Category: fiction writing

Ignis Fatuus

A story about ghosts and possums.

I saw my nephew, Ricky, in the Amvets parking lot on a freezing Saturday in December with a centimeter of slick ice on the blacktop and a fair amount of booze in my veins.  My three friends, Burt, Leo, and Klaus, came out with me to the car, since I was their ride.  Bar time was now midnight at Amvets because the owner lacked joie de vivre.

I recognized Ricky immediately.  He was sitting on the hood of my Tercel.  When we got close, he pulled a gun out of his parka.

“Ima stick you up.”

Burt said, “You gotta be fucking kidding me.”

Leo said, “You better get us all in one shot, kid, or you’re in some shit.”

And my friend, Klaus, the only one I could ever stand in the late hours after we’d all been kicked out of Amvets, said, “You’re definitely in some shit.  That’s a pellet gun.”

“This ain’t no pellet gun, dawg.  You wanna test me?”  Ricky held it up so we could see it in the moonlight.  Then he pointed it at each of us.

“Hi, Ricky.”

“Uncle Dave?”

I nodded, wobbly on the ice.

“Hey I remember when you had that piñata for your birthday,” Klaus said.  “What was that, like five years ago?  How’s your mom?”

“Don’t say shit about my mom.”

“Come on, man.  I also know your dad.  Kevin, right?  I know your whole family.”

Ricky glared and turned the pellet gun on Klaus.

Leo yawned.  “Why don’t you just put that thing away?  You might kill a bird.”

Everyone but the stick-up kid thought it was funny.

“You wanna flex on me, motherfucker?”

“Who is this guy?” Burt said.  “And why is he talking like that?”

“It’s the rap music.”  Leo fished keys out of side pocket of my jacket before I could object.  He had long fingers and had once made a living as a pickpocket.  The more he drank, the more graceful and charming he got with bartenders and waitresses and the more likely he was to rob them.  In a way, I envied that about him.  Even his problems were smooth.

“It’s the Internet,” Klaus said.

“Video games.”  Burt leaned against the car and crossed his arms.

Leo nodded.  “Yeah.  And the social media.”

“That’s clearly a pellet gun,” I said.

“Uncle Dave, I didn’t even know this was your car.”

“It’s okay, Ricky.  Get in.  We’ll drive you home.”

That evening in Amvets, I’d been hugged by a woman named Celestina, who’d been after me since high school.  Now that we were both old and divorced and only associated with our respective groups of friends, she must have concluded the time was right for a full-body embrace.

The time was not.  She’d been sitting on the barstool next to me, ignoring her two friends the same way I’d been ignoring Burt, Leo, and Klaus.  Then, without warning, she put down her empty glass, slid half off her stool, leaned in, and hugged me.  Celestina was a wide woman, stronger than she looked.  When she hugged me, I had to stand up.  She whispered something in my ear, but I couldn’t make out what she said over the music.

Someone had played Waylon Jennings’ Never Could Toe the Mark in the jukebox and it was loud, louder than anything I’d ever heard played in Amvets.  You rarely heard country blasting out of the ceiling.  But time and space had distorted while steady pressure was being applied to my body by the woman who’d sat behind me in Civics decades before.

I knew I’d see her around town.  Hauberk, Missouri, was on the small side and you ran into the same people about once or twice a month.  Celestina and I were destined to encounter each other again in line at the bank or next to each other at a stoplight on Lagniappe Way, or drifting through the produce section of Harveys.  Then we’d both have to smile and nod hello and think of her hugging me off my stool.

We’d all squeezed into the Tercel when she came out, waving at us across the parking lot.  She almost slipped on the ice in her big, puffy, white jacket.

“Who’s the old lady?” asked Ricky.

“Christmas,” said Burt.  “No, Christina.”

“No,” Leo pumped the gas as the engine sputtered.  “Celestina.  Like the stars.”

“You’re gonna flood it,” I said.  “You don’t need to do that.  Just relax.  It’ll go.”

“She’s coming over here,” Klaus said.

“Bitch be crazy.”  Ricky took out his pellet gun.  “Ima blast her.”

I put my hand on the gun and guided it down.  “Don’t do that.  She nice.  She’s just got a drinking problem like everybody else.”

“Oh shit,” Ricky said.  “I’m not sure, but I think she works at Hoover.  I think she’s the nurse.”

“You’d know if you ever went to class,” Klaus said.

The engine turned over and the vents started to blast hot air.  Leo rolled down the window and smiled at Celestina.  “How’s it going?” he said.

“Hello,”  She leaned over and peered past Leo into the car.  It took her a moment to place me in the backseat.  “Dave, I think you, um, left your wallet at the bar.”

I smiled and nodded even though I could feel my wallet in my back pocket.

Celestina straightened up and held it out to Leo, her breath hanging around her like a halo in the moonlight.

“Well, thank you kindly.”  Leo handed it back to my nephew without looking away and Ricky immediately removed the bills, folding them into his jacket pocket.

“Say,” Leo said, “you wouldn’t be interested in a nightcap over at David’s house, would you?”

You sonofabitch, I thought.  You absolute, pristine, solid-state sonofabitch.

She focused on Leo as if she were noticing him for the first time.  Then her eyes came to rest on Ricky sitting between me and Klaus.  “No, but thank you.  I think I should go home.  I have to work tomorrow.”  She tilted like she was about to pass out.

“Oh, that’s a shame.”  Leo gave her his minty smile.  “Don’t be a stranger, Celestina.”

She smiled back, glassy but very happy, showing teeth, and hugged herself, trying not to shiver in spite of the enormous jacket.

Burt leaned across Leo and said, “You better get inside.  It’s cold out here.”

“Yeah,” she said, swaying a little but still smiling.  “Good-night to you all.  Good-night, Dave!”

Burt waved and said good-night, but we pulled away before she could hear.  I looked back and saw her standing in the parking lot, still hugging herself, staring at the car.

When we hit the street, I dropped my hand on Leo’s shoulder and he flinched.  “Why are you turning my nephew into a fucking criminal?”

“You mean the kid with the gun?”

“I’m sitting right here,” Ricky said.

Burt turned around in the passenger seat and coughed out a nicotine booze cloud.  “It’s a good thing you are.  Good thing you ran into us instead of some cop or a peckerwood with a hog leg.”

Ricky ignored him.  He held the wallet open and squinted at it like an old man who’d lost his spectacles.  “Terry . . . Ig-nat-ee-us.”

