Bill Eisele: An Interview

by

Daniel M. Jaffe

Bill Eisele’s novel, Scrub Match (Kensington Books; $14.00), brings a unique perspective to fiction of romance and the difficulties encountered when seeking love. Scrub Match tells the story of Paul Carter, a young basketball player who moves to San Francisco to begin life anew and escape memories of a painful breakup. After joining the Gay Men’s Basketball League, Paul finds himself caught up in a bi-racial love feud that spills onto the court, causing passion and heartache.

Although Scrub Match is his first novel, it is by no means his first foray into writing. Eisele, a journalist, has won awards for his coverage of issues in the San Francisco Independent newspaper chain and for the Gannett Newspaper Group. I ask Bill how his experience as a journalist affects his fiction-writing. "My work as a reporter has influenced every story I’ve ever written," says Bill. "What other profession introduces you to so many different people and so many different situations on a daily basis? Unfortunately, I found it really hard to be a journalist full-time and also have any energy left to sit at the computer and work on my fiction, my #1 passion, so the reporting had to go. I still freelance though, from time to time, and I love doing it."

Bill explains the evolution of his novel: "I first started tossing around the idea for Scrub Match in 1998 when I left San Francisco to move to the East Coast. I knew I wanted to write a book set in SF so I could slip into a hot tub of memories about that city whenever I wanted. But I really started to crank on the book in 2000 when I enrolled in Vermont College’s MFA program.

"I knew I wanted to write a sexy basketball novel that took advantage of the SF cityscape. Baseball and football get way too much lit time at the expense of b-ball, which is far more exciting, and in my mind, a lot more raw and intimate. Once I nailed the scene where Paul and Twitch meet on the deserted basketball court, I felt as if the story could take off from there." After Bill completed the manuscript, "finding an agent was a year of torture, one rejection letter after another; I must have a couple dozen. Once I found my agent, he found a publisher in about five months."

Scrub Match captures so well the time of life when young men deal awkwardly with infatuation and unrequited love. So I wondered whether, while writing, Bill found himself tapping into his own emotional memory of early dating years. He replies, "I had my share of sordid dating situations, definitely. When I first started going to gay bars, I would let myself become ridiculously infatuated with guys I found attractive. In the book, Paul refers to these as ‘typhoid crushes,’ and they really do eat you alive if you’re not careful. So yeah, lots of dating pain, but I’ve also learned to sneak other people’s dating pain into my work as well."

One of the novel’s unusual features is its handling of interracial romance. Were such issues part of the novel from the outset? "I always knew," says Bill, "that my characters were going to come from different ethnic backgrounds, and I knew that would create tension in certain instances. The narrator Paul is half-black, half-white, and he falls for a white guy who happens to have it bad for a black man. People dodge the topic a lot, but white men and black men have all kinds of stereotypes about each other … Power roles get ascribed to different races. All this ties directly into sports and sex, so it made sense to deal with it in my book."

Given that Bill is not of mixed racial background, did he hesitate making the novel’s narrator a bi-racial character, a person so different from himself? "Paul has always been my first-person narrator, and I knew he was bi-racial pretty early in the book’s development. People always ask why I’m writing from this character’s perspective, and I always ask, why not? If Michael Chabon wants to have a gay protagonist in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, I say ‘Go, Mikey, go!’ As long as the character rings true. If Tom Wolfe wants to write from the perspective of a female co-ed, I say, ‘Have it your way, Tommy,’ again as long as there’s truth."

The novel bravely tackles a number of socially sensitive issues, so I felt curious as to whether Bill kept a particular audience in mind while writing the book. "I hope that anyone who likes basketball, or San Francisco, or romantic fiction, will find my book and love it. I also hope that anyone who had been through the ups-and-downs of dating can appreciate Paul’s situation. People who have started their lives over far away from their friends and family should also understand a lot of the pain Paul experiences. Realistically, based on the cover, I think a lot of people are going to come to this book looking for hot man-on-man action between guys with NBA bodies, and that’s just not what Scrub Match is about."

In his new home of Seattle, Bill is hard at work on another novel. But he’s somewhat cagey as to its subject. All he’ll reveal is, "It’s my post-millennial novel about a guy with some interesting pimples." Will acne ever be the same?

Dan is the author of  The Limits of Pleasure. He regularly publishes short stories and personal essays in literary journals and newspapers, has compiled and edited an anthology, and translated a Russian-Israeli novel in addition to teaching fiction writing for UCLA Extension. Dan can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it  and his web site is: http://danieljaffe.tripod.com