Welcome back to DC's Writers Workshop. This is the fourteenth in a series of days on the blog where writers who are part of the blog's community present work-in-progress in search of the opinions, responses, advice, and critiques of both readers who don't normally post comments here and local inhabitants of this place. I ask everyone to please read these works with the same attention you give the normal brand of posts here and respond in some way in the comments section below. Obviously, the closer your attention and the more you're able and willing to say to the writer the better. But any kind of related comment is welcome, even a simple sentence or two indicating you read the piece of writing and felt something or other about it would be helpful. The only guideline I'm going to give out regarding comments is that any response, whether lengthy or brief, praise filled or critical or anywhere inbetween, should be presented in a spirit of helping the writer in question. I'll be responding to the work too in the Comments section towards the end of the weekend. So, I guess all of that is probably clear. Giving support to the artists of different kinds who read and post on the blog has always been a very important aspect of this project, and this workshop series represents an opportunity to make that aspect more formal and explicit. This weekend's workshop features a short fiction work by the writer and d.l. Bill Porter. He asks for any thoughts, support, or criticism you can give him. I thank him greatly for entrusting his work to us, and I thank you all in advance for your kind participation. -- D.C.
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Visit
by Bill Porter
The house was for sale, the truck was for sale, I think the car was for sale. I ask forgiveness for not keeping track as well as I should have of which parts of my life I was meant to discard. It can take time to scrub yourself off of things. I ask forgiveness of the airfarers for the airfare, for the frenzy of expenditure that whirled all the anxious beneficence up to my door. I ask forgiveness of the business travelers for having been business. You guys didn’t need to do that. I see now how easily I might have unwound your organizer. I could have done it with a note:
Dear Bert,
Thinking of you. I affirm my continuing consent to play the part of your father in the usual Mary Poppins-ish way.
Love,
Dad
The only charge against me while that chance was coming and going was that I sounded like a zombie on the phone. Later I was accurately accused of worse.
To go back:
I met my son at the airport. When we pressed ourselves into the meaty hush of our hugging, I felt the swelling insistences of other people’s money behind him. On the drive home, suspecting a rescue mission, I sounded his handyman urges with the radio. Traffic and taxes, war and bodeful weather: he bubbled with solutions for them all.
His siblings’ money? My brother’s? My father’s? My children’s mothers’?
When the answer was revealed, when they all showed up to pitch their pennies into my well, I found myself interested less in the word from my sponsors than in the sudden unfolding of a funny picture: I saw a sign, WORRIED ABOUT DAD, and under the sign, a special shortcut through airport security, an expedited course through the seeing machinery just for those who could produce for the authorities, along with their drivers’ licenses, the churchy murmuration, the sanctified gabble of fretfulness that had engulfed me.
More strictly:
My son Bert came, he stayed two nights, and on the night before he left he led a gathering of my friends and relatives, which he had secretly organized in advance, in a kind of communal admonishment against my self-neglect. An intervention may be the word, although to me it felt as though the thing came not between my trouble and me but on top of it, riding me down.
Without going too much further I should say that I, the broken voice, am the hero of this story and I take my own side. My sympathies remain with the weakness in me that I agreed to extinguish. My son has always been my son. I have seen him claim life, motion, and speech. He has a grip on my lens. Yet in the forlornness of deepest thought I deny him. I lose him among hateful shadows. He is one of too many such sons. They are full of techniques for grief and healing. They shine with faith in clean getaways. A hundred of these flying invaders must be aloft in America right now, or driving rented cars, working cases worse than mine. So my allegiance is to the Dads—the worried-about, the very worries themselves, failing without fuss in their hundred peaceful houses.
I was subsiding into shabbiness amidst the rattling husks of my old cell phone chargers when my son and his rehabilitative bunch arrived. They bought me a gym membership and a storage unit. But they cannot choose how my example will instruct them.
I was ready to be cheered up by Bert. I was ready to let him buy a couple of meals. I’m saying we could have done the rest later. It was his first visit as a citizen, an equal substance. There was time yet for him to grow into the role of my teacher and corner-man. I suggest that he overdid it a little.
