Three Seconds of Dead Air

Never Aim to Please November 10, 2009

Here’s the conclusion to the story I’ve been posting for the last two days.  This is really all the farther I got in National Novel Writing Month.  There are a few half-hearted pages of a third story, but that’s where my defeatism trumped my ambition.  If you’re just joining the story, you can find the previous two installments here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

*****

Back in his bedroom, Garrett sat at his desk with the AAA guidebook to Ohio and his mom’s Cavalcade entertainment book.  If he was going to show Rachel that no two-bit Indiana rube was worthy of her love, he didn’t have time for half-measures.  The clock was ticking on their relationship, and he needed to use every shred of ingenuity he could muster.

He’d been saving as much money as he could from his country club job, in between buying tapes, topping off the gas tank, and going Dutch with Rachel on most of their dates.  That was his first resolution: There’d be no going Dutch from here on in.  If she still wanted to see him – and he hadn’t called her yet, so he knew that might be a big if – he’d pay for everything.  Movies, dinners … and that’s where the other two books came in.  Up to this point their dates had consisted almost exclusively of movies and dinners.  The paucity of Garrett’s imagination – combined with the relative lack of entertainment options in Edgewood – meant that their previous dates had been especially anemic.  They hung out a lot at each other’ houses, and occasionally headed into the park to wander aimlessly up and down the gravel paths and make out under the oaks when no one was looking.  Six months of that had been fun, but Garrett conceded that Rachel might be ready for a change.

And now he sat at his desk, feverishly circling any potential attractions he found in the AAA book – yes to Great Serpent Mound, no to the Wright Brothers’ Bicycle Shop – and scouting out new restaurants for which he now had coupons courtesy of the Cavalcade entertainment book.  He wouldn’t be boring.  He wouldn’t be normal.  He’d show Rachel that he knew how to have a good time.  He’d plot out a series of dates the like of which she’d never seen – certainly not with Garrett – and which she wouldn’t be likely to see with some muscle-bound frat boy.  If there were a museum for memorable dates, these dates would be so spectacular they’d get their own special exhibit.  He knew it wasn’t a good sign that the voices running through his head at the moment belonged to Dan Aykroyd and Steve Martin – “We’re two wild and crazy guys!” – but he hoped he’d have at least a day to purge them.  Assuming, that is, that Rachel would go out with him.

And that led him to the next big step, of course, which was mustering up enough courage to call her.  He was reminded once again of Steph, and of that first painful phone call when he felt as though he were behind the wheel of a race car that was about to go flipping head first into the crowd.  This was an odd sort of nervousness for Garrett.  Because he and Rachel had bonded first as friends, over movies and books and music, the rest of the relationship had come without any nervousness or awkward preamble.  By the time they shared their first kiss, he’d been calling her for weeks, so the first post-kiss call was, for all intents and purposes, business as usual.

Now, however, he stared at his phone like it was an exploding rattlesnake.  He knew Rachel had called, and courtesy dictated that he should call her back, preferably sooner rather than later.  But at the same time, he didn’t know if he could handle rejection over the phone.  Garrett wasn’t a conversationalist under the best circumstances, so he had very little faith in his phone etiquette to begin with.  As much as he liked talking to Rachel, after a few minutes their phone calls usually devolved into the two of them hmmmmming and errrrring until one of them made the brave suggestion to hang up and go make out in the park.

He tried to imagine how this conversation with Rachel would go.  Should he apologize for last night?  Throw himself on the mercy of the court?  Maybe he could just pretend it had never happened.  What was it he had learned in Civics class?  The Twinkie defense?  He could ignore their conversation last night, and if it came up, Garrett could claim his judgment – and now his memory – had been clouded by his abnormal intake of pasta and buttery garlic bread.  Blinded by carbohydrates, he simply hadn’t been in his right mind.

Ridiculous.  Of course it was. In some ways it would be worse if her mom answered and it turned out that Rachel wasn’t home.  Garrett’s imagination would run riot with that, wondering where she was, whom she was with, why she hadn’t called to let him know.  He knew jealousy was a dangerous and unbecoming trait – thank you, Fatal Attraction! – but his worry wasn’t really about jealousy.  Instead, it was a deep-seated anxiety that told him anything good that happened to him would surely one day go sour.  If Rachel were already out with another guy, it would in many ways not be surprising, simply because that scenario had already been playing to sold-out audiences in the theater of Garrett’s head for weeks.

And then he knew what he had to do.  He and Rachel were always a better team in person than on the phone.  If he were going to take this commitment to no half-measures seriously, then it was clear that he had to go to her.  Physically, and not as a disembodied voice over the stupid telephone, where he couldn’t see Rachel, couldn’t read her feelings from the different smile she assigned to each mood, or the way she ducked her head when she was embarrassed, letting her bangs shroud her eyes.

He had to go to her.

