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There are a number of things Victoria won’t do. And the trouble with that is I’m paying her to get up off her skinny ass every fifteen minutes and look down at the street. And that’s exactly one of the things she won’t do. She won’t do it because I want her to. She won’t do it because she likes to get something for nothing. Maybe she won’t do it because in our miniature thimble food stamp life, it amuses her to see the pissed-off look on my face all the time.
“Go,” I say. “Go.”
And I raise my hand like she can talk to the palm if she wants to argue. But Victoria doesn’t argue. She never talks to the palm. She dyes her hair blond every month and lets it go dark at the roots. She eats us out of house and home. She disrespects me on a daily basis. She lives in a different universe than most other normal people.
Still, sometimes I say go and she does. Sometimes, I think she actually does what I’m paying her to do just to keep me guessing. That’s another thing. I never know what’s wrong with her. But there is something definitely always wrong with her. And I’m always on the receiving end of it and guessing about it and how it’s going to screw up my life next.
I’ve been guessing for over ten years of marriage to the woman. And I still have to pay her minimum wage. We got married long enough ago for me to have forgiven myself for the period of temporary insanity—compounded by horniness and rapid decision making—that led up to the wedding. In short: I’m a victim of the human condition. And that’s something at least I don’t have to guess about. But: capitalism. She’s got to get paid or she don’t go.
She comes back from the window and just stands there.
“Yes?”
“Nothing,” she says. “Linda doing her whore thing. That Hoffman kid’s sitting on top of his car. There’s a dog. Nothing for you down there.”
Then she stops and smirks. She’s waiting for the punch line, the second shoe, the moment I look disgusted or angry or depressed or even like I don’t care anymore. So she can laugh at me and say something sarcastic and go back to her crossword puzzle.
And she goes: “I’m sure you’re going to make it down the stairs in time before Linda gets a customer. I’m sure.”
“You don’t know a goddamn thing.”
“Oh, I know a thing or two,” she says raising her eyebrows at where my legs should be. Instead of a thing or two, I’ve got a stump or two. But I’ve got all kinds of moves. It’s like she doesn’t even see the guide ropes down the stairs or the pulley system I put in. I’ve got a lot of time. What did she think I was doing up here with the hammer? I’ve told her, but the words just bounce right off her crossword-doing brain.
Victoria’s done every crossword book published in the last 50 years by Simon and Schuster. She has stacks of them. I asked her one time does she want to just stick to the ones in the Herald because they’re free and she tells me they’re way too easy. So she’s like this crossword puzzle Jedi master. And she’ll throw words out on me, too. Like: lugubrious.
I’ll be sitting here, drawing something—what I usually do every day—like trying to get the line of Linda’s calf just right or the expression when one of her customers looks up and thinks he sees me watching but he’s too busy getting his money’s worth to keep thinking about it—and Victoria will just come out with lugubrious. Just spontaneously like that and completely blow my mind.
“Where do you think all these drawings come from if I can’t make it down the stairs in time? I’m even faster now than when I could walk.”
“You keep on telling yourself that,” she says to the crossword book. “Mmm-hmm, you keep on believing.”
And if she busts out with a word like lugubrious, I’ll usually say something like, “Lugubrious? Get the fuck out of here with your lugubrious. I don’t even know what that means. That’s not even a word.”
But it won’t do any good. She’ll just nod like Buddha and take another sip of coffee like she’s doing right now. And I’ll know it’s a word because I’ll definitely go look it up in her crossword puzzle dictionary. And then the joke will be on me. Always. But I never back down over a word.
“Look, I’m paying you too much to keep an eye out for me, in that case, if you don’t even think I can get down there in time.”
“It’s your money.”
“Damn right it is,” I say, wheeling myself over to the shelf where I keep my sketch book and backpack. “I’m going to go do my art. With my money that you’re stealing by not doing your job.”
“Keep your money,” Victoria says. “I’m going on strike.”
She isn’t going on strike. We’ve been married a decade. My wife doesn’t strike. Even when, for example, I get really pissed-off and use a word like lugubrious in every other sentence to drive her crazy. I might say something like, “I’m not trying to be all lugubrious about it, but I think we’re running out of coffee” or “Those kangaroos on the show were really lugubrious the way they ran around like that. Don’t you think?” That sort of thing used to get to Victoria. But now she just laughs at me. She doesn’t even bother defining the words for me anymore.
The rope and pulley system gets me down to the landing and then out the front door of the building in less than a minute. It works like this: I’ve got a pair of really smooth electrician’s gloves. It took me forever to work them down so the rubber wasn’t sticky. Now they slide on the ropes like no tomorrow and I can glide down the stairs hand-over-hand. I’m using a double-braided Mammut Supersafe 10.2mm climbing rope threaded through a system of 12 extra-large anodized aluminum pulleys nailed to the wall of the stairwell. I cinch up the seatbelt on my wheelchair, kick off from the top step outside our door, and let gravity and expert hand coordination do the rest.
Whenever I get to a pulley, I have switch hand positions. I’ll admit I missed a switch once and wound up on the landing after taking a dozen stairs upside my face. But since then, I got professional at it, and I cross-train with 10 lb. weights for those times when I have to carry something heavy down in my lap. It’s all in the biceps.
So that’s what I do to get down, and today I’m actually out on the sidewalk as the guy gets out of his car and follows Linda into her apartment building across the street. Why she takes her customers up to her own residence I will never understand. But I don’t ask questions because we’ve got a good thing going. Her building has an old-fashioned Otis traction elevator inside with an expandable iron gate. By the time I wheel myself up the ramp and go into the lobby, the elevator is coming right back down for me.
The lobby’s all brown marble and decaying sofas, and if you’re moving fast in a wheelchair, you really have to be careful you don’t turn too sharp. Marble’s slippery and it hurts your face when you fall.
Ever since getting blindsided by a drunk child in an SUV in the winter of 1994, I’ve learned new things about all kinds of surfaces. I was on the crew resurfacing the part of upper 47th street that runs down to the water when the girl’s fender pinned me against our truck. That day, my life changed in just about every way. No legs, no more job at the DOT.
Now I read a lot more, and I’m compiling my own set of words like a Sith master getting ready to pull one on the Jedi. I even went back and got my AA degree. Recently, I’ve earned certificates in painting and drawing from The Odessa Institute Online—not cheap, but what the hell am I going to use my money for now? Just to pay Victoria to be my lookout?
I was about to retire so we could move out of the city. Instead, now I’m an artist. That’s what I do. And my subject is, and always will be, Linda.
A new story published in The Nonconformist Magazine. Read it here: https://nonconformist-mag.com/the-ashes-of-the-trumpocene/
(Part of a long story in progress.)
It was around this time that the dreams began. Looking back, it seems remarkable that they hadn’t begun sooner in all of us. But, even if they had, we probably wouldn’t have known. We wouldn’t have talked about it.
Tyler would have belched and blamed the beer or the Eagles or the general stupidity of Carling. Greg would have gone along with him, regardless whether he secretly harbored some superstitions or otherwise fanciful beliefs about the provenance of dreams. And Lindsey, perhaps the smartest and most insightful of us all, would have left it open. “Maybe it all means something,” she’d say. “Or maybe not.” Then she’d ask, again, about the bonfire.
To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure I would have been more forthcoming than Lindsey. Someone who has a hard time talking about love wouldn’t be able to easily broach the subject of dreams—which supersede love and, in that sense, seem to grant access to an even more private, deeper vulnerability. It was better for all of us not to ever speak about dreams or love, as was our custom. But the dreams were real, as real as dreams can be. And there was no escape, no respite, no bright simple explanation for how they seemed to dovetail with our thoughts, our anxieties.
In the shadows of my dreams, I saw the lighthouse at Beacon Point. And the vision struck me like the resonance of a deep temple bell, though when I woke I could not say exactly how or why. The lingering impression of something incongruous and dense just beneath the surface of the very mundane lighthouse made me doubt my mind.
Dreams of water and rain, of a dark rusted hospital ship drifting toward the rocks. Waking to thunder and lightning outside my bedroom window. It had been storming just off Beacon Point for days, never moving too far inland, just enough to cover Carling and the beach. How much had I slept? Three hours? Two? I went into the kitchen and started some coffee.
Dreams and the fragments of dreams. Echoes and reflections of a mind untethered. I didn’t like it when I dreamed, the loss of control, the stillborn sense that I’d been somewhere else, leading a wholly different life. The residue of those feelings and the fragments that sometimes returned throughout the day: the lighthouse illuminated from behind by an unknown source, its tiny circular windows dark and still, the rain coming down hard but completely silent. Such images would come back to me like memories.
In my mind’s eye, I’d recall the surf crashing noiselessly against the rocks, arms of white water raised in a voiceless paean. And the dead hospital ship making its way inexorably toward the land. It would crash against the shipways. The destruction would be incredible. Enormous. In my dream, I felt desperate to tell someone. But I was always alone.
The coffee maker beeped. I leaned against the sink, looking out through the little window far above the apartment lot, the space tinged green by sodium floods. And watched the sheets of rain glitter pale emerald against the night.
A story about volunteers.
Of all the things I’d hoped to accomplish that fall, digging a six-foot-deep moat around the family house wasn’t one of them. But the governor decided to end all Covid restrictions in the middle of the pandemic, causing the state’s heavily armed population to take it as a sign and go berserk. When that happens, you dig a moat. So I couldn’t argue with Uncle Red’s decision to fortify the premises. Nevertheless, there were problems.
My own troubles started a week before I moved in. Hauberk College cancelled its spring semester in the interests of social distancing and good hygiene. So instead of moving into the dorms the second half of my freshman year like I’d planned, I found myself staying at the house my mother once described as “a ramshackle pit” and trying to spend as little money as possible. I was supposed to have received a dining hall meal plan along with my freshman year scholarship. Given my Aunt Phoebe’s cooking, I think losing that meal plan depressed me the most.
“Put your back into it,” Uncle Red said, “or I’ll make you mask up!”
I nodded and tried to approximate what “putting your back into it” looked like, but I was tired. I’d been shoveling my assigned section of moat since morning, my back hurt, and I’d gotten blisters on my hands. This, I thought, is no way to start an adult life. If I’d wanted to dig moats for a living, I could have joined the Peace Corps like my brother.
In my uncle’s view, masking up was the ultimate dunce cap, fit only for democrats, Marxists, social justice activists, and professors. In this branch of my family, wearing a mask to protect against Covid was a sign of weakness, wrong thinking, unworthiness, and shame. I had a pack of five N95 masks in my suitcase, but I hadn’t taken them out.
It was enough that everyone knew I was attempting college. Anything more and I felt the generosity of my relatives would become strained beyond the bounds of credulity. As Uncle Marty liked to say, I’d be just another “freak peckerhead.” And nobody wants that. More importantly, I’d also be out on the street.
“That’s hardpan you’re digging!” yelled Aunt Phoebe from the porch. “Too hard for you!”
“No doubt about it!” yelled Uncle Marty.
“You got that right!” yelled Uncle Red.
I said nothing and kept trying to look like I was putting my back into it.
Uncle Red was called “Red” because his first name was “Redding.” There was a story behind it that no one ever talked about. He was short, had a beer belly, small eyes, and a round face. He was also completely bald and never had anything close to red hair. Uncle Marty looked completely different: tall, muscled, with blue eyes and a thick blond goatee that made you think of King Arthur.
Aunt Phoebe, on the other hand, was completely gray and starting to develop a stoop from osteoporosis. She liked to say her bones were getting smaller along with her brain. None of them looked like each other. And none of them looked like me. I sometimes wondered whether any of us were actually related.
The moat was wide enough for two grown men to stand on the bottom shoulder to shoulder. We knew this because that’s exactly what my uncles did. They checked the depth with a wooden yardstick as we progressed. We dug our way clockwise around the house; past the corner of the porch; past the enormous red-brick chimney that started at the base of the foundation and went up six feet above the roof; past the completely rusted propane tank, which everyone agreed would someday explode; past the back porch and the far corner of the house, gray and disintegrating like the old barns you saw from the highway; and back around to the front. It didn’t dig like hardpan. The ground was relatively soft. Still, it was an enormous project to attempt in one day.
When we found our way back to the front yard, the ouroboros could almost bite its tail. So we broke for dinner. It was ham and cheese sandwiches, brought out by Aunt Phoebe on her Franklin Mint 2016 commemorative platter, featuring Donald Trump and Abraham Lincoln healing the sick of Bombay. Above them, the good Lord smiled down from his golden throne in the clouds. Aunt Phoebe liked to joke about it, but I also noticed she kept the platter on a decorative stand by her boom box over the sink.
My uncles and I sat on the edge of the moat, our feet dangling down like kids at swim class taking a break. There was a festive air, a certain delight that Uncle Red and Uncle Marty never seemed to show. But when they looked at what we accomplished they smiled and high-fived each other.
Back on the porch, Aunt Phoebe turned and yelled, “Eat up, boys, but don’t take too long!”
“Not a chance!” yelled Uncle Red.
“We’re on it!” yelled Uncle Marty.
Then the three of them looked at me. I raised my fist in solidarity and took another bite.
Uncle Red, Aunt Phoebe, and Uncle Marty, lived together in the house about 40 miles northeast of Hauberk, Missouri. It was a two-story Coronado foursquare build by the Louis Company for my great-grandfather in 1912. He moved there from Kansas City with the expectation that the town of Hauberk would eventually grow along the railroad in his direction, raising the value of the land. That proved, however, to be a precipitous assumption. The property was the last bit of an unproductive patch, which before the Great Depression had been optimistically designated as farmland, but which was now just a flat plain of grass and birch trees with dry creeks and too many crows.
The house had been going to seed for the last 80 years, just like our family, and was known to be an area where you might get threatened with a .410 for trespassing. Still, Uncle Red, Aunt Phoebe, and Uncle Marty, having survived their respective spouses, retired together to the old house in the late 1990s. Since then, they seemed to have given themselves over to the kind of melancholy one feels when the good old days are unquestionably gone forever.
When they weren’t digging moats, they were a fairly morose bunch and they were avoided at all costs by the rest of the family. I’d learned that the feeling was generally mutual; though, the three of them maintained a reverence for our grandfather and his property that bordered on religion.
They did not keep the place up, but they did admire it greatly, if only in the abstract and usually in the evenings after a certain amount of alcohol. The house signified the last good, common, family thing in their lives. They were not well off, but they treated the old homestead not unlike one of the great estates of a lost European nobility, a sad reminder of a grander, more glorious age.
“You’re never gonna get it done!” Aunt Phoebe yelled.
“I know!” yelled Uncle Marty.
“Damn shame!” yelled Uncle Red, pitching his crumpled can of Bud into the open leaf bag in the center of the front lawn.
I looked at the remaining distance we had to cover, maybe about 15 feet, and realized that Aunt Phoebe would have said that even if we’d only had one shovelful left. That was just her style, the same way that my uncles agreed with her no matter what she said. I was a guest in the house, yes, but I was also a spectator.
When the George Floyd protests came to Hauberk and someone tried to burn down the Walmart Megastore a block west of the college, Uncle Red, Aunt Phoebe, and Uncle Marty defaulted to the fatalistic, medieval siege mentality that had been lurking in their DNA all their lives. They ran up their credit cards at the gun shop and patronized whichever local box stores were still open in order to prepare for the worst. They figured the End Times had finally arrived. It cheered them immensely.
All Hauberk was on edge. Everyone was talking about what had recently happened in Nirvana, just over the Arkansas line, where an anti-police brutality protest turned brutal and an entire strip mall went up in flames, including a bank, a nail salon, a Mongolian restaurant, and a storefront sculpture gallery featuring Remington reproductions and assorted objects of rodeo art.
Though the editors of the Hauberk Gazette condemned the violence in the strongest possible terms, stressing the need for dialogue and down-home midwestern tolerance, there was an abiding sense that anything could happen. One worried that the civil unrest, which had so recently and shockingly boiled through the country on the coattails of the pandemic, might rush inward from the coasts once again, burning everything in its path, until it all coagulated in the center of Hauberk’s main drag.
“Knees! Dig from the knees!” yelled Aunt Phoebe.
“That’s what I keep telling him!” yelled Uncle Marty.
“Absolutely!” yelled Uncle Red as he tossed another can of Bud into the bag.
Unfortunately, the moat had not been dug from the knees and it was decidedly not watertight. The 50 gallons of bituminous tar specified for that purpose in Uncle Marty’s Medieval Siegecraft for the Modern Home was not obtainable from Amazon Prime in less than a month, the local Home Depot having sold out of it two weeks earlier. We weren’t the only ones digging moats.
Things got more difficult when Aunt Phoebe strained her back boiling crab apples in an enormous cast iron cauldron behind the house. This took most of the joie de vivre out of the moat digging experience, seeing that she then parked herself on the front porch swing with a Mason jar full of ice water so she could critique Uncle Red’s and Uncle Marty’s shovel technique.
“The knees!” she yelled. “It’s all in the knees! If you don’t hurry it up, you won’t get finished before sundown! And then what?”
“I know!” yelled Uncle Marty.
“Dig like you got a pair!” yelled Uncle Red—I think to me, since he had his back to Marty and it wouldn’t have made sense had he been addressing Aunt Phoebe. But I’d learned to take nothing for granted while staying at the house. And though we hadn’t talked about it, I think we’d all seen enough zombie movies to know what happens after dark when moats are only half-dug.
Mercifully, Aunt Phoebe left me alone. Yes, I had bad shovel form. I knew it. At 19, I’d already developed what some might call “rickety knees,” which ended all career paths involving well digging, trench maintenance, basement retrofitting, pool resurfacing, and freelance latrine management well before I could investigate those brochures at the Hauberk Job Center.
Sometimes, Uncle Red called me, “boy” or “the kid,” not in a condescending way but because, to the three of them, that’s what I was and probably what I’d always be. Uncle Red often said, “A man busts his ass.” By that calculus, I was just a kid with an unbusted ass and weak knees, who’d therefore gone to college to study Marxism and smoke dope.
“You’re hopeless!” yelled Aunt Phoebe.
“Truth!” yelled Uncle Marty.
“No kidding!” yelled Uncle Red.
I did my best to put my back into it and dig like I had a pair. I shoveled as fast as I could, thinking we’d have to engineer some sort of pit trap or at least a deadfall with broken rocks and shards of glass at the bottom to stop the house-invading hordes of liberals my aunt and uncles expected any time now. In case we didn’t get the tar, my Uncle Red said they had a backup plan; though, none of them felt inclined to share it with me just yet. And I knew better than to attempt to pry it out of them. They had their secrets, jointly and severally, to be sure.
Still, in spite of the fact that none of us pleased Aunt Phoebe with our shovelry and my uncles took regular piss breaks, constantly bringing more Bud Light out from the pantry, we completed the moat by nightfall. They completely filled the plastic yard bag with their empty cans. By the end, they were, as Aunt Phoebe put it, “drunk as two otters.” Nevertheless, it was a magnificent moat, yawning, black and ominous as a skull in the dark.
I felt we would all sleep well that night—my uncles from an abundance of beer, me from physical exhaustion, Aunt Phoebe from her nightly Halcion crushed up and taken with warm milk. In the upstairs hallway, she grabbed me by the arm as we passed each other on the way to our rooms. It was dark, but we paused in a slant of light from the circular window over the stairs. Fingers digging into my arm, she warned me not to go outside if I woke up before dawn.
“Why?”
“Cause you don’t know what’s out here,” she whispered. “You never know.”
I thought Aunt Phoebe was going to caution me against falling into the moat, but I couldn’t imagine what caused her to think I might be wandering out there in the middle of the night.
“Bears?”
“Ain’t no bears in Missouri,” she said. “Leastways not around here.”
“Democrats?”
She sighed, frowned at me, then let go of my arm and shuffled down to her room at the end of the hall. One day, Aunt Phoebe would tire of my sarcasm. Then there would be hell to pay. Until then, it would be either liberals or bears or perhaps liberal bears, and hell could wait.
It was a big house, two stories up on a high footprint. The wood and flagstone front porch was painted dull clay red on a gray concrete foundation about six feet off the ground. The top floor—four bedrooms, three bathrooms, and a solarium full of cardboard boxes and miscellaneous dusty junk—felt more like a third story.
I opened the bedroom window and felt the night air on my face. The window was more like a set of narrow doors with yellow glass panels. It had little French handles made of pewter and, when it was fully open, it framed my body from mid-shin. No screen. You turned both handles at once, swung both sides inward, and then it was just you and the night sky. No one, to my knowledge, had ever fallen out and broken his neck, but it was the first thing I thought of as I stood there listening to Uncle Red snoring two rooms away.
The flat blue-gray plain of dead farmland stretched out under the moon. Here and there a black copse of birch broke the monotony. Uncle Red called them “volunteers,” because the birds had dropped the seeds. The saplings grew tall and thin together like groups of people mingling at a party. My uncles were too superstitious to cut them down. When I asked, Uncle Marty just said, “You don’t fuck with the land.” And that was that.
I looked for the moat, but I could only see the edge of it if I leaned way out, which scared me when I did it. I’m not afraid of heights and old creaky houses, but there was something about how the stands of trees cast long shadows in the moonlight that made me think no one would ever notice me out there if I fell and broke something.
The room smelled like they hadn’t vacuumed since the Kennedy Administration and I wondered how many people had slept in the lumpy queen bed over the years, what their lives had been like, and how many of them might have stood at the window on a moonlit night and watched those dark stands of trees sway in the wind.
In the morning, I came down to the kitchen, feeling groggy and sore from the previous day’s agricultural labor, all that putting of my back into it and digging like I had a pair. Aunt Phoebe set out a bowl of Cream of Wheat for me with a slab of butter in the middle like a tiny radiant sun. She was in a good mood, doing the dishes, whistling, had the local conservative radio show going full blast from her ancient boom box over the sink.
I noticed she’d washed and replaced the Franklin Mint platter beside the radio. After I’d been sitting at the table for a minute, Aunt Phoebe fell back into her unconscious habit of answering the show under her breath—“Right” or “Not a chance” or “That’s for damn sure” as she moved around the kitchen. I thought it was a holy roller radio service at first. But it was just an agitated republican.
“We’re pretty much stocked up,” she said. “Nothing can touch us now!”
“What about the crab apples, though?”
Aunt Phoebe gave me a sour look. “I dumped ’em. Too much work. And I was short on jars. The squirrels’ll get ’em all before the end of the week anyhow. You’ll see.”
The speaker on the radio had a feverish, almost breathless way of spitting out his words, as if each one were a bullet. The question under debate was what the violent liberal rioters were going to do when Trump won again. A group of illiberal Marxist dissidents was supposed to be holding a sit in that evening in downtown Saint Joseph and the local militia was set to come out and prevent various statues from getting beheaded. The speaker paused, then asked with great intensity: “Will they burn YOUR town next?”
“Not this damn town,” muttered Aunt Phoebe; though it was unclear which town she meant. It was all a bit hard to take with a bowl of greasy porridge after a day of engaging in medieval siegecraft.
The moat, as I have already mentioned, was lacking a sealant, at least one appropriate for a crusader stronghold. But the backup plan was sound and had already been put in motion. My uncles returned in Marty’s Dodge Ram just as I was forcing myself to swallow the last spoonful of breakfast. Roped steady in the truck bed was a 50-gallon drum of self-hardening fiberglass resin they’d bought that morning at Complete Building Materials over in Columbia.
Uncle Red explained the plan as we looked down into the moat. “This turns to stone and it’s watertight. When we have to, you know, pour Greek fire in there and light it up, it won’t burn extra hot like with the tar, but it’ll keep it going.”
“Greek fire?”
Uncle Red lit a cigarette, squinted, gestured at the moat with his smoking hand. “An incendiary weapon first used in Byzantine warfare in the seventh century, Anno Domini. What’d they teach you at school?”
“Napalm,” Uncle Marty said and grinned. “They never expect napalm.”
“Isn’t that against the Geneva Convention?”
They laughed.
Later, we sloshed the self-hardening resin around the entire inside of the moat, got harangued from the porch by Aunt Phoebe for sloshing it wastefully and not bending our knees (“I know!” yelled Uncle Red. “Yeah! Exactly!” yelled Uncle Marty.), and got dizzy from the fumes. Then Uncle Marty took me out to see his cattery.
Two things are always true in this existence of toil and servitude, no matter who you are and no matter what you do for a living: one never expects napalm and visiting a cattery will change you. The former is true because napalm, like moats, is something out of myth and legend, something we only see on TV. No one says, “It’s looking like rain tomorrow, Bob. We better roll out the napalm.” It just doesn’t happen.
The latter is true because feral cats are sons and daughters of the goddess, Bastet, and therefore inherently divine. And 38 furry divine beings peering at you from the roof and through the slats of an ancient collapsing barn will deliver such pagan grace as to make you rethink certain fundamental assumptions and generally reconsider your life. Uncle Marty explained this to me when we got there, which also made me reconsider Uncle Marty.
He had a large black cat statue, which he’d positioned at the edge of the roof overlooking the broken side door. “Soon as I put the statue up,” he said, “they started coming. They told their friends. I’m well known.”
“You’re a cat celebrity.”
“Don’t joke.” He nodded at the Bast statue, which had been carved so artfully that the black cat sitting next to it looked identical. “She’s a goddess. She’s kind. But she’s got her dignity. You know?”
I didn’t. I also didn’t know whether he meant the black cat sitting next to the statue or Bastet herself. When we got out of the truck, the cats started meowing.
“Ancient Egypt’s always called to me. I got a ton of books on it. Started having these dreams. Then one day, I came out here to shoot some cans and I saw a cat sitting right over there.”
He pointed to a cement block sticking up about a hundred feet away, part of an old house’s foundation, what they used to call a “ghost basement.” The house got torn down and all that was left were concrete basement walls sunk into the earth. But the barn had remained, slowly listing until a tornado or maybe just age and termites caused it to definitively collapse sideways. From the look of it, one more bit of harsh weather might do it in completely.
Uncle Marty opened up five large tins of cat food and positioned them around the doorway. He talked as he washed out and refilled two aluminium water dishes of the sort the local farmers used for goats and alpacas. “I followed the cat inside here but it was gone. Then, about a week after that, I had a dream of cats in a golden temple and I knew.” He straightened up and gave me his King Arthur smile as if the rest of the story should have been self-evident.
A large crowd of cats had now formed around my uncle, some taking sips of water, some rubbing against his jeans, or nibbling at the food. A row of them looked down from the edge of the roof like vultures. Pairs of eyes stared at us from spaces in the wood. The meowing was prodigious and incessant. I’d never seen feral cats act like this. Then again, I’d never seen an ancient Egyptian cattery barn dedicated to a goddess before, either.
“You knew what?”
“I knew I touched on the infinite.”
In the evening, Uncle Red got drunk up in the attic, watching C-SPAN on the house computer. Uncle Marty disappeared to his room. And Aunt Phoebe put on the AM ballroom station, twirling around the kitchen like an ingénue of the early cinema. Contrary to what one might initially think, this was their usual routine.
It was also why I hadn’t asked Uncle Marty to explain what touching the infinite meant. After many nights of watching my aunt bow to an invisible dance partner, whom she referred to as “Mr. Godfrey,” and listening to Uncle Red have heated drunken arguments in the attic with his dead wife (Aunt Paula—I met her once when I was very young), an Egyptian cat shrine in backwoods Missouri didn’t seem unreasonable.
Aunt Phoebe and my uncles weren’t stupid. They weren’t insane. They were simply ingrown, weird, haunted by people or things long gone, by memories or regrets or fantasies. And to watch them in their evening pursuits, to pass judgement on them, even silently, seemed indecent, made me feel as though their loneliness could add to mine. So I gave them as much room as I could in that dusty old house, retreating to my bedroom after dinner to read.
My great-grandfather’s bookcases were still in the basement, preserved under dusty drop cloths and I liberated the complete Dickens in hardback, the stories of Guy de Maupassant, an illustrated Moby Dick. I kept a diary on my laptop; though, I was often uninspired and only tapped out a few lines. And that was the circumference of my nights when I wasn’t recovering from digging like I had a pair. I’d hoped to study English at Hauberk College, since reading was the only thing I ever truly enjoyed, but given a long enough timeline in that house, I felt I, too, would be holding seances, talking to ancient cat goddesses, and sharing a Coke with Mr. Godfrey.
I’d never been normal, if normal meant barbeques and baseball games. I wasn’t fond of team sports, wasn’t voted most likely to succeed at anything. Toward the end of my senior year, as I was getting ready to go away for college, after noting loudly and critically that I didn’t have a girlfriend, my mother pronounced me too smart to be normal and cast her own form of divination, part curse, part prophecy.
I would, she said, be lonely and miserable in the years to come. But there would be a time when the tables would turn and all those kids who seemed to be having fun now would despise themselves and their lives. Then it would be my turn as long as I studied very, very hard. She had that angry righteous light in her eyes when she said it. But she never foretold that a virus would sweep the world or that I’d wind up living in “the ramshackle pit” instead of taking British Literature at Hauberk College. My parents hadn’t returned my last three calls. I could only assume that they didn’t want me coming home so soon. Maybe they thought some moat digging would be good for me.
We were about ten miles out from the house on a dirt road without a name. I asked Uncle Marty if the barn was part of the family property, but he just smiled and shook his head.
“Somebody owns it,” he said. “Or nobody does.”
“Maybe the cats.”
Uncle Marty laughed, nodded. Maybe so.
A new story in Terror House Magazine. Click here and read it on their site: https://terrorhousemag.com/two-women/
A story about spiral dances.
I threw the beer can. It was half-full, just like Dorian’s head. So when it hit him, the damage was minimal. A brain in a half-full head is a self-parking mechanism. It floats—not in intelligent space, not in some New Age cogito-esque void full of purple smoke and glittery points of cosmic consciousness—but in an oily brine exuded by all the old lizard desires. In Dorian’s case, this meant racism, football, bros before hoes, and the ability to quote Rush Limbaugh chapter and verse. Dorian was an idiot, a bully, a formulaic high school tyrant. And I hit him with a beer can in the summer of 1992.
Only we weren’t in high school anymore. And Dorian had fucked himself up on oxycodone so bad after senior year that he now had a lazy eye. And I couldn’t afford college. And it had therefore become manifestly unclear who was having the last laugh, since Dorian was making five figures selling Toyotas with his dad on I-49 and I was pushing a mop in Kansas City three nights a week. Ha ha. Right? Modern life.
So the can. I’d never thrown a football straighter than a piece of cooked spaghetti, but the Miller can hit Dorian behind the left ear with military precision. And then he turned, about to hulk-out, with that lazy right eye probably giving him enhanced peripheral combat vision and his girlfriend, Lorena, shrieking like an agitated monkey: “No, Dor, don’t kill him!” And so there we were. But why I threw the beer can is somewhat more complicated and has to do with Ally and why we were angry and always dressed in black. (At that moment, Ally was in the car, watching, dressed in black.)
Black was our color and zero was our number. Nowhere was where it happened and nothing was the result. Our unspoken credo since 10th grade. Ally and I lived it like two little nihilists until we finally had sex in her attic and became something else. On October 14th, 1990, to be exact. Probably around 2:00 AM. And it wasn’t bad at all. I don’t think it’s strange to have recorded the date in Herr Diary. Strange is relative. And we were definitely strange according to everyone else in our school.
Dorian crossed the distance between us in a flash as soon as he saw who’d thrown the can. Because, a year after graduation, our high school pecking order was still hanging over us like some podunk Great Chain of Being. And the bros half of bros before hoes would have invalidated his status as a higher-order lifeform if said bros learned he backed down from me. But maybe that unique moment in time, in the Silver Hill Mall Parking Structure B, was part of the greater anomaly that had begun to warp my life, losing me the only woman I ever loved, and blasting me out of the Midwest forever like some doped-up chimp shot into space just for the yucks. Who’ll ever really know anything in this fallen world?
At the moment, though, the only monkey sounds were being made by Lorena. Ooh, baby, dooon’t! He came on like the Amtrak. And later I’d write in Herr Diary that I wasn’t sure exactly why I hit him with the car door of all things. But now I’m fairly convinced it was because I was terrified, realizing what I’d started, and I’d been trying to get into the car as fast as I could.
Force met force in a Newtonian kneecap singularity in which the 1965 Malibu door prevailed as the immovable object. I’d never seen someone’s leg buckle backwards at the knees before, but the Chevy had an oblong ridge along its doors at just the right elevation for hulkamania. Too bad for Dorian. It hurt him. But I regret nothing.
They called us freaks because we didn’t know goth from shinola. But we did have a one-tone wardrobe. We took German instead of Spanish, philosophy instead of P.E. Black coffee in the mornings and The Cure’s Disintegration, Ministry, KMFDM on cassette in the upper parking lot.
Toward the end of junior year, Ally got into Anton LaVey and started wearing an enormous goat-head pentagram, referring to herself as the Übermädchen. We got matching tattoos in Fraktur on our left shoulders that read, “Nichts.” I read The Virtue of Selfishness, Philosophy: Who Needs It, and Return of the Primitive. I decided that the world was cruel and nasty and that being able to accept this truth without stepping in front of the Amtrak on it’s 6:00 AM rumble outside our little town of Hauberk, MO, meant I was a superior being. Then Ally discovered an essay called, “Bitchcraft” and declared that she was a Satanic witch. And we had more sex. And she called it black magic. She cursed the whole football team, her mother, the principal, and “others.” Who those others were, Ally said she’d never reveal. We were seniors, then.
Dorian writhed on the ground, screaming, holding his knee with both hands. Lorena was so upset she stomped her feet, making her tan lines jiggle as she wailed in simian grief. I stood behind the door for a moment, looking down at Dorian. In the passenger seat, Ally lit a cigarette.
Then I snapped out of it, jumped in the car, and shot through the parking structure, bottoming out at the end of the B-level ramp and swerving into the night. We never did see Lethal Weapon 3. To this day, I can’t bring myself to watch it.
“That was . . . um . . . manly?” She rolled down the window because the ashtray was full. Ally’s hair was long and eggplant purple. It whipped around her head, hiding her expression. But I knew what it was.
“Just don’t, okay?”
“Go ahead. Drive faster, Mike.” Her way of saying I was driving too fast. She called it “lesser magic,” some speaking-in-opposites thing to control you. If I drove faster, I did what she wanted. If I slowed down, I did what she wanted. Then she could say to herself, See? Sheeple are easy. In truth—and I have admitted this to Herr Diary more than once—I threw the beer can because lately Ally had moved me from the people village to the sheeple pen. And I didn’t like that.
“What do you want from me? I know your fucking tricks.”
“Oh, really.” She flicked the cigarette out the window. “I don’t want to go home.”
“Well, I don’t want to take you home.”
“I’m not completely fed up with you, Mike.”
I punched the gas and ran the stop sign at the entrance to I-49. “I’m not fed up with you, either. I feel great. It’s been a great day.”
I had half a tank of gas and I was thinking of driving all the way to Kansas City at suicide velocity just to prove I couldn’t be manipulated, that I was the immovable Newtonian object that moved where it pleased.
But then Ally said, “He’s never going to walk right. You’re aware of that, aren’t you?”
