All fiction was about the same thing to Frank Wilder: the crime of his never having been published. Once a reader advanced beyond the great divide of 1945 to enter the furious stew of the modern moment, any novel, Frank felt, was fair game to be scorned. He thought often on the direction of American Literature in the last half century, the opposing poles represented by Mailer and Salinger; the slow death of the important American novel through the 70s and early 80s, culminating in the election of Ronald Reagan as president and, across the Atlantic, the ascendancy of Martin Amis; the recognition of the Academy Awards Ceremony in Los Angeles as a forum of the greatest artistic seriousness; the recent onslaught of poseurs with their image-driven facsimiles of literary gravity, all of whom Frank took the liberty of referring to as “that guy,” regardless of gender: Kerouac (too vacuous), Percy (too Christian), Capote (too jaded), Pynchon (too cartoony), Wolfe (too bombastic), Updike (too flighty), DeLillo (too male), Roth (too Roth), Morrison (too praised), McInerney (too clipped), Rushdie (too shallow), Coover (too madcap), Oates (too morbid), Wideman (too fevered), Moody (too threadbare), Moore (too much), Franzen (too withering), Homes (too demented), Lethem (too ridiculous), Hempel (too elusive), Johnson (too tangled), Munro (too perfect), Chabon (too indulgent), Lahiri (too successful); the list went on—not one of them like him, not one of them just so. On more gracious days he could admit to the merit of a global contemporary like Arundhati Roy for having written one good novel, and then quit—and, when inclined to reach further back into the past, Fyodor Dostoevsky, for the sheer breadth of his comedy and rage. In the end, Frank’s unsteady feelings before a fictive page amounted to one certainty: there had to be a place for him.
“A writer of considerable talent”: the words that had brought Frank to Brooklyn. It seemed like decades ago that someone, a high school teacher, inscribed them on a story he had written, and only Frank had not forgotten. He took the praise to heart, held it there and, upon graduating from college, moved with his girlfriend to Park Slope.
In the back of their narrow studio, across the open entrance to the kitchen, hung a tattered American flag a Republican uncle had given him when he turned nine. The flag had touched the ground many times since the days when he raised it at his father’s behest—up the fifteen-foot pole next to the pool in the backyard that rang out when the rope snapped against it. The colors on the flag were faded, but, aesthetically, it pleased him. With the lights in the kitchen on, and those in the foyer out, red and blue prisms fell across the weathered couch and framed photographs on the wall.
Sometimes, Frank reclined on the couch alone in his favorite trousers, slate grey and orange plaid, with forest green suspenders, frayed and faded from nearly a century’s wear. The attire had belonged to Frank’s grandfather, Irving Wilder, himself once an aspiring novelist. Other times Frank shared the couch with Lena, his girlfriend—also his best reader—and admired the aleatoric way that the flag’s color scheme embraced her angular bangs.
Their Park Slope apartment was located in the southern outskirts of the neighborhood. Frank bought a queen-sized mattress and scarlet sheeting and laid it right on the floor. Outside, men and women in seemingly identical striped, sleeveless shirts pressed down the block. From a window, Frank watched them go by. It was what he did instead of smoking cigarettes. An Off Track Betting depot around the corner attracted low-talking clusters of wishful thinkers. Cats peeked out from under the chassis of parked cars.
“My boss is the plague in human form,” Lena said one day over lunch, at a sidewalk café, “She’s like the human dating virus. Literally everyday, the woman has a new adventure to embarrass herself with. It’s just so—ugh. Incessant. She doesn’t know how to stop! She can’t!”
Lena worked as an editorial assistant at a widely purchased fashion mag; she harbored serious respect for ripening trends. Her boss and her father were two favorite topics of conversation. Seeing Frank chafe under the weight of his modestly paying job, a visible discomfort in letting her settle the bill, she often mentioned her father.
In the mornings, she began more and more frequently to mention the pigeons outside on their kitchen windowsill. They clustered there and cooed, as light emerged on the earth from some unseen source. Frank could hear them as he turned again to face his Santa-beard of shaving cream in the bathroom mirror. His expression was serious.
During the week Frank earned pay as the guy at the information desk of the local branch of Burns & Porter, a corporate super-bookstore whose name possessed such currency in the modern era that to invent a fictional alternative for it seemed hysterically futile. In the stories Frank wrote about someone working for Burns & Porter, the store was always Burns & Porter, never something else. Both in his stories and real-life, people arrived after having seen mention of a particular novel’s title on daytime TV and ordered one or two of those to go, maybe grabbing the famous face magazine Lena worked for off the rack while waiting in line for check-out. Modern fiction gone bad, image reigning supreme, nobody knew anything anymore, thought Frank, coolly returning the look of another customer whose unconscious gaze had affixed on his vintage suspenders.
Work, such as it was at Burns & Porter, consisted mainly of learning to obey managers and the older hands. Another important facet of the job was feigning solicitousness toward every sort of idiot customer. It drove Frank nearly mad; on the page his characters courted ever deepening darkness.
**
This morning they are at the breakfast table that Lena insisted be placed in one corner of the narrow kitchen. Granola crunches between Frank’s teeth, the slices of banana soft and sweet on his tongue. Before breakfasting with Lena, Frank had never been a guy to include banana in his breakfast bowl. Seemed somehow too dainty. But with her around, things are different.
Lena is peering at him, or maybe past him, toward the grated window immediately behind him. She flutters the open section of the Sunday Times, then closes it, letting it rest atop the others in her lap. She takes a two-handed sip from her coffee mug, lowering her head to its steaming mouth.
Then she looks at Frank and asks, “Do you love me?”
Frank sets the spoon back in his breakfast bowl. Her eyes hold his for a moment, desperate with the question, then she seems to recede into herself, gone vague in some interior space.
