Peacocks on the Loose!

1. Fellow book blogger Jen, of Jen and the Pen fame. 2. Napolitano’s wing-woman: writer, poker player, and bad-ass Tuscaloosa lady Helen Ellis, with Napolitano’s proud brother.

 

Of course I stole the title of this entry from Hannah Tinti of One Story.  I stole it because I liked the sound of it.  That, and it was an easy way to lead in to my EL “exclusive:” Ann Napolitano does a killer peacock call.

Napolitano was at McNally Jackson last Thursday night for a conversation with Hannah Tinti about Flannery O’Connor. The underlying reason for the “conversation” was the publication of Napolitano’s new book, A Good Hard Look, set in O’Connor’s hometown of Milledgeville, Georgia.  In this historical fiction, Napolitano imagines an interaction between O’Connor and the small town in which she lived out the end of her days.

 

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Carmela Ciuraru in conversation with Andy Hunter

1. Evidence: Andy and (Russell) Brandy. 2. Andy and Carmela announcing the winners of the pseudonym contest.

There’s some college nostalgia going around in this July heat. First, I’m trying to figure out what to do with Google+ like I was trying to figure out what to do with Facebook freshman year. Then, someone sent me this unprompted, and if that doesn’t make you yearn for a Bud Light purchased with your old fake ID, then move along and pay no heed to the misty-eyed Outlet contributor on your way. Finally, capping this month on Lake Wobegon’s campus, Carmela Ciuraru and Andy Hunter sent me, along with a standing room-only crowd, back to the classroom (in a good way) last Wednesday.


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Limitations in Art

Motel in Tucson, AZ.

I’ve always been fond of setting limitations for myself, in a way. When I was in high school, my best friend and I started a “B&W” club and only wore black or white for almost a year (we stopped when we found another pair of girls doing the same thing). I like limitations in writing, too. For my college thesis, I wrote a collection: Each story was mainly about two people, and each was titled with their names. The “novel” I wrote last semester all took place in hotel rooms. The one I’m working on this semester takes place in a mall and an apartment. Sometimes I want it to be only in the mall, but I start to get dizzy thinking about expanding scenes in other stores or the food court. I go to the mall as much as I can, now, and it is one of my least favorite places. At the same time, I love it, because it stifles me.

A fashion designer, Ann Sofie Back once said in an interview, “I’m working with burgundy. I hate burgundy. I’m fairly excited about this.” Perhaps more now than I’ve ever noticed before, designers are creating lines that are a combination of attractive, sexy things and references to the laughable outside world. This is very much inspiring me in writing.

Back’s latest collection was inspired by a Second Life character. Other runway inspirations I’ve read of this season include The Matrix, the first season of Melrose Place, Jamaican dance hall drag queens, and Burning Man. These designers are using cheap, recognizable materials: crushed velvet, fraying denim, sweatpants fabric, faux fur, and t-shirts decorated with body-jewelry. I don’t believe they are making any anti-fashion statements, and most of what I’m listing is actually quite beautiful. Perhaps some shows are saying something about the economy (of course, everything is about that, right?), but mostly, designers, like any artists, need to challenge themselves to make something worthwhile.

I’m  not sure where I’m going with this novel, but I’m into the idea that I can at least see all the walls it can bounce off of. Plus, a mall is like walls inside of walls. Even the food court is segmented, and it has railings around the dining area, and you’re not allowed to smoke in certain places outside, even. There are screaming children and slow-moving old people in front of you. It’s almost as confining as a being on a plane.

I’m also interested in the idea of successful storytelling within narratives (like in letters, or orations at parties), because those seem to me like huge limitations on writing. The author is setting himself up to have to tell a story that is more engaging than the one he was setting this one inside of, or else the reader gets anxious for the real action to begin again. And he has to fend off more interruptions, while this is going on, in order to create realism. People at the party ask questions, the character doing the speaking needs a drink, the reader wants to know what she looks like while she talks, and if she can be trusted.

I’d like to write a story about a group of people or a person I truly hate. I want to write from the perspective of a total misogynist, and have him write letters to women, maybe letters to the editor of a publication I hate, and maybe the real action will start within those pages, and I’ll have to limit each step forward to a tiny square of ranting that is despicable, but at the same time eloquent enough to be published in a magazine. Maybe I’ll just assign that exercise to my students, instead.

-Natasha Stagg is a writing teacher and student in Tucson, Arizona.