I began to feel low, like I was worse than Dorian, roids and Rush Limbaugh notwithstanding. Now I’d never rise up on any Great Chain of Being. Never go from mineral to vegetable to mop-pusher to night watchman or whatever modicum of ascension I could have achieved if I’d only controlled myself in Parking Structure B.
So I turned around and took Ally home like good sheeple do. When we got there, she smirked, gave me a big theatrical wink, and said, “Catch ya later, tough guy. Call me,” which I think meant she never wanted to see me again. But you couldn’t be sure of anything when lesser magic was involved.
I sat in the car until the lights in her house went out, breathing in what I imagined were the last traces of her cigarette fumes. Though, it could have just been the ashtray.
I went to jail. And it wasn’t funny. When I got out, I needed a new job. I got temp work with a company that repaired farm buildings that had been damaged by tornadoes. Part of my job training was memorizing interesting tornado facts. Like, did you know that tornadoes have been reported in every state of the Union? Did you know that a tornado can occur at any time, but they are most likely to occur between 3:00 PM and 9:00 PM? That every tornado has its own color, sound, and shape? That the safest place to be during a tornado is far underground or in a foreign country or, optimally, far underground in a foreign country? That tornadic winds can accelerate a piece of straw up to 300 mph, effectively turning it into a toothpick projectile of death that can tack your guts to a telephone pole?
You don’t know these things because you’re normal. But having gone to jail and emerged as a tornado specialist, I had entered the paranormal. We pulled a lot of straw out of the corrugated metal walls of barns and granaries. The sun shone through the holes like god’s shotgun blast. We rebuilt houses, gathered the appendages of farm animals that had been torn apart and deposited on roofs, and inspected bathtubs for tornado durability. Missouri is in Tornado Alley and if you don’t have a sturdy bathtub, you’re asking for death. If you get caught in your house, the bathtub might be the last resort for shelter; though, there have been accounts of people being hurled extremely long distances while hiding in their tubs. There is no easy solution when your bathtub is hurled. You’re sheeple at that point. You’re Nichts.
Through all of this, I thought about Dorian, about Ally, about the future. I had regrets. I wished I could give Dorian back his knee. I wished I had told Ally I truly loved her and wished I’d suggested we take a break from backwards-talking bullshit and Ayn Rand and Die Übermädchen. I confided these things to Theo, an anorexic dreadlocked hippy who I worked with and who got me the tornado job because he also attended my court-mandated anger management course.
We’d be re-stuccoing the side of some farmhouse and he’d say, “Mike, are you mindfully releasing your anxiety triggers by allowing an abundance of positives into your conscious buffer?” And I’d say, “Yes, Theo, I’m trying to actualize as many focused positives as possible in this segment.” Only, we’d be using compressed-air stucco blasters. So it would sound more like, “Mye-SHHKEEREEYIT-allowing a-SHHHKOYIP-ositives into your-FLISSSHOP-uffer?”
But I’d know what he was saying because people in the anger management course always said the same things. I could have just talked about my “uffer” and Theo would have nodded. After a week of power-stuccoing, you’re half deaf. I wanted to feel good by confiding in Theo. Instead, I think the parts of my past he did understand just made him smoke more weed on break in his truck while trying to bring positives into the current segment. I think I was depressed. I think I was trying to give myself a “consciousness upgrade” as my anger coach called it. But jail, the thing that wasn’t funny, had changed me.
Dorian’s father got a lawyer who got the district attorney who got the police who got me. Dorian probably had the most expensive legal team in Missouri. The judge called it a “neutral street fight” in the hearing. The state chose not to bring assault charges against me. But there was the matter of battery with a car door, which was mitigated by it being my first offence and by the fact that it was impossible to prove I wasn’t just enveloped in white-knuckle terror, trying to get away from 268 lbs. of enraged ex-lineman hulkamania; though that’s not exactly how the judge put it. On my public defender’s advice, I pled down to “public affray” and got two months in Moberly Correctional, a year of anger management, and a $3000 fine to be paid in monthly instalments of $50 for the next five years. My public defender told me I was lucky. In retrospect, I think he might have been joking.
Ally never visited me, but she could have. The level 2 minimum security unit in Moberly Correctional was very relaxed. It was a mellow incarceration and the pepper steak was okay. I shared a cell with a nice Italian kid not too older than me who’d forged a bunch of checks in Saint Louis and got in a high-speed chase with the Highway Patrol while tripping balls. During the day, I mopped, cleaned the toilets, and did groundskeeping. In the evenings, I read books from the tiny prison library: Eat, Pray, Love, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Great Gatsby, The Razor’s Edge, How to Score with Women Under 30—the most used book there but strange, I thought, for a male prison—and The Spiral Dance by a New Age feminist in San Francisco who called herself Starhawk.
We were doing clean-up on a corporate dairy farm outside St. Joseph after a twister had de-legged five or six Holsteins, which meant we had to wear hazmat suits. It was just me, Theo, and two guys doing community service, which meant they disappeared as soon as we started unloading the biohazard bins from the truck. So it was basically just me and Theo.
“Damn. It never ceases to amaze me how much there actually is inside a cow.” Theo heaved a carcass into one of the big red bins.
“Hey. You ever hear of some chick named Starhawk out in California?”
Theo thought for a moment, scratched himself through his hazmat. “Yeah, I think so. She’s cool, right? Witchcraft. But the real militant feminist shit. Give us equal pay or we’ll hex your balls off!” Theo wiggled his fingers like a cartoon wizard. Only he couldn’t do it very well with heavy gloves on. So he added, “Ooooh,” and walked around with his arms sticking out straight like Frankenstein’s monster.
“I’m serious. You ever read The Spiral Dance?”
He stopped doing the monster and looked at me through the clear plastic visor of his suit. I wasn’t joking. I wasn’t releasing my anxiety triggers.
“No.”
“You should. It’s good. You ever read any Ayn Rand?”
Theo looked at me a moment longer. Then he dug into the dirt that had been under the carcass with his shovel.
“You can keep that shit.”
Back in Moberly, The Spiral Dance had started me thinking. What if Ayn Rand had been wrong when she claimed that guns or logic are only two ways people can deal with one another? Starhawk’s vision was different—a single universal yoni constantly becoming aware of itself in greater degrees of particularity, a spiral dance of vaginal creation in which love was the force of individuation, the glue between the “myriad separate things of the world.” All in, that sounded pretty fucking reasonable.
Sitting in my cell, listening to the Italian kid snore while I read, I suddenly wanted to believe it more than Rand’s “Judge and prepare to be judged.” I’d been judged. Now I wanted to be a Wiccan vagina-hippie in a fairyland San Francisco where public affray wasn’t a thing and I didn’t have to imagine Dorian walking with a cane for the rest of his life. But in the margin beside Starhawk’s passage in which she called us all unique “swirls of the same energy,” someone had printed in barely readable ballpoint: So how come my brother got no hands? Because of swirls like me, dear friend. I’m a bad swirl. A bad, bad swirl.
After a month of upgrading my consciousness and de-tornadoing farms, I decided I had to find Ally. I didn’t know what I’d say. But I felt I had to say something. Instead, I’d find Dorian, which was not what I intended—or would ever intend if given the choice anywhere on a timeline between now and eternity.
But before that could happen, Theo blew up on me. He hadn’t said much in the week since I’d asked him if he’d ever read Ayn Rand. Then an Enhanced Fujita EF-3-level twister came through Hauberk at 165 mph. They called it the Marlena Tornado, after the small town just south of us that took the brunt of it. Like Marlena Detrich—a hot dead blonde now resurrected as a killing wind. Another bad swirl. It took off several roofs, but luckily nobody got hurt. We were in the truck, headed to a cornfield run by some genetics company, when Theo pulled into a ditch, got out, started screaming and pounding on the hood.
“What you don’t fucking understand, Mike, is that Ayn Rand completely disregards the question of metaphysics! That’s her first basic stupid fucking problem!”
I locked the truck’s doors. Happy pot-smoking Theo had become a werewolf.
“What about Descartes, huh? What about Hume? What about motherfucking Kant?”
“Theo? Hey man. I think you need to, you know, inventory your anxiety triggers.”
“Critique of Pure Reason, asshole.”
I was torn. Did I leave my best and only friend on the side of the highway raving about Ayn Rand failing to account for the Existentialist position on concrete human values? Or did I need to subdue him somehow, tie him up with strips of clothing and put something in his mouth to keep him from swallowing his tongue?
He rattled the driver’s side door handle. “Open up. OPEN THE FUCKING DOOR YOU OBJECTIVIST.”
“I am not, nor have I ever been, an Objectivist.”
“Don’t LIE to me, Mike.”
“Truth! Kant is logically consistent in his argument that human beings are valuable in themselves! But Rand contradicts this assumption when she argues that altruism is immoral! Breathe, Theo! Breathe!”
After a moment, his therapy kicked in. He held up his hands as if to say okay, okay, and took a few deep cleansing breaths.
“You are a white cone of joyful light!”
He closed his eyes, breathing, mouthing the words: I am a white cone of joyful light.
“Your anger is not you! It is a feeling passing through you!”
My anger is not me. It is a feeling passing through me.
“Anger is a choice you can decide not to make!”
Anger is a choice I can decide not to make.
The mantra seemed to work. Mr. Vignus, my high school philosophy teacher, used to say that philosophy could save your life. Only now did I understand.
What was a book like The Spiral Dance doing in a prison library anyway? It made less sense than How to Score with Women Under 30. Starhawk’s book had a creased spine and dogeared pages. It had been read a lot of times since—according to the stamp inside the front cover—making its spiral way to Moberly Correctional back in 1979. Maybe all people, no matter how deviant, are in search of some kind of connection. However, it is worth noting that on the shelf directly above The Spiral Dance, right beside For Whom the Bell Tolls, were four tattered bright orange copies of Mein Kampf.
Theo didn’t speak for the rest of the way. I just sat in the truck, staring at the fields outside Hauberk, bewildered. I felt sure of only two things. My anger was not me. And lesser magic was a bitch.
A story from my first collection, Gravity.
It was hot. That was foremost in my thoughts. A sheer, raw, violating hotness that wobbled on the cement quad and in the still dry air above it. I focused on getting across without fainting. I fixed it in my mind. I didn’t have to ask why there weren’t any birds in the Flushing sky. I knew they all had heatstroke, carpets of passed-out sparrows under the campus trees. Even the shade pulsed with heat. I’d accepted the hottest day in Michigan history the way one accepts an incurable disease or a prison term or a bad marriage. I stopped fighting. I let it own me.
As I reached the rusted double doors of Animal Science, the world seemed to tilt. Darkness rushed into the edges of my vision, and the numbness of heat prostration began to twist through my skin. Panting, I sat down on one of the benches in the building atrium, wondering if my three-mile hike from the adjunct lot was destined to put me in the hospital. The central A/C was broken, but there were box fans every 30 yards, and I felt truly grateful to the Animal Science secretaries for providing the hot air current. Hot air that moved felt better than hot air that didn’t.
I would have thanked one of them, but the secretaries seemed oblivious, radiating a certain continuous misery—large, overdressed women with pained expressions, drifting slowly through the halls. They seemed to move in a complex pre-set loop from one office to another, leaning in doorways, fanning themselves, adjusting their clothing, their bangs stuck to their foreheads. It was clear they’d set up the box fans because they’d been ordered to—not due to some hidden motherly goodness or basic human decency. One of the fans had already blown over. It rattled facedown, blowing air against the floor.
The Animal Science atrium was an enormous vestibule beneath a dirty glass cupola that read FLUSHING CC in green block letters. There were graffitied wooden benches at the four corners of the area where the classroom wings intersected, and there was a vaguely Cubist fountain of burnished steel rectangles in the center. As it hadn’t worked since the Ford Administration, the students used it as an enormous trash bin. Today, it had been covered by a red drop cloth as if it were the hidden reason for the President’s speech, some miracle invention to be unveiled, a secret weapon destined to eradicate everything old and broken, and bring perfection to the unwashed of south central Michigan.
The summer students of Flushing Community College were nowhere around. They’d no doubt been dispersed hours earlier by campus security, all class meetings in the building summarily cancelled. There was an important occasion underway, which meant no sideways ball caps and bellybutton rings, no heavy eyeliner, no tribal barbed wire tats and low-rise revelations. Everyone in the atrium wore business attire but me. And if the portly assistant deans and accountants and assorted adjusters in their suits and pearls seemed uncomfortable—secretly perspiring in their boxer shorts and pantyhose—they at least tried not to show it when the President looked their way.
This was the President’s Hour and the only attendees were apt to be those on the President’s administrative staff or those hoping to ascend. About 30 of them were present, milling, casting furtive glances in her direction. It was a yearly reception held for an hour in the middle of summer session for any employee with a grievance. Naturally, it was catered. A long cafeteria table held pyramids of crullers, nickel-plated salvers of creampuffs, watermelon slices, cheeses, eight different types of cracker, fancy lion-footed tureens of Guatemalan coffee with upside-down cups on saucers.
The President was currently holding forth at the far side of the atrium. Her voice carried over the hum and rattle of the fans—all peaks, no valleys, a voice that stayed in the higher octaves as if it resonated from a rare ornamental glass caught in the wind. She was talking about austerity and solar panels.
“In 25 years,” she said. “An amazing ROI.”
Helen, a tall pale woman in her early 30s, who managed the Presidential office and dressed only in dark primary colors, smiled and nodded vigorously. Oh, yes. The ROI was amazing, wasn’t it. Just amazing.
All of the food was free and nearly all of it would go untasted. The President’s Hour spread was legendary at the college. And it remained the stuff of legend, probably due to the fact that no one dared raise a grievance with Madam President. It seemed that there could never be a good reason for an employee of FCC to speak with “All Heads Are Bowed,” as a colleague of mine had named her.
No one in the English Department knew I’d come. It would have been scandalous if they’d discovered me crossing over for crullers and cool slices of peppered roast beef with avocado spears, an unforgivable violation of the general surliness expected in all dealings with the administration, doughnuts notwithstanding. But I was an adjunct, unemployed through the summer, and it was there. Food. Whole platters of it that would be dumped by College Catering Services as soon as the President got back in her blue Mercedes and drove home to her house on the river. Eating trumped solidarity just as the transmission of my ancient Honda had trumped groceries earlier in the month.
I raked my hair back and re-tucked my soaked button-down. I was sure I had no more liquid left in my body. I looked like I’d fallen in a puddle, my shirt and the tops of my khakis half-soaked through. I stood slowly, waiting for the dizziness to recede, my hand on the back of the bench.
“Reprioritizing,” said the President. “Austerity measures? Absolutely.”
She was a small woman, though extremely vigorous looking with short gray hair and piercing blue eyes. One could see that she’d once had normal human feelings and responses. But, at some point, she’d made the choice to rebuild herself as the perfect weapon—the way people will in law and finance who attend seminars on how to win through intimidation. Her page on the college website said that she admired Ayn Rand, Walt Disney, and Davey Crockett, trained privately with a sifu of Bak Mei Kung Fu, ran marathons, did Pilates every morning. She was currently enrolled in an online course for developing a photographic memory. When her eyes swept the crowd, people shifted their weight, looked away, put their hands in their pockets.
I undid the clasps on my shoulder bag. It was just about time to execute the mission. Normally, my shoulder bag held course texts and student papers. But today it only contained three extra-large heat-resistant refrigerator bags. The plan was to fill them as quietly and quickly as possible. The hike back to the car would melt everything in the bags down to a hybrid food substance that, while unpleasant, would remain reasonably edible. I’d eat a slice of it every day with some tap water. If all went well, it would sustain me for two weeks.
They were talking about money, which made them dangerous but wholly focused on each other like lions circling a dead impala. I could hear their bestial roars: “efficiency review,” “resource management,” “new Gant charts,” “reapportioning our assets.” Soon the President would say something that would draw everyone’s attention with a veiled reference to layoffs—trimming the fat off the impala of some department’s temporary employment. And the rest of them would lick their chops with glittering eyes. It was as inevitable as any herd ritual, the instinctual pattern of it written deep in the DNA of the college administrator. Perhaps it was just as inevitable as the appearance of the wild adjunct, impending starvation having made him foolhardy around the larger predators.
I squeezed out my shirt cuffs and rolled up my sleeves. I would have to be fast and smooth, unremarkable, bland. Most of all, there could be no hint of intellectual or academic energy about me. That was as dangerous as a deer arriving late to the watering hole with a cut on its rump.
Marvin Wilson, one of the assistant deans, smoothed the ends of his moustache and patted his tie. “Yes, indeed, Madam President,” he said. “You got that right, for sure.” Marvin was partially deaf and once said during a faculty address that hearing aids gave him headaches. So he went without and compensated by using a Victorian hearing trumpet and speaking very loudly. At close range without his trumpet, Marvin could give off a nervous cheerfulness that made him seem about to snap. The possibility of a violent psychotic break was his only natural defense against other administrators with more formidable capabilities. Though, as Marvin was also unseasonably fat, one wondered whether a right hook from him wouldn’t result in immediate death. I imagined that the President often made him cry.
When the heat rises to such a degree in Flushing, crying is hardly out of the question. Even if a grown man like Marvin were to strip down right here in the atrium, weeping and running his hands over all his slick white corpulence, no one would blame him very much. No Michigander would do aught but invoke the usual curse on all things democratic, homosexual, and Californian—concluding that good Marvin must have been at least one of those things in the closet after all. Of course, the fact that I was born and raised in southern California hadn’t helped my job prospects in Michigan after getting a PhD there the year before. But so it went.
The President took her place behind the podium set up before a bank of 30 folding chairs padded with white cushions that read FLUSHING in the same block letters as on the cupola. She cleared her throat into the microphone and said, “I will speak to you now,” causing everyone to immediately stop their conversations and take seats.
“Let us bow our heads in thanks for surviving another fiscal year.”
All was silent except for the rattling box fan that everyone continued to ignore, since righting it would have meant getting up and moving out of the President’s aura. It would have meant performing an overt, subservient act. During the President’s Hour, all visible actions took on an amplified significance in the pack logic of the administrator, signs of how the pecking order would be for the upcoming academic season until the great migration back to the atrium next summer. So the fan stayed face-down, rattling loudly. Even Madam President ignored it.
“Let us be thankful that the state subsidy has increased by 4.6% and that enrollment has remained consistent, giving us a projected windfall of 6% per annum.”
All heads were indeed bowed. The President closed her eyes and extended her hands over the seated administrators like a charismatic minister delivering a holy benediction. No one saw me glide up to the food except one of the Animal Science secretaries way down the east wing hallway. I could see her staring, frowning. At that distance, she could probably only see how I was dressed and little of what I was doing. She no doubt thought I was a student drawn like a stray hyena to the outskirts of the kill.
“And let us remember how fragile our jobs are, how easily we could be made redundant or be replaced. And let us give thanks that our good attitudes and hard work have not yet brought this upon us. Amen.”
“Amen,” replied the crowd.
“Well,” said the President, “it is encouraging that in the five years we have been holding the President’s Hour, not one grievance has been voiced. It shows how committed we are to solving our own problems. And in this economy, with nothing certain, that’s the right way to be.”
A round of light applause rose up from the crowd and Marvin’s thunderous, “Here, here, Madam President, here, here!” Then she looked right at me, but I almost had my third bag full. I’d turned such that, from her side of the room, my actions weren’t visible. I had my back to her and appeared to be staring intently at the dropclothed fountain, while my hands moved quickly and efficiently out of sight at waist level. I didn’t have time to worry.
Besides, the President was right in the middle of the yearly spell of intimidation she wove over her subordinates. She wouldn’t want to jeopardize it for a cheese plate. Then again, the approaching secretary had no such compunctions.
“My subject today, as you may already know, follows from the email I sent all of you the day before yesterday on the matter of austerity measures—finding out what isn’t, who isn’t, working and applying the right corrective metric.”
The Animal Science secretary wore white, a voluminous blouse and skirt meant to conceal the unflattering parts of her body. But its effect was rather to make her seem even larger than she was. The woman moved forward like a gunfighter, hands held open by her sides. She led with her stare, her expression fixed in a pointed frown. She came down the east wing hallway, stalking me, not looking away for a second.
I filled the third bag just as the President broached the subject of faculty hiring freezes and dispensing with non-essential adjuncts, which made everyone applaud feverishly. I’d cleared out the back quarter of the table. Bag three was cheese and pastry—the most problematic bag, given the heat. But I couldn’t allow myself to think about that. Thinking about the food spoiling before I got it home would have made me cry like Marvin. Bag two was all cold cuts. Bag one held rolls and crackers.
I might have even tried to guzzle a few cups of black coffee if the secretary hadn’t noticed me. But there she was about 30 yards away and closing. As I crossed the atrium, casually (yet quickly) walking behind the fountain in the direction of the west wing hallway, I kept my eyes on the floor in front of me.
“These are hard times,” said the President, “which means you are going to have to be hard. When we institute District Plan 44, you’re going to have to do some difficult things. And you’re going to have to face some members of our community who unfortunately think they’re indispensable.”
I’d almost made it across the atrium when I looked up and saw Marvin half-standing, turned, one hand white-knuckling the back of his chair. He was staring right at me, his big watery eyes wide with shock, his mouth slightly open under his light brown moustache.
“Now there are going to be cuts. And it will be up to you to speak to those being cut in language they can easily understand. You will not be using institutional jargon”—polite laughter from the crowd—“or financial terms that someone with a Masters in philosophy can’t be expected to wrap his head around.” More laughter broke out, this time with some clapping. “Instead, each and every one of you will have prepared a simple statement of fact that you will repeat if confronted in the office or hallway or elevator. Moreover—“
It was then that she noticed Marvin, who was now fully out of his seat, fumbling for his inhaler with his right hand and gesturing frantically with his left.
“Marvin? Did I give you permission to stand?”
Marvin sucked in a blast from his inhaler and I disappeared into the west wing hallway. Half of the crowd had probably seen me. But no one wanted to join poor Marvin in the place of judgment and scrutiny. As soon as I entered the hallway, I broke into a jog. The secretary had almost crossed the atrium behind me. There were no fans down at this end and the air itself was a barrier—a hot thick cloud pressing in from all sides. Formaldehyde from some of the laboratory rooms gave off the rich odor of old urine. And the deep bouquet of cow dung from the student dairy seeped through the walls.
In the distance, the President’s voice boomed: “Sit down, Marvin!”
I could hear the secretary’s shoes flapping, gaining ground behind me. I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d do if she caught me. But I had a feeling it would result in campus security, public humiliation, no employment in the fall, and—worse—having to give the food back, even though no one would want it now. No one had wanted it in the first place. But the secretary came on anyway. It was the principle of the thing. The rules. The food had to be dumped. And no other creature in the college ecosystem believed, ruminated constantly on, lived and breathed the “principle of the thing” more intensely than the department secretaries. At Flushing CC, the rules were all they had. It was harsh, but it was the Law of Nature, cruel and beautiful and wild.
But knowing all this didn’t stop me from ducking into an open classroom once I was around the corner and out of her sight. Hopefully, the secretary would pass by and assume I exited the building way down at the end. Each wing of the Animal Science classrooms had two hallways connecting to each other at 90-degree angles. Since there were four wings, if you pictured the building from above, the only image you could imagine would be a swastika. I tried not to dwell on this.
It was an old stadium classroom dedicated apparently to farm animal biology. A sign on the wall said the capacity was 300 people. I wondered if 300 people had ever, in the history of the planet, converged in a single room to discuss the innards of cows and sheep. I ran down the aisle, looking for a place to hide just in case the secretary got wise and doubled back.
Luckily, the room hadn’t been refitted with motion sensors that automatically turn on the lights. There were shadows made by the red exit signs glowing above the doors I’d just come through and on either side of the stage. And the stage platform was illuminated by a feeble ceiling light directly over a plaster cow the size of a small truck. Next to it, in a cardboard box, were detachable portions of its hide, half of its skeleton, and various oversized plaster organs.
The cow’s enormous glass eyes looked as if they were about to begin rolling in agony, the beast suddenly realizing that it had been taken apart and left there on display. Bathed in hot shadows that smelled of formaldehyde and animal excreta, the room seemed more like a vivisectionist’s chamber than a classroom—a black hell where the insides of living things are slowly removed layer by layer before a stadium crowd.
I hesitated for a moment, looking up at the cow, and then ran to the exit doors on either side of the stage. They were both locked. I was about to run back up to the top and peek out into the hallway, when I heard the door I’d come through click. Someone was slowly opening it, talking back to another person in the hallway. It was the secretary speaking to someone male. How could she have gotten campus security so quickly? I climbed up on stage, but there were no curtains at the back of the platform, no other doors.
Standing beside the cardboard box that held the organs and one side of the cow, I considered the complete absurdity of my life. After 15 years of higher education and two advanced degrees, the best job I could get was that of a temporary employee at a community college in rural Michigan. Now I was stealing food because there was no more money in the bank and I’d eaten all my backup lentils. Once the lights came on, there would be nowhere to hide, no way out. I put my arms around the cow and tried to steady myself.
Should I try to eat as much of the food as possible to fortify myself for the impending ride to the police station? A wave of dizziness passed through me and I felt a bit nauseous. I began to breathe heavily and worried that I might pass out, that I was starting to hyperventilate. I hadn’t hyperventilated before. If I was about to hyperventilate and lost consciousness, this would be the place—hanging onto a gigantic plaster cow in a dark room that smelled like shit.
“Okay,” the secretary called, “you look in there. I got this one.”
And then I got an idea. It was a really large cow.
The secretary found the light switch just as I snapped the outer hide of the cow into place. With the internal organs and half of the ribcage removed, it easily accommodated me as long as I was able to maintain a fetal position over my shoulder bag. The inside smelled like mold and half-melted crullers. The permanent part of the ribcage that didn’t detach pressed into my back. And the hard plaster mold of the chest cavity had a painful ridge directly beneath my knees. But the important thing was that I was completely hidden.
Light streamed in through the hollow nostrils of the cow and the tiny cracks and spaces that had formed after years of animal science. I listened to the footfalls of the secretary on the nylon-carpeted steps that ran down the aisles between the bleacher tables. Luckily, she didn’t approach the platform, didn’t smell the melted chocolate or hear me breathing.
I followed her huffing and cursing as she moved from one door to the other. Evidently, she hadn’t exerted herself this much in some time. But there she was: one condemned to a life of stapling documents, changing toner cartridges, and taking petty condescension, going out of her way to stick it to someone even less fortunate. The king of the beggars is always a tyrant. The prisoner in charge of the work detail always makes use of the whip.
She came back to the open space before the stage and paused. I held my breath. She must have been staring straight at the cow. The pain in my knees was intense, and I tried not to think about walking again would be like.
“Motherfucker.” The way she said it told me both that she hadn’t caught on and that she was giving up. A motherfucker with emphasis on the second part—more fucker than mother—a spontaneous cry of universal frustration. All hunters know that sound. Raptors probably made it when their quarry found a hole in the rocks. Tigers might have roared it at the cruel sun while apes shook the branches of trees and motherfucker-saying humans fired rounds into the mist just so the report could sound the depth of their anger. No blood today. Today, the impala goes free.
I heard the door up at the top of the stairs click and I forced myself to count to 20 before I popped the side of the cow off and lowered it to the stage. After being enclosed in there for a few minutes, the outside air tasted pure and sweet. There was a lesson: even a cup of dirty water is welcome in the desert.
My knees buckled and shook when I put my weight on them, taking my first steps into the light like a newborn calf from my plaster mother.
Motherfucker.
The question was: who was the father? By the time I got back up to the hallway, I had my answer. It was the President. The secretary and campus security were nowhere to be seen, but the voice of the President echoed down the hallway. She was still back there, the Mother of Abominations fathering monsters with all heads bowed and a metric for every inappropriate erection or eructation.
“Let us go forth,” she was saying, “and remember what it is we’ve been hired to do. And that, above all else, we must be hard if we want to be good.”
The administrators streamed out into the heat and I with them. No one looked at me twice. I did not exist, which was just as well. Sometimes insignificance has certain advantages. I walked around the front of the building, avoiding the barbwired student dairy pasture. The administrators were dispersing quickly, a cloud of navy broadcloth and silk untwisting in every direction like a drop of coloring in a glass of water. No one wanted to stand in the sun no matter how much more gladhanding and social jockeying remained.
I took the most direct route to the adjunct lot, a narrow cement walk that ran from Animal Science, around the weed-choked amphitheater that hadn’t been used in years, and down the line of parking lots ordered in terms of importance—administration, permanent faculty, staff, campus police, plant operations, students, farm equipment and machinery, and then adjuncts and seasonal help.
On my way through the administrative lot, I saw them: the President striding forward ahead of Marvin and two young women in business suits and identitical bobbed haircuts. The three of them were struggling to keep up, speaking over each other, trying to get the President’s attention. Then another wave of vertigo passed through me. The President and her courtiers seemed to grow smaller as the edges of my vision grew dark. I put my hand against a tree and thought about dehydration. Even the parking lot trees—selected expressly for their hardiness and ability to live their whole lives in small concrete rings in the asphalt lots—seemed about to go up in flames. The bark felt as if it were burning the palm of my hand.
I closed my eyes. When I opened them, a short balding man in a coal gray suit stood facing me beside the open door of his Acura. He tossed his suit jacket onto the passenger seat, pulled off his blue clip-on tie, and tossed that in after it. Then he whistled.
“Need a ride?” He smiled, looked me up and down, nodded at his car.
“No.” It came out in a dry croak. My throat felt swollen, raw.
He shrugged, ran a hand over the top of his head and flicked off the sweat. “You might like a ride.”
I was afraid to let go of the tree. I said no again and looked down.
He squinted hard at me. “How old are you, anyway?” Then he got in his Acura, whipped the car in reverse out of the parking space and, with one last hard look, shot down the row towards Campus Drive.
I sat down three times on the walk back to my car and drove home in the slow lane. When I got there, I opened the windows in both rooms of my apartment to catch the faint draft that sometimes reached the sixth floor. Then I put my shoulder bag in the empty fridge and lay down on the hardwood next to my bed. It was cool there, the only cool spot in the place. I stared up at the pocked white ceiling, listening to my downstairs neighbors have their daily screaming fight. They’d go until someone slammed a door and something broke against it. And then she would sit right beneath me and sob as the birds of Flushing woke up from their prostration beneath the trees and the neighborhood cats stretched awake, their tails twitching in the heat.
* Note: this story originally appeared in The New Ohio Review, 12 (2012): 101-109.
A short short about mistakes by lakes.
Hockel knocked once, softly. Louis knew it was him, but Louis didn’t get up. He stared at the rain on the window. It had been raining for eight days. After six, Louis found that he could almost believe it was going to rain forever, a cold, greasy, stinking rain coming down on the city for all eternity. Cleveland would never get clean.
He folded his hands on the unfinished wooden table, felt Hockel waiting silently on the other side of the door. It was late afternoon on a Tuesday and, in the waning light, the rusted tube-chimney on the opposite building’s roof looked warped and blurry through the wet windowpane. Louis had been staring at it for—he wasn’t actually paying attention to how long.
Hockel knocked again. He’d keep knocking until Louis answered. Hockel was as predictable as the rain. Louis stood and quietly moved down the short hallway that connected the room that served as a living room, cotroom, and kitchen to the closet bathroom and the front door with five deadbolts and three sliding latches.
“What.” Louis spoke softly, his left hand hovering over the dented copper knob.
“Louis? That you?”
“Who else would it be?”
Hockel lived two doors down. And, in the year Louis had rented the tiny concrete-box studio on Euclid Avenue, Louis hadn’t said a cheerful sentence to anyone other than Gina.
Now Gina was gone. But, unlike everyone else in the building, Hockel couldn’t take a hint. He regularly appeared at the door with that soft, insinuating knock of his. Eventually something horrible was bound to happen to Hockel, given his lack of sensitivity. Then Louis would be free.
“Can I come in?”
Louis shut his eyes and took a breath. “What was it you wanted?”
“Open up.” The knob jiggled. “It’s dark out here.”
The light in the hall outside had been broken for weeks. One had to walk down from the elevator in complete darkness and know where the right door was. But it wasn’t difficult. Louis had gotten used to it. He opened the door a few inches.
“You mean to say you can’t find your door?”
Hockel pushed in, turning around the edge of the door like a gust of wind. “Of course not. I’m not an idiot.” He sat in the other chair at the little wooden table beneath the window. “I just don’t like waiting out there in total darkness for someone to answer their door. You know there’s roaches in this building, right?”
Louis sat back down and sighed. “I’ve never seen any.”
“You wouldn’t.”
At 34, Louis was short, wiry, already balding with a narrow face and a delicate pointed chin. Hockel was five years older and at least 20 pounds heavier. Everything about Hockel seemed swollen, from hands to lips, his shock of jet more like a mane. He was just starting to go gray and his hair stood up in places though he always tried to slick it back.
“I’ll have a coffee. Black is fine.”
Louis looked at him. “You came over to order me to make you a coffee?”
“When you hear what I have to say, you’re gonna want to, I don’t know, pass out or scream or something. Before that, let’s have a cup, alright?” Hockel thought for a moment, then grinned, which involved his entire face, making his eyes open wide and his forehead wrinkle.
“It’s about Gina, isn’t it?”
Hockel shrugged and pursed his lips, resting his chin on his hands. “Only one way to find out, eh?”
Gina. What could be said about her that hadn’t already be said already, over and over, from Louis to Hockel, from Hockel to Louis, from Lewis to Gina’s voicemail, from Gina’s voicemail back to Louis as he replayed her outgoing message in the middle of the night? If Hockel had something more to tell, it might mean that she had come back from Lithuania. Should Louis let himself hope that somewhere in the frozen dark of Vilnius, in the decrepit condominium Gina inherited from a grandmother she’d never known, her affection for him had somehow returned?
He got up, went to the sink, and started to fill the kettle—as much to hide the anxiety at the corners of his mouth as to make coffee.
“Come on, man. Did you really think I’d hold out on you if I knew something?”
“I don’t know what to think,” Louis murmured. He lit one of the gas burners with a wooden match. The ring of blue flames wooshed into being and gripped the bottom edge of the kettle like little blue hands.
“What?” Hockel was still half-smiling when Louis sat down again.
“Nothing.”
A few moments passed in which neither of them said anything. The rain clattered against the window. The cheap aluminum kettle began to wobble and hiss. Maybe it was the way Louis stared at nothing or the lack of conversation, but after a few minutes, Hockel started to drum his fingers loudly on the table.
“This rain. It’s crazy, yeah? How do you sit in here all day with that racket going on?”
“I don’t sit here all day. I have a job.”
Hockel nodded slowly. “Oh, right.”
The kettle began to shriek. Louis got up slowly and turned off the burner but leaned against the stove, listening to the kettle’s long wail die off. He dumped a spoon of instant into a cracked yellow mug and poured the hot water. Then he set it down hard on the table before Hockel, the swirl of undissolved grounds twisting on the surface.
“Instant.” Hockel sighed. “My stomach will never get used to it.”
Louis sat back down and folded his hands again. “So talk.”
Hockel took a long sip then licked his lips, smiling down into the cup. “Still, you do buy the good stuff, Louis. I’ll give you that.”
“Gina. If you’ve got something to say about her, say it. Or am I going to have to wait for you to finish the whole damn cup?”
