The Year of Living Famously (Finally) : For Almost Two Decades, Dagoberto Gilb Could No Get Published. His Laborers and Dreamers, Drifting Across the Southwest Landscape, Went Undiscovered, Until He Hooked Up With a University Press. Then It Started Raining Literary Prizes.

Don’t bother asking author Dagoberto Gilb to talk about himself, because he will--and he will regret it.

He will regret it because he will tell you much more than he means to tell you, much more than he probably should tell you, much more than, in the end, you should know. This is a man who has packed a lifetime of hard living into 45 years. A man who has roamed from East Los Angeles to the western tip of Texas, yet who can truly call no single place home. A man who has known desperately hard times and broken more than a few laws. For this, he will make no apologies, because as Gilb sees it, a storyteller is only as interesting as the life he has led. And while many may quibble with the paths he has taken, few would deny that his life has been one long, occasionally terrifying, adventure.

And if you attempt to understand Dagoberto Gilb, he will tell you that you are missing the point. Read his novel “The Last Known Residence of Mickey Acuna”; read his collection of short stories, “The Magic of Blood.” This is where you will learn all that matters, he will say. But the desire to understand him remains, because this excruciatingly contradictory man so defies understanding. A union carpenter with a degree in philosophy and no formal writing training, he didn’t even pick up a pen until his mid-20s. For years he managed to publish in obscure literary magazines. Then, after screaming into the void for an interminable 10 years, after almost abandoning the whole damn thing, he was handed, one right after another, practically every major literary prize awardable: He was a 1994 finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for best fiction and won 1994’s PEN/Ernest Hemingway Foundation Award for first fiction, a 1993 Whiting Writers’ Fellowship, 1994’s Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award and a 1995 John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

He’s a man whose rakish charm and inexhaustible exuberance can easily overwhelm. Whose angry confrontations with uppity members of the creative-writing Establishment are legendary, yet whose speech and writing often register one notch above a whisper. A man who continues to rail against a system that once ignored him--despite the fact that this system has wholeheartedly embraced him.

It all defies understanding, but you will attempt it nonetheless because at the center of it all is a man with an extraordinary gift. Not that extraordinary necessarily translates into likable. Gilb is, first and foremost, a fighter. He’ll be the first to stand up and say (proudly), “If someone wants to not like me, there’s always a good reason.”

He also doesn’t understand why you want to know so much about him, fearing that you will confuse his life with his stories. He would prefer to let his writing do the talking. But you won’t let him, and for that you are glad.

It was said that my great-grandmother ended up in California and eventually got into the beginnings of the film industry. Nobody knows whether she got rich by it, or famous, or anything, though we do know she married some movie director--he was also old and he also died, but no one talks about any intrigue concerning his death. What mattered, to all of us, was this one glamorous, and verifiable, detail: she had a Hollywood address. It was like believing there was magic in our blood.

From the short story “The Magic of Blood”

There are few verifiable details about Dagoberto Gilb’s family history--at least, few verifiable through him. In fact, family is the one topic he’s visibly uncomfortable discussing. He even requests numerous times that it not be mentioned. Yet he is the writer he is in large part because of his family life--or lack thereof.

“I’m like the least likely writer,” Gilb says. “Almost every writer I meet says they were writing their first story at 6. Well, sorry, I didn’t have any idea what a pen was then, you know? I wasn’t into that. I wasn’t one of these people who popped out of the womb and wrote about the womb experience.”

What Gilb will acknowledge is that his beautiful mother immigrated illegally to the United States from Mexico City as a young girl, and his ex-Marine father, of German ancestry, grew up in Boyle Heights. She lived next door to the industrial laundry where he worked and where they eventually met. Theirs was not a peaceful nor a lengthy marriage; in fact, Gilb never lived with his father.

“I didn’t know anything about family. I was always on my own,” he says matter-of-factly. “That was both the best thing about my mother and the worst thing: She didn’t do jack s - - - for me. I did everything for myself. Everything I’ve done has been because I’ve thought of it. Some things were bad, but I never got caught, and I thank God I didn’t get caught.”