“Igneous?” asked Burt.  “Like the rock?  That’s a weird one.”

“Gimmie that.”  Klaus snatched the wallet and angled it toward the window.  “Ignatius.  Terrence Ignatius.  Any of you guys know a Terry Ignatius?”

“Never heard of him,” Leo said.  “Let me concentrate.  I get another DUI and it’s over.”

“You don’t strike me as the kind of dude who’d have multiple DUIs,” I said.  “Then again, you don’t strike me as the kind of dude who’d encourage somebody’s nephew to steal money out of a stranger’s wallet.”

This made everyone laugh, even Ricky.

“I am that dude,” Leo said to the windshield.

“He’s not a stranger.”  Klaus snapped the wallet shut.  “He’s Terry Ignatius.  We know him.  He’s our buddy, Terry.  Good guy.”

“You guys’r fuckin’ strange,” said Ricky.

Burt sighed.  “You don’t know the half of it.”

Leo dropped me off and they continued on in my car.  He said he’d bring it back in the morning, but I knew he wouldn’t.  The night was young and there were other cars to drive before bed.  It would take me two or three days and that many bus rides to get the Tercel back but, like Leo, I couldn’t get another DUI.  Unlike Leo, I didn’t talk about it to Burt and Klaus.  Each of us had our things, our lingering problems, our punishments and payments, times when we’d made wrong turns or said wrong things or spent money or didn’t spend money or got in cars with the wrong people or made promises when we should have kept quiet.  Leo had his own car, but he never drove it.

I walked up the outside steps to my tiny apartment, stopped to listen at the Porres’ door to see if Martin Porres was beating his wife—their customary family activity on Saturday night.  But it was all silent.  Was that good sign or was it bad?  I decided to believe it was good and not think about it.  Because who the hell was I?

Usually, when he was ranting and slamming doors and she was calling him a cocksucker and their two kids were crying and the dog was howling, I’d knock and one of them would answer, usually her, and say what do you want.  I’d say excuse me but can you keep it down?  She’d wipe her eyes and look at me more closely and say oh it’s you.  And I’d say yeah, from upstairs.  And then she’d say sorry and shut the door.  We did that every weekend.  It added continuity to our lives.  But tonight, nothing.

My apartment was spare, save a few pieces of yard sale furniture.  A Formica table with two rattan chairs, a diseased-looking velour Barcalounger with a rip down the seat, a mini-fridge and a two-burner stove, a twin mattress on the floor of my little bedroom with a cardboard box as a bureau-nightstand.  I didn’t have a lot of clothes, either.  My most valuable possession was the Tercel.  I wasn’t some kind of ascetic, but I’d had reversals since the divorce.  Money was infrequent.  I was currently between jobs and had sold or pawned most of my things.  I opened all the windows and sat at the table in the dark.  I had an almost-full bottle of wine and, though my head was pounding and I felt unsettled by the Porres’ silence, I poured some in a coffee mug and started to drink.

Air had gotten into the bottle and I hadn’t touched it in about a week.  So the wine already tasted like vinegar, but whatever.  I turned on the radio, found the old person’s jazz station.  Thankfully they weren’t playing Kenny G or fucking Manhattan Transfer.  I turned Ugetsu up as loud as the little speaker would go without buzzing.  It was Saturday night.  If the Porreses weren’t screaming, I wanted to do my part.

That was one thing—the frozen wind coming in, lifting the dusty lace curtains.  Sometimes a car hissed along the street.  Apart from such infrequent movement, there’s a certain stillness after bar time, when all the drug freaks and booze mutants have either passed out, holed up somewhere, or are making their way home as quietly and inconspicuously as possums on a moonless night.  Because, at such a time, every possum knows the same universal truth.  When all your friends have left, there’s only one way to get your car back to the driveway: side streets, frontage roads, alleys, and the occasional cornfield turnrow.  At least, that’s the Missouri version.

When you do get home, you open all the windows and put on some music.  You give thanks.  You drink whatever awful remainder’s lurking in the back of the cupboard.  And you try not to dwell on the foolishness you’ve seen earlier in the evening or that you’re bound to participate in later in the night.  This constitutes a good time, all things considered.  If the night ends there, you’re safe.  You’re lucky.  The things you don’t remember don’t have to be remembered.  And you can’t be held accountable for things you haven’t done.

Tomorrow will happen in the fullness of time and you will not need to contact an attorney or make a court appearance in ten days.  But if the night doesn’t end there, be advised that whatever happens between the hours of 2 and 5 AM may negate all your previous good luck.  They call midnight the witching hour, but they call 3 AM the devil’s hour.  And they call it that for a reason.

But a ghost or an ignis fatuus can appear earlier than that: I saw her puffy white jacket at a distance hovering over the dark snow like a will-o’-the-wisp.  And I thought, what are the chances?  In a small town like Hauberk, the chances are already decent and in the devil’s hour they might even be fair-to-good that you will see some degenerate you left at the bar wandering down your street.  Maybe drawn by the hard bop tumbling out your windows.  Maybe just following the serendipitous magnetism that the devil’s hour exerts over all creatures of the night.  Celestina’s jacket reminded me of a large segmented marshmallow.  The night wouldn’t be over for me until dawn.  Apparently, it wasn’t over for her, either.

I moved to the Barcalounger by the window and watched until she was half a block away.  Then she noticed me.

“Hey!”  She waved, swaying in the snow, her eyes half shut.  “Hey, you live here?”

“A lot of the time.”

“I can’t find my car.”

“Amvets is ten blocks back the way you came.”

“What?”  Celestina looked around.  Did she still think she was in the parking lot?  Her black hair had gotten stringy and stiff in the cold.  The way she swayed, I thought she might fall.

“You better come up.”

“Oh, I couldn’t, Dave.”

“You better.  Then we can find your car.”

She processed the thought, then nodded.  “Okay,” she said.  “I like you, Dave.  You’re a good . . . ”

“No, I’m not a good.  I’ll be right down.”

Celestina was bigger than me.  When she slipped on the narrow stairs, one arm hooked around my neck, we both nearly fell backwards.  It made her laugh.  I couldn’t tell if it was because she was drunk or embarrassed or a bit of both.  But I couldn’t pass judgement.  I thought of how many times I’d come home from Amvets and slipped on those concrete stairs.  To be honest, I’d done much worse.

