Peter Cherches

Portrait of a minimalist fiction writer/performance artist as a young man - and before, as a kid growing up in Brooklyn, and after, as an older man, again in Brooklyn. The author’s first lines: “I plan to publish my autobiography without words. The book will consist solely of blank pages in white and black shades of gray.” Actually, seen in a slightly different light, the blank pages include 83 short chapters, each chapter a compact snapper capturing a memorable moment in the author's life. To share several snapshots from the album, below are a handful of snaps of the snaps, complete with chapter titles, author quotes and my modest comments.

YOUNG PETER CHERCHES, A FILM BY MARTIN SCORSESE
“I must say I was rather disturbed that the kid was wearing a yarmulke. He didn’t look Jewish, though. As a matter of fact, he was blond with a little goyish nose and looked a lot like Jay North from “Dennis the Menace.”" ---------- After conversing with the kid actor, Peter tells Martin Scorsese he doesn’t think he’s right for the part, not enough irreverence. Scorsese reassures Peter the kid will make a terrific eight-year-old Peter Cherches. We can almost see Peter rolling his eyes, wondering if such a wholesome-looking all-American kid will communicate to an audience how, as Peter wrote recently, “My greatest accomplishment in life was surviving my childhood. And I’m not kidding.”

NEW DADDY WITH A MUSTACHE
“Whenever I was out with my mother and saw a man with a mustache, any man with a mustache, I would go up to him and ask, “Will you be my new daddy with a mustache?” My mother found this very embarrassing.” ---------- Peter’s dad died of leukemia when Peter was two years old. A few years later, Herbie, a man from the neighborhood, used to visit and dance the cha cha cha in the living room with Peter’s mom. Herbie had a mustache and seemed like a nice guy, thus Peter asked other men with mustaches he encountered in public if they would be his new daddy. Turns out, Peter’s mom remarried when Peter turned six - his new dad didn’t have a mustache but his mom was spared future public embarrassment.

A BUS RIDE
“So, we were driving through this mysterious tunnel for quite some time, and I was a little anxious, a bit short of breath, minor heart palpitations. Perhaps the tunnel’s a shortcut, I thought. When we finally exited the tunnel we were in familiar territory. Unfortunately.” ---------- Very unfortunate. For Peter quickly understands the tunnel is a time tunnel and he's on the Peter Cherches tour, the bus ridding through the Brooklyn of his childhood, the tour guide pointing out a number of different landmarks, like the Kent Theater on Coney Island Avenue where she tells everybody "this is where Peter went to matinees as a child." Not a happy bus tour, to say the least, since Peter tells us directly how he had a miserable childhood filled with horrible memories and taking a tour along memory lane was always as if returning to the scene of the crime.

THE WORST THANKSGIVING
“You can’t tell a depressed teenager that they have everything, or that they’re being selfish, or that things will get better (even if they usually do.) Their despair is real. I know. If I could tell a teenager on the brink of suicide anything it would be: hang in there, I know it’s unbearable, but there’ll come a time when you can call the shots, when you can tell all the people who are fucking you over to go fuck themselves, or ignore them, it’ll be your choice.” ---------- Words of wisdom spoken from someone who has himself lived through many of the deepest pits of teenage hell.

BECOMING PETE
“Peter. The writer, the man obsessed with crafting sentences, and with a certain kind of order.” ---------- Ah, yes! Peter aka Pete recounts his breakthrough in his early 20s to the world of writing and the arts. And to add fuel to his literary fire, he notes: “The real turning point in my life came when I moved to the East Village, in 1979. For a Brooklyn kid, finally getting to Manhattan was a triumph. I felt I finally had control of my life. And I was fortunate to dive headlong into one of the most vibrant literary and performance scenes New York City has ever known. I don’t think I’ve ever been really, truly miserable since.”

DOWNTOWN MADE ME
“So I turned my texts into performance pieces. It worked. I was hooked, and for the rest of the decade I was a performer as well as a writer.” ---------- A lively section of the story – Peter’s rousing success as a performance artist adds yet again another artistic dimension to his identity as a recognized author of short prose. At this point in his life, Peter is really cooking. And why not? The sizzling East Village performance and experimental art scene back in the 1980s – for an artist with a unique voice such as Peter, life doesn’t get any better.