Hockel paused, the cup halfway to his mouth, and nodded solemnly. “You know, I get it, Louis. I know what it feels like to be put under the bus by a woman. By many women. All kinds of women.” He took another sip, shook his head. “Damn. It gets better with every sip. I have to get some of this shit. What’s the brand?”
“Lucky Instant.”
He set the cup down and grinned again. “No way. You’re definitely messing with me now. This is the good shit. I know you wouldn’t make me a cheap cup of coffee on me. You’re too classy for that, my friend.”
Louis looked out at the rusted chimney. It stood all by itself at the edge of the opposite roof, condemned to be assaulted by all the rain and snow of Cleveland’s unforgiving winters until the day the wrecking ball took it down.
“Remember how Gina used to come over to my place and bum cigarettes off me?”
“Yeah.”
“Those were the days, eh?”
“What’s so amazing about that? She was your neighbor.”
“She was your neighbor, too. But you don’t smoke. That was something she had in common with me.”
“Guess it was.”
“Yeah. Guess so.” Hockel tipped back the cup, then set it down and pushed it towards Louis with one finger. “I appreciate the coffee. Generous of you.”
Louis looked at him, then back out at the rain. “I think you better get going, Hockel. You know the way.”
Hockel stood, grinning again. Louis looked at Hockel’s brown short-sleeved shirt with a lighter square where the front pocket used to be, his frayed gray pants, his bare feet in rubber sandals.
“Okay,” Hockel looked down at him. “If that’s how you wanna play it. That’s cool.”
When Hockel got to the door, he turned back and wagged his finger at Louis as if the latter was a misbehaving child. In that moment, in the Louis’ peripheral vision before he turned his head to look, Hockel gave the impression of a large grinning bear.
“I’ll tell you one thing,” Hockel said. “Something my mother told me on the day I got let go from the plant. You know, I got caught up in some stupid shit out there. And, when I came home, all pissed-off and full of bitterness, she said some broom factory bullshit is not why you failed, son. Cleveland’s why. Cleveland is why you fail.” He nodded to himself, then smiled again with his whole face. “She goes, you get out of here and you’ll do just fine.”
Hockel fished a bent cigarette out of his pants pocket and put it in the corner of his mouth. “She wanted me to join the Navy.” He laughed and shut the door behind him.
Louis looked down at his hands still folded on the table. He thought of the four dates he’d had with Gina and imagined her buying a plane ticket to Vilnius, dropping her good-bye letter to him in the airport mailbox. The letter didn’t say much—goodbye, was nice living next door to you, you’re a decent guy, sorry things can’t work out but a condo is a condo.
Louis went to the sink and washed out the mug he’d given to Hockel. The kettle was still hot. Its curl of steam still twisted up from the spout. He spooned some instant into the cup and went to pour the water but hesitated and poured it onto his left hand instead—white hot pain so intense he dropped the mug and kettle in the sink.
Louis collapsed where he stood, back against the sink cabinet, burned hand between his thighs. But he didn’t make a sound. Instead, he looked up at the window. Rain was still pelting the glass. The rusted chimney was a faint silhouette in the glare of the drugstore across the street.
A story about pain.
When I rolled into Missoula, Jim Donlon was waiting for me in dark glasses and a black cardigan with a white T-shirt underneath. He looked drunk.
“Davis,” he said, as if my return was the last in a long line of depressing accidents, “what the hell is this?” His way of saying welcome back. I took the cigarette he offered, and we walked out of the bus station through the snow. He was parked five blocks north. We stopped in at the Old Sod along the way.
I was exhausted from my three-day bus ride from San Diego. And neither of us felt like talking right off—which was fine by me considering that these were the first drinks I’d had in almost a year. Jim was closed-mouthed when he drank, the sort who made it seem alright for you to quietly let alcohol simmer in your veins. We must have looked ridiculous that afternoon, sitting in the empty bar without talking: me with suitcase and laptop satchel and Jim still wearing his sunglasses. We used to come to the Old Sod a lot. And here we were as if I’d never left. In the months I’d been gone, nothing had changed. Nothing good would ever happen in this lousy bar. The fat bartender would be eternally reading the paper.
“I thought you quit drinking.” Jim blew long shoots of smoke out his nostrils.
“How’re things?” I asked. “What’s new?”
Jim sighed. “Look at this.” He took out the smallest pistol I’d ever seen and put it on the table between us. The barrel was two inches long, lighter than my drink.
“Careful,” he said. “It’s got a bullet in there.”
“What do you need this for?”
Jim finished his drink, lit another cigarette. “You’re back in Montana, Davis. Didn’t you notice?”
“These things kill people.”
“So do these things.” Jim held up his cigarette. “And this thing.” He stood and grabbed his balls.
There weren’t many people in there. Two mustachioed old men in the corner staring into their beers. The jukebox had Broken on it. There was one woman in the place—redhead, mid-forties, plastered. Jim hid the gun in his waistband under his cardigan and walked over to her table. They talked. He held up his hands and asked, “Why not?” loud enough that I could hear it. Then he came back and sat down.
We looked at each other.
“Jim?”
“You don’t know a thing,” he said.
We drank until we both ran out of cash, switching to pitchers of Pabst at the end, when we got to our last. Then we staggered out into the snow. It had begun to glow with the gray-white luminescence that only the streets of Missoula have in the late afternoon, like cold ashes.
He destroyed one of his own plastic garbage cans, when we got to his apartment, sending two weeks of trash into the air, over his car, and out into the cul-de-sac. Two wheels of his Acura were up on the curb. I laughed and slipped on the ice. Everything was funny.
“What about all this trash?” I asked as Jim walked to his front door.
“Forget about it, “ he said and I found this funny, too. I’d ripped a hole in the right knee of the only pair of trousers I owned.
In October of 1999, I was determined to rethink my life.
A letter came from Yugawara, chair of the English Department, asking if I would be available to work as a private tutor for a high school kid. The pay, he wrote, would justify my return to Montana. I believed him.
I packed a small suitcase and called a cab.
I’d been taking a year off in order to write; though, the real reason I’d left Missoula had been to dry out. A graduate student at the University of Montana and twenty-three years old, I already had arrests in two different states for driving under the influence. I was not proud of this. Perhaps because I am an only child or because my parents both came from broken homes, I have always been indulged. But, whatever the case, my mother and father did everything they could to help me with my drinking problem when I should have been disowned.
In order to help myself financially and morally and I think to, as my mother put it, take some time to develop a spine so you won’t always let everyone walk all over you, I moved back to San Diego on leave of absence, promising teachers and friends that, when I returned, I’d have my novel finished and be ready to take my degree. I fully intended to do this, but I didn’t work on the novel at all in San Diego. I produced one frivolous, eight-page story that I threw out.
So when Yugawara’s letter came, I jotted a short note that said I was going and left it on my bed. I took the cab downtown, to the Greyhound Bus Station, bought a eighty-dollar ticket one-way to Missoula, and sat down to wait. My parents wouldn’t ask questions. Still, I felt like I was abusing their hospitality by leaving so abruptly in the middle of the day with a stack of library books on my bureau that needed to be returned and no explanation whatsoever.
I told myself that, even though I was worthless, I was doing what had to be done. I needed to go, and I was never any good at good-byes, usually getting soppy and melodramatic enough that I made a fool of myself and embarrassed whoever I was with. My family hated public spectacle, so at least in that sense, I told myself, I was doing them a favor by disappearing. I would write to them from Missoula. Though, deep in my weak, self-centered heart, I knew I was a rotten son.
It was October. At least that much was certain, an unavoidable fact. Winter in San Diego meant that days stayed in the upper seventies instead of the lower nineties, and palm trees swished slightly more in the wind. But that didn’t mean winter couldn’t be just as hard there as anywhere else. I always felt that it wasn’t the climate that killed so many homeless over the holidays but the hardness of everyday people around the world, taking out their petty frustrations on the less fortunate. I knew that was a sentimental way of looking at things, but sitting in the Greyhound terminal can bring out the sentiment in anyone. It seemed like all the homeless people in the city were sleeping in there that day. And it made me sad to look at them curled up around me in the black molded chairs, stinking, talking out loud in their dreams.
When I got up to board the bus, I left a ten-dollar bill on my seat. Money never meant much to me. I had a tendency to give it away if people asked for it—which someone usually did. Or I’d fall into one of my sentimental fugues, insisting that they take it for their own good. And I never saw the point of fashion. It took too much of my energy, too much money, too much space in my life.
But Jim was different: two years older, tall and thin, like me, but with better clothes and style. He seemed to move through other people’s lives, through entanglements that would side-track any normal person, with a certain effortlessness. Years ago, he’d inherited a lot of money, had an apartment in Montana, one in a Vegas suburb—where he’d go sometimes on weekends. In Missoula, Jim was a graduate student in my writing program. He took the bare minimum of units and taught classes like everyone else. And he made having money and everything that came with it seem a given, seem easy, even the day after a drunk.
As soon as we got into his apartment, we polished off the better part of a bottle of Absolut; though, I don’t remember doing it. I passed out in a small wicker chair in his living room, my suitcase and satchel placed neatly by my feet. In the morning, I woke up, still in the chair, with my legs straight out, crossed at the ankles. My body was stiff. I felt like I’d been dead for a thousand years.
I opened my eyes to a full-length cherrywood bar, an entertainment center, a few miniature indoor palms, an Italian leather couch, and a blonde on the end closest to me with a lit cigarette and one breast hanging out of Jim’s bathrobe. Jim was sitting on the other end, in black pajamas, also smoking a cigarette and there was hockey on TV.
I felt the vast, horrible waves of nausea that come from mixing types of liquor. So I didn’t say anything. I sat there quietly and looked at them. Jim was staring at the widescreen. The blonde was staring at me.
“It’s a breast,” she said. “Want to see the other one?”
“Show him the other one,” said Jim without glancing away from the game.
“Fuck off,” sighed the girl. She yawned, looked me over, took a slow drag. “You look like a sick rat.”
“Darcy, this is my friend, Davis, from San Diego.” The only way to tell Jim was hung over was that he’d let his cigarette burn down to a crooked finger of ash.
There was a silver dish of cigarettes on the coffee table. Darcy picked one out and lit it on her old ember. The ash tray sat on the middle cushion between them on the couch.
“He’s breaking up with me, you know. He broke up with me yesterday. I’m moving out.” She raised her eyebrows at me and took a drag.
Jim changed the channel. “I’m sorry I was so erratic last night, Mike. I could have gotten us both killed. It’s stupid to drink and drive.”
“He doesn’t care about anyone or anything. He’s not your friend.”
“I think I might vomit,” I said.
“Darcy, be a doll and go get him the wastebasket from the kitchen, would you?”
“I fucking hate you.” She tied the bathrobe more tightly around herself and went into the kitchen.
Jim looked at me for the first time that morning and smiled: “What can you do?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know what you could do. First I was a drunk. Then I was sober. Now I was a drunk again. The guilt hadn’t even started, but it was stalking me. I could feel it. It was being sportsmanlike, waiting for me to vomit a few times before it sprang on me in all its demonic fury. I did vomit several times—but not in the wastebasket. I weaved along the hallway and into the downstairs bathroom. The act was painful when I got to it: a thin gray fluid hanging like a cloud in the center of the bowl and then the dry heaves. For all the drinking I’d done in my short life, the day after never got any better, only worse.
Half an hour later, I made my way back down the hallway, feeling like I was swimming through an underground cave to the light. I stopped before entering the living room. Darcy had shed her bathrobe and was straddling Jim, who hadn’t moved from his sitting position at the end of the couch. Her cheeks were full of tears. She whispered things and ran her fingers through his hair while she rode him. He still had the top of his black pajamas on and his right arm stuck straight out to the side over the armrest. One of them had put the ashtray on the floor beside the couch so Jim could ash in it while they did their thing. I walked back to the bathroom, sat on the closed toilet, and put my face in my hands.
This was two and a half months before the millennium.
Jim went to school to teach a class. With nothing to do that day but wait until my appointment with Yugawara, I sat around in the coal-gray suit Jim had lent me, smoking and imagining how the world might end on New Years Eve. I didn’t see any reason to go to the university early and have to explain my life to my former colleagues. So I stayed on the leather couch and stared back at Darcy, who was wearing a pair of Jim’s shorts and one of his T-shirts. All of her possessions were now packed in her car, but she wouldn’t go. She sat in the wicker chair looking at me blankly. Maybe she was looking through me. There was an open Ziploc full of large pink horse-pills on the table between us.
“Christ,” she said. “I’m getting so thin. It’s like my bones are growing out of my skin.” Darcy had a fake tan, but it looked good on her. Her body wasn’t too thin; it was just right. Her eyes were a pretty blue-gray, even though there was too much white around them at the moment and she was sweating.
“You look fine.”
“Look at my hands. I’m a skeleton. You can see the bones coming through.”
“What are you worried about? You’re beautiful. You got everything going for you.” I handed her a cigarette, but she couldn’t keep the lighter’s flame on. I lit it for her and sat back down.
“What am I worried about?” Darcy puffed quickly, not inhaling, sending fat milky clouds into the air between us. “Wow. Yeah. Wonderful. That’s wonderful.”
We sat in silence, listening to her breathing. I thought about taking one or two of those pills, just so we could be on the same planet, but I had no idea what would happen. I wanted to stay straight for Yugawara and the high school kid’s parents who’d be there to interview me. So I went behind the bar and made myself a whiskey sour. Just one. Just for steadiness. Darcy watched me with a sick, detached expression—like those pills had made everything horrible, everything disgusting.
“Look,” I said, “you’re making me nervous. Why don’t you have a drink.”
She half-nodded, so I brought her mine and made another. But she let it sit on the coffee table in front of her, condensation puddling on one side of the glass. I sat back on the couch and loosened Jim’s black silk tie.
“I’m gonna kill myself,” she said to the drink. “You might want to leave.”
“How many of those pills did you eat?”
“Who the fuck are you?”
I brought her over to the couch and put my arm around her. She was shaking.
“Shit,” she said, hugging me and resting her head on my chest. I held her tight and sipped my drink.
After enough whiskey, you forget you ever had problems. You forget what a failure you are and how you’ve let everybody down. I sat there holding Darcy, waiting for Jim to get back from teaching his class, and the only thing I could do was drink. The first whiskey sour was my first mistake and, having made one mistake, it was all too easy to make another and another.
I laid Darcy down and got a blanket off Jim’s bed to cover her with. Then I began to pace. I paced around the living room for so long that soon pacing was all I could concentrate on. After a while, I didn’t concentrate on anything. I looked at my track in the carpet, walked around the room, looked out the windows, and sipped whiskey.
“You look like hell,” said Jim when he came in the front door. “Even in an expensive suit, you look like a drunk.”
He was right. I’d wrinkled his suit at some point and combed my hair over with some water, but it hadn’t done any good.
“Your girl. I think she od’d.”
He went over and looked down at her. “She’ll live. She say she was going to kill herself?”
I nodded and the room tilted. I steadied myself against the bar.
“Happens all the time.” Jim put his arms around her chest and dragged her off the couch. We put her in the backseat of his Acura, then got two unopened bottles of Irish whiskey from behind the bar and took off down the street.
I was drunk but I was wide awake—enough to know there was no way I could do an interview and not seem like an idiot.
“Yugawara. I can’t see him. I’m not up to it.”
“You’re a mess,” said Jim. “Open this, would you?” He handed me one of the bottles. Speeding up the I-50 felt like we were on a rollercoaster. Misty, snow-covered mountains were all around, but the highway could have been going up, over the top of the world. Jim kept one of the bottles between his legs and only slowed down when he wanted a drink.
“I heard about this kid up at the Black Creek Lodge. People stick things in his body for money.”
“That’s where we’re going?”
“Shit,” he said, “what are you, a genius?”
“What about her?” Darcy was in the middle of the back seat, head back, mouth open.
“Forget her. She’s stoned.”
The road was covered in ice. It made a sound like air escaping from a giant puncture.
By the time we got there, Jim had gotten drunk enough and I had gotten sober enough that we were both tired and quiet. Before we left Darcy in the car, I took off my coal-gray suit jacket and covered her with it. I couldn’t see why we’d brought her. But I was sure that if we didn’t cover her, she’d freeze.
“Davis, you’re a saint,” Jim said.
At the Black Creek Lodge, there was an annual bull testicle eating festival of international repute, which made it a meeting place for freaks of all kinds year round. But, on that day, the parking lot only had a few cars in it, and we both slipped twice. I was shivering violently from the cold and almost dropped the unopened bottle of whiskey. Jim held the opened one to his chest.
We walked through several large empty rooms, one that had been the inside of a barn. Then we came to a lounge that had a full bar in it and large bay windows looking out on a pasture. The pasture was covered in snow. A cow stood in the middle of it, staring at the windows. An old woman was waitressing and serving drinks behind the bar. The low wooden tables looked just like her—brown, cracked, not long before they’d collapse. In the corner sat the kid who got things stuck in him for money—bird-thin with a light blue sheet around him like a Roman senator. His hair was shaved down a centimeter from his head and his face showed no emotion. He sat completely straight in his chair.
A few locals were sitting in a semi-circle in front of him, laughing and drinking. A man in a bowl-cut and two flannel shirts, missing his left index finger. A blonde with a nasty puncture scar on the side of her neck. And another woman with no teeth at all; though, she couldn’t have been more than 35. A few others. Everyone but the kid looked at us when we walked up and sat.
“Look at this. Whiskey for everybody,” said a fat, bearded man in a thermal undershirt and jeans. Jim smiled and toasted them with his bottle. The men sitting there looked like loggers and so did their women. I wondered if they’d come for this or if they just happened to be drinking here.
The old woman from behind the bar walked up. “I’d ask you two what you want but it looks like you got that covered.”
I opened the full whiskey bottle and took a sip. Jim asked the woman for cups and, when she brought a stack of plastic tumblers, he poured out whiskey for everybody, brightening spirits all around. Jim even poured out one for the kid, but the fat bearded man held up a hand and said, “No, thanks. He don’t drink.” The kid didn’t do anything but blink. He was completely still.
After everyone had some whiskey, the bearded man stood. “This is Colter and he only does this once a day.”
Too much whiskey: I felt stupid, my thoughts dissolving in to Montana nothing, as if I were no different from that cow in the snow-gray pasture.
“Is he gonna scream?” asked one of the women.
The bearded man slapped Colter hard across the face and said, “See? He don’t feel nothing.” He took the sheet down and pooled it around Colter’s waist, leaving the boy’s upper body exposed. The skin was pale and curiously unscarred. Did it matter that he was sixteen or fifteen or fourteen? He had nothing in his eyes, dead stare, vacant. Then the bearded man brought out a black dish containing hatpins, a long thin paring knife, an assortment of thumbtacks and small pins.
In San Diego, my parents’ yard would be covered with plum blossoms. I thought of them and wished I was there. California was a bright complex of light and heat that was beyond us here, in this place, after we’d given the bearded man ten dollars each—where we took turns silently pushing hatpins into the boy’s arms and chest—where even the snow looked like ashes.
When we finished, thin strings of blood ran down Colter’s torso where silver thumbtacks had been stuck between his ribs in graceful arcs. The pearled plastic drops at the ends of the hatpins looked vaguely like peacock jewelry, an ancient beautification method, difficult and prized.
“Shit,” said one of the women, “I want a picture.”
“Five dollars,” said the bearded man, getting a Polaroid from behind the bar.
Like the lady bartender, this woman had nut-brown leathery skin, and it was hard to tell how old she was. She leaned over Colter and did a 1950s-style cheesecake pose as if she were on a float—Miss October. When she grinned, she was missing two of her teeth.
Jim had been drinking steadily from the bottle and staring at the boy, who was still expressionless with arms and chest full of pins.
The bearded man stood. “Okay, that’s good. We’re all done now.”
“Wait a second,” said Jim. “What about that knife?”
“Oh,” said the bearded man, “the knife. If you want to do that, it’s fifty dollars.” He smiled and looked at Jim as if he were seeing him for the first time.
Jim inserted the paring knife sideways, right under Colter’s left nipple. The kid hardly bled at all. Everyone cheered—whether for Jim or for Colter was unclear—maybe just for the spectacle of the thing: the kid, a human pincushion, so much metal sticking out of him, and some drunk bastard adding that thin knife, as if it needed to be done to make the effort complete. But I remember Colter’s exhalation, the sound of it—long and gradual as if from a great distance.
Darcy woke up, when we were half-way home, screaming as if someone had just jumpstarted her heart.
“Where the fuck am I?” she said.
“Don’t worry,” said Jim, squinting intensely through the snow coming down in thick, moth-gray sheets. He gripped the wheel with both hands. The engine made a steady whine and the wipers could barely keep up. We were doing seventy, seventy-five, outrunning the distance as the car fishtailed and hissed. He raised his eyebrows and flashed me a look as if he expected me to object. But I looked out through the snow, thinking of Colter’s expression as the knife went under his nipple, when he slowly began to smile.
Later, we’d drink until we both wept. Jim would cut himself on a broken whiskey bottle, bleeding all over the top of his cherrywood bar. He’d shoot his pistol off twice into the floor and scare us both. The next day, he’d lend me another suit. I’d make apologies to Yugawara and get the job tutoring a slow, yet very wealthy, fourteen-year-old girl with a vision problem. And all that winter, I’d dream of plum blossoms that settle in the heat like parade confetti, making my parents’ back yard look covered in snow. I’d step through the ice to the laundry at the corner, where I’d buy my parents postcards of blue mountains in summer and scrawl I love you on the back.
“What’s going on? Where we going?” hissed Darcy, holding onto the back of my seat for dear life.
“Don’t you worry,” said Jim. “We’ve got you. Nothing’s gonna happen.”
White men are horrible, straight men are horrible, white straight suburban women are especially horrible, oven cleaner is white adjacent, history is horrible, you are horrible, look at my dog.
Racism, hillbilly violence, iconoclasm, the anarchy must be put down, but isn’t it about time, anarchy is okay, anarchy in the UK, anarchy is not about you, anarchy is you not me, Antifa burned my house down, love me.
The media sucks, IQs are dropping, the virus is rising, white scientists suck, fake news, a febrile bodily stench, take your medicine, we can never go back.
Kellyanne got a face lift, replace the skeleton with surgical titanium, love dolls are the solution, blood from a 12-year-old injected daily, who are you to judge?
I won’t take a knee, why you should take a knee, liver damage, unemployment, poverty, citizen journalism, pepper spray is not a crime, unicorn riots, win this 18-bedroom smart home in Beirut, it’s hopeless.
Inject this insect paste into your knee if you want to live, admit that you are fragile like an Easter egg, will we really make it to Easter I don’t know, buy this jade spoon embossed with the face of Benjamin Franklin before they light it on fire, racial slur, it can’t be a racial slur, banking conspiracy, violence, Kellyanne put down that puppy.
Easter apocalypse up in your grill, every day, violence, violence, violence, disease, you deserve to suffer, you don’t deserve to suffer, you deserve violence, and disease, and this delicious curbside fruit delivery, buy an intimate massager, sterilize the poor, the worst week of Trump’s life is today.
Greta Thunberg? Don’t you say a goddamn thing about Greta Thunberg.
10 best novels by cave-dwelling anabaptists, Walmart, no-touch orgasm, we replaced her knees with industrial springs and now she jumps a lot higher, Kellyanne is why we can’t have nice things.
Trump, Trump, Trump, Trumpety, Trump, Trump, don’t touch me like that while I’m sedated, the left wants aliens in your sandwich, the right wants to kill art, do you know where your Easter eggs are being dipped, can we stop with all the Trump, Biden’s in the basement, space junk will rain down fiery Mayan death upon our children.
Cops with broken hearts, shit cops don’t know the meaning of heartbreak, white fragility, cop fragility, black fragility, heartbroken asian fragility, cops gone wild, Jim Henson was a Nazi, Kellyanne is why I wear this sailor suit, it’s not okay to say these 756 words, racist orgasms, systemic orgasms, systemic racist orgasms on the dark web, but who will pay reparations to the hundreds of undocumented sidhe living in Torrance, California, it won’t be North Korea this time.
I don’t want to visit North Korea, I need the New York Times like I’ve never needed it before, hold me Kellyanne like you did on Naboo, and bring the light inside the body, it’s not a riot if it don’t got that febrile bodily stench, don’t talk to me today, Kellyanne, I need a haircut.
Trump, please make it stop, just put me on the rocket ship, I don’t care, I just want to go.
A short story about voicemail, voyeurism, and stupidity.
Sea-Tac at high noon is a cold saucepan, everyone sitting in it and the burners waiting. The occasional flash-boom of a jet outside. Blue-white daylight through ceiling-high windows. Static crackle of dust remover on plastic. The burnished coffee stand curdling the air around it with sour French Roast. Far away, someone shouts into a phone. It’s always like this.
Waiting for the next thing in the Seattle airport is like waiting for the saucepan to cook. Major airport, major risk: one moment, cold metal emptiness; the next, shitfire and everybody burns. Terror. Screaming. Bullets. Anything could happen at any time. Jim Fowler sat up in the black plastic seat and thought this as calmly and easily as he thought of anything, whether he should take a flight sedative, for instance, or whether to call his voicemail before boarding.
Today, Jim was wearing a coal-gray three-button DKNY, one of his traveling suits—really decent, actually, but not impressive. The impressive suits, the ones he’d bought through a consultant, were too good to wear on the plane. The two Jim had taken to Seattle were wrapped in plastic inside a reinforced Kevlar valise that could withstand a three-hundred-pound anvil dropped on it. Jim knew this because he’d gone to the corporate demonstration where they’d dropped the anvil.
So far, he’d noticed two other men in the airport wearing his same coal-gray suit, but that wasn’t why he was sitting in a desolate part of Sea-Tac, staring out a wall of windows. Jim was three hours early for his flight and no one else had arrived at the gate.
He opened his cell and speed-dialed: his voice, There is no one here to receive your call, in sterile monotone. Had he taken something before recording the outgoing message? It was possible. Something to make him sleep. And then the permanently programmed machine girl sounding more human than Jim: You have . . . zero . . . messages. He loved her voice: frowsy, smart, with just a touch of humor. You have . . . zero . . . messages, as if it were a personal compliment. They knew something over at that cell phone factory. Or maybe they didn’t. Maybe there was no girl like this on any other voicemail in the known world.
Girls. The trouble with girls. He never knew what to say. They made him nervous, shaky. Always judging, picking out his mistakes, noting the every hard swallow, every flat joke—always on record. Jim kept his hands in his pockets and avoided eye contact: they’d see him again somewhere, sometime—and they’d know: he was the creepy one, the one with that look. The windows rattled as a 757 shot down a runway.
That morning, Jim had woken up at 5:00, as always, unable to go back to sleep, and soon got bored with the Weather Channel loop from the edge of his hotel bed. So he called a cab and wound up watching the sky over Seattle lighten from the inside of Sea-Tac.
Jim had wandered for a while, glancing in the tourist stores and the lousy restaurants, at the determined expressions of people already in a hurry. And he’d stopped to look up at a 15-foot steel sculpture of a praying mantis that had been temporarily installed by his gate. It was burnished just like the coffee stand, the railings, the oblong strips of metal that had replaced whatever bland paintings used to line the jetways.
Beside him, a little girl with rings around her eyes and a dirty-looking teddy bear stared up at the mantis as if it might suddenly bound off its circular metal platform. Its front legs were pressed together in the classic mantis pose, sharp spines sticking out sideways from its body—hundreds of tiny daggers waiting for someone running late to trip and fall over the red velvet stanchion-ropes.
“What is it?” the girl asked, pointing at the mantis.
Jim squatted down beside her and looked up. “That’s a sculpture. Somebody made that and put it in here so we can look at it.”
“Did God make it?”
From the girl’s vantage point, the mantis seemed twice as big. It’s blank stare passed through him and Jim imagined it springing to life, its steel claws ripping him in half.
“Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”
“No,” said her mother, putting her hands on the girl’s shoulders from behind and staring down at him. “It’s a bug, honey. Just some bug.”
Jim stood and watched them go to a far gate. He’d seen the mother in the leper smoking room, where the glassed-off air looked pale gray and so did the people sucking down their morning tobacco. She had frosted hair, gold rings, and a faint desperation in how she’d crossed her arms and concentrated on her cigarette. They’d made eye-contact as Jim passed by the room.
She was pretty in a removed, angry sort of way, and he’d gotten ideas. What were the chances of them being on the same flight, in the same row, sitting together? He’d let the possibilities play out for a few moments, then forgot all about her. And this is what it came to: Jim transformed to an insect, squashed under a forty-dollar pump. How often could this sort of thing happen to one person?
Now, in the empty block of seats facing the windows, Jim didn’t have to speak to anyone. If he stayed medicated for the flight, he’d be able to avoid any further human nastiness. Of course, he didn’t always try to avoid people. His real reason for coming to Seattle was to meet someone. But, as usual, things didn’t work out that way. The National Convention of Law Librarians had been something.
Frenzy: everyone single paired-up immediately, then everyone married-but-open-minded, and then anyone else who got a randy thought toward the end of “Comparative Search Diagnostics” or “Alternate Systems of Citing Primary Authority.” Unfortunately, there were a small number of people who always missed out on the librarian bacchanalia. Jim had now been in this group two years in a row.
Bored, he watched a fuel truck creep like an orange beetle through tarmac heat wobbles. The truck didn’t look like it was moving very fast but, if he aligned a wingtip in the foreground with a distant pole out on the airfield, he could measure the fuel truck’s progress. Jim did that for a while, imagining how it would be if the truck suddenly exploded, how it would look from his position—the flames curling up around the tank in wreathes or maybe shooting around the truck in all directions, hanging in the air for a heartbeat, like a fiery octopus.
By expecting the worst, you’re prepared. Lose all hope, lose all fear. Jim wouldn’t mind losing fear. He was turning thirty-five next month, had no family left, and the college girlfriend who had once come close to marrying him was now an interior decorator in Singapore and no longer returned his calls. His hair was gray above the ears, which seemed to have already put him in the geriatric crowd. When he looked at girls in their early twenties—long hair, midriff, belly button ring, little tattoo over delicate ankle—he saw worlds forever closed to him. After thirty, he no longer showed up on their radar. Or, if they had to deal with him, it was the thank-you-excuse-me, the pasty smile, the consolation laugh right before they escaped to the other side of the room.
But what to do. Back home in Irvine, Jim tried to face it. Mind over matter: he answered personal ads and went on nightmarish exploratory dates. The single mother who left the pictures of her ex-husband face-up on the restaurant’s table like a challenge and spoke earnestly to him about becoming a lesbian. A bird-thin waitress with strands of colored string braided into her hair who cried at Neruda’s love poems and had dreams about the devil. A middle-aged professor of economics who said she’d never orgasmed and wanted to know what he thought about pissing.
“Pissing?” he asked.
“It can be a lot sexier than you’d think,” she said.
In the end, they all seemed as disappointed with him as he was with them. And now Jim had just wasted all three convention nights in his hotel room and voicemail was still his best friend.
Behind him, the girl had wandered back to the praying mantis, seemed fascinated with it, staring up into its metal face like it was about to tell her something. Jim felt the urge to walk over and talk to her again, but he didn’t want a second encounter with the mother. The girl was right at the edge of the red velvet ropes and was reaching out tentatively toward one of the mantis’s folded-down claws.
Jim turned back toward the wall of windows. It wasn’t his business if she cut herself. When he looked again, she’d slipped under the ropes and was standing directly under the claws, looking up. The sharp leg-spines pointed all around her, only an inch on either side of her face.
Jim turned and vowed not to look anymore, staring at the fuel truck, now an orange speck in the distance. He was sure that soon the screaming would start. He fished a sedative out of the plastic pill case he always kept in his vest pocket and swallowed it dry. His hands were shaking slightly so he crossed his arms and closed his eyes. It would take a moment for the pill to kick in.
***
Irvine. Yuppietopia of southern California. Yet, there was something about it, thought Jim, something to love. The palm trees were bio-engineered. The streets were angled for maximum runoff. There would never be a major septic horror. There were no alligators in the sewers. Or, if there were alligators, they were ecologically appropriate. Maybe there were no sewers. In Irvine, the sun was sunnier. The kids were kiddier. Birds cartwheeled through height-zoned eucalypti.
Whatever wasn’t working was cavorting and every car came internet-ready. Jim looked down from the 22nd floor and listened to the absolute silence of Gould, Dien, and Strunkmeyer’s law library, his library. Mirrored office towers flashed in the new light and Newport Beach glittered in the distance, blue like a perfect sky.
Today, he was wearing a rust cardigan-slacks combo with pale cream button-down and burgundy Ungaro tie. On the fashion e-calendar provided by his consultant, this ensemble was dedicated to putting a spin in June’s gloom with the earthy tones of fall. Theoretically, one was supposed to stay just ahead of the season: when everybody was still wearing grays, you crept into the browns. At this time, said the calendar, accessories with polka-dots are recommended. Recommended but not required, thought Jim. That was key. Not everybody could get away with polka-dots.
Dark thoughts on this Monday morning: where was Scafandra, his assistant? He got to work at 7:00; he expected her at 7:30. Lateness was the devil, the root of all vice. Jim was never late. Even this morning: mesmerized by the Weather Channel again for a whole hour, then the sudden shock of lost time, the pressured zip down the 73 from his condo, Prussian blue Acura revving 80, barely making it, iced coffee through a straw, email on car-screen, no messages, no messages. It was too soon to start calling his voicemail. But now, sitting at his desk in the library, he felt like he’d left something back in Seattle. His watch read 7:34.
The library’s holdings were extensive—as good as any public law library, in some respects better—and when Jim ascended from assistant to head librarian, he redesigned the floor plan: Federal Cases to the north, California Appellate Reports to the south, taxation, intellectual property, Uniform Commercial Code to the east, transactions, forms and business practices around the big window in the west.
GDS rented a storage annex in the basement as big as a supermarket for everything else. And in the center of the library: his oak desk on a raised dais flanked by both editions of the Annotated California Code. If the lawyers needed to know the law of the land, they had to approach—supplicants at Jim’s altar, where a fat brass desk lamp made him glow like Moses fresh off the mountain.
Then Scafandra came in through the library’s oak double-doors, her eyes already shrink-wrapped in tears, and Jim knew it would be like this. He could have predicted it. Forecasting Scafandra’s tears on a day she was late was about as hard as guessing rain after a week of darkness.
“You have no idea what I’ve gone through this morning. It’s . . . I can’t even talk about it.” She was a thin woman with delicate pale features and auburn hair, the sleeves of her mustard knit sweater rolled up into gigantic cuffs. Her sweaters were psychic shields—always massive, always making her seem like she was dissolving into them, in need of assistance.
“Oh?”
Scafandra Theory 101: any reaction at all will feed standard traumatic breakdown. Any little cooing sounds that would normally mean sympathy and commiseration will cause one to be immediately sucked into 30-minute-long lateness-justifying vortex of pain.
“I was read-ended. Rear-ended. I don’t know what I’m gonna do. I love that car. That car is my life.”
“Oh?”
“My god. What is this world coming to? It’s just . . . life is just . . . sometimes, it’s too much. Sometimes, I think I could, you know . . .”
“Rear-ended you say?”
