The Birth of Ramsy

This post was written on March 3, 2016.

With Each Vagabond By Name nearing publication, I find myself searching for scraps of its infancy. The truth is, I don’t remember in any clear detail how the idea for this story came about. It’s a reasonable question, one I feel I should be able to answer. Yet the first scribblings happened so long ago--fifteen years--that identifying what inspired them is all but impossible. How did I get the idea? Despite being the author of this story, I do not know.

Well, that isn’t entirely true. There are clues to each strand of the story--each character, each element of the plot. And I’ve been able to follow them like breadcrumbs to their beginnings or nearly so, thanks to my antiquated habit of writing exclusively in longhand--in notebooks that still exist, carted along through adulthood with me in boxes I never bothered unpacking until now.

Recently, I unearthed the stacks of five-subject spiral-bound notebooks that hold my earliest notes on Vagabond--which, of course, was not in any way the Vagabond, in story or title, that exists today. And there, in a notebook from 1999, was taped a messy note that revealed the origins of my main character, Ramsy, owner of a mountain bar who befriends the outsiders who appear in my novel and shake up Ramsy's small-town lassitude.

The note was written on a page torn from a page-a-day calendar that offered daily Magic Eye illusions. I scrawled it before bed one night. It was something I’d heard that day that I wanted to remember in the morning: “...and a newly removed left eye. Nobody asked what happened, and nobody seemed surprised. He was the kind of man whose eye should have been missing years ago.”

I think the one-eyed man in this note exists in real life, but I don’t know for sure. I’ve never met him. A bartender from the restaurant where I was waitressing at that time told me about him, during one of our many nights drinking Bud Lights in the seamy underbelly of what passed for remote southwestern Pennsylvania nightlife in the summer of 1999. This part of the description had struck me, stuck with me, and I wanted to remember it so I wrote it down before falling asleep.

It took a while for this character to become Ramsy. First he was Yamsy, a one-eyed bartender at a bar filled with dusty junk he wanted to sell. Yamsy initially appeared in a seven-page short story I wrote in graduate school. He became Ramsy some revisions later, and his bar lost its junk, and his missing eye was explained, and ultimately I needed over two hundred and fifty pages to tell his story. But he never lost the threatening reticence that made him the kind of man whose missing eye surprised no one. This character arrived in my life whole. His story grew and changed along the way, but he didn’t.

Stella, the other main character in Vagabond, took a bit longer to emerge. In the novel, she’s a woman still grieving her daughter, who was kidnapped fifteen years ago. I found a crazy line in that same 1999 notebook describing Stella as “a husky teenager with a hooker’s body who came to Yamsy’s every so often with older men.” She showed up again as a woman who looked for dead animals in black plastic bags by the roadside. But she soon became who she’d be for the long haul--a woman whose baby was stolen, who searches for her child long after any hope remains of finding her.

And the vagabonds themselves, the itinerant thieves who drive the story--they seemed to travel right from the gossip in my hometown into the pages of my notebook, pulling with them the conflict and heartbreak that finally brought Ramsy and Stella’s story to life. I found my first ideas about including “gypsies” in a notebook from 2002: “Maybe Ramsy’s daughter wants him to move because his house was robbed by gypsies…”

Ramsy. Stella. Itinerant young thieves vilified by fearful locals. The alchemy that made those disparate parts into Vagabond happened with my pen, with my quick-typing fingers, but I’d be lying if I said I understood it. I couldn’t write this story until each of these elements came into my life. Only then, like some deep-earth, mineral-shifting exhalation, was the story released. Messily, unsatisfactorily--in no way a perfect gem. But it was there for the shaping. The blasting, the pick-axing, the chiseling.

An offhand bit of restaurant gossip, a dashed-off late-night note. And now--here we are.