I recently suffered a period of acute backstorylessness. My memory failed. I was seen to halt among cubicles with a notepad. I was heard to speak in half-thoughts. At home, I was known to visit cruelties upon dogs. A nice way of putting it would be to say that I became very careful about what I chose to acknowledge as real. Justice allows that I was overprescribed. What matters is what my employers thought, which was, not enough. One Wednesday my truck and I washed up in my driveway with some cardboard boxes and nothing else to do forever. I called Bert from there and told him about the security escort.
Since then, my wife had been supporting us—ourselves, and my housemates and fellow eaters, her sons—with a job I discovered I knew nothing about. Frances. I asked her once as she was leaving for work: You know when I think about it I guess I don’t even know what ceramic is? I expected no answer and received none, because she was in her car when I said it, and I was whispering it, or less. I don’t suppose, I whispered, it’s the same ceramic they make mugs out of.
She was an accountant for a company that manufactured ceramic insulators for computer processors. I sat at home and tried very hard not to spend her money.
In this difficult time I received many phone calls from all of you. Thank you. First, sweet purposeless condolence. Then there was an argument that I appeared to lose, over and over, about the unending welcome that the world holds out to honest people. There were other jobs, as you all knew, and at churches and community colleges and in the frightening Spartan buildings tucked among trees in the municipal parks there were health-giving and affordable stimulations. I bought a few hours’ worth, such as a fitness walking class I enrolled in to win an argument with my wife about whether I still owned a pair of white socks.
Bert is my first son, my first child from my first marriage. That marriage and my second marriage gave, including him, six children. Bert was a real phone-caller. His siblings were not. (The relative silence of the rest of this half-jury of descendants would not, however, deter the intervenors' presumption to represent them. All I wish to say for now about these other kids is that the versions of them invoked against me like hungry ghosts, wasted with cares and dull-eyed from praying, were trinkets of rhetoric, a backfire. Think of your children! Believe me, I did. The actual ones were better, and they cared about me less.)
The children of Frances are two boys, Brian and Max, fifteen and twelve. My new employment was to watch them more closely than I had before. They were passing through a period of vagueness, like baking bread hidden by its own steam in the oven window. I picked them up at baseball practice and they fell asleep on the way home. I wondered whether they were befriending the principle of their formation. I learned not to trust or accuse them. Stepsons: I had sprung Playboy on them once in friendship and it got back to the wrong people. Their father was a firefighter.
At my fitness walking class, I got lapped by two tanned twists of gristle, men as old as my father. I asked them as they passed if they wanted to get some frozen yogurt with me. One gave me a companionable scolding look and meaninglessly touched his nose. It was a resistible kindness. If I can talk then you can, I said. I stopped with my hands on my hips. I coughed for the time it took the old men to sail another half of a lap. Then I took my keys from my pocket, unlocked my truck from a hundred yards, and cut straight to it across the infield.
If I had had more questions about myself, or more specific dissatisfactions, the world that presented itself to my new condition might have felt more abundant to me. I knew of people who were learning things they wanted to learn.
At dinner on the first night of his visit I grew fond of the notion that Bert had come to ask my advice. Perhaps he was soon to enter upon marriage or battle an illness, and believed that I could help him prepare. Maybe he only missed me. I have visited people for that reason.
I did my best to keep my grip on these few charitable doubts, but from the moment our important salad was served, the jutting edges of the redemptive design jostled me, like the corners of a coffee table as large as life. We were eating steamed kale with almonds and a squash thing. I was shown how to chew it while smiling.
I said: Arrhythmia, as in rhythm but wrong. Hyperglycemia, as in like sugar or something but hyper. See, if you can do a two-piece jigsaw puzzle in Latin then you know just what to do.
I scooped salad until the bowl was empty.
Bert asked if the police had been back.
Brian, I said. Max. It’s weird that you’re eating this.