Her cheeks were wet with tears. Scafandra had skills, but there it was, the split-second glance, scanning Jim’s expression to see if she was making progress.
“Weren’t you listening? It’s alright. I don’t expect you to understand. No one ever does.”
“You’re right,” said Jim. “Some things are more important than being on time.”
Scafandra nodded, daubing her eyes with Kleenex from her purse.
He watched her go to her desk in the glass cubicle near the east wall, where the architects had originally meant the head librarian’s desk to be. Jim knew that by lunch she’d be chipper again, tapping out messages to internet chat friends and humming to herself. When he could see her sitting at her computer in the little glassed-off space, he unlocked a drawer and took out a sheet of GDS letterhead. Below a long list of excuses, Jim made another entry complete with date, time, what she’d said, and how he’d responded.
When he got to the bottom of the page (one more excuse to go—he hoped it would be good—lightning setting her dog on fire, all four tires blowing out spontaneously, abduction, smoking fissure opening beneath her straight to Hades) Jim would type a memo, circulate it to the partners of the firm, and that would be the end of Scafandra. Until then, Jim would wait, serene, detached: 22nd floor law library bodhisattva. Nothing bothered him. Kung Fu. The e-calendar’s icon, a radiant sun, smiled and winked at him from the corner of his computer screen.
It was strange the way he felt about Seattle. Unpacking, he’d gone over everything. All his bags had arrived, plastic-wrapped shirts layered and locked into place. Nothing heavier than an anvil had been dropped on his valise. Nothing lighter than socks came out. No surprises. No unsolved mysteries. And yet, driving through Newport, Jim felt dreamy, detached, felt a nagging something in the back of his mind. He called his voicemail. You have . . . zero . . . messages.
No emergency phone calls from the hotel or Sea-Tac about lost credit cards. So . . . what? Jim didn’t know. But there was something going on here. Something bothering him. He called his voicemail again, as if the solution might have been in the beautiful scrollwork of her voice. First, his own: There is no one here to receive your call. The more Jim listened to it, the more it seemed like he had taken a sedative before recording the outgoing message.
Newport Center Drive was wide and full of BMWs. Being on it was like docking at the galactic spaceport—everything huge, slowly pulling you in. To the right, huge white office buildings like great latticeworks of bone with mirrors in the sockets. To the left, a shopping center bigger than a city: Relax, we have you in a tractor beam. The streets were full but traffic circulated with a low pulse. People instinctively knew when it was their turn to glide. They didn’t have to check. At the light, a pigeon-haired man in a 745i gazed absently into his AC blast. His face looked creamy tan like his leather interior. He glanced at Jim, then shot ahead.
Jim parked and walked into the mall—past the Towne Bistro that had waiters with white dinner jackets and its own domesticated tiger, past the koi pond, past the Venetian fountain with marble cherubs climbing over each other in a gigantic heap, the topmost one spitting up at a non-offensive slant, past the store that only sold toys guaranteed to raise a child’s IQ by a minimum of fifteen points. It was Consumer Never-Never Land: Peter Pan, all grown up, buys a cell phone and a Bimmer, spends his time in boutiques with names like Anthropologie and Un Petit Cadeux.
Jim didn’t mind the ambiance, always a faint tinkling in the air, a freshness, trellises of red Bougainvillea and tiny ornamental catwalks that only a cat could walk on. But there were no cats, no birds, nothing that might offend. Even the kids were well-behaved. Something in the atmosphere weighed them down, made them walk dutifully, quietly beside their parents. A group of them stood around the koi pond in silence, watching the thick golden fish swoop furiously back and forth without making the slightest ripple.
The shopping center was called Fashion Island, and it had one really great quality, one thing that made it different and better than most of the hulking malls of the world: Dream Houses. Jim spent a hundred dollars there every time he visited. Dream Houses was nestled on the other side of the rose atelier between Middle America and Anja’s Day Spa.
He stopped at Middle America’s floor-to-ceiling window. Inside, a fat, red-faced man in shirtsleeves was all smiles as he drove a pair of oxen across a plot of land. Off to the side, his wife and son cheered. He’d stop to wave and get his picture taken or have the attendant put new bandages on his hands—already bleeding from the wooden plow handles. He loved it. Off to the side, the manager, looking like she’d just stepped out of Anja’s in black Von Furstenberg chiffon, her hair at a wicked slant, sipped a cup of coffee and stared into infinity.
People paid to help cultivate the land then got a gift basket later in the year full of the beets or turnips or kohlrabi they’d helped produce. You could hear them happily going on about their crop in the Towne Bistro over a light wine and spanakopita, fresh white gauze across their hands.
But Dream Houses was different. Ultimately, it was about people, about real life and its challenges. Deep down, Jim liked to think of himself as a people person, and Dream Houses was where he interfaced with humanity. This was the human condition. And, for the price of a gold-plated sink faucet or a pair of high-toned brass knobs, it came dirt cheap.
An extremely thin girl with burgundy hair sat at the DH front desk. Her name was Leda. In the year and a half he’d been a customer, Leda had never said more than two words to Jim, but those two words were enough.
“How long?”
“An hour would be good,” said Jim.
She smiled as if that was just right and gave a little Asian nod, even though she wasn’t Asian, tapping something into a computer that was part of the flat surface of her desk. It looked like she was practicing scales, her purple-black nails ticking.
Jim walked past the desk and sat down on a twisted Sköna Hem sofa with green and white stripes. This week was part of the Hide-a-Way Den series and the furnishings had a lush sink-into-me feeling, despite the pastel motif. There were two sofas, a pale blue Italian divan, and a Yamakawa end-table engineered to slowly change its elevation as the wood aged. Somehow, the designers had managed to sink the floor two steps down, and Jim wondered whether they’d built a whole new temporary level above the old one or simply exposed the original floor. He stretched his legs and crossed them at the ankles.
It started as a small home furnishings outlet with a different set interior every month. But it grew into something more. Now time inside was billed and there was a new interior every week. One was expected to buy something, but that’s not why you came to Dream Houses.
It was, quite simply, the best way to meet people. Voyeurs and the occasional tourist excepted, DH had its regulars—people who appreciated style. And the designers were gods. Most of Dream Houses Online was dedicated to the twists and turns of their dramatic lives in exotic cities—Casablanca, Monte Carlo, Biarritz, St. Croix—one was cheating on his wife with a Finnish model; one might have been gay or a woman or a gay woman (10 gigs of posted speculation said the photos were fake); one had a club of Japanese schoolgirls dedicated to group suicide if he ever stopped cheating.
Actors showed up at Dream Houses. Rock stars got photographed in the secret exclusive DH franchise that operated by invitation only. It wasn’t just a showroom, it was a way of life. And, for one or two hours, you could become witty and graceful on your molded Italian chaise lounge; you could flirt provocatively over Ting dragon-cisterns filled with white roses and come away with a handsome mother-of-pearl sconce or an authentic Karastan throw as a memento. The idea was to bring a little bit of it home with you every time. Someday you’d reach perfection.
Jim knew he was far from perfect, but he also knew that the blonde on the other sofa was named Tiffany. At least that was the name she used in Dream Houses. And, every week, they bridged the gap to perfection together. Always, at their time, she’d be waiting—long straight hair, blue eyes, some cream Atsuko Kudo polymer shift that revealed just enough as it clung to her curves. Was she married? Did it matter? Contact wasn’t allowed. DH had its rules: no touching, no smoking, and no food—nothing that would jeopardize the merchandise. It was that simple, and it was never a problem.
“You’re late,” said Tiffany.
“No. You know that’s not true.”
“I’ve been waiting here forever.” Her smile became a pout. She tilted her head to smell roses in an onyx vase beside her without looking away. “Where have you been?”
“Around,” said Jim. “Why does it have to matter?”
“You know it matters. It matters to me.”
“I’ve been at work. Where else would I be?” He folded his hands in his lap and looked down the long interior. Beyond a silk partition of cranes in flight, a different couple was having a conversation, voices only murmurs in the stillness.
Tiffany and he had carried on this romance for nearly a year, and she was incredibly talented at keeping him interested. One week, she’d be jealous, the next, bubbly and vivacious, the next, depressed. The situation encouraged this behavior. Relationships in Dream Houses depended on talking, on never letting things rest, never letting the conversation get predictable. Boredom was a constant threat and mood swings, unlike in the outside world, were an asset here. Tiffany was brilliant. Sometimes Jim admired her ability so much he thought he actually was in love with her.
“Did you get my email?”
Sometimes they sent each other email as a way to keep things going. It was a good way to stay consistent or to let each other know of a time conflict. But in her last message, Tiffany had very tentatively asked him out, said there was a mime who did the Rodney King beating to Japanese Butoh music. He was exclusive. She had tickets. Did Jim want to go? Et cetera. She’d been off-hand, embedding it in a long discussion of DH’s bleached llama carpets and whether they were treating the llamas right.
Jim was getting vaguely interested in the issue—whether Dream Houses ran clandestine llama farms, exporting glue and steaks to South America when the animals stopped putting out quality fiber—until she popped the question. It sickened him. Tiffany was willing to throw it all away, to violate the purity of what they had. And for what? Dinner and the usual? She was missing the whole point. He wrote her a long response, saying as much, then re-wrote it, then deleted it. All he had to do was not respond, right? He’d stay quiet, and things would continue. Right?
“No,” he said. “I haven’t checked.”
“You’re distant.”
“I am the way I’ve always been. I don’t change. I’m like the ocean, always there.”
“Like the distance, you mean. Always over there.”
“Close your eyes. You can sense me.”
“I’d rather feel you.”
“Don’t.” He stared at the silk cranes. The other couple’s conversation rose and fell like quiet tide. Jim wished Tiffany and he could stop talking and just listen to it. But she was changing. Their situation was changing. He tried to focus on a set of long black-dipped teak chimes that didn’t really chime, though they always looked about to. And he knew that what had been good about Tiffany was drawing to an end.
“Well.” She looked toward the lime-tinted storefront windows, where Leda was talking to what looked like three gigantic Swedes in jogging suits. “I don’t know what I’m getting this time.”
“I’ve had my eye on that brass curtain-rod,” said Jim.
“I could say a lot . . . in response to that.” Tiffany smirked—inappropriate on her porcelain features. Women like her, thought Jim, should be cold and poised, removed, like high mountain snow that never melts.
And then, completely without warning, Tiffany did the unthinkable. She sat down next to him and planted a wide warm kiss on the side of his neck. It was a direct violation of the rules. Jim froze. They could both be permanently banned for something like this.
She had her arms around his neck and kissed him a second time before he thought to tell her to get back to the other sofa, that Leda might see them through the surveillance camera.
Leda was already standing there when he looked up.
“This has to stop,” Leda said, “right now.”
Tiffany sneered but let go of him and sat back.
“Wait. It’s not what you think,” said Jim.
“I’m putting a violation in both of your accounts. And I think your time is up.” She stalked back to the front desk, her purple-black skirt swishing.
Jim sighed. A violation meant no more discounts, no more updates, no more promotional offers or exclusive events. Another violation and he’d be barred permanently, worldwide.
“I have to be somewhere,” he said and stood up.
Tiffany crossed one knee over the other and gave him a blank stare.
Jim bought the brass curtain rod from Leda without looking at her. He told himself he wouldn’t come back for a long, long time, but he knew that wasn’t true. In the car, he started shaking, so he took a Hydrocodone from the plastic pill case in the glove-box. One of the lawyers he worked with was a walking pharmacy and Jim helped bankroll his habit. It was amazing how steady and calm he became with the help of synthetic opiates.
Voicemail told him he had zero messages; Jim stood in his darkened entryway and listened to the voice repeat a few times. His apartment complex was shaped like a honeycomb—twelve-inch-thick cement walls, units angled so you didn’t have to look at anyone else. Everyone had a balcony and could, in theory, see a shred of Newport Pacific; though, the apartments started on the fourth floor and went high enough that braving the balcony would have been a major undertaking for most of the retirees there.
As far as Jim knew, he was the only resident under fifty. His complex was always completely silent. Everything was sound-proofed. But tonight he couldn’t relax. He kept thinking of Seattle. What had he accomplished there? He hadn’t met anyone—hadn’t even had the opportunity. No one had paid any attention to him. He’d passed through the convention like a heavily medicated ghost.
He went into the bedroom closet, took off his suede windbreaker, and hung it up. It was half-past nine, almost time for bed. Jim had let dinner drag out, sipping jasmine tea in Bao Voce—a new restaurant that served Vietnamese and Italian dishes together—and pretended to go over a research file from work, while eavesdropping on three drunk lawyers from Quill Collins, one of GDS’s rivals. He hadn’t learned anything useful, but it helped pass the time.
He took off the rest of his clothes, folded them neatly, placing the stack in the sky-blue hamper at the back of the closet. His apartment was completely dark except for the weak moonlight that glanced across the carpeting, making everything black or pale gray. He never closed the drapes. His unit was on the fifteenth floor. Besides, the windows were an inch thick, didn’t open, and polarized automatically on sunny days. He took down a shoebox from the closet’s top shelf and carried it out to the bed.
This wasn’t something Jim did every night, but he did it often enough that it had become like tacit punctuation at the end of a hard day. He sat on the bed and took out a pair of Newcon NZT-22 hands-free night vision goggles. They were SWAT issue from the 1980s: secured by a head strap, starlight technology, could be rotated up, away from one’s eyes along the canvass strap, which came down to Jim’s forehead and made his hair stick out to the sides like a cartoon scientist. He clicked them on and the world turned bright green. Jim looked strange in his bedroom mirror, naked and goggled with glowing green eyes, which, he knew, were being magnified by the starlight effect and were actually tiny points.
He’d bought them through a catalog years ago but hadn’t used them until he moved into this apartment. Now he used them all the time because the old man who lived one unit down and two to the right was great entertainment at night. Jim walked out onto his balcony. It was warm, no wind. Most of the other units were dark. You could do anything on that balcony. No one would see—commit murder, seal the body in the apartment; by the time anyone checked, it would be dust and teeth.
Jim had to stand at the very edge of the balcony and lean over in order to see into the old man’s unit, but it was a small price to pay for such good entertainment. Jim didn’t know what the old man did during the day; no one ever saw anyone in the building coming or going.
The dim hallways seemed to absorb all sound, and movement wasn’t easy—every floor required a numerical pass code, as did the elevator, the parking garage, the trash chutes. Jim figured most of the residents simply stayed in their apartments, had their groceries delivered, kept their televisions turned up. But the old man led a double life. During the day, he did whatever he did, and at night he became a railroad magnate.
Without the night vision, Jim would still have been able to see the electric train moving through the hills and forests. But he would have missed the important details: the small dog running beside the tracks while a boy called to it and waved his hands; the miner on a stretcher being carried out of an opening in a hill; a wooden bridge sagging and broken over the river; hobos hunched around a campfire behind the rock quarry.
Above it all, the old man hovered in a tie and a pressed suit, keeping track of everything, wringing his hands, squinting through the gloom of his faintly lit apartment, talking to the train and then listening to it intently. His entire living room had been turned into an electric set, and he noted all changes on a green chalkboard that was propped up at one end of the room—precipitation, supply and demand, date, time in fifteen-minute increments, profit, loss, employment, and “Projected Expenses for Next Fiscal Term.”
The train curved into other rooms where, Jim assumed, there were other wooden towns like the one in the corner of the living room—something like depression-era Kansas: old dirty buildings, drifters shuffling through the streets, shadowy train yards and tumbleweeds.
The detail was astounding. Jim was sure the ceiling of the living room was painted. The walls were done as perfect three-dimensional extensions of the landscape, hills like the old man’s balding head sloped up from forests. There were four bridges: two of wood, two of rusted iron. And the river that ran beneath them went all over the landscape, widened where logs floated down toward the mill outside of town, and carried a boy on a small skiff.
The old man was deeply involved in the lives of his people. He gestured dramatically to the hobos, gave advice to the boy on the skiff, moved the dog farther down the tracks and then consoled its owner as best he could. He was the guardian spirit of the world he’d created. The real entertainment wasn’t the train or the set. It was the old man himself.
When he’d turn the speed all the way up, the train would eventually derail, and he’d weep at the destruction—pine trees smashed, one of the drifters knocked to the other side of the mountain, the miner clattering down the slope with his stretcher-bearers. The train would go over the half-broken wooden bridge and the old man would cover his mouth in worry.
Jim could watch him all night—how he held forth like Cato before the senate, making passionate speeches, gesturing, long unruly wisps of white at his temples and his fingers stained with chalk. He’d been someone in his life, probably someone with a lot of responsibility, thought Jim. And now he went through a full range of emotions every night.
Buildings were destroyed and rebuilt the next day. Hobos and drifters moved around the terrain, disappeared into other rooms, showed up days later at the edge of the trees or leaning against the wall of the train station. Occasionally, the old man receded into the background so that, even with the night vision, Jim could only make out his silhouette, black-on-black, in the short hall that went to the other rooms.
And so it went: the old man in a pressed suit and the train circling through the rooms. It did occur to Jim that he was equally ridiculous, perhaps more so, standing buck-naked on his balcony wearing night vision goggles. But who cared? A day in the life. Jim only knew these things amused him.
This was a night when the old man wouldn’t stop the train to unload or link up new cars. He just let it go and followed it around his apartment, drawing a hash mark in the corner of the chalkboard every time it made a complete circuit. Jim wasn’t sure what the hash marks were supposed to accomplish, if they were building up to something or not.
It didn’t matter. The important thing was that the old man was there, doing what he loved, in deep conversation with the train. Every so often, he’d gesture at it with an open hand, admonishing it, as if to say What did you expect?
Jim watched until he got his fill of smirking at the old man’s pained looks as he bent over the train and clasped his hands together, full of anxiety. Jim leaned out over the balcony railing, enjoying every minute of it, the glowing green eyepoints of his goggles like tiny anonymous stars.
Of course, he was wearing a double-breasted Zegna with classic pleats today. The e-calendar had laid it out in no uncertain terms: the moment is auspicious for Prada, Fendi, or Zegna as surely as Gladiolus blooms like the midday sun. Jim was not completely sure what that meant, but his wardrobe Feng Shui was clear: Zegna in, everything else out. The e-calendar’s radiant sun icon smiled and winked at him from the corner of his computer screen: friendly guardian spirit. The ancients lit incense at the feet of icons, Jim double-clicked them. It made sense.
The real question was why Scafandra had suddenly been possessed by the Daemon of Work. She’d already cite-checked and proofed a 40-page pleading that one of the lawyers had left in the to-do tray the night before, and it didn’t look like she was even going to break for lunch. This was not normal Scafandra behavior.
Jim unlocked his desk drawer and looked at his List of Scafandra’s Excuses. Had she picked the desk’s lock and found it or had she just reformed? This morning, for the first time ever, she’d come in before Jim. There she was behind the glass partition, eyes riveted on her computer screen, sections of the pleading in neat stacks across her desk.
But, of course, nothing ever changed; people certainly didn’t—always the same, whether cite-checking into the blurry gum-eyed afternoon, running only on coffee and the fear of getting axed, or banned from Dream Houses. People, Jim knew, were as reliable as the California sky, static, dedicated body and soul to the usual—which presented certain fundamental truths about Scafandra, certain unquestionable realities. Jim wondered if the stacks of paper on her desk were even real documents.
Catlike, he made a long circuitous path through the oak-paneled stacks, suddenly pretending to be interested in California Real Estate Law 3d, then pirouetting through California Jurisprudence into the Federal Supplement shelves. Pure stealth. He snuck up behind her glass cubicle, walking only on the blades of his shoes so the carpet wouldn’t swish, and peered over her shoulder at the computer screen.
There was the pleading in all its tedious majesty. Could it be that she was actually working? Impossible. He cleared his throat.
“Yes?” Scafandra kept typing, didn’t turn, the day’s voluminous sweater making strands of her short auburn hair stick to her neck. She’d had too much coffee and was sweating. Jim stared at the back of her neck and imagined kissing it but banished the thought. Scafandra was a problem. One didn’t fantasize about kissing sweaty problems.
She stopped and swiveled. “Yes?”
“Aren’t you hot in that?”
She cocked her head to the side. “What do you need?”
Jim hadn’t planned in advance. “Well, I’ve been thinking.” His mind raced.
“That’s always good.”
“Right, well, do you eat? Lunch?”
Scafandra glanced around the cubicle then back up at him. “Is there a problem?”
Problem? What did “problem” mean in this context? Jim tried to focus.
“Are you alright?” She crossed her arms and rolled back a few inches.
“No, I mean, are you going to take lunch?” He noticed her eyes were the same light brown as her hair.
She frowned.
“Look,” he said, “I’ll buy you lunch.”
Scafandra seemed wary, half-shocked, like he’d just offered her a deal on some stolen TVs. But she said okay and they were both suddenly relieved, each retreating back to their private spaces—Jim to his desk, furiously reading a random section of the California Code on dog bites, Scafandra making busy noises and clicking her mouse.
How had this happened? His nerves. Suddenly Scafandra had morphed from irritating assistant to woman. What did one do with a woman? What would it mean to see her every day now that this had happened? Jim thought: if I’m going to have a nervous breakdown, now would be the time. A few minutes later, Scafandra sent him an email and disappeared with her purse in hand.
Jim’s inbox bleeped just as the library’s double-doors closed silently behind her. She said she’d meet him at Gordon Yow’s, an all-Hawaiian grill, just off Irvine Spectrum, where you could eat poi out of wooden bowls. Jim made a mental note to surreptitiously check her car for rear-end damage when the moment presented itself.
He stared blankly at the email until the screensaver blinked on and passworded itself. He was going to have to do this. Any possible excuse Jim could have cooked up was now worthless. There was no way she could be expected to check her email in the thirty minutes until they were supposed to meet.
Jesus, he thought, spending social time with Scafandra . . . it was crazy, unthinkable. Jim ordered his desk, locking his briefcase in a bottom cabinet. He’d never been to Gordon Yow’s. He didn’t know the terrain, possible distractions, possible escape routes. At least at the Towne Bistro, they could watch the pet tiger and not speak.
He walked out of the library, between the glass-partitioned offices. The world was busy sending faxes and barking into cell phones. No one looked at him. All internal walls were glass and Jim always got the feeling he was walking through a cross-section cutaway entitled “Law Firm.”
One of the associates paced back and forth running his fingers through his hair over and over. Another sat on the corner of his desk, gesturing at a webcam mounted on top of his computer screen, papers across desk and floor like a carpet of snow. On the far side of the room, the smoked glass walls of the partners’ offices stood out like blackened teeth. Jim saw the outline of someone leaning back in a chair, speaking to a silhouette on the other side of a desk.
Absolute truth: visiting the restaurants of Irvine is like visiting the smaller cities of eastern Europe one at a time. You’re aware of the differences until you aren’t, until all the minarets and cathedrals look the same, until the soul-deadening sameness of the landscape signifies exactly that and nothing more.
So: poi in wooden bowls. There was a luau at Gordon Yow’s and Jim suddenly realized this wasn’t foreign terrain. He knew everything about the place without ever having been there: the bartender, who he knew, knew, was named Chaz or Troy or Blair, who used to be a pro skater and now, you know, was, uh, trying to break into the entertainment business.
The waitress in the silver ass-pants, just this side of whorish, who’d snap if you went a hair over her line—a line re-drawn so often she was practically occult. But Jim didn’t want to flirt with her. Jim didn’t want to flirt with anybody. And, luau or not, lunch would have to be short and crisp with a straight shot clear back to the loading entrance if Scafandra started to make any sort of scene whatsoever. Somewhere in the back, there would be a busboy willing to keep her busy for a twenty while Jim hit the freeway at speed.
He almost hoped it would come to that, peeking around an oversized fake palm at Scafandra, who was trying to do the same thing from a different palm ahead of him. She hadn’t seen him yet. Jim had arrived a half-minute before her and, instead of taking a table, he’d said he was meeting a friend. The one who sat first would be the one who got observed, the one under the scope. Hence this double-sneak, while grass-skirted Kanakahanaleya did a greased-up belly dance under a platter of roast pineapple and the coconut was flowing.
But minarets, they keep pointing.
And cathedral bells, they ring.
And this landscape was never going to change. Absolute truth. Look at it forever, he’d see the same thing. The sad part was that Jim knew it, maybe he’d always known it, like knowing burnished Sea-Tac in an upbust of fiery dawn when none of what happens is new and none of it any good. Jim walked. It was all too much. He found three pills at the bottom of his pocket and swallowed them dry without looking.
The energy was all wrong, nerves in his face twitching, hands getting cold like he was about to hyperventilate. Wooden left-right, one step then another. The glass doors, etched in gigantic Gordon Yow’s, opened to harsh parking lot light. The moment was auspicious for escape as surely as Gladiolus dies in Orange County hardpan. And his Acura: a glittering Prussian blue lifeboat amid all that space.
It was hot. Shimmers reared up at the street’s vanishing point, making the distance look wet. Jim pulled over. He’d drifted across Irvine in a haze. Somewhere along the way, his hands had started shaking bad. Nerves. Scafandra was back there under a latex palm, now hating him twice as much. A parti-colored mass of University High students moved across the street. In the shade of the tree-lined sidewalks, they looked like gumballs in a quarter machine, all the bright colors clumping through patches of light.
Jim dialed his apartment: There is no one here to receive your call. It felt like the vents were blowing hot air but the AC light was on. Tiny fires kept starting inside his veins. He didn’t know if it was nerves or pills. Jim clicked the AC off and on, rolled down his window. You have . . . zero . . . messages. Someone a block over was pissed, beeping long streams of angry car horn into the air. Jim got out, left his cell phone on the seat. Now there would be a message to play back—a long sustained car horn. It was something.
And then there was Hegemon: a store-front café, now owned by Starbucks, that was filled with loud furniture and no longer sold coffee. He sat at the wooden counter and ordered a carbonated chocolate sundae. It looked like normal ice-cream but, when you put it in your mouth, it had a faint fizz. At least that’s what the little chalkboard over the register said.
The pink-aproned woman behind the counter repeated a dollar amount for the third time, but Jim couldn’t focus. He put down the loose bills that were in his pocket. He wished he’d brought his phone. It would’ve been really nice to hear her voice right then, to murmur something sweet back to her. Yeah, baby, I know, I know.
The place was full of senior citizens. In a puce loveseat, a skeletal grandmother spooned heaps of carbonated ice-cream into her mouth, mobile oxygen machine parked next to her like a robot companion. On the stool beside Jim, an old man with wisps of white hair and a pressed blue suit sat down with a Register and a tumbler of peach frappe.
“Don’t I know you?” said Jim.
The old man unfolded his newspaper and scanned the front. “Nope.”
Jim leaned toward him. “No. I do know you. You live in my complex.”
“Nope. Sorry,” said the old man, turning a page.
“You’ve got this incredible train—”
“Look, sport,” said the man, still not turning toward him, “I come in afternoons for a quiet frappe. I don’t know what you’re on.” He glanced quickly at the woman behind the counter. “Excuse me,” he said, taking frappe and paper over to a purple velour sofa, where he sat between a cadaverous 80-year-old man in a straw hat and a fat woman in a sweat suit with an unlit pipe clamped between her lips.
“I don’t know what I’m on.” Jim thought: Valium, Xanax, Librax, Tranxene, baby-blue Vicadin, apple-green Hydrocodone. The floor tilted when he stood up.
The woman behind the counter stared at him.
Out front, the bus from the old folks’ home was still unloading. Jim staggered around a woman’s walker toward his Acura.
Valium, Xanax, Tranxene, baby-blue Vicadin, apple-green Hydrocodone: the mantis was gone and Jim was stoned. These are the facts of life in Sea-Tac at dawn when you don’t know what you’ve taken. The pinwheel of memories behind him was still rolling through disjointed hours of the flight-time dark that put him here. And nothing, nowhere, at no time would ever be auspicious again.
Jim had lost track. He didn’t know how much of what he had taken pre-flight, during-flight, in what combinations. Somewhere, in a medical reference, there was probably an entry for what was working inside him, but the mantis was gone so it didn’t matter. He’d never know whether the little girl had blinded herself, impaled herself on the sculpture or not. Or maybe there had never been a combination of chemicals like this in any person’s body in the known world. Maybe he was beyond reference, off the map. Maybe he’d become the map. Jim staggered back a step, hugged himself.
He stood in front of the spot where the mantis had been. The velvet stanchion ropes were still in place, cordoning-off a circle of empty carpet. A passing janitor gave him a look. His Zegna jacket had an ice cream stain up the right sleeve. He’d gotten a few nosebleeds, and there were splotches of blood where he’d used his tie to wipe. Jim’s shirt was out, left shoe undone. He thought he should sit down; he had nowhere to go. The familiar bulge of his wallet was missing from his pockets. All he had left was his phone.
Jim walked to the same bank of plastic window seats he sat in before. Had the mantis ever really been there? If he turned around right now in his seat, would he see it again, all burnished chitinous mandibles and razor-sharp spines? If the girl had killed herself, had tripped against it or gotten pushed back against the spines in his dream, would it have been any less tragic? Jim would have asked someone, but there was nobody around—empty seats to vanishing points, black morning-dark windows—and words weren’t moving right in his mouth anyway.
He speed-dialed home. If this was all a drug hallucination, maybe this time she’d say something to him, something affectionate, understanding. The phone slid out of his hand, down his wrinkled shirt as the peal of a miniature car horn came out of the speaker. In the distance, the first flight of the day touched down. And a fuel truck on an empty stretch of tarmac suddenly exploded: a marble-sized fireball from where Jim was sitting. But he didn’t see it. He was asleep.
A short short about interpretive horticulture.
Over lunch, Luke tells me about the murder, how he looked up and saw a black cow standing all by itself in the field. And how that was what made him cry. After everything. The cow standing there all alone, completely black.
Luke says he’s not afraid anymore.
I look for a cigarette, then think I must be losing my mind since I’ve been quit for over a year. Luke has switched to vaping. So I can’t bum one off him. Instead, I ask why he came to San Diego, but he only adjusts his sunglasses and shrugs.
Life fell apart, he says, when he quit drinking. Marianne got promoted. He couldn’t go out anymore. His sponsor relapsed, disappeared. He spent a lot of nights alone.
“So that’s why—it happened?” I can’t bring myself to say it.
The waiter comes over and asks if we want anything else. I order another beer. Luke gets a club soda.
“That’s just it. I don’t know. It wasn’t me.”
The wind blows a plastic bag along the sidewalk by our table and we both look down at it instead of at each other.
“She was beautiful that day.”
Two blocks west, Pacific Beach rolls white static in the heat. We can look down Chalcedony Street and see the thin line of the break coming in. Everybody here is tan except Luke, who’s a waxy Missouri pale. He got thin since I left Hauberk. He grew his hair long, dyed it black.
“I don’t understand,” I say.
He looks at a waitress inside the cafe laughing at a table with three blond surfers. “I don’t understand, either.”
But Luke says he remembers everything. He’ll never forget how happy Marianne was when Bulldog moved her desk into his office. Bulldog has a real name. Everyone just calls him that out of affection, but everyone hates him.
“Marianne hated him. But she was so happy.”
“She always seemed happy.”
Luke takes out his vape pen. It’s chrome, has GOLIATH down the side in a space-age font.
“You met her twice,” he says.
She started going out after work with guys from the office. To Nene’s, the Burmese Lounge, the Five Dimes. He’d call around until he found her, ask her to come home. Luke was never invited. What was he going to do? Sit there and drink 7-Up? He tells me nobody liked him. Bulldog made fun of him, called him Sauron. Marianne thought it was funny.
“She didn’t really think it was funny. She just said she did.”
“Is that why—”
Luke exhales a thick cloud that smells like a chocolate liqueur dissolved in alcohol. “Stop. Can you please?”
I feel embarrassed even though I didn’t do anything. I don’t know where to put my hands now that I’m done with my salad. So I put them in my pockets, which still feels awkward. But Luke doesn’t notice. He’s watching the waitress talk to the surfers inside.
I’ve never met Bulldog, but I’ve met Marianne and I can imagine: up goes her desk to the third floor right next to the Dog, who’s taking her out to Nene’s later with the lucky few who can’t say no. And Sauron isn’t coming because, frankly, he’s embarrassing and uncomfortable and not too stable. And what’s she doing with him anyway?
I picture Luke next to Marianne in the dark, eyes open, maybe whispering her name, maybe putting his hand on her arm. That’s great, but their lives, like their stuff, are all mixed up together because they’ve been living with each other for three years. Situations like that don’t get solved by calling around at bar time or touching someone’s arm in the middle of the night. Maybe she says, “Luke, let’s get some sleep.” And maybe that’s what they pretend to do.
He tells me how numb he feels. “Like I’ve been away somewhere for a really long time. Like I’m someone I don’t know.”
“That’s how you seem to me, too. No offense.”
“None taken.”
He vapes. He watches the waitress inside the cafe. I look at the V of ocean down at the end of Chalcedony Street and think about how the water is pale jade but it looked gunmetal a week ago and how this is a lesson of some kind.
Luke could have learned to accept Bulldog in Marianne’s life. “He has this five-story house in north Hauberk. One of the old Victorians. It used to be the girls’ school. He has a refrigerator that plays music. His wife, Kathy, she wears a lot of gold. She’s a treasury. That’s what he says, my baby’s a treasury. But he means all the gold.” And it could have been okay like that. But the one time Luke and Marianne came over for dinner, Kathy’s old shih tzu pissed on Luke’s leg. So Bulldog threw Luke out.
“Funny that he’s named Bulldog and he has a dog.”
“Marianne thought so.”
“Sorry.”
Luke looks at me. I can’t see his eyes behind his black aviators.
“Nobody’s ever sorry,” he says.
He’s not the kid I knew in high school. Piers Anthony novels at lunch and Judge Dredd comics and too much Black Sabbath and his dad on duty in Gavin Long Men’s Facility five nights a week. His mom died before he got to know her. Maybe that’s what we’ll say in the end—that’s what fucked Luke up. But in the end no one will probably say anything. Marianne’s dead. I don’t know what it means.
“So I ran over the dog. It’s name was Scruffy. I ran over Scruffy.”
“Did you kill anything else?”
“No. Just the dog.”
I nod, like, that’s good. It’s good you only murdered one human and one dog.
“It didn’t suffer.”
Two years ago, I went back to Hauberk for my uncle’s farewell. Luke came and it was good to see him. He was quiet, stood in the back of the church, and tried not to stare when my aunt collapsed on the coffin. Who will go to Marianne’s funeral? Will Luke stand in the back and try not to stare? Will I?
“Where are you going now?”
“Mexico, I think. Maybe nowhere. I stabbed her. With a bread knife.”
“Jesus Christ, man. I mean—”
“I stabbed her and she was wearing this Hawaiian sun dress. It was white but it had huge red flowers on it. You couldn’t see anything. She didn’t suffer. I promise.”
“Alright,” I whisper. “I guess that’s good.”
Tears run down under his aviators, but his mouth stays flat, his voice level. “You believe me, don’t you? That she didn’t suffer?”
“I believe you.”
“We were having a picnic by this little stream. It was a good place. It was peaceful. You could hear the water on the rocks. Then I looked up at that black cow. And it didn’t seem nice anymore.”
My throat’s too tight to speak. I drink some beer. Then I look at Luke and say, “Yes. I understand.”
