San Jose is a city full of ghosts. They’re in the shadows of historic neighborhoods and blighted buildings. They are the city itself, haunted by forgotten communities and ways of life torn down to make way for a future that is now the present. A city in love with innovation and renewal, at times at the expense of history, Gary Singh is familiar with the heart, soul, and even the ghosts of San Jose.
A world traveler, musician, recovering alcoholic, writer, and man on a perpetual quest, Gary’s history reads like the romanticized and tragically doomed histories of writers past. The hard truth is, happy people rarely make good writers, but Gary didn’t share that notion. When asked if suffering at some points during one’s life is the trademark of a good writer, he responds, “You want to connect what you are writing about to some personal experience or knowledge, but in the end it has to be your point of view and not anyone else’s.
“I’ve never really fit in anywhere,” he offers, reflecting throughout our conversation on his childhood, his years in music, and traveling the world as a professor’s assistant at San Jose State. Born in San Jose to a Sikh father and an Anglo mother, Gary’s relationship with his father was complicated and marked by long emotional absences. “My father was completely absent from my entire childhood. Physically, he was there, but not mentally… He was drunk the whole time. It’s sort of a cultural affliction for the Sikhs. They’re known as the Irish of India.” On his struggles with belonging and acceptance, he adds, “I’m sure that’s where a lot of my feelings of not fitting in come from and of course, I inherited all of his problems, like the alcoholism and everything else that comes along with it.”
At sixteen, Gary suffered the passing of his father. Gary’s mother ensured that music filled the Singh household, teaching Gary to play the family organ. They still see each other weekly, and when Gary first started writing for The Metro, she saved his clips. “I had to tell her to stop at some point; she would be saving a lot of clips,” he laughed.
Gary’s love of music continued in high school. Classes were no match for playing in a band and a hard partying, rock and roll lifestyle. Those were the days of the Cactus Club, when Nirvana and No Doubt would play the venue. Gary remembers these as the ‘good old days of music’ in San Jose. “The politicians and 21-and-over age limit killed the live music scene in San Jose,” said Gary with a shake of his wavy, shoulder-length hair. “The problem with this city is that it can’t decide what it wants to be. It doesn’t know if it wants to be a big city or a suburb. It’s all part of what I like to call the ‘San Jose condition.'”
For a guy who seems to relish the role of perpetual outcast and challenger of established conventions, Gary spent considerable time in a collegiate environment — first, as a student when he received his bachelor of music degree, then as a master’s in interdisciplinary studies degree candidate, and later as an assistant professor for the department. During this time, as Gary was travelling for work, he began paying attention to the interplay of cultural contrasts and similarities that intrigue him as a writer today.
In the theater of interdisciplinary studies, a major that allows students to make their area of study, essentially, Gary and his friends regularly held conceptual stage performances involving deconstructing modern artifacts and activities, such as amplifying and destroying a car, or frying an egg on stage. Gary still enjoyed playing classical music in college and hung out with “seven different groups of people, from the underground rockers, to academics, to stage performers and classical musicians.” By touring San Jose’s different groups, he met local writers and caught on to writing as a profession. It started with a few freelance pieces that eventually led to his weekly column, Silicon Alleys, in Silicon Valley’s most popular alternative newspaper. But the full-time gig didn’t last, and eventually Gary went freelance with The Metro, for which he writes today.
“You can’t justify paying someone for a full-time job if they are never at their desk,” admits Gary. Notably, all excuses of journalism being a profession that calls for being out of your desk regularly are absent from his speech. “If I didn’t have writing, I don’t know if I would be sitting here today… I could have easily ended up in jail, dead, or still a person with an addiction if I weren’t a writer.” Of course, while things could have turned out badly for Gary given his history, family, and vices, the simple truth is that Gary’s intellect and gifts for articulating the world around him pulled him down a sharply different road. But Gary remains… plain-faced…and somber as he reflects on ‘what could have happened’ — “Well, yeah, but that was just my path,’ he hesitates. “It could just as easily have been…a different path.” Is he saying this for my benefit, or his? As his voice trails off, it’s hard to say, but the specter of ‘what could have been’ is incredibly present as we wrap up our conversation.
Gary bemoans the dumbing down of reporting and mass communication, which is now widely acceptable. He calls out specifically people who blog and write for The Examiner. “Everything is just so dumbed down; the standards are now lowered. My friends do it, and they’ll call me a prick, but I am a writer. I don’t post something on Suite 101 and call myself a published writer; that’s a bunch of nonsense.” Despite the criticism, there’s an acknowledgement that this brave new world of citizen journalism and casual writers may be the future. “I don’t want to discourage people from writing. Everyone should have the opportunity to write if they want to. Some people make more money than professional writers, so who am I to put them down?”
As Gary wanders the streets of San Jose, he speaks of one day moving to India to get to know his Eastern heritage and his father’s side of the family. But India’s gain will be San Jose’s loss. Gary clarifies that if he leaves, it will probably be indefinitely. “I couldn’t go for just two weeks. I would need much more time because it would be exploring that side of myself and that part of my family.” Gary has wanted to move to a bigger city before, but said that as part of his ‘San Jose condition,’ he has never left. Maybe that was the more challenging path to take. Gary is at work finding lost histories and discovering new ones in a city in flux with its own identity, just like Gary, neither of whom can be defined. Gary’s work describes what ‘is’ — and so, too, must the observation be made of Gary: a man at the crossroads of cultures, saved by his gifts from what could have been, savagely observing the world and his peers through that same lens. He is. It’s his ‘condition.’ It’s enough.
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Read Gary Singh’s column in the Metro: www.metroactive.com/features/