Frank imagines how he will describe her in the novel he is writing; how her type will become the type that all the young seekers emulate; how his novel will be a smash, resurrecting the pursuit of serious fiction across the nation, undoing years of shame and neglect; how the two of them will jump together into a fountain, like Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald; how they will, in this manner, alter history’s irrevocable course; and how, finally, as figments on a page, be granted life eternal.
What Frank says to her now should resonate. He pictures the day awaiting him—the hours in the information booth, followed by a solitary lunch, then the evening before his keyboard, where he will catapult himself once more into empty space, beating back all doubt to bring home the future lives that he and Lena must share.
“Love is funny,” he listens to himself say, “Isn’t it? Just what two people make out of nothing.”
From the sill the pigeons coo.
- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor. He can be reached at jt_price at hotmail dot com
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I’m in love with a shiksa—she’s right over there against the subway doors reading The Book Review—and there’s something between us. And I mean that in the worst way possible. You see I am in love with a shiksa who keeps getting farther and farther away from me. And it’s killing me! I mean it; I’m dying, I can’t breathe. You see there’s this thing between us and it keeps getting bigger and bigger. It’s not what you think. What I mean is, every time I watch her move the bangs from her eyes, or scratch her forearm, or shift her weight from the right foot to the left foot, the space between us grows a little bit larger. Well, to be perfectly honest it’s not the space that grows. Just look at me and you’ll get it; it’s my nose! Every time I so much as glance at the beautiful shiksa-love from my dreams, my already remarkable schnoz grows another five centimeters. I mean it! Mount Zion is growing out of the front of my face! I have to stand ten feet away from this pole before I have anything to hold on to.
Oh, how her brow furrows. I think she’s beginning to notice me. She cares not for looks. A prodigious nose is a handsome nose, she thinks. So accepting of human flaws, yet so perfect! My god, mein Gott!
“My gut,” she coughs. She speaks! But is it just me or does she look a bit pained? And maybe even a bit purple?
“You’re suffocating me,” she manages to sputter. Am I moving too fast? We’re in love for thirty seconds and already she needs her space! She points to her stomach.
“Your nose,” she says, “is poking me in the gut.”
- Molly Auerbach works as an Editorial Assistant for Electric Literature. She is also the bassist and band manager for art-prog sensation, Thrillington.
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His real name was Serge.
He used the name Francois when he was doing sex work. He was all over the Internet.
He was pretty but he wasn’t that good a fuck. Junkies never are. They want to get high. Not have sex. Sex is what Serge did for money.
He wanted into Cinematheque. He was a talented artist but I didn’t think he could turn his life around.
“There are too many twelve-year-olds,” I tried explaining. “I just don’t think I could expose them to an addict as committed to heroin as you are.”
We negotiated. Negotiating is what junkies do.
I would let him into Cinematheque’s art program but he had to clean up his act. He went into a treatment center and he tried. I know he tried. I know it was hard. But I had to be hard, too.
I had never kicked anyone out of the program.
In fact, I wasn’t the one who kicked Serge out. The other boys did it themselves. I was amazed at how angry they were with him.
We were in Amsterdam then. He relapsed. It happens.
Eavan was the first one who came to me. Eavan is a junkie himself. They don’t have HIV for nothing.
The propaganda rhetoric calls them boys at risk. “Serge is using.”
My eyes to the sky.
“I will talk to him,” I said.
“You better do more than talk to him.” Eavan walked away.
“Don’t walk away from me, Eavan.” But he kept on going. And the New York Writing Remoras think they’re arrogant. They haven’t met Eavan. They might someday though.
Now, Eavan was writing, and had stayed away from junk.
I was going to have to wade into it. I try to stay out of all their convoluted stuff. It is not always possible.
I knew Serge was close to Remy. But I did not want to know much more than that. Remy is young. But Remy is old in ways that defy sanity itself.
“We’re lovers,” Remy tells me. Remy is defiant. It’s just his way.
The Amsterdam loft was becoming complicated. Paris had been.
There is only one reason Serge would be sleeping with Remy. Remy’s family has money.
‘Remy, are you bankrolling Serge.”
He bites his lower lip.
Shit.
“Il a un fusil.”
“What kind of gun.”
“Silver.”
Remy knows nothing about guns.
Probably a revolver. A relapsed heroin addict with a gun. Just what I needed.
Serge was gone a lot. Amsterdam beckoned. I wondered if he’d been doing tricks. An adolescent with HIV as a prostitute. None of this was good. I had worked so hard with this boy. He was in his room asleep.
I crawled into his bed.
You are thinking sex. Yes, you are.
I crawled into his bed with my clothes on. I crawled into his bed because I wanted his attention. It had nothing to do with sex and everything to do with a failure that has haunted me for over a year, now.
He was not surprised that I was in bed with him. I knew him to his core.
“Tim…”
“It’s three in the afternoon, Serge. You need to get up.” His room was a wreck. His works and his gun were in the bed with us.
He wasn’t hiding anything.
“Get up. We’re going for a ride.”
“I want to sleep.”
I pulled him out of bed by his hair. He didn’t weigh that much. Food just doesn’t interest junkies. I pushed him up against the wall. I hit him in the face with my fist. Several times. His lip was bleeding and his eye was going to swell.
He was naked.
He just took it. “What the fuck, Tim.”
“Get dressed. You’re coming with me.”
There is a beach in Wilhelmshaven. The drive there is nothing.
I needed to walk on a beach. The sea was cold and mean.
He was having trouble keeping up. “Tim, I can’t walk as fast as you!” He screamed. I left him there.
In the cold. Getting back would be his problem.
That night, they kicked him out. They took a vote. It was a done deal.
I just sat there with my head in my hands. I knew what this was going to mean. I knew.
I do not think the twelve-year-olds had any sort of awareness about what kicking Serge out was going to come to. Or mean. How could they. But he scared them and this was their chance to get rid of it.
“Are you sure,” I asked them. They were resolute. Even Remy.
He didn’t fight it. He just left. We heard he was back to his usual tricking in the Pigalle. The red light district of Paris was not unknown to them.
