Who is Ralph Crespo?
Tolkienesque’s narrator, Ralph Crespo, was invented to be the butt of jokes. Ralphie first appeared in an earlier version of my forthcoming novel, Vanishing Places. In very early versions, my protagonist, Christopher Salvatore’s classmates, were a lot like my high school friends. For a novice writer, writing about your buddies is very tempting. Populating your fictional world with familiar personalities is easy. It also increases the chances that people you know will take interest. It is, however, a mistake. You can run into trouble if you portray someone in a negative light or write about a story that should remain private. I didn’t have those particular problems though; I treated all these characters with kit-gloves. Unfortunately, writing about a bunch of well-behaved, admirable people does make for some very boring writing. Good scenes (especially in a story set in high school) require awkwardness, stupidity, and, most importantly, adversarial tension. At least one character really needs to be a jerk sometimes. My initial solution was to let everyone keep their saintly demeanors, but I added a stooge to the mix. Ralphie would be the fool when a fool was needed.
The main character of my first novel (Christopher) shares some things in common with me. For example, he grew up when and where I grew up, and went to the same schools as me. But a protagonist needs to have the characteristics that drive the story. That meant in most ways, he could not be much like me. So, what to do with all my leftover high school foibles? I dumped them into Ralphie. Because he was a minor character, I felt more comfortable making him a lot more like my high school self than Christopher could ever be. He was unapologetically nerdy, short, bespectacled, socially awkward, sarcastic, physically unimposing, clueless when dealing with members of the opposite sex, and strangely obsessed with Aerosmith. He quickly became a faithful sidekick to my troubled protagonist. I named him Ralphie because, at the time, all of Christopher’s friends had a last name that ended in ‘y’ or ‘ie’ But he is also named after a my maternal grandfather and uncle. His last name, Crespo, just sounded right. While I do have distant relatives with the surname of Crespo (which my father pronounced “Creespo”) it is more likely that I thought of the name because of guitarist Jimmy Crespo. As a big Aerosmith fan in my high school years, I was keenly aware that, for one underrated album (Lightning Strikes), a chap named Jimmy Crespo took Joe Perry’s place as the lead guitarist.
As much as I enjoyed writing about Ralphie, there was not all that much to say about him. Christopher Salvatore’s story spans decades and deals with world-changing ideas. Ralphie, however, fades from the narrative. This was in part because, like me, Ralphie went to graduate school in clinical psychology. For him, Christopher was one of those friends you retain a closeness with, but who you see less and less of as time goes on. Ralphie seemed destined to be a minor character in my work.
That began to change when I moved to Westchester. I started to experience situations that I found quite comical (as someone who grew up in Staten Island, NYC). I wrote a few short stories for my newsletter which I put under the heading, “The Back Porch: The City Shrink’s Guide to Village Living.” These stories lampooned my real-life experiences. I could have written them as autobiographical pieces, but I gave them an extra layer of fiction to enhance the comedic material. When I did this, I found these stories weren’t about me anymore. They were about Ralphie. The Back Porch, I realized, was a spin off. From there, another flight of fancy led me to convert the story to Tolkienesque (I described this process in ‘Why In Middle-earth did I write Tolkienesque’). With a laugh, one day I concluded that the structure only worked if the therapist at the center of it was the “Frodo” of the story. Absurd, I thought, Ralphie is nothing like Frodo! He is not heroic. He would never go on a quest or face danger. Ralphie certainly wouldn’t be able to destroy the One Ring. Then again, my story was never about a heroic quest. There is no combat. No there-and-back again-journey. It was, first and foremost, a psychological tale. And for that, I needed a psychologist who was below average height. As luck would have it, I knew just the person.
Ralph Crespo, Ph.D. stepped into a story of his own. I decided to start him off at a point in life that seemed like the jumping off point to my own adventures in perilous adulting—living in Long Island with a new wife who was finishing her medical residence and wondering where the fates would take him. In his case, the adventure begins with an invitation to a party in Harmony On Hudson.