Dayvid Figler

Interview by Jarret Keene

On top of serving as a Las Vegas capital-murder defense attorney, Dayvid Figler has been a fixture on the West Coast slam poetry and spoken word scene for more than a decade, having performed at many national festivals, including Lollapalooza, South by Southwest, and Bumbershoot. Figler's humorous world view has popped up in such disparate forums as NPR's All Things Considered, McSweeney's, the Porchlight storytelling series in San Francisco, and a 2002 Kapow! chapbook called Merry Christmas, Jewboy. More recently, Future Tense Books has just brought out a third printing of Figler's Grope: A Fiction, which chronicles 24 hours inside Original Eden's Gentlemen's Club. The main characters include Finn, a neurotic voyeur, and Beth, a smart Jewess who thinks shaking her moneymaking ass is no less immoral than hawking Girl Scout cookies.

I caught up with Figler for breakfast at a real-life Vegas grind joint called Spearmint Rhino in the industrial part of Sin City. Against the booming soundtrack of songs like Billy Idol's "Rebel Yell," I probed Figler's thoughts on what it means to be an underground writer in Las Vegas.

Grope had many previous incarnations. It was originally a short sketch for a literary magazine, wasn't it?

Even shorter than that. For years I had been writing ten-word pieces that were fictional seeds that I didn't know how to grow and nurture. So I just broke the lines down and hawked them as poems.

Then I made them a little longer and discovered I could still get away with calling them poems. Free verse is very forgiving! And then they started to turn into stories with all these quirky bits scattered about. Ultimately, I began to focus on developing characters, sharpening dialogue. Before I knew it, I had a longer fiction.

You didn't shy away from sex in your previous book — Merry Christmas, Jewboy — but Future Tense is pretty well-known for championing sexually explicit writers. Does Grope mark a new direction in your writing?

If I could be half the pervert that [Future Tense Books publisher] Kevin Sampsell is, I would feel that I had accomplished something in life. I think that sex is overexposed — ha-ha! — but I think a smart take on it, trying to figure out why we ignore the sexual drive controlling so much of our lives, is a very fertile — ha-ha! — area in which to discover some compelling story ideas. I'm very impressed with Future Tense's approach to stuff. It's always surprising and fresh, and certainly, Kevin never ceases to amaze me as an editor and a writer.

He's a master at making everyday sexual thoughts and activities seem important and quite beautiful. But we're not talking about Kevin!

Well, we can touch on the fact that you're "label mates" with Susannah Breslin [You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?] and Shane Allison [Black Fag], who are considered sexually extreme writers.

There's nothing too extreme in Grope, though. I've been telling everyone I'm going to submit Grope to the annual Literary Review Bad Sex [in Fiction] Award, in which they give awards to the worst sex scenes in books.

Tom Wolfe won a few years ago with I Am Charlotte Simmons, right?

Right, for his dorm-sex novel. I mean, as hot as my book is, there are really only two hand job scenes. The world seems to have forgotten about hand jobs. Whatever happened to hand jobs? So I have two hand jobs.

Still, while Grope may not be as explicit as, say, Shane Allison's Black Fag, your book is a penetrating glimpse — my turn to say "ha-ha" — into the culture of gentlemen's clubs, at least in Las Vegas.

Well, that's the whole thing. In a way, I'm trying to desexualize the whole experience. Here you are; you voluntarily enter into these dens of promised sexual energy, and to just kind of rip away that façade is fun. And that's what I do with Grope. Even the title itself has a double meaning.

There's a whole strip-club culture that tends to be ignored. It's just really easy to focus on the despair in those places, as we've seen in many movies, or the scintillation, as we've seen in many movies. How many movies filmed in Vegas don't have a strip-club scene? It's ubiquitous. In all honesty, strip clubs thrive not because Arnold Schwarzenegger stops in there on his way to solving a crime. It's because thousands and thousands of people go in there every day, searching for something transcendent, and I just picked one character who is looking for something, as well, something different from the others, maybe. Finn, he's sort of detached and ironic about everything he sees. But ultimately, he's searching for some kind of resolution in his own mind. Beth, the stripper character, is searching for something, too, and it's not despair.

And your characters are Jewish.

They're Jewish. They're smart. And it's not Leaving Las Vegas. Both characters were raised in Las Vegas, had left Las Vegas, and they came back. It's a story untold of people who are raised in the environment and the normalcy they try to cling to in an abnormal environment. And I think it's all very rich subject matter. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if I started writing a whole series of stories about "normal" people in weird Vegas places. I could write a story about every strip club in Las Vegas and have something completely different and unique happen. Most of the time it's just a toss-off for writers:"My story is in Las Vegas, so let's take the characters to a strip club." Grope tries to go beyond that, since the whole story — except for the "super-shock ending" — takes place entirely in the club.