A few days later, Eavan is in my room. He had been on the Internet. “Serge has blown his head off.”
That was all.
You have them when you have them. You can’t save them all.
Bullshit. I want to save all of them.
The train ride to Paris and the funeral is one of those memories I only have in fragments. It was my fault. I could have talked them into letting him stay but I did not do it.
My head was coming off.
Eavan put his arm around my shoulders. “Just sleep.”
We arrived in Paris and I could not go on another foot.
“We were all he had.”
“They don’t need you to bury him, Tim.”
We took the train back to Amsterdam.
All the way back to Amsterdam, I kept hearing him scream at me. “Tim, I can’t walk as fast as you can!”
Set at naught. Defiance speaks to me. It always has. I fail all the time with them. The wolves are always at the door. The voices are articulate and come from oblivion as if pulled by horses. No, you can’t keep up with me. Egress is just a man and a boy upon this beach and you have drained me of redemption. Go to hell.
I am hearing voices.
- Tim Barrus is the author of six books and has written for the New York Times Magazine, Esquire, the Columbia Journalism Review, American Baby, Advocate Men, Men on Men, New American Library, Houghton Mifflin, Random House, Gay Sunshine Press, Knights Press, Bay Windows, Desmodus Publications, and Hustler magazine.
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We all knew the storm was brewing, just below the surface, because we’d seen one before—at least, I had—that is, I knew. Remember the absurd rivalry between ninjas and pirates, maybe about four years ago, probably five? With the wildfire phenomenon of Twilight and the recent publication of Seth Graham-Smith’s Pride & Prejudice & Zombies, it was only a matter of time and meteorology before the grave-robbers would be rising up from the very crypts they’d pilfered, the artists of war stealing the very souls from their enemies’ veins. Something about the undead enchants us: is it untouchability or is it the unabashed sense of wanton destruction? The undead cannot be held responsible for their appetites, their faults. Responsibility is a construction of livelihood; they are not the latter and therefore cannot submit to the former.
Let’s get something straight: while both are considered monsters, vampires and zombies—like ninjas and pirates, and Republicans and Democrats before them—fall into a spectrum of expectations. The bourgeoisie, like my friend Søren, assistant of sorts to some entrepreneur of questionable practice, gravitate toward vampiric self-impressions. Of course, this type is drawn to the affluence of Castle Dracula and the agelessness of pale beauty rather than the villainy prowling behind their lips. But I suppose, self-awareness is difficult when no mirror will bear your reflection. On the other extreme, the zombie appeals to the bohemian hedonist, where all is forfeit to the singular allure of brains. Felix—another acquaintance of mine; someone I know from the classroom—readily admits that he’s a cannibal but won’t seek help until it becomes a real problem for him. A problem, how so? I ask, but he just growls, tired of the subject.
I never gave into the politics of the undead. Just tried to ignore them, at least, until the snowstorm, just before October ended. I’d been staying with my friend Søren as my own house was without heat, and we acted snowed in. Drifts outside grew by the minute. Søren said he was going out for something warm to drink and asked if he could bring anything back for me. I just shrugged, which seemed to put him in a mood. Søren left, and while he was gone, Felix called. Well, that’s it, he told me. I just wanted to pick her brain, you know. But then, I don’t know what happened. She’s gone now. I told him where he could find me, so we could talk it out, but when he got there, Søren was back. What’s worse was that Felix’s most recent victim was Søren’s sister. There was a vicious spat before Felix got kicked back into the drifts. Felix started banging on the door, trying to knock it in, groaning; however, Søren’s rage subsided once his adversary had been ejected. I watched in vague disbelief as snow drifted over Felix’s feet, rising to his shins and then knees, and yet Søren did not seem at all aware of his persistence or the snow’s.
Almost forgot, Søren said after some time. He handed me a lidded paper cup, and I took a sip. Whatever he had brought me was now unbearably cold. What he offered was certainty I would not have obtained on my own, certainty that there is futility in refusing to choose sides.
.
- David K Wheeler’s work has been included in literary journals such as The Penwood Review and Jeopardy Magazine, as well as in the forthcoming collection, The Pacific Northwest Reader, from HarperCollins. Meanwhile, he contributes to the Burnside Writers Collective at www.burnsidewriters.com.
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Samuel: Samuel was a maudlin Jewish boy who wore colorless T-shirts with old soda slogans like, “RC Cola, the mad, mad Cola”. He also wore flip-flops in the winter and pretended to be engrossed in all aspects of Marxist literature but mostly read bland, “young adult” graphic novels with feisty, female protagonists.
His “wounded” expression was tiring at best until I discovered that the source of his pain was a permanent splinter embedded into his hip one summer at sleep away camp. His mother was over-domineering and wielded large metal spatulas whenever I spent the night.
Breaking point: Listening to him pontificate on yam farming after a sojourn at an experimental Kibbutz in Nebraska.
Anil: Anil was a graphic design student I met in an elevator in the Transamerica Pyramid. I was temping for the day, which involved serving white fish and tiny, red crackers to a dozen Russian men. They were a gregarious bunch and slipped me twenties and threw worthless rubles down my blouse for fun.
Anil chatted me up, remarking on the design of the building and I rolled my eyes and stared at his at knit cap which was an intense red, it reminded me of afterbirth or red velvet cake. We made mad love on the dining table the Russians had just eaten on and when he rolled off the table, I noticed he had a piece of white fish stuck in his coarse black, back hair. I never said anything about the hair.
Breaking Point: I saw him once more and we ate aloo pakoras at a kiosk in the meat district. He started in on Eames chairs and I drifted away, bored by him and all of modern design.
.
St. John: St. John was an Irish boy I met one summer while quahogging knee deep in a sandy inlet. He said his name in a slippery sort of way, like” Sinjin” as if his mother were too drunk at his birth to enunciate the letters properly. “Oh, Siiinjiiin, you will bear mee cross, ye young feller!” she sang out then vomited quickly in her whiskey soda.