Later, Frances was loading the dishwasher, and I was watching the news and speaking to it. Bert perpetrated current-events quizzes during commercial breaks, saying higher, higher while Brian and Max and I guessed at the number of people our government had killed here and there. Bert had studied the latest estimates. A commercial for one of the drugs I was taking came on. It showed a man walking in a park. Bert then suggested a walk in the park, and under the circumstances it was tricky to refuse. On the screen, the man squatted on his haunches and scratched a golden retriever behind the ears. I pointed at him and said I could do anything he could do. Ask your doctor about Voxadryn, said the television. I already did, I yelled. My brain crackled with meanness and error.
We took the truck to the park and walked there for twenty minutes. I sweated like some demon of lust. The terrible sucking of my breath carved my vision away from the edges until my eyes were locked in a tube. After scarcely a mile I hugged a tree, more or less, though not for the tree’s sake, and said we had to go home.
You OK? Bert asked.
—me just piss on this tree, I said.
One day not long before Bert’s visit, I arrived home from the pharmacy to find a cop-car parked in our driveway.
I held an empty cardboard cup in my right hand and a plastic spade. To slurp the last drops of melted yogurt I had ventured nose-first into the cup and pressed its sticky rim to my forehead, leaving an arch of scabbed sugar with a foot in each eyebrow. My tongue, exhausted by rapture, was a puffed husk, turning sour. I had no thoughts about the cop-car at first, I only liked it and wished that it were mine. I had to sit there a moment, very still, towletting the crust of dried yogurt from my forehead, composing my mood. I remembered the what-seems-to-be-the-trouble tone of the abashed opportunist: rueful, grudging, but honorable about getting caught. What I was caught for I didn’t know.
The officer was reading a newspaper spread over the hood of the prowler. He was pale and thin, mole-specked, splotch-flushed, purple at the eyes: a smoker, with a wet orange stain in the floor of his moustache. He had a slack, low-slung little paunch that clung to him as modest as a dewdrop. He promised to have a frightful mouth. I readied for a look into it as I walked up the drive with my yogurt cup. It was pink, an angering color. I did not feel well.
Mister, pause, question mark.
That’s me, I said. I gave the policeman my name. His teeth were better than I’d expected, but I was right about his voice: a clucking stink at the fringe of every breath and vowel.
Now so as it’s out of the way right now, I want to tell you you’re not under arrest or anything like-at OK, he said.
Well yes, I said. I mean of course not.
Thing is you got too many dogs for a property your size. Now I checked into it and it’s true. I’ve never issued a fine for a deal like this and I hope I don’t have to.
I felt worse and worse. I tried to burp and it didn’t help. I was attending, with growing fear, to my interior situation. I retired to a vision of my inwards as a tenebrous, somehow shuddering cathedral. Between my head and the invisible height of the ceiling, the surrounding darkness hung heavy and close. I peered in, or perhaps out, or down. I heard my egresses whispering. There was something churning the texture of the gloom. The smoke that the darkness wore at its edge was stirring.
City ordinance, said the policeman—LEE, by his badge. No more than X number of dogs per X number of square feet. From an enforcement standpoint I can’t say it’s normal, but you see you got a neighbor who likes I guess calling us on the phone a little bit.
The thing was swiftly rolling toward me across the nave, a foreshortened somersaulting boulder of affliction soon to proclaim itself in parts of my body known for their inflexible demands.
You have four dogs at this property sir?
My wife had dogs, I had dogs. There were dogs in the house called her dogs and my dog. We respected distinctions of possession in order to divide responsibility for their offenses. Whereas her two principal dogs were sometimes guilty of excesses of affection, and another of looser affiliation chewed things and leapt upon the bed, my dog was a wormy stump rotting in the shed.
Benjamin the dog: he was a comfort to me because he inhabited the one chunk of inarguable space in the universe where my defenses against reality generally outlasted those of others. When my wife asked about my day, my best efforts at reply tended to tell about Benjamin’s day instead: the color and thickness of his fluids, the tally of his emissions, the psychology of his wheezing, the faint manifestations of his will, the butterflies of his acquaintance, his melting teeth, the ghosts of his enthusiasms, his sad conference with the tennis ball of his youth, the plagues of his skin, his exasperating contraindicative contempt for ticks—above all, the persistence of his mysterious refusals (to complain or cry or give voice, often to eat or drink, to walk or stand, to seek joys like a living dog), and his abiding example of unbitterness, his accidental monumentality. I was alone in the house since my job and I had lost one another, and Benjamin offered the one variety of fellowship we knew we could go on affording.