MR. CHERCHES MAILS A LETTER
"Mr. Cherches puts on his jacket. Mr. Cherches puts on his cap. Mr. Cherches leaves his apartment and greets the day. It is a bright, sunny day. Mr. Sun smiles at Mr. Cherches. Mr. Cherches smiles at Mr. Sun." ---------- This is a snippet from one of Peter’s charming absurdist fictions, a piece included as its own chapter. There are also chapters where Peter visits such locales as the planet Mars, India, Spain and working with Frank Perdue and his chickens, all told with quirky flare and a light touch.

And since I am particularly drawn to absurd minimalist writing and Peter Cherches is among my favorite authors, to end my review with the hope of whetting your appetite for this delicious little autobiography, here is one of Peter’s chapters in its entirety:

COMPASSION
A man who looked like my mother with a mustache told me I must be on the wrong line. Isn’t this the line for compassion? I asked. Let me see, he said, I think the compassion line is down that way (he pointed), between mustard and indignation.
I started walking toward mustard and indignation, but I could find no compassion, as the line between mustard and indignation turned out to be the one for bird calls.
I asked the guy at the end of the bird call line if he knew where the compassion line was. I think I remember seeing it when I was heading over here, he said, let me think. Oh yes, it’s over there (he pointed), just past incontinence.
I didn’t really feel like passing incontinence, so I waited on the bird call like instead. I waited 45 minutes and, then my turn came. I was given a Swainson’s Thrush. It was stunningly beautiful. As beautiful, I’d venture to say, as compassion.


"When Mr. Cherches got off the rocket he saw that thousands of Martians had come to greet him. Many of them were carrying signs, which said things like "Greetings Earthling! and "Welcome to Mars, Mr. Cherches." ----- From MR. CHERCHES GOES TO MARS


"The restaurant we mostly patronized was Joy Fong, on Avenue J, a now-defunct place that retains an almost holy status in the memories of Brooklyn Jews of a certain age. I wouldn't be surprised if people visit the site of the former restaurant and wail against the wall." ----from CHINESE FOOD, THE EARLY YEARS… (mehr)

The first minimalist novel/micro-fiction in this collection, Mr. Deadman, is thirty short chapters long, each chapter taking up no more than half a page, featuring, well, no surprise, Mr. Deadman.

In the first chapter, Pushing Up Daisies, we read: “You can’t keep a dead man down. Six feet under is six feet too many.”

Turns out, Mr. Deadman plans a getaway, starts working out right there in his cramped coffin, push-ups and sit-ups, until he’s ready to burst through the wood into the dirt, up, up, right up to the surface where he literally pushes up the daisies.

Each subsequent chapter features a different episode, a unique reflection, a new adventure, for example: Mr. Deadman at the sushi bar; Mr. Deadman takes a holiday; Mr. Deadman visits a nail salon; Mr. Deadman dances the dance of death; Mr. Deadman tries to keep up with the Joneses; how Mr. Deadman doesn’t like being called a stiff.

Offbeat combination of farce, satire, screwball, eccentric humor, black humor, morbid humor, gallows humor, dry humor and deadpan humor (no pun intended). Actually, I love it. I’ve read this Peter Cherches micro-fiction at least a dozen times.

I’d send a serious letter of recommendation to the Nobel committee with this book enclosed but I fear those sober Swedes would take my communique as so much morbid, screwball, black humor.

With Bagatelles, the title of the next micro-tale, we are given twenty-five brief trifles, telling details part of an intense yet amusing relationship between a man and a woman. Each bagatelle is no longer than a half page and black humor remains on stage but steps aside as situational humor takes the spotlight, front and center. And it is the man who does the telling with such quirkiness and precision of language that I am obliged to quote a quartet of these bizarre bagatelles in their entirety lest I bend, crack, twist or break their delicate, warped kink:

“She was a constant. I used her to gauge reality. The world existed for me in relation to her. For instance, I used her as a standard for temperature. For the sake of convenience, I called her body temperature zero. For us to be comfortable, room temperature had to be considerably below zero. And when she had a fever it had to be even colder.”