He was fond of Dylan Thomas (like most good Irish boys should be) and often wore a dark, silk kerchief crisply round his throat just like Dylan but his poetry was bland and weak and stunk like the day old quahogs we often harvested. Sex with him was like the great potato famine: dry and void of any empathy.
Breaking Point: After an all night bender involving a suitcase full of clams in a dive bar called “Kelp”, I ditched him that summer and moved on to his friend, Padriac, who was glum, needy and wholly ignorant.
Andrew: Andrew was enamored by blood sausages and Angostura bitters. It was the first thing he offered me when I approached him at “The Redheaded Den” downtown. He was curled up in a red leather booth, under a red lamp; his sturdy yellow construction boots nestled under his legs like a dead golden retriever.
We got drunk on Pisco Sours and blasted “Urgent” by Foreigner on the jukebox, then dry humped each other on a bar stool during the sax solo. Eric the Red, the bartender, kicked us out after we knocked a signed photograph of Eric Stolz off the wall. Later at his house, I blew him on a plaid blanket in the garage next to an old dehumidifier. His father woke up and shined a flashlight over us and growled. I remembered his father distinctly because of his bright red hair and I thought, I should really bring that guy to the lounge.
Breaking Point: His habit of stealing my makeup to paint thin wisps of hair over his bald head.
.
- Shelagh Power-Chopra is interested in the merging of fiction and fact or as a friend calls it, “speculative observation”. Aside from writing, she dabbles in photography. Recent publications include Gargoyle Magazine and The Significant Objects Project. She maintains the blog: http://saidobject.com
- Kara Jansson Kovacev is an artist living in New York City. Her iPhone drawings have been featured in the Washington Post Digit-al Art Gallery, Beautiful Decay and the iCreated gallery, and will be included in an upcoming online exhibition in The Incliner and a book on iPhone art by David Scott Leibowitz. Her work can be seen at http://cloudbuilder.com
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Boyfriends, Kara Jansson Kovacev, Memior, Shelagh Power-Chopra | 1 Comment »
A girl says, When Julian would scream until his throat bled I’d think how I knew our love would endure forever. When I’d watch him shave his chest in some motel before the show I’d feel less sure. When the band would play “Righteous Soul Slave” for second encore I’d know that they would never be famous. They were too good. The audience didn’t understand the complicated, holy thing that was happening. It—the audience—only wanted a wall of noise to throw itself against, an ocean to dive into and drown a while. Whatever. Julian’s the poet, I’m just his. Some of the weak ones fell, bleeding, got trampled or were pulled upright by some pit angel; glaze-eyed, disorientated, stalk-stumbling off. I’d stand off-stage on Julian’s side and watch the show. Except of course on the nights—these were not rare—when the stage was just a taped-off section of floor. Those nights I stood in back with Darren the manager i.e. the merch guy i.e. the bass player’s cousin, and watched the crowd heave. Each crowd was different and the same. Sweaty teenagers swipe half-drunk warmbeers from ledges, chug with pride, to puke later in the parking lot with same. Julian was the singer and lead guitar. He was pasty and gorgeous, haunted and haunting, recalcitrant nova, all the right things, blah. But our lives were perfect, weren’t they? Rattling motion and cigarette ash. Where were we, anyway? A rest stop in some desert, bald mountains like a great fence hemming us in. The van choked out blue smoke if we pushed past sixty, but we knew we had to be in the next place by this time the next day, whatever day that was, I mean was going to be. The stakes never changed, just the fill-in-the-blank after WELCOME TO SCENIC, another sign we were already in Heaven, anyway Limbo—some place where verb tense doesn’t matter. Whatever. Details were anyone else’s job. My only job was Julian. After all, where would he be without me? Me without him? I shouted to the drummer that I was a quarter short for the snack machine. He looked past me, at the thing itself, fished one from his pocket and flipped it my way, then turned away to light his cigarette. I of course missed the catch and it landed flat in the clay, no skitter. I picked it up and saw that it was shiny, new, one of those state ones. A bird—hawk, maybe? Fuck it, it was going straight into the coin slot so I could eat. But right before I slipped it in I decided two things: first that the state on the coin was the place where we were, so Idaho. Second that the coin was a tea leaf, state motto therefore a secret message. I don’t know dick about Latin but some things are just obvious and sometimes I think that’s what God is: the obvious, resplendent and intractable and dumb. I left the other Twix in the wrapper for later, got back in the van and told Julian that in the next town he could have a groupie, if I could film it.
- Justin Taylor is the author of the story collection Everything Here is the Best Thing Ever, which is just out from Harper Perennial. He is also a contributor to HTMLGiant. His personal website is http://www.justindtaylor.net/
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It was just something that he had always kind of wanted to do. By no means was it the only thing that he could think about, nor did his life bare scars of regret in its absence. It came into his head, this thing that he wanted to do, every so often between more pressing thoughts, and he would half-smile and imagine how neat it might be if one day without warning this thing were to actually happen. There was a girl in his life, and he waited to ask her until they had been together for a while, until she really knew what sort of person he was and that this small thing that he had always kind of wanted to do was just a peripheral quirk, some odd take-it-or-leave-it itch that was maybe oddly endearing or even a little bit sexy. He wasn’t crazy or perverted or a freak. She would need to understand that first. So he waited, weeks and then months, before he ever brought it up.
“Let’s make love in the carwash,” he finally said one day while they were sitting on the roof watching the sun dip over the top of another roof.
She turned her head slowly and snorted.
“In the carwash?”
“Yes. I think we should make love in the carwash maybe.”
He reclined on his elbow, the words hanging there. She wrapped her arms around her knees.
“Like on the ground, in the spot where the cars go, where all the dirt from the cars is washed off?”
“No silly, in a car in the carwash. You know, either yours or mine, while it’s being washed we can stay in the car. We can stay there and make love in the carwash.”