I have two professions: I am a chef and a writer.

I have two professions: I am a chef and a writer.

One of these professions is doing very well; wages are rising; young people—educated , bright, energetic young people who might otherwise go to law school or med school are clamoring to join it; it has caught the popular imagination; it has its own cable network; it is, as they say, blowing up. When I attended its most celebrated festival last year, I saw something I never thought I’d see: colleagues of mine with their own entourages, like movie stars or prizefighters.

As a well-regarded but hardly famous practitioner of this profession in what is considered a third-tier town I’ve not only been interviewed and reviewed and profiled and asked to speak on panels but even caricatured by local cartoonists and offered money to endorse products. And at a time when people in occupations once thought to be iron-clad guarantors of prosperity are downsizing their expectations and girding their loins for the worst, I, a natural pessimist, am sunny about the future of this profession.

The other profession—well, it’s not going so great. One of its practitioners, in a famous article in Salon announcing his retirement, bemoaned that he was being paid the same rate that he had received when he started out 30 years ago, the same rate—not adjusted for inflation—that he had received in 1978.

Many of its oldest and most venerated outlets are closing their doors. Hardly a week goes by without the announcement of massive layoffs in this industry; even the most established practitioners worry about their own obsolescence; shortly before his death, its most famous American practitioner woefully compared his craft to the trade of a coach maker at the dawn of the automobile age.
Even though I produce something for this profession every week, I earn little from it—less per hour, I can’t help but notice, than the cheerful acid casualty who cuts my grass.

Yet, if I were to ask myself where my heart is, where, as Auden would say, I put the money of my feelings, it would be on this other profession, this sinking profession.

There comes a time in the life of most writers when they realize the truth: they will never be famous; forget posterity: their works will be largely unknown even to the present day; the two or three stories or poems in the little magazines (whose readership consists of, let’s face it, not the appreciative common reader Virginia Woolf wrote for, but resentful fellow practitioners); the book that sold 1,500 copies and then sunk without a trace–that’s as good as it’s ever going to get.

(But what about the Internet, you say. Well, —to continue the culinary/ literary metaphor—don’t you feel , when you log on, then log off a short time later, like someone who has been slouched over a refrigerator door for ten minutes, who then ruefully closes it, telling himself he was never all that hungry anyway?)

It didn’t start out that way—this bleak outlook we writers have; from the moment when our third grade teacher read to the class our earnest, block-lettered essay about the death of our pet hamster and our faces burned with happy embarrassment, we’ve been hooked on—we’ve been conditioned to expect—ever-larger doses of recognition.

But there comes a time in the life of most writers when they realize the truth: the need to write runs deeper than the ego; deeper than the need for praise or fame or riches or even some obscure desire for revenge.

Why do we write—why do I write? I confess that every time I ask myself this question and come back with an honest answer it never fails to put a smile on my face: We write because we have to write.

Why do we have to write? It may be for a reason as eloquent as Richard Wilbur’s, who said: “It is by words and the defeat of words/down sudden vistas of the vain attempt/that for a flying moment one may see/by what cross purposes the world is dreamt.” Or it may be for a reason as homely as the matron’s in E.M. Forster’s essay who proclaims, “How can I know what I think until I see what I say?”

But we embrace this truth out of desperate necessity because—

Because, haven’t you heard? It is the chefs who are now the artists, with their own school of explicators who analyze their creative birth pangs in works with fatuous titles like The Soul of a Chef. We even have our own avant-garde, complete with its own manifestos, space-age techniques, food that doesn’t even look like food, and forward-looking eagerness to elevate something as intrinsically pleasurable as eating to new levels of tedium. And perhaps somewhere, slouching towards San Sebastian waiting to be born is the chef ready to destroy the bourgeois illusion that food is supposed to taste good.

Perhaps, I think to myself in moments of grandiose self pity, now is the time for the writer in me to embrace the anonymity of the craftsman, with the painstaking vigor of the stonecutter, who carved in the obscure corners of cathedrals, the elaborate foliation of which he knew would be visible only to the eye of God.

But maybe you’ve had enough negative affirmations for one evening.

If not, here’s another, final one, from Ted Hughes:

To hatch a crow
a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
         over emptiness
But flying

-John Broening is a chef and writer based in Denver, Colorado. His work has appeared in the Baltimore Sun,the Baltimore City Paper, Gastronomica, Edible Front Range, and the Denver Post, for whom he writes a weekly column about food.

