Metro Pulse/Gamut/Jack Mauro's Gay Street

Jack Mauro didn't know what to expect from Knoxville. In his book Gay Street, he tries to make sense of what he's found.

by Jack Neely

When dark falls the park becomes one of any number of things. It is a halted carousel, or an elegant wine party scene, or an altar in a pastoral cathedral. More than at any other time of year, the tiny park is then universal. It glows with the voltage of all possibilities, vulgar and dreamy, richly spiritual and mawkishly sentimental.

You may be surprised that those words were written in the last 50 years, or the last 100. The style might remind you of Dickens, or Hardy, or Austen, or Proust. In fact, that's just part of a passage from a story called "The Park: II" that describes Krutch Park at Christmas time. The setting is just five years ago.

Gay Street is a collection of stories related only by the fact that they have the same setting. They all take place in or near downtown Knoxville.

The author is as unlikely as his prose. Jack Mauro is a native of New Brunswick, New Jersey, a 42-year-old service director at Club LeConte. Bald and dark-eyed, he looks something like a moodier version of Calvin Trillin. By his intense manner and his wealth of literary allusions, he could pass for a professor.

As if to abolish that illusion right off the bat, he blurts, "I chose not to go to college. I had no interest in it." But he seems sympathetic toward those who did. "I still believe it's as valuable as sitting and reading."

He has done a great deal of that. Charles Dickens is his favorite author, and many of his stories, especially "Penance," a conscious homage to Dickens published for the first time in this issue, echo Victorian rhythms. He's also fond of the contemporary short-story writer William Trevor and may be the only writer working in Tennessee today who admits being influenced by Elizabeth Gaskell, the mid-Victorian biographer of Charlotte Bronte. Mauro has spent most of his adult life reading, working in restaurants, and, by his own admission, drinking.

Though he wanted and expected to write for a living since childhood, before he finished Gay Street this year, he'd never written a book. With maybe one exception he may never show anyone. "It's mostly finished," he says. "If I published it, I'd have to use a pseudonym. It's my personal philosophy about recovery."

He insists the story in his introduction is strictly true. It starts when he heard the song, "Tennessee," a hit for the hip-hop-pop group Arrested Development. "[T]here was no reason at all not to at least investigate that strange land. I went for the atlas to see, precisely, where this Tennessee was."

He picked Knoxville almost whimsically ("Like the trespassing blonde in the fairy tale," he writes, "I considered it just right.") He arrived on an especially bleak day in February, 1994. After two years, he left town to take another job and later found himself living comfortably in West Palm Beach. But then he started thinking about Knoxville again. "This single departing from Knoxville caused me more anguish in the few years following it than I can, even today, properly account for," he writes. "I had small notebooks, with entries made from a bench on Cumberland Avenue in Knoxville, to remind me of where, exactly, I had been happy."

The song "Tennessee" is ambiguous about the state's troubled past, but at least makes it sound like an interesting place to live, a place with a soul. In some ways, Gay Street does the same for Knoxville.

From the beginning, Knoxville struck Mauro as a city with literary possibilities. Gay Street wasn't the first Knoxville-based novel he tried to write. "I wanted to write a hybrid 19th-century novel," he says, "a really classy horror novel" dealing with the aftermath of the World's Fair. "It died on me," he says. All that he salvaged from it is the name of one character: Faith.

That's now the title of his favorite story in Gay Street. "Of all the stories, "Faith" is the one I'm close to," he says. The story concerns a Knoxville-raised girl who has spent most of her adulthood in Florida. She returns home for holidays, feeling sophisticated, convinced she has outgrown her mother's illusions about life.

"If the story is good, it was a gift," he says. "It was handed to me." It's a fine piece, but he hasn't tried to market any of his stories individually. He'd rather think of them all as part of the book.

Gay Street has already caused a bit of a stir, mainly among readers who don't know that it's fiction. Mauro's unusual precision about describing real places in Knoxville, and his even more unusual habit of giving precise dates for events in the book, give these stories the illusion of reported truth. All of these tales and all of these characters seem at least plausible, and for those in the habit of spending a lot of time downtown, several of them even seem familiar.

