By Glenda Winders
SDUN Book Reviewer
“I love his work. He’s my hero,” Kish said during an interview. “A few people in my writing group (San Diego Writers Ink) said my writing came close to his, and that was one of the best compliments I could receive.”
Kish says that while Sedaris calls his genre “fiction based upon real memory,” what he is doing is “creative non-fiction.”
“You muddy the facts when you’re trying to remember,” he said.
The result of his efforts is a collection that works on two levels – nostalgia for anyone growing up in the 1950’s and ’60s and the chronicling of a young man’s developing personality and his realization that he was gay. Some of the tales are laugh-out-loud funny; others range from tender to heartbreaking. Some of the humorous ones recall talking on party lines, being rewarded with M&Ms for saying the rosary, giving up the accordion because Connie Francis did, too, and his mother’s cure-all enemas.
More disturbing is his memory of the hot August day when a young man drowned on the Allegheny River beach near Kish’s home in Natrona Heights, Pa., while he and his siblings were there swimming. In one touching story, his overweight brother, Bobby, steals a girdle from a department store by smuggling it out in a popcorn bag. In another that he says is an apology to his brother Andy, he recalls beating up his younger sibling.
Some of the stories are funny now, although they wouldn’t have been at the time they happened – such as the time Kish nearly burned down the house by setting a fire in the basement, his father’s failed attempt to tell him the facts of life during a fishing trip and Kish’s stab at learning how to play baseball: “That very evening I announced that I would officially retire from my illustrious baseball career and concentrate on cake baking and interior house decorating.”
The pieces are arranged in chronological order, with hints about the growing boy’s emerging sexuality tucked into accounts of dressing a teddy bear in women’s clothes, preferring home economics to wood shop and delighting in his mother’s high heels.
“I’m not a cross-dresser and I don’t want to be a woman,” he said, laughing, and then with perfect comedic timing: “However I do think Halloween sometimes presents an opportunity.”
He has also written a play, “Collision With a Stranger,” about Ernest Hemingway’s son, Gregory, who was in the process of transitioning into a woman when he died in a jail cell.
“When he was arrested [for indecent exposure] the police put him in the women’s section of the jail,” Kish said. “He was happy because he was finally recognized as a woman.”
Kish’s attraction to the theater began in 10th grade, when he played both George and Martha in a scene from “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and won first prize in a dramatic competition. After a stint in the Army, he studied drama at Slippery Rock State College and Westminster College in Pennsylvania, eventually moving west and completing his playwriting degree at San Diego State University.
Since then he has both written for and acted on the stage. An early play, “Fridays With Maureen,” was produced at the Actors’ Asylum, which later became the Cygnet Theater. More recent was “Obits for Dummies,” produced at Swedenborg Hall. Kish has also written theater reviews for the Gay and Lesbian Times, City Beat and Lavender Lens. He’s currently the movie critic for San Diego Theater Scene, and he writes occasional pieces for the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” series.
The idea for writing a memoir began when his father became ill with Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. During trips home to spend more time with his family, Kish also began reading his mother’s journals.
“They weren’t literary journals,” he said. “She wrote about what flowers she had planted and what she made for dessert.”
But they were enough – along with thousands of family photos – to get Kish started. The project expanded through Facebook, and other relatives got involved.
Publishing the book proved more difficult than writing it, he said. Agents and publishers told him that while they liked it, they’d only consider publishing it if he wrote a novel first. Not interested in doing that, he published it himself. Its length – fewer than 200 pages – was determined by the prices at Bookstand Publishing, but if he is successful in selling it to a mainstream publisher, he said he has 20 more stories to include, along with what he calls “flashes” – bits of ephemera to illustrate the stories. One is a 1960 Bell Telephone ad that introduces phone booths, urges customers to “reach for the phone and have a happy time” and touts equipment in “a garden of colors.”
For now, the book is available at The Grove in South Park and The Obelisk in Hillcrest as well as at amazon.com and Kish’s website, kishwriter.com, where visitors can listen to him read some of the stories. He’s currently meeting with composers with an eye to turning the book into a musical.
As to his unusual name, he was born James Joseph Paul Kish, the oldest of five boys and one girl in a Polish Catholic family. At one point he changed his name legally to just Kish.
“Like Cher,” he said.
Later he taught English in Mexico City and fell in love with the Aztec culture. Today his full legal name is Cuauhtemoc Quetzalcoatl Kish.
“I’ve got an Aztec king and an Aztec god,” he said.
He shares his North Park home with his partner of 10 years, Jorge Gutierrez. The couple first obtained domestic partner status; then they married in San Francisco. After that marriage was nullified, they married again in San Diego.
“Today we’re legal until the courts tell us differently,” he said.
Kish said he enjoys his life. In addition to his writing projects, he spends time with his Mexican hairless dogs, Chaparro and Yatzachi, and volunteers at the San Diego Humane Society as an assistant counselor.
“At 60, if you can’t be who you are, when is that going to happen?” he said.