Writing & Money

you must chooseI sometimes think writers have a different relationship to money than other people. It’s the odd work-wage equation that changes things: you can easily find yourself toiling for no pay for decades, falling into a life of monk-like asceticism with diminishing expectation for salvation at the end of the line. Writing becomes like a protracted prayer—for recognition, or at least a wise, understanding reader who exists as a kind of imagined angel. In Enemies of Promise, his book about the myriad ways in which a writer can fail, Cyril Connolly admits that poverty is devastating, but adds that having money to throw around can be “a substitute for creation.”

Conversation among writers more often than not revolves around the subject of agents and advances. The name of a magazine comes up, and the first question is: how much do they pay? They sound like a group of salesmen, insisting on a materialism that we don’t really possess, as if to trick themselves into believing that the profession is like any other. The shop talk is a way of fending off our anxiety about a livelihood that constantly seems at the point of disappearing. On occasion, the pursuit of money is put forth as the only reasonable motive to write, an absurd bit of bravado that we all know to be untrue. Norman Mailer once told of being approached by a stockbroker after the success of his first novel The Naked and the Dead. Mailer handed him $10,000 to invest. Less than a year later, the broker informed him that the value of the investment had almost doubled. Mailer cashed in the account, and refused to retain the broker. “I thought, if it’s this easy to make money I’ll never write again.”

Having a cushion of inherited money brings its own set of problems, not the least of which is the resentment it incurs, queering the fellowship hard-up writers depend on to help them through lean times. The poet James Merrill, whose father was a founder of the brokerage company Merril Lynch, navigated the touchy subject of his wealth by creating a foundation that gave grants to writers. “Cleverly, Merrill had figured out that if he wanted to spend time with other poets rather than bankers, he needed to share the wealth without making it look like handouts,” Edmund White writes in his recent memoir City Boy: My life in New York during the 1960s and ‘70s, “If a friend put the touch on him, Jimmy could always say, ‘Apply to the foundation, but remember I’m just one of the board members.’” Everyone knew Merrill had the final say, but the set-up served its purpose. “If someone got money from the foundation, he or she didn’t have to feel beholden to Merrill himself. Nor was it a loan that had to be paid back – or that could potentially create bad blood…”

A well-heeled novelist I know who comes from a family of famous industrialists complains of the American romantic notion that money is inimical to the creation of art. He’s only half-joking when he says, “I’ve had a hell of a time overcoming my advantages.” He claims that the family fortune had been dissipated by his parents. “What I’m really like is the poor schmuck who inherits a twelve-bedroom house that he can’t afford to heat or repair.” In fact, he would discreetly make substantial loans to his friends. Several years ago he bailed me out of a mess, apologizing that he couldn’t afford to give me more. “Things are a little tight, you know.” He seemed irritated when I tried to pay him back, and never cashed the check.

Having to explain the chasm between your ambition and low status can grind you down, especially when it lasts into your forties. Edmund White ghostwrote textbooks for three hundred bucks a chapter. He worked for a petrochemical company preparing glossy annual reports designed to explain to shareholders why the company continuously lost money. White was grateful to a friend for understanding how brave he was going out into the world and meeting well-known writers even though he was not yet “armed with a single publication.”Starving-Writer

Sherwood Anderson’s collection of stories, Winesburg, Ohio, kicked around for four years before he found an interested editor. The editor summoned Anderson to New York and arranged to meet him at a certain corner near Central Park at four. Anderson arrived and waited. He was still waiting at six, when he gave up and returned to his hotel, seeing it as some kind of sadistic trick publishers enjoyed playing on hopeful authors. In his Memoirs Anderson wrote: “I went to my hotel and threw myself on the bed…tears flowing from my eyes. It all seems silly now but on that evening I was really more desperate than I had ever been before in my life.” Most writers recognize this particular brand of despair. To be told “It’s only a book,” as I was when in the midst of a seven-year heartache over my first novel, is like telling a lovesick adolescent “There will be others.” At nine that same night, the editor called Anderson. They had been waiting on different corners. He wanted to publish the stories. Anderson expresses no pleasure at this turn of events, only a vague  feeling of relief, a perfect illustration of Epicurus’s definition of happiness as simply the absence of pain. For Anderson, pain wasn’t absent for long. When Winesburg, Ohio was published, in 1919, “in review after review it was called ‘a sewer’ and the man who had written it taken as strangely sex-obsessed…a kind of sickness came over me, a sickness that lasted for months.”