The first time I realized I didn’t have the temperament to be a concert pianist, I was sitting in an enormous practice hall at San Diego State University with my teacher, Dr. Conrad. I was 16 years old. Eight years before that, through a serendipitous confluence of family connections, happenstance, and generosity on the part of my mother, I’d started taking piano lessons from him at $10 a week.
Even in 1989, that amount seemed considerable, given that living in San Diego ate up most of my father’s middle-class teaching salary and my mom wasn’t working. So I felt rightly privileged to learn from a professor of piano and composition, who I discovered many years later, actually had a reputation as being one of the most difficult, ferocious members of the music department.
To me, he was a kind gentle person, always willing to cancel a session to talk about the lives of the composers or take me down to the recital hall to look at the harpsichords or just tell jokes. One day, we took an upright piano apart, piece by piece, to look at how it worked and produced its range of sounds. The experience had me fantasizing about becoming a professional piano tuner for years.
But really I was just in awe of Dr. Conrad, who seemed surrounded at all times by an aura of brilliance and gentility and yet had a goofy sense of humor and a love of children. I learned more from him about music, teaching, and life than anyone I can think of. He was an important person to me.
But the day he told me I just didn’t have it, I took it very hard. I knew a number of kids at my school who were into theater and music, many of whom had formal training like me, but who always seemed better, sharper, one step ahead. It kept me up at night. I wanted to be like them, as good as they were.
Having been surrounded by poets, painters, and professors throughout my short life, I thought creative artists, especially classical musicians, were a breed apart. My idol at the time was John Field, an Irish pianist who studied under Muzio Clementi. He was considered a weak student early on, but he rose to greatness later in life, praised by Beethoven, and even mentioned in War and Peace. The reasons I took him as a model should be obvious.
That improbable dream seemed to melt away the day I asked Dr. Conrad the ultimate stupid question, one that I have since been asked many times by young (and more than a few older) writing students: Do I have the talent to make this a career? It’s a horrible question, one that should never be asked by or of anyone, not even of oneself.
Unfortunately, it’s asked by everyone at least once, and it’s something every art teacher hears over and over. Do I have it? Am I good enough? Am I worthy? Will Béla Bartok let me into heaven? Will Gustav Holst discourse with me on the nature of the spheres while Mozart packs my bong? I know das Leben ist kurz, aber die Kunst ist lang, but I’m ready to go the distance.
Up to that day, I’d had no idea Dr. Conrad smoked. Besides, it was forbidden in the practice halls. But before he answered my question, he motioned me outside. The hall with about 50 grand pianos was on the second floor and, from the balcony walkway outside, we could see the women’s gymnasium, the campus tennis courts, and the great parking lot beyond, packed with cars glittering in the late afternoon.
It was windy that day. I remember Dr. Conrad setting a lit cigarette in the corner of his mouth, crossing his arms, looking into the distance, and thinking for a moment. He had the habit of stopping to think, as if he were listening to a voice only he could hear, and I knew not to interrupt him. But it only made the moment heavier, more dreadful, as if my entire future depended on what he was about to say.
After what seemed like a very long moment, he flicked ash over the metal railing, looked at me, and said, “Michael, you’re very creative and I have no doubt that you will find the right way, but you lack the temperament for serious musical study.”
I nodded. What could I do but nod?
Then he said, “I think we’re through for today.” Because he knew that if you’re going to tell someone what you consider to be a hard truth, you have to allow them time to mourn their lies, their comforting illusions.
Of course, I was crushed. But there was nothing but honesty and kindness in him when he said it. And even then, I knew that when someone speaks the truth at that level, with that much transparency and, actually, compassion, you should accept it at face value. You might not agree with it, but you cannot disagree with the sincerity behind it.
A very deep part of me knew that he was right. It would take years for me to fully accept it, years spent both struggling with music and becoming fascinated with English literature and essay writing. It was me finding my true will, that path Dr. Conrad said he had no doubt I would eventually discover. But it wasn’t pleasant; it took a long time; and it demanded a lot in return—the general template for most things in my life.
I was a weak music student, but not because I didn’t practice hard. I practiced so hard that at times it affected my health. I had the obsessive nature of a musician without the bifurcated mind necessary to be both mathematician and sculptor at the same time. In retrospect, even then, I thought more like a writer, but I wouldn’t realize this about myself for almost a decade.
At the time, my dedication to piano, though misplaced, brought me a certain amount of instructive grief. I took a long time to analyze pieces; I was often deeply, inconsolably frustrated at my technical inability; and my adolescent self-doubt was only amplified by these things, rendering me morose and miserable much of the time. Add to that, my lack of social development and the fact that my heroes weren’t celebrities or pop stars but 17th and 18th century composers. And I had the perfect recipe for spontaneous teenage bridge jumping.
Though I came close a few times, I would not trade those grueling hours in the practice rooms or my loneliness—as much due to the other facets of my life as my musical studies—for anything. I learned discipline. I learned what it is to do everything right and still fail. I learned compassion. I learned to revere the creative life as one of invisible risks, enormous sacrifices, and sometimes rewards that make those things worthwhile. And I learned the value of telling the hard truth as I understood it to my own future students.
Dr. Conrad never told me I didn’t have talent. He always said that’s something no one can know, not even about oneself. He told me I didn’t have the temperament. And that’s why he was correct. I have the temperament of a writer, something he recognized but didn’t know well enough to name. His world was music. And because of him, I was able to exist in that world long enough to acquire some of its virtues and vices.
When I do play piano these days, it’s for my own amusement. And I can only be amused at my ability (and lack thereof). In the fullness of time, when I get my Roland out of storage, I think I’d like to start practicing again, maybe learn some Professor Longhair. If I manage it, one day I can be that grinning old man with long white hair, playing boogie woogie on his balcony.
Who’s that up there?
Just some old creep, honey. Don’t look at him. Get in the car.
A short short about an epilogue.
You want a book and a blanket, warm shoes, a strong cup of coffee. You want interesting birds at a comfortable distance, flowers nodding in the sun, forgetfulness at least for a time. You even want redemption, relief, the past to stay past—even as it reaches out somehow to the present—symbolically, perhaps in dreams or in the figure of shadows beneath the trees—to reassure you that it’s going to stay put. You want the world to stop ending for a minute and the mountains to stay purple under their white peaks. And, yes, you very much want to be in love.
Of course, as your body expels a month of agricultural pollution, you mostly want to breathe straight. You decide you love clean air more than anything else.
Coming out of the San Joaquin Valley in the high-pollution days of summer is like being reborn. You don’t remember how it was the first time, but can’t you imagine? Screaming, covered in slime, a slap on the ass, and then the first ragged breath: this is what it’s like driving north on the 5 and looking back at Gustine, Newman, Patterson, Westley. You stop for gas in Lathrop. You consider taking a detour out to Manteca because someone in your PhD program said he once ate a good enchilada there and you’ve been chewing old jerky since Buttonwillow. You didn’t want to get out in Los Baños because breathing there makes you want to brush your teeth.
But you don’t do the detour. You push north, feverishly. Maybe your fever isn’t only because of the gallons of chlorpyrifos being dropped on orange groves by the freeway. It tastes like talcum powder. It’s on the windshield, turning the sap of dead butterflies light gray. As with the butterflies, so with your lungs. Enchiladas de Manteca are one thing. Getting out of the Valley—really getting out without an engine fire or a family emergency or a carjacking or the strange magnetic pull of Fresno simply yanking you back to the Tower District—that’s an enchilada of a much higher order.
So you get out, and it’s quietly amazing. You spend the night in Sherwood and dream about a forest. You go up to Portland and you look at a tugboat. People walk past you with hands in their pockets. Someone laughs at a joke. The Willamette is clean beneath grey steel bridges and pillars of rust. You decide this is where people go when they figure out what matters in life. You buy a silver Ganesh pendant on Burnside Street and spend hours in Powell’s Books reading about Mikao Usui.
Finally in Washington, you make your first journal entry in weeks: I think I feel healthy—what happened? When you blow your nose, the tissue isn’t stuck with black. You no longer have a smoker’s cough after walking outside. You think this might be something. It might be momentous. Your lungs don’t feel like ten pounds of water.
You are inspired to meditate for the first time since you left Michigan. You are inspired to sit for hours at the edge of Puget Sound and not think about the doctoral program you left behind like a messy divorce. And you don’t think about the virus much.
You’re still running—both to and from some other life you could have, should have, would have been leading. But you might take a little time to watch an orange spider in its web. You might read a novel. You might close your eyes in the sun and breathe clean air for a while and, just for today, let everything slip, moment by moment, into evening.
A short short for Wynonie Harris.
It was then that he had a horrible moment of clarity, standing in the kitchen, listening to the clock. Normally, he didn’t hear it or didn’t pay attention to what he heard. But tonight, with only the soft whisper of rain against the roof, the second hand sounded terrible, like it was chipping away at something—inexorable, unconditional, tiny-but-relentless chipping. And the horror of it, of everything it implied, rooted him to the spot.
Perhaps that was the only place he could have one of his moments of clarity, the only confluence of space and circumstance—breaking a glass in the sink three hours before; gulping the last bottle of red wine to get the hateful, spiteful, self-critical voice out of his head and promptly vomiting; lying awake beside his sleeping-pilled wife, administering the old self-accusatory review of all his failures back to age eight—which could open his mind now to the hard truth.
One day he’d be too old. One day he’d run out of ways to hustle up the meagre scratch that kept them going. And then, when the juice ran out, it would be the street. The small mercies of the little house owned by his in-laws, to which he and his wife had repaired when they both lost their jobs, would be long gone. And then the street. And all the street would entail.
He could already see the signs: gray streaks in his hair, his wife’s chronic pain, the litany of sacrifices they’d had to make increasing steadily, incrementally, over time. His moment of clarity was a moment of dread so deep and profound and undeniable that he felt tears almost come. But crying was something he never did.
Still, one might cry, all alone in a kitchen, thinking about the future to a ticking clock. Daddy’s ghost wouldn’t bar his way to heaven for a transgression as small as that. Would it? Then again, if Daddy’s ghost were anything like Daddy, it would be a puffed-up, arrogant, critical, contemptuous sonofabitch. So maybe yes, Daddy’s ghost would bar the way for shedding a tear.
As Daddy’s cruel voice had reminded him not long ago in bed, as he’d learned the hard way growing up, all failures are accounted for, all sins recorded, all capitulations and weaknesses tracked with Newtonian precision. The world does not forgive. The world does not forget. And the only law the world has is that of Motion, of cause an effect, action and reaction, crime and punishment. And then the street. Where even this whispering rain, so quaint while one is safe indoors, becomes the executioner’s song.
This is why he drank, to stop that cruel voice and it’s precise accounting, to stop the dread. This is why he drank a whole bottle of his father-in-law’s discount red, since the beer ran out days before, and the lockdown meant getting to the store entailed days of advance planning and a depressing conversation about expenses.
But the voice didn’t care, that part of him that sounded like Daddy and hated him, that wanted him to suffer. He had to drink it into submission. And all he had now was the unopened fifth of Jim Beam he’d gotten for Christmas two years ago and was afraid to open. If he drank that, then the voice would tell him about his stupid, crazy things, things that he’d regret for years, that his wife would be sure he never forgot. Because he was weak. Because he’d lost his job. Because the Law of Motion. Because consequences.
And the voice, the cruel presentiment that kept him awake on nights he gave in to thinking. Its horrifying clarity about what would come. His failure to find more work. Their struggle to pay her strict disappointed parents the modest rent on this house and the sheer certainty that he and his wife would then be turned out of doors. The juice running out. Better, said the voice, not to think at all. Better not to wake up and have to face the payments and punishments of another day.
He walked to the sink. The razor-sharp Japanese paring knife was there, drying on a cloth towel. Don’t think about the electric bill you can’t pay, about the choices you’ve made, about a virus in the streets, dead bodies piled in the morgue, the juice all gone. Don’t think any of it is right or wrong—because you’re still going to pay, one way or another. Don’t think about Daddy’s ghost or the seven steps to heaven the song says are just too steep. Don’t think about what will become of your wife. Don’t think about the street.
Dead plants on the window sill over the sink. Dark blacktop glistening from the amber streetlight at the corner. The old willow just beyond, waving in the wind like it knows, dense with amber shadows. Don’t think about the street, the relentless ticking of the clock. And don’t cry. The doorway to eternity resides in every moment. Tell yourself that. Pick up the knife.
A spontaneous short short, written at midnight.
One dreams of an enormous bird of night, shaped out of a cloud, its edges illuminated, because one saw it at midnight and remembered.
A bloodstain above the horizon or a fume of ink, with surrounding moon and constellations, and the 12:40 freight to Gary, Indiana, pushing through the black landscape, its headlamp an angry earthbound star.
One dreams of the bird while sleeping on the dock of Vu-Tech Logistics—the only place it’s possible to sleep on such a hot night in Missouri—big spiders and moths up around the floods doing their dance and five more nightshift hours to dawn.
One guards nothing at Vu-Tech Logistics and gets paid for it, gets away with it, a job only a human could possibly have and only a robot could possibly do. Someday, they’ll invent a machine that can process nothing, contemplate nothing, scan through vacant warehouse space on an algorithm of emptiness, accomplishing nothing. And they’ll love it. And then the world will truly end. But until that time, nightshifts will pass hour-by-hour and fools will dream on loading docks in summer.
So why not dream? Dream anything but a horrible bird of night.
Dream the cloud of blood expanding, edges bright from a sodium-vapor sign above a dirt lot in Triton, Arizona—a landlocked town named for a sea monster, a town whose first mistake came long before its name and whose last would come long after it called its only bar, MOM’S.
The dirt lot behind the bar.
The bar, a filthy violent place.
A place you might someday forget, along with the blood.
And the blinking sign above: EAT . . . AT . . . MOM’S.
You roll on your side and watch the train pass by, as you have many times before, as you will again, listening to the crickets beneath the dock’s crumbled lip.
One day, there will be no bird of night, no bird-shaped cloud, no cloud-shaped blood. No memories of a dead drunk in the sodium light. Only passing freight to wake you up. And no more MOM’S burning in your dreams, making the wings above glow red.
I lead a mostly inward existence. The part that isn’t, my small public-facing side, is bound up with my art, with what I write and submit for publication. In this way, I’m constantly reinforcing and reiterating my identity, performing it. I have to do this. We all do if we expect to survive, immersed in the strange demimonde of the writing life.
Since you never know if you’re any good and there is always someone saying you aren’t—including your own inner sadist—you have to affirmatively decide that you’re a writer and reject all arguments and criticisms to the contrary. When you can do that and put words on the page, you are one. If you can’t do that and you’re still waiting for permission, you’re not. Not yet, at least.
A big part of making that decision and then constructing your identity publicly involves not letting respectability get in the way. In 2013, feeling like I’d discovered this and that it was true, I wrote “The Discipline: In Your Head, Off the Street, and Away From the Club.” At the time, I thought I was articulating a set of beliefs and practices that could make it possible for creative people to continue in spite of the ubiquitous, overwhelming pressure to stop.
Here is the concluding paragraph. My sentences tend to get long and loopy when I’m writing Something Very Serious:
People enmeshed / immobilized in a fugue of “respectability” (in my opinion, a parasitic set of social mores and strictures that slowly consume the time and energy–life–of innocents whose only mistake was doing what they were told from an early age) will say you are crazy, unambitious, stupid, a loser. They will do this because you haven’t had the time and wouldn’t spend the effort to become a stakeholder in their hierarchy of values. I have experienced this first-hand and still do from time to time when the ripples of life-decisions I made in my late 20s come back to me. But I do not have regrets. I have largely overcome my personal demons, the emotional, familial, social fallout associated with owning my life. That’s why this is a discipline. You have to practice it. It’s not something you do once. It’s a way of life. And I want that for you if you want it for yourself.
Seven years later, I feel less certain about this. I think I was shoring up my identity for myself, talking to myself in the mirror, convincing myself. While I’ve had a considerable amount of positive feedback from writers about that essay, it now seems more like a lacuna than a manifesto—a place where the reader can deposit her anxieties and, if only for a little while, dismiss them. But the question remains: was I talking myself into or out of something in that piece? What was the real opportunity cost of deciding to set foot on this odd, widely misunderstood, extremely demanding path?
Over the years, I’ve stayed faithful to the discipline, mythologizing my life in the way of a writer trying to buffer himself against the world. A lot of creative people do this, using their imaginations not only to produce work, but also to perform their identities as artists in order to keep the cynical, draining importunities of late-stage capitalism at bay. Unfortunately, just as an actor can get lost in a role, forget himself, and believe he is the character, it’s easy to mistake self-construct for reality, map for territory.
I’ve often lost myself, performing a writerly persona. And I’ve had to return to the great voice-driven modernists I’ve always loved—Celine, Henry Miller, Hemingway, Bukowski, Hunter Thompson, Melanie Rae Thon, Brett Easton Ellis, John Fante, Denis Johnson, Isaac Babel, Osamu Dazai, Ryu Murakami—as a corrective. In their fiction, the “constructedness” (“artificiality” isn’t quite right) of idiosyncratic first person always reminds me of the distinction between map and territory, between the “author brand,” or as Foucault says, “the author function” in discourse, and the unknowable human beings who’ve disappeared behind their texts.
As the constructed persona, I’m perfectly fine with the discipline “in my head and away from the club,” living on the edge, by my wits, freelancing and being a ghostwriter in a plague year. I’m even writing a novel based on it. I maintain a fierce, self-aggrandizing positivity and narrate myself as the protagonist of the story, on my hero’s journey, making the raw material of my life into text I hope people will find interesting.
But this is a plague year. Millions are out of work. The economy is flatlining. Although it may seem like that would have less of an effect on someone leading the introspective writing life, I’ve realized that without society, there’s nothing for me to eschew, no place get away from. Self-isolation means something different when everyone’s doing it.
The pandemic has changed everything in the course of a few months and we have changed, are changing, along with it. As Guitar Slim liked to say, “The things that I used to do, lord I won’t do no more”—not as a matter of preference, but as a matter of survival. Like most people, I want to live past next month. Yet, in order to do that, I need society to play along. And right now, society just isn’t up to it.
In The Atlantic, Yascha Mounk, a professor at Johns Hopkins, published a very dark, pessimistic appraisal of our future with COVID-19, observing that “After weeks in which it made sense to hope that something would happen to end this nightmare, the prospects for deliverance are more remote than ever.” He might be right. If he is, what then?
I read about drug cartels, poachers, and conmen taking advantage of the lockdown hysteria. I get into online discussions with fellow writers about whether Andrew Cuomo is doing the right thing and whether Bret Stephens knows what he’s talking about. And I ask the question everyone’s asking: if it all goes dark, what will become of us, of me?
It’s necessary to offer something to the world and receive things from it if you intend to function outside a monastery or an ashram. But, practicing my creative discipline, I’ve always felt I could be happy sitting in a small room, surrounded by books, with a narrow-ruled steno pad, a laptop, and a small refrigerator. I have a lot of memories and thoughts to explore. I have the voices of other writers always drifting around in my head and a very small circle of friends in the world who write to me. I’ve never wanted much more than that.
But these days I feel transparent and weightless, untethered. In one sense, it’s fine. I’m not afraid to die. I’ve accomplished most of the things I set out to accomplish in my life. But I would like to finish this novel. I’d like to see my third book of stories find a publisher. And even teach story writing to a few more people before I go. Those things would be nice, but they’re contingent on systems that are undergoing radical changes. I fear the old world is slipping away. I fear I am, too.
“Everything was all right for a while. You were kind.” She looks down and then goes on. “But it was like you weren’t there. Oh shit, this isn’t going to make any sense.” She stops.
I look at her, waiting for her to go on, looking up at the billboard. Disappear Here.
— Brett Easton Ellis, Less Than Zero
Consider this hypothetical. You’re standing in your kitchen, cutting slices of cheese with a razor-sharp carving knife. You realize there are such things as cheese knives, but you don’t have one. For those readers currently languishing in suburban opulence, who can’t imagine someone not owning a cheese knife, I’m here to tell you such people exist, and they are probably more numerous than you have imagined.
Anyway, you’re cutting some cheese. It’s not difficult because the knife is a diamond-sharp Japanese “Zebra” blade, perfectly weighted for carving your burned pot roast, which is otherwise as uncuttable as second base. Now let’s say you drop that knife in a moment of privileged carelessness and it goes point-down through the top of your foot. Stop screaming. You’re not going to die. But there is quite a bit of blood welling up in your slipper. Better attend to that. You limp to the bathroom, whimpering and cussing, and start looking for the antiseptic.
In spite of what you plan on telling your spouse (My hand was wet. It just slipped.), you really have no idea why or how this could have happened. All you know is that it hurts. Did you deserve it? Think about this. Did you deserve to have a skewered foot?
One argument says, yes, if you hadn’t been worrying about your Bitcoin investments at that moment and whether the new walnut end tables really express your essential joie de vivre, you might have paid closer attention to what you were doing. You might have taken better care. Now small ripples of dread and frustration will radiate through your life for the next few weeks the same way pain radiates through your foot.
Your mindset will be affected. Your spouse’s mindset will be affected. Maybe your acuity at your job will temporarily decrease. Your irritation levels with Ralph, your neighbor, when he decides to fire up the lawn mower at 5:40 AM next Sunday, may run considerably higher. You might even speak harshly to the cat—a small thing, like the cat himself, but surely not something he, as a fellow living being, deserves. You’re the one who dropped the knife, you careless dolt. There are consequences for everything. Close your mouth and own up to them. Be an adult for a change.
But another argument says, no, accidents will happen. No one wants to injure themselves and no one ever truly asks to be hurt. There are so many opportunities in modern life to harm yourself or others that it’s likely to happen, now and then, even if you aren’t naturally accident prone.
No matter how much care you take, there are acts of god; there are times you break your foot stepping off the train, even if you’re minding the gap; a tree hits your bedroom wall; a texting teenager rear-ends you 45 feet into an intersection and you almost get hit and have to wear a neck brace for a month; you drop your phone in the airport toilet; you forget your wallet at the register.
These sorts of things happen whether or not you look both ways, don’t inhale, read Consumer Reports, wear three condoms, and keep your windows triple-locked. Feeling ashamed and responsible for unforeseeable disasters is just adding insult to undeserved injury. Sit down. That’s right. Have a cookie. And tell me where it hurts.
Two good arguments: one about responsibility, the other about compassion. One is not better than the other, but here we stand on the diamond edge of that Zebra knife between them. Which one seems more persuasive on its face? Well, that depends on our emotions, doesn’t it? The argument that resonates more powerfully depends on who we are as emotional beings. The one we choose says volumes about us and very little about the event itself.
Hold that thought. Before we decide which argument style we prefer, let’s talk about how this distinction applies and let’s take it even further, foregrounding the discussion by characterizing the “baby boomers.” Because the boomers have been the deciders, standing on that diamond edge since 1946. And much of what terrifies us today was authored expressly and overtly by them choosing a flimsy kind of emotional “responsibility for the responsible” instead of the more compassionate feels—which tells us a lot about them, if not everything we need to know.
The boomers spent the precious freedoms their parents bought for them as traumatized adults in WWII and before that as traumatized children of the misunderstood, alcoholic, Silent Generation—and the boomers act like they earned it all themselves through true grit and moxie.
Actually, the boomers are the ones who economically fucked over Generation X. The boomers built the nuclear stockpiles, created the student debt crisis, lusted after Gordon Gekko and Ayn Rand, and are the ones who currently despise millennials more than any others. Well, we all despise the millennials. But still. We know who the boomers are. We’re still dealing with their fuckery.
There’s an internet catchphrase going around these days, “Ok Boomer,” which the dictionary tells us is used “often in a humorous or ironic manner, to call out or dismiss out-of-touch or close-minded opinions associated with the baby boomer generation and older people more generally.” Ah. That sounds about right for the generation that established our current ruinous, self-serving climate politics.
As Sorya Roberts puts it (quoting Michael Parenti) in “Happily Never After,” as the environment collapses, elite panic in “strong states with developed economies will succumb to a politics of xenophobia, racism, police repression, surveillance, and militarism and thus transform themselves into fortress societies while the rest of the world slips into collapse.” Isn’t that a lovely vision of the future? Most of the boomers won’t be around to see it. They’re going to die on the golf course well before that. But the rest of us might live to enjoy it. That is, if we’re the lucky ones.
In the art world, particularly in creative academia, worsening since about 1975, boomer narcissism has taken this form: there is always room for talented people. Oh, there are no jobs for you? You must not be one of the talented few (like me). Too bad. Even though, in the boomer generation, you could get a tenured position with an unpublished manuscript and no teaching experience.
“Always room for good people” is a veritable baby boomer mantra, the meritocratic fever dream of those steeped in imperial luxury, who turn beet-red when someone points out that the they got where they are because they were born into a fortunate time and place between global catastrophes; that the emperor is not a god; that the empire is not eternal; and that its luxuries were founded on a pylon of human skulls. Boomers comprise a large part of Donald Trump’s “base,” the leering retirees in the MAGA hats. And though academics generally despise 45, they conveniently overlook that he has more in common with them than any other generation.
So you’re a millennial or, hell forbid, a gen-Xer in your 40s and the socio-political-economic Zebra blade has now gone straight through your foot. Are you trying to stay interested in the impeachment? Are you crying “Why me?” when you realize that halving global greenhouse emissions by 2030 is neigh impossible at this point? Have you been taking solace in Oprah’s self-care philosophies and burning Gwyneth Paltrow’s special candle? Are you ready for what comes next? Are you one of the anointed few like dad was?
You’re not. You can’t be. But why not just pretend you are, just for a bit, after the Bactine and the Band-Aids, while the Parthenon burns?
If you’re a writer, you’ll live your life not knowing if you’re any good. And you’ll die not knowing. I think John Berryman said that.
After Phil Levine published his first book of poems, people said, yeah, but can you do it again? Then he did it again. Then they said, yeah, but have you been featured in the New York Times Review of Books? Then he got a review. So they said, yeah, but have you won any major awards? He won several. Then they said, yeah, but we remember you back when you were broke in Detroit. You’ll always be a bum.
There is no escape. Nobody from the old neighborhood wants to see you get ahead. It’s a law of nature, the Bumfuck Reflexive Property. You can ruin your life if you burn your emotional energy wondering whether they’re right. Every moment you spend doing that is a waste. But all writers do it.
Hang around with writers and artists and you realize they’ve got a particular tangible proficiency at their kind of art. Maybe they were born with it or, more likely, they worked hard at developing what little gift they had into something presentable. The gift, whatever it is, is real and observable. But whether they’re mediocre or brilliant, derivative or original, a flash in the pan or someone whose art is set to be preserved in the basement of Cheops, you will never know. More significantly, they will never know.
If you like their work, great. If you don’t, you can always recall the time they were broke and living in the projects across from Wayne State. HA. HA. HA. Let’s all laugh at the sad clown. Some people and their lousy choices. Am I right? If they were any good people would want to pay them for their work. I mean, that’s just common sense.
I suppose it’s sad when an artist hasn’t learned how to fail (or how to stubbornly and angrily reject failure), when she takes the Bumfuck to bed and makes love to it, when she’s covered in despair, when she finds herself thinking about her choices. The rest of us chose to avoid that humiliation early. We were smart and didn’t even try. Or if we did, we never let anyone see it and gave up shortly thereafter. And look at us today. We just got back from our annual trip to Florida. It’s a good life.
But she has to spend some nights staring at the wall, probing for answers that will never come. Because her friends and family don’t know what to tell her, even though they have many strongly held opinions on her work and direction in life. Her teachers didn’t know (even the ones who praised her back at clown school). And ultimately, she doesn’t know, can’t know, even if she wins a Golden Bozo next year and gets to put “Genius” on her resume. She might just be a lucky clown, a clown of the moment, a one clown wonder. How do you ever really, truly know if you’re any good?
Genius. Hell, she can barely afford lunch. And so the questions: am I actually a no-talent, deluded ass-clown? Was taking out a loan to go to clown school the worst decision of my life? Should I have listened to my old high-school friend who went straight into an apprenticeship as a waste management professional and who is now debt-free, pumping out the city’s shit everyday for a middle-five-figure salary? The dude owns his own house. He loves reminding me how debt-free he is. He loves it.
Can I say the same? Do I love being a clown? I thought I did. But now that I’m out of clown school, I feel so alone. At least back there I had a useful amount of social friction, mutually shared productive spite, the catty competitiveness of nervous art students to hold me up and distract me.
Now I only have these four walls and the dirty mirror over the sink and the constant message that if it doesn’t make money, it’s a hobby, not a calling. A life spent vacuuming out the municipal sewer, by that definition, would be the Grail Quest. But that tract house and the vacation package in Florida speaks for itself.
How good do I have to be to take clowning seriously, to argue that it is my reason for living and not just a lukewarm pastime that regularly torments me. Sometimes, I wonder what good is—if it is something metaphysical, some hidden imprimatur, some mysterious proof, like divine grace received only through predestination. Do we know it when we see it? Or do we see it because we only know what we’ve been told?
How much telling is good? How much showing? If I get the emotional effect I want by the last line of my story, does that justify anything I do along the way, any narrative impropriety—like Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants,” one of the most structurally verfucked stories I have ever seen that nevertheless works? It works because it moves me. Me. Not necessarily you.
What’s more, when I get to the end, I know in the way that comes from having spent too much time with fellow ass-clowns, that “Hills Like White Elephants” would have never gotten a pass in clownshop. Poor sad clownbear. Put on your hardhat and gas mask. There’s shit pumping needs to be done.
I read the New Yorker and The Paris Review. For clowns, those are basically trade publications. Those clowns really know how to do it. They know what’s good, what’s right and wrong about art and culture, what should be published, what should be condemned. The people they feature—man, that is some serious clown shit. They really push the clownvelope. In fact, they are so serious at times that their work transcends everyday clowning and enters the Mime Plane. It’s a micro universe. All the mimes who ever existed and who ever will exist live there in an eternal limbo that can fit on the head of a pin. And yet it’s enormous. Space and time. You know. Like warm bubble-gum.
But I stay away from the mimes, like Alice Mimero and Jonathan Mimezen and Jeffrey Eumimedies and Mimeberto Eco. Their work is—I don’t even know how to describe it—it’s mysterious. Like pushing the wind or the transparent box or juggling the invisible chainsaws. Somehow, it’s supposed to seem dangerous or terrifying. Risky. But when an invisible chainsaw slips, there’s only invisible blood. Hard to see. You have to pretend it’s there. Mime stuff, you know. Everyone acts like they get it.
And yet they’re held up to us as the cultural elite. How does that work? Why are we still encouraged by the Big Six to think of these clowns as mysterious and compelling? I guess only those who put out effort to remain mysterious will continue to be seen that way. And perpetually wrapping yourself in a glamour of mystery is a lie. Because no one is actually that. But we lionize our artists. The publishing industry runs a lion circus. We want to believe they know something we don’t when they jump and roar.
Them lions is pathological. All they know is that gazelles are tasty. And us? We don’t even know that much.
I might know that shit stinks and pumping it for a living is a bummer. I know I’d give a hundred tract houses and a timeshare in Pensacola not to have that be the substance of my Grail Quest. I’d rather squander my life writing, even if I am a no-talent ass-clown.
But you? I’m not so sure about you. Maybe you’re not one of the Cheops Basement All-Stars yet. Maybe you’ll always be a bum somewhere in municipal Detroit, freezing in your bloodied clown suit. But I can tell you one thing. You’ll never really know if you’re any good. And you won’t be able to look at others for the answer. They’re all a bunch of ass-clowns, too.
All you can do is keep at it, day after day, hoping somebody somewhere sees what you see. All you can do is show up.
If I could tell you the number of stories and novels I’ve begun writing and not finished, we’d be here too long. But “not finished” doesn’t mean “discarded.” It means what it says.
The difficulty comes when I’ve convinced myself that I’m one sort of writer (the consistent, cheerfully productive kind) as opposed the other, less glamorous (or, at least, less visible) sort—a slave to the vicissitudes of the moon or some shit, the guy with 25 ongoing projects and an inability to stop working on any of them.
I know this about myself. I tell myself that it’s all part of the bigger creative process. I imagine all these incomplete pieces fermenting, cross-pollinating, mutating. Nothing lost. Everything in motion. And I take refuge in those ideas and metaphors so I can keep working. Being a writer, I tell myself a story. But it might be bullshit self-deceit.
The Romantics smoked opium to get closer to the moon and further from the Victorian head trauma of “productivity.” And when my genre writer pals do highly Victorian social media posts that go, “Sigh. Only 10 pages today,” I wonder whether they’re writing from inspiration or simply turning a lathe in some Dickensian word factory. Productivity equals commercial success, while moonbeams are their own reward. Still, I have word count envy no matter what I do.
The problems of productivity and self-deceit are at the center of trying to write the hard thing. They are the essential obstacles in making the fiction I came here to make instead of clocking in and lathing out a bunch of words to satisfy something or someone else. I don’t want to produce that which has been assigned to me by industry, necessity, or convention. I hate obeying. But am I achieving anything in my disobedience? For that matter, is achievement even the point?
When yet another publishing industry blog post comes out sounding like the vehement Alec Baldwin scene from Glengarry Glen Ross, I feel repulsed. I don’t want to spend time creating a fucking audience platform. Being an artist is not about “closing.” Just doing the actual writing takes up all my energy. I don’t want to frame pieces of my fiction as marketable units. I want to sit in a moonbeam and make something that arises from my own unique imperatives and disposition. I want the serendipity of inspiration. I live for it. And I resist the overtures of commercialism dedicated to consumption and to bullying artists into seeing themselves as part of a service industry.
Unfortunately, I also can’t avoid wanting the world to read my work and maybe give me some money so I can feed and clothe myself. It’s terrifying sometimes. Years ago, at an AWP conference, talking with a publisher after I put out Gravity, my first collection of stories, I felt like Nunez in “The Country of the Blind”—faced with the choice of getting what I loved if I voluntarily blinded myself or seeing clearly and climbing out of the hidden valley forever. In the end, I chose to keep my eyes.
“If you want to get a second book out using the momentum of your first,” he said, “you need to complete the manuscript in less than a year. More than that and people forget who you are. You won’t be able to position it. You’ll be starting over.” Six years later, my second book was done. And he was correct: from the marketing, word factory standpoint, I was starting over. From a creative-process standpoint, those six years were predicated on the six that came before. I wasn’t starting over. I was writing something hard that had emerged from my ongoing creative process, something I couldn’t have written in under a year.
Finishing writing in one’s own time instead of in service to the word factory is difficult. Discovering one’s limitations as an artist and then transcending them is very difficult. Putting in the years is difficult. Doing this up to and beyond age 30 is not only difficult but scary. Nevertheless, all can be accomplished if one is willing to believe in something greater than the word count. One says, it’s all part of my creative process and tries to calm down. One decides not to read (or write) certain self-aggrandising Facebook posts.
Of course, there might not be a bigger process. Maybe there is only Random House, Amazon, AWP conference ugliness, building a platform, positioning and branding, and Best American Monotony. Maybe. Maybe we exist in a world full of cynical anti-creative money-making ventures, cautious art, and nothing else. It’s always possible. The thought of it sometimes keeps me up at night, especially in those blocked periods of worrying and not writing.
