Cinder-hell-a

>> J.T. Leroy traces his scary fairy tale life in The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things

by JULIET WATERS

 In this month's Vanity Fair there's a picture of Jeremiah T. Leroy dressed up as a freakish Cinderella. The symbolism is obvious, though somewhat inside out. The usual take on this tale has an orphan being handed over to an evil step-parent. Instead, at the age of four, Leroy was taken from loving foster parents and handed over to his extremely fucked-up, 18-year-old birth mother. The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things, Leroy's first collection of short stories, narrates how he went from a home where Bugs Bunny was considered too violent, to life on the road with a truck-stop hooker.

 Leroy's mother, the inspiration for his first novel, Sarah, published last year when he was 20, is the hooker with the heart of crack. Narcissistic, nasty and paranoid, she convinces the four-year-old J.T. that he's wanted by the police for being evil. She eviscerates his self-esteem, beats him, molests him, leaves him for days in his own urine-soaked sheets and clothes, locks him in a hotel room for the weekend with a pack of cheese slices while she goes off to find action, and dresses him up as a girl so she can pass him off as her sister. Well before puberty he's been raped by his mother's ex-boyfriend. By the time he's hit puberty he's a cross-dressing truck-stop hooker himself, a full-blown masochist, and uncertain of his gender.

 Now the Cinderella part. As a teenage runaway, Leroy's writing talent was discovered by a competent therapist whose encouragement led him to publish. By age sixteen he'd achieved cult status. He's been mentored by Dennis Cooper, Dorothy Allison and Mary Gaitskill. He's a regular contributor to Spin, and New York Press. He's received raves in the New York Times and The Guardian. Sarah is being made into a movie by Gus Van Sant. And this month he's interviewed in Vanity Fair by Tom Waits who writes, "J.T.'s stories are like stitches, like exit wounds, dispatches, depositions. He is the brilliant, gifted, and profound fly on the wall. You'll need handkerchiefs and Novocain to get through his new book."

 In the context of this kind of hype, it's important to know that the stories in this recent collection were written before Sarah, and should probably be read after Sarah. In the scope of Leroy's hopefully long career, they will go down as his juvenilia. This is a weird word to use about someone who was exposed to more adult reality at four than most people at 40. But there's a great leap between the maturity in this collection, and the vision in Sarah. While beautifully written and unbearably moving, The Heart Is Deceitful still has a somewhat journalistic, black-and-white moral vision. Sarah was remarkable for the lurid, colourful, complex way in which this world was crafted and also for the rich sense of humour, which is virtually missing from the short stories.

 With or without Novocain, one finds oneself numb by the end of the never-ending tale of abuse. What hurts more than the abuse is how betrayed the narrator is by his own heart. He has no one to love but his mother, and because at an early age he was programmed to love, he does what comes naturally: forgive her, trust her and want her.

 They say that the first three years form a child's life forever. Obviously this theory doesn't take into account the possible appearance of depraved birth mothers. In interviews Leroy has thanked God that he had a decent early childhood or he might have become a total psychopath. But, at the same time it's obvious that this innocence made him all the more vulnerable. It made him capable of love. And there are moments in this book when one can't help but hate love. Still, what defies the title is the very strong heart that beats beneath the beatings. It's this heart that must give him the strength to face memories that most people would still be trying desperately to repress. :

 The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things by J.T. Leroy, Bloomsbury, hc, 247pp, $37.95

 

Down There by the Train by Kate Sterns, Knopf Canada, hc, 246 pp, $29.95