What he knew most about as a teen was fast girls, fast cars and serious fights--in that order. When Gilb was 13, his father hired him to work part time at the laundry, so he always had plenty of pocket money. And for a kid left to fend for himself, there was plenty of trouble to be found.

“I was wild,” Gilb says over gorditas at his favorite neighborhood lunch spot in El Paso. With a smile, he pops out his false front tooth with his tongue--as if proof of his wildness were needed (he also broke his nose three times). “Lots of drugs. I grew up in the ‘60s. And I grew up in a part of Los Angeles that’s pretty bad--near Washington High School, right next to Watts.

“My requirement for friends was that you didn’t have both parents. You couldn’t have both parents and hang out with me. Those kids just didn’t live in the same possible world--they couldn’t get away with things, they couldn’t go out. I even had trouble with girls I liked if they had both parents.”

He and his friends would steal cars, mostly to joy ride. They’d go to Hollywood, then return the car if they could. Often they would steal the car of someone they knew. Another frequent pastime was rolling drunks along Atlantic Boulevard.

That phase lasted until Gilb was about 18.

“Then I got the light,” he says. “I wanted to be educated, and I got really serious about that--super serious about that. I wanted to be smart.”

He isn’t sure what prompted the dramatic switch. Certainly, the cloud of Vietnam played a big role. It was 1968, and he knew he didn’t want to play a part in that war, so he headed for junior college, attending a series of them before ending up at UC Santa Barbara. By the time he graduated in 1973 with a double major in philosophy and religious studies, he knew he wanted to be a professor. He went on to get a master’s degree in religious studies.

It was during this period that a teacher suggested he write down some of the stories he told with such relish, and he began jotting down his thoughts in notebooks. In these notebooks, which he has kept for more than 20 years, are the heart and soul of the writer. Yet only God knows what is contained in the thousands of pages, for Gilb steadfastly refuses to show them to anyone. This much he will say: When he was in the throes of his toughest times, instead of doing drugs or getting drunk, he would write. “I think it saved my life.”

Upon graduating, he turned to the only work he could find--construction. And so began his life as a nomad.

“At some point I just started wandering,” he says. “The first time I went to Colorado, I suddenly realized that what I really liked to do was get in a car and go places.”

By 1976, he had wended his way to El Paso. His intended destination was Austin, but El Paso held his interest; his mother had often claimed to have come from there.

When Gilb got to Texas, he was jobless, planless. Clueless. He would have arrived with a little over $300, but he blew a gasket driving across the desert, leaving him with about 30 bucks. He lived in a sleazy hotel while he looked for work. No luck. Finally, he moved to the Y, where he got a job as a desk clerk.

Those days form the foundation for “The Last Residence of Mickey Acuna,” which follows an aimless drifter who may or may not be running from the law, who ends up working the front desk of the Y in El Paso as he slowly loses his grip on reality, and whose future looks bleak.

“I was trapped solidly for a month or two,” Gilb says of his six-month stay at the Y. “I was getting nowhere.”

Fittingly, he’s now sipping a drink at the sort of dark, lived-in bar in Juarez that Micky might have frequented--and which, Gilb says, was a favorite haunt of Pancho Villa. He’s made the walk from El Paso on the sort of sizzling West Texas day that would wilt an out-of-towner, talking all the way.

*

None of us worked construction because we were rich, but neither did any let his body get this aching and exhausted and dirty only for love of money. It was a need, and what we learned, physically and mentally, was that not just anybody could do it, not week after week, month after month, year in and out. Our job was our pride, who we were around our families and neighbors....It was the sex the women liked about us, the muscles our children admired. Employed, it was what we were never ashamed of.

From the short story “Churchgoers”

*

Unlike Mickey, Gilb found a way out. He started getting construction jobs again, spending much of the ‘70s and ‘80s shuttling between lucrative union construction work in Los Angeles and his life in El Paso. He got married, had two sons. The carpentry work, which he grew to love, was the ideal contrast to his writing, which had become an even bigger passion.

“For me, a guy that likes to write, it was great,” says Gilb, who spent 16 years doing construction. “I could work six months and then take off for three and write some stories. It suited my nature; I’m not a dedicated company man. I didn’t want to work like that all the time. I had other things I wanted to do.