Rachel lived with her parents and older brother in an old red-brick Georgian house in the center of town.  It was one of the older homes in Edgewood, an architectural marvel whose distinctiveness had been muted by the peculiar landscaping choices of the neighbors.  It was nestled in between a two-story monstrosity that, for inexplicable reasons known only to the lunatics inside, had been fronted with a faux-marble veneer, making it look like an ill-conceived Greek temple, and a home whose owners were apparently fond of the American Southwest.  The house itself was a nondescript, wood-frame two-story, but the front yard was littered with silhouettes of cowboys leaning against trees, plywood Saguaro cacti peeking out from the shrubbery, and a large wagon wheel tilted on end with a sign that read, “Welcome to the Harris’ Hoe-Down.”  The Nelsons’ home, in contrast, looked like it had been plucked from a residential block in Dublin, Ireland, and made to sacrifice its dignity in Edgewood, Ohio.

This time of day the curbside was nearly empty, and Garrett successfully parallel-parked his parents’ Bonneville on the fourth try, finally maneuvering himself into position so the front wheel on the passenger side was no longer bumped up on the curb.  His parents had relinquished the car with little fuss, presumably due to the frenzied air Garrett had tried hard – but failed – to jettison.  They seemed to know there was a greater purpose at work here, and this time they might do well to spare him the inquisition.

Garrett sat behind the wheel for another moment.  Morrissey’s “Everyday Is Like Sunday” played quietly through the speakers, and Garrett idly drummed his fingers on the steering wheel while mouthing the words.  Looking out the window, the house seemed empty.  The Nelsons had a separate garage behind the house, so Garrett couldn’t tell if anyone was actually home.  He strained his eyes at each window, hoping to see some telltale sign of movement, but all, at least from the outside, was still.

As the song trailed away, Garrett shut off the ignition and closed his eyes, focusing on his racing heart.  He knew his nervousness was completely out of proportion to the task at hand, but for some reason he couldn’t get his nerves under control.  Now, parked outside Rachel’s house, he saw this situation ending in a dozen different ways – the best resulting in his being kicked out of the house, the worst involving a hostage situation and Garrett being taken out by a police sniper.  He suddenly wished he’d just gone ahead and made the phone call.

“Fuck it.”  He got out of the car, looked both ways – safety first, even in times of emotional duress – and crossed the street.  He moved slowly up to the Nelsons’ front door, taking the two steps up to the door with all the delicacy of an octogenarian suffering from a recent double-hip replacement.  The inclination to pause, breathe deeply, and wrestle control of his anxiety was strong, but not nearly as strong as the fear of being seen standing outside the Nelsons’ front door with his eyes closed, talking to himself.

Before he had a chance to change his mind, he knocked.

And knocked again.

He counted to five Mississippi and knocked a third time.  Still no answer.

He backed away from the door and tried to unobtrusively peek through the window just to the left of the entrance.  Nothing doing there, either.

Now he didn’t know what to do.  He’d ruled out the phone call, mustered up the courage to drive in here, and now no one was home.  He figured the logical next step was either to go home and try calling later, or else drive around town for a bit, make a return visit, and if she still wasn’t home, wave the figurative white flag and live to fight again another day.

Both of those courses of action were safe, clean, and logical.  Both of them would get him in touch with Rachel eventually, and he’d have the chance to plead his case when he did so.  Either choice was a good one.

So, naturally, Garrett sat down on Rachel’s front steps to wait.

After 90 minutes, Garrett thought about leaving.  The summer sun had already peaked over the rooftops on the other side of the street, and it was now mostly obscured by both the second-storey eaves of the houses and the interlacing branches of the oaks that lined both sides of the street.  Flecks of light shimmered between the leaves, but it was swiftly turning into the deeper, burnished light of early evening.  This was not good.

Garrett ran the timeline – what little of it there was – in his head.  Rachel had called at 9:20 this morning.  At 4:30, she wasn’t home.  Now, at a little past 6:00, she still wasn’t home.  As far as detective work went, this didn’t give him much to go by.  He supposed he could still leave, drive around for a bit, and come back.  He didn’t want to go home, not if he wanted to have any chance of returning.  If Garrett went home, he knew there was every chance Steve and Kathy would say he was home for the evening.  That would leave him with the unappetizing prospect of dialing Rachel’s phone every fifteen minutes until someone picked up.

If he didn’t go home, he could swing by the Dairy Queen or drive through the park, see if maybe she was there independent of her parents.  That was something he hadn’t considered: maybe she wasn’t with her mom and dad.  Maybe she had called this morning to drive the final nail in Garrett’s coffin, and now she was with someone else.  She’d been over to Bloomington last week for freshman orientation and to schedule her classes; is it possible she met someone while she was there?  She could have called him last night, and he could have agreed to make the drive and pick her up this morning.  It was possible to get from Bloomington to Edgewood by 10 A.M.

And who said this prick had to live in Bloomington?  IU is a big school – this guy could be from Cincinnati or Dayton or Muncie or Columbus or any number of cities closer than Bloomington.  He probably picked her up this morning, and then her parents took off for the day themselves, and now Rachel’s out there with this other guy, all because Garrett just had to push for a firm commitment last night.

