Todd Dills is wearing those leather pants again. It’s a Tuesday night in early April, and he’s holding forth at Quimby’s Bookstore, reading from his novel in progress to a small, attentive audience. “My mother was a crazy whore,” he begins, his oratorical voice filling the room. “My father, Professor Hank Ledbetter, was perpetually drunk in the family room.” At this there is laughter from the audience, but silently a number of people are wondering: What’s with the leather pants when you read, Todd?
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In early September 1998, two days after his birthday, Dills left Rock Hill, South Carolina, where he’d spent his first 21 years. He arrived in Chicago, plump from his mother’s cooking and pulling cigarettes from the requisite pack of Marlboro Reds, to study fiction writing at Columbia College. These days Dills is 50 pounds lighter (not a conscious effort, he says) and one MFA heavier and the founder and editor of The2ndHand, a broadsheet literary quarterly. He’s given up the Marlboros for budget-friendly cans of Bali Shag tobacco, and has successfully banished a colony of rats from his basement apartment in Ukrainian Village–a feat that should decisively make him a Chicagoan.
In his novel, Rapture, agents of the Lord descend to earth and transmogrify into turkeys. The story arcs from the post-Civil War era to the present and borrows from Revelation and The Confederate Reader; he reluctantly sums it up as “a series of interlocking narratives [that seek] to project nothing less than the very mind of the south onto your pliable Yankee brain.” His self-published 2002 collection of short pieces, For Weeks Above the Umbrella, is a portal into the mind of the south in its own right, filled with Dills’s autobiographical accounts of, among other things, holiday trips back to Rock Hill and a quest for the perfect pair of aviator shades.
“12:47,” begins one of Dills’s recent entries. “Look at watch in bathroom. Excrete. Emerge to the scene, yet again, ghosts from years past, when you traveled around wildly uncertain of anything and nothing at once. Comprehend this fact: time can not move in reverse….Move to dance. Fail, crashing into dwarfish woman, girl, who scowls.” He wants to eventually publish a book of itineraries solicited from various pop culture icons. Lou Reed’s first on the wish list, followed by a host of disparate personalities: John Ashcroft. Kate Moss. Ira Glass. Iggy Pop.
In the meantime Dills digs in on the near northwest side, thinking and writing about the south–something he can best do at a safe remove. In his darkest vision of a return to Rock Hill, all projects are lost to blackout nights at the Silver Dollar Club; his gut balloons in response to bountiful fried okra, sausage gravy, and biscuits; he is blown clean of all writerly ambition by warm southerly winds and stripped of momentum by some thankless job, some $5-an-hour thing involving grease traps and dishcloths. At best, the words would keep coming, but they’d fall on deaf ears. When Dills gave a reading in Greenville, only two friends and three random shoppers showed up. “In Chicago,” he says, “there’s cultural space, and interest in someone like me. People will listen.”