“But what I used to love about construction that I hate about writing is that it was really about what you did and not how you yakked. Nothing to do with what you said; it was, ‘Did you build it? Did you build it on time?’ I like that.”

As his short stories accumulated, he sent them to literary magazines. And got nowhere.

“At this point, I was totally into it,” he says. “I had this myth in my head that you wrote s - - -, you sent it off to magazines, you got paid. And when you got paid, you tried to write more, and that’s how it worked. But it isn’t that way.”

What he discovered was academia’s intricate creative-writing system: Aspiring writer applies to university with prestigious creative-writing program, studies with prestigious author/teacher who introduces aspiring writer to prestigious agents/editors who publish aspiring writer’s work. The better the program, the better the author/teacher, the fewer the students, the more clout with the publishing industry.

It boggled his mind.

“It was stunning to me to see that you had to go to college to be a writer,” Gilb says. “I thought it was the opposite. I thought you needed to be intelligent and you needed to write well and you needed to find an editor.

“It just seems unfair when it’s really about how much you can afford to spend or whether you can fit into an institution,” he continues, getting more than a little worked up. When this happens (which is often) Gilb’s brain produces words much faster than his mouth can process them, and one thought tumbles into another before it’s completed.

“I just think it’s odd . . . that access . . . and there’s this pecking order . . . I find it offensive. . . . It’s everything that I don’t believe art is about. Art is about being a little wild, taking risks, not necessarily getting approval from somebody; it’s the disapproval. I used to think the more of them, the better I would look. They’ve never been out of school. It’s like their whole life is this resume: How many gaps do you have? Me, I like gaps. Gaps are interesting. This gap tells me something about your personality. I’m suspicious of people who are too good at all that.”

The people who are “good at all that” weren’t remotely interested in publishing Gilb’s stories, which focus primarily on the professional and personal struggles of working-class Mexican Americans. They considered his work “too colloquial.”

“One editor said, ‘You know, they’re all laborers or carpenters; they’re all the same,’ ” Gilb recalls. “Well, what’s the difference between a banker and a receptionist? They’re livin’ in the same world. But a plumber and an electrician are not the same to me. And a mechanic is not the same as a carpenter. They just didn’t understand the class.

“They don’t expect Chicanos to be employed. They would look at my stories and say: ‘Where are the cholos ? Where are the curanderas ? Where are the illegals? Where’s the Chicano world? Where do you live?’

“Well, I’m in El Paso, and I’m tellin’ you, this is how it is. They just didn’t get it.”

There was one notable exception: Wendy Lesser, editor of The Threepenny Review, who consistently published his work.

“I remember thinking this guy was like Chekhov with a working-class Hispanic environment and language,” Lesser says. “He had this really tough, detailed, interesting world that I hadn’t seen much access to in fiction. The nature of the stories and what he was doing fictionally had to do with very delicate turns of emotions. Almost nothing happening and then a little, tiny change that affected people emotionally but in no other discernible way. And I thought that was a wonderful combination.”

Although a number of other literary magazines began to publish Gilb’s work, Lesser was disappointed that the interest stopped there.

“I would fly into a rage because I would nominate him for prizes and nothing would happen,” she says, “and then I would recommend agents and editors and people he could send things to. But then I would get phone calls from them saying, ‘Do you edit his stuff because the language in your publication sounds like good English and he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy that could write good English.’ That would drive me mad because I wouldn’t edit his stuff any more than I would edit anyone else’s. It was the most incredible kind of racism that I had no access to until I saw Dagoberto’s work.”

Time continued to tick by--five years, 10 years--without any major publishing interest.

“At one point, I counted the number of pages of my fiction that had been printed. It was like 700 pages, and I couldn’t get a book,” Gilb says peevishly. “And I thought, ‘This is ridiculous. Why am I not qualified to be in a book?’ ”

Lesser believes that a number of factors stymied Gilb:

“One was being Hispanic but the wrong kind of Hispanic; they wanted the tokens to have a certain quality, and he didn’t have that. Also, bad taste on the part of the commercial publishing industry. They’re in there to make money, and they looked at his stuff and said, ‘That’s not going to make any money.’ ”

Gilb reached bottom somewhere between 1991 and 1992. He couldn’t get a construction job. He was disgusted with the literary world. His two young sons were growing up in front of him, and he had nothing in print to show them he hadn’t been wasting his life.

