Swim - Chapter Two

In Chapter Two of Swim, Kerry learns more about his disease and we learn more about his family, particularly his sometimes strained relationship with his parents. A relationship put under even more pressure by his diagnosis and his family's reaction to it.



Dr. Patterson, Kerry’s new oncologist, slid a three inch thick sheaf of papers across the desk to Kerry and Tabby. “The news,” he said, “is not what we would have hoped for.” He stood and affixed an x-ray to the light screen on the wall. He pointed to dark spots, blobs, blurs, rocks beneath the water on the screen, tapping each spot in turn. “Lungs. Lymph nodes. Around the heart.” He nodded to Kerry. “You’re officially in Stage Three.”

“What does that mean?” Tabby asked. She pulled the papers in front of her and held a Bic stic pen at the ready. She didn’t need the pen; she would remember everything Patterson said. The pen was for taking the copious notes Stephen would require later to understand everything that was going on. After twenty-five years of marriage, Tabby had learned that even her recollection of things wasn’t enough to satisfy the analytical nature of her husband.

Kerry sat still in his chair, staring at the lighted-look at his insides , trying to differentiate between normal and not, lung and tumor, the black nothingness of the film and the black somethingness of the shit trying to kill him.

Patterson sat back down, tapped one finger on the topmost sheet he’d handed them. Frequently Asked Questions – Testicular Cancer and You. Kerry looked down at the sheet. His life reduced to a FAQ. Cancer reduced to nothing more than some computer virus Ellis had accidentally downloaded to Kerry’s computer with his latest porn video. System crash. Hit control-alt-delete to reboot.

If it were only that simple.

“There’s three stages to testicular cancer,” Patterson said. He was an older man. Salt and pepper hair, heavy on the pepper, barely more than stubble goatee, a pair of thin-rimmed glasses that slid down his nose as he spoke. He punctuated every sentence by sliding them back up the bridge. “Stage three is, obviously, the most serious. What it means, essentially, is that the cancer has metastasized.”

“Metast – what?” Tabby asked, pen hovering over paper.

“Moved,” Kerry replied, glancing back at the x-ray. “We learned about it in Senior year Health. It means its moved.”

“Exactly,” Patterson nodded, middle finger of his left hand sticking his glasses back up between his eyes. “In your case, the disease has spread to those areas I mentioned.”

Lungs. Lymph nodes. Heart.

“The major concern for us is that all this metastasizing, moving, makes it harder for treatment. Sometimes chemo isn’t enough.”

“It lowers his chances as well, doesn’t it?” Tabby always was one for the practical.

Patterson nodded again, leaning across the desk and running his own pen across that top sheet, bracketing a section of statistics. “Stage One patients have the best survival rates,” he said. “Almost 99%.” He smiled at the number. “Don’t ever let anyone tell you that we haven’t gotten better at beating this.” He slid the pen further through the paragraph. “Stage Two survival rates are also high, typically over 90%.”

“And Stage Three?” Kerry was still staring at the x-ray. Right then, he wished for Superman’s x-ray vision, so he could see through his skin, into the flowing blood, to find the cancer sailing along on cellular rafts and hemoglobin canoes, so he could turn those x-rays on it, burn it out of his body forever.

“Stage Three varies,” Patterson said. “Typically, as high as 80%. As low as 50%. It depends on where the disease has spread and how aggressive it is.” He settled back into his chair. “Your specific disease has been moderately aggressive and, unfortunately, has reached the area surrounding your heart. Fortunately, it hasn’t permeated your bones or reached your brain. That gives us good reason to be optimistic.”

Tabby ran her hand across the page, tracing the lines of words and numbers that explained her son’s chances at not dying. “I understand that you can’t give us an exact figure,” she said. “But could you give us an estimate? Odds?”

Patterson studied Kerry’s x-ray for a long moment. “I don’t ever like to get too specific until we’ve had a chance to get in there, see what the surgery reveals. But… if I had to put a number on it. I’d say 70%.” He slapped a hand down on the desk and grinned at Kerry. “I’d make you at least a ten point favorite, son.”

Kerry nodded back, smiled slightly. Kept that positive attitude up. A ten point favorite. Hell, a good surgery and maybe they could bump it up, make it two touchdowns at least. Kerry imagined Bill Belicheck in the gallery during the surgery, yelling in plays, sending in substitutions. “What the hell, Patterson? Who taught you how to suture? Brady, get in there.” That’d do it, right? Let Tom Brady lead them all on the two-minute-chemotherapy-offense. No need for last second field goals here. This puppy’d be in the bank by the fourth quarter.

Or maybe it’d go to sudden death.

Patterson was talking again, going through the list of treatments and medications with Tabby. “A standard regimen,” he said. “Platinol. VP-16.” Minor side effects possible. “There are, occasionally, some issues with various blood diseases. And his immune system will certainly be compromised. Nausea, obviously. Hair loss.”

Kerry ran a hand through the thin-since-he-was-fifteen layer of dirty blonde atop his head. Hair loss? Pain and impending death weren’t enough? Was there really a need to rush the inevitable?

Tabby was furiously scribbling notes on that same top sheet. Kerry didn’t know why she’d bother. Certainly all this was covered in the FAQ, and that had to be detailed enough for his father. “Anything else?” she asked.

“In some cases,” Patterson said, “there are issues with sterility. The disease itself, combined with the loss of the testicle and the treatment protocol… it’ll be hard to say. Most likely we won’t know anything until months after treatment, and even then…”

“Is there anything he can do about that? In case it does happen?” She tapped her pen against the desk. “I read online last night about freezing sperm. Is that viable?”

Kerry’s eyes widened and he no longer needed that x-ray vision to see his blood. He was quite sure every drop of it was flooding his face. His mother discussing sperm? His sperm?

“That is an option,” Patterson said. “Unfortunately, it would have to be one you would need to pursue rather quickly. With surgery on Monday, he would have to make a deposit this weekend.” The doctor tugged open a drawer, rifled through some pamphlets. “I believe I had some literature on a facility in Utica..”

“No,” Kerry said. His mind still swimming with thoughts of sperm and deposits and his mother. “I’m not going to…” He pictured himself in some tiny cubicle, with nothing but a thin curtain separating Tabby, impatiently clicking her heels on the tile floor, from him, his bottle, and the latest copy of Jugg-Fuckers. “I’ll worry about that later,” he finally said, shaking his head to clear the image. “Let’s get through this, first. No sense putting the cart before the horse, right?”

Tabby stared at him and Kerry wondered if she was getting the same mental picture he had. “Right,” she said, drawing the word out. “That would probably be for the best.” She turned back to Patterson. “Now, about the surgery.”

“The orchiectomy,” Patterson said, as he stood and moved around the desk. He stopped in front of Kerry, a long metal pointer dangling from his hand, aimed at the younger man’s crotch. “It’s a rather simple procedure, really,” he said. “We don’t go in through the scrotum as you might think. First, we make an incision here,” the pointer drew a diagonal line across Kerry’s jeans, just below his waist.