I let her down in the Barcalounger then hung her enormous white jacket up on the back of the door. I pulled one of my wobbly rattan kitchen chairs across from her and offered her my cup of wine, but she waved it off.

“I had a dream about you,” she said, her head nodding forward.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah, a really great dream. It was beautiful.”

“What was it?”

“We were walking through a field of sunflowers.” Her head dipped again if she were going to topple forward out of the chair. “They were huge.”

“I’ve never had a dream like that, but it sounds nice.”

“It was nice. We were holding hands.”

I leaned forward and held my hand out. She took it in her big puffy grip. I thought I could at least keep her from falling out of the chair that way. She had a nice hand, warm and enveloping in spite of the cold wind coming in the open window beside us and the snowy blocks she’d walked.

I turned down the radio and we sat there for a while, listening to Sister Sadie, my left hand holding Celestina’s right, her nodding then gripping my hand harder to steady herself, me staring at the discolored circle over the door where the clock used to be.  I’d even pawned the clock.  Got $15 for it.

Eventually, she grew quiet and still, passed out.  Maybe she was dreaming about sunflowers.  Then I had to let go of her hand because Leo knocked.  I knew it was him.  I’d have known even if I hadn’t been expecting him.  He had that soft, tentative knock—just like the way he’d smile and say something kind while picking a waiter’s pocket and ordering the souffle. Behind him came Burt and Klaus. They were holding cups of coffee.  Everyone looked sober.

“Shit,” Burt said, closing both windows. “What’re you trying to do, get pneumonia?”

“That’s right,” I said. “You got me.”

Leo raised an eyebrow at Celestina and grinned. “So you and her, huh?”

“No. You wouldn’t believe it.  She was just walking down the street.”

“This street?” Klaus said it flat with the straight face that meant he was joking.

“I was sitting here and she kind of floated down the sidewalk.”

“I can see her doing that, floating,” Leo said.

“What happened to my nephew?”

“Took him home,” Burt said. “You know, he’s kind of a shit. He’s on a bad path. He better straighten up and fly right.”

“Yeah, I know.”

“Well,” said Leo, “it’s getting about that time.”

I nodded, put the cup of rancid chianti on the floor next to Celestina. Then I went into the bedroom closet and got the bolt cutter, a mini crowbar, an old sawed-off Ruger over-and-under, a box of buckshot, the HK 9mm that looked like it had been burned in a fire but still worked, and a hardware store machete. I wrapped it all in a pillowcase.

On our way to the door, we stopped and looked at Celestina, now snoring loudly, her head lolled to the side. Burt said hold on, got my bedspread, and covered her with it, tucking it under her chin. Then the four of us went out and crept softly down the stairs.  A car I’d never seen was idling on the street.  We got in and put our seatbelts on.  Burt and Klaus sipped their coffee.  Leo pulled away from the curb and we glided into the dark.

Consider the Kitten

When I see something ignorant, robotic, and false being held up as brilliant, innovative, and true, I think of how good my life must be.  I tell myself there will always be stupidity and hypocrisy in the world, especially in writing and publishing.  I remind myself that it’s better to feel compassion for people caught up in mistakes than criticize their blindness.  And I admit that I’m fallible.

Yet there are moments when human nature undercuts my better judgment and I feel willing to kick the kitten that just vomited something on my doorstep.  I’m not proud of such feelings.  But no matter how much I meditate, no matter how much Thich Nhat Hanh I read, there’s a cruel, stony part of me that just doesn’t care.  It’s a hard world, Fluffy.  Get off my porch.

I quit smoking 20 years ago.  Everyday some part of me still wants a cigarette, which is probably why the characters in my short stories smoke.  At least someone still gets to enjoy it.  But I’ve had some great writing insights over cigarettes and coffee—more, I’m inclined to think, than I do now, even if my caffeine consumption has grown to replace the nicotine.  I have clean lungs and a rapid heartbeat.  I’m wired but not as wise.

This might be the root of my intolerance.  Some writers really need to start drinking again.  They’re not able to produce unless they do.  Maybe if I went out and bought a carton of Camel Lights, I’d look at many of the insipid things currently promoted as quality writing and smile along with the alcoholic cigarette ghost fume of Jack Kerouac, who once declared in a letter: “I don’t know; I don’t care; and it doesn’t make any difference.”  That’s it.  Light up.  Nothing matters.

Long ago, at the University of Montana, I found myself on a smoke break during a one-day-a-week, four-hour creative nonfiction workshop that nobody wanted to take.  There were five or six other MFA-program degenerates in the class.  We couldn’t get the workshops and literature sections we needed due to a writing professor having a midlife meltdown the previous spring (which included loudly and publicly criticizing his terminally ill wife, sleeping with his students, physically threatening other faculty in the hall, and declaring that he thought we were all imbeciles).  Of course, he had tenure.  So he went on leave.  Now it was almost Christmas.  And we’d signed up for electives to kill time and keep our tuition waivers flowing until the search committee hired a temporary replacement.  Morale was low.

When English studies people fall, they fall hard.  This is known.  We were all trying to keep it together.  Hence multiple smoke breaks behind the five-story, brutalist classroom building in the dark, snow up to our knees.  There was, I should admit, a deluge of alcohol being consumed that semester.  Cocaine was too ambitious and, honestly, too expensive.  But whiskey in Montana?  Shit, it came out of the water fountains.

Andrea was my smoke-break buddy.  She’d go out the back of the building and lean against the parking lot hydrant.  I always ran into it because it was covered in snow.  Paying attention to things like hidden fire hydrants seemed to require a volume of positive life-affirming energy I just didn’t have.  So I barked my shins on it regularly.  But that was Andrea’s bitter smoking spot.  Out in the desolate lot in her enormous down jacket, she was a shadow and a tiny ember.  I’d walk over and stand next to her.  We wouldn’t talk much.  The protagonist in every one of Andrea’s stories was Taylor Swift.  Once you know that, there isn’t much left to say.

She spent a lot of time obsessing over Lauren, a fellow student and the darling of the department, whose dad was a media executive and had paved his daughter’s way to a book deal and literary fame well before she came to grad school.  This was the ostensible origin of Andrea’s bitterness.  No one suggested that, apart from having family in publishing, success might have been more forthcoming if Andrea hadn’t made every story about Taylor Swift.  But nobody knew anything.  If her collection of stories had gotten published alongside Lauren’s novel and Andrea had gone on a big book tour, everyone, especially the faculty, would have seen it as a sign of the new literary age, the new 20 under 30.  But as it was, Lauren remained the “it girl.”