A few midsize presses had expressed interest in publishing his work over the years, but he had always turned them down: He was holding out for New York. This time, when The University of New Mexico Press approached him, he said yes. He sent two collections of his short stories, which were combined into “The Magic of Blood.”

In doing so, Gilb says, “I was symbolically giving up the fight. So I sent them, and everybody there was really enthusiastic. And I thought, ‘What an a - - hole I’ve been. What a stupid a - - hole.’ ”

That’s when things really began to turn around.

I applied for a prize....I didn’t expect to win. Not because I shouldn’t, because I arrogantly believe I should, even pisses me off to think I won’t. Except the prize isn’t only about the work, how deserving. It’s more about being in the right places, knowing the right people, doing the right things. I live in El Paso, and Chino, who I like, cuts my hair for seven bucks, and most of the time I scrounge for any work I can. I’m not appropriate, I am not winner material.

From the short story “The Prize”

Gilb didn’t know much about literary awards, so when the UNM Press asked which ones he wanted them to enter, he had to do some research before making his list, which included the PEN/Faulkner, the PEN/Hemingway and the National Book Award. He did know about the Texas Institute of Letters Jesse Jones Award, and he wanted it. Ironically, he almost didn’t get it-- but only because his editors somehow neglected to ship the entries for any of the awards. Gilb discovered this fortuitously, and, furious, he did some 11th-hour mailing of his own. This time, the tenaciousness paid off.

First came the Whiting Award, with its $30,000 purse. Although he had won an NEA grant in 1992 (which kept him from getting evicted and bought his house), winning the Whiting was what Gilb considers his first real break. It provided his first trip to New York. And with that, he says, “Something changed. You could just tell.”

He had been shopping “Mickey Acuna” around for about two years. It was not an easy novel to sell. Much of the action occurs within the main character’s head as he drifts further and further away from reality. There is little resembling a traditional plot. The ending isn’t.

“I was trying to let this place dictate what the shape would be,” Gilb says. “I’m trying to give the experience of the Y, of living that life. And when you’re done, with all your questions, you’re just bitching about living there just like all the other people living there. So when you come away, you might have a view of what happened; but the fact is, you can’t be sure what happened.”

Morgan Entrekin, publisher of Grove/Atlantic, bought the book. Ever since he acquired and merged Grove with Atlantic Monthly Press in 1993, Entrekin has been working overtime to return Grove to its former glory. He says he knew immediately that Gilb would be an ideal fit: “There’s a seriousness to the work. It isn’t just wild and loose; it’s very, very tightly crafted.”

Finally, Dagoberto was home.

“My literary life is in Grove,” Gilb says. “Grove represents the literary wildness that has been absent for almost 20 years in this country. It was where the avant-garde, the odd, the outlaw people hooked up--William Burroughs, Jack Kerouac, Samuel Beckett, Henry Miller, Jean Genet.”

In December of 1993, Grove bought the rights to the novel and the paperback rights to “The Magic of Blood.” In the spring of ‘94, Gilb won the Jesse Jones best book award. A month later, he learned he was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner. A month later, he got a call from Pulitzer Prize-winning author E. Annie Proulx. She told him he had won the PEN/Hemingway.

Gilb’s response?

“The first thing I said was, ‘I can’t take it; this is too much.’ It was just too much of a turnaround. First, nobody wants me, and suddenly . . . I called my agent and said, ‘I think they should give it to somebody else. I don’t need any more prizes. I’ve got plenty now.’

“Before, you’re writing and you feel like you’re taking this leap. And you don’t know if you’re going to land or not; you’re just in the air. And the awards came, and I landed in New York.

“Poof!” he says, laughing. ‘It was sort of amazing. I was still in shock. You hit bottom, and the bottom turns into the top. It was definitely odd. New Mexico was not New York.”

And it wasn’t over. This year, Gilb won the Guggenheim.