It’s like reading about nuclear war or the earth dying from climate change: you have no agency, no option to mitigate the damage, soulless politicians are making horrible decisions, and there is only one way this can end. Apocalypse. Tragedy. No one at the wheel. Inhuman corporations controlling everything. And death, ignominious and unnoticed, unless you get with the program and start churning out formulaic units.
Capitalism wins. It usually does. But if there is a bigger process at work in your struggle to be an artist, it can’t have anything to do with metaphors of productivity on a factory timeline. That is a reality you must not accept.
How does a writer know what’s real? Is it moonbeam or production line? Is it both? Can it be both? Andy Warhol, Ernest Hemingway, and David Bowie say yes. For the rest of us, maybe not. For every Warhol, Hemingway, and Bowie, there are multitudes who weren’t lucky enough to have their unique artistry coincide with commercial demand.
Hugh Howey likes to write about Wool the way Elon Musk talks about launching a roadster into space: let me tell you about my unique genius and the origin of my success. But self-publishing fame and running a car company have one thing in common that never gets discussed: they exist because they are timely. So it is with any highly lucrative creative effort. And that intersection has to do with luck. Meanwhile, someone out there is no doubt making Peking opera, but they are unlikely to be buying villas on the Riviera anytime soon. Nobody cares. Their units don’t ship. And yet they also have the favor of the moon.
Writers are especially predisposed to misunderstand what is real—what is objective versus just a moonbeam. They spend a lot of time deliberately thinking in metaphors, some more useful than others. And if they’re not paying attention to their minds, they can mistake such metaphors for objective reality (which, incidentally, has nothing to do with capitalist realism). Over-absorption in a world of imaginative metaphors can become a source of anxiety when the non-make-believe world reaches out and reminds us that we can’t live totally in our imaginations. Make your Peking opera, sure, but also accept that the six years you put into it mean nothing in terms of branding and positioning.
A writer will see something and begin to imagine things about it—everyone does this, but writers seem to do it with particular intensity—and before long the writer starts to feel like he or she knows it or, even worse, is it. Then something from the world of physics and money communicates: no, you are not that. You can’t imagine yourself to fame and fortune if you’re doing original work. You might get lucky, yes, and I hope you (I hope I) do. But commerce and true creativity exist in different spaces.
So I look at my 25 open projects with a bit of trepidation as the days go by. I’m turning 46 this month. I’ve published a lot of stories in magazines and two books. These have been hard things. Are they enough? Will they ever be enough?
Don’t worry, I tell myself. There’s bigger process at work. There must be.
Read my latest in Splice Today: https://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/jonathan-franzen-can-t-solve-climate-change-for-anyone-who-matters
There was something evil in the glow of the room’s blue lights. I felt the weight of the man on top of me. He could no longer move. His eyes were closed. I stared long into his face. I realized that I wanted him. I wanted the passion he had until a moment ago. I wanted his shoulders, which were quite muscular for his age, and his naturally tan face. I got out from under his body, sat in a chair, and lit a cigarette. I had to wait like this until he fell into a deep sleep.
It was raining outside.
— The Kingdom, Fuminori Nakamura (trans. Kalau Almony)
First, a Sincere Declaration of Thanks
I’ve spent most of my life running in circles looking for something authentic, then waiting for permission to explore it, and harshly criticizing myself when I didn’t get that permission. Maybe other people have different experiences, but this has been mine, my personal through-line from childhood to the present. So I try to be as sincere as possible when I write about my frustrations and failures. Because what else can I do? While it’s true that sincerity doesn’t make you friends, at least it makes you the right sort of enemies. I imagine this blog post will do more of that.
Still, I try to avoid self-pity and, because of this, I usually take a long time to form opinions about what I’ve done or failed to do and how others have reacted. I ruminate. I turn things over, trying to see past faulty assumptions, convenient rationalizations, and other self-serving anodynes. Most people probably do this to some extent, but I think I do it more. Sometimes, it works. Other times, what I took for a true perception, for reality, eventually dissolves into just another subjective field, just another corridor of the maze that I have come to think of as my life. In a maze, you never know what the next twist will bring. Usually, it brings another twist.
With this in mind, I should begin by saying that in 2010 I came very close to ending my life. This essay is about that time, but it’s not just about depression and not really about suicide. It’s not a success narrative where I write about how I overcame great difficulties and am now nearing perfectibility. It’s not about taking revenge on others through a misguided petty hit piece. And it’s certainly not about castigating myself for the many imaginary errors I’ve regretted and then dismissed over the last eight years in order to keep getting up in the morning. It’s a slice of life—a big, fat, ugly slice that tries to embrace the broadest range of experience in order to get closer to the truth. In this, it’s a lot like an advanced non-fiction exercise.
“Advanced” because it is not easy and not something you would assign to a 17-year-old English major in an introductory writing workshop. “Non-fiction” because it’s a mode of creative expression that pretends a certain degree of inviolable objectivity, even though we know that’s impossible. Every memoir, no matter how fabulous, must begin implicitly or explicitly with an assertion of truth or at least with a sincere declaration of authorial good faith: “I did this. I saw this. This happened. At least, I think it happened.” Rousseau’s Confessions does it with style:
Whenever the last trumpet shall sound, I will present myself before the sovereign judge with this book in my hand, and loudly proclaim, thus have I acted; these were my thoughts; such was I. With equal freedom and veracity have I related what was laudable or wicked, I have concealed no crimes, added no virtues; and if I have sometimes introduced superfluous ornament, it was merely to occupy a void occasioned by defect of memory: I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood.
This is my favorite passage from the first part of the book because literary historians have proven that the Confessions contains many misstatements if not deliberate falsehoods. Such graceful bald-faced prevarication is a rare and beautiful thing. But I am not so talented. And I have no plans to weigh my heart against a feather on the last day.
Instead, I will put it this way: I suspect I am not a horrible person. I have faith that I’m not even tactless. I believe my greatest defect is that I lack the imagination necessary to see several moves ahead. I lack interpersonal foresight, which has made me a poor manager of nervous egomaniacs and a terrible chess player. But I love chess. And that is a serious problem, even if I hate the high-strung pampered egomania of academic writing programs, because everything toward the end of my PhD program was just a version of that game.
Robert Greene, in the acknowledgements of The 48 Laws of Power—a book loved equally by goateed 25-year-olds with a Libertarian Bitcoin fetish and the morose IT professionals you see combing the self-help section for books on how to become an alpha male—has a similar protestation of sincerity:
I must also thank my dear friend Michiel Schwarz who was responsible for involving me in the art school Fabrika in Italy and introducing me there to Joost Elffers, my partner and producer of The 48 Laws of Power. It was in the scheming world of Fabrika that Joost and I saw the timelessness of Machiavelli and from our discussions in Venice, Italy, this book was born. . . . Finally, to those people in my life who have so skillfully used the game of power to manipulate, torture, and cause me pain over the years, I bear you no grudges and I thank you for supplying me with inspiration for The 48 Laws of Power.
If we read this carefully, we have to smile. Greene is doing what we might call an “inverted Rousseau,” making the same assertion in a backwards way: this is a book about real things; therefore, I thank all those who have manipulated and tortured me for providing good material and, in the process, I declare my sincerity.
Greene puts us on notice that his book is based on subjective material that emanates from his and Elffers’ lived experience, creating a Rousseau-esque escape hatch. As The 48 Laws of Power is all highly subjective (essentially a kind of implicit portrait of Greene stitched together in historical anecdotes), the value of whatever he writes defaults to his apparent sincerity (“I may have supposed that certain, which I only knew to be probable, but have never asserted as truth, a conscious falsehood”). It’s not about an objective truth process. It’s about rhetorical ethos.
That is wonderful because ethos might be the only sincere rhetorical mode. After logos topples from an unstable foundation of assumption, appeal to authority, and generalization; after pathos is unmasked as merely a screen of emotion recollected in tranquility; the persuasive credibility of the speaker is all that remains. In a world where absolute truth does not exist, everything is ethos. And so I construct my own ethical escape hatch.
2010 was the worst year of my life, the year after my mother died of lung cancer; the year after my first book was published; the year I got my PhD in English; the year I attended my last AWP Conference; the year I traveled to the deep South for an excruciating week-long job interview and realized the English department clichés also obtain south of the Mason-Dixon Line; the year I got very ill; the year I was admonished by my mentor for questioning the value of my degree and told to be grateful for indefinite unemployment; the year my father began another surly adolescence; the year I began to think that there was no place for me in this world. There are many years I’d relive if I could. 2010 is not one of them. But I have been told to be thankful for these experiences because they have supplied me with a lot of inspiration. As such, this writing is my sincere declaration of thanks.
Prelude
You never know what the next twist in the maze will bring but, in 2009, I think I was doing as well as could be expected when I stood in front of the department graduate adviser’s desk and said I needed a leave of absence to visit my mother in hospice. For some reason, that moment stands out as a prelude for the upcoming year.
The adviser, the department’s resident medievalist, seemed to exist in an acid vapor of contempt for all creative writing students and their keepers. She disliked me in particular because I’d dropped her Old English seminar the previous semester and she’d taken it personally. Since I was doing a PhD with a creative dissertation (the final product would become Gravity, my first story collection), I didn’t need to be in her class. But she needed me there. Or, at least, she needed to feel loved by as many students as possible.
This was the woman who would thereafter try to prevent me from graduating so that my funding would run out. This was the woman—whether due to old workplace feuds or out of resentment that there were more creative writing events on campus than dramatizations of Piers Plowman and undergraduate maypole dances—perpetually tried to block funding to the creative writing program and force out the graduate students depending on tuition waivers. Her style of chess was to kill the pawns first. Attack the supply lines, starve the more dangerous units in their fortifications, and wait for winter. Classic medieval siege tactics.
However, standing before her desk, I was barely aware of the billowing acid cloud. I was half-blind with grief. All I thought about was my mom and how I had to get back to California to see her. Looking back, I’m surprised I even had the wherewithal to stand up straight, much less ask for a leave of absence. But I was very responsible. I took everything seriously. I thought a lot about my future in academia, especially in creative writing instruction. And I felt my future depended on me contentiously following up on every detail. I was, essentially, as sincere as I have ever been in my life. I shouldn’t have been that sincere.
Given my emotional state, what the adviser said to me didn’t register until I’d left the building. The conversation went something like this:
“I need a leave of absence to go to California because my mother is dying of cancer.”
She rolled her eyes, looked out the window as if she were considering it, sighed, then shook her head. “No can do. You only have so much funding. Your funding will not cover you for another semester.”
“My mother is dying. She doesn’t have long. I’ve completed my course work. My dissertation only needs to be approved. I don’t even need any more credits.”
Another sigh. More contemplating the clouds. “Well, that’s really too bad. You have to be in residence or your funding will run out while you’re gone. Good luck.”
I stood there, trying unsuccessfully to process this. Then she rolled her eyes and asked me if there was anything else.
The grief robot turned and left her office, got on the elevator, rode it down to the bottom floor, walked out to the fountain in the center of the courtyard, and stared at the water for a long time. Only then, did he think of the graduate adviser rolling her eyes. Over the ensuing 9 years, the moment of her eye roll would be impressed in his memory as a perfect metaphor, a perfect image foreshadowing all the inspiration and gratitude to come.
The Tragedy of Not Dying
A hospice is a horrible place. It’s like being given a lollipop for a bullet wound. You’re bleeding out and everyone tells you to enjoy your lolly. It’s cherry. It’s got a smiley face. Why aren’t you happy? Visiting my mother with my father there added another layer to the experience. In spite of the pain and horror of the place, in spite of watching my mother waste away in her bed, hallucinating and suffering and being afraid, I came to understand that my father’s grief was different from mine. I was feeling bad for my mother. He was feeling bad for himself.
This was still 2009. My only course, aside from empty dissertation credits, was a German reading and literature seminar. The professor, a kind old man about to retire in his late 60s, loved his students the way he loved his trees—which is to say, far more than he loved the university. I asked him for advice because he was the only person I could ask. And he made it possible for me to exist in two places at once. I gave my own writing students two weeks of work and held online course meetings via Skype and I emailed my German professor my work, which made it seem like I was present. This is what allowed me to fly to California and see my mom for the last time.
In those first awful trips to the hospice, I’d naïvely hoped that my father and I could come together in our grief and support each other. Of course, this was pure fantasy since he’d always enjoyed being a father but had rarely done any fatherly things. I could count the number of times we’d gone to movies, the one thing we could do together because it involved no conversation. And there were a few other misadventures over the years where my mother badgered him into going to some school play (he stood by the door to be the first person out) or taking me fishing (we did a U-turn at the access road to the lake and went home) or camping (it rained and so we packed up in the middle of the night and left). He never beat me and he brought home a paycheck. To the best of my knowledge, he never stepped out on my mother. But he was never involved more than that; though, he lived with us in the same house—somewhat more than a housemate, somewhat less than a relative.
So my hope that he would be able, somehow, if in a manly way, to share this painful experience with me, was not based on reality. After a certain amount of talk about how sad he was, it became noticeable that he never talked about my mom. He sat by her bed, lost in his own self-pity, as the cancer ate its way through her brain and wasted her body. As she died by inches, he proceeded as usual, focusing on his own needs above all else.
I witnessed this. My wife witnessed this. But I was so aggrieved I could barely speak. Sometimes, my wife had to help me walk from the car to my mother’s room. Have you ever been so upset that you can barely walk? Until you have, you won’t know the feeling. When you have, you’ll never forget it. It transcends description.
I focused completely on my mom. I waited for her moments of clarity. I told her I loved her. I told her the good things about my PhD program. I made jokes and she tried to laugh. One day, my great aunt—a stately old Italian woman who sounded like my late grandmother and seemed covered in the old-world charm that vanished with her generation—showed up with a peach and a kitchen knife. She cut slices and fed them to my mom with a smile on her face. Even now, as I write this, I cry a little because it was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen. That kind of goodness doesn’t exist much in this world.
It was a very difficult time. Two weeks later, I returned to finish my program. In one of her last moments of clarity, my mom had ordered me to go back. She didn’t want me to see her die and me being in the PhD program meant a lot to her. I think she felt ashamed that she wasn’t going to be around to take care of my father and me the way she always had. And knowing that I was going to get a doctorate was a relief, as if it would be the next best thing. She also had a lot of pride in her appearance and the cancer had been unkind. So when I offered to stay, she insisted that I not. About two weeks after that, my father called and said to say good-bye to her. I told her I loved her. And I think she died shortly thereafter.
I miss her every day. But this isn’t about that, either. It’s about the aftermath, how everything changed as a result of her death. Some people are the linchpins of their families. When they go, everything goes. That was what happened. I flew back again for her funeral. She was buried holding a photo of my father and me. It was a closed casket and I don’t remember much else, just bits and pieces. I was out of my mind.
As we moved toward the Fall semester of 2010, I felt melted down and recast as a different person. I’d lost my happy thoughts. I didn’t go out or talk to many people other than my wife and my program mentor. I stopped writing fiction. Most of what I did was perfunctory. But I knew I had to get my degree. Even if I collapsed afterward, I would complete the PhD.
The Reading Series
The year before, I’d allowed myself to be persuaded that working as the assistant coordinator for the university literary reading series would “look good on my resume.” And I did my best as the monthly, sometimes bi-monthly, flier maker, venue securer, introducer-to-the-introducer, complaint taker, fielder-of-calls from mentally unstable bookstore proprietors, irradiated scapegoat, and general handler of said low-rung celebrity infants terribles.
Sometime before I left town for good, one of the faculty members admitted to me that the assistant coordinator position was really only supposed to entail flier making and that the professor who was getting paid to be to be doing the other things had dumped the rest on me. But by then I was so depressed that I couldn’t summon the necessary outrage.
One writer wanted a per diem that wasn’t in his agreement. Another wanted intel on, in his exact words, “the most fuckable students who might be around.” The butch lesbian poet would only communicate with me through an intermediary because I was straight and male. The playwright was supernaturally high throughout his entire visit and had to be physically guided to the stage. The “local writer,” penciled in because there was a vacancy in the schedule that month, struggled to contain her spiritual darkness through the entire event such that when I handed her the honorarium (significantly less than what the other, slightly more famous writers had received), she snatched it out of my hand, hissed a “Go fuck yourself,” and then smiled broadly at an approaching faculty member. These were some of the more endearing ones.
Needless to say, it was not the greatest collection of individuals. They generally came across as worn out, mediocre, vain, full of fear, full of resentment, and perpetually on the hustle for any crumb of recognition. Calling them fools wouldn’t be accurate because they were all reasonably intelligent. They simply knew the score too well, knew they should have received more for their dedication and efforts. You could see that loathsome awareness stamped on their faces. Now they were privileged to read their work to the smirking tenured faculty who hadn’t hired them, a menagerie of twitchy English students, and whichever townies may have wandered in looking for free wine. It wouldn’t get much better than that.
I disliked the visiting readers even though I saw myself and my fellow grad students reflected in them. Most of the people featured in the series that year hadn’t been picked for life’s cheer squad. They were the leftovers, the understudies, the adjuncts with slim books from presses you’ve never heard of. Many, it seemed, faced depression so considerable that they were pharmaceutically enhanced 100% of the time. I wondered more than once how they could continue to produce writing. The greatest irony was that most of them had already gone further in their careers than anyone currently in my PhD program stood to go.
There were a few exceptions, a few graceful and brilliant souls who’d agreed to come as personal favors to various faculty members. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention them as well as the moments of hilarity you find in every English department. 2010 wasn’t all doom and gloom, just most of it.
The second time I was told to go fuck myself was around 3 AM on a Sunday morning toward the end of Fall semester. My insomnia had become pretty dependable at that point and I was already awake when the phone rang. I got out of bed, told my wife I had no idea who it was, and shuffled into our tiny living room, where I sat on the couch and listened to the breather on the line. He was panting hard. I thought it was quaint that in this day and age people still gave breather-masturbator calls. The caller ID came up with nothing.
When he realized I’d said hello and was listening, he rumbled out a “Go fuck yourself” and hung up. I sat in the dark for a while, thinking about the human condition. Then he called back. It was F, one of the few grad students who’d been asked to read in the series. He mumbled some things and then shouted that he thought I had a problem and should get help. He was drunk off his ass.
I asked him why he felt that way and he broke it down for me. F had read with his wife, you see, and I’d made the mistake of introducing him before her. Neither of them were ever going to get over it. Plus, she was a Navajo princess and I’d introduced them as husband and wife. You don’t do that to a Navajo princess. Didn’t I fucking know that? What was wrong with my head?
“Princess? Really? I thought you guys were from Pittsburgh.”
He hung up again and didn’t speak to me until I ran into him at the AWP Conference a few months later—where he was keyed up and sweaty, slapping me on the back, telling me how he’d been featured in a very cool spontaneous reading held on one of the convention center’s escalators that drew an enormous crowd. Now he had a pocket of phone numbers to network. Amazing. He didn’t remember a thing about calling me in the dark and telling me what I could go do with myself.
Or maybe he’d repressed that memory along with his courtship of the Navajo princess, that hard winter living as tribe’s writer, the majestic swish of his khakis as he hunted buffalo, armed only with an unpublished manuscript. I haven’t seen him or heard a thing about him since the conference, but I suspect he’s either got tenure by now or he’s back in Pennsylvania selling pre-loved automobiles like it’s a poetry slam.
The End, My Friend
Depression is a very idiosyncratic and personalized illness. But those who have it tend to have a few things in common, one of which is that depression can be cumulative in its gravity and magnitude. Today, you’re not feeling good. Tomorrow, you can’t get out of bed. The day after that, you’re standing on a chair with a vacuum cleaner cord around your neck and you think you’re the only one in the history of the world who’s endured such a linear degeneration. Feeling alone is a big part of it.
I felt alone until I discovered Darkness Visible by William Styron and recognized a lot of what I’d been going through. I don’t know how I found the book, whether it was in the fiction section of the library where I sometimes studied or whether I encountered it in a used bookstore or somewhere else. While it wouldn’t be true to claim that the book “saved” me, I can say it helped enough to get me down off the chair, multiple chairs, actually.
Reading it was an emergency measure, but it was something I could depend on. I didn’t talk about my feelings. I’ve never been very good at that, not even with my loved ones. But I could read someone else talking about his. And since I loved Styron’s fiction, I felt like I could trust him. If he said it, I could accept it enough to be able to think about it. And that was usually all it took for me to keep going.
By Spring break, I was prepared to submit my dissertation. I missed my mom horribly and my wife and I returned to California to take care of the empty house where all my mother’s things sat gathering dust. My father wouldn’t go near the place. When he wasn’t drunk, he was hard at work rediscovering his hormones in erratic, awkward, and desperate ways. Our relationship, never substantial to begin with, began to splinter irreparably when, out of guilt, he started to regularly criticize my mom.
He was a self-righteous Catholic for most of my life, who often amused himself by telling me to get my ass to church and that since I’d been baptized I could never not be a Catholic. But after a year of drinking, trash talking, and a pissed-drunk rape attempt on my cousin in front of me, he was ready to start up a relationship with an equally neurotic married woman who’d run after him at an event.
He confessed this to me one afternoon because I guess he couldn’t confess it to his priest. Then he added that it was like a DH Lawrence love story. Then he said she was going to get a divorce from her despicable husband and they’d marry each other. Lovely. I didn’t want to hear about it. I especially didn’t want to hear him ask me to be his best man. I could hardly speak. It shows how detached and self-involved he was that he thought it was something he could ask me.
“What about all that Catholicism?” I remember asking. I don’t remember if he answered.
Around that time, because he wouldn’t help me clean out my mother’s things, I’d been over at the house, crying, putting her clothes in Goodwill boxes, packing up old photo albums, doing all the things we could have done as a family. Instead, my wife helped and we did the best we could in a few days. Much was overlooked, things from my childhood, things in the garage that I really do wish I could have kept. But we only had so much time. Now I imagine my father and his new wife paid at some point to have it all carted to the dump. But I have no way of knowing, since I haven’t been back in years.
I do recall taking to the gardener, who revealed that he’d had my mother making food for him right up to the point where she went into the hospital for the last time. She couldn’t lie down straight in bed. So she was sleeping sitting up in a chair in order to breathe, then walking around on crutches, cooking and cleaning. According to the gardener, he screamed at her frequently. She was fucking dying and this is how he treated her. That’s abuse. It’s horrible fucking abuse. And my mother, who was just about a saint in every way, did her best.
My mother was a talented painter and sculptor, but he’d left her art in a shed that had a broken roof. It rained a lot that year and most of her work was ruined. I’d been standing in the backyard, looking at the shed, unable to get in because he neglected to give me the key to the deadbolt (probably because he didn’t want me to see what had happened) when he called with a task for me. It was something small, something to do with getting a TV boxed up for him and cancelling the TV service that my mom had in her hospice room. I’d already taken care of it, but he spoke to me with contempt, as if I were very lazy. He said, “After all I’ve done for you, couldn’t you take care of this one thing?”
I thought of my mother on crutches, making him breakfast. I thought of her art destroyed through neglect. I thought of my father drinking a case of my cousin’s high-end champagne and then trying to fuck her in front of me. I thought of all the nasty things he said about my mother when she was gone, after he’d cried his eyes out for himself, after he blamed me for not being there when she died, after the sizeable amount of heirloom gold from old Italy that my mom wanted to come to me but that disappeared right around the time my father and his new cadaverous lady friend got a second condo in San Antonio. I thought about all these things and saw that no matter what his paycheck had been worth, no matter how much I may have cost as a child, no matter what my mom and he may have given me as a teen or a confused 20-year-old, I owed him nothing.
I felt something snap and a certain coldness overtook me. My depression had come to be replaced with something more useful: calm, thoughtful anger. We had it out. He told my wife and I we had to be out of the house. Within 48 hours, we were. I’ve never looked back.
Gone for Good
I got my PhD without fanfare. My wife and I went out to dinner and it was nice, just the two of us. I knew I’d miss my mentor in the program and her brilliant husband. I’d miss certain things about the university town and my own writing students, several of whom had become more like friends. But I was glad to be done—done with the degree, done with my father, done with trying to hump the dream of being an academic creative writer.
In the eight years since the day we drove south, blasting M. Ward’s “Helicopter” with the windows rolled down, I’ve thought about 2010 quite a lot. I still get depressed. But I can cope. I’ve learned that it is possible and, for me, even preferable to have a life outside academia. And I’ve come to accept that family isn’t really who raises you when you don’t have a say in the matter. It’s who you choose when you do.
I miss my mom every day and I write fiction every day. As of this writing, I’m working on my third collection of stories with a novel draft mostly written. I’ve published over 30 items in magazines, worked as a freelance writer and journalist, and lived in 9 countries. I’m healthy. I really don’t have anything to complain about right now. And sometimes I even give myself permission to think I’m happy. Somewhere, there’s a Navajo princess riding through the clouds over Pittsburgh, but I doubt our paths will cross again.
Sally Yates at Carter Center
Woke up this morning thinking about Sally Yates—how standing up to President Trump seems to have dramatically influenced the course of her life, how I’ve watched part of her emotional transformation through social media, specifically Twitter, and how her public narrative seems to reveal and confirm things I’ve suspected about the nature of personal meaning and career.
She seems to be undergoing a kind of emotional rebirth. As someone who works primarily in the emotional mind—emotional intelligence being the primary resource for teaching and doing creative writing—I have learned to recognize when someone is emerging into a deeper, more meaningful emotional life. She certainly is, even if only by a slight degree.
Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning consistently seems to prove out: it doesn’t matter what we do or where we are as long as we can find or create meaning for ourselves. And so I return to the question of my own career, my own meaning. When I think back to the teaching I have done, I’m faced with the choice of believing that most of my professional life has been meaningful vs. meaningless. Obviously, I prefer to think my work has made some kind of difference.
It’s hard to believe in things I cannot see, but I have to nurture a certain degree of faith in the teaching and writing I’ve done. Sally Yates, someone who has lived primarily in the analytical mind, is now at the beginning of something new—one hopes, something emotionally significant and transformative. To see someone publicly come into being like this is to bear witness to a largely unnoticed dimension of human experience. It’s something that sincere teachers get to see more often than any other profession.
But my personal question remains: how am I coming into being? Just as someone with Yates’ background and skill set might step into a more intuitive life (by running for public office instead of remaining in the legal-bureaucratic infrastructure), I bear the responsibility for my own development. Where am I going now? What’s next? The future is never fixed, never certain.
As I have said many times and in many different ways, graduate study in literature and creative writing is not easy for anyone, even in the most favorable circumstances. There is an inner, emotional, psychological, processual effort that no one talks about and an outer, technical, rhetorical, production effort that everyone takes for granted. Both of these “efforts” are difficult. They must run concurrently and consistently for satisfactory completion of your program. And no one—not advisors or fellow
Philosopher with an Open Book by Salomon Coninck (1645)
students—will have the wherewithal to set aside their own problems in order to help you with yours. You are alone. You are responsible for expressing a universe of ideas in your own voice. You will accept this or fail.
If you pay attention, you will soon come to realize that your path is more or less unique—that you’re following a largely self-determined trajectory through the work. It may be partly modeled on someone else’s (such as that of a mentor with a strong personality telling you what you should be reading, writing, and thinking), but ultimately you’re making your own intellectual path by walking it. This is one of the signature characteristics of higher study in the humanities. It may be a strength.
A large part of this blog is dedicated to exploring these things, to making the implicit explicit for the good of those who feel drawn to the discipline of English studies and / or creative writing. It’s clear that I’m critical here of what I often see as hypocrisy and self-serving prevarication in greater academia. But I also disagree with the Libertarian voices currently developing the Don’t Go to Graduate School in the Humanities genre of business-oriented success advice. I think, in spite of very practical arguments to the contrary, if you feel called to study, write, and teach, by all means do it. Just don’t do it ignorantly and learn how to survive afterward so that you can keep doing it. How this unfolds in your life will be a mystery specific to your becoming.
With this in mind, I expose my own values here, my own work, which continues the inner-outer efforts I mention above. The Writing Expedition represents part of my disciplinary “production effort,” dedicated to expressing insights on what I have experienced in this field. Moreover, I think “expressing” is the right word because it implies a dichotomy. In order to ex-press something (or “squeeze out” if we want to look at the origin of the word), there must be an interior area where it already exists. An inner world. Often, a hidden world that can make the dominant scientistic discourse of reductive materialism very nervous. Like it or not, the Academy is subject to the dominant political, economic, and aesthetic tropes and discourses of the day; though, academics often find this distasteful and prefer to ignore it.
The ivory tower covered in camouflage.
It is safe to say that the Academy is an ancient type of institution that has survived to the present by appearing to be what society needs it to be in any era. Study the history of higher education in the West and it is easy to notice that the great universities have not existed in spite of what they imagine to be the barbarism and ignorance of the profane, but as a mode of cultural expression, 
a conglomeration of beliefs and rituals, a matrix of ideas given a particular form in the material world. In other words, the Academy is an extension of culture. It offers a product that society wants and survives by making that product seem relevant. It has always been that way; though the outer wrapper of the product is redesigned again and again to reinforce existing narratives of power and faith. In the rare times it fails to do this: Kent State, May 4, 1970.
As Martin Petersen writes of CIA tradecraft standards (intelligence agencies being very similar to universities), “We have to establish our credibility and usefulness individual by individual, administration by administration. There is no down time when it comes to quality” (“What I Learned in 40 Years of Doing Intelligence Analysis for US Foreign Policymakers,” Studies in Intelligence, Vol. 55, No. 1). Without being too cynical, we could easily convince ourselves that establishing credibility and usefulness is one of the ongoing directives of the Academy: we want to matter.
Enter: John, who also wanted to matter.
When I was in graduate school, studying creative writing and rhetoric, John, a friend of mine there who happened to be a gifted poet, went through a kind of nervous breakdown. Since no one knows what a “nervous breakdown” actually is, we can call it that or we can say he went through a season of harsh depression, anxiety, purposelessness, and emotional pain. His wife described it as a “slow-motion train wreck” and they both tried to laugh about it. But it was real and the pain he went through changed his life.
Before you even think it, I should note that this person is not me. Things may have changed for John since then, but what hasn’t changed is the high-schoolish competitiveness in our colleagues that has lingered for a long time. Since many of them read this blog, I will only tell the part of his story that everyone already knows. And I will do it for a particular reason. Nevertheless, I hope he forgives me for this and understands what I am trying to say. Knowing him, I think he will.
It started with the birth of his daughter in our second year. John had come to the PhD from a high-paying career in industry, such that he didn’t have to take out student loans and could rent a fairly large house (as opposed to the holes most of us were living in). His wife didn’t work and they were living off their considerable savings. Still, the pressure was on, partly because John now had a child to think about, but also because had an immense work ethic and he was no fool. He knew, as did we all, that there were very few full-time teaching positions available and that trying to get one (even getting an interview at AWP or MLA) was like playing the Irish sweepstakes.
Nevertheless, John applied himself, wrote good poems, said smart things, and generally did well. He was older, married, and didn’t waste his time like the rest of us at the sad graduate school parties or looking for love in all the wrong places. He had a particular energy around him that said, I know the truth and, if I don’t know, I’m sure we can discover it together. In short, he seemed like the type who should win the career sweepstakes and become an assistant professor. There should be more people like John in teaching positions. When I think of what it takes to be a great graduate student, I think of him.
But he reached a breaking point, something in his “inner process” that no longer worked the way he thought it should. The reality of being a father had become far more real and compelling than the realities he was creating as a student of English and a poet. His hair turned stark white over the course of a month and he went through a kind of existential fugue, which according to him involved a lot of crying, regret, and hopelessness. Eventually, he dropped out of the program. He moved with his wife and daughter to Arizona to live with his in-laws. And two or three years later re-entered a PhD program at a different university, this time to study British modernism. As far as I know, he’s now a professor somewhere in the Midwest and I am sure he is great.
I tell his story here because although it had an ostensibly happy ending, his dark night of the soul is one that most of us experienced on some level at some time in our work. The difference may have been that he suffered from pressures we didn’t have, destroying the credibility and usefulness of the Academy for him. I believe this as much as I believe that he also lacked certain essential qualities necessary for running those inner and outer efforts concurrently and consistently, at least the first time around.
The voice in the fire: one hears it or one does not.
A teacher of mine once made an interesting observation about “mystery.” The more one seeks out the lacunae in one’s life—the numinous moments, the noetic leaps of high strangeness that result in extraordinary creations, realizations, and states of consciousness—the more mystery seems to increase, not decrease. Seek the mysteries and you will find there are more mysterious things in this world than you ever imagined. Or maybe you will find yourself imagining more such things as you 
learn to accept new ways of knowing.
Conversely, if you let existing modes of expression, accepted narratives, the exoteric rituals of consensus culture (especially those of the Academy) crowd your senses, ways of knowing will become narrower; meaning will become increasingly delimited and rigid; and the dominant cultural discourses (for us, scientism and reductive materialism) will come to seem all-encompassing. This is what I believe happened to John in his first PhD program. His outer effort was strong, but his inner work was obstructed by the anxiety of feeling responsible for his family. I do not fault him for this. However, I think his experience offers us an interesting lesson.
Recall that the “inner effort” is an emotional, psychological process. It therefore partakes of mystery because interiority cannot be completely mapped. This is where the muse, the creative genius, lives. This is where we dream, where we hear that voice speaking to us about who we truly are and how we must express ourselves. It is the place artists go when they produce authentic and original work.
Funny thing about the muse. She gives and she takes. Dedicate your life to a particular mode of expression and you must always try to hear her. Your sense of the numinous will increase exponentially, but you will also have to make sacrifices. As your outer effort must concern itself with “credibility and usefulness,” your inner effort must be like a love affair with the mystery inside you, which is what we’re talking about when we refer to the inner life of an artist.
Hakim Bey discusses this in The Temporary Autonomous Zone and calls it “sorcery”:
The dullard finds even wine tasteless but the sorcerer can be intoxicated by the mere sight of water. Quality of perception defines the world of intoxication–but to sustain it & expand it to include others demands activity of a certain kind—sorcery. Sorcery breaks no law of nature because there is no Natural Law, only the spontaneity of natura naturans, the tao. Sorcery violates laws which seek to chain this flow—priests, kings, hierophants, mystics, scientists & shopkeepers all brand the sorcerer enemy for threatening the power of their charade, the tensile strength of their illusory web.
A poem can act as a spell & vice versa—but sorcery refuses to be a metaphor for mere literature–it insists that symbols must cause events as well as private epiphanies. It is not a critique but a re-making. It rejects all eschatology & metaphysics of removal, all bleary nostalgia & strident futurismo, in favor of a paroxysm or seizure of presence.
Incense & crystal, dagger & sword, wand, robes, rum, cigars, candles, herbs like dried dreams–the virgin boy staring into a bowl of ink—wine & ganja, meat, yantras & gestures—rituals of pleasure, the garden of houris & sakis—the sorcerer climbs these snakes & ladders to a moment which is fully saturated with its own color, where mountains are mountains & trees are trees, where the body becomes all time, the beloved all space.
We can just as easily speak of it in terms of embracing a wider spectrum of expression. Viktor Frankl puts it this way: “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather he must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible” (Man’s Search for Meaning).