And Kerry’s eyes didn’t see denim and the blunt tip of the pointer. He ‘saw’ soft skin, giving way to the sharp edge of the scalpel, ‘saw’ parting layers of flesh and muscle and gushy-mushy layers of fat slowly splurting open and then blood

and then Tabby was thanking the doctor and leading Kerry down the hall, through the maze of black and white tiled floor to the parking garage and settling him in the front seat, head leaning against the partially opened window.

“You’re going to need to toughen up,” Kerry,” Tabby said as she paid the attendant and pulled the car from the garage. “I know this is a lot to take but… ” She shook her head and turned on the radio. “We’re all going to go through a lot the next few months. And we all need to hold it together. You falling apart at the first sign of difficulty will make it very hard for anyone to be able to give you the kind of support you’re going to need.”

Kerry took in a long, slow breath. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. Don’t fall apart. First signs of difficulty. He let his eyes drop to his lap, ‘saw’ the invisible line Patterson had sliced across his groin. And let his eyes fall shut.

Difficulty, he realized, was much like cancer. Worlds easier to ignore if you couldn’t see it.


****


Lunch was less like a meal than the strategic coordination of an invasion. While Kerry sat passively, almost involuntarily working his way through a ham and cheese with too little mayo and too much of the fancy faux-European cheeses his mother enjoyed, Tabby had immediately gone on the offensive. Pulling out a day planner as thick as the kitchen table, she had gone straight to work, addressing the practical implications of Kerry’s illness. Outlining their battle plan.

Kerry had managed, weakly, to put up some resistance to any massive upheaval of their lives. He’d argued, clearly in vain, that treating the situation as normally as possible would probably be the best for his condition. The most conducive, he’d argued, for him, out there on the front line. Helping him to maintain his focus on beating back the disease.

Tabby had slapped his sandwich down on a plate, ignored him more or less completely, and hustled him to the same seat at the table he’d had since he was six. Rescheduling, she maintained, was a necessity. Someone would need to take Kerry to and from chemo and Stephen couldn’t take time off from teaching, not at this point in the semester, not with Spring Break just about to end and final exams to build to. “No,” she argued, “the only logical choice is me. Your grandmother could do it, I suppose, if push came to shove and all. But you know how she is with sickness and there’s taking care of your grandfather and all…”

“We’ll have to do some significant adjusting,” she said, flipping through the daily calendars for the next several weeks. She paused on the coming Monday, orchiectomy day. ‘O-Day’ she jotted in the margin. “Hmmm,” she hummed, tap-tap-tapping her pen against the table top. “Next Monday. Not the best timing, certainly. Busy day at work, you understand,” Kerry was sitting across from her, his father Stephen was leaning against the refrigerator, but she still seemed to be speaking to no one in particular. “Three major accounts,” she went on. “Lunch with the buyers from Buffalo…”

Stephen chimed in from his post by the fridge. “Maybe my mother could-”

Tabby cut him off with a flick of the pen. “I’ll do it,” she said, the tone in her voice suggested finality was the only option. “It will be fine. I’m certain I’ll be able to work something out with my boss. After all, there are seven of us in Account Management and surely one or two of the others can make up for my absence.” She circled the number 5 next to the day of the week on the calendar. “And I can probably make arrangements to go in after hours to deal with any problems that might arise. After all, I’m sure Kerry will be exhausted from the chemo. He’ll probably simply sleep.” She turned to Stephen then. “You should be able to handle a few hours of sleep, right?”

Stephen nodded, quickly, then resumed his almost stoic pose against the refrigerator, hands clasped behind his back in that vague almost ‘at ease’ pose he so frequently assumed when dealing with Tabby and her schedules, plans, and stratagems. He had, so far, taken everything rather well, though even Kerry had to admit there was precious little way to tell the difference between Stephen’s ‘taking it well’ and his ‘dying inside’.

He had said little, though that was also nothing new. Tabby was the aggressive, strategic, action-oriented mind of the family. Stephen tended to approach everything situation as he would a problem in one of the math courses he taught at the Community College. He examined it from every angle, made sure to get all the vital info before drawing any kind of conclusion or making any kind of move. To Stephen, everything in life was worth of scrutiny, careful deliberation, and a well reasoned, logical plan.

Kerry had often wondered exactly how it was that Stephen had ended up with Tabby.

Tabby rolled on with her scheduling, pushing several calendar pages out onto the table in a semi-circle. She was in the midst of outlining a rotating shift schedule for her and Stephen to keep tabs on their son during the night, when Kerry finished his sandwich. It was then, as Tabby debated the merits of three versus four hour shifts, that he decided, for his own piece of mind, he needed to get the hell out of there.

“I’m going back to the dorm,” he said, standing and sliding his chair back with more force than he had intended. He wanted it to seem simple, an easy unforced decision – the less likely for Tabby to challenge it. An emotional outburst complete with slamming chairs would achieve only the opposite effect. Falling apart in the face of difficulty again and all. He dropped his dish in the sink and made for his room down the hall.

Tabby was on her feet and following him in an instant. “What? Now?” she asked as they moved down the hall, Stephen following as well, bringing up the rear of their regimental line.

“Yes, now,” Kerry replied. He reached the door of his room and let his eyes roam, in search of the pair of shoes he’d kicked off when they came home. “I left some stuff there I’m gonna need. And they don’t close the dorms till Sunday morning, anyway. And I’d like to get out, you know, since I won’t be able to after Monday.” He noticed the shoes next to the bed, arranged neatly, side-by-side, toes pointed to the door. Exactly not how he’d left them. He shuffled to the bed and sat down. “And besides, A.J.’s coming over tonight. We’re supposed to hang out before he heads back to NYU.”

A.J. was Kerry’s best friend since diapers. A brighter, more motivated, more talented best friend with a full scholarship ride to New York University, and the never ending admiration of Tabby.

“Anthony is in town?” Tabby asked. “Why hasn’t he stopped by?”

Kerry shrugged then bent to retrieve one brown loafer from the floor. “He just got in last night,” he said. “He was on break this week and he had an internship interview in North Carolina. He’s heading back on Sunday so we were gonna hang tonight.”

Tabby nodded and Kerry could just barely see Stephen in the hallway over her shoulder. His shadow on the wall had more visual presence.

“Are you sure this is wise?” she asked. She’d stopped in the doorway, keeping her distance both physically and in her gaze, her eyes hummingbirding their way around, darting back and forth across the door, out into the hallway, covering the carpeted feet between her and her son. She always did that, always scanned ahead, always searched out the oncoming obstacles, the possibilities for ambush. “Do you really think you should be going out in your condition?”

Kerry paused halfway through unlacing the shoe. “I’m sick, Mom,” he said. “Staying here and staring at the ceiling all night isn’t going to change that.” Truth be told, he didn’t imagine he’d be in much mood to do anything other than sit in his dorm room and stare at the ceiling. But it would be that ceiling, not this one.

