lives without a lot of glitter or glamour, in the voice of such people, rich lived-in voices you have to pay a listen to.

A journeyman carpenter as well as writer (he has apparently worked on high-rises as long as he has been churning out fiction), Gilb also introduces into the great legacy of American writing characters from the border that often don’t make such appearances, except in a few distorted instances. In fact, the El Paso/Las Cruces region is fast becoming a hot bed of Latino/a literary talent, with such notables as Benjamin Saenz, Denise Chavez, Pat Mora as well as Gilb writing from there. And many more Latino/a writers in other cities--among whom I humbly include myself--have roots there.

I celebrate such writers, such works; they now must be recognized as vital to the living lexicon of North American letters.

As for Gilb, the way he can divulge a story he can sit in my back yard with beer in hand any time. I’ll wager he’s a good carpenter too.