Novel Approach -- Storyteller Katherine Dunn Confronts Our Comfortable, Politically Correct Lives

CUTLINE: BETTY UDESEN: DUNN EMBRACES JIM REDDEN, HER BOYFRIEND AND FELLOW VOYEUR. DUNN GETS AROUND IN BOOTS AND CABS.

CUTLINE: BETTY UDESEN: THE WHITE EAGLE BAR IN NORTH PORTLAND IS IN A WORKING-CLASS NEIGHBORHOOD AND IS THE SETTING FOR KATHERINE DUNN'S NEXT NOVEL, ``CUT MAN,'' AN EERIE STORY ABOUT A WARM, HUMOROUS, CHARISMATIC KILLER.

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About three years ago, a group of Portland writers assembled on the banks of the Deschutes River to launch a raft into its bucking waters. The Deschutes, as everyone in Central Oregon knows, is a quarrelsome river and does not take kindly to amateurs in rafts, poking their paddles into its lunging rapids.

Most people approach this river with reverence and respect, but that could not be said of a Portland novelist named Katherine Dunn. On that warm day years ago, Dunn did not flinch before taking to the oar, and she certainly did not heed the river's demands for practical clothing.

To the amazement of her friends, Dunn showed up in her casual, customary attire: A turtle-neck top, jeans and high-heel leather boots that reached to her knees. She waved her customary hello, rolled her customary cigarette and applied her customary spirit to that day's adventure - which is to say, she took the front seat and never looked back. Between drags she whooped the whole way down the unsuspecting river - and ended the day with another minor triumph over nature. When they set ashore, she gallantly squashed a scorpion beneath the heel of her boot.

For those of you who haven't heard of her by now, Dunn wrote the startling novel about love, mutants and mutilation among carnival freaks, ``Geek Love.'' It features the Binewski family, led by parents who manipulated each pregnancy with insecticides and radioisotopes to produce a clan of deformed but gifted children. As proprietors of a carnival, normalcy was not their goal. They succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.

In the highly acclaimed novel, Dunn weaves an eerie story around these geeks, drawing parallels with a society that is increasingly creepy.

Lust, violence and deviance have become so commonplace in our culture that an irreverent but insightful writer like Dunn is needed to interpret the chaos and expose the brute lurking nearby and nestled within. Dunn contends there is a killer or maimer in all of us, stalking our better sides, ready to lunge should just the right (or wrong) ingredients collide, be it romantic rage, financial ruin or religious frenzy.

With that in mind, the 45-year-old writer is now moving beyond the wildly exaggerated caricatures in ``Geek Love'' and is writing a book that directly confronts our propensity for deviant behavior.

``Cut Man,'' as the novel is called, will tempt readers to identify with a warm, humorous, charismatic character - who also happens to be a serial killer. This murderer is ravenously bloodthirsty, but he doesn't drool at the mouth or suffer from some early emotional lobotomy. The killer is charming and articulate, not unlike the next-door neighbor you've known for years.

Knopf plans to publish the story next year, as we pull our trench coats a little tighter and head further into the '90s.

``The Nazis are all dead. The Russians aren't our enemies anymore. The animal is within us,'' says her agent, Richard Pine. ``Katherine Dunn knows how to tell stories about that.''

Dunn is a contrarian who looks and lives as an outsider. Like the freaks in ``Geek Love,'' she embraces her own individuality and doesn't expect pity or help from others. Among political philosophies, anarchy appeals to her most: ``It is not mayhem, chaos and bias - it is responsibility by individuals for the consequences of their acts. I don't like to see anyone suffer, and there's a very, very fine line between being healthy and working and totally down and out. I have that capacity. I just hope to hell that I won't blame anybody else or think it's someone else's responsibility to scoop me out of the gutter.''

If they tried, she'd probably fight them off with a swift kick or two, courtesy of the high-heel boots she still wears around town.

Despite her self-reliance, Dunn doesn't drive. She walks or relies on taxis. Most cabbies know her by now, as do many other people in Portland. The success of ``Geek Love,'' coupled with her visibility as a boxing writer and columnist for Willamette Week newspaper, have made her a local celebrity. Dunn and her wiry, ratlike dog get ample attention when they walk home to the enormous antique house she recently purchased in Northwest Portland. It dominates the block and is just a stroll and a smoke from the apartments where her good friend, Gus Van Sant, filmed parts of the movie ``Drugstore Cowboy.''

Dunn did not want to buy the big blue house, but she could not ignore the $175,000 advance she received for ``Cut Man.'' She reluctantly took the ownership plunge and moved in with three males: her dog, Kid; her boyfriend, writer Jim Redden; and her 20-year-old son, Eli.