She laughed a single laugh in that high-pitched way that means a million things and you have to choose just one. Then she turned back toward where the sun had set over shingles. Silence followed until the sky was purple and the chill drove them inside. When conversation resumed, the topic was dinner. He suggested Thai and put the carwash thing out of his mind.
This was not a disappointing outcome. It had never been his expectation that she would agree right away. That might have seemed slutty after all, which was really not what this was about. He thought of toes in the water and reminded himself of the importance of perspective. This first attempt had landed somewhere between acceptance and rejection. It was not a yes, but it was not a no either. Silence was a promising response.
They dated for a little while longer with things being quite pleasant. Each found the other to be entertaining, and there were some sweet times when they just wanted to sleep all day in the same bed with their legs touching. After an extended period of things being pleasant and the two really getting along, they decided to get engaged. She was very happy, and so he asked her again soon after.
“Let’s just make love in the carwash,” he said.
She kissed him, which he thought was a yes, but then she never brought it up again, and it sort of went away. They got married in a garden that you could rent for weddings. He was happy to say things like, I’ll have to run that by the Mrs., and she felt better after they fought and made up when she could call him my darling husband. They lived in a little house with a lamp post in the yard and felt very much like real people living real lives. Sometimes they laughed just because being that way made them both feel like laughing. It was nice, but then there was this question that surfaced from time to time – not often, just every once in a while – when they had finished raking leaves or when she found out she might be pregnant:
“Why don’t you and I take the car down the street to the carwash and, you know.”
It kept coming up, here and there, after a good movie, before a dentist appointment. The subject usually changed quickly or just melted away into chuckles and kissing. Their lives progressed in standard ways. Insurance was purchased. Important decisions were made, but then there it was again, this question at random moments, after a long night when the baby didn’t sleep or the time the cable company accidentally gave them some premium channels that they didn’t watch that often but it was nice to have for free anyway.
“No, I don’t think so.”
She started answering him outright instead of dodging, which made him feel uneasy, like maybe this was really something that was not going to happen for a very long time.
“I don’t think that’s such a great idea, husband.”
She still smiled when she said it though, a sliver of chance, a fading possible maybe perhaps.
He changed his approach several times, which was really just a matter of semantics. Why don’t we do it in the carwash? Let’s get something going, carwash style. I’m up for some carwash intimacy, how about you? She continued to deny him in as many different ways as he knew how to ask. It slowly became clear after many varied attempts, when their lives were getting very busy with things that had to be done and her patience was beginning to crumble, that there was a distinct possibility that this thing that he had always kind of wanted to do might never happen even once in his entire life.
A thinly-veiled desperation became audible.
“I’m feeling the carwash, and it’s now or never.”
His asking became a wedge. She would leave the room and then he would be there alone with his thought for too long.
He asked less frequently, but still it came up, and when it did she acted like he asked all the time. So he asked even less, almost never, and only when she was in a really good mood and the kids had been well-behaved and the laundry basket was empty. She stopped cushioning her reply and just started saying no. It was an angry no at first, but then over a period of weeks and months, the no grew softer. Exasperation became resignation, and the sound of her refusals slowly waned and wilted into silent contemplation. Finally one day, after he had swept the porch and located the toenail clippers that had been missing for weeks, he asked one last time.
“Carwash?”
“Fine,” she said.
The nearest carwash was a brown brick building with three slots in it for cars to drive through. There was no one that worked there, only a machine that counted coins and asked credit or debit? It wasn’t used very often except on days when the oil change place gave out coupons for free car washes with any premium oil change. It was crowded when that happened, so they called to make sure this wasn’t one of those days,
It was empty on the Sunday that they went, just brown bricks and pools of soapy water. He put in six crisp bills and pressed the Superwash button. A green light beckoned Enter, and he angled the car onto the track. The red light said Stop, and he shifted into park, checked the mirrors, released the seatbelt. She took off her shoes and crawled across him, placing her knees carefully on either side of his thighs, wrapping her arms around his neck, leaning her head against his so their eyes made blurry versions of each other in the idling hum. The car began to move, and everything became very dark.
There were sounds all around in every direction, and they could hear the driving blast of the water jets running cold fierce torrents across every inch of outside. The windows buzzed and glazed over, blunting hard edges, carving whistling rivers into glass. The car began to shake, and suddenly the whole wet world was pressed flat by spinning churning things with tongues and tails that make rubbery sounds in the dark. And there was gravity confused and visions of drowning and the pulling of shy things away from comfortable places, and for the two of them inside together there was nothing to do but be present and feel for the lean rift of each aching second that passed without promise of another to follow. The muffled roar expanded and absorbed every tin rattle until there existed only one broad sonic thrust. It raged on for longer than they imagined that it possibly could, too long, and for a moment they felt that they might be trapped in a systematic malfunction that would slowly erode their car, their clothes, their bodies into nothing with graceless automaticity. It grew louder still, the sound of everything at once, booming, savage, unhinged, vibration until they couldn’t hear anything else, and they couldn’t see through the glass, and they felt very small and far too brittle to be saved from angry sopping metal set spinning in the black.
But it was warm inside, and they were safe because it was both of them in there and not just one or the other. The sounds melted back into slender wet breaths and then there was just dripping and movement toward a lighter place where the sun fell on the pavement and the water rushed off into sewers they could not see.
“That was pretty okay” she said.
“Yes, it was.”
“It reminded me of something else.”
“Watching a storm.”
“At night through a window in bed.”
“And everything rumbles when the thunder falls too near.”
