Collapsing Time: A Conversation with Mike DeCapite

Mike DeCapite | Jacket Weather | Soft Skull Press | 2021 | 256 Pages

Mike DeCapite’s Jacket Weather is the story of a man in his fifties rekindling a relationship with June, a woman with whom he reveled in New York’s thriving punk scene as a youth. The novel is an atonement for an electrifying past, tracing an eponymously-named protagonist’s adjustments to life in middle age. DeCapite’s story is populated by keen observations–namely of light and weather–bouts with anxiety, and sometimes hilarious ruminations on music, food, the drama of love, and the absurdity of the human experience. In the conversation below, DeCapite discusses his work and his ties to Cleveland in the run-up to a recent book tour, which included a stop at The Beachland Ballroom.

Shawn C. Mishak: Tell me about the title, Jacket Weather.

Mike DeCapite: These people in the book are in their fifties. So by the time they get together it feels late already. They’re starting to feel a chill.

SM: How do you use weather and light as literary devices to connect the reader to the moment?

MD: Weather and light are just part of what I’m paying attention to. They’re part of my daily experience. Our daily experience. I assume: if they affect me, they affect you. In 2013, we went to see a retrospective of the installation artist James Turrell at the Guggenheim, in New York, and he turned that whole central atrium into an installation. People were lying on the floor and sitting around the perimeter. So we sat down and waited for something to happen. And gradually, the light started to change, until we were in this subtle orange-y bath, and everyone looked good, and I felt good. Hopeful, like at sunset, sometimes. Outside of time, maybe. I guess that’s why I do it and not how. How I do it is that it just comes naturally to me to write about weather and light. More naturally than for me to write about people.

SM: Through the Windshield was published in 1998 and met with some acclaim. Jacket Weather is a long-awaited second novel to your fans. Why now?

MD: There’s a novel called Ruined for Life! that hasn’t been published, except for a few excerpts here and there. So Jacket Weather is my third novel. And there’s a little book of essays called Radiant Fog, most of which I wrote for Amy Sparks, at Angle Magazine, in Cleveland, while I was living in San Francisco. And a chapbook called Creamsicle Blue. So I’ve been writing all along. It’s just that Jacket Weather had a better chance of getting picked up by a commercial publisher because there’s a love story. Even so, I’m lucky it found its way to an editor, Yuka Igarashi, who was willing to take a chance on it.

SM: How has your work matured and/or how has it been nurtured over the years?

MD: I’ve probably got a better idea of my strengths and weaknesses. And I have less to prove. I guess I’ve nurtured it by continuing to do it. And continuing to believe that a piece of writing is successful if it does what you want it to do—if it works, rather than if you make any money from it.

SM: Music has always been a force in your work. How does music help inform your characters’ inner state and to inform the reader or to drive the narrative?

MD: Music is a big part of my life. I’m very involved with it, you know what I mean? I’m in an ongoing consideration of and conversation with the music that’s important to me. So it informs what I’m writing. Sometimes I find myself trying to translate a piece of music into prose. Some feeling or memory or quality of light that’s captured in it. I’ll play a song over and over while I try to get it right. There’s a Michio Kurihara guitar piece I played over and over while writing one passage. Gene Clark demos. I must have listened to “Maggie May” a hundred times, after hearing it a thousand times already in the last fifty years. There’s a Spotify playlist for Jacket Weather, by the way. I think it’s called Jacket Weather: The Playlist.

SM: “Black ribbed sleeveless shirt, black miniskirt, high black boots. Full moon through fast-moving clouds. I grow fangs.” (Jacket Weather, 118) 

You have these lovely observational vignettes and interludes throughout the novel. Can you talk about these?

MD: I want this to feel put-together and not like I sat down and wrote it from beginning to end in one place, in one mood. So it’s made of small parts. It’s a way to catch things that go by fast. Those three sentences wouldn’t be more effective if I couched them in another 30 sentences to say where we were and what we were doing and found a way to transition from her boots to the clouds. We got it, let’s go. 

SM: Much of your work is signaturely autobiographical, how does being vulnerable to the reader affect your process?

MD: It’s funny, I don’t feel vulnerable. Realistically or not, I expect a book to be judged as a piece of writing rather than by its characters’ behavior. I don’t feel exposed. Though for sure the idea of exposing other people has affected me. It hasn’t necessarily stopped me from writing about them, but it’s caused me a lot of anguish about whether or not to publish certain things.

SM: Did you tackle the nicotine addiction? If so, after how long?

