Teatro Grottesco by Thomas Ligotti Read Free Book Online Page A

knows his way around. You’ve been some places, am I right?’
    ‘I suppose so,’ I said.
    ‘I thought as much. Look, I’m not just interested in chit-chat here. I work on commission finding people like you. And I think you’ve got what it takes.’
    ‘For what?’ I asked.
    ‘Town management,’ he replied.
    I finished off the last few spoonfuls of my soup. I wiped my mouth with a paper napkin. ‘Tell me more,’ I said.
    It was either that or make an end of it.

SIDESHOW, AND OTHER STORIES
     
    FOREWORD
     
    A
t the time I met the man who authored the stories that follow, I had reached a crisis point in my own work as a writer of fiction. This gentleman, who was considerably older than I, was several steps ahead of me along the same path. ‘I have always desired to escape,’ he said, ‘from the grip of show business .’ He said these words to me across the table in a corner booth of the coffee shop where all our meetings took place in the late hours of the night.
    We had been first introduced by a waitress working the night shift who noticed we were both insomniacs who came into the coffee shop and sat for many hours smoking cigarettes (the same brand), drinking the terrible decaffeinated coffee they served in that place, and every so often jotting something in the respective notebooks which we both kept at hand. ‘All of the myths of mankind are nothing but show business,’ the other man said to me during our initial meeting. ‘Everything that we supposedly live by and supposedly die by – whether it’s religious scriptures or makeshift slogans – all of it is show business. The rise and fall of empires – show business. Science, philosophy, all of the disciplines under the sun, and even the sun itself, as well as all those other clumps of matter wobbling about in the blackness up there –’ he said to me, pointing out the window beside the coffee-shop booth in which we sat, ‘show business, show business, show business.’ ‘And what about dreams?’ I asked, thinking I might have hit upon an exception to his dogmatic view, or at least one that he would accept as such. ‘You mean the dreams of the sort we are having at this moment or the ones we have when we’re fortunate enough to sleep?’ I told him his point was well taken and withdrew my challenge, having only half-heartedly advanced it in the first place. The conversation nevertheless proceeded along the same course – he submitting one example after another of show business phenomena ; I attempting to propose plausible exceptions to the idiosyncratic doctrine with which he seemed hopelessly obsessed – until we went our separate ways just before dawn.
    That first meeting set the tone and fixed the subject matter of my subsequent encounters in the coffee shop with the gentleman I would come to regard as my lost literary father. I should say that I deliberately encouraged the gentleman’s mania and did all I could to keep our conversations focused on it, since I felt that his show-business obsession related in the most intimate way with my own quandary, or crisis, as a writer of fiction. What exactly did he mean by ‘show business’? Why did he find the ‘essentially show-business nature’ of all phenomena to be problematic? How did his work as an author coincide with, or perhaps oppose, what he called the ‘show-business world’?
    ‘I make no claims for my writing, nor have any hopes for it as a means for escaping the grip of show business,’ he said. ‘Writing is simply another action I perform on cue . I order this terrible coffee because I’m in a second-rate coffee shop. I smoke another cigarette because my body tells me it’s time to do so. Likewise, I write because I’m prompted to write, nothing more.’
    Seeing an entrance to a matter more closely related to my own immediate interest, or quandary or crisis, I asked him about his writing and specifically about what focus it might be said to have, what ‘center of