I might have had an easier time of it during the long apprenticeship years had I listened to my father, who, seeking to protect me from a future of hardship that he saw more clearly than I did, urged me to get a university degree. “At least you’ll be able to teach while making your bones as an author,” he said. My concept of what being a writer would entail was so unformed that I took his well-meaning advice as a typically philistine insult. Teaching sounded like a prison sentence that I might never finish serving. What I really doubted, I think, was my ability to lead a double life, writing secretly on weekends. According to Connolly, excessive isolation is one of many traps the writer should take pains to avoid. Having no one to talk to can distort your work, but talking about it too much can kill it. In retrospect, I see I first had to announce my ambition in a brazen way in order to begin to believe in it myself. Now, like most of my writer friends, I pretend that I believed it was a viable profession all along.

- Michael Greenberg is the author of Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life and the award-winning memoir Hurry Down Sunshine. Visit his website at www.michaelgreenberg.org.

Jim Shepard On the Subject of Fiction Based on Non-Fiction

sp_aaib059_16x20_the-hindenburg-disaster-posters_707The first worry writers have when they consider working with something like historical events has to do with the issue of authority:  as in, where do I get off writing about that?    Well, here’s the good and the bad news:  where do you get off writing about anything?   Where do you get off writing about someone of a different gender?    A different person?   Where do you get off writing about yourself, from twenty years ago?

Writers shouldn’t lose sight of the essential chutzpah involved in trying to imagine any other kind of sensibility.  And that they should take heart from that chutzpah, as well.   The whole project of literature – the entire project of the arts — is about the exercise of the empathetic imagination.   Why were we given something as amazing as imagination, if we’re not going to use it?

We need to bear in mind, as we’ve been told many times, that we’re working from, but not necessarily about, our lives.   The poet Seamus Heaney had a nice way of putting it.   He said:  “I do not suggest that the self is not the proper arena of poetry.   But I believe that the greatest work occurs when a certain self-forgetfulness is attained.”

And here’s the happy paradox:  such distancing seems to enable a new – and often unexpected – version of emotional honesty and intimacy to be generated within the work.   Both of which are crucial.   Oscar Wilde had a great insight about that.   He said, “Man is least himself when he talks in his own persona.   Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.”

An old student once quoted to me Allan Gurganus’ remark that it was the writer’s job to take the world personally.  I think that that’s true.  When I read about The Who or John Ashcroft, or the disaster at Chernobyl, I’m reading about it because I’m interested in the subject, and by interested I mean to suggest that not only my intellect but my emotions have been engaged.   And when I’m reading, I’m trying to read receptively; that is, I’m beginning, if I’m engaged enough, to pay attention to how what I’m reading is affecting me, and why.   You might say that, if I’m, for example, reading about the catastrophe at Chernobyl, I’m simultaneously storing away the facts about the disaster and keeping on eye on the spectacle of my own ongoing affective reaction to what I’m learning.

Suffering is everywhere.   Drama is everywhere.   Why do some things affect us so much, when others don’t?  Some things we come across and say, Oh, that’s terrible, and go on to the next thing.   Other events, experienced and imagined, stay with us.   The fact that they don’t go away is a hint about how important they are to our psyches.   That’s a hint to which the writer should pay attention.  What’s important about those things?   That’s for us to find out.

- Jim Shepard

Chapter 22 of Shya Scanlon’s Forecast

forecast42

Forecast is being serialized semiweekly across 42 web sites. For a full list of participants and links to live chapters, please visit www.shyascanlon.com/forecast

Chapter 21

22

Knowing Zara, knowing she was on her way home, seeing her turn the corner and head toward her house, seeing her approach the path, approach the steps, mince up the steps—all this made me nervous.  The Professor was not yet done explaining to Jennifer and Marshall—or more accurately, they were not yet done understanding him—and it seemed potentially calamitous to let Zara see him there.  She’d known him as a child, sure, but she wouldn’t remember him at this point.  And anyway that wasn’t the concern.  It was the oddity of it.  The locked door.  The stranger.  The lack of explanation.  Coupled with Zara’s inquisitive and ever-suspicious mind, I wasn’t convinced her parents would be up to the task of preventing their daughter from uncovering at least some part of the truth.  I scrambled to encourage a less conspicuous mode of egress—had all exits marked—but the Professor wouldn’t budge from his own plan which, well, who knows exactly, but which certainly did not involve giving one damn about being seen by Zara.  It seemed a tad unprofessional, for the record, but I’ve come to understand that the Professor often has a separate and not altogether transparent agenda.  In my experience questioning his does not always advance one’s own.  Besides, as you’ve seen, here as would often be the case, Asseem, or perhaps Zara’s relationship with him, provided a foil for the near misses of our team, for our learning curve, distracting her exactly from what by rights should have exposed us, or at the very least been the source of extreme suspicion.  So, in retrospect, it could very well have been that the Professor expected her mind to be elsewhere, and capitalized on the occasion as he saw fit.