- James Bartels is a writer of fiction. His work has been published in Flatmancrooked and Takahe Magazine. Additionally, he has been been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and recognized as a finalist in the Glimmer Train Award for New Writers.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Carwash, fiction, James Bartels, Marriage | 1 Comment »
“One Groove’s Difference”: Inherent Vice by Thomas Pynchon
“Maybe the Golden Fang had sailed on to its fate, gathering those who hadn’t found their way to shore deeper into whatever complications of evil, indifference, abuse, despair they needed to become even more themselves. Whoever they were. Maybe Shasta had escaped all that. Maybe she was safe.” – Larry “Doc” Sportello, entertaining ‘maybes’
Practically speaking, the business of a private eye arises from the exercise of paranoia. To see around appearances, you might entertain every manner of phantom notion, and it’s only as false leads drop away that the truth will become isolated, more often than not cloaked in silence. Ain’t that just the way with evil? Only in cartoon life would a Bernie Madoff, bound in rope, choose to fess up to Scooby and the gang: “Yes, I did it. And here is how. And here is why… woulda got away with it, too, if not for you rascally kids!” Cartoon life, or some kind of spiritual echo chamber, maybe.
The fiction of Thomas Pynchon has always enjoyed an easy relationship to paranoia and cartoons. Evil, too. Inherent Vice, then, his latest novel, a play on the hard-boiled—or seriously baked—detective tale is not such a departure from previous work, even if the edges appear rounded to the naked eye.
Principal in this “glittering mosaic of doubt” figures one Larry “Doc” Sportello, affable stoner and PI, whiteboy afro on his head, huaraches on his feet. A hippie with a gun, he’s a denizen of surf village Gordita Beach, CA, a locale lost in time somewhere between the 60s and 70s. Doc has love for old movies, particularly those starring John Garfield (a blacklisted movie star of the 40s and 50s), and hate for contemporary TV hit The Mod Squad, which he sees propagating the myth of Cop-as-Everyman, paving to the earth the part once played in popular consciousness by PIs.
No matter. Even as a self-conscious member of an endangered species, Doc is more than happy to ask questions about a married real estate mogul named Mickey Wolfmann, who his “ex-old lady” Shasta Fay happens to be seeing. Of course, the investigation begins at Shasta’s request (“You were always true,” she tells Doc). And when these initial, nearly innocent questions lead to more vexed questions, and the vexed to the outright thorny, Doc doesn’t hesitate (too much) in keeping after the figurative ball, even if he’d rather be watching the Lakers play in the NBA Finals. The trick being to talk to the right people, adopt the right guise, and not forget to pack a few joints.
It doesn’t take long before Mickey and Shasta both have disappeared. So it is that Doc sets out, behind the manner of cool, to identify the agent(s) of evil pulling the strings at a classy outfit called Golden Fang Enterprises. Beyond Gordita Beach and the flagging myth of the American West (the Manson trials provide backdrop to Doc’s pursuit and obsessive fodder for his imaginative life), the investigation comes to center on two persons: Coy Harlingen, revenant surf band sax soloist and Zelig-like chameleon, and Lt. “Bigfoot” Bjornsen, investigating officer in the Mickey Wolfmann case and general pain in Doc’s ass.
Not long after Shasta’s disappearance, Doc receives a call from Coy Harlingen’s would-be widow, Hope: she’s not sure that her husband’s really dead. Married with a child, they were stuck in a seemingly unbreakable cycle of addiction and longing. Heroin to her represented “freedom—from that endless middle-class cycle of choices that are no choices at all.” And when Doc catches up to him, Coy sees it nearly the same way: “We’d get fucked up and just sit there and go, ‘We’re draggin each other down, what’re we gonna do?’ and then end up doing nothing…” The answer, it seems, was provided by Golden Fang Enterprises: fake his own death, and Coy could become a well-paid counter-subversive. “A spy… a snitch, a weasel,” is how Coy, in self-hatred, sees it. “A very well-paid actor,” is what the guys in the suits call it, “and without groupies or paparazzi or know-nothing audiences to worry about.” When they sweetened the offer to include a set of false teeth, Coy, with his heroin-ravaged choppers, was sold. Only now he finds himself cut off, adrift between feelings for his wife and child, and the duty he’s bound to fulfill:
Doc knew that tone of voice and hated it. It reminded him of too many vomit-spattered toilets, freeway overpasses, edges of cliffs in Hawaii, always pleading with men younger than himself distraught with what they were so sure was love. It was actually why he’d quit doing matrimonials.
On the other hand, there is Bigfoot Bjornsen. In so far as a spouse can be seen as a constant companion who incessantly reminds you of your shortcomings, Doc’s might as well be his badge-toting doppelganger, “the LAPD’s own Charlie Manson,” as Doc puts it, “the screamin evil nutcase right at the heart of that li’l cop kingdom.” Everywhere Doc goes, Bigfoot seems to follow soon after, and soon enough, it becomes unclear whether Bigfoot is trailing Doc, or leading him.
Haunted by Hunter S. Thompson’s “high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back,” or lost idealism of the 60s, Inherent Vice culminates in meditation on the collective, more genuine life that once seemed close enough to touch, just a people’s movement away from realization. A friend of Doc’s has arrived at the myth of a vanished civilization to represent something akin to this disappearing dream. About the lost city, Lemuria, Doc later reflects:
People in this town saw only what they’d all agreed to see, they believed what was on the tube or in the morning papers half of them read while they were driving to work on the freeway, and it was all their dream about being wised up, about the truth setting them free. What good would Lemuria do them? Especially when it turned out to be a place they’d been exiled from too long ago to remember.
Which is a lot of weight for any hard-boiled—or seriously baked—detective tale to bear.
“The Ballad of Lost Children”: Home by Marilynne Robinson
“It is the desire of the tattered moth for the shining star that has brought me home, little sister.” – Jack
The prodigal observances run like this: “I’m sorry,” he says. Followed shortly by the dissonant smile, or a surprised laugh (as if to ask: how did this happen? Or, where did I go awry?). Maybe even a hand raised to hide his face, touching “the nick of scar” beneath his eye. An action taken time and again, with nearly the regularity of those sanctified by Sunday ritual.
His believing sister’s unvarying response: a generosity of tears.