“I said something that she obviously misinterpreted, because she reacted angrily. She was screaming in a frenzy. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I let her go on until she ran out of steam. When I was sure she was through, I repeated my original statement. She must have understood this time because she said, oh yes, now I understand.”

“Sniffing each other was our favorite pastime. We would produce various and sundry odors for each other’s benefit. Some of our odors were mutual, but certainly not all. She produced many odors that I could not duplicate, and vice versa. We spent many pleasant hours producing odors for each other. When we became familiar with each other’s repertoire of odors, we began to make requests. It was pure ecstasy. When we were sniffing each other nothing else mattered. We had each other, and as far as we were concerned, who cared how the world smelled.”

“We tried to put each other into words. But words weren’t enough. So we put each other into sentences. No good. Paragraphs. Unsatisfactory. Chapters. Not quite right. A book. Books. Volume upon volume upon volume. It just wouldn’t work. Nothing was enough, everything was too much.”

The next mini-tale in the queue is Dirty Windows, a somewhat similar quizzical spin on a man and a woman, only this time they just did meet at a bookstore where she was thumbing through Finnegans Wake and he said “Nice weather.”

She took an instant liking to him since she was a meteorologist. Trio Bagatelles likewise highlights situational humor and gallows humor with a touch of epigrammatic humor and parodic humor seasoned in, a tale where three people interact in a kind of post-modern, eccentric spin-off of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Oh, and the sexes of these three are not given – you as reader can designate as you see fit.

Alas, we come to the last tale in this collection. Julio Cortázar had his A Certain Lucas and Peter Cherches has his A Certain Clarence, twenty-one peculiar adventures of a very charming but very peculiar man. How peculiar? Here’s the first adventure – piquant, provocative, provoking, and, of course, perversely peculiar:

“Clarence decided to paint his room. It was a small room, and Clarence reasoned that he could create the illusion of more space if he were to paint his room the colors of outside. So he painted his ceiling blue like the sky, with a couple of white clouds for good measure. He painted his floor in patches of green and brown, like grass and earth. And his walls he painted no color at all.”



Peter Cherches - micro-tale teller, performing artist, kazooist - one unique voice on the contemporary literary scene.… (mehr)

Condensed Book - A string of micro-fictions penned by the one and only Peter Cherches, Brooklyn born and East Village cooked, a writer dedicated to the funky offbeat and the nerdish out-there flaky.

A batch of tantalizing tales collected and condensed here, including one where the highlight of a narrator's life is combining all sorts and types of Campbell's Soup - creating varieties like my personal favorite: tomato noodle broccoli barley bacon.

To share a condensed taste of Condensed Book, here are the opening micro-paragraphs from one Cherches cracker in the book box, a perfect prototype of Peter's peculiar portfolio:

MR. CHERCHES MAILS A LETTER
It's another day. There are so many of them. Seven days in a week, thirty in a month, or thirty-one, or sometimes twenty-eight or twenty-nine, three hundred sixty-five days in a year, and leap years have an extra day, so many days, so much time to fill, twenty-four hours in a day, sixty minutes an hour, sixty seconds a minute, so much time and so little to do.

It's another day and Mr. Cherches can't decide what to do. What to do, what to do, so much time and so little to do. Mr. Cherches says to himself. What shall I do.

Look out the window, Mr. Cherches.

Mr. Cherches looks out the window. It is a bright, sunny day. What shall I do on this bright sunny day? Mr. Churches wonders.

One should go out on a bright, sunny day. Bright, sunny days are just right for going out, just as dark, gloomy days are just right for staying in.

Mr. Cherches stayed in yesterday. Yesterday was a dark, gloomy day and Mr. Cherches stayed in. It was a good day for staying in. But Mr. Cherches hates to do the same thing two days in a row, that makes for a boring existence, and anyway, one should not stay in on a bright sunny day, for bright sunny days are made for going out.