If only we were able to ask him.

Interestingly, the Professor was a proponent of forgetfulness too.  It is the third of the three immutable rules of engagement for Citizen Surveillants—thought it’s termed Omission—the first of course being Dispassion.  Then Perspicacity.  But Omission we were taught first, perhaps because it’s the most difficult to learn, and had always maintained a privileged position among our rules.  I remember, for instance, that on the second day of CS training the Professor didn’t show up for class.  We sat for a long time in a cool metal clockless room, without speaking, without so much as one glance at one another, instead reading and re-reading the assigned reading material until we knew it front to back.  We simply sat.  And sat.  We sat longer before warming up and looking over and engaging with one another, breaking stranger silence.  And once conversation died down we began to test each other on the reading, and went on to form elaborate and convincing arguments for and against the basic premises of the reading material until, some time later, the door opened and a small, plainly dressed woman came in and handed us each a piece of paper with instructions to forget the text entirely.  It was irrelevant to our training, we were told, but would nonetheless skew our understanding of certain essential points to be discussed later and would therefore have to be placed under Omission.  So we did.  I can’t provide a good tutorial for this procedure.  It is a non-standards-based practice.  One simply (though not easily) finds one’s own unique “switch.”  And we were tested of course, tests based on interpretations of such material as would make clear whether or not we’d successfully forgotten the information we were supposed to Omit.  And if we failed we were tested again.  And if we failed that we were tested once more.  I know that failure to pass this test eventually led to dismissal from the training—a few didn’t make it—but it had yet to be determined what could reasonably be expected, so my class was probably given more leniency than was given to those that followed.  Though I say this not to discredit myself, nor to discredit others from my class—we all worked extremely hard, and helped develop the program into what you see today.  In fact, as Lead Surveillant for WatchGroup 01-Z, I feel it’s both my place and my duty to state that what we may have therefore lacked in certain areas, we have more than made up for in others.

And gentlemen, I will argue that point to the very end.

Still, watching one half of a close knit yet erratic couple like Zara and Asseem is almost twice the effort.  Granted, this was the birth of the program and hence before I had the resources Citizen Surveillants enjoy today, but over the next couple years of Zara’s accelerated drift toward adulthood, I was stretched to the limits of my ability to fulfill the basic responsibility with which I was charged.  I’m not saying I missed anything.  Under the increasingly bright lights fueled by our first foray into the power of ETMs the pair stood out unmistakably: Zara and her inability to produce Buzz and Asseem’s rapid ascent into a Buzz-production powerhouse.  But despite my training, keeping track of their progress was a challenge.  One could barely interpret their behavior, nor easily predict the outcome of their interactions.  A fight could deepen their commitment, and a stable period—something any family man would credit with keeping a relationship together—for this couple might mean a distance only to be bridged by spontaneous eruptions of vaguely defended antipathy.  Without the knowledge that they had in fact fallen in love, who would have predicted it based on their interaction at the theatre, or based on their physical violence?  I kept loosening my grip on Asseem after mistakenly thinking he’d obviated his role in Zara’s life by his own behavior.  Meaning he was often an asshole.  But he’d suddenly reappear, changing Zara’s direction in ways which, though unexpected to us at the time, could surely have been predicted should we have kept better track of him while outside Zara’s immediate vicinity, or more accurately, kept track of them both as a plural yet irreducible subject.