Tabby shifted slightly, but remained in the doorway, one foot lingering in the relative safety of the hallway. “Are you going to tell him?” she asked, her eyes still dancing, tangoing their way around Kerry, zigging and zagging across his face, back up, up and up and up, past where his hairline soon wouldn’t be, then back down like a shot, down to his chin, then nose, cheek, a cross hatching pattern of avoidance. “About the cancer, I mean. Are you going to tell Anthony?”

The room seemed to freeze, molecules of oxygen and carbon dioxide stilled in mid-movement, stalled in their breathe in-breathe out exchange. Kerry locked in place, one still laced shoe now half on, foot mashing down the leather heel. Tabby was frozen in the door, fingers gripping the wood of the frame, lips parted, barely, still closed enough to hold the invisible string tied to the word, looped round the ‘r’, holding it, gravity working on it, fighting the helium force of it, making it linger, balloon up slowly, bobbing through the space as it slowly filled it. Drifting. Hanging. Floating slowly from mother to son.

Cancer.

Kerry nodded slowly, breaking the spell, the physical movement like a pin to the balloon, rushing the air back into the room, refilling his mother’s lungs. He concentrated his own eyes on his feet, on slowly squeezing his foot into the shoe, working against the heel, wriggling his toes in without undoing the laces, afraid to undo anything at this point. He didn’t need to look at Tabby, he knew the pattern by heart now, the way her eyes drifted in his presence, as natural and as out of her control as her own breathing.

Tabby stepped back, second foot joining the first in the hallway, her body shifting back to totally block Stephen from view. “Fine,” she said, the tight, clipped sound of the word indicating it was anything but. “We have dinner at your grandparents’ tomorrow night.” Saturday night family dinner was a tradition dating back to before Kerry was born. “We’ll tell them then. Seven o’clock. Don’t be late.” She turned and moved across the hall, the door to hers and Stephen’s bedroom slowly shutting behind her.

Kerry finished shoving his foot into the shoe, quickly pulled the other one on as well. He stood and glanced at his father, still in the hall, leaning ‘at ease’ against the wall. He saw so little of himself in Stephen, so little of his own rounded face in the stern, angular looks of his father. Kerry had always wondered what happened to his father’s features in the transfer from father to son. Everything about Kerry was round, soft, Play-doh malleable. Nothing like the thin, perpetual state of ‘sunken in’ his father existed in. It seemed almost as if Stephen’s body had turned on him, absorbed everything that came into before it could add to his outsides, then become so hungry that it started to feast on itself, pulling bones, blood, and skin into a far-too-tight to be natural fit.

Maybe, Kerry reasoned , that was what had happened in the womb. Tabby’s genetics had overpowered Stephen’s, her DNA had omnivorously devoured his, eaten his chromosomes whole and spat out the carcasses, still hungry and looking for a snack.

Kerry moved toward the door, head down, wishing for anything but an ‘encounter’ with his father. Stephen stepped in front of him, stiffly, knees locking in place, one arm crookedly coming out from behind his back.

Kerry looked up. “Dad?”

Stephen’s arm hung there, between them, long enough that Kerry wondered if it hadn’t locked in place, before Stephen finally let it drop. “See you tomorrow,” he said. He moved toward the door to his own bedroom, his hand hovering near the door, as if he intended to knock. “Don’t be late,” he said and then, apparently deciding against the knocking idea, slipped through the door.

Read more!

Swim - Chapter One

OK, even though this is called Never Finish, that's not technically true. I did finish something once: my Master's thesis. It was a novella entitled Swim. Now I'm turning it into a novel and I'll be posting it as I go.

Swim si the story of Kerry Matthews, a college sophmore who has just been diagnosed with cancer. Facing the possibility of death will force Kerry to reevaluate his life, relationships, and his place in the world.

In Chapter One, Kerry is diagnosed and must tell his family, even as he begins to wonder what this will mean for his future, or if he'll even have one.







Kerry Matthews stood in his parents’ bathroom and stared into the mirror, hand hovering over his crotch, over the cancerous left testicle his doctor had found that afternoon.

It wasn’t the usual mirror – the near wall sized, monstrosity with the phony gold edging that his mother Tabby loved so much and the row of oversized round bulbs lining the top and both sides. Lights that Kerry was convinced had never – not once – cast anything but the most unflattering shadows of him on the marble sink top and the hardwood floor. No, that mirror lay against the far wall of the bathroom, temporarily replaced by a simple, square, function-over-form medicine chest. Tabby was in the midst of one of her every-five-years-or-so remodeling jags, and the bathroom walls and counters were to be the first victims.

In his youth, Kerry had convinced himself that Tabby had installed the mirror when she did – just after his twelfth birthday – on purpose. Just in time to give him an entire puberty filled with first-thing-in-the-morning-full-frontal shots of whatever gross and geeky growth his body had seemingly spurted out overnight. It was, he figured, something of a time saver for her; doing in only seconds what it would have taken her the better part of four or five minutes to do with words. He was convinced she’d found a way to curse the mirror, to turn all that gold, glass, and light into one giant reminder of everything she found wrong with him. A physical manifestation of her holy trinity of daily admonishments:

Pull your pants up, stop slouching, and, for God’s sake, brush your hair out of your face.

And, of course, that had always been followed by some under her breath mutterings. A few choice words about genetics, the apple not falling far from the tree, and it being severely bruised when it did. Despite everyone’s insistence that Kerry looked just like her, Tabby had spent most of her son’s life working under the assumption that every defective detail of Kerry’s existence could be traced back along a direct DNA line straight to her husband, Stephen, passed on through cells and chromosomes and the messier fluids and substances she chose not to mention, not out loud at least.

Kerry wondered how long it would take her to establish a connection between his father and the cancer. He figured five minutes. Tops.

Kerry stared into the mirror, at a total loss for anything else to do. Right now, he was supposed to be washing up for dinner, making sure to put the hand towel back on the rack properly – folded neatly, fold facing to the right. Right now, it was Thursday, the next to last day of classes before Spring Break. He was supposed to be heading back to the dorm, figuring out exactly what to pack for his week long visit back home. Wondering if he’d run into his ex-girlfriend from high school, maybe, finally, lose that damn virginity. Planning out the essay on World War II he had due a week from Monday in History. Outlining his article for the Intro to Journalism elective he’d added on at the last minute. His own obituary, set sixty years in the future.

He wasn’t supposed to be thinking about moving up that timeline.

It didn’t make any sense to him. He didn’t feel anything. No pain. No telltale signs of the murderous damage his cells were inflicting on each other. He’d gone to see Dr. Estabul for a cough and a standard physical. He didn’t feel any different and he couldn’t, even when he turned and used that giant slab of glass and faux gold leaning against the wall, see anything either.

He could, when he turned, see the differences in the an he was now, and the just-turned-twelve boy he’d been back then. The freshman fifteen were readily apparent around his middle. A sophomore sixteen was slowly starting to thicken into place, just starting to cross over the border of his belt, encroaching on the space the waistband of his jeans should have occupied. The hairline Tabby had spent years pushing back up, out of his eyes, was now heading that way of its own accord, seemingly bending to her psychic will.

