Airport beers with Mike Nagel’s ‘Duplex’
Airport Beers is an interview series. The following is an interview between Bryan Harvey and Duplex author Mike Nagel:
Bryan Harvey: Beef Ham. Have you ever had Beef Ham? Are you a connoisseur of canned meats? I remember a cabinet above the stove in my grandma’s house that always had a can of SPAM in it. I think it was always the same can.
Mike Nagel: First off, I gotta say I love the cover that Amy Wheaton designed for Duplex. I don’t remember us even discussing it much, if at all, but immediately when I saw the can of Beef Ham I loved it. I’m an advertising creative director for my day job, so I felt like I should be pickier, but I had no changes. In terms of eating Beef Ham, SPAM is probably the closest I’ve gotten. My dad used to fry it up, so I thought it was like a special-occasion meat. A treat. After I got married, I fried up some SPAM and when my wife got home she opened up all the doors and windows, turned on all the fans, and told me to never do that again. In the book, Beef Ham functions as a sloppy metaphor for simpler times — which, like Beef Ham, probably never existed — but someone sent me a picture of an actual product called Beef Ham so I guess I’m just not that creative after all.
BH: I’ve taken up frying chicken on New Year’s Eve the last few years because of a cookbook my sister gifted me. We open all the windows and tape trash bags over the cabinets. It’s fancy because it’s a lot to do, but it’s also not fancy at all. I feel like Duplex is full of that kind of sentiment. The “economics” of chicken nugget meals “astound.” I can sense a sarcasm there that some might read as an attack on the fast food industry, but I can also sense genuine wonder. How does McDonald’s do it? Another moment like that one might be the Q and A that happens between the guy at the liquor store and the store clerk, which is just a brilliant bit of dialogue for being both sad and hilarious. Do you find yourself as a writer consciously trying to straddle that line in your work or is that just an innate blessing that already exists in your sense of humor?
MN: I think the sentiment you’re describing about frying chicken being “fancy because it’s a lot do to” is 100% a vibe that I’m drawn to and informs the way I write/think/read/live. I think, very often, we are all having very meaningful experiences with seemingly unmeaningful things. Fancy experiences with un-fancy things. Deep experiences with shallow things. I have a stronger emotional connection to Little Ceasar’s $5 Hot and Ready pizzas than I do to the Mona Lisa. I think finding a sense of wonder in the McDonalds value menu or in a mundane liquor store interaction is maybe all I’m really trying to do. And I don’t think I’m the only one. I think this vibe or sentiment is partially why magazines like Taco Bell Quarterly have popped off recently: We were all immediately like “You know what, yeah, Taco Bell actually does mean a lot to me, and I have things to say about it, and I want to hear what other people have to say about it.” I’m not sure I naturally see the value in these things, or naturally find the humor in them, and maybe that’s why I try to write about them: to try to practice really looking at the things in my life and articulating what they mean to me. Regardless of whether the writing turns out any good, I think that’s a nice way of living a life, you know?
BH: Duplex boards a plane. Does it make for better reading in an aisle seat or a window seat?
MN: Got this question as I was getting off my plane home from AWP (window seat, my favorite). It seems to me that the correct answer would be neither.
BH: Was there a Jack in the Box at the airport?
MN: Unfortunately there was no Jack in the Box in the airport, at least not that I could find, although I am a sucker for their absolutely filthy 2-for-$1 tacos and their sourdough jack. On Friday nights when my wife was out of town, I used to get 8 of those tacos, a fifth of Bulliet bourbon, a case of Sierra Nevada pale ale, and blow an entire glorious evening that way. Those were the fucken days, man.
BH: I used to have a similar standing date with Five Guys’ grease-soaked bags of French Fries.
MN: The most relatable seating position for reading Duplex would be the middle seat: the worst of both worlds with no upside whatsoever. You still have to bother someone if you want to go to the bathroom, but you get nothing to lean against to fall asleep. You’re shoulder to shoulder on both sides. Good luck taking off a jacket or putting one on. Like living in a duplex, the middle seat is not quite anything: a weird inbetweener, a place nobody plans to end up but where everyone ends up at some point.
BH: That’s interesting — like each row of seats is a duplex. I always think of duplexes as being lateral, but there’s a great deal of verticality to Duplex’s final passage, maybe some ambivalent despair as well. How often do you think about the Great Chain of Being? Did you always have that final scene guiding you or did it arrive from writing the rest of the story?
MN: The final piece of the book is the only one that I wrote while being aware that it was going to be in a book. Most of the book was cobbled together from scraps I’d written over the years for various lit mags. They didn’t know they were in a book. But that last piece knows it, which I kind of tip when I say, “All the sad parts of this book are true.” I actually struggled with that last bit quite a bit. I think it took me a month or more to tie it up, probably because the entire book was definitely working forwards and not backwards. I didn’t have any final scene in mind. I didn’t know what the book was about. I didn’t know how to land it. Actually, in an earlier version of the book, that last essay went further to show me and J moving out of the duplex and into our new house, where we live now, but Michael Wheaton (Autofocus publisher/editor) and I both decided that the book needed to end inside the duplex, almost like these characters are trapped here and may never actually leave. I’d originally considered the book a horror novel. Maybe that’s the despair you’re sensing. There is something hopeless about the whole thing with just the slightest lift at the end at the possibility of us leaving. And then the perhaps lame pun about getting to the bottom of this, which for whatever reason just felt right, and I’d been futzing with it so much I eventually had to just decide that this was the best I could do.
BH: What you’re calling a lame pun I thoroughly enjoyed. I thought it pulled off a duality that’s in a lot of the book’s humor. The horror angle is interesting. We lived in an apartment that had a raccoon in the space between the ceiling and roof. Lots of scratches and scurrying. Do you still drive a Nissan? I ask because I still drive a 2007 Sentra.
MN: Still driving the same Nissan! White 2007 Sentra. I recently swiped the side mirror off and re-attached it with electrical tape. Easy! It won’t pass inspection and I’m too lazy to get it fixed, so it’s anyone’s guess what’s going to happen next. Probably something bad.
BH: Are you currently working on anything?
MN: As to what I’m working on currently, there maaaayyy be a follow up to Duplex already completed and in the editing stages . . . but you didn’t hear that from me. And otherwise, I’m just doing what I always do: Taking notes on my life and seeing if they add up to anything. Usually not. But every once in a while you get lucky.
BH: Is your middle name Scott?
MN: Yeah. Why?
BH: My middle name is Scott.
Mike Nagel’s essays have appeared in apt, Hobart, Salt Hill, DIAGRAM, and The Paris Review Daily. His essay “Beached Whales” was a Best American Essays 2017 Notable Essay. His first book, DUPLEX, is available now from Autofocus Books.