The old house is laid out like a brothel. The two top floors are teeming with rooms that branch from the wide, functional hallways. The main floor embraces a greeting parlor, den, a living room lit with lava lamps, and a no-nonsense kitchen that features a framed picture of Mad Max, a k a Mel Gibson.

Dunn usually writes in a small room upstairs, but on this day she holds court in the den, seated in a red velvet chair.

The direct sunlight, which she hates, floodlights her face. Her eyes are large and brown, her cheekbones high and handsome, her mouth wide. She calls herself ugly, a startling description because it is so blunt, so cruel and so wrong. When she removes the large glasses from her small nose, she looks more like Loretta Young than the froglike creatures she has compared herself to all her life.

She is wearing faded blue jeans, new burgundy boots with tall heels, a drab brown turtleneck, orange lipstick and clear polish on manicured nails stained with nicotine. A yellow pouch of cigarette tobacco rests in her lap.

Since ``hitting it rich,'' as her writer friend Larry Colton puts it, ``her wardrobe has improved. But from my eyes, that's like trying to polish a turd. Her sense of fashion, let's say, is not vogue.''

Dunn is an unconventional woman whose independence is reflected in her paradoxical life.

She is more like Betty Crocker than Bella Abzug, according to Mark Zusman, her editor at Willamette Week. Yet Dunn doesn't cook, she drinks Jameson whiskey and rolls her own cigarettes.

She has helped so many others in Portland's talented writing community, which includes the likes of Ursula LeGuin, Jean Auel and Craig Lesley, that she is fondly called the Den Mother of that group. Yet Dunn is a former topless dancer and bartender whom patrons regularly likened to Miss Kitty on Gunsmoke.

She is widely regarded for her generosity, grace and courtesy, yet Dunn loves the brute power of boxing and is one of the nation's leading columnists on the sport. She prefers the company of men to women (whom she considers ``dangerous creatures'') and spikes her fabulously eloquent and imaginative prose with accents from the gutter. In fact, the courteous side of Katherine Dunn recommended that the crude side of Katherine Dunn be censored a bit for this story, so readers will kindly forgive the blips and bleeps that follow.

With that out of the way, Dunn discusses her past, a gypsy-like childhood on the raw side of life: ``No ennui-in-the-suburbs horse # !# # .''

She was born in Garden City, Kan., an average Midwest town but for one minor detail: It was here that the Clutter family was murdered, as detailed by Truman Capote's ``In Cold Blood.''

Whether that instilled in her a call to the wild,

or a call to writing, or both, she can't say, but Dunn suspects there was something in the soil there to set her apart.

She tells it best in an autobiographical blurb she penned for editors at Knopf when ``Geek Love'' was published. She thought the note was for their eyes only. They read it and decided otherwise. It was widely distributed with the book.

It begins: ``My background is standard American blue collar of the itchy-footed variety. We're new world mongrels. The women in the family read horoscopes, tea leaves, coffee bubbles, Tarot cards and palms. My mother is an escaped farm girl from North Dakota and a self-taught artist and painter. My dad was a third-generation printer and linotype operator, by all accounts a fabulous ballroom dancer. He was jettisoned from the family before I was 2, and I have never met him and have no memory of him. The story is that my older brother, 13 or so at the time, ran him out of the house with a kitchen knife for speaking roughly to our beloved Mom.''

Until a stepdad appeared on the scene many years later, they were poor and they were gypsies, rumbling between towns and migrant farms with a mattress roped atop their DeSoto.

The family picked beans in Walla Walla and strawberries in Newberg; they cut salal in the forests around Puget Sound. They lived in migrant camps where televisions were virtually nonexistent. The evenings were highlighted with stories.

``No meal in our family was complete unless you'd made someone at the table spew out a mouthful of food by dropping the punchline at exactly the right time,'' Dunn says. ``It wasn't boring. It was never boring. My mother could make pie out of two saltines and a raisin, and she often did.''

Those may not have been humdrum years, but the poverty was stressful. Dunn saw more in her childhood than most people see in a lifetime, and it toughened her outlook on life.

``I don't assume automatically that everybody is my friend,'' she says. ``And I don't assume automatically that nobody would hurt me. I assume that I have to stay on my toes and be quick of foot. Anybody who lets their guard down is a booby.''

Which is not to say Dunn is overly cautious: She is well-known for her jaunts along life's edge. In 1989, for example, she went to a S&M house party to help report a story for Willamette Week. She was unfazed by the bondage and whipping - it was all ritualized theater to Dunn - although the main attraction did make her flinch somewhat. It took place on an autopsy table in the ``dungeon.'' Dunn cringed as an older woman dressed in leather leaned over a younger woman and cut a large double-headed eagle into her back. It was very bloody, yet the younger woman rose from the table grinning wildly.