Sometimes we talked about Lauren, who no one ever saw in class because she was skiing in Vail or visiting friends in Spain or doing a book tour or attending a gallery opening.  We had to sit in a bright classroom that smelled like hospital disinfectant.  We had to read each other’s boring attempts at fiction-adjacent prose and make helpful comments.  And when we weren’t doing that, we had to talk about things like Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Year of Magical Thinking, and the rhetoric of Vietnam war propaganda.  Meanwhile, Lauren was living the life.

Maybe Andrea forgot what I remembered: I was here to talk about those things, not to lead the life.  This was not real life.  This was a sub-dimension, a demimonde, an absurd mirror world where we could obsess about each other, be jealous and competitive over silly things, and wind up reading texts we never wanted to read in classes we never wanted to take.  A small part of me knew it was glorious and someday I’d look back at it like a weird fairyland where I had seemingly unlimited hours to write and think and talk about art.  And maybe that radiated outward because I always seemed to cheer Andrea up on our smoke breaks, even if we didn’t talk all that much.

But the smoke break I remember so vividly was the one where Andrea pulled out a hardcover of Lauren’s recently published novel and handed it to me without comment.  I’m not going to name it because Lauren and her novel are real and the book is still in print.  I’d read parts of it in previous workshops and I knew, just as Andrea knew, that it was garbage.

Lauren had everything necessary for meteoric success and it didn’t hurt that she was charming, smart, cultured, and gorgeous.  But she couldn’t write.  Years later, I’d hear that her prestigious publishing house performed a very invasive round of edits to the point where subsequent drafts were almost ghostwritten (maybe ghost rewritten).  But I chalked that up to jealous post-program rumors.  Now, I’m not so sure.

I remember angling the book so I could see it in the light from classrooms, snowflakes landing on the pages.  I remember Andrea blowing a funnel of smoke at my face, as if to say, “See?” or maybe “Take that, you cheerful moron.”  Take that.  Take it and like it.

I handed the book back, and said, “Good for Lauren.”

And I remember Andrea shaking her head, smiling at the corners of her mouth, taking long drags, saying, “Yeah.  Good for Lauren.”

I don’t know what became of Andrea.  After the program, we lost touch.  I know Lauren didn’t publish another book.  She got her degree and disappeared into the soft world prepared for her since birth, a world in which Andrea and I would never set foot.  And to be honest, I don’t blame Lauren for anything.  In the arts, you have to use everything at your disposal, every advantage you can, to do what you’re called to do.  If I’d had fancy connections and book deals, I’d have been leveraging those things.  Andrea would, too. Without a doubt, there’d be a book of short stories with Taylor Swift’s face on the front and Andrea’s on the back.

But sometimes, when I see the same things over and over, when I see the vampires and shills of the publishing world salivating over the shitty writing of a young, attractive first-book all-star, who—let’s be honest—can’t help that she’s young and attractive or that her writing is shit, I don’t feel all that compassionate.  I don’t blame her.  I feel angry at the cynicism in the marketing.  I know she’s a lost kitten who only wants to be loved.  But when I read something like this about to come out with a Big Six publishing house, I might feel inclined to kick her off my front step:

In the little courtyard off Piazza di Santa Maria, the robins are flitting like a crimson rain around the fountain and the statues of great writers no one remembers.  The sky is sad, overcast, and the wind from the café carries the scent of patriarchy and the tears of the forgotten whose poems will never be spoken.  You sit across from me in the melancholy breeze, sipping your Cinzano, your long lashes seductive and unaware of the robin at your elbow, and I am brought back to the fields of San Salvador.  The robins are joyful, but soon they will cry.

I wonder if this person’s parents are famous designers or wealthy investors or successful movie producers.  I hope so.  Otherwise, the sky will truly be sad after this book gets pushed out to pay some business debt that has nothing to do with its author or its contents.

My smoke breaks with Andrea may have taught me more than the classes we were in.  At least I’m still working.  I hope Andrea is, too.  Now I can look back at our writing program with a certain amusement, maybe amazement. I am not a monster, most days.  And I wouldn’t say no to anyone who wants to write a book and happens to have the juice to put that book in front of a large audience.  Better this author than an AI; though, an AI might write it better.

In my more generous moods, I want to bless anyone who cares about literary fiction enough to get involved and try to make some.  But the Andrea part of me, the skeptical, hard-hearted part, is still standing in the snow, thinking, “What the fuck?”

Being a Creative Writer in an Age of Anxiety

A colleague of mine, a self-employed commercial artist and science fiction writer I will call “Jim,” recently declared, “If you’re a man getting close to your 50s and you haven’t done something yet, don’t say you’re doing to do it someday because you probably won’t.”  Jim was criticizing another guy in the same industry, who he doesn’t like and who seems to be loudly and visibly struggling in his career. 

Strangely, Jim is also getting close to his 50s, hasn’t done all the things he wants to do, and is also existing paycheck to paycheck, trying to live off his self-published work (which is quite good, in my opinion).  The difference between them is the other guy whines loudly and constantly plugs his GoFundMe, while Jim works harder and (mostly) swallows his frustration.

Jim’s comments on social media are usually criticisms of people who complain about their difficult lives instead of working hard like him.  I can accept that attitude.  If anyone has earned the right to be scornful of the weak, it’s someone who started off in a weak position and made themselves strong or, in Jim’s case, perhaps marginally stronger.  Still, it doesn’t feel good when his angst rises and he starts punching down.

His pronouncement above sounds like flinty entrepreneurial wisdom—Yoda in a self-made, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps vein: do or do not (in your career, in your life); there is no try.  But I know his criticism and anger are rooted in his own insecurities, not in some external source.  We’re always the most critical of our own family, our own friends, our own professional colleagues, members of our own communities and cultures because, when they fail, it makes us feel like we’re next. 

Jim was, to use a trendy term, “triggered,” and he had to release the vapors.  We all have that friend who tries to speak like a philosopher or social critic as a way of purging anxiety and legitimating his concerns.  Sometimes, I do that, too.  So I’m not trying to be inordinately critical of Jim or except myself from a behavior that seems common among sensitive people, particularly artists and writers.  If you’re not bothered by something, you usually have little motivation to write or speak about it publicly, especially on a blog or in a magazine op-ed or on social media.  But in order to understand the criticism Jim’s making, we also have to know something about arts communities and social timing.