It struck Kerry then, the irony of it all. Life was nothing but visible. The evidence of growing, of all the pains of life, were wrinkled onto faces, buried beneath flabbily-expanding waistlines, doubled over in creaking, weakening joints. Reflected back in crystal clear, Windexed to within an inch of its life high-definition glass. Death, it seemed though, was invisible. Made it easier for it to sneak up on you, to Pearl Harbor you days before Spring Break, when you were supposed to be worrying about that essay, faking your own obit, and wondering if you’d ever get laid.

To his credit, Kerry had handled it well so far. He’d taken the news from Estabul without showing even a moment’s fear, listened calmly to his instructions – go home, call your family, I’ll make an appointment for this afternoon with the Urologist. Take someone with you, Kerry. Your mother, father, someone. You’ll need some help with all this.

A fatherly hand on the shoulder as the doctor sat on the edge of his desk in front of Kerry. “I won’t lie to you, son,” Estabul had said. “This won’t be easy. But you can beat it. Thirty years ago, a man in your condition? He might not have made it. But now… look at Lance Armstrong.” The doctor had smiled down at him.

Kerry had smiled, weakly, in return, seriously doubting anybody would be sporting yellow bracelets in his honor as they watched him climb the mountainous stages of the Tour de France.

“I’m no Urologist,” Estabul had rolled on, “but I know you’ll lose the testicle, certainly. But that’s a small price to pay, right? Lose the testicle, save the life.” Another meant to be reassuring smile. “You see, Kerry, in an odd way, you’ve really lucked out here. If you’re going to get cancer, this is the one to get.” The hand had dropped from Kerry’s shoulder then, but one finger had lingered, pointing at the younger man’s crotch. “With cancer, it’s not always about where it ends up,” Estabul said. “A lot of it has to do with where it starts.”

Standing alone in his parents’ bathroom, Kerry’s eyes blinked in the mirror. He knew all about the importance of where things started.

He’d listened, as attentively as the slow numbness spreading throughout him would allow, as Estabul had rattled off the basics of cancer. He left the office with terms like seminomas, nonseminomas, and inguinal orchiectomy swimming in the soup his brain had become. And he’d driven, slower than usual but smoothly, to his parents’ house. Kerry had enough experience with bad news to know that this was the type of thing that needed to be shared. The entire drive, he could feel it, practically bursting through the skin of his arms and hands, lustfully craving the air, the openness, the chance to spread and infect everyone Kerry chose to tell. Once he’d gotten to the house, he’d let himself in, made the calls from the phone in his father’s study. He called Stephen first, mostly because he knew he would be met with exactly what he heard coming across the line: a staticy voice mailbox with his father’s name on it. He hung up without leaving a message. Somehow this didn’t seem like voice mail material.

The call to Tabby was his one weak moment, the only less than ‘handling things with grace and nobility’ three minutes he’d had since Estabul had given him the diagnosis.

“Mom? I’m at the house. You need to come home now.”

“Kerry? I’m at work,” Tabby had said, the words coming in strained, thin, clipped sounds, less than a minute into the conversation. “I can’t just leave.”

“You need to come home,” Kerry had repeated. It was the only words he could actually force his lips to form. His mouth was resisting, as if to actually let those other words – CANCER TUMOR DYING – would make them any truer than they already were.. Those were words to be shared only in hushed whispers over the dining room table, hands clutched together, tissues at the ready, not to be sent sizzling across town on Verizon wires.

“Kerry, just tell me what’s going on. I’m sure whatever it is, it can wait-”

“Doctor Estabul found a tumor,” Kerry snapped off. “There’s things we need to do, other doctors we need to see. He made appointments for this afternoon and…” He’d paused then , the ‘and’ hanging there, dangling open-ended on the line. And we need to find out how bad it is. And we need to know if I’ going to make it.

And we need to be prepared if I don’t.

“Just come home.” He’d hung up without getting a response.

When Tabby had come home twenty-five minutes later, Kerry’d been sitting in the basement, on the cold concrete floor. The carpets were pulled up in preparation for the remodel – Tabby still couldn’t decided between re-carpeting and adding hardwood to the basements as well – and Kerry had deposited himself in the spot where Stephen’s chair usually sat. He’d hooked up his old Super Nintendo he’d gotten the same year the mirror arrived, to the TV and was pinging away at a game of Tetris. He looked calm, collected, focused on the game, spinning and twisting the pieces into line after solid line, but he was adrift on that floor, and ocean of cold, grey concrete surrounding him, waiting for the waves to overtake him, to swamp him, the undertow to pull him down, the riptide to flush his lungs with water and fade it all to black.

But the waves never came. Somehow that had made the waiting worse.

And then he and Tabby had done those ‘things’ they needed to do, met with the Urologist, scheduled the Inguinal Orchiectomy (which, as it turned out, was the removal of the offending testicle) for the following Monday, had a CT scan and a chest X-Ray and blood drawn and countless other tests for things like tumor markers, vascular or lymphatic invasion, and epididymitis. Things that Kerry didn’t understand and didn’t want to. Scheduled an appointment with a Dr. Patterson, an oncologist, for the next day. Headed home to break the news to Stephen.

Kerry had called his roommate, Ellis, let him know he was crashing at the house for the night, and no, he wasn’t sure he’d be back before break, and yeah, have a good time in Cancun. And then it was ‘how will we tell the rest of the family?’ and ‘will the insurance cover this?’ and countless other practical, needed to be addressed but so unim-fucking-portant right then things that Kerry had excused himself and gone to the bathroom to wash up.

And to wonder if he could just stay there. Forever. Just him and the mirrors and that damn cancerous nut.

Read more!

Never Never Land I: Twenty Minutes

In an effort to, as my wife says, write because it's my passion and not because I have to, I decided to post a little something. This is the beginning of, well, I don't know what. A collection of stories, maybe. Or a novel. Don't know, yet. Don't care, either. I'm not going to go back and change anything. I'm just going to forge ahead and keep working. This way, I get some feedback (maybe) and Harwell has a better way to procrastinate. So here it is - Never Never Land I: Twenty Minutes



     It’s January 4 and that means the holidays are over and the holiday staff is gone.  The seasonals get dropped on the second and by the tent, a day before Cooper turns 25, it’s back to regular crews: 2 in the AM, 2 in the PM, 3 for the overlap but only on busy days, which is fine since the crowds are already dropping off.  Even the returns-exchanges have slacked off, a bit early this year, but what can you have returned when your sales sucked?  And now the final Saturday night of the busy season is almost over.  9:10pm, Cooper notes, glancing down at his Darth Vader watch, mentally reminding himself that no normal twenty-five year old would be wearing a Darth helmet on his wrist.  Only another twenty minutes, he thinks.  He can do this.  He can make it.
     