Mauro admits the real and the fictional are something of a "blur" in the book, and that a few characters are roughly based on people he's known here in the last six years. "The ouija board scene really happened," he says of scenes in the story, "The Garretts: Sylvia." There's also a literal description of a severely eccentric young man who used to spend weekends on downtown streetcorners declaiming from a black book. (Mauro's not the only writer who stopped to listen.) However, he says most of the stories and the characters are purely fictional, or composites of people he's known here and elsewhere.

There's a lot of ambiguity in the book: historical ambiguity, sexual ambiguity, ambiguity about what's real and what's not.

Many of the settings are precisely drawn: Krutch Park, the odd rose garden on King Street, the Clinch Avenue viaduct, the inscribed bricks on the Gay Street sidewalk. In one of his stories, the narrator mentions the notion of genius loci, which has to do with the idea that a place is affected by all the things that have happened there. "I do believe in genius loci," he says. "I do believe in it. I don't know why." He obviously enjoys describing a place, and the significance of a single glance, in ways that have been abandoned in most fiction for a half-century or more.

Mauro, who had no connection to Knoxville before he was 35 and could live anywhere, admits that he's obsessed with the place, especially with the downtown area where most of these stories are set. So what is it about Knoxville? "For all its flaws, and they are myriad, it's almost my idea of a perfect small city. It's in a valley, a perfectly situated place. There are just enough people, not too many, and just enough Southernness left." He's intrigued with Southernness, but he admits it gets in the way of the genuine. He says he finds both here.

"This was the last town I could invest something in. I want to be worthy of a place again. That plays a large part in my obsession with this town."

He offers an oblique illustration. "The first time I lived here, I was at the Y," says Mauro. "Two guys were changing, a couple of lawyers. One was happy about the weight he'd lost. The other said, 'You don't seem to have lost any weight.' The other responded, 'Well, that's just because you have a critical spirit.'

"You're not going to hear that in New York or New Jersey."

His book is peopled with eccentric characters, from the wealthy regulars at lofty Club LeConte—boldly, he set one of his more startling stories at his own workplace—to the schizophrenics and street hustlers he observes on the sidewalk level.

They shocked him on one of his first days in town, when he was eating at the old Cafe Mozart on Market Street. Looking out the window he saw male prostitutes, long a common sight downtown after hours. "I was not prepared for that being here," he says. "That's a dangerous life."

He deals with that issue in the story, "Jason," which he says is fictional. It's a bit of a departure from the other stories in the book, most of which could be redrawn in a Victorian parlor.

In his prose and in person, Mauro is a little bit of a curmudgeon. "I love people in theory," he says. "In practice I'm really not all that good with them." He offers a seasonal example. He says he can watch one of his favorite movies, A Christmas Carol, and swell with love for humanity. (Don't ask him which one, even though that classic has been filmed a dozen times. For Mauro it's a dumb question. "There's only Alastair Sim, 1951," he says.)

"Then, the next day, I can curse man if I'm on the street and someone crosses against me." He adds, "I give a great deal of thought to spite. It intrigues me."

Mauro says he finds "just enough decency in people" to keep from giving up on them. "I think we're all miserable sinners, myself included," he says. "I'm always very pleased to come across sparks of genuine goodness."

Of his characters, he says, "I'm protective of them."

Mauro got the book published through iUniverse.com, which also sometimes publishes promising texts in print. He's marketing the book himself locally and is attempting to do so nationally, and he's heartened that the few who've read it seem crazy about it. He says his friend Carly Simon read Gay Street and called it "brilliant and funny." Sometimes he's a little frustrated about getting it into all the markets where he thinks it might sell. For now, the book is available only at Borders and B. Dalton (in West Town), as well as amazon.com.

"I don't drive, so I live downtown," Mauro says. " I go to work, go to the gym, go to the library." He has become another of downtown's characters.