A creative community, whether physical (like a writer’s colony, a brick-and-mortar magazine, or a college art program) or on social media, is a perpetual knife fight in a submarine.  It goes without saying that in every creative field, money is always tight, careers are always precarious, hyper-competitiveness is the rule, commercialism undercuts everything, and exploitation is a fact of life. 

These hardships and uncertainties naturally produce immense anxiety, since survival is always at issue on some level, even when you ostensibly “make it” and get famous.  As the actress, Jewel Staite, drolly notes on her Twitter profile, “I like routine, predictability, and living a non-stressful existence, which is why I’ve chosen the film industry.”  That’s darkly funny.  But it’s also true: life as an artist isn’t simple or calm.  You don’t get job security, even when people know who you are.  You’re always on the make.

Keeping this in mind makes it easier to see how tearing down other creatives can become a Malthusian side hustle.  If they’re wounded, the instinct may be to kick them where it hurts.  If they’re down, put your foot on their back.  Do unto others before they can do unto you.  More table scraps for you that way.  You’ll feel less vulnerable, less likely to die in poverty and obscurity, less hopeless, lost, and ashamed that you ever considered yourself worthy to live a creative life.

If publicly criticizing others relieves your constant, grinding dread, even if only for a moment, it will be tempting.  But there’s a problem with that way of being, apart from its meanness and craven pettiness: it makes you less able to do your own imaginative work.  Competitiveness and the anxiety that stimulates it erodes creativity.  It demands your emotional energy, the power you should be channeling into your creative process.  And it makes you feel like you have to court public visibility at all costs to protect yourself from others like you.  It brings to mind Putin parading around his nukes, saying don’t mess with me.  I’m serious business.  That’s exhausting.  Artists should not have nukes.

This is why I have generally avoided arts communities; though, social media has put most writers like me in a perpetual online detention camp with my peers (and the current surge of AI art paranoia isn’t helping one bit).  The pandemic only exacerbated the tensions and forced online interactions that would not have been advisable in any other era.  Add the wave of self-conscious, humorless, social-activist writing still moving through pop-culture and the creative life seems nothing but an exercise in misery.

Western, middle-class, social timing says that by certain decades of life, one should have certain things and be certain things.  But very few people will admit that they fall short of those ideals.  One cannot log onto Twitter or Facebook without seeing some financial marketing come-on that goes, “How many millions will you need to retire?”  In other words, how much money will you need to avert an ugly humiliating end after you retire?  Millions?  Most artists and writers have thousands (or hundreds) in the bank.  Some, who are actually very gifted and good at what they do, live below the poverty line.

So I think I understand Jim when he says if you haven’t done a thing by 50, you aren’t going to.  He’s not talking to you or me.  He’s talking to himself.  Because he’s thinking about social timing and emoting like a neurotic artist in a creative community, wondering if he’s destined to die in the gutter.

While I don’t accept the assumptions that go into the success / failure binary encouraged by middle-class social timing—I think it’s a little more complicated and there’s more room to live how you want to live, if you’re willing to make compromises—I also think it’s better to work hard than pump your GoFundMe for sympathy change.  But I feel sad when I see a talented colleague desperately cutting down some other poor sap who’s just trying to make the rent any way he can.

We get one life.  It isn’t over ’till it’s over.  And ultimately we get to do what we want as long as we’re willing to accept the consequences.  That means, if you really love being an artist, you’ll choose art.  The hard part is making that choice in a relaxed, generous way.

Black Ribbon

Then my uncle bought the costume shop.  And, for a while, things got interesting again.  New Years Eve, 1991, he let me borrow a classic notch-lapel tuxedo and some patent leather shoes.  The whole package.  Socks.  A cotton laydown collar shirt.  Onyx links.  And a midnight solid bow tie.

“You look like James Bond,” he said.  Then he turned to my friend, Evert, and said, “You look like James Bond’s hairdresser.”

“Thanks, Uncle Tim,” Evert said.

“Why do you hang out with this guy?”

“I don’t know,” I said.  “But, yeah, thanks.”

Evert was wearing the same thing I was.  But Uncle Tim never felt right unless he was giving somebody a hard time.  He was basically a good guy, funny too.  I was sad when they found him three years later.

This was supposed to be a fun night.  The Hotel Escondido threw a big party every year.  You needed formalwear to get in.  And an invitation.  So Evert and I already had the problem half solved thanks to my uncle, who now sold costumes but also wedding gowns, tuxedos, and second hand suits.

He put three folded hundreds in my pocket and gave me a hug.  “Don’t give any to goofball over there.”

Evert was waiting by the door.  “I can hear you,” he said.

“Be careful,” Uncle Tim said and chucked me on the shoulder.

I was 18.  The year before, Evert and I snuck into the Hotel Escondido in the best clothes we could find.  I was in my old pinstripe Confirmation suit that I had to keep unbuttoned because it had started to tear inside.  Evert wore a sweater and khakis.  We ate canapés, got drunk on fancy champagne, watched the fireworks from a stone balcony, and made out with girls two years older than us, who said they were getting paid to be there.  After midnight, Evert and I escaped through the side entrance one step ahead of security.  It was great.

This year, we were going to do it right.  We’d studied the floorplan.  We knew the exits.  We knew what to say to security.  And with Uncle Tim’s assistance, I felt we were bound to meet some nice girls this time who weren’t being paid.

When we got in my ancient Rambler, Evert said, “Why is your uncle such a dick?”

“He gave us these suits, didn’t he?”

“He’s a dick.”

“He’s old school.  He went to jail a couple years ago.  He had a messed-up childhood.”

“Dick.”

It was somewhat true.  Uncle Tim could act obnoxious, always seemed a little angry, dressed in all polyester, and smoked too much.  But he could pick you up with one hand.  He loved dogs.  And his laughter could almost knock you over.  Nobody talked about why he went to jail.

I parked in the dark corner of a dirt lot seven blocks away from the hotel and set my two steering wheel locks.  Then I pulled the old Alpine out of the dash and put it in the trunk under a piece of cardboard and some crumpled newspapers. Downtown San Diego in the late 1990s wasn’t bad.  And the Rambler wasn’t good. But such were the cars that usually got jacked—the buckets.  And anything Honda.  Evert never stopped making fun of me for using two steering wheel locks on a car like mine, to which I always responded, “Get your own fucking car, then,” and to which he never had a comeback.