Of course, for the first couple weeks it couldn’t have been easier.  Nor less interesting.  One can only stand for so long the days of cooing and clucking and holding hands and, finally, in an abandoned building three blocks away from Zara’s house, the awkward thrustings of intercourse.  I can’t tell you how unbelievably dull it was to watch, day after day, as they sat in Handpepper’s class, staring straight forward while every cell of their bodies strained toward the center of the aisle as they felt each photon bouncing between their shiny, sweating skins.  And while the lazy perambulations after class, the pointing out of their favorite houses and alleys and overgrown yards, or the extreme sensitivity to small touches and rubs between adolescent limbs might delight both parties involved, and even those who, just passing, can take a moment to re-imagine their own first love before continuing on with their head full of errands, I promise you, it is a grating thing to endure for days on end.  And while it bears no comparison to the superlatively dull period after Zara became Helen and Helen became housewife, it was my first taste of surveillance, and I must admit that I was in the process of rethinking my choice of vocation by the time, about two weeks after their first encounter, Zara and Asseem dropped out of school.

There was little fanfare.  The couple had talked about it, weighed their options.  Zara’s parents were encouraging, Asseem’s weren’t told.  Asseem had been offered a new job working exclusively for Mr. Styles—the Hollywood fat-man whose authoritative whine made Zara sick to her stomach—and could only take on the role of translator (and later writer and consultant) of minority culture in the films Styles watched (and went on to produce).  For her part, Zara hadn’t found employment yet, but had decided she wouldn’t just jump into the first thing that came along, would wait for something compelling, something that would be worth her while, something big.  Or perhaps it was something to impress Asseem, who had quickly gained the confidence of Mr. Styles, being the charming, rather hypocritical kid that he was, and who continued to pressure Zara into getting a job working with him, insisting that Mr. Styles would probably accept her as a personal assistant.  For her part, Zara failed to see the opportunity inherent in servitude.  “And besides,” she said, “we should have separate careers.”

Isn’t she just great?

Well, except the “career” that Zara finally settled on managed to alienate just about everyone save her parents, who predictably encouraged it as they had her decision to leave school, citing its subversion of restrictive social mores as a symbolic step toward their daughter’s complete appropriation of agency.  I mean for Heaven’s sake.  Call me simpleminded, but I’d always considered stripping exploitative.  And though I hardly pride myself on alignment with those whom I happily tag as “degenerate,” it seems significant here to note that even Knuckle himself was reluctant, at first, to let Zara ascend the small stage in the room he’d built behind his Dirty Dog stand.

“Whoa whoa hold up a minute.  You wanna what?” he said, eyes pulled back into his head.

It hadn’t taken Knuckle long to learn he had the knack when it came to emotional transfer.  It helped, certainly, that one of the first ETM machines in Seattle nested on the corner adjacent to his business, but his entrepreneurial spirit would have driven him anywhere to use one.  He’d have made his little discovery anyway.  He’d have begun to capitalize on it in whatever way he could.  That it happened so quickly was at best a result of factors beyond anyone’s control.  But of course there’s probably nothing I can add at this point to the thought that’s been put into the “Knuckle Problem,” and besides, back then he was still small time, building from the gutter up, not greasing down an entire generation of highway drivers.  He’d simply acted on an impulse, charged up enough juice to run some old spot lights he’d had packed away, and hired his son Junior to build him a rickety runway stage in a big tent he popped on the unused corner of his property.  Presto: a strip club, unimaginatively named Knuckle’s Dirty Doghouse.

Zara had of course seen the tent go up, seen girls go in and out, and seen the crowds.  Being a drop-out had afforded her an opportunity to take a look around the neighborhood and assess what options she had for employment, and between picking up trash for the city, working in the open air food courts above 5th Avenue, and babysitting little brats for her parent’s rich friends, she didn’t feel like showing people her body—this absurd bag of blood people were so incomprehensibly fascinated by—was such a bad deal.  She already had a closet full of S&M gear, and though perhaps too small for her now, it wouldn’t need too much work to be serviceable.  And dancing, well, that’s just moving your tits around and spreading your legs.  It had been over two weeks since she’d quit school, and it made her sick to think that she had less to do than Asseem.  Every time he ran off to work and left her alone she felt increasingly useless, and she was becoming concerned that Asseem felt something similar.  She wanted to be useful.  She wanted to do, not to just be.  Plus a little income couldn’t hurt.

“I said I want to dance.”  Zara leaned into the counter like she was asking for a Dirty Dog—taking their unstated exchange to its next logical level.

“I heard you,” he said.