``I wouldn't have missed that for the world - to see the reality, not the myth,'' Dunn says. ``I'm not a sensitive, shrinking flower.''

Throughout Dunn's transient childhood, she checked in and out of different schools. With each move, she adopted a new personality, trying to fit in and rarely succeeding. She was a loner, a tomboy and a world-class liar and thief. ``I was stealing from Peter to pay Paul. No. I was stealing from Peter and pawning it to Paul.

``It was fun, thrilling. It gave me an ace up my sleeve. I may not have been invited to hot parties, but, hey, nobody else knew how to smuggle a TV out between their knees.''

She interrupts herself with a deep, smoky laugh. ``I never actually did that, but I knew shoplifters who did.''

When she wasn't stealing pantyhose and other items that she sold to girls at school, she was indulging herself in another private passion, reading. Page by page, her own sordid world would disappear and be replaced with dramatic interludes from another place and time. She could escape into those pages, and reinvent herself.

That escapism was further satisfied through storytelling, a family talent she polished with classes in public speaking. She dreaded standing before her peers, with her froggy voice and eyes, but she forced herself to face them - with a few secret effects to aid her.

On the nights before speech tournaments in junior high and high school, Dunn would sneak out of her stepfather's home near Tigard, Ore., and steal away to Fanno Creek. There, fully clothed, she would enter the cool water and lie down in the stream, immersing all but her nose, mouth and toes. The purpose, she says, was to deepen her voice and lighten her head, via a cold and slight fever. The impact was reinforced by walking home in wet clothes, shivering through the moon-lit fields surrounding their hamlet.

The technique worked. She won most of her tournaments, despite the stage fright that gripped her vibrant but feverish mind. Decades later, she would still yearn for the soothing waters of Fanno Creek as she approached the radio booth at KBOO, where she was the Story Lady of Portland for years. Upon meeting her today, people still cock their heads when hearing her speak, trying to place the dramatically familiar voice.

High school passed with few other academic accomplishments. On graduation night, she skipped town for California and was soon picked up by police on a beach near Santa Barbara - not because she had run away, but because a local boy and girl who had skipped their graduation ceremony had been murdered on that beach a couple of days earlier. They were shot with a .22.

It just so happens that the boy Dunn had been traveling with also carried a .22 and had been picked up with a valise full of women's clothes. Fortunately, they were Dunn's graduation clothes and she was able to clear her companion.

She was not so lucky a few months later. In Independence, Mo., she was arrested and thrown into jail for trying to cash a bad check. It gave her a serious case of the creeps, not to mention a felony conviction and two-year parole.

As she stared through the jail bars, Dunn saw a bleak vision. ``I faced a petty life, very alone, with very grueling, gritty, nasty poverty and crime. I knew I had the potential to do something else, and I knew if I got my # !# # together in a major, major way, I might be able to pull it out.''

She definitely got her # !# # together.

``I myself am just as potentially dangerous as everybody around me. I have been guilty of wreaking psychological damage and in some cases physical damage on other people. I never murdered anybody. I never put anyone in the hospital that I know of, but I certainly had some fights - and lost almost all of them. That was a good reason to turn to words, you see: verbs at 20 paces.''

Dunn is talking about her life as an adult. She had stopped stealing from others and started giving of herself, as a writer. As ``Geek Love'' proved, words had become a powerful motivator and weapon for her. She poured a lifetime of savage lessons into her prose and didn't pull any punches along the way. It was a ``take no prisoners'' approach that surprised and pleased most critics.

``Geek Love'' was a 1989 finalist for the National Book Award for fiction, one of the most prestigious literary honors in America. Dunn also sold the screenplay rights to Harry Anderson, a magician and actor who stars on the television comedy series ``Night Court.''

``The book was monstrous, it was epic, it was horrifying,'' Anderson says of ``Geek Love.'' ``By Page 70, I knew I wanted to do the screenplay.''

So driven, he visited Portland to court Dunn. He arrived on her doorstep bearing the appropriate gifts: a giant carnival tarp featuring Siamese twins that were ``Born Alive!''; a monster puppet shaped like a deformed infant with warts and snot running from its nose; and a videotape of his magic show, in which Anderson eats a live guinea pig and drives a 10-inch hatpin through his forearm.

Dunn was mighty impressed: ``I knew this was the man for me.''

Just what actors will be cast as Olympia Binewski, the albino hunchback dwarf, or her brother, Arturo (born with flippers instead of limbs), is anyone's guess. And it's nearly impossible to imagine casting for the hundreds of mutilated cult followers whom Arturo has inspired. But the movie, if made, will be no less controversial than the book it's based on.

Despite its critical acclaim, ``Geek Love'' angered some readers, including radical feminists who considered it misogynous trash.