All he really wished for was something like a clear, unpolluted understanding. Clear? Maybe even more than that. Mickey was alert for a directive issued from God or His Equivalent. A bush. A special twinkle in the sky. A voicelike shaking underfoot. Anything like that. Mickey did not want messiahhood, prophethood, sainthood. Mickey was simple in this: He wanted one truth that was, at least, true. He could get healthy off that. Like aspirin for the headache, Alka-Seltzer for the stomach, socks for cold feet.

From “The Last Residence of Mickey Acuna”

Gilb has a big mouth, which he doesn’t hesitate to shoot off when he’s provoked. Over the years, he’s been provoked a lot. Mostly by the so-called Plimpton set (it was George Plimpton who first dubbed him too colloquial) and their buddies in the creative-writing world. There was that especially memorable panel discussion at the University of Houston where he went head to head with poet (and Paris Review poetry editor) Richard Howard. Not to mention that running feud with Texas Observer editor Lou Dubose. He’s also had his gripes with other magazine types, with his Chicano brethren, with his birthplace. The running theme: a lack of respect.

He spent years trying to write for Texas Monthly. He pitched idea after idea. He was successful--once. A second story was accepted, then held for a year (he threatened to take the magazine to small-claims court over that one). A few got edited into oblivion. All involved much angry exchange. The rift continues to baffle Gilb, primarily because Texas Monthly editor Gregory Curtis was one of the first people to praise his work.

Gilb doesn’t understand why, even after he won all those awards, he wasn’t Texas Monthly material. The only answer he could come up with was that the magazine wasn’t interested in the Mexican American experience.

Curtis sees things differently. The problem, he says, is more simple than that:

“We don’t print fiction. There’s a lot of straightforward reporting that goes into our stories. I think Doug is a really good writer, but he’s not a reporter. If I’m remembering rightly, the problems we had with the stories were that they weren’t reported; they were out of his own experience and I didn’t think were telling enough as they were.”

Ironically, Texas Monthly’s September cover story listed Gilb among its 20 “most impressive, intriguing and influential Texans of 1995.” But don’t expect Gilb to return the favor. When asked if he’d write for the magazine now, he says simply: “They can kiss my a - -.”

Earlier this year, Gilb was contacted by the New Yorker, which he says was interested in including him in its summer fiction issue. He thought about putting something together for them, but his body, he says, wouldn’t let him do it: “I just didn’t care enough. I’m not gonna jump just because they paid attention now.”

Some of Gilb’s peers--primarily the ones he hasn’t pissed off--consider his bluster a welcome addition to the scene.

“Writing is such a timid little fluttery world,” says Austin-based author Sarah Bird. “Dagoberto is the perfect antidote to the world that rules writing out here, and that’s the Texas Monthly mentality. Texas Monthly is about status, it’s about a very acute kind of class awareness and getting at the high side of that. And that’s everything Dagoberto is not.

“If he thinks there’s an injustice, he pursues it and pursues it. And if that means calling up a magazine editor and saying, ‘I’m gonna kick your a - -,’ he’ll do it.... Quite frankly, it would be a better world if a lot of those editors got their butts kicked regularly.”

Just as he had a love-hate relationship with the New York literati, there was a time when Gilb was miserably uncomfortable with his cultural identity.

“I wanted to be German and smart,” he says. “As a kid, you work out these stereotypes, and I was totally ashamed. Being smart was not being Mexican. I hate to admit it, but it was true. It’s what they do to your brain. It’s total bulls - - -.

“I had a German philosopher phase: I wanted to be half-breed Hegel. I used to read a lot of half-breed Indian novels. I loved those stories ‘cause that’s how I felt all my life: not anything; not this or that.”

Today, although Gilb has come to terms with his heritage, he--along with many of his peers--is ambivalent about being labeled a “Chicano author” or “Southwestern voice.”

“The nice thing about Dagoberto’s writing,” says author E. Annie Proulx, “is that it’s just not ‘here’s a Chicano slice of life.’ It’s humanist writing in the best way--in its compassionate voice that comes to us. And it wouldn’t matter if he were a seventh-generation Yankee or a Norwegian immigrant or whatever, as long as that voice and that compassion and that eye were still there. So the ethnic writer label is less important to me than the quality of the writing of the stories, which transcend any of that sort of thing.”

Gilb consciously refuses to tow the politically correct line.