     He slips his cutter through the cardboard and packing tape of yet another box, another box from another load from their first restocking shipment of the new year, only a week and a half after they really needed it, but try telling Home Office that.  L&C clings to their shipment schedule – planned by men and women in ties and skirts who wouldn’t know a Pokemon from a poke in the eye – with the fervent devotion Cooper’s mother reserved for the fourth of her twelve steps.  And so, last week, when they could have used the merchandise for day after returns and exchanges (such as they were), the shelves were as bare as pole dancer’s ass, but from now till November, Cooper and company will be filling one item holes with six or seven or eighteen too many and pricing load after superfluous load.  

     Welcome to the wonderful world of retail.  Check your intelligence and life goals at the door.

     He steals another glance at Darth, then flips the black helmet shut.  Nineteen minutes, thirty seconds.  Twenty-nine, twenty-eight, twenty-seven… nothing to it.  Just keep sliding boxes on the shelves.  Mindless busy work.  Open.  Price.  Put away.  Five more boxes.  Four.  Three.  Nineteen minutes.

     He can hear Dave in the next aisle over and Jared up front.  He should be starting to clean up the store front, getting ready for close, but Cooper knows he’s not.  Jared’s probably talking to a girl, probably a blonde, tits bigger than her hair, but just barely, looking eighteen or nineteen, save for the Hello, Kitty purse, but even that doesn’t warn you anymore, doesn’t scream I’m Twelve!  Thirteen!  Fourteen next week!

     And Jared’s the kind that wouldn’t even think of it, would never even cross his mind to ask.  A sweet guy, really, smart as a whip at his job (#1 Video Game Salesman in Northeast Region Seven three years running) but he’s lucky that he’s got looks, lucky that his smile makes you think of a young pre-couch-assaulting Tom Cruise, all glossy white teeth and sharp enough to put out an eye cheekbones.  The young ones want to date him, to parade him out in front of their friends.  The older ones want to take him and teach him the finer points of a long, slow fuck.  The younger ones probably wouldn’t mind that, either.  Jared could get laid more than Cooper and Dave combined.  Except…

     He can never close the deal.  Oh, he gets the digits and the dirty notes dropped off at the counter by giggling girls for their giggling friends and he takes them to The Pub for a drink or two, but then they hit the parking lot and see his little ride, the bright blue Neon with the Jesus fish on the back end and the Elmo keychain dangling from the rear-view and the sex appeal just slips away and Jared goes home alone, again, but never seems to mind.

     Cooper finishes box number three and stares down at the last two.  Seventeen minutes and it’s on to board games – bored games – Clue, Sorry, Chutes and Ladders, and Monopoly.  And Monopoly.  NFL Monopoly, NASCAR Monopoly, Pokemon Monopoly, Yankees and Mets Monopoly, Star-fucking-Wars Monopoly.  And how much for the Death Star with two hotels, again?  He just shakes his head and tries to get into the rhythm.  Pull it from the box.  Slap a price sticker on (upper right corner, batter sticker below).  On the shelf.  

     Lather, rinse, repeat.

     “Tom Cruise,”  Jared says, from up behind the counter, where he’s “sweeping”, the broom doing little but pushing air.  

     “Cruise?” Dave asks from his aisle, the scorn in his voice strong enough to scour the flaky beige paint from the shelves.  There’s no one in the store.  They can talk without having to raise their voices.  “You can’t pick Cruise.”

     “And why not?” Jared asks, though Cooper suspects he already knows.  Cruise is a December choice, maybe November, a pick for playing with the seasonals, with their tween-age part-time minds that can’t comprehend pre-1995 cinema.  Cruise is the traditional lead off pick of the filmically challenged, the old standby, the fruitcake in the yearly roll call of Next Big Things.  The Lohans, the Duffs, the Biels.  Cruise is not a January choice.  Not in a world of Jennifer Jason Leigh and Seymour Hoffman and Amy Adams.

     “Too easy,” says Dave, striding in his silly-power-walk style out of Three – the Male Action Aisle – a small pile of ripped open action figure packages in his hands.  Old school G.I. Joe figs.  Somebody got the good shit.  “Gotta be some challenge there, man” he says, slapping the packages down on the counter.  “Gots to be some challenge.”  He tugs at his belt buckle, the silver plate with his initials on it, and his pants shift a bit, giving him a little more wiggle room in front, though, if you listened to him, he’d mention the fifteen pounds he’d lost since December 1, along with the twenty he lost at Thanksgiving and the thirteen he lost back around Labor Day.  

     “You’re stalling,” Jared says, wagging a stern fingered broom handle at him, looking for all the world like the teacher Cooper’s supposed to be at his second job, Graduate Assisting at the local college.  “You’ve got nothing.”

     Cooper shakes his head and turns back to his last box.  Fifteen minutes now and he’s onto Uno and Uno Stacko and Uno Attack and Uno, Dos, Tres, let’s get the fuck out of this place!

     “Hey… back off there, bitch,” Dave says, reaching one Chunky Soup arm across the counter to slap away the broom handle.  “I’ve got an answer.”  He glances around, making like he’s checking for someone listening in.  “Top Gun.”  He grins and gives Jared a double thumbs up and does a little victory dance that jiggles his wiggle room toward his hips and he has to pause to straighten it out.  “That’s right, babee!  Just call me Maverick!”

     “Ooooh… Top Gun.”  Jared scoops the torn G.I. Joe packages off the counter and dumps them in the trash.  “Really had to work hard for that one, didn’t ya, you… you… you Tubby Bitch, you?”

     Cooper bites back a chuckle, waiting for Dave’s retort, but then he hears them, hears them even before he can see them, pulling a Radar O’ Riley – Attention All Personnel, Incoming Assholes – hears their voices echoing down the mall hallway, all the way down into Aisle Four.  He drops his last box and heads to the front of the store, past the bickering Dave and Jared, looking out into the hall to check them out.

     It sounded in the Aisle like a troop of them and one look confirms it. A gang.  Each one trying to look or act or sound worse than the last, but Cooper’s not buying.  He’s looking for the quiet one, the one that’ll slip in while you’re distracted by his buddies Sound and Fury and rob you blind.  And Cooper finds him right off, near the middle of the line, blending in with the others in their oh-so-cool matching bad-ass-black.  He’s got a Metallica T-shirt on, Ride the Lightening logo screen printed on it, looks older than the guy wearing it and Cooper tries not to think of the fact that he’s old enough to remember when Ride came out and this little shit probably wasn’t even born yet.

     He flips open Darth’s head and checks the time.  Fourteen minutes.  Of course they have to come in now.  He stands in front of the store, arms folded across his chest, flexed as tight as he can make them, Darth-covered wrist tucked away under the other arm, fingers slipped under the fronts of his sleeves so the fabric will bulge more.  He tries to will them to go on by.  Turn around.  Leave.  Go to the food court or the movie theater or parking lot.  He hopes they’ll see him there and just pass on by, yeah, that’s the ticket, he thinks, see me and be scared off.  Because everybody knows a polo shirt and a fucking “Hi!  My name’s Cooper!  Ask Me How to Get FREE Batteries!” name tag is the intimidating outfit of the season.  