The street was ghost empty.  And we could see the Hotel Escondido’s lights turning the everything yellow down at the end.  It had originally been a 15-story office building, built on a hill in 1949 in a time before mirror-glass and rooftop helipads.  It had gargoyles.  The elevators were marble and brass and smelled like old metal.  And there were butt urns set every few feet down the halls.  If you were going to crash a big holiday party, that was the place.

The festivities would be in the ballroom on the ground floor, an enormous space with parallel staircases on either side sweeping up to a vast mezzanine and a stone veranda that overlooked the lights of India Street and the bay.  What most didn’t know was that there was a dirt trail up the side of the hill to a small, unlockable wrought-iron gate.  The gate opened onto a narrow service staircase that led up the side of the building to the veranda.

When I’ve told others about that night, they’ve asked me, “Did you get thrown out?” as if that were the punchline, the most important detail, some kind of moral at the end.  I never know what to say.  Of course we got thrown out.  Was it a stupid plan?  Of course it was.  Were we stupid kids?  My answer to that is all kids are stupid at 18.  The trick to having more good memories than bad is to be the right kind of stupid at the right time.

Later, I waited in the Rambler in front of Evert’s house while he changed into some sweats.  He brought his tux out in a large paper grocery bag, shoes on top.

“Tell your uncle thanks.  But I don’t think I’ll be doing this again.”

I nodded, waved, and pulled into the street.  In the rear-view, I saw Evert standing in the drive next to his mother’s gray Pinto, watching me go.  We wouldn’t be doing this again because Evert was headed to college in a few months.  And I was headed nowhere.  Uncle Tim already said I could work for him at the shop.  I was considering it.  But it wasn’t something I felt like talking about.

When we snuck down from the veranda, we expected a grand ballroom full of people.  But it was half-empty and it didn’t look like the management had paid any models to stand around and look glamorous.  The DJ was spinning solid ’70s disco and nobody there looked under 40.  A few drunk soccer moms were doing something that vaguely resembled the Twist in the middle of the floor, acting more self-conscious than the kids at my high school dances.  No waiters with canapés.  Only a long buffet table with a cashier at the end.

It took about an hour for security to notice us and show us to the door.  We didn’t run.  It was too depressing and low energy for that.  Last year, they’d worn tuxedos, too, and had little earpieces like in a spy flick.  This year it was black windbreakers with SECURITY in yellow block letters across the back.

“Let’s go.”  A windbreakered guard with curly blond hair beneath a black and yellow ball cap that read “A-1” put his hand on my shoulder and guided me toward the lobby.  Evert trailed, looking down, hands in his pockets.

“I’ve got an invitation,” I said.

“Sure.” The guard opened one of the front double doors for me.  “Have a happy new year.”

“You, too,” Evert said, “You have a hell of a year,” as the guard shut the door softly behind us.

Evert lived with his mom and sister about five minutes from Pacific Beach.  After I dropped him off, I parked in an alley near Crystal Pier and walked down to the end.  The beach bars were full.  You could hear the distant shouting and music like little pockets of chaos, little hell caverns, each competing for some sort of reward to see who could be the most crazy and perverse.  The Garden of Earthly Delights.  Every New Year’s Eve, the whole world became that painting.

The pier smelled like creosote and rotten wood.  It went far and high enough over the water that you could dive off the end and swim back.  At least, that’s what everybody said.  Or you could die.  It was a big dare, one of the many opportunities for making a bad decision you encountered as a teen in San Diego.  The bad kind of stupid.  I thought about jumping.  I could give the ruined tuxedo back to Uncle Tim with the $300 and make up some wild story.  He’d love it.  Instead, I leaned against the railing and looked back at the city glittering electric in every color of the rainbow.

To my left, one of the fishermen you saw on the beach all hours of the day and night took a swig of something in a paper bag and said, “Prom?”

“New Year’s.”

“Wow.”  He smiled, adjusting his fishing pole against the rail.  “Fuck that.”

The sky was clear.  There was a full moon.  And you can’t stay at the end of a pier forever, even though there were some nights I’d spend hours there, leaning against the rough wooden railing.  If the beach bars sounded like an infernal Hieronymus Bosch pep rally, the ocean at night was a different sort of hell: black ribbon over glittery onyx, the sound of the surf letting you know there’s a lot going on out in that faceless, trackless dark and you’re right on the edge.  One step off the pier was all it took to be part of it forever.

Time of night changes the darkness on a street, even if it’s beachfront and lit up like New Year’s Eve.  I walked down Ocean Front, avoiding the crowds in front of the bars, made a left on Hornblend, and crossed Mission.  Tourists from New Jersey, Connecticut, Vancouver, New Mexico, all drunk, packed ten to a truck, no shirts, speeding pale through the streetlights, hollering, tossing crumpled beer cans at the dark storefronts.

Growing up in San Diego, I saw them every year, every holiday, every summer night I spent at the beach.  No big thing.  Half of them would be arrested by dawn.  A fourth would go home and make up tales of the vacation they’d had.  Maybe a sixth would believe their own lies and want to move to California someday.  But they’d never be able to afford it.  Or they’d get as far as Bakersfield and learn the true meaning of heartache.

I told myself if the party at the hotel had only been better, I’d feel differently about everything.  I told myself then I wouldn’t feel so depressed.  But none of that was real enough to be true.  It was just a story I was telling.  Truth was, I didn’t feel much of anything.  No anger.  No pain.  No regret.  No sense of missing out or that I had to search for something better.  Nothing but a faint melancholy, a vague tiredness.  High school, my life, was about waiting, everything calculated in terms of how long things were going to take, when I could expect them to end, what I’d have to put up with until they did.

And I told myself Evert had it better.  But what did I know?  “I don’t think I’ll be doing this again,” he’d said.  “Why is your uncle such a dick?” he’d said.  I could have told him some obscure Tibetan Buddhism fact from world history, “Yes, the answer is to just apply yak oil to the icon of Yidam Kurukulla and do the great dance of the Knowledge-Causing Mother-Buddha,” and Evert would have given me the exact same look.  The I’m leaving for college look.  The too bad you aren’t but that’s how it goes look.