MD: I tried lots of times to quit smoking, over the years. Then after I moved back to Brooklyn, I quit for maybe a month, a couple of times. Once I quit for five months and then had one with David Thomas, downstairs at the Beachland on a bitter-cold night just before Christmas. I was finally able to quit a few months after I met June. Because I was asking her to believe in a future with me.

SM: What is your process like now that you’ve quit smoking?

MD: Computer solitaire, Shawn. This is what I’m reduced to. But it works. A few hands takes me just far enough out of it that it clears my head but not so far that I go down a hole and can’t find my way back.

SM: The older gentlemen in the book, especially Lou, seem like a reflection of Michael (your protagonist)’s meditations on mortality. What can the reader take away from Michael’s relationship with them?

MD: They’re part of the book’s pattern, a repeating element, like in a mosaic. And they’re history on tap, those guys. I hadn’t thought of them as examples of where I’m headed, but you’re right, they are. 

SM: I have to ask: What’s your favorite pasta dish and what is your favorite Italian restaurant in New York?

MD: My favorite pasta dish is probably baked ziti, with sausage and spareribs and braciole cooked in sauce on the side, which I make only a couple of times a year because it takes six months to digest. My favorite Italian restaurant in New York is Sandro’s, on the Upper East Side, if we’re talking strictly about food, and maybe New Corner, in Brooklyn, if we’re talking about some ineffable combination of food, atmosphere, and the availability of braciole.

SM: You have some Cleveland connections, you lived here and wrote here. Can you talk about this? How has this city impacted your development as an artist?

MD: I grew up in Euclid, and I have a long association with the Southside because I went there every Saturday when I was a kid to see my grandmother and aunt. So I was a known figure at the dime store on Professor Avenue and a soda counter at the corner of West 11th and Fairfield, in a building no longer there. 

I’m not sure how Cleveland affected me as a writer. I was very aware of the changing seasons, that’s one thing. And even though I grew up in Euclid, I was in touch with the natural world in a way I wouldn’t have been if I’d grown up in New York. And I could find anything I needed in Cleveland in terms of information about the rest of the world. Great art museum; great film series; great, great library downtown, where I used to go every Saturday when I was a teenager. Right off the top of my head, I can think of three good bookstores that were downtown, one of which I worked at: Kay’s on Prospect, where I met people who were hip to what was going on in New York and London at that point. And I had no trouble meeting musicians and artists and all kinds of interesting people. 

Here’s what happened. I moved to the Southside with my girlfriend, Carol, in maybe 1982. She knew Keith Brown, who started Progressive Urban Real Estate, and we moved into the first house he bought down there. We lived upstairs, he lived below. (I think it was $120 a month, and he gave us money off the rent for taking down the red-brick tarpaper siding.) Carol and I split up a couple of years later, and I had a couple of years on my own. I quit seeing bands, I wasn’t part of any scene, I drove a cab, and I started to look around and feel like part of my surroundings. And I spent a lot of time with my friend Ed, who moved in next door. He’s older than me, and he showed me his world of the Near West Side. And then I met a woman and moved to London. So right when I had this new appreciation for Cleveland, I was yanked out of it—to London, of all places. So Through the Windshield, which I started writing there, became this love letter. To Cleveland, and to my time alone there. Because you know how it is when you have a chance to see something and then you lose it.

SM: You were quoted as saying the Through the Windshield “gets past linear time.” Is this true of your writing in general or of Jacket Weather at least? Can you talk a bit more about the nonlinear story arc?

MD: Did I say that? Well, it’s what I hope to do, anyway. Jacket Weather covers ten years, but it collapses them so that everything that happens in one of those ten Septembers is in the September part of the book, and the same with October and so on. It seems true to my experience. You remember that something happened in a particular month or season but not necessarily what year. At least when you get to be my age. Even so, there’s an arc, like the arc of the year. I’m really not trying to tell a story. I’m trying to give a reader a place to go. And go back to.

SM: What do you hope the reader comes away with from this book?

MD: Feeling uplifted. Energized. Calm, but alert.

SM: What’s next?

MD: Another book. This one even less linear, more free.

Mike DeCapite has published the novel Through the Windshield, the chapbook Creamsicle Blue, and the short-prose collection Radiant Fog under the banner of Sparkle Street Books. Cuz Editions published his story “Sitting Pretty,” later anthologized in The Italian American Reader. DeCapite grew up in Cleveland and has lived in London and San Francisco, but has spent most of his time in New York City, where he now resides.