This story can also be found in Peter's Autobiography Without Words.… (mehr)

Peter Cherches performing with keyboardist in 1985 - "Early on in their relationship they agreed to proceed cautiously, so they hired extras to do the stunts." - from the absurdist mini-tale, Dirty Windows

The first minimalist novel/micro-fiction in this collection, Mr. Deadman, is thirty short chapters long, each chapter taking up no more than half a page, featuring, well, no surprise, Mr. Deadman. In the first chapter, Pushing Up Daisies, we read how: “You can’t keep a dead man down. Six feet under is six feet too many.” Turns out, Mr. Deadman plans a getaway, starts working out right there in his cramped coffin, push-ups and sit-ups, until he’s ready to burst through the wood into the dirt, up, up, right up to the surface where he literally pushes up the daisies. Each subsequent chapter features a different episode, a unique reflection, a new adventure, for example: Mr. Deadman at the sushi bar; Mr. Deadman takes a holiday; Mr. Deadman visits a nail salon; Mr. Deadman dances the dance of death; Mr. Deadman tries to keep up with the Joneses; how Mr. Deadman doesn’t like being called a stiff.

Offbeat combination of farce, satire, screwball, eccentric humor, black humor, morbid humor, gallows humor, dry humor and deadpan humor (no pun intended). Actually, I love it. I’ve read it at least a dozen times. I’d send a serious letter of recommendation to the Nobel committee with this book enclosed but I fear those sober Swedes would take my communique as so much morbid, screwball, black humor.

With Bagatelles, the title of the next micro-tale, we are given twenty-five brief trifles, telling details part of an intense yet amusing relationship between a man and a woman. Each bagatelle is no longer than a half page and black humor remains on stage but steps aside as situational humor takes the spotlight, front and center. And it is the man who does the telling with such quirkiness and precision of language that I am obliged to quote a quartet of these bizarre bagatelles in their entirety lest I bend, crack, twist or break their delicate, warped kink:

“She was a constant. I used her to gauge reality. The world existed for me in relation to her. For instance, I used her as a standard for temperature. For the sake of convenience, I called her body temperature zero. For us to be comfortable, room temperature had to be considerably below zero. And when she had a fever it had to be even colder.”

“I said something that she obviously misinterpreted, because she reacted angrily. She was screaming in a frenzy. I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. I let her go on until she ran out of steam. When I was sure she was through, I repeated my original statement. She must have understood this time because she said, oh yes, now I understand.”

“Sniffing each other was our favorite pastime. We would produce various and sundry odors for each other’s benefit. Some of our odors were mutual, but certainly not all. She produced many odors that I could not duplicate, and vice versa. We spent many pleasant hours producing odors for each other. When we became familiar with each other’s repertoire of odors, we began to make requests. It was pure ecstasy. When we were sniffing each other nothing else mattered. We had each other, and as far as we were concerned, who cared how the world smelled.”

“We tried to put each other into words. But words weren’t enough. So we put each other into sentences. No good. Paragraphs. Unsatisfactory. Chapters. Not quite right. A book. Books. Volume upon volume upon volume. It just wouldn’t work. Nothing was enough, everything was too much.”

The next mini-tale in the Table of Contents queue is Dirty Windows, a somewhat similar quizzical spin on a man and a woman, only this time they just did meet at a bookstore where she was thumbing through Finnegans Wake and he said “Nice weather.” She took an instant liking to him since she was a meteorologist. Trio Bagatelles likewise highlights situational humor and gallows humor with a touch of epigrammatic humor and parodic humor seasoned in, a tale where three people interact in a kind of post-modern, eccentric spin-off of Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit. Oh, and the sexes of these three are not given – you as reader can designate as you see fit.

Alas, we come to the last tale in this collection. Julio Cortázar had his A Certain Lucas and Peter Cherches has his A Certain Clarence, twenty-one peculiar adventures of a very charming but very peculiar man. How peculiar? Here’s the first adventure – piquant, provocative, provoking, and, of course, perversely peculiar:

“Clarence decided to paint his room. It was a small room, and Clarence reasoned that he could create the illusion of more space if he were to paint his room the colors of outside. So he painted his ceiling blue like the sky, with a couple of white clouds for good measure. He painted his floor in patches of green and brown, like grass and earth. And his walls he painted no color at all.”


A more recent photo of Peter Cherches - micro-tale teller, performing artist, kazooist - one unique voice on the contemporary literary scene.… (mehr)