One reviewer for the progressive newsmagazine The Nation called it a snuff film in print. Dunn bristles at that: ``Oh, poor baby. She must have been so offended. Ugga bugga.''

Dunn argues that the book's main female characters aren't victims; they are independent people dealing from positions of strength, even if they are sometimes villainous positions. Until people realize that women, like men, have the power to do evil, she says, women will never be fully respected, or feared.

Her own views on feminism emerged years ago when the rebel in her took up modeling and topless dancing. She did not feel exploited as she sat naked for hours or shimmied under a spotlight - although she admits to a deep sense of inferiority about her own looks.

``It was the standard thing; an ugly female trying to work her way into her body,'' Dunn says of the modeling she did for art students in Portland. ``It was fiercely uncomfortable, which is why I did it. It was a crude form of phobia therapy - you get closer and closer to the snake and finally you're petting it.''

That phobia eventually disappeared, but not without a struggle. ``The drawings that made me look like a fat, dumpy cow confirmed all my worst suspicions, and the ones that were better than that I thought were romanticized versions.''

Dunn is not a fat, dumpy cow. She is thin and graceful and strong, and works out in a crude attic gym almost every day. Still, her self-image has always been skewed. When she moved from modeling to topless dancing, for example, she was certain she would be booed off the stage. Dressed in sequined underpants and her trademark high-heel boots, Dunn stepped tentatively into the spotlight. When she saw the dreary faces of a dozen or so men staring back, she immediately felt more sorry for them than she did for herself.

``I don't think it was exploitive any more than ditch-digging is exploitive to men,'' she says. ``You're paying people to use their bodies.''

That notion is emphasized in ``Geek Love.'' The freaks trade on their uniqueness, and two of them actually make brief, dazzling appearances as topless dancers.

Those scenes and a few others take dead aim at radical separatists in the women's movement. Dunn wanted to slam them and their angry rejection of men. She also takes on a larger phenomenon she calls PC - ``politically correct'' thinking and behavior. PC-ers accept liberalism, for example, as a package deal, without questioning its set premises on abortion, feminism, racism and environmentalism. Conservative PC-ers adopt equally rigid viewpoints in the opposite margin. She also chides moralists who insist that upstanding people are incapable of violence, sleaze and lust, arguing that any thinking, breathing human being is a sinner waiting to happen. She decries lock-step thinking as sheeplike and weak.

As her favorite button proclaims: ``The Meek Shall Inherit # !# # .''

That's why she is impatient with people who don't take responsibility for their own lives, while she is enormously generous with those who do. She has lent money to struggling writers and is defiantly supportive of their work. She detests literary snobbism, saying ``a good writer is a good writer and I don't care if it appears on the back of a Wheaties box. The best poets today are the rap musicians. To say those people are not good writers, that they're not harking back to the tradition of Homer, is ludicrous blindness.''

So she praises where others sneer. She assists where others retreat. Just ask cartoonist John Callahan. When Dunn learned he was going to lose some of his Medicare benefits, she launched a campaign to help him. Callahan is a quadriplegic and cannot fully support himself on his income from irreverent cartoons about people who are disabled, fat or psychotic.

``I was in trouble and Katherine Dunn gathered all her writer friends and got them to write state and national officials,'' says Callahan. ``It looks like it's helping.''

Callahan first met Dunn on a street corner in Portland where he was soliciting responses about his latest cartoon: ``I think it was the blind nun with a seeing-eye penguin.''

Dunn, of course, loved it. Callahan was pleased, although he had no idea that this particular stranger had absolutely no threshold where good taste was concerned - nothing he could have produced that day would have offended her.

Since that meeting, the two have become close friends, sharing a survivor's sense of dark humor. ``Geek Love'' even inspired a cartoon series called ``Rootin', tootin' mutant,'' followed by a Callahan ballad, ``Pollution is the solution . . . because Mother Nature is annoying to me.''

Anyway, Callahan thinks the world of Dunn. ``She's unusual, she has no vanity. When you're around a person like that, you feel like you're going to the well.''

Just how deep that well is remains to be seen. With her new book half written, Dunn smiles mischievously when she thinks about the effect it will have on people. Not that she's into sheer shock value, but she does want to jolt readers from their cozy, rigid stupors. To her, normalcy is treachery because people will do anything to defend their security - sabotage, maim or kill - and she will do anything to expose that internal monster.

So, she retreats to her studio each morning at 4, listens a bit to the night sounds outside, turns on a light, and begins. Her long fingers reach silently for the computer keyboard, hover, flex and pounce. Quickly, mercilessly, they strangle our tired notions about proper living. Next year, we'll see where those worn-out notions are buried.

The Cut Man cometh.