Right on Bayard and down past Grand.  Left on Thomas where the old cinderblock apartment complexes rust and crumble to eternity.  At night, they look like industrial back lots for meat packing plants or ball joint factories.  Weird and empty.  Nothing you’d want to spend time in.  Orange-white safety lights always buzzing.  Concrete stairwells that smell like piss.  Some tatted-up, naked guy in a window, holding a bottle of wine.

Where was I walking at the end of 1991 in Uncle Tim’s notch-lapel tuxedo?  I thought the Rambler might have already been towed, which made everything feel even more tiring, more futile.  Home was in North Park, 20 minutes east on the 805, with a mother and father whose idea of a good New Year’s Eve was not having to suffer fools all night and start the new year with a headache.  They were smarter than me.  I told myself next year I’d go to bed early.

One of the apartments, three flights up, was open, light streaming down into an empty courtyard parking lot, stereo thumping.  A woman with long wavy green hair leaned over the metal railing and waved at me like otherwise I wouldn’t notice.

“Come up here,” she said.  Flannel shirt and jeans.  Very drunk.

I looked at her.

“Steve.  Come up and dance.”

The stereo inside was loud.  I had to shout.  “I think you got the wrong guy!”

“Steve!  Get up here!”

“I’m not Steve!”

“Don’t worry about it!”  She waved me up in wide, exaggerated arcs.  I thought she might lose her balance and go headfirst over the railing.

Inside, ten extremely drunk people were trying to dance in the small shag-carpeted living room.  A few cardboard boxes of Bud Light had been savagely torn open and unopened cans had rolled under the plastic coffee table.  On the couch, a very large man snored with his shirt unbuttoned, wet spot on his crotch, unlit cigarette between his fingers.  I looked at his hairy belly, at the green-haired woman who said her name was Ada.

“I’m Steve,” I said.  A joke.  But she was busy telling me how the man on the couch had stolen the beer out the back of a liquor store.

“He’s a genius,” she said.  “He’s Polfrey.”

“That’s his last name?”

She frowned up at me.  “What?”

I smiled and shrugged.

Ada stepped back and took me in.  “What’re you doing in that mod getup?”

“Not a lot,” I said.  And that she understood.

We danced.  We danced slow when everyone else was dancing fast and falling into each other.  Some bleached surfer went face-down into the plastic coffee table, rolled on his back, and laughed.  A girl in a burgundy pencil skirt and cream blouse, looking like she’d just got off work at an insurance office and didn’t approve of any of this, sat on Polfrey’s legs, took the cigarette from between his fingers, and lit it.  Someone sprayed beer on the stereo, on the window, on the splotchy ceiling light.  Someone said happy fucking New Year.

I thought Ada might be in her 30s, but at that time I wasn’t good at judging anyone’s age beyond my own.  She laid her head on my chest.  “You sure are dreamy, Steve.  I could take you home to mama.”

We went out in front of the apartment, kissed for a while, and leaned against the railing.  “But I don’t live with my mama.  You want me to take you home?  My girlfriend wouldn’t like that one bit.  You get high?  Do drugs?”

I said I didn’t and Ada patted me on the shoulder.  “That’s good, sweetie.  You keep that dreamy smile.”

“I should go,” I said.  “They might tow my car.”

She gave me a fierce hug and kissed me on the cheek.  “I’m gonna get high.”

At the edge of the parking lot, I looked back.  Ada was still standing at the railing, silhouetted in the doorway light, waving in slow motion, like when you watch someone’s ship pull away from the pier, not really expecting to see them but hoping you might catch one last glimpse.

Walking back to the Rambler, I decided that when I returned the tuxedo, I’d tell Uncle Tim I met a nice girl and we danced all night.  He’d say something like, after you ditched that moron friend of yours, right?  And I’d say yeah, that’s right.  Exactly.

Dominance and Submissions

Let’s say you’ve labored long in the fields of creative writing and the People Who Know (or maybe just the people who’ve noticed) have appreciated your talent.  Some have appreciated it loudly and publicly, some quietly to friends in ways that eventually come back to you, some through amazing feats of jealousy, and others through an unrelenting aggressive competitiveness that beggars belief.  The lower the stakes, the higher the vitriol is an axiom of creative culture.

Let’s also say that for the first decade of writing and submitting short stories to magazines with names like Lost Nose Quarterly, Barbaric Yawp, and Bitch Review, the feedback of the 25-year-old readers working on these magazines mattered.  Susie Lillywhite, the fiction editor at Uncommon Snuff, writes you a personalized rejection, praising your “humorous story of cis-het men behaving badly,” and your ever-present grinding self-doubt abates for ten full minutes; though, on minute 11, you wonder how Susie writes dialogue (“Hello, Mister Cisgendered Heteronormative Male.  How are you today?” / “Hello, Thinly Veiled Proxy For Susie Designed To Signpost Authorial Identity And Abate Criticism.  I am fine.”).

You get the inevitable raft of rejections and a few acceptances.  In time, your acceptance average goes up.  You know this because you obsessively gamify your submission process on a spreadsheet like fantasy baseball.  Maybe your box scores show progress.  Maybe all this effort means something—if not anything tangible in your day-to-day existence, then perhaps in a kind of working-fiction-writer sabermetrics that suggests your chosen life direction hasn’t been a horrible mistake.  Maybe the 500 hypothetical readers of Dogwater International are upping your short story RBI.  It’s possible.  Don’t say it isn’t.

You’ve got a novel in progress.  This goes without saying.  Everyone has a novel in progress.  Your screenwriter friend, Gaurangi, tells you she has two novels in progress, a poetry chapbook in progress, and a book of essays in progress.  Yet, she’s miserable and hates her life.  “Is that because you’re still assistant manager at KFC and can’t break through the glass ceiling?”  “No,” she says, “it’s because you’re a fucking asshole.”  You’ve been friends for 15 years.  Her name means “giver of happiness.”

There is no joy like mine, you think.  I am a cherry blossom adrift in the infinite cosmos.  The form email from GOAT Bomb sits in your inbox.  You can see that it begins, “Dear Valued Author, thank you for submitting to GOAT Bomb . . .” but you’ve been meditating.  And if zazen has taught you anything, it’s that impersonal form rejections are naught but the transcendent meanderings of The Great Vehicle.  The rejections aren’t depressing you.  It must be something else.