Sir. You have four dogs at this property is that correct. Well next week one of them’s got to be gone, don’t ask me how I couldn’t tell you, but that’s how it is. I do wish truly that I could tell you there’s a fine or a penalty or something like-at but what they tell me is that in this kind of deal what happens typically is they, meaning we the city, we I’m afraid will take the animal away from you and we will destroy the animal.
Up the street, a garage door hummed open and my neighbor appeared with a green hose. He attached it to a spigot and commenced to water his driveway. He hosed down his concrete driveway. He washed the speechless stone. He did it with care. He waved to us as he did it. Officer Lee and I waved back.
That’s the gentleman that called in I believe, said Lee.
He pointed up the street to the brown house. A bib of scorched lawn, six cars and a boat, birds in the gutter, wincing boyfriends who came calling in basketball shorts, bringing the wrong kinds of dogs, and toys in the grass like they had thrown them there, and not as far as they’d meant to. I suppose the man with the hose who lived there was my enemy.
It’s such a beautiful part of the country, I said. Why does it seem like we’re running out of things to do?
In the last interval before the disaster, Lee thought on this. Evidently the particular manner of my inconsequence had left an impression on him, or else he was one of those ever-musing good sports who to please you will make profoundest riddles out of half your thoughts. I enjoyed the sight of him puzzling out whatever, with his top lip indrawn, his bottom teeth riffling his sooty whiskers, and his gaze looping through the mystery like a boomerang, flying home to the image of his next cigarette. I had long enough to engender a hope that Lee might produce a memorable and fine answer to my question. Then I fell to the malady that had caused me to ask it.
I could tell I was sick when I caught myself casting about for a perception to congratulate myself on. (There it was: I couldn’t see, which is a hard thing to notice.) I staggered toward Lee, raising my hands to keep my balance.
He hopped back smartly and lowered his hand to his belt. He had weapons there. He warned me not to come closer.
I said: No, I’m sorry. I need to. See. Mind if I just.
There: the clutch of sharp fire. The thousand-pricked blurt of perspiration over all my skin. The electrification of my scalp, and the sense originating there that my heavy soul, the actual weight of what was I, was rising, lifting and rising. I turned with a yelp and ran like a dog for the front door. Officer Lee shouted, but I was not running from him. Within two strides there was pee, I was peeing. Or, I wasn’t yet, but I was straining without avail against a peeing, a dear trusted sufficiency had resigned. Presently I peed as voluntarily as a man can. I flung out my gear with a roar of shame and then I let it all go out of me.
I wept and laughed. I sang a low sigh in my best natural note. I burned in the drowning beam of mercy. There was a little too much relief then to think of continuing to reside in my person, so for a moment, off I went about the landscape, riding a curl of ribbon out of my head. Perspectives wheeled by, and in several I recognized the figure of the fat man pissing in the dirt, the sick suburban interloper fouling his own den. To the hawk up on the telephone pole he was a heaving blot of wrong colors too big to kill. For the large-holed face in the neighbor’s window, to whom he presented the three most informative quarters of his profile, he was a man abandoned to trash. What was he to the breathless policeman with his pepper spray? I feared that I would not get back soon enough to where I was needed. The policeman and he were both screaming. Any further evolution of events along the present course might block a non-policeman’s exits. It’s bad to scream with a cop.
My wife came out of the house, and she was screaming too.
Please don’t please don’t. (There I was.)
Oh my God, etc. (My wife.)
I am not dangerous, we are not dangerous, I blubbered, as Officer Lee pointed his pepper-spray canister at me and then at her. I showed him my harmless hands. Unaimed, my three volumes bucked and swung. I pissed on my shoes with every appearance of deliberation.