In her most recent novel, Home, Marilynne Robinson has set herself the task of creating a work of lasting import that lives up to its title, a tall order if ever there was one. After more than twenty years of waiting since the release of Housekeeping, we erstwhile readers have been fortunate enough to receive in the past five years the critical and popular success Gilead and, now, as of fall 2008, its sister fiction, also set in Iowa of 1956.
It is almost beside the point to say that she succeeds.
Like a fissure running across the novel’s pages the prodigal observances appear with such regularity (“I’m sorry,” he says, with that smile or that laugh, that shame-covering hand, the finger raised to touch the nick of scar) that some readers—one fresh from the work of Thomas Pynchon, for example—may find their hearts thundering with impatience at the page’s staid serenity, burning with a desire to exclaim, ‘For crying out loud, man! Stop it!’ But he can’t hear you, Robinson’s protagonist, and that is exactly the point. Jack is alone, and deeply so.
More properly, Jack is John Ames Boughton, son of the reverend Robert Boughton, who for years has served as the Presbyterian minister in the small, middle-American (and fictional) town of Gilead. The name “John Ames” comes from Boughton’s lifelong friend, the still active Congregationalist minister (whose memoirs to his young son comprise the full text of Gilead). Ames, reinvigorated by a late marriage to a much younger woman named Lila (having lost his first wife in childbirth) and the arrival of a son, Robby (named after the elder Boughton), claims to be able to picture his ailing friend with “that lace bonnet sitting on the top of [his] head,” decked as he once was in the threads of infancy. The two men meet on a near weekly basis, the ambulatory Ames arriving at Boughton’s house to discuss the concerns of his congregation, as well as the pressing matters of the day, at least as they register to the two old friends: “Eisenhower or Dulles or baseball or Egypt.”
“Egypt will have consequences,” Boughton declares.
On politics, Ames simply avers, “Stevenson is a very fine man, no doubt,” meaning that he will never vote for him. Boughton, of course, sees it the other way.
Newly arrived on the scene is Boughton’s youngest child Glory (there are eight Boughton children in all). At thirty-eight, she has just returned from a protracted engagement that failed: the man was already married, a secret she keeps from her father; one night she deposited over four hundred of their letters in the sewer. Glory is surprised by the transformation in her father, ambivalent about the role she is expected to play in his house (caretaker to both him and the family trappings, his expectation being that she will maintain it like a museum, with pieces that include: “the table and sideboard with their leonine legs and belligerently clawed feet, like some ill-considered, doily-infested species of which they were the last survivors”). In Old Boughton the ravages of age are in plain view, and yet the sight of him is not without passing beauty: “His hair had been brushed into a soft white cloud, like harmless aspiration, like a mist given off by the endless work of dreaming.” Much of Glory’s father’s time is spent in agonizing on the well-being of Jack, whom neither he nor Glory has seen in twenty years.
Then he is there on the front porch, the handful of false cues that he might soon arrive instantly forgiven. The well spoken son of a preacher man, Jack has been shedding skins now for years, most recently in the restorative embrace of a woman named Della, with whom he lived for some time in St. Louis. This confession he makes to Glory. Della, who is black, has recently been taken up by her father and brothers to return to the family home in Memphis; Jack’s only means of communicating his longing for her is through letters, which go unanswered.
Wearied and worn by the world, Jack remains adamant in his refusal to accept his father’s faith, “I wished very much at the time that I could have been, you know, a hypocrite. But I just didn’t have it in me. My one scruple. And it has cost me dearly.” When Glory invests in a television for the three relative strangers to gather around, conversation runs like mercury from the tried and true to an underlying strife more difficult to address with politesse: for example, recent events in Montgomery, Alabama. Or the murder of Emmett Till. As father and son vie over social outrages that demand redress (the son’s cause) and the state of the younger’s soul (the father’s), Glory, in her abundance of empathy, seeks to ensure nothing more than peace of mind for them both. This, in spite of her own lingering emotions, a feeling of unease at occupying her father’s house, of futility at expending further effort on Jack, who can be, to say the least, difficult. “I really am nothing,” he tells her. “Nothing, with a body. I create a kind of displacement around myself as I pass through the world, which can fairly be called trouble.” And, again and again, he makes the prodigal observances.
As students of American history, we know that Gilead—small town middle America—will soon change forever (on the light side, check out Bill Bryson’s “The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid,” on the dark, Nick Reding’s “Methland,” and somewhere in between, Ron Power’s “Tom and Huck Don’t Live Here Anymore”). The fires that animate Jack’s passion will consume the town where he feels he cannot remain. Old Boughton and Ames debate whether God’s existence in the universe allows for the possibility that a person might change (“A person can change,” Lila declares, “Everything can change”). While, steadfastly, Glory keeps watch, making the gentlest observations of her wayward brother:
That odd capacity for destitution, as if by nature we ought to have so much more than nature gives us. As if we are shockingly unclothed when we lack the complacencies of ordinary life. In destitution, even of feeling or purpose, a human being is more hauntingly human and vulnerable to kindnesses because there is the sense that things should be otherwise, and then the thought of what is wanting and what alleviation would be, and how the soul could be put at ease, restored. At home. But the soul finds its own home if it ever has a home at all.
- Jeff Price is a freelance writer and editor. He held the position of Associate Editor at Electric Literature in 2009. His blog is http://heresthedope.blogspot.com/.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Jeff Price, Marilynne Robinson, Review, Thomas Pynchon | 2 Comments »
by Etgar Keret
There was this guy who could walk on water. Not that that’s such a big deal. Lots of people can walk on water. They usually don’t know that because they don’t try. They don’t try because they don’t believe they can do it. In any case, that guy believed, and tried and did it. And that’s when the whole mess began.
