INTERVIEWER
Outside of Steinbeck, I haven’t read anything else about day-labor farmwork in such detail as in Fat City. Did you know boxers who did that?
GARDNER
Oh yeah. A lot of those boxers worked on the farms. When I worked out in the Lido Gym, where the professionals were working out, they’d come right from the fields in their overalls, with peat dust all over everything. After a hard day’s labor, they’re beating the hell out of the bag and they’re sparring. Most of them were minorities. When you’re in a place like Stockton, you need a job, and nobody wants to hire you. So you go out and work in the fields.
INTERVIEWER
Did you ever do that kind of work yourself?
GARDNER
Yeah. And it wasn’t research, either. I first worked when I was fourteen years old. The postmaster of Lodi was a friend of my father’s. He had a ten-acre walnut orchard and I just wanted to make money. I worked a couple of days. My job was to run in front of a tractor. It was pulling what they called a tower, where a guy had this long pole and was knocking walnuts out of the trees. It wasn’t safe work for a kid. I ran up and pulled the walnuts that had been knocked down from the tractor’s track. My hands were six or eight inches from the tractor coming in. I was motivated to save every nut. I could’ve easily gotten my hand run over and maybe amputated.
INTERVIEWER
In the book, you paint the skid row of Stockton as a place of ratty hotels and dive bars. On the first page, we find Billy living in a place called the Hotel Coma. Was there really a hotel with that name, or did you make that up? Because it’s such a beautiful metaphor.
GARDNER
I was afraid to use it. There was a Hotel Coma in Stockton, but I felt that if I put it in the first line of my book, everybody was going to say, What heavy-handed symbolism. And the other voice in my head said, if there’s really a place like that in Stockton, I’m chickenshit for not using it.
INTERVIEWER
That world you describe barely exists now.
GARDNER
It’s in the paper a lot in San Francisco. There’re hundreds of people sleeping on the sidewalk. A lot of them have tents. They sort of set up almost like a permanent home. Everything is so goddamn expensive now that it makes sense that there would be that many people that have to sleep on the street.
INTERVIEWER
In Los Angeles there is also a huge homeless encampment.
GARDNER
I was not interested in a beautiful tourist spot. I never wanted to write about society people or something like that. I was interested in the rougher side of life. There’s something about struggling people, poor people, that’s dramatic. Struggle is dramatic. I’ve had friends who wrote pretty good novels about college boys and college professors. I didn’t dislike them. But it’s a matter of drama. For a lot of people, real life is a struggle. Maybe wealthy people suffer, but if you read a book about their suffering—a multimillionaire’s wife is divorcing him or something—it’s just different to me. It’s not as desperate as drama set in poverty. A boxer can get killed any time he enters a ring. And also, I grew up with an ex-boxer father who talked about boxing all the time. It was a world I got very interested in.
INTERVIEWER
Your father became an inspector for the U.S. Postal Service, but you mentioned that he had no education.
GARDNER
No, he had an education. He went through the sixth grade. He was smart, and then he learned to type. He should’ve been a writer. I have a pile of stories he wrote. He was kind of a natural writer. He would write three- or four-page letters to family whom he hadn’t seen in years, and he’d take trips and make up stories about people traveling where he traveled.
INTERVIEWER
You studied writing.
GARDNER
I started writing fiction in the fifth grade, after I recovered from rheumatic fever. I had been in bed for eighteen months without seeing anyone but my parents and my sister. And then I went back to school. I would write stories and the teacher would read them to the class. He thought they were really good. And so I started saying I wanted to be a writer when I grew up. I started writing a novel when I was about fifteen. Did you ever read Thorne Smith?
INTERVIEWER
The guy who wrote Topper?
GARDNER
Yeah, he wrote sexy comic novels. I was reading him and I thought, That’s the way to go. So I tried to write one of those novels. I was fifteen and I would come home from school and the other kids would want me to come out and play. And I’d say, “I can’t, I’m working on my novel.” I never finished it, but it was good. I put in everything I knew about sex.
INTERVIEWER
Then you went on to study creative writing at San Francisco State University.
GARDNER
That’s where I did my last two years of college. I got my B.A. there. I was what was called a humanities major. I was interested in art, too, and took painting courses and sculpture and pottery. I did take quite a few writing courses.
INTERVIEWER
Was there anything valuable that you remember from those courses?