I’m just having a kind of ordinary accident, I said.
You’d better tell me what’s going on fast, you running away on me like-at.
Can I ask is it against the law to pee on your own bush. I mean I guess there’s indecent exposure or I don’t know.
Public urination, said Officer Lee.
My wife said: Is that a question?
Honey, please, I said. You’re being a little too courageous.
Folks, help me out, said Officer Lee. Just one of you say something helpful.
(New treachery in my body now. A trembling in my legs that had begun with the first fears of uncontrol had developed into a loony jerking in both knees, like a deracinated swimming stroke. I was a creature plying the wrong medium. My hands shook. The pissing was as prodigal as ever, and I received strange and wistful intimations of some parallel version of this act, in which my flailing limbs and errant fluids witnessed to my joy of life.)
With pepper spray it’s the same with any tool, Officer Lee continued. Once you have it in your grasp it has a way of making its own demands. I just could use a little help from you that’s all.
He has diabetes, said my wife.
(Of course I did.) Of course I do.
I fell to my knees in the grass, pitched over in my own puddle, and fainted away.
After that I started to sound like a zombie on the telephone. I slowed the delivery of my favorite joke:
SETUP [misc.]: Very sorry to hear you lost your job. Heard you lost your job, that’s real tough. Did you lose your job? I heard about it, scary. (Ad lib.)
ME: Thanks, but I have a pretty good idea of where it is.
I declare that I will no longer allow you to get away with that joke, Bert said.
I think that joke shows optimism. The point isn’t whether I endorse it. The point is that it’s alive, it’s in contention.
It’s disconcerting to hear that joke in a voice barely above a whisper.
Maybe barely alive. That’s fair. But still: the silver-lining detector, the apparatus—
I can’t even hear you right now.
I’m still choosing a survival technique here. Believe me, bright-heartedness is something you have to sneak up on.
I’m coming to see you. Next weekend.
Frances says she’ll help. We’ll tape up Hallmark cards all over the walls. Every time you turn a corner in the house, boom, an infusion—
Dad, I’m worried about you.
Later, in my living room, it would be a popular opinion that this was all happening too soon. But no one would say how much too soon.
The truth is I’ve had all the vitality I can stand. I can’t separate a concept of health from that of prowess, of bare lethal potential. I am not robust, fast, or beautiful, but I have lived for years and years amidst creatures I can kill. I have bathed my children, I have lain down beside sleeping women. The infant Bert had a neck as paper-crisp and yielding as a toad. In defense of illness I would say that its imperatives are essentially pacifying.
The morning after my walk at the park, I awoke sopping with pains and lay in bed awhile, brewing the black coffee of indignation in my heart. A bubble in the gorge, a scent of stirred blood in the depth of the nose. Today I would tell Bert to get out of my house and go sleep in the street, if he wished to teach me something. We could continue my lessons in autonomy from there.
What kind of son was he, when he was a son and not a houseguest? I wish I were worse at remembering him. Retrospection in its fastidious cruelty reveals unwelcome meanings in everything. When I led him into the house, he appointed a stage. When I led him into his room, he unpacked a costume. In the last act I would sit in the armchair and he on the same sofa that he had stopped to squint and mumble at upon his entrance. He would wear the green oxford of special power, the first shirt he had taken from his suitcase, the one which he had hung, alone, from the back of the guest room door.
I rose, washed, and took my pills before the mirror. My face took on different shapes of anger until I found the one I was looking for. Why pick on me? I wasn’t a theorist, I had no immodest beliefs, the fraying of my life was not a defense of an idea. I could state my view of personal well-being in full by remarking that I flushed with a feeling of positive action and judicious force as I took my pills each morning. I liked to count them. There was one for each thing in me. It gladdened me to account for myself. Most mornings I could look through the mirror far enough to borrow an impersonal kind of blessing for whatever I saw there. I figured that if I ever needed more than that I’d ask for it.
Bert got up and came to the kitchen like some camp counselor, sheepishly haggard and full of positive programming. He suggested a drive to the botanical gardens. I gave him dogkeeping duties. We brought the dogs in and fed them. We let them out and spoke to them to make them run around.