It was midmorning, a nice but slightly chilly fall day, and Knuckle stared at her face before letting his eyes slide down to the v-neck of her t-shirt to trace freckles across the expanse of 18 year-old flesh strapped tight over angular collar bones.  A robin’s egg would fit perfectly in between them, he thought.  He could see that her nipples were hard from the chill, but being a gentleman he looked back at her face.  He’d practically seen this delicious thing develop all the way from something you just don’t think about to something you think about guiltily to something you feel no compunction whatsoever imagining bent over your grill with its skirt hiked up.  But she was still out of bounds.  He knew that.  Her folks, despite being weird, practically indecipherable people, were paying customers.  And more importantly, they were connected.  He didn’t know what they did, exactly, but he’d seen the strange cars and he’d heard the rumors and they obviously, though neither rich nor powerful themselves, were host to all manner of rich, powerful people to the point where you’d have to be blind.  So.  He was not going to get in the middle of anything that might jeopardize his new and, legally speaking, questionable business.

But then, she’d be a draw.  Hell, who wouldn’t want to see that little body on stage?  It was a tough call, but that, my friend, is what business is all about.  He frowned.

“Ask your parents,” he finally said.

Zara huffed, pushing off from the counter and flopping down at a table in front of Knuckle’s stand.

“What is this, story hour?  I’m not looking for high moral fucking ground here, Knuckle.  But thanks for the concern.”  What was she going to have to do, give him a rim job?

“Listen kid,” he said.  He was used to her mouth.  “I got plenty a girls.  Why I need a put up with the headache?”

“The headache?  Is that some new slang for money I haven’t heard yet?”  Zara knew what her naked body would be worth in this neighborhood.  “Cause if it is it’s pretty stupid—money, duh, makes headaches go away.”

What a peach.

The standoff remained silent for a few minutes, Zara picking at her jeans and staring at the dirt and Knuckle leaning on the counter in his greasy bib and looking out across the street at the dimly pulsing ETM, scheming.  Despite the fact that he didn’t think he’d ever actually see Zara naked, the potential had inspired him.  Perhaps he was selling himself short with these cheap bitches he’d picked up downtown.  Could he power a bigger place with that crazy machine?  Two?  And what about another stand?  Meanwhile Zara was running through the different ways she could negotiate with Knuckle, and how comfortable she’d feel lying entirely, if it came to that.  As a general rule, she found that lying put her at a disadvantage, creating an Achilles heel that had constantly to be guarded, watched, and stressed-out about.  Worse, the more desirable the object to which the lie might grant access, the more intense these undesirable “symptoms” of lying became, until nearly all enjoyment of the object was sapped by a morbid preoccupation with being discovered, called out, or otherwise in trouble.  Of course, this was not a question of getting her parents’ permission.  Zara knew this would be enthusiastically granted—and it was exactly a matter of wanting to avoid the spectacle she imagined would be a result of that enthusiasm.  Namely, she knew they’d come “show their support.”

Zara followed Knuckle’s gaze across the street to the line that was beginning to form at the ETM machine.  People stood around, eyeing one another suspiciously, pockets full of old dead batteries.  It had only been a few weeks, and it was still a strange and unnatural sight: the glowing, sweating machine producing its low, ominous hum.  The smaller sidekick that transferred power into the containment device (in most cases batteries).  The conduction spot, fenced-off and set back from the road.  One after another, people moved inside the fence and waited for a minute, getting their bearings, then went to work.  They squinted, concentrated, distorted their faces and bodies in all attempts to conjure up any and all shameful memories, dark and unpleasant secrets, and who knew what all else.  The parameters of emotional transfer hadn’t been thoroughly outlined for the public, nor were they thoroughly known, so the undertaking was a tad blind in the beginning, and to watch people trying to transfer was easy proof.  And as if this embarrassment were insufficient, the process had too the unique result of embarrassing both those for whom it worked only a little, and those whose electric return was unexpectedly large, so that many of the people once sheepish standing in line then put on their awkward show only to sulk away with their shoulders sagging under the weight of having so publicly intimated what lurked—or didn’t—in their hearts and minds.  For this reason, among many others, ETMs were soon made a far more private affair.  But those early days the spectacle was engrossing.  Zara and Knuckle sat in silence as the sun shifted a few degrees westward and the shadows shrunk.

“Fine,” Zara said, suddenly, and set off down the street.  Knuckle wasn’t sure if this fine meant the deal was off, or if it meant she’d attain permission from her parents, but he watched her walk away in a quick, determined slice, shrugged, and quickly pictured her bent over the oily surface of his crooked countertop, moaning softly as he drilled the little bitch in backwards.

Chapter 23