The Green Muse by Albert Maignan (1895)
What, then, is the voice in the fire? It’s not a degree from Yale, tenure, and a tactless sense of entitlement. It’s that unmappable, ineffable interior effort, that numinous guidance system which instructs and inspires us to continue our work. It sustains us through years of advanced study, reveals the mystery inherent in the world (even in something as outwardly mundane as the sight of water), and helps us answer for our lives. If we are responsible practitioners of our art, we will listen to this voice just as carefully as we may express our work-products. If we stop listening and forget the internal process, focusing only on the external product, we will enter the dark night of the soul, which entails a lot of suffering.
This is the meaning of that famous line from the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas: “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” If this is the life you choose (realizing that you have been chosen to answer for your life this way), I continue to wish the best for you.
Listen. And seek the mysteries.
In the morning, I watch the sun come up from the bottom of the empty swimming pool, lying on my back in dead palm fronds. In the afternoon, Faye calls to tell me she’s going to kill herself. In the evening, I buy a bottle of port wine at a grocery store in town and drive back out to the motel. I sit in the threadbare chaise lounge by the pool, drink from the bottle, and listen to the wind push dead fronds over the concrete.
While I’m sitting there, Faye calls again.
“It’s all ready,” she says. “Just give me a day before you tell anybody.”
“Faye. Stop.”
She’s crying. She’s been crying for about ten days.
“Look, I’m at a motel about five miles north of Plaster City. There’s nothing out here. You can come if you want.”
I’ve been living in the motel, drinking one thing or another for the past two weeks. This is the first time I’ve told Faye where I am. All day, I’ve had this new internal organ pain that I’ve never felt before. And I think, okay fine. Would it be so bad if I died in this motel? I’m $130,000.00 in debt, and my legal career just ended before it could begin. No, it wouldn’t be that bad. The world would go the way it’s going. A couple people would feel sad.
“I’m not coming anywhere. I mailed a letter to your apartment.”
“I don’t live there anymore, hun. I won’t get it. You can come down. It’s nice here.”
“You can fuck yourself.” She hangs up. Faye has called me twice a day to talk about suicide since I’ve been here.
Palm trees shed their fronds all year. Someone thought to plant a ring of them around the motel. I haven’t counted how many there are. Palms can grow anywhere. In a couple decades, there might be twice as many of them here. Eventually, the motel could be in a palm grove. As far as I’ve seen, there aren’t any other palm trees near Plaster City.
The place is about 17 miles west of El Centro, just north of the Mexican border, smack in the middle of 41,000 acres of open desert. There are a few sad motels along the highway, held over from the days when gas tanks were smaller and cars went slower. But mostly there’s just Interstate 8 in an immense beautiful emptiness. You might see a hawk or heat wobbles in the distance. In summer, you might see an overheated car or a dead armadillo.
Faye calls back, and I look at the phone light up in my lap. There’s a dead silence out behind the motel at night, and the sound of my phone vibrating seems violent and stupid like a crime. There should be misdemeanors issued for the use of certain phones or ringtones. I look at the phone until it stops vibrating. I finish the port before listening to her message.
“Okay,” she says. “The thing that’s killing me. You know, I was attracted to him. And if he called me right now and said let’s have a do-over, let’s give you another chance, I’d go in a second. I wouldn’t think about it. So now you know.”
But I already knew. I already knew it. And what I implied to her more than once was that I wasn’t judging. What happened didn’t bother me. And it wouldn’t have bothered me if she’d decided to make a move like that. You’ve got to use what you can to get ahead. Faye not using her looks just didn’t make sense. Of course, the fact that I didn’t cut her loose when I should have didn’t make sense, either. But she didn’t. And I didn’t. And so it went.
Two agonizing years of law school down the toilet. My whole future. Just for being visibly involved with her, for thinking that I was some kind of savior, that I could do anything. It’s an old story: the good professor propositioned her. She turned him down. And then he told her she was through. You don’t fail a class in law school and continue. And law professors don’t need reasons. I objected and so I went, too.
I call Faye back but now she’s decided not to answer. “You should come out here,” I say. I’m starting to slur my words and I can’t think too straight. That’s good. “Come out here and die in the sun instead of up there. He’ll hear about it up there. It’ll be an event. They’ll say you were crazy.” It occurs to me in some non-drunk part of my brain that maybe that’s exactly what Faye wants—for Professor Steptoe to hear about it and maybe feel bad for ten minutes.
“But don’t do it, okay? You’re not going to do it. You’re not going to do it because that will really fuck me up and we both know I’m already really fucked up. You can call me back, but I’m getting ready for bed.” Sometimes I pass out in the chaise lounge by the pool and wake up at dawn. This will be one of those times.
Tempora mutantur nos et mutamur in illis. Times change, and we change with them. John Owen wrote that. He died in 1622. He was a Welshman and he liked to compose Latin epigrams. You get a lot of Latin epigrams in law school. Going through the 17 spiral notebooks from the trunk of my Corolla, I find tempura mutantur nos et mutamur in illis written at the top of a civil procedure practice exam: tempura changes and we change with it. That was good. I ate tempura that day in a little bistro off El Camino Real in San Jose. Lunch break on my internship at the Santa Clara County Adult Drug Court.
However, I find the motto of Korvinus Junior College in Sackstona, North Carolina, to be more compelling: Tempora mutantur. Times are changed. Times have changed. I don’t know why this is the motto of the school. I do know that a triple murder happened there on their upper field. It went to the NC Supreme Court due to a disproportionate representation of African-Americans on the jury. It was a hate crime in which an unemployed former auto worker axed an African-American family to death in the middle of a softball game in front of about 70 witnesses. After a mistrial and a completely biased appellate decision, it went up to the supreme court. Professor Steptoe taught the case in Con Law II, which I failed. Now the Axeman is sweating it out in ADX Florence up in Colorado where they shipped him when he bit someone’s ear off in Craven Correctional. I know this because I’m supposed to know this. I know this and thousands of other things like it because I’ve been trained to know. Faye knows this, too. We were in the same class. The five practice exams I took before the final scored between 93% and 98%.
Today is a Korbel day. And on a Korbel day, you sit in a hot tub with beautiful women and appreciate philosophy and culture and the invention of champagne. Okay, it’s Korbel, so maybe they’re not so beautiful. Maybe they’re missing some teeth or they’re afraid to get their extensions wet or they’ve got pendants made out of rhinestones that say their names. Kaneesha. Jobie. Dolores. Those three were sweethearts.
My usual rule is that I don’t start drinking until the sun has been up for at least two hours, which puts it at about 9:00 AM. But I don’t know because the hotel room doesn’t have a clock. I’ve got my course notebooks spread out all over the floor and it almost seems wrong to be drinking Korbel without my girls from the drug court. But I need something between me and the memories locked in my handwriting. Faye hasn’t called yet. And I’m trying not to think about it.
Delores’ pimp paid a lot of money to have her sterilized so he could fuck her without a condom and stop paying for abortions. She was his property and he kept her on a dog chain in his apartment until she lit him on fire while he was sleeping. She did not get arrested for this. Rather, it came up as evidence for her post-traumatic stress disorder when she was caught driving a van full of meth months later. Delores was a nice girl. She just got some bad breaks. Same with Jobie, whose mom had been a hooker and pretty much brought her into the business as soon as it was biologically feasible. Kaneesha was just a junkie.
I’d walk down the hallway to the courtrooms and they’d all be standing there, a hundred people or so in handcuffs and ankle chains, males on the left, females on the right. I’d see them standing there every day, waiting to be arraigned because there is only one drug court in Santa Clara County and a lot of goddamn drugs. I got to know people. The Accused. Getting caught with a heroin kit or robbing a store because you’re getting sick doesn’t make you a monster. I’d stand there and drink the machine coffee from the lobby and talk to them. About the 49ers. About the fact that R. Kelly got screwed. About O.J. Everybody wanted to know what a white male law student thought about O.J. I’d wink and say, “Shit, man, you really think he did it?” This never failed to incite gales of laughter. Sometimes they’d call out “O.J. innocent!” when I’d see them getting loaded back onto the bus at the end of the day.
Kaneesha and Jobie didn’t get convicted for their offences. Delores did two months on a parole violation because the meth was hidden in the fenders of the van and they couldn’t establish clear possession much less intent to traffic. After she got out, she looked me up at school to thank me for calling her mom about the trial. Faye and I had a party with Delores, Kaneesha, and Jobie to celebrate. Faye brought everyone together. We all got incredibly drunk on cheap champagne. It was the happiest moment I’d had in years.
But that handwriting. That handwriting tells it true: there were days when I was so nervous, I could barely hold a pen. I had this shaking thing crop up from time to time. Others developed facial tics. A couple people in my classes were working hard on a cocaine habit. Everybody drank when they could. Pot was irrelevant; though hash had a brief renaissance at the end of my first year.
The traditional bullying of individual students in classes of 100 people was one thing. But law school is like a game of belligerent poker in which the institution keeps raising the stakes. You fold and fuck you: you weren’t cut out to be a lawyer anyway. You raise and you better know what you’re talking about because even if you’re right, the professor has an ego. And power doesn’t like a challenge. Mostly, you try to stay in the game. You pray that the competitive bullshit and the sadistic scrutiny of the professors leaves you alone while you go further into debt and develop health problems from worrying all the time, not sleeping, and destroying your liver. But John Owen knew what he was talking about. Times do change. And nobody can live like that for long.
I step out of my room because I have to piss. I take off my left shoe and put it down so the door won’t shut all the way. I don’t know where my key is, and the toilet in the room hasn’t been flushing for two days. There’s a communal pissoir at the end of the hall, which lends a certain bouquet to the entire floor. The communal pissoir is not often flushed, either. But at least it’s away from my room. It’s dark when I go in because the lights are on a timer—like an oven timer that ticks down. If you want to do your business in the light, you’d better be able to complete the operation within two minutes. I wind the light switch up to the maximum two and go over to a urinal.
In one of the stalls, Nelson is trying to take a shit. Nelson owns the motel and, as far as I know, he’s the only person who works there. He’s leathery, about 700 years old, and wears a lot of turquoise jewelry. I like Nelson, but I don’t like talking to him while he’s shitting.
“How’s it goin’?” he asks. He’s wearing Converse tennis shoes that a teenager might wear. His stall is closed, and all I can see are the shoes and his sky-blue polyester pants crumpled down on top of them.
“Oh, fine.”
“Good to hear. Me? Oh, it’s been a horrible day. Just horrible. I’ve got problems a young man like you can’t even imagine. With the plumbing.”
“You mean shitting?”
“Some days it just won’t happen. I’ll sit here for hours. Nothing. My legs fall asleep.”
I flush the urinal but it doesn’t flush.
“Well, you take care,” I say. “Maybe I’ll see you out by the pool.”
“Unlikely. I may have to sleep here. I might have to ask you to carry me to my room.”
“Keep trying. I won’t be around.”
After I wash my hands, I realize that I’d made a mental note last time to remember there are no paper towels. I wipe my hands on my T-shirt and look at myself in the spotted mirror. I look awful. At 29, I’m almost completely gray. I’ve got bags under my eyes and I haven’t cut my hair in two months. I’m growing a lopsided beard that’s going gray or blond in patches. I can’t tell. It should be black, but it looks like I’m hiding a skin condition.
“Yeah, that’s your generation, isn’t it,” Nelson says. “Twist up the light, will you?”
I do. And it begins to tick down again from two minutes. I step in some water with my shoeless foot on the way out.
There’s only so much Korbel a body can handle. And I am nowhere near that limit, but I am near the bottom of my fourth and last bottle. What to do: there’s half a bottle of $8 sherry that I don’t like and a case of warm Pabst in the back seat of my car. You can drink and drive out in the desert. The chances of you wrecking are the chances of you winning the California lottery. But I don’t like to drive into Plaster City unless I’m relatively sober. Too bad I’m going to make an exception because I don’t want warm beer and that sherry is being saved for desperate times.
I’m halfway there, trying to keep my eyes open, when Faye calls. I drop the phone twice before clicking on.
“I’m driving,” she says. “I need directions.”
Faye says she left the night before, hasn’t slept, and she’ll be here in a couple hours. She thought about what I said and she wants to see me.
I say okay and give her directions before I hang up. I’ve got about a hundred different emotions and none of them are good. So I keep on toward the little market on the edge of Plaster. There’s no way I can be sober when Faye arrives. I’m potentially an alcoholic. But no one can tell me what an alcoholic is. So I don’t really know. It’s easy to feel like you’re potentially anything. I was potentially a lawyer 49 days ago. Then I got my grades and I knew Steptoe had made good on his threat. Now I’m potentially ruined.
At the market, I get three bottles of ruby port, four bottles of Korbel, a fifth of Jack Daniels, a twelve-pack of Coke, and three bags of ice. Then I think, what the hell, Faye’s coming. So I also pick up a bottle of Southern Comfort, sour mix, and a quart of Early Times on sale for $28.50. I spend money like this. I’ve calculated out a few hundred just for alcohol from my remaining student loan money. The rest comes to about two grand and change, enough to get me somewhere else, wherever that might be. Enough to buy me some time. I haven’t talked to my family in years. I have a BA in history an no marketable skills. All my personal effects are in a storage unit in San Bruno—where I might be living soon.
My good friend, Sanjit, rings me up at the counter. “You’re drunk already,” he says. He has an incredible white turban, an equally incredible white beard, and wears a lot of army surplus.
“You don’t want my business, say so.”
“Don’t worry, my friend.” He takes my money and shakes open a brown grocery bag. “I’ll take all your money before you die.”
“Good man,” I say and walk the first two bags out to the car.
I start thinking about Steptoe again on the drive back and realize I’ve become dangerously sober. So I pull over and open one of the bottles of port. It’s only after I’ve drunk about half an inch past the top of the label that I can think about him without despair overwhelming me.
Me. Fucking me. In my good suit with gel in my hair, standing in front of Steptoe’ desk, shouting. I did the research feverishly, indignantly. The case law in California alone could have its own library. Teachers sexually harassing students. Students, teachers. Teachers, other teachers. Janitorial staff, teachers and students. Teachers, athletes. Athletes, campus clergy. Campus clergy, department secretaries. The combinations are endless. I found enough to argue multiple torts. There was also a criminal angle. But I didn’t want Steptoe’ resignation or damages or conviction. I wanted him to apologize to Faye and, ultimately, to me. Faye was my girl. And my ego was involved.
I pull up in front of the motel and Nelson comes out of the office, waves.
“Lemme help you with those,” he says. I hand him a grocery bag. But it’s too heavy so he sets it down on the super-heated parking lot asphalt.
“Having us a little party?” he asks when I run back to get the bag before the ice inside completely melts.
“Something like that. My friend’s driving down from San Francisco. You’re invited.”
“That’s wonderful. You’re the only motel guest I’ve had in six months. I hope you never leave.”
“You’re cheerful,” I say. “Did you shit?”
“As a matter of fact, I did, yes. No thanks to you.” Nelson draws himself up and gives me a stern look. Tangled white hair. Watery blue eyes to go with his turquoise rings and plaid button-down. “You realize how long it took me to get back to my room with this metal hip?”
“You could see a proctologist.”
“I am a proctologist.”
I heft the last two bags and kick the car door shut. “That explains your knowledge of crap.”
“That, my boy, explains my sadness.”
By the time Faye arrives, Nelson and I are already deep in the Early Times. I’ve fallen into the drained pool and cut both knees. Nelson has urinated on himself and sweat through his clothes while sitting in the ripped beach chair by the edge of the pool, eyes shut, head tilted back.
She walks around the corner of the building at dusk and the setting sun outlines her like she’s some kind of Celtic goddess. Or that’s how she seems in my misted vision. We’ve already been having a conversation when I realize that it’s Faye and she’s here. But only she will remember what we talked about.
***
“I don’t know how you can live like this,” Faye says. This from the woman obsessed with suicide. It’s early. We’re sitting in a Dennys somewhere near Plaster City. Faye drove. And in the pale light, she looks tired. Washed out. Like she’s been crying consistently for days, which is probably the case. I wonder if this is her look now. I’ve seen that look on guys I went to high school with who went into insurance sales, real estate, got jobs at car dealerships and started making money—for a while. A worried, tired, regretful look with a touch of resentment creeping out around the corners of the eyes: how Faye can’t look straight at me when she talks and I can’t look straight at her when she doesn’t. There’s an embarassment in that look, too, a sense that all these emotions wouldn’t be necessary if some key decision hadn’t been made incorrectly. The mistake you remember for the rest of your life. The deal that ruined you.
“I’m alright for now.” I take a sip of the rotten Dennys coffee that I can’t even taste. I’m congested. My head is killing me. And some internal organ (Kidneys? Liver? Who really wants to know?) feels inflated and tender. But this is still the good kind of hangover. The kind where I don’t have to think and I can just focus on my body. It might be the Zen state to which all heavy drinkers aspire—not the process of drinking or the drunkenness, but the painful dead-calm of the morning, the no-mind that comes from obliterating yourself completely the night before.
Faye’s got a thick wrap of gauze around her left forearm. When I ask her about it, she says she couldn’t go through with it. “But it looks like you’re succeeding,” she says. “You won’t last long drinking like this.”
“You remember Delores from the drug court? We should go back up there. Look her up. You know? That was fun that one time.”
She looks out the window at the parking lot. She’s got bags under her eyes and the cruel mouth wrinkles that women in law all seem to get. Law is a harsh mistress, especially to women.
“Yeah,” she says. “I remember Delores. She’s in Chowchilla now, doing eight-to-ten.”
The place is starting to fill up with the morning crowd. A table of Mexican laborers. A few worn out old men who look like farmers but who can’t be farmers because this is the desert. Our breakfast arrives.
Faye looks at her French toast like it just died on her plate. “This isn’t what I thought it would be. I’m going to drive back tomorrow.”
“Could you stay a couple days?”
“This isn’t going anywhere. You’re not going anywhere,” Faye says. “You need to dry out.”
“There’s time. You have time for a couple days.”
She pushes her plate towards the center of the table with her thumb and then rubs her thumb hard with a napkin. “There’s no time for us,” she says. “There never will be.”
Of course, the very nature of a criminal court internship means the intern is going to witness tears. The system is built on sorrow. And in the fall of my second year, I began to notice a certain attrition. Arraignments came and went. People got tried in groups and convicted as individuals. They were put on the “Rocket Docket” and got fast-tracked out to Fulsome, Chowchilla, Lovelock, CYA. They had one or two strikes, previous convictions. Their hearts gave out in their cells. They got sent to work homes, group homes, rehab centers. They killed themselves in the night with pieces of broken glass or plastic forks. The great world went on. A few people were sad. But not that many.
I’d see them in the hall on Friday (“Yo! OJ innocent, man! Ha ha ha!”) and by Monday they’d be on a bus. That year, I drank more than I ever had before. I worked for lawyers and judges. I filed papers. Took notes for the public defenders. Had lunch with law students, secretaries, paralegals, all the lesser carnivera of the judicial food chain. And I saw the wind and light change into winter. And I saw families weeping on the courthouse lawn. And always new faces lined up down the hall. And I didn’t want to make friends anymore. I walked past them quickly.
Late December, I got a postcard from Jobie in my law school mailbox: They got me in Seattle. Guess I fucked up. Don’t have nobody to write to except you. Good memories. Say hi to Faye. She is such a dear. – Jobie. I pushed the postcard across the table to Faye one afternoon when we were having lunch at a little Japanese bistro a block from campus.
She read it and smiled, shook her head. “I’m not surprised. I thought she had a little crush on you.”
“You don’t feel bad? Like maybe it’s a tragedy she’s back in?”
Faye pushed the postcard back and slouched in her chair. Then she looked at me. “The world’s full of tragedy,” she said. “You better toughen up.”
Faye takes sleeping pills and passes out in my rumpled bed before Nelson brings out his Glock 17.
“Where’s that little blonde gal of yours? I don’t trot out my gun for just anybody.”
“She’s asleep,” I say. “So that’s your piece, huh? What about the other one?”
“The elephant gun?” Nelson takes three magazines out of his pockets and starts loading them with bullets from a plastic utility box, copper 9mm rounds all tumbled into a single container like metal cigarette butts in a giant ashtray. “I don’t know where that monster is. Maybe somebody stole it. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
Tonight, I’m drinking the Southern Comfort I bought for Faye with the sour mix and a Pabst on the side. Nelson’s back into the Early Times, but he’s taking it slow because he wants to shoot his gun.
“I only shoot one tree,” he says. “That one.” He points to the very center palm tree in the dirt on the other side of the pool. At one point, there was a fence where the concrete stopped. Now there’s just a row of palm trees like the condemned before a firing squad. Beyond that, acres of parched flat earth run out toward purple mountains, which you can barely see after a rain.
“I hate that one. I like the others. But I hate that one. Reminds me of my wife.” He grips the Glock in his bony liver-spotted hands and fires nine times. It sounds like a Chinese firecracker. Pop. Pop. Pop. Nelson takes a sip of Early Times and ejects the clip. “Goddamn tree,” he says.
He tells me that the tree he hates is the original palm tree, the primogenitor of all the others. Nelson also explains how much he hates large palms in general. They make dust that gets into his lungs. He doesn’t like the way the big fronds look. And he drained the pool because fronds and pollen made it impossible to keep the water clean. “Like Natasha. Filthy woman.”
He slides a new clip into the gun and hands it to me. “Go ahead. You kill the tree.”
I aim, trying to hold it the way he did, but something isn’t right, because I squeeze off all nine shots and not one connects. The gun smells like smoke and machinery, which, I realize, is mostly what it is. When I turn, Nelson is sitting in the chaise lounge, eyes shut again, short glass of Early Times balanced on his knee.
“You know,” he murmurs, “later on, I’m gonna go take a shit.”
I load up a third clip, fire one mis-aimed round, and stop. What did that tree do to me? I put the gun in my belt. I’m staggering and wary of falling in the empty pool again. So I give the edge a wide berth. I go up to the condemned tree and notice that it doesn’t have a single bullet hole on it. Nobody’s watching. I put my arms around it and say, “I hope you have a long and happy life. I’m sorry.” And if I start to cry for a tree, it’s only because I’m a drunk and the world is full of tragedy and I haven’t toughened up even though Faye tells me I need to and I know she’s right.
I wake in my bed with Faye standing over me. She’s showered. She looks determined.
“I’m going.”
It takes me a moment to process this. “Where?”
“Back. Rudy called.” Rudy is another law student. He’s been after Faye since he met her and has despised me just as long. “He says Steptoe’s having a party in two days.”
“And you’re going to it.”
“Steptoe can reverse my grade. I have to try. But I better cute myself up. Think I’ve got it in me?”
“We were shooting trees last night. You should have seen it.”
Faye gives me a level stare. “Take care of yourself,” she says.
Out by the pool, I push Nelson’s broken whiskey glass into a pile of shards under the chaise lounge and resume drinking from the bottle of Southern Comfort. The Glock and the open box of bullets gleams in the afternoon sun. I wonder how hot it would have to get in the desert for those bullets to explode in one giant supernova of death.
Nelson is nowhere around and I resolve to check the bathroom later in case he fell in. I know he’s probably sitting there in the dark, meditating on old age and constipation or snoring and dreaming about better days—before he married filthy Natasha and made that one fateful decision that ruined him forever.
That day in Steptoe’s office, I ranted and raved at the top of my voice about ethics, best practices, betrayal of trust. About the irony that he was famous for his civil rights cases. That he’d argued the Constitution before the US Supreme Court. I even cited the Constitution.
He’s a dignified man, a fatherly man, someone you want to trust with his close-clipped gray beard, wry sense of humor, and the way he squints into a smile. He was smiling like that when he said, “Are you finished?”
I was out of breath. I stood there on the Persian rug in his office, stunned by my own tirade.
Still smiling, Steptoe folded his hands on the desk. “You’re making a career decision.”
“I think you made a career decision when you sexually harassed Faye McDaniels, Professor Steptoe.”
He sighed and nodded. “You’ve said that.”
We looked at each other. And then I noticed Steptoe’s vision shift. He stared right through me at something else.
“Good luck to you,” he said to that other thing.
“This isn’t over.” I didn’t know what else to say. I turned on my heel and stalked out of his office, slamming the door behind me, and walked off campus. After five or six blocks I went into a liquor store and bought a fifth, which I drank greedily with trembling hands in the aluminum bleachers of a high school football field. Some kids were playing catch there. One of them stopped and looked over at me. I can only imagine what he saw.
A day goes by and I’m out of alcohol again, except for the Early Times and the disgusting sherry—which is just as well because my kidneys (I think) have swollen up enough that it’s hard for me to sit straight. By late afternoon, the pain is manageable and I feel good enough to make the drive to the market. I call Faye from the road but she doesn’t answer.
“Look,” I say in the message, “I’m not judging you. But I want you to ask me sometime why I failed Con Law. It’s not because I didn’t study.” I never found out if anyone else knew what transpired that day in Professor Steptoe’s office. I wrote a letter to the dean of the law school shortly thereafter. The letter disappeared. I think I expected outrage. I expected people to rally to my cause. For a few days, I told myself I was a hero, that I was doing what lawyers did—standing up to power, giving a voice to those who, whether through fear or incapacity, were voiceless. I took my finals. Con Law was open and shut with no surprises. I wrote 15 pages longhand and finished in good time.
“Ah, it looks like you’re finally dying,” Sanjit says.
“Don’t be envious. At least I don’t work at a liquor store in the desert.”
“Where I come from, there are far worse things. But you are an idiot. Why do I speak to an idiot?” Sanjit is drinking a strawberry smoothie from a white foam cup and the bottom of his white moustache is stained pink.
“Yes.” He grins and makes crazy eyes. “Can you believe it? It is a smoothie. Fruit. It’s healthy. But you would not know about that.”
So I let him have it. I tell him everything in one big paragraph: I got kicked out of law school over a girl. I’m thousands of dollars in debt. No future. Little money. And no one to take me in. “And, yes,” I say, “I am an idiot.”
“Come with me.” Sanjit puts his smoothie down and locks the front. He’s wearing his usual perfectly white turban and a red long-sleeved shirt unbuttoned down the front over a Bull Taco Motorcycle T-shirt. His pants are gray-blue arctic camo and he has a pair of black combat boots coming apart at the seams. I follow him out the back of the market to an asphalt lot with weeds growing up through the cracks. The lot is full of wrought iron in the shape of a deer, an enormous Japanese robot, a kid doing a handstand, a horse, a cowboy driving a stagecoach—all of it rusted, baking in the heat.
“Just look at it,” he says. “My son did this.”
“Your son’s a welder?”
“My son’s an artist.”
I walk around the sculptures while Sanjit watches me from the shade of the doorway.
“They’re beautiful,” I say.
He nods. “The smoothie place is two blocks away. I won’t be offended if you spend some money there.”
My insides are killing me, but suddenly I want to break down and weep or hug him. But the sharpness in his eyes makes me think that if I tried either of those things, he’d punch me in the face. Instead, I extend my hand.
“Don’t do me any favors,” he says and turns back into the store.
I look at the sculptures a little more: wrought iron life, motionless in the heat. I wonder if his son really did make them or if Sanjit’s in there having a good laugh at my expense. But then I realize it doesn’t make a difference. Somebody made them. And it doesn’t matter if someone sees the sculptures or wants them. They’re out there anyway, soaking up the desert heat, playing out their silent drama for the weeds.
Sanjit rings me up in silence. In the interests of good taste, I only buy another case of Pabst and a second bottle of Early Times, both of which I put in the trunk before walking down to Smoothie King for a strawberry-bannanna zinger. I vomit it up along with a gallon of bile beside the door of my car. My best friend doesn’t come out, even though he must have heard me retching into the asphalt. Driving away, I feel incredibly light-headed; though, there’s only one thought in my mind: I’ll have to find a new market.
Nelson has a rechargeable hair clipper. Later that day, with the sun melting into the smog over the mountains like a bloodshot eye, I sit crosslegged in dead palm fronds at the bottom of the pool. I drink Jack Daniels and shave my face and my head down to the scalp. There are small brown scorpions and centipedes under the fronds. A scorpion crawls past my bottle of Jack. A centipede investigates a gray clump of my hair with its feelers. This is more fascinating than it should be. I call Faye to tell her about it but her line just rings and rings.
When I wake up, I’m on my back in a puddle of whiskey, the phone held tightly to my chest with both hands. They used to bury knights that way with their hands gripping the hilts of their swords. But with me, a phone’s more appropriate: live by the phone, die by the phone.
Nelson has turned on all the exterior motel lights. The place is lit up like an orange landing strip. I get up on one knee and steady myself. A whiskey-soaked patch of cut hair falls off my neck. I stare at it for a moment, trying to understand what it is, what it signifies. In the orange light, it looks like a little fiberous alien, it’s long shadow jagged over the palm fronds. The bottle is on its side and there’s hardly any whiskey in it. I stand up and throw it against the wall of the pool. It explodes in a flower of amber glass that glitters on the fronds like tiny stars.
Swaying, I almost fall face-first into it. The pain in my side has gotten worse, progressing from a dull ache to a sharp stabbing agony that comes on every few heartbeats, making me feel like I should be vomitting or shitting but I also feel that I won’t be doing those things anytime soon. Instead, I stand with my arms straight out to either side like Jesus over Rio and look at my shadow while Nelson fires his elephant gun at the tree.
BOOM.
The shot sounds hollow and thick the way a ship’s cannonade must have sounded off the coast of far Tortuga.
BOOM.
And a mass of blue-white smoke moves over the pool. I shake whiskey out of the hair clipper, put the phone in my pocket, and contemplate walking up to the shallow end beneath where Nelson’s standing, cursing and reloading his gun.
“Bitch! Whore! Howdjalike that, hah? 40 calibers, bitch!”
I cup my hands around my mouth and call out: “Hey there, Nelson! I’m in the pool, okay? Hey! Cease fire!”
There’s a moment of silence before he lets off another round. BOOM. And my right ear starts fluttering like a strained muscle.
BOOM.
“Take it all, you filthy whore!”
I hear him grunt and crack the stock of the gun to reload. In spite of all the drinking and self-destruction, the living animal part of me still gets hungry and wants sex and knows when I should sleep and wants to live. My palms are sweating. I wipe them on my jeans and laugh at myself. That elephant gun would take me apart like a watermellon on a hot sidewalk. Would that be so bad? Wasn’t I the one with nothing left? But that deep part of me is locked on the amber floodlight, the glitter of the broken glass, the carpet of dead palm fronds, my long dark shadow on the bottom of the pool.
“Hey! Fuck you, Nelson. Unless you want to kill somebody, hold up so I can get out of the goddamn pool. Alright?”
Another moment of silence. Then his ragged screaming, more scared than angry: “Shut up! Get out of my fucking head! You’re not in the fucking pool!”
My inner safety animal tells me that if I want to live, I need to scramble out of the pool before Nelson finishes reloading because he’s about to walk up to the edge and let one go. I run to the shallow end and half-leap up the little blue staircase in the corner: whiskey-stained, shaven superhero with magical hair clipper.
Nelson looks up with terror in his face just as he’s closing the stock on two more enormous rounds. When he sees me, he lets out a little cry. I notice that he’s wearing a woman’s maroon tassled bathrobe with paisley designs that make it looke like a Turkish carpet. It’s open down the front, showing his sagging hairless chest and belly poking out over a dingy pair of boxers.
“Who the fuck are you?” He pushes his round wire-rimmed glasses up on his nose and squints. “You’re not Natasha.”
“No. Obviously not.”
Nelson points at the hated palm tree that reminds him of his wife. One of the shots must have grazed it because the top fronds are burning like the bush of prophecy.
“I taught her,” he says. “I taught her a lesson she’s never gonna forget, the bitch.”
And I nod. The palm tree will never forget. Ash and burning embers fall in a tiny rain of fire to the foot of the tree. He hands me the rifle and says, “You be the guard.” Then he shuffles through the glass door that connects the pool area with the motel’s single internal hallway.
All the lights go off. I sit in the chaise lounge next to the empty bottle of Early Times and a cardboard box full of enormous .40-caliber shells. The gun is impossibly heavy with over-and-under barrels and a round metal sight. I unload it, put the two rounds back in the box with the others, and settle back to watch the tree burn.
Nelson isn’t up the next morning, but I am. Being neither intoxicated nor hung over at 8 AM seems unnatural and awkward. I do not feel better about life, but the image of the burning tree and Nelson, drunk and hallucinatory, in what could only have been his late wife’s bathrobe haunts me. I decide not to drink for the rest of the day.
Tempora mutantur. Times have changed. And we may or may not have changed with them. But some things are always the same, like the feeling I got when I first read Jobie’s postcard. They got me in Seattle. Guess I fucked up. Death energy there, laced into the words. Guess I fucked up like I’m going to die now. This is it. Arivaderche Roma. Give my regards to Broadway. See you in the next life, on the flip-side—out in the far country, far Tortuga—where you’ll be headed, too, before long.
There’s always a degree of absurdity in that feeling, like it’s a horrible farce, a killing joke. Like the Axeman chasing a whole family down one-by-one between third base and the west side bleachers of the upper field—running back and forth with a bloody Woodsman Mark VIII, while 70 people screamed and made for the chainlink.
It’s the same feeling I get when I walk out back and look at the half-burned palm tree. A V-mark of soot runs down the center of its trunk. It’s fronds have been burned to spindly tendrils reaching up toward the sky. If the tree could scream, it would sound the way those tendrils look, sharp and twisted and wrong against the rising heat of the day.
Out here, in this emptiness, an old man can get drunk in his dead wife’s bathrobe and fire a .40-caliber gun at a tree in the normal course of human events. A former potential lawyer can try to drink himself to death and realize what a fool he’s been. And who knows how many ex-wives are buried without their bathrobes between Plaster City and El Centro.
My best friend is not surprised to see me. He stands beneath the cigarette overhang with one hand on the register and another on a glass case full of cheap cigars—an inscrutible wirey Sikh in a white turban and an USMC jacket with the patches ripped out.
“You look now like you’ve escaped a concentration camp.”
“Well, maybe I have.”
“I sincerely doubt it. But it shall now be impossible for me to sell you more alcohol.” His eyes regard me from a great distance beneath his bushy white eyebrows.
“That’s fine. I’m here for something else.”
“You wish to rob me?”
“I wish to work for you. Tell me you don’t need the help.”
Sanjit looks down and sighs. He shakes his head. “The help. I don’t need it. But ask at the Smoothie King. I will provide a recommendation and lie that you are not suicidal or impossibly stupid.” It takes him a moment to grin at his own wit.
“That smoothie made me puke.”
“Yes.” He nods slowly. “In my parking lot. They are often disgusting. The milk is often sour.”
“That’s why you need to hire me. It’s too unhealthy over there.”
Still grinning, he says, “That is the first thing you’ve said that has not been stupid. Come back tomorrow and you can try out for the position.”
On the drive back to the motel, I pull over and study my face in the mirror. I don’t recognize myself—gaunt cheeks, shadows below my eyes, shaved head. I really do look like I’ve survived something big and terrifying. The destruction of my home planet. An endless galactic war. Some chapter of Revelation that permanently changed the times and changed me with them.