That guy had an apostle who was very close to him and sold him out. Not that that’s such a special thing either. Lots of people are sold out by someone very close to them. If they weren’t very close, then it wouldn’t really be considered being sold out, would it. Then the Romans came and crucified the guy. Which, also, isn’t very unique. The Romans crucified a lot of people. And not just the Romans. Lots of other nations crucified and killed lots of people. All kinds of people. Ones who performed miracles and even ones who didn’t. But that guy, three days after they crucified him, was resurrected. And by the way, even that resurrection thing didn’t happen here for the first time, or even the last, for that matter. But that guy, people say, that guy died for our sins. A lot of people die for our sins: greed, jealousy, pride, or other, less well-known sins that haven’t been around for such a long time. People die like flies because of our sins and no one bothers to even write a Wikipedia entry about them. But they wrote one about that guy. And not just any old entry, but a really big one with lots of pictures and blue-colored links. Not that a Wikipedia entry is such a big thing. There are dogs that have Wikipedia entries about them. Like Lassie. And there are diseases that have entries there, like scarlet fever and multiple sclerosis. But that guy, they say, unlike multiple sclerosis and Lassie, achieved what he achieved through the power of love. Which is something we’ve also heard before. After all, there were those four English guys with the hair and the beards too, just like him, except that they were a little less famous, and they sang many songs about love. Two of them are already dead, just like him. And they, by the way, have a Wikipedia entry too. But that guy, there was something special about him. He was the son of God. Except that, actually, all of us are God’s children, right? We were born in his image. So what the hell was it about that guy that turned him into such a big deal? Such a big deal that so many people throughout history were saved or killed in his name?
Anyhow, every year, around the end of December, half the world celebrates his birthday. In many places, it snows on his birthday and everyone’s happy. But even in places where it doesn’t snow, people are happy on that day. And all because of what? Because a skinny guy who was born more than two thousand years ago asked us all to live lives of love and morality and was killed because of it. And if that’s the happiest thing this weird race has to celebrate, then it deserves a Wikipedia entry too. And actually it’s got one. Go to the nearest computer now. Type in “humanity” and you’ll get the entry. Short. Very short. Not a lot of pictures. But even so. One whole entry on a fascinating and slightly baffling race. A race that could have walked on water and never tried. A race that could have killed all those who believe the world can be a better place and in most cases, made sure to do just that. So merry Christmas to you too.
Please forward or post online, in full or in part, with credit to the source.
Translated by Sondra Silverston
Etgar Keret can be found at www.etgarkeret.com.
Image: Details of The Last Supper Double Jesus by Andy Warhol.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: Christmas, Etgar Keret, Humanity, Jesus, Lassie, The Beatles | 2 Comments »
In 1979, when I’m eight years old, my dad, drunk out of his gourd on Schlitz and high on crank, runs over some guy with his brand new El Camino. I don’t know this when I’m eight. I just think his car is cool. It’s cherry-red with a huge, white vector stripe and vaguely resembles the Gran Torino from Starsky and Hutch. He drives it as he leaves town and us later that year.
Five years later, I’m thirteen and visiting Dad for an assigned two-week stint at his crappy apartment in Indy. This guy Snyder is there—as always—and Dad’s drunk—again—but it’s Milwaukee’s Best this time, not Schlitz. Dad throws me one and tells me to drink up. And he tells me the story.
This guy’s sprawled out in the middle of the road, in the pitch black. Dad’s blitzed as he’s driving down Meridian, so he doesn’t see the guy until the last second. He doesn’t even try to brake, he says, just cruises right over him. Dad stops, gets out of the car, walks over and gives the guy a once over.
This is what he sees. The guy’s naked, hog-tied and has a curling iron shoved up his ass. Every time my dad mentions the curling iron, he makes this uppercut motion with his fist like he’s actually the one cramming the thing up the guy’s keister.
I’m sure Snyder’s heard this story a hundred times, but he still spits his Beast and slaps his knee.
“I tell you what,” Snyder yells. “That was one sorry motherfucker.”
Dad does the uppercut movement again and says, “I’m just glad the fucker was already dead when I hit him or I would have been in serious shit.”
My thirteen year old mind processes the information, thusly: driving around drunk and stoned at three o’clock in the morning is not serious shit so long as the guy you run over is already good and dead. Or like this: it is better to be lucky than good.
This is a maxim I repeat and live by for many years, even though I don’t like the taste of beer—Schlitz or the Beast or even Heineken. I begin to think at some point that this is the only life lesson I will ever learn from this man, my dad. It is hard to learn life lessons, I guess, when you no longer talk.
But then, twenty-five years later, I talk to my dad for one last time and learn something new. He has just bought a small-town convenience store and invites me over for a tour. I peek in and see about what I expect to. Overpriced packages of diapers compete with Fig Newtons for space on crowded metal shelves. Stained linoleum runs under our feet, not completely intact at the seams.
As we walk through the store, he explains his hopes for expansion—into gas and liquor. He pauses for a moment, stretches his arms wide and grins. Without looking at me, he says the thing to me that I will always remember. Without irony, he says this thing. In complete seriousness, he says it. This is what he says, as he stands in the middle of his run-down mini-mart: “Son, it’s all legit. Not a single black market item in the place. Your step-mom insisted. How do you like that?”
I don’t know how I like it. I ask him if it is a rhetorical question that he asks me.
He walks over to a cooler, pitches me a beer—PBR—and says, “What the hell are you talking about?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “I have no idea.”
I toss the beer back his way and tell him I have to go. And this is what I learn: as good as it feels to go, it doesn’t feel that much better than staying.
On that day in the convenience store, the El Camino is long gone. Not just Dad’s, but all of them. Erased from the automotive memory of a nation. But not from mine. I love that car, no matter how many people he ran over with it.
- Jason Stout lives in Atlanta, Georgia with his wife and five children. His works have appeared in Every Day Fiction, Twelve Stories, Flashquake, The Battered Suitcase, A Thousand Faces, Loquacious Placemat, Shine! and Pequin. He can be contacted through his website: jasonstout.jimdo.com.
Categories: Uncategorized | Tags: El Camino, Flash Fiction, Jason Stout, Schlitz, Sodomy, Vehicular Homicide | 2 Comments »
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