     Dave’s behind him, straightening the impulse counter.  “So, come on Jar, you picked Cruise.  You got anything better than T.G.?”
     
     “Hell yeah, I got one,” Jared says, moving out from behind the registers, broom back in his hand.  “Risky Business.  T.C. and Rebecca DeHorney.”  He smirks at Dave.  “Who’s your daddy?”

     Cooper watches as the crew moves in, barely even breaking stride as they filter through the store-front, fanning out into flanking and rear guards, like some sort of slacker SWAT team.  He wonders, briefly, if they’re that well armed, hopes not, they haven’t had a gun in the store in at least a month.  Most of them hang around the front, playing with the demos, the Bumble Ball in particular, picking shit up and putting it back any old place, generally just acting like kids.  The quiet one is still quiet, but he’s not slinking off into an aisle, he’s standing tall and proud, front and center, in his T-shirt, black jeans with holes in both knees, red and black flannel tied around his waist, sleeves dangling down to the top of his combat boots with their laces undone and half the left toe ripped off.

     How very grunge, Cooper thinks.  How very 1995.

     “Hey, Coop?” Jared calls out, as he moves further up front, waving the broom over the floor, simply moving the dust from one side of the store to the other and back again.  “Cruise to you, man.  Show Tubby how it’s done.”

     At least a couple of them are drunk, Cooper thinks, his eyes never leaving Grunge and his crew.  They’re staggering a bit. Slurring just a little as they talk smack back and forth, but still, they’re keeping it down, behaving almost civilly, certainly no worse than most of the ten to twelve set, better than most of the parents.  He checks his watch again, careful to shield Darth’s head from prying eyes.  Eleven minutes.  Maybe, he thinks, they’ll just get bored and leave.

     “Coop?”

     “Days of Thunder,”  Cooper says, diverting his eyes from Grunge and company for just a moment.  “All you, Dave.”

     Dave leans back against a bulk stack display of EZ-Bake Ovens and tugs at is belt buckle again.  It doesn’t move and Cooper wonders if Dave realizes they all know his pants aren’t really that loose.  “Easy,” Dave says.  “Jerry Maguire.”  The thumbs come out and up again.  “Show me the money!”

     Cooper’s eyes slide back to the boys in black and he sees that they’ve found the sporting goods in Aisle Five.  Bats, balls, and Frisbees, oh my.  Grunge picks up a Nerf football and starts chucking it back and forth with a couple of his boys, the girls in the gang standing off to one side.  Heavy Metal Cheerleaders.

     Watch check.  Nine minutes.

     “Cruise to you, Jared,” Dave says, the tone of his voice making it quite clear that he’s relishing any difficulty Jared might be having.  

     And one of the girls breaks formation.  Slips away from the rest.

     “I’m thinking, Tubby, I’m thinking.”

     It’s her hair that catches Cooper’s eye, even as he starts to look at his watch again.  Red, brown, and orange all at once, curling flames and sparks licking their way down her back, nearly down to her ass.  She seems jittery, nervous, too caffeinated to be drunk, just shaky enough to be strung out, moving – hopping more than walking – toward the grid of sale priced Barbie in the store-front.  Cooper pulls his eyes from her long enough to see that Jared and Dave have noticed her too.  

     Darth’s alarm beeps.  Seven minutes to close.  Time to round ‘em up.

     Cooper turns his attention back to Five where Grunge and his sidekicks are still playing catch.  He starts toward the aisle, but Grunge has already sent one of his boys deep, gotta test the arm, you know?  But Grunge’s boy doesn’t see the bulk of clearance merch right in his path, runs himself a nice little post pattern, but Grunge thought he was going to button hook and now his boy’s gotta dive for the badly overthrown ball.  And a cardboard display of Buster Bubbles – The Biggest Bubbles Blowing Baby! – pays the price.

     Five minutes.

     Dave’s already jiggling his way toward Five and Jared’s jumped back over the short counter by Register One – a move Dave and Cooper are both too round to manage – and now his hand is poised over the speed dial button for security.  Which leaves Buster Bubble Boy for Cooper.

     He extends a hand, helping Bubbles pull himself up out of the mess and tries to ignore the puddles of soapy water already pooling under the drunken fool’s ass.  “Think it’s time to go, boys,” aiming for strong and stern and landing somewhere near his father’s ‘do your homework’ voice.

     Bubbles, clearly brighter than Cooper had given him credit for, sensing trouble, tries to make amends.  “Hey, sorry ‘bout that, man.  Didn’t even see that shit, man.”  He takes a look back at where he landed, sees the puddle on the floor.  “DUDE!  Bubbles!”

     The look on Cooper’s face shuts him up.  Grunge – clearly dumber or drunker than Cooper originally thought – is slower on the uptake.

     “Hey, fuck that.  You kicking us out for that?  That ain’t shit, man  Kicking us out for fucking bubbles.”  He gets right up in Cooper’s face.  “Where’s your Christmas spirit, man?”

     Cooper stands his ground, despite the currents of cheap beer rolling off of Grunge’s breath.  “Christmas was last week,” he says.  Three minutes.  “And I’m kicking you out, man, because we’re closing.  And because you and Jerry Rice over here just ruined-” he takes a quick look down. “About a hundred bucks worth of bubbles.”

     “Fuck that noise,” Grunge snorts.  “Bubbles ain’t worth fucking shit.”

     Technically, he’s right.  Cooper knows a hundred bucks is probably four times the actual damage based on what was broken and what was left in the display to begin with.  But, he thinks, that’s hardly the point.

     “Watch the language, Sparky,” Dave says, sidling up next to Grunge.  He draws himself up to his full height and sucks in the gut a bit and he’s almost intimidating.  “Now why don’t you and your little buddies just move on, all right?  Before my buddy back there dials up security and you get to spend the rest of your Saturday night talking to them.”

     And then, right on cure, security shows up and that’ll be it for the Grunge gang’s night at the mall.  No shirts, no shoes, no service for you assholes.  They leave, swearing at Cooper, Dave, and anybody within range.  And then, there she is again, bringing up the rear, walking – shivering, shaking, shuffling? – slower than the rest.  Almost drifting.  And just before they reach the hall, she slips off, melting into a group of moms and daughters, scouring the store-front dump bins for that just marked down bargain.  Cooper watches her the whole way.

     No one else sees.  No one else cares.  

     One minute.

     Dave starts pulling in the dump bins and sale signs from the store-front, politely suggesting to the moms and daughters that it’s closing time.  They flash him a dirty look or two, but move on anyway.

     Jared cleans the counter and leans back, reaching for the button to lower the gate.  “You know,” he says, “that one guy, the one that dropped the pass, he wasn’t too bright.  Reminded me of Dustin Hoffman, you know, in that movie… what was that movie?”  He rubs his chin, thoughtfully, for a moment before breaking into that make-the-girlies-weak grin.  “Oh yeah… Rain Man.”  He high-fives himself and lets loose a ‘Boo-Yah’.  “Cruise to you, Coop.”