So let’s say you’ve also learned how to save money as an effective freelance survival tactic.  Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that you’ve managed to eke out an existence as a ghost writer and a copyeditor.  Let’s say, also for the sake of argument, that your cousin, who thought college was stupid, now makes low six figures as a construction manager and thinks you’re hilarious.  You see him at Christmas dinner, a rosy-cheeked beer-drinking construction Santa with a twinkle in his eye.  And he asks you the same thing he asked you last year: “Are you a mental midget?”  He finds the question hilarious.  “No,” you say.  “I mentally fidget.”  He can’t stop laughing.  “With your digits!”  In this family, we come together through spontaneous and combustive rhyming.  You don’t take it personally.

But you don’t follow baseball.  Thus, your spreadsheet submission game perpetually teeters on the edge of something else, deep and dark, eldritch and unspeakable, an existential abyss.  Why do you do it?  How does publishing another story in The East Punjabi Fiction Annual (that took you six months of sustained before-dawn writing sessions and seven painful drafts) matter in the construction management food-on-the-table sense?  You joke, but there are no rhymes for it, at least none that would entertain your cousin.

The fact is, you are a mental midget.  You must be if you still have to worry about putting ten more dollars on the credit card for a sandwich at Safeway—which isn’t Joe Biden’s fault.  So don’t start.  The supply chain is effed-up, yes.  Covid is ineffable, yes.  The pandemic shooed you out of Bangkok one step ahead of the Thai quarantine police, yes, and now you’re living in a Hawaiian jungle, but that has nothing to do with anything.  Here you are.  The feral rooster outside goes, “KEEEEE-YAAAAW-KOOOOO!”  And the great world turns with its comings and goings.

Smoke three cigarettes with Gaurangi in her Kia in the parking lot of KFC.  It’s midnight and she is off work.  You drove into Hilo just for this because it’s a miracle that you both now live in the same place and she texted you: come smoke a cigarette with me so I can cope with the fact that I manage idiots.  She won’t smoke at home because she has a two-year-old daughter and cigarettes are poison.  “I should move back to L.A.” she says.  “The fucking Big Island’s getting me nowhere.”  “You married a Hawaiian.”  She looks at you, drags deeply, and smiles.  “Yes.  That probably has something to do with why I’m here.”

One manages a KFC in Los Angeles if one wants to be a screenwriter, a whole different fantasy ballgame.  One brings one’s Hawaiian husband to a bungalow in Glendale.  Maybe one sells the script for She’s Gotta Have It 2, earning $135,000 for the original screenplay, including treatment, and suddenly it’s all cheddar.  One writes one’s friend in the jungle: I don’t hate L.A. now.  It is what it is.  Now one can calm down and finish that poetry chapbook in peace.

You’re drinking too much coffee and you read a lot of news. Some nut writing for The Conversation says Covid and climate change are going to turn coffee into a rare luxury item like Kobe beef or Cristal.  But the enormous tin of Safeway Select on top of your refrigerator suggests otherwise. You wonder how much the writer got paid to cook up a pandemic scare piece on coffee. What if you pitched something similar about a thing everybody wants being unceremoniously taken away by forces beyond one’s control? What about cheese: “Is Cheese Systemically Racist?  Biden Might be Coming for Your Gruyere.” Or sex: “The Death of Intimacy: Gen Z Prefers Online Porn to Sex and Who Can Blame Them?” Or healthcare: “The GOP Thinks Letting Grandpa Die is Good for the Economy.”  You write these ideas down and fire up the laptop.  There’s rent to be made.

At this point, there are many possibilities.  You’ve moneyballed your way into 30, 40 magazine publications.  You have three published story collections and a multitude of columns, articles, and essays floating through the aetheric digitalia.  But you still live in the jungle.  You’ve got a neighbor up the dirt road who deals with his emotions by smoking crack and shooting cats with his Marlin 60.  You’re still getting rejections from 25-year-olds and machines that go, “While we appreciate your interest in Dark Pissoir . . . “

Occasionally, some acquaintance on social media will pay attention to you for more than 30 seconds and wonder how you exist.  How do you make a living (or How can you possibly make a living?)?  You say as best you can.  There are 25-year-olds publishing novels with Random House.  There are 25-year-olds managing construction sites and getting welding certificates and buying their kids $900 gaming consoles.  And there’s a fine line of termite dust along the base of your hovel’s north wall.  Are you discouraged?  What does that mean, exactly?

Mapping the Swamp

Today, I think I overcame my hitherto impassable mental block, the one I always get between pages 50 and 70, that indicates I’ve hit the “swampy middle.” The term “great swampy middle” wasn’t invented by me. In fact, I have no desire to discover who first coined the term because I have no desire to utter it ever again; though, I fear that’s just wishful thinking. Of course, I’m going to talk about, think about, and confront the GSW again. I always get bogged down in the middle. It’s stopped me from completing whole books. It hits me in longer stories, too. The hideous abyss waiting for writers at the middle of a piece of fiction is an inevitable occupational hazard.

I’ve been struggling with this novel for several weeks. The first 50 pages emerged quickly. And, in all seriousness, I think they’re very good pages, some of my best. So I can’t allow myself to seriously entertain thoughts of abandoning the project. I have to see it through if only for those good pages.

The only way out is to make an outline. I hate outlines. When I write, I want to be in a creative trance, driving the muse’s burning chariot through the dark firmament of hell. Or something like that. Bukowski promised that you’d know the gods and your nights would flame with fire.  When his promise comes true, it really is the best thing. When the divine chariot is half-submerged in the swamp, when it backfires a cloud of rancid bio-diesel and won’t even start, when the muse doesn’t even show up because she was partying with some publishing industry types last night and has to sleep it off, when the way forward is just a mucky green-brown maze of shit-streaked walls, you need a scaffold. You need to build a ladder out of the swamp. You need to draw a map. So that’s what I did.

I will always hate outlines. But now the editor part of my brain can see the way forward. Now I have a schematic. I know I can follow it—if everything doesn’t change tomorrow, if the muse doesn’t laugh at me and send me a dream that completely turns my scaffold upside-down. That happens, too. We’ll see.

 

A Good Thing Going: an Exercise in Idiosyncratic Voice

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.

Fiction Writing Course

Friends,

I’m offering a short fiction writing course (actually three courses in one), designed to take someone from the basics of story writing all the way through the publication process. If this is something you’re interested in, take a look at the link below.

https://writingexpedition.com/fiction-writing-instruction/