“Certain Chicanos will say to me, ‘Why don’t you write more about politics? You’re not really writing about la causa.’ The funny thing is the laborers are very much aware that even talking about the working class is extremely ‘cause’--it’s the oldest, most radical cause in this country. It’s a dangerous subject. A lot of people don’t see that. And there’s nothing I can say. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it.”

What also vexes Gilb is that his fellow Angelenos have shown so little interest in his work. (During the L.A. stop of his book tour last Fedruary,, two people showed up at the Rizzolisigning.) “From 1979-86, I was in L.A., and not one person was ever curious about me, and I was publishing--probably more than most,” he says.

It isn’t that he doesn’t love L.A.; he does: “Growing up in L.A., you think it’s the greatest place in the world. I’d see license plates from New Mexico or Arizona and think, ‘Those poor saps; they’re not in L.A.’ ” It’s just that as far as he’s concerned, most writing about L.A. isn’t about the real L.A.

“When people write about L.A.,” he says, “they’re really writing about Santa Monica, West Hollywood or West Los Angeles. Maybe Beverly Hills. People live in Santa Monica and think they live in L.A. People from the East move to Santa Monica or West L.A. They don’t move to Paramount or Compton, which is where a lot of people live. And those people live as far away from L.A. as people in El Paso.”

The difference between Mickey and the Sarge was that Mickey knew he didn’t know what might happen next, while the Sarge thought Mickey did.

From “The Last Residence of Mickey Acuna”

*

Gilb is a year behind on his next novel, “20 lbs,” the story of two guys who sell 20 pounds of marijuana to a New Age couple in Denver. He started it before all the hoopla--before the book tour and the awards ceremonies, the public readings and the appearances on NPR’s “Fresh Air” program. It was going to be his commercial novel, a quickie to get him squared financially.

The only problem is, for the past year, he’s been doing almost everything but work on the book. Speaking to the carpenters’ union in Washington D.C. Reading at the Library of Congress. Hanging out at Elaine’s. Schmoozing with movie stars at the Chateau Marmont. Then back to Washington to share the stage with Pete Seeger at a labor/arts event. Mingling with Chicano students at Yale.

The notebooks, meanwhile, have flourished.

“I write in them every day,” Gilb says. “That’s the writer I am: this guy who keeps track of s - - -. I love them because nobody’s looking over my shoulder, nobody’s judging me. If I’m weeping or writing s - - -, nobody cares.”

Which is important when you’re going through “a sea change,” as Gilb says. “It’s like I moved to a different country, and I’m not acculturated. Like I’m learning a new language. I haven’t felt right for the past year or so.”

And he hasn’t felt quite right about “20 lbs.”

“I had a draft,” he says, “but it wasn’t the book I wanted to publish. But it’s changed, and that’s good. Now it got weird. Now it’ll be interesting. What I need is to not get pulled out of it.”

What he needed was to escape life as he now knows it. So in August, he picked up stakes and headed to Providence, R.I. (thanks to a connection at Brown University) to focus on “20 lbs.” He stayed two months in hopes that he would finish, but didn’t.

The good news is that in the midst of all this turmoil, he’s learned a thing or two about himself and his writing. One of the reasons he’s so antsy to finish “20 lbs.” is that he’s excited about the idea for the novel that will succeed it (which he will describe merely as “an L.A. novel”). And he’s once again motivated to write.

“I feel like I’ve got the best job in the world,” he says. “I feel really lucky. Most people my age have been doing something for 20 years and they’re bored, or they’ve peaked. But my career’s just gettin’ goin’.

“What I discovered is that I get to write. One of my jobs is to try to write these stories that I have. The two novels are my required thing so I can get into heaven. And the other things are extra.

“It’s like, wow, I’ll just do these and I can die smilin’. Maybe I didn’t do a lot of things right, but I did my job.”

Mickey made himself invisible downhill from the car and took off into darkness, away from voices. Nothing was unintentional. Not the star-punctured sky, the bleached moon, not the blackened earth below; a gulf of flat desert ringing to the curved brim, falling into the emptiness of this world. Except the emptiness was all around, and the moon suspended in it precariously, perilously, was evidence and proof, night after night.

From “The Last Residence of Mickey Acuna”