     Cooper leans back against the lowered gate and surveys the slowly spreading Buster Bubble flood.  One minute over.  And not over yet.  “Mission Impossible,” he mutters, heading for the backroom, the cash counting, the book balancing, and the end of his night.  

Read more!

My Writing Manifesto: A Lesson in Bitterness and Finding the Hidden... well... Lessons

By popular request on my main blog, I'm posting my full "Writing Manifesto". This was done for the final creative writing workshop class I took at Miami University in Ohio. It was the end of two loooooong and difficult years for me, which kind of comes out in the writing. It's long and possibly confusing, which is typical of me. Enjoy.


The Frothy Blossoms: My Writing Manifesto

The Beginning (Or, Knowing Me, the Ending)

I was told once, in a critique, that the “interconnection of characters and plots” was one of my big themes and that my stories had a “whirlwind-like, which way is up, effect”.

I think that’ll be true here as well.

To me, it is all interconnected. My inspirations, my intentions, my beliefs about writing and how I feel I fit into the writing world (I often don’t think I do). Maybe that’s why I write the way I do – with all my multiple perspectives and time jumps and non-linear narratives.

Or maybe I’m just fucked in the head.

Either way, really.

But I guess that’s just my warning, my preamble, my little yellow hazard sign to say that this isn’t going to be normal or straight forward. But it is my manifesto (I know this because I’m writing this part last) and it pretty much does declare all my intentions and goals and feelings. And I know it’s supposed to be readable and a public document and all. And it is.

It just may not be one that make all that much sense if you’re not me.

But nobody ever said it had to.


The Frothy Blossoms: Part One

I’ve never read the Bible.

I have a student in my Intro level creative writing class who recently wrote a story that prompted another student to comment “I don’t feel intelligent enough to read this.”

Those two things are connected, I swear.

My student’s story was an interesting bit of writing. It was filled with poetic descriptions (nephews as imps with azure eyes and roses with frothy crimson blossoms), random jumps in time, abstractly connected scenes, deep themes buried under all that poetry, and enough clutter and movement to confuse damn near anybody.

About half my class got it. Or, more accurately, they got enough, enough of the story under the frothy blossoms, or enough of the beautiful descriptions, or enough of the pretty sharp dialogue, or enough of something, to want to keep reading. The other half had no clue. They felt, as the one girl said, like they weren’t bright enough to understand it. They couldn’t get through the phalanx of azure eyed imps who only appeared for one page, they couldn’t travel through time as we moved forward to and camp and on to love as “rich poetry and pumpkin pie.”

A great debate ensued. Did the story work? Did the author simply have, as one girl put it, “mad skills” and should soldier on, even further into the pumpkin pie and poetry? Or, as others offered, was it simply an overdone, overwritten, confusing mess that made no, as one guy put it, “fuckin’ sense”?

As with any debate, they eventually turned to the expert for the answer. Me.

- to be continued -

The Reading List and the Unread Masses

I’ve got to construct a list. So far, so good, even I can make a list.

It needs to include fifty texts. OK, still all good. I’ve got that many books on my shelf at home.

Ah, but only twelve of those texts can be of my own choosing. The rest need to come from a list provided to me by the far more esteemed and considerably better suited to choose what should influence me English Department. Hey, I can live with that. They are the ones giving me the degree after all.

And then I see the list. And recognize all of four names on it (which actually turns out to be three when I discover one isn’t who I thought it was). But that’s still fine, I always knew I’d have to read to get a Master’s. So, I just ask for a little advice.

Read people who write like you. Explore similar themes, tackle similar topics.

OK, so who writes about a bunch of adult morons, acting far younger than they are, working in a toy store in a never ending quest for young pussy, good times, and any way they can find to remain “not adults”? Anybody?

OK, how about this one? Three sad sack people, all of whom desperately love each other, but can’t seem to stop fucking up each other’s lives, even from the grave. Oh yeah, and there’s infidelity, murder, an (almost) incestuous relationship, a psychic, and a town that may or may not be Satan. Anybody?

No, huh? Well, shit.

OK, so no similar topics, characters, etc. But there’s themes, we all know that. And if I can just figure out what my themes are (beyond betrayal, pain, and the brilliance of a well placed dirty joke), I’ll be all set.
And the list I can choose from is nothing if not lengthy, there’s bound to be numerous writers on there who share a similar style with me. Writers who like to fuck with time and point of view, who eschew the typical rules of narrative and story telling, who don’t subscribe to the idea of finding who’s story it is, of limiting it to that one character, writers who still believe that the story is the key and that how you tell it doesn’t really matter. Writers who still hold to that literary Field of Dreams - If you write it (and it’s good), people will read it.

There are writers like that on the list?

Great! Now I can read them, study them, let myself be influenced by them, absorb some of their brilliance (clearly they must have some as they’re on the list and only writers of great literary importance and cultural impact would be included on our list, right?). Only one problem.

I don’t want to write like any of them.

Why, oh why, in a culture (and here I speak of the English Dept. culture) where we claim to value difference and creativity and originality do we actually reward the same thing over and over again and, in fact, encourage such similarity and repetitiveness and shun and degrade anything that is, I don’t know, different?

I guess this is my long winded, occasionally off topic, round and round the literary mulberry bush way of saying that my intentions for my work are as follows:

- To be different.
- To be original, interesting, challenging.
- To fuck with the rules and the system

And, most importantly…

To write my way. Close minded, mired in tradition, the nine people in this room say it’s so and so it must be “writers” be damned.


The Frothy Blossoms: Part Two

So, now I needed to come up with an answer. Mad skills or confusing mess?

Both, was of course, out of the question.

And both was, of course, the answer.

“Clearly," I said to the young, impressionable writer, “you’re good at
descriptions. Yours are poetic and beautiful. But sometimes, they’re a bit overdone.”

She frowned. Clearly, being good at something and having that be not good was a hard concept to grasp.

“It’s,” I said, “A lot like playing the guitar or the piano. You get good at that one note or that one riff or the scales and, of course, you want to play that note or that riff or the scales all the time. You’re good at it, why wouldn’t you? We all want to do what we’re good at.”

She nodded. Clearly, being good at something and wanting to do that over and over and over again wasn’t that hard a concept to grasp.

“Take me for example,” I said. “I’m good at dirty jokes and snapping off one line paragraphs, little one liners that add a punch.”

I am pretty good at that, you know.

“And I’m good at mixing my stories up, flipping them around, telling them in weird ways that make people have to work at reading them.”

Me? Tell a story in a less than traditional way? Me?

“But,” I said, “sometimes I do it too much, you know? I use so many one liners that they lose their impact. People get sick of them. They see them coming and they just skip over them.”

Like you’re skipping this one.

“And I mess around with the time so much and tell the story in such a weird ass way that like half the people that read it have no clue what the hell’s going on.” I shook my head. “My own ‘mad skills’ lose half my audience every time.”

“And the other half?” she asked.