The fact was that neither of us was ready to live the way we were living. In myself I felt an openness, a readiness to join in laughter with him over it all—it was a good enough joke that I was fat and peed on things, and if we worked together we could forget here and there that it had been played on us. But he was still shocked and sealed and hoping to harden.
We went to dinner that night—Frances, Bert, and I—and Bert’s intervenors arrived at the house while we were out. They were set up in the living room when we came in, the finest chair waiting for me.
Four on the sofa, too many for it to hold: my wife, my son, and her sons. Four on kitchen chairs set against the wall: her parents, her brother, my friend. One seated backward on the piano bench: her friend, the decoy, the cookie-arranger, the one I would be allowed to attack. Three dogs in a fuddlement of arousal. An empty chair for my brother, whose plane was late. Every face a flake of courage. Even in recollection I find the prickle of a choked protest upon me like some inexpressible sneeze.
Let’s talk! First, greetings to all and sodden commendations. And then who are you, and why are you here? We went down the line. Once three people had spoken there weren’t any answers left—
I’m here because Bert asked me to be here.
I’m here because I feel a duty to be here.
I’m here because I care about this family.
I’m here for the same reason as Larry.
—but then, that doesn’t embarrass anyone but me.
Here because he felt a duty to be here was Maxwell, my wife’s father. He spoke in such a way as to suggest that this duty of his might be a home to anyone who didn’t want to get caught wishing for the worst. He had heard that the problem was that I was alive and at large as myself, and so to him the solution was obvious but awkward to hope for.
We are all family, he said. I believe that means being there when things go sideways.
I found him artful. He loved me less than anyone I knew.
His grandsons, my wife’s sons, my stepsons, sat with Maxwell, deepening their distance from me. My health was to be the instrument of his patrimony.
I asked him: How close is this supposed to be making us feel? (Maxwell: changeless. I was making this too easy for him.) Because I feel sort of half-in-half-out. I got an internet church’s preaching certificate and did a wedding ceremony for my two friends of mine, and that was similar. It was a mistake. We sort of stopped speaking after that.
Part of my trouble here is that I’m not sure that the thing I had a run-in with was a real social form. Was it possible to have an intervention against the mere state of being fat and sad? From the soaking boredom that had fallen on us, as though we were suffering together through a bad dinner prayer, it was clear that there were others discomfited by the squishing of this question. It wasn’t my privilege to hold up the production, and I felt I owed it to my intervenors to behave as though they knew what they were doing. Nevertheless a conversation in which it was somehow irrelevant for me to mention that six other people in the room were as fat as I was, was ipso facto one that had gone down the wrong track. Moreover the sum of encouragements, wishes, warnings, grocery lists, threats, recipes, parables, condolences, and exercise tips might not have amounted to a coherent and practicable program of action. Even now I suspect that I was not properly asked to do anything, other than to behold an invisible sculpture of myself.
There’s a lot of—let me put it like this, there’s a lot of medicating of symptoms going on, and not enough of the kind positive change that can really get to the root, Bert said. Let’s talk about that. Who wants to go first.
I watched him presiding. I wanted to go first. Questions: Where did the money come from? Could this be done twice? I’m an obedient man, but what if this doesn’t work?
Around eleven o’clock, a stopping point that must have been negotiated in advance, I was offered a chance to plead exhaustion and I took it. (You must be tired: not even a question, exactly.) My stepsons, who enjoyed food-work and seemed to belong to the silence of it, helped my wife parcel out the carnage of the uneaten snacks. Old yogurt containers with mismatched lids came out of their unruly and neglected cupboard and received scarred heels of cheese, gored olives, brownie tatters and nut rubble. I went outside and got a cigar out of the truck, along with the noisy stapled paper bag containing my pills, and a candy bar I’d been hiding. I went to the backyard to smoke.
Puffing and smacking, I stood aside, as I loved to do, while my whole mind crowded into the fierce blossom of corruption in my mouth. I have said all my life that I smoke cigars when I want to think, and never once, while smoking, thought one thing.