While I’m stopped, Faye calls.
“I just thought I’d tell you,” she says. “We’ve worked it out.”
“Yeah?”
“Well, we’re going to, I think. He forgave me. He’s leaving his wife.”
“Oh?”
“He’s going to make a call. I’ll be back in on a probationary basis.”
“And that’s good?”
“I don’t think we should talk anymore,” she says. “It’s too risky. I can’t fuck up again.”
We sit on the open line without speaking. Then she says, “So . . . good-bye.”
“Good-bye, Faye.” I listen to the beep.
When I start the car moving again, I think about looking for an apartment nearby, maybe a small sandblown house. Times are changed. Times have changed. And I’ve arrived in my own far country. The road from Plaster City shimmers before the car—a painted background damaged by heat that can no longer trick the eye into believing it’s real.
Note: this story was originally published in Isthmus magazine.
- You don’t need to be famous to be an artist. You just need to make art.
- You don’t need to make art in any particular style or volume or at any particular rate. These considerations come from industries interested in art as a product that can be sold, irrespective and ignorant of the creative process. Such considerations can often be destructive and should be understood by the artist, then carefully set aside.
- You do need to share your art with others because doing so magnifies it. Having an audience, no matter how limited, transforms your work in the minds of others. The art you make should grow beyond you, transcending the boundaries of your personal subjectivity. People are good for art. By offering your art to people, they become part of it and it becomes part of them.
- You do need to have a day job. Engage with the world around you and do not allow yourself to stagnate. It’s good to have mundane concerns like employment, stability, friends, and family. What you do when you’re not making art is less important than the fact that you are out there, living, doing it. So find something you like and try getting good at it for a while. An artist needs to live a human life in order to understand human experience. You are human. Come down from the attic.
- You do need to control time and space. You are also divine. Time could be as short as an hour a day as long as it is consistently available. Space could be a small as a closet as long as it is consistently available. Go back to the attic.
- You do need to keep learning and changing. Inspiration depends on it. Eschew formulaic thinking and comfortable templates. Give yourself increasingly ambitious assignments. Integrate everything you learn into new projects. This is how you develop. Stagnation is death.
- You don’t need to make a living on your art in order to feel like you’re really an artist. Every artist has an identity problem and there will always be someone telling you to quit. People with the fortitude to develop themselves creatively often aggravate those too scared to take the first step. And there are always more of the latter than the former.
- You don’t need to talk about your ongoing project with friends and family. Doing so can make otherwise good people into passive-aggressive antagonists. Better to let them read the finished product and criticize you behind your back. Your life will be simpler and you will still be able to attend the family reunion without getting drunk first.
- You do need to realize that art is more than just cleverness and craftsmanship. Consider this statement and see how you feel about it: the creative process is the act of recognizing the limitlessness of the psyche in the sense that all is mind and that a work of art is an embodiment of that totality in space and time.
I started this website years ago, when I was living in East Africa and had no idea when I’d be leaving. The idea was to experiment with travel non-fiction essays I might eventually submit to magazines. But, over time, The Writing Expedition became more than that. I’ve begun to notice a theme emerging—the same theme that characterized most of the stories in my first collection, Gravity:
[T]he assumption that everything in life depends on being solvent, employed, and generally needed. These things constitute the gravity, or the seriousness, of one’s situation—that which holds a person’s life together and makes it mean something.
I guess I’m still thinking about what it means to survive in our often unforgiving, inhuman post-industrial economy. It seems that writing and thinking about this is emerging as an aspect of my life’s work—my overall artistic project. I think I should probably be reading more Studs Terkel, Orwell, Huxley, Ignacio Silone, Walter Benjamin, Viktor Frankl. I should be doing a lot of things.
Since my book came out in late 2009, I’ve published in more magazines. I’ve taught more students at the Gotham Writers’ Workshop. I’ve received praise for my work from those who get my project and the inevitable pushback from those who don’t. It’s all part of the writing life. Nevertheless, times change and we change with them. Recently, I’ve had occasion to look back the at the road behind me and also wonder about the future.
Abre Camino
After a number of reversals, sickness, and a new appreciation for my mortality, I left Burundi sooner than I thought I would. I wrote a story loosely based on my experiences there, sweated profusely in Belgium, led a charmed existence in Tallinn (a city fairly close to how I imagine paradise), and then had to leave the Schengen due to an unresolvable issue with my visa. I spent a few discombobulated days in Oxford before it was back to central California again for hard times, family betrayals, and a veritable buffet of disappointments and bad luck.
As soon as I got back, I knew I had to leave again. So I did. Since I work primarily online, I was able to go places where I could also enjoy myself—San Francisco, Seattle, Boston, Washington D.C. Then I left for England again, living in Oxford for a good while. I had a short interlude, staying with friends in a village outside Vienna. And then London. Soon, I will return to Oxford before heading out to Asia. It’s a good life if you can stay flexible and you don’t want to own a lot of things.
The Hounds of the Grass
Another theme has been that of trading financial stability for time and interesting experiences. In the beginning, this was not altogether intentional. I got my PhD at Western Michigan University and hit the job market, which, I discovered, hits back. I have three advanced degrees, 17 years teaching experience, an expert ESL certification, numerous magazine publications, a book with an academic press, and a winning personality.
Still, the tenure track job interviews right out of my program were not forthcoming. I had a few in which I was competing tooth-and-nail with a large number of equally qualified candidates for, say, one position. I talk about this experience often on this blog. I think it’s important that some people tell the truth about the process. In the end, Thomas Benton’s notorious “Graduate School in the Humanities: Just Don’t Go” has proven out. What he describes hasn’t quite been my experience. I’ve been lucky that way. But I think Benton has been nearly prophetic for a number of my friends who I’ve seen lied to, exploited, blamed, and disregarded by a broken system packed with terrified neurotics. I say go get the degree you want to get. But do it with open eyes and be willing to do what you have to do to survive.
Kephera – Egyptian Neter of Coming into Being
So this morning, I got up and looked at the calendar. In 24 days, I will turn 41. And, thinking about that over my coffee, I realized that I’ve had many, many interesting experiences over the years. I’ve done some amazing things—at first from necessity, then in order to court eustress and test myself. Now I really do think I’ve changed. I love teaching, without a doubt, it’s part of who I am. But I no longer have that sense of desperation that characterized those of us who made it through the PhD relatively sane. I’m no longer that brittle academic refugee. I’ve evolved.
No one knows what’s around the next corner. Though, after 4 decades of life, it seems preferable to hold Will to Meaning as my highest good instead of Will to Productivity or Consumption. In my ongoing search for a meaningful life, I’ve come to experiences over approval, freedom and time over money and obligations. Or, as the Uncle Aleister used to say, “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.”
I’m sitting in a cafe in downtown London with a show tune version of the Doors’ “People are Strange” playing overhead. At some point, some focus group, some collection of sample listeners employed by a marketing concern or polled through a survey, decided that this schmaltzy cover was better than the original. Based on their decision, the track was included. This is the hidden world of the beta listener, beta reader, product tester, quality control specialist, and sometimes that of the literary editor. And it smells like untreated beta.
Let’s play a magical game of what if? What if you wrote something and not everyone liked it? Would you still be a legitimate writer? In the words of the incomparable Ksenia Aneske:
Stop worrying about what will happen. Will anyone read my books? Will anyone like them? Will anyone buy them? Will my mom call me and tell me I’m a genius? Will my dad send me a pistol to put to my head? Will I have to forever hide from my friends in an opium den and will my face slide off my head from shame and embarrassment at the atrocious and absolutely abominable quality of my prose? Put it out of your head!
Yes. Stop. And fuck the beta reader. Do this for any number of good reasons that remain good no matter what kind of writing you’re doing, how famous you are, or whether you feel the thing you just wrote is brilliant or incoherent.
One of them, maybe the biggest one, is that ultimately only one entity is served by the advice of even the best beta reader: the publisher. Having beta readers for your story or novel helps your publisher in three ways: (1) it lessens the already considerable work of the publicist-editor-copyeditor tasked with getting your manuscript in line with what the publisher wants; (2) it focuses your work towards a viable consumer demographic; and (3) it reminds you, the author, that you are not as important as you would like to think, given the cruel, rapacious hellworld of publishing.
Why does having a beta reader do these things? Because there is a difference between a beta reader and someone just providing feedback. This difference is rooted primarily in the language and assumptions of genre presses and e-book publishers; though there has been some bleed into the general vernacular of publishing in general.
Consider the submission guidelines for the “Harlequin Heartwarming” imprint. It’s worth reading the entire set of guidelines for all the Harlequin imprints, by the way:* “Similar in tone and feel to movies and TV shows like Sleepless in Seattle, Parenthood and Enough Said.” Why would a publisher say something like this as a guideline? Why, indeed. Because the job of a beta reader on a manuscript meant to be sent to this imprint is to give feedback relevant to that tone and feel—i.e. the beta reader’s job is one of aesthetic critique and revision. It’s writing-by-committee. And it sucks.
This is exactly the problem in MFA programs with the soulless “workshop story.” As the Writer’s Digest article puts it, “a workshop story is . . . insidious: on the surface it appears authentic, profound, meaningful. But really, it isn’t about anything.” Yup. It’s about style at the expense of substance. And this is the realm of the beta reader. In a bad workshop, every participant becomes a MFA beta reader, an experience worse than death.
Oh, you’re an artist? Excuse me. Hugh Howey puts it like this:
[W]riting within a genre is a huge first step in being discovered. No one is looking for you or your particular book. You are both unknown unknowns. So you better write a book that’s near a specific book. You can either change your name to L.E. James or you can start writing billionaire erotica. Of the two, I’d go with the latter. Science fiction, romance, new adult, erotica, fantasy, crime all sell better than literary fiction.**
This is unquestionably true. But if you want to write a memoir or a novel about an old couple living in Kansas, please, please, please do it. Please don’t make it a novel about a teenage couple having a romance in a post-apocalyptic Kansas because you think no one will be interested in the novel if you don’t put zombies and vampire ninjas in it.
In contrast to the beta reader, the person providing feedback is not reading relative to a particular style sheet—or she shouldn’t be if she’s trying to be a good reader. She’ll try to understand your project. And she’ll give you feedback that helps you realize that project more fully. That’s it. And that is very hard to do. It’s what happens in a successful story workshop. It helps writers become more of who they already are as artists. It does not churn out something that can be positioned as the next big salable thing (which is bullshit anyway—ask Hugh).
Back to what if? What if they held a workshop and nobody came? What if you’re writing all by yourself in your drafty garret? What if you actually are writing a teen paranormal werewolf romance novel in a post-apocalyptic dystopian vampire Kansas? Do you need a beta reader then? Not really. Do you know what you’re doing? If you don’t, aesthetic quality control isn’t going to be that much help (Um, I think, the scene in the taxi could be a little more like that one scene in Sleepless In Seattle . . . ). If you do, your polished draft will arrive in the editor’s inbox with only a few changes necessary–which is part of being a professional instead of a hack. I do think reading and sharing our work is really important and useful. But the beta reader is a creature of marketing, not art.
* Note: I choose to pick on Harlequin because they’re an institution in the world of the romance genre and because I am not aware that any of my writer friends are publishing with them. Of course, I want all my friends to publish everything, get rich and famous, and bathe nightly in bathtubs filled with Cristal if that’s what they want. Still, it won’t stop me from grinding my axe on this blog. Sorry, bubu, them’s the breaks.
** Hugh Howey has good things to say and I’m not disagreeing with him about being discovered. I’m disagreeing with the attitude that literary fiction is irrelevant based on what sells.
I sat down today intending to write a piece critical of certain shrill MFA voices that seem to have gotten shriller since MFA vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction hit the shelves last February. Is “shriller” actually a word? It is. But it only takes meaning as a comparative adjective once something that was brittle, high-pitched, piercing, and so exaggerated as to be deeply annoying gets intensified beyond the bounds of reason and tolerance.
In fact, this was going to be one of those, “I think yon highly privileged (shrill) MFA Child Of The Universe doth protest too much, Horatio” posts. In it, I would have been sure to impart a sense of having been there and done that, taking care to insinuate that I was a hard bitten veteran of the academic creative writing hustle. I might have added a touch of weary exasperation that the culture of many workshop-based programs is about everything but the work. And I might have tried for a some kind of brief reversal three-fourths of the way through so that I could have ended on a slightly hopeful note.
Nope.
But come on. I’ve done all that. I’ve argued both sides: that MFA writing programs are excellent ways to focus on learning craft for two to three years without the distractions that would otherwise apply. I’ve also argued that the bloated culture of privilege and cynical, thinly veiled mediocrity in many of these programs short-changes students from the beginning. I still believe all of this. I also believe that if you go into it with open eyes, intending to use the program as a tool to facilitate your development as an artist, you will not regret your decision. If you go in and expect a big hug and Wonder Boys, your life will come to resemble a Muddy Waters song.
I’ve written a lot, here and elsewhere, on MFA programs—why I think we should still believe in them and the ways I think they utterly fail everyone involved. And by “everyone,” I actually mean anyone interested in the mission of creative writing, which I guess means everyone. The Big Everyone—like you, me, the kid on the big wheel down the block, President Obama, and Ray Kurzweil. Everyone. Because, in my opinion, the mission of art school is nothing less than cultural transformation. It’s founded on the assumption that the arts can and should have a place in society.
So I don’t know. Maybe I should recognize a certain degree of irony implicit in any post I write about gifted, neurotic, highly privileged 20-somethings in creative writing programs. I was one. In many ways, I still am. I feel at home with that crowd. And as a freelance writer and fiction instructor for the Gotham Writers’ Workshop, I’m still connected to the academic MFA world. I guess the question is whether there is anything new to be said about it. The perspectives in MFA vs. NYC have not been very surprising or insightful. It seems like the same old array of objections and justifications we’ve been hearing for years. Now they’ve been collected in a book instead of appearing in The Atlantic or on websites.
Maybe an even better question is whether anyone sees MFAs clearly at all. What if I point out that there is a perceptual “distortion field” around MFA programs which encourages students to believe themselves at the center of the universe? What if I argue that, because of this world-view, many MFA students also believe that the universe is in a state of perpetual collapse—because its center has been revealed to contain semen, bent paper clips, and cotton candy instead of the fire of the gods? And what if I describe the almost universal malaise that seems to descend on these young lords and ladies of creation around the time they’re halfway through their programs? A certain melancholy made from dwelling on the absurdly large student loans they took out in order to be “student writers” and how this seems like a perverse existential joke considering their post-program job prospects?
Oh, don’t be sad. There’s enough cotton candy for everyone.
Writing seriously means nursing enormous egotism, believing that your inner life is worthy of concrete expression, worthy of sharing. The outside world wants to constantly remind you that you are nothing but a small, failed, decaying byproduct of its grand mulching system. But bringing forth what’s inside you gives independent life to something that never before existed outside your mind, something that cannot be immediately quantified, digested, and mulched. Therefore, writing is subversive. Writing is Occupy Consciousness. Writing is black magic. It’s an external frame of reference, a constellation of ideas, a place outside the compost heap. And we can go there together.
Don’t buy into the romantic assumption that being a creative artist is easy for those who are truly talented and meant to do it. This is a materialistic commercial lie. Something I believe: art is part of being human and must therefore be available to everyone. And those who do it right never find it easy; though, the publishing industry, for example, may find it easier to sell certain books if readers believe that the writers being published are like idiot savants.
Everyone has an aptitude for some kind of creative process. Finding out what it is means finding out more of what it means to be human and alive. Not investigating this firsthand means voluntarily accepting an impersonal, commercially interested assumption about one’s creative potential—some external story about you imagined and written by someone who doesn’t even know you. It’s an affront to everything unique and valuable in the individual self.
Moreover, it elevates money over art, which is fundamentally disconnected from the reasons we make art in the first place. This is essentially stupid. Therefore, we need to appreciate art. We should create it and consume it, but we should not assume that it is something mysterious, selective, elite, or random. It is better to think of artistic ability as an attainment, a product of self-cultivation that uses materials we already have. And our job is to understand it, interact with it, develop it, and teach this praxis to others. Our job is not to worship those being held up to us as a select, anointed group. Our job is to understand how commerce reacts with art and then to set all that aside so we can do our own work.
Planisphaeri Coeleste
The structure of what I write is the structure of my emotional life. My fiction isn’t autobiographical in any overt way. Yet how I approach my subject matter depends on the way I see the world and myself in it. Therefore, conceptually, perceptually, structurally, I write the narrative of my life the way I write any narrative—certainly in words but, in a deeper sense, in images. Strung together in the mind, they form a constellation of emotions unique to me. The physical manuscript is a chart of these moments, an inner star map, a personal zodiac that makes it possible for others to see what I have seen and feel the way I have felt. The secret of such navigation is not in the words but in the structural relations between them, not in any given star but in the proportionality of the constellation.
This is my current understanding of creative writing: building associations between emotional states instead of focusing on monolithic things (characters, paragraphs, settings, scenes). A character is a humanlike set of particularities that exist in relation to something else. A paragraph is a movement, an emotional gesture. A setting is an environmental set of particularities, also significant insofar as it relates to something else (even to the eye of the reader, Mr. Fish). A scene is all of the above moving together and in relation to all the other scenes. And all of it exists for one purpose—to map a structure of intricate emotional movements that took place first in my mind, now in yours.
Is this difficult or complicated? Not really. But it is more honest, more elemental (-ary), than saying, “according to so-and-so, a character should do X, Y, and Z in a dramatic scene.” Focusing on X, Y, and Z misses the point. I don’t write to fulfill a preset arrangement of static constituent categories. I write to move my reader. And that is just as dynamic, relational, and variable as any emotion I might feel.
AIR AND LIGHT AND TIME AND SPACE
”– you know, I’ve either had a family, a job,
something has always been in the
way
but now
I’ve sold my house, I’ve found this
place, a large studio, you should see the space and
the light.
for the first time in my life I’m going to have
a place and the time to
create.”no baby, if you’re going to create
you’re going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or
you’re going to create in a small room with 3 children
while you’re on
welfare,
you’re going to create with part of your mind and your body blown
away,
you’re going to create blind
crippled
demented,
you’re going to create with a cat crawling up your
back while
the whole city trembles in earthquake, bombardment,
flood and fire.baby, air and light and time and space
have nothing to do with it
and don’t create anything
except maybe a longer life to find
new excuses
for.– Charles Bukowski
Like most who went to college in the early 1990s, I had the misfortune of first encountering Bret Easton Ellis’ work indirectly via the movie adaptations. I rented Less Than Zero and thought it was okay in a rich-kids-get-the-blues-and-make-bad-life-decisions sort of way.
Cool yet deeply annoying.
James Spader was simultaneously cool yet annoying. And that pretty much characterized my opinion of Ellis’ sensibility for a few years. The people he wrote about were outside my experience; though, I’d known a few self-entitled wealthy narcissists at my private high school in San Diego—daddy owned a boat and mommy took valium, that sort of thing. But what I didn’t realize was that I had been reacting to the oversimplified (maybe clichéd) Hollywood tropes that had been extracted from his writing—a serious case of lost in adaptation, particularly for Less Than Zero and Rules of Attraction.
During my MFA, my professors were so determined to dismiss Ellis—I thought, mostly out of jealousy—that their vitriol actually piqued my interest. I went through everything he had out at the time—Less Than Zero, Rules of Attraction, American Psycho, The Informers, Glamorama, and Lunar Park. I read them with an eye for plot structure. I paid attention to his use of short chapters and perspective shifts. But mostly I apprenticed myself to his idiosyncratic first person voice. I think that’s his strongest stylistic quality as a fiction writer.
Consider this beginning to one of Lauren’s chapters in Rules (and note the Hemingway-esque beginning in media res via “And”):
And it’s quiet now, and over. I’m standing by Sean’s window. It’s almost morning, but still dark. It’s weird and maybe it’s my imagination but I’m positive I can hear the aria from La Wally coming from somewhere, not across the lawn since the party is over, but it might be somewhere in this house perhaps. I have my toga wrapped around me and occasionally I’ll look over and watch him sleep in the glow of his blue digital alarm clock light. I’m not tired anymore. I smoke a cigarette. A silhouette moves in another window, in another house across from this one. Somewhere a bottle breaks.
Stoltz cannot save your movie.
And it continues this way. The entire chapter is a long paragraph—not atypical for the novel or its predecessor, Less Than Zero. The speaker’s voice—her tone, how she frames her perceptions in words—shows more about who she is than what may or may not be taking place in the physical setting. Just as each voice-driven passage sets up a rhythm using long and short sentences to evoke the personality of the speaker, the lengths and arrangement of the chapters does the same thing on a larger scale. By the end, we realize that the novel works not only because the main characters (speakers) have fully formed implicit arcs, but also because the novel itself has a vocal arc. Rules weaves each of the character arcs together to push beyond their particular experiences and make a broad statement: this is what’s happening to your children, America. Or, maybe, this is what happens when you give your child a gold card and send her off to college.
Great book.
The broad message is what it is: disaffected youth with too many resources, upper-class dry rot. We can watch any movie about the idle rich and enjoy the cliché of the vacuous aristocrat. In my opinion, those things are less important than what we can learn by paying attention to Ellis’ writing style. He has been put down for having a trite, narrow message (and for his off-color comments on social networks and the media), but I think we definitely miss out on what’s great about his work if we let those things take precedence over the writing itself. When I want to solve a problem using voice and I don’t know how to do it, he is one of my teachers.
RIP Elmore Leonard. A great talent has gone out of the world today. He will be missed.
It looks like my story, “The Catherine Wheel,” has made it into the Painted Bride Quarterly Print Annual 6. Buy one here. ~ Michael
The alligator gar was a magnificent fish. Even in the dark room, it glittered: long, a ribbon of dimes floating in the tank. Empty tank, clear water. Seen from the bed, the gar seemed more like a static picture behind gray glass as if it would never move. And, in truth, Hoki had not seen it travel more than an inch forward or back in the enormous tank. The fish never showed more than the slightest muscular ripple, its tailfin drifting gently to the side. The tank filled the top half of the wall beside the bed. Hoki watched the fish. The fish watched Hoki.
“Stop it,” said Rina.
He heard the flick of her lighter, the hiss of her cigarette. Hoki lay on his side, his back to her, his head resting on his arm. He often woke in that position, staring at the gar, listening to Rina’s quiet breathing or to her already moving around her house. The mouth of the enormous fish was slightly open, flensing the water back through its gills. It’s row of white teeth like a saw. It’s black button-eye in a silver iris.
“How can it know I’m watching?” he said.
“It knows.” Smoke in the dark. The fat hiss of her long black cigarette with a golden band where the filter began. “It can feel you. Trust me.”
Rina felt things like that. She always knew when to call, knew when he was asleep. Hoki often wondered how she managed it. Rina never did what he expected. He’d turn in mid-sentence and Rina would be dreaming, her breathing deep and slow. But when he was least expecting it, in the middle of the night, in the dark hours of the morning: the flick of her lighter, the hiss, the gar looking at him through tinted glass.
Hoki rolled onto his back. Bars of moonlight through the blinds striped rumpled sheets, Rina’s thigh.
“So tell me its name.”
“Stop asking.”
“You can’t just keep it there in an empty tank. It’s inhumane.”
She laughed. The cigarette hissed. “I’ll be the judge of what’s humane for my fish.”
Hoki didn’t look at her. He slid off the bottom of the bed, walked barefoot down the long oak hallway in the dark—warm wood, even in winter, even without turning on the heater. Wood that made the soles of one’s feet feel good, that cost a lot of money. Not his wood. Not his money.
Not his bathroom, either. Hoki waved his hand over the switch. The lights came on dim, got brighter until he waved his hand again. He didn’t want it too bright that early in the morning, after a night with Rina. Hoki rubbed his eyes. His spiky black hair seemed to have gotten grayer at the temples. At 33, he felt twice that. These nights with Rina were sending him to an early grave.
“What are you doing?” she called. “Get back in here.”
Everything in the bathroom was dusty blue marble and steel. He took a cotton ball from a chrome jar and soaked it in rubbing alcohol from a bottle below the sink. Hoki knew where everything was—the bottle of codeine; the dark towels Rina’s husband, David, never used; David’s bottle of Viagra that had given Hoki the most painful and long-lasting erection of his life; the sterile needle and thread taped underneath the middle drawer just in case. His shoulder might have needed re-stitching this time if Rina had kept on. The places where her bites had punctured his skin burned when he swabbed them. He washed his face and dabbed it dry with a burgundy towel that he re-folded and placed beneath a neat stack of identical towels in the side cabinet.
“Baby get in here.” Rina was not a patient woman. But there was one last thing. Hoki found the tube of Preparation-H where he’d left it beside the rubbing alcohol. He carefully smeared a bit under each eye, where the skin had begun to sag, and counted up to fifty. Baggy, tired eyes were not acceptable, even in the dark.
When he went back to the bedroom, he felt more put-together. He stood beside the bed. Rina ran her fingers over his stomach muscles while she finished the last of her cigarette. She smiled. The sheet had bunched in her lap, bars of moonlight across her breasts, the black ringlets of her hair.
“You’ll tell me its name someday,” he said.
“Don’t waste time.” She blew a line of smoke and threw the sheet aside.
He climbed onto the bed and went down on her, realizing too late that he had forgotten to wipe off a bit of the Preparation-H below his left eye. There was no fixing it now.
Hoki dressed while she was showering. His T-shirt and jeans smelled like sex. She’d bought him a new pair of Bottega Ventanas on a whim and Hoki made sure to wear them when he came over. They still smelled like new shoes. But eventually everything he wore would smell like her Sobraines, her Clive Christian at $800 an ounce. The black marble box with white veins sat on a narrow table right below the tank. Just large enough for six crisp $100 bills. Hoki folded the money, put it in his back pocket. The gar stared. And Hoki paused as if the gar were about to speak, to explain everything.
“I’ll get your name,” he whispered. “You’ll see.”
The gar’s tailfin flicked gently. It’s gills expanded, contracted.
Hoki always waited until Rina left the room before he went to the box. It was good that way and it wasn’t vulgar. Then he went down the hallway in the dark. She wanted him gone by the time she got out of the shower. That was part of it, the night over and a new day beginning. He keyed the house alarm and closed the front door behind him. By the time David got home from the airport, the sheets would be changed, windows open, another black Sobraine between her lips.
You must stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you. – Bradbury
And if you can’t write, maybe just get drunk. A teacher of mine once said, “I’ve known a fair number of writers who spent their time drinking when they should have been writing. And I’ve known even more who were writing when they should have been drinking.”
True, that. True, that.
“Don’t try,” Bukowski said. But trying is all there is. All he did was try. If he’d stopped trying, he’d have died long before writing Post Office, Ham on Rye, Women, Hollywood, “The Most Beautiful Woman in Town,” “Kid Stardust on the Porterhouse,” and the stories in the posthumous Tales of Ordinary Madness, outstanding things that people need to read and talk about.
So try. You’ve got to be tough to be a writer. Think: James Crumley, Andre Dubus Sr., Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O’Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Shirley Jackson. These are some of the people who define tough. They ate nails. Pour one out for Charles Bukowski, too, even if you don’t buy his romantic hustle and don’t believe he was as hard as he tried to seem. If a person writes one good story, that is direct poof that that person took a handful of nails and got down to business. One good story, in itself, is something amazing. There are people who would pay big money to produce just one and can’t or won’t or think they can’t.
What about P.D. James, John D. MacDonald, Elmore Leonard, Charles Willeford, Ursula LeGuin, John Fante, Denis Johnson, Truman Capote, J.D. Salinger, Melanie Rae Thon? Read them with reverence and awe. Go take your hat off at the grave of Theodore Dreiser. Go absorb some brilliant Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald and then apprentice yourself to Michael Ondaatje and Paul Bowles and Isak Dinesen and learn all you can about the work of Somerset Maugham. What? You haven’t read anything by Maugham except The Moon and Sixpence? Shame on you. Shame. Go to the library and get The Razor’s Edge. Now. And while you’re there, get Labyrinths by Borges and anything by James Jones and everything by Anita Loos. Will you? Will you read John Cheever? Will you start?
So try. It’s a miracle that any stories get written at all. And the aforesaid writers produced many good stories in spite of the undeniable and obvious fact that the universe hates, fucking hates, serious art and artists of any kind. And the world especially hates writers who aren’t in the service of momentary commerce. In fact, all good writers are exceptions to the rule that says if it isn’t easy, you have no business making art, and if you were any good, you’d have made it by now. That’s the publishing industry talking. That’s the Random House Marketing Strategy. That’s the substance of jacket quotes and blurbs that say so-and-so is the Next Brilliant Voice of American Literature. Forget that. There are no rising stars. That light you see up there is already dead.
It takes so long to get any good at making art, especially fiction writing. It takes so much endurance and dedication and authentic, highly personal unattractive suffering. Once you get an idea of how badly the process is going to mess with your life—usually several years after you’ve made a serious investment into becoming a fiction writer—you’re either hooked on the energy and don’t care or you’re in the process of losing things. You may and probably will lose spouse, custody, car, respect of family / friends / self, teeth, your temper, your self-confidence, your identity as a functional and enfranchised member of grownup society and, without a doubt, that crappy job you’d hoped would give you more time to finish your novel. Maybe you’ll lose all of the above and be reborn as some purified Zen idiot who only knows how to write and lives in a flop house. And maybe that will be the way for you.
I got hooked on the energy of the creative process and stopped caring around 1997. Although I’ve had many moments of caring—convulsive episodes of remorse and dread that come on like a special kind of writer’s epilepsy, I’m still at it. My worst moments have coincided with various losses from the list above. But I still have my teeth and my spouse and no one ever took me that seriously as a functional adult anyway. So losing that one was moot. Otherwise, it has been a long road to get a book and 20 stories in print. I’m proud of that because I have to be, because that’s where my 20s and most of my 30s have gone. Now I’m 38 and getting close to books 2 and 3—a new collection of stories and a novel. And that has to matter to me. I have to care. I’m compelled to try, to keep going, to fight, to get up every day and put my time in even if those nails hurt when I swallow them. Like a junkie who might die from cold turkey, I’m too far along to ever get out. I have my bad moments. But I’m never quitting the juice.
So when I came across the quote at the top of this post from Ray Bradbury—I think I read it once before, years ago, in an interview with him or something—I started to think about being in east Africa and about writing and isolation. I started to think about what it means to keep calm and carry on as an artist when most of the “reinforcing hits” from the outside world (the sort of identifications that our culture uses to let us know who we are) have vanished. It’s easy to keep trying when people are telling you that you shouldn’t give up your day job. That was pretty much my MFA program and at least major sections of my PhD. The hard part is when you find yourself in a culture that doesn’t even care enough to want to starve you out.
Most people here in Bujumbura are grateful that the political situation is reasonably stable. They like the fact that they can work, that their families are okay, that the government isn’t systematically killing them. If I said something like, “Hey, I’m having a bitch of a time with closure in this story I’m writing,” I’d likely get a polite smile and a thumbs-up. If I said something like, “I’m doing this working artist thing because it really matters to me,” the Burundians I’ve met would likely agree—with all their characteristic tact and quiet reserve—that it is a very good thing to do. But a population worried about typhoid and tomorrow’s dinner may also tell you to take your difficult plot arc and try to eat it. Will your characterization take away my daughter’s fever? No? Ah, excuse me. . . .
Most writers here, the few there are, work in isolation—way more isolation, it seems, than is usual or necessary for the creative process to work. I think it might be different in neighboring countries; though, I hesitate to speculate at this point. I can say that Burundi is still recovering from the last 20 years of political instability. And as a foreigner here, as one of the few North Americans, I’ve often found myself turning inward, focusing on how my professional, artistic, cultural identity contrasts with the dominant ethos of the people here. I’m told there is a gentility in Burundi that does not exist in many other parts of Africa. But I might extend that: there is a gentility here that does not exist in many other parts of the world. How, then, does a 38-year-old writer construct himself in a context where the sort of social friction that fueled his work in the USA simply does not exist?
My only answer—at least, the only one I can come up with right now—is to keep writing and hope the question answers itself. Keep trying. Don’t stop. And this is what I recently told a student from years ago who emailed me with the Big Question. No, she was not proposing. She wanted to know what I thought her chances were for a career in creative writing if she went to a MFA.
In my capacity as a creative writing instructor, people are always asking me the same thing: whether I think they have talent to, you know, go pro. I try to be nice about this when they ask me, but I have no idea how to answer this question. I can say, look, you submitted two great stories to the workshop. I think they’re great because I liked them and felt moved by them in certain ways. Please note that not everyone felt the same way in the critiques. Also understand that my opinion is just one among many. I do not have the ultimate secret formula for quality writing in my back pocket. I can tell you what I see. And maybe I see more than the student critiquers because I have been doing this longer and to a more intense—some might say desperate—degree. But that’s it. Only YOU can determine if you have talent. You do this by trying to produce something of value every day.
Most often, I say: I have no idea and then feel bad when they decide I’m being disingenuous. I imagine that in the minds of most adult humans, the same script is running daily (given certain variations): what if I lose the house? What if she’s really going to that motel on I-80 instead of yoga class? What if I fail, I freeze up in the clinch? What if the deal falls through? What if that spot on my leg keeps changing color? What if I can’t perform? What if they already know I’m a fraud? What if they’re laughing at me behind my back? What if it all goes away? What if inside me there is just an empty void? The writer adds two more: what if I’m deluding myself about wanting to be a writer? What if everyone who says they like my work is lying?
Well, what if? You don’t have to eat too many nails to be a writer—not handfuls, at least. Maybe you just swallow one roofing nail every day you can’t write. After a while, you’ve got a stomach full, poking through to other organs, tearing you up little by little. I don’t know if Ray Bradbury ever ate nails; I know less about him than some others. But I do know he wrote some very cool novels. I know he learned things about being an artist that I don’t know—yet. I know if I try hard enough, I will eventually discover such arcana. Even if I’m the only person in Burundi writing a story set on a train in Nebraska. Even if I’m in an empty room with a notebook and a bowl of rice with Pili-Pili sauce next to me. Even if I have to eat nails. Even then.
mission24: perseverance (Photo credit: greenkozi)
Creating reproductions of other works requires an extremely high level of technical proficiency. One’s subject matter will always be personal, but I want to encourage my students to deliberately acquire new technical skills by taking on the aesthetic of the writers they read.
In this sense, every text is a potential writing instructor. I have taught myself a lot by doing this assignment. For example, by imitating Melanie Rae Thon‘s imagistic descriptions, I learned how to make an idiosyncratic first person voice graphic. By imitating Hemingway, I learned greater control of the line, of syntax, as a mode of characterization. By imitating Thom Jones, I learned to appreciate tragicomic realism, which led me to the work of Denis Johnson, which ultimately led me to Maupassant and Isaac Babel.
I want my students to learn to see how one writer connects to another stylistically and thematically. I tell them to imitate everyone. Fill notebook after notebook. This is how one practices, how one acquires a technique that can render and evoke anything the story needs at any point.
And it never ends. We should use the library as the ultimate resource for self-education, the ultimate art studio. None of this will cause a writer to forget herself or her own voice. On the contrary, it will enrich her style, inform her subject matter, and teach her more about who she is as a working artist.