“Oh,” I said. “They get it. And they,” I said, “they are the ones I write it for.”

- to be continued -

The Birth of the Writer

I was told once, in a critique I received during a fiction workshop, that in my writing I should at least give some mild consideration to the highbrow. Because, the author of this critique said, that’s what most readers of short fiction are. “Average Joe,” this writer said, “probably doesn’t subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly, The New Yorker, or even buy novels.”

Well, duh.

I don’t subscribe to The Atlantic Monthly or The New Yorker. Fuck subscribing, I don’t even read them. Couldn’t even tell you the last time I picked one up, other than maybe at Barnes and Noble, to move a misplaced copy out of the way to get to the newest issue of Maxim. And I, Average Joe Writer, don’t buy novels either.

I buy books.

You remember books, right? Those things most of us used to read as kids and maybe even teenagers. Those flimsy kinda things, made out of paper with some fancy dancy picture on the cover that no doubt had nothing to do with what was inside. Remember books? Those paper jobbies you read under the covers with a flashlight or devoured in one sitting on some Saturday afternoon when it was too rainy to go play baseball or go to the mall. Books. Those paper and glue bundles with that magic prize inside.

A story.

Remember stories?

Ah, stories. With heroes and villains and the fate of the world, or at least a relationship or two, hanging in the balance. The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew and The Great Brain and those little running rabbits of Watership Down. And then, as I got older there was Huck and Tom and eventually Holden and other books I was made to read and outwardly loathed and secretly loved. And then I discovered the Kings and the Clancy’s and the Grishams (say it ain’t so!) and the sections of the local bookstore I could (as an advanced reader) rip through in a week or two, getting caught up in the adventures of a family trapped in old hotel with a crazy ass daddy, a CIA analyst chasing down Sean Connery in a Russian sub, or maybe a lawyer or two, always doing something laywer-ly, but with just enough action and loose women to make it interesting.

Ah, stories.

Do you know what I thought when I read those?

I thought, My God, who would publish such tripe? Who would allow such hacks to demean the world of literature (and I always said that with the appropriately refined British accent)? Who could so belittle the power of fiction as to write such obvious, cliché ridden, lacking in meaning and depth rubbish, such blatant sell-out, money grubbing whore, work?

Oh. Wait. My bad. I never thought that.

I thought – Gimme some more.

And they did.

And I lapped it up, reading it in all it’s junk food digestible, in one brain cell out the other, when does the movie come out glory. And I watched as the people around me – Average Joe and Average Jane, did the same. And I decided, then and there. That’s what I was going to do.

I was going to be a writer. And I never once said it with even a hint of a refined British accent and I never once thought of the highbrow and I never once thought of it as anything other than what it was:

Making shit up. Telling stories.


The Frothy Blossoms: Part Three

The look on my young pupil’s face was enough to tell me she still didn’t get it.

“But if half your readers don’t get it, why write it?” she asked. “Don’t you want to write for them too? Why would I want to write a story that half the people in this room don’t understand?”

Because, I said, the half of the people in this room that don’t get it aren’t going to be buying your shit and therefore paying your bills and giving you all the love and worshipful devotion a person of your talents deserves.

See? I can write a one liner that’s longer than one line.

What I really said was:

“It’s your choice as a writer. Let me give you an example. There’s this guy I read a lot – James Morrow,” I waited for a nod of recognition from her or anyone.

Anybody think I got one?

“He writes satire, which I usually don’t get,” I said. “And he writes about God and religion. His books are filled with allusions to the Bible and the Old Testament, the New Testament, this religion, that religion, stuff I don’t get at all,” I said. “I’ve never even read the Bible.”

Told you they were connected.

“So you don’t understand his books?”

I shook my head. “Nope, a lot of it I don’t get. The allusions and stuff. But I still read them. Every one, even his book of short stories, even though it was called Bible Stories for Adults, and even though I never read the Bible and I’m an adult in age only…”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because the stories were cool. He’s got these three books about God dying and they find his body beneath the ocean and have to tow it for a proper burial. And there’s plagues and wacko’s and sex – all the good shit.” I smiled. “That’s why I like his work – the story underneath the allusions, underneath his frothy religious blossoms.”

And that’s why they - that one half of the class – liked her story.

Because of the story beneath.

“Morrow writes about the things he’s interested in and in the style that works for him,” I said. “And I’d bet you anything that every time he turns in a first draft to his editor, he’s got about a hundred more allusions and a hundred more references to things that heathens like me don’t have the first fucking clue about.”

“But he takes them out?”

“Some of them, enough of them for some people, like me,” I said. “But I’ve got religious friends, dudes that go to Bible Study every week and they can’t stand reading Morrow.” I shrugged. “Can’t please everybody.”

And that, I told her, is the greatest skill any writer can have. The ability to accept what he or she can’t change – the audience – and to write for that half that gets it and for themselves.

Like Morrow.

Like me. Most of the time. Some of the time.

Not often enough.

To Whore or Not to Whore: That is the Question

Allow me to share with you an excerpt or two from my memoir, to be written some fifty or so years from now.

On the question of where, during my long (and profitable) career as a writer, I got my ideas:

Generally, I thought of people I knew, and usually didn’t like, and made them even weirder and more unlikeable than they really were, put them in some bizarre situations, tossed in a few shockingly graphic phrases/ideas (oral sex and the strange behavior of men when obsessed with a fine piece of ass were usually good for this) and let things go where they may.

As to whether I thought my work, typically lumped as “mainstream” or, if some critic/peer wanted to insult me, as “genre” fiction, was as credible and worthy of acclaim as “real” literature:

I wrote “real” literature, or tried to. In college. In grad school. And all it did was bore, confuse, and put my readers to sleep or make their heads hurt from trying to figure it out. And Average Joe (or Jane) doesn’t buy books if he’s asleep or has a headache don’t buy books. So I quit and went back to what I was good at.

And, as to whether or not that “quitting” meant I sold out and was nothing more than a Grisham or a Clancy, a “literary” whore as opposed to an actual artist:

Did I sell out?

Fuck Yes. Sold out every copy. Every time.

And that selling out paid my bills. It put food on my table. It kept my wife in shoes, my kids in toys, my dog in chewy toys filled with peanut butter, and my mortgage up to date. And it kept shlubs like me entertained. Not bad for a day’s work. Does all that make it worthy?

The more important question, I think, is far simpler.

Do I care?

What do you think?


The Frothy Blossoms: The Conclusion

I don’t have a conclusion. Not Really. I don’t know exactly why I do what I do or feel how I feel. To me, writing has always been a personal thing. Yeah, there’s some things you can learn from a book or a class, but the best writing, the real writing, the stories that are alive and wonderful and make me want to read more and write more and be more, well, there’s just something about them. There’s that presence or that life, or that feeling behind it that comes through in the words and makes one thing abundantly clear:

The writer loved writing it.

I think I forgot that the last year and a half. At least a lot of the time.

So I guess that’s my conclusion, my intention. To remember.

From now on.

Read more!