Through the kitchen windows and the patio doors I watched the dumb show of the house, with me out of it, mellowing its mood. There was a rinse of demure and solemn happiness that brought the people back to themselves and their relations by gentle ways. A smoothing humor flowed among them and I was touched to see it. Maxwell draped a dishtowel over Max’s head. Brian impassively aimed a fake punch at Maxwell’s jaw. Veronica, my mother-in-law, performed the first large laugh, and after a doubt as to its propriety startled her—eyes popping, hand flying to her lips—others joined her in it and redoubled it. Frances, standing at the sink, bobbed in this laugh. She had been given solitude within some business with the dirty dishes, so that she might live a little longer with the feeling that we were fixing this. The characteristic gesture of fellowship among just, sound humans busy corroborating each other’s rights to pleasure and health is a light touch of two fingers inside the elbow. In the living room, phones showing pictures of new boats, beaches, and the triumphant young athletes of the family were handed around.
I could hear them better now, as they resettled their free and natural movements, than I had when they had spoken, when what was more necessary to detect than any word was the extent of its distortion by the ghost, the curse, the sickness, the threat, the ill presences in me that had evoked it.
I’ll buy the truck, Maxwell said. I’ll take Benjamin too, he can live out his days up at the farm with us.
We’ve gone in together on a storage unit so you can clean out the house and the garage and sell the house, Veronica said. Here is the key to the storage unit right here.
I’ve got a good friend who’s a personal trainer, said Marla, the decoy, eating a cookie.
Bert leaned out through the patio door to report the sleeping arrangements. Maxwell and Veronica were headed home and would see about Benjamin and the truck later in the week. My brother Phil sent a text message from Atlanta: delays upon delays, he’d sold his seat for the points.
My flight’s at seven. So I figure airport by six, leave by four thirty. Up by four.
Dinner tonight was nice, I said. We all deserve credit for it. A head start on the healing. You’ll have noticed I ordered fish.
You should sleep. Four’s early.
Though now I know what that candlelight-melancholy look was all about. You were regretting that you couldn’t just hop from the men’s room window into a plane. I believe you ended on the wrong note.
Good night, Pop.
He went in.
When I finished my cigar, I unwrapped my candy bar and went to the shed. Benjamin rose from his blankets toddled up to me at the workbench. I broke the candy bar into two pieces. I rubbed the oily fur behind his ears. I took the pill bottle from the bag and ten pills from the bottle. He lay down again. I plugged the pills into the soft center of one half of the candy bar. He yawned.
I sat down beside him.
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p.s. Hey. So, I've pretty much said this in the introduction at the top of the post, but please devote some time and thought to Bill Porter's story this weekend, and give him your feedback, whether it's in the form of a short acknowledgement, if that's your style, or, of course, ideally, something more in depth and detail-oriented, if you can and don't mind. Basically, please show your support for Bill's writing and for his kindness and courage in entrusting it to us. I'll add my thoughts at the end of the weekend. Thank you all very much in advance! ** Torn porter, Cool, I'm stoked too. Oh, right, my email. It's dcooperweb@gmail.com. Just send me your mailing address, and it'll get the prize in the mail asap meaning, I guess, on Monday. Yeah, I guess I was partly wondering how you or one deals with having to work in the firing line or cresting-wave-like space between the band and the crowd. In theory, the restriction there seems exciting, but I would definitely be shy or something like you, but, unlike you, my photos would likely suck. Concert reviews are a real toughie, or they always have been for me. Even describing a concert situation in a fiction context is extremely hard to pull off, and I don't think I've ever managed to do that. Writing reviews of movies, art, things, theater, is so much easier. I guess maybe because the crowd is so important to the music show, and so inseparable from the show's aesthetic and effect/success, and the reviewer is both part of the crowd and removed from it to a more violent or distinct degree than with other events or something. I don't know, blah blah. Congrats to you again, man, and have a swell weekend. ** David Ehrenstein, You see why, yes? Your entry was pretty cool too, sir, and completely unexpected. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, Ben. Shit, I forgot to wish you happy b'day on the day itself. The plans you made for it sound quite sweet. I'm guessing it was, right? Thanks about the goody bag. You're too kind. ** Etc etc etc, Hi. Wow, interesting: the connection to the Thieves Like Us videos. I'd never seen them. I kind of like them. There's some kind of atmospheric stress in or around the 'cute' thing that's interesting or melancholy/fascist or something. Hm, I'll have to watch them again. Yeah, why is it that 'Beats' fiction movies inevitably suck. Suck generally in a particular way. It's so true from the ones I've seen. Don't think I'll try 'KYD'. Theoretically, it seems like you could make a decent or even pretty damned good movies from/about the Beats or their texts. Maybe it's that directors always give the movies way too much shape. Too much hourglass and not enough sand. And the movies' tempos always seem very imposed and unfaithful and wrong. Or something. Anyway, interesting. Ha ha, the 'Munich' comparison ... yes, I'll stay far away from that film, thank you. New Death Grips is crazy great, like they have the formula for exhilaration or something. Lovely weekend to you, Casey. ** Gary gray, You think about the truth in denial? Well, there's truth in everything and everything/nothing in truth, I guess, or something. Calm, interesting ... I'll go revisit them and think about that. It's interesting that the tenor of those posts can change from month to month since I'm always at least consciously just gathering the ones that seem the 'best' in the same way as always. It would be weird if they were somehow about my state of mind or something. I don't want to think about that. That would ruin it. ** Tender prey, Hi, Marc. Fuckme was a good one, yeah. I don't think I had a favorite one this month. I thought that for some reason this month they were most effective as an ensemble rather there being one or two or three stars and the rest forming their back up band or something. Your new work: sublime, man. Awesome that the M&P post is a goer! Wolf! Tell Wolf hi and give her a just-this-side of a back breaking hug from me. And my love too, if the hug wasn't a fill-in communicator. ** Bill Porter, The man of the hours! I hope it goes really well this weekend, and thank you again so much! Robust, interesting. I never fully know what their collective effect will be. Maybe I should do an Escorts Post Workshop post or something. Too square, you? What?! Perish the thought. If you're square, so am I, and, huh, I think I probably am, come to think of it. Anyway, enjoy. How was Jonathan Richman? I haven't seen him live or even listened to him in, gosh, ages and ages. Weird. ** Sypha, Glad you liked the batch, and thanks on their behalf. Sounds like a super fun day you had there with Mr. K and Lee. Why is one not allowed to take photos of HP Lovecraft's grave? That's weird. I've never heard of a such a rule in a graveyard setting. 'Bedrooms Have Windows', that's a score right there. Yeah, I think it and the 2nd edition of 'Idols' with that even more ludicrous than original cover were contemporaries. Have a fine weekend, James. ** Bill, I think if you're an escort in Fiji, you must need every advantage you can get. You're in Brooklyn? You're even more on-the-go than I am. Wow, you're doing the thing with my text this weekend? I hope my thing serves you well. That's so cool. Tell me what happened. And break not only your leg but mine too. If I wake up in the late-middle of the night on Saturday with a charley-horse, I'll know you were the hit that one would fully expect. ** Steevee, Tell me more about the amusement park ride sexual fetish thing/program, if you can. That's really fascinating to me, unsurprisingly, and ... wow. ** Misanthrope, I figured you knew I was being facetious, I just wanted to cover my bases or something, who knows? If 'Glee' made Dave Grohl seems like a paragon of virtue, it must be pretty fucking bad. France has an 'X Factor'. I've never watched it. No, wait, I did stop on it once just to see what happened to that format when French people were inside it. Nothing much happened to the format other than the accents. Excellent weekend, G! ** Right, Now, please turn your full attention to Bill Porter's story if you haven't done so already. I'll add my feedback to yours when late-ish Sunday my time rolls around. Thank you again for your time and concentration this weekend, everybody! See you in the comments arena ere long, and then from the vantage point of my proper place (here) on Monday.