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I worked at a bar in Hollywood for six years as a dishwasher, or what’s called a barback – a bartender’s assistant. During the fourth year I thought there might be a short story in it and began taking second-person notes at work, reminding myself to ‘discuss’ this or ‘discuss’ that, happenings large or small that I feared might be forgotten in the haze of smoke and whiskey. I brought the notes home and tried to re-work them in the first and third person, but when neither of these suited me I decided to write the piece in the notation style. It was only a short story, after all, and if it fell flat it was no great concern.

For me it’s a mystery, why something works or doesn’t in writing. An empty mystery, because I don’t much care about the why, only that the words do what they’re supposed to. My feeling with the notation format, the second-person voice coupled with the ‘discuss’ device, was that it worked, and worked well. This happy accident, along with my closeness to the subject matter, provided as solid a jumping-off point as I could have asked for, and I soon found the short story becoming a long story. At some point it occurred to me I was writing a novel. 

Ablutions wound up being about a few different things, and alcoholism is only one of them. It is about the protagonist’s search for the motivations of the bar regular, something that in real life became a kind of obsession for me. Here we had a group of grown men and women, some of them professionals, some of them on the fringes of society, gathering in a room each night to black out their lives and share their half-truths. They were transparently ingratiating with the staff; with one another they were tolerant or contemptuous and occasionally violent. What was the appeal of this room for them? What did the ritual hold? This remains vague to me, but I came to see they were filling out their lives as best as they could; also that they shared a fear of time passing, and recognized time as a needful, hungry space.

Ablutions is also about work. Or rather work vs the worker. I’d had any number of horrible jobs before the bar, but in this last position I felt I’d met my match. At first I was pleased: good pay, all the drinks I wanted, days free to write. But as the years passed, the routine began to take its toll. The drinking became heavier and invariably ruined the next day’s writing for me. Also my personal life was suffering; one can’t expect respect from his mate while retching. At the same time things were going south for me: a good friend and co-worker at the bar was experiencing similar troubles, and we spent our shifts drinking and discussing our problems. We were frustrated, we felt cheated. More than anything we were worried our lives had arrived. I wanted to give this person a voice: someone who believes he can do better, but doesn’t know what better entails, doesn’t know where to begin. Eventually, my friend and I figured this out. He got sober. I wrote a book.

Further reading...

Ablutions
By Patrick deWitt
Granta
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Meet the rest of Waterstone’s New Voices 2009: Matthew Plampin, Jenn Ashworth, Patrick deWitt. Francesca Kay, Amanda Smyth, Catherine Hall, Dave Boling, Richard Millward, Mari Strachan. Janice Lee, Anthony Quinn and Yiyun Li

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