Milwaukee Writer Comes Home to Buffalo in New Novel

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Todd Lazarski made a reputation for himself in Milwaukee as a food writer. Highly opinionated, hyper personal, maybe even cynical, Lazarski favored simple foods well prepared and was impatient with foodie BS. The savant of tacos and burgers (his writing appeared on shepherdexpress.com) fell relatively silent over the past year and turned to novel writing, and yet the prose of Spend It All will ring familiar to his readers.

In Spend It All, Lazarski’s protagonist, Teddy Rawski, returns home to Buffalo, maybe to find that second lease on life or maybe to die young in a world that offers endless promises but delivers only frustration and anxiety. Lazarski will discuss Spend It All with The Milwaukee Anthology editor Justin Kern at 7 p.m., May 10 in a Boswell virtual session. Meanwhile, I asked the author some questions.

Writing a novel is a difficult undertaking and in our current world, it will probably be less read than an essay posted online. Why write a novel?

My therapist is always asking me this. If I had a priest, I’m sure he'd be after me on the same point too. Usually I hear it as: ‘why did you choose to piss away seven years of your life? Why not do something useful? Are you going to clean up what you just spilled?’ 

There is something about that proverbial bus, the one always running me over in my mind, I always wonder, what would my last thoughts be, when the MCTS 15 smooshes and splatters me across its monstrous windshield as I amble daydreamily across KK? At least I left something behind, something with an ISBN-13 and a cool cover and a few too-long sentences that I’m not entirely embarrassed by. It is something of an immortality project.

I often think of the Dylan line: ‘If I’d a thought about it I never would have done it, I guess I would have let it slide. If I’d have paid attention to what others were thinking, the heart inside me would have died.’ I know that if I paid too much mind to who or how many were reading, I'd have quit this racket a long time ago. And then there’s the advice I heard once about pursuing anything creative on a professional basis: ‘Don't do it. Unless you can't stand the thought of not doing it.’

I also once heard a terminal cancer patient asked, ‘What would you do differently with your life knowing what you know?’ To which she replied, ‘I wouldn’t do anything because it made sense.’ All of these snippets meatball in my head when my house is quiet and I should be sleeping or scrolling Instagram or doing something sensible. Maybe Kerouac said it best: ‘I wrote the book because we’re all gonna die...’

How do you describe the theme of Spend It All? Do you think it reflects a widespread generational experience?

If there were a remedial public high school English class teaching the book, I would dream it might be described in a general way as a meditation on loss and seeking, before appropriate discourse on how disjointed and meandering it all is. I think of it mostly as a poem of late-20s ennui, a travelogue of finding one's place in the world, or actively choosing no place at all. Which in some ways can be a beautiful fist-shaking form of protest against an existence that makes little sense.

More universally, it’s about the struggle to find a technique for living. And it’s about eating chicken wings, and it’s about loving to eat chicken wings a little too much, about being a natural born loser with stains on your shirt, about a certain kind of person you probably know who is maybe too excited to go to a restaurant, and then you go with him and he wants to get a drink or two or three at the bar beforehand, and then he wants to order every appetizer, and take a picture of the entree, especially if the entrée is pizza or chicken wings or a really greasy burger with dripping melted American cheese, and not for Instagram, but for a night years later where he’ll sit in a dark basement in a quiet house with Lester Young or Tom Waits playing low and have one more and take a look back to savor the taste of that moment. It’s really about a specific type of American dreamer who stays up too late.

Will people who know you be alarmed at recognizing themselves in the novel?

Most of those people are dead. So, I’d imagine they have many more interesting things to be alarmed by. Others are illiterate. The rest won’t read it, I always assume out of some kind of affront to me as a person. Many characters are obfuscated amalgamations of people I’ve known or partly known or just passed by, which I think, legally speaking, keeps me from being liable for defamation. There is only one person who I wonder and worry about seeing themself too clearly, and it really didn't for a second even occur to me until after the book was well past done: maybe Neal Cassady didn’t want to be Dean Moriarty. But he was Neal Cassady, and so we all have the book. Inthat spirit, I can only hope this person's fictional likeness is seen as celebratory instead of exploitative.

Are you from Buffalo?

I am, as evidenced by these stains on my shirt and this ever-present Buffalo on my hat. Mostly the book was born as a love letter to Buffalo. And just as much, to the Bills. When I was 6 and started watching football in earnest, the Bills began a devastatingly brilliant run of four straight Super Bowl appearances, and four straight Super Bowl losses. This streak began the year after my father died.

These years instilled an unmendable broken heart and an idea, one born of truth, that life is mostly failure, loss. But losers know more about life. And from maybe this sensitivity, an appreciation for being alive despite the absurdity, I look at the Bills logo as a sort of emblem, a crest, of my family, of everything that I come from, all hopes and dreams and aspirations and disappointments and abstract wishes of some sort of future togetherness are somehow wrapped up in the outline of that standing, or charging, Buffalo. The fandom aspect is silly, ludicrous, inexplicable. Wouldn’t you move away from something so painful?

But it’s maybe like the link between survivors of a plane crash. Everyone in a Josh Allen jersey tee shirt is at once my brother. I see a schlub in a Bills shirt at a gas station and feel compelled to stop them, to explain myself, to give my entire life story. The food aspect, though, is very much not silly. About this I am deadly earnest: Buffalo has the best food in the world. And I can think of no finer method for ending it all.