Why did he do that?  Why couldn’t he just leave well enough alone?  He and Rachel were happy together the way things had been, and they probably would have continued to be happy the rest of the summer.  August would have been a good time to broach the subject, when she was faced with the prospect of missing him, and she’d have been more likely to say she’d never leave him for someone else, not ever.

But what was so wrong with him, anyway?  Even if it was June, why didn’t Rachel want to be with him?  Why did she hold back?  They had fun together, sitting in their rooms, talking, laughing, making out, driving around town, going to the park.  Why wasn’t any of that good enough for her?  Maybe she was just using him, he thought.  She wanted to be with someone in high school – what girl wants to go to college without ever having had a boyfriend? – and Garrett had fit the bill just long enough to seem like a substantial relationship, but not so long that it became nauseating.  That was it, for sure.  She had used him, but the worst part of it was that she had made him feel good, like he wasn’t alone, like he meant something to someone.  He had just started to believe in himself, and now it was gone.  All of it.  Gone.

Garrett started to cry, softly.  Not huge, melodramatic, wailing sobs, but his nose clogged, his eyes welled up, and the first tears seeped from his eyes.  Soon his shoulders were convulsing, and he struggled mightily to get himself under control.  He felt his pockets for a tissue, and of course there wasn’t one.  He remembered seeing yesterday’s mail still sticking out of the metal box next to the front door, and he stood to see if there was junk mail, a circular, some ads, something he could use to blow his nose and blot his eyes.  He turned to check the mailbox.

And there was Rachel, standing in the open front door.

“Garrett?”

He didn’t need a photograph to know how he looked.  He’d seen himself in the mirror post-cry before – eyes swollen to twice their normal size, nose red and running, cheeks flushed from the exertion of sobbing – and it was quite a sight.

“Um … hi, um, Rachel,” he muttered, and tried, in one motion, to wipe the tears from his cheeks, dry his eyes, and run his hands through his hair, while simultaneously attempting to unplug his nose with a healthy snort.  It looked just as appealing as it sounded.

“What are you doing here?” she asked hesitantly.  She had stepped halfway out the door, but seemed unsure whether she wanted to commit entirely.  Her hand had stopped halfway to Garrett’s shoulder and floated there, like it had been filled with helium and wanted nothing more than to float away.

“Where were you?” he asked, trying and failing to keep the pitiful, beseeching tone out of his voice.  Suddenly he was five years old, and his mother had become separated from him at the supermarket.

“We went to Antioch.  To have lunch with my sister,” she said.

“Antioch?”

“I called you this morning to see if you wanted to go.  Didn’t your dad tell you I called?”

“He told me.” Garrett felt himself shrinking.  It took everything he had not to immediately turn on his heel, jump behind the wheel of the car, drive off in a screech of rubber and a cloud of foul-smelling smoke, and never return.

“Why didn’t you call me back?” Rachel asked.  “I wanted you to go.  We were going to have lunch with Katie and then I thought you and I could hit that record store you like, Toxic Beauty, the one we went to last time?  That was the plan, at least.”

“But … last night,” Garrett ventured lamely.  His voice came to his ears from a long way away, like he was speaking through the wrong end of a megaphone.

“What about it?”  And now, with the threat of raised voices drawing ever closer, Rachel stepped all the way outside and closed the door behind her.

“You said … you didn’t know if … “ The mismatch of what he thought and what he was saying with what Rachel seemed to be telling him was swiftly becoming too much to bear.  It didn’t help matters that she looked more beautiful than ever that afternoon, her dark hair pulled back in a loose ponytail and her growing anger bringing a flush to her cheeks.  She looked strong, ferocious, adult. Garrett, on the other hand, seemed to be growing younger by the second.  He tried to regroup, eliminate the last hint of tears from his voice, and start over.  “You told me –“

“Jesus Christ, Garrett.  It’s not the end of the world.  What?  Everything comes screeching to a halt because I can’t read the future?  Is that it?”

“Well … no …”

“You,” and here she stabbed a finger at his chest, “tell me. Do you know what you’re going to be doing six months from now?  The people you’re going to meet?  The girls in your dorm?  In your classes?  Do you really feel totally confident that you’re not going to meet someone else, with me hours away?  Can you promise that?”

She had backed him into a corner, and now all he could do was meekly feign ignorance. “I don’t know.”

“Exactly.  You don’t.  Neither do I.  That’s all I was saying last night.”  Rachel’s voice softened.  She went to brush his cheek with her fingertips and Garrett, still smarting from the poke in the chest, flinched.  Rachel smiled.  “Garrett.  I like you.  A lot.  And I have no intention of dumping you.  But I don’t know if I love you.  And I don’t have a clue what’s waiting for me in Bloomington.  It wouldn’t be fair of me to make a promise I’m not sure I can keep.”

Garrett didn’t know what to do or say next. It seemed to make sense to beat a hasty retreat while she had calmed down and was less likely to throw things at his back. “Well, okay.  I guess I’ll be going.”  He took a few steps backward.

Rachel closed the distance between them again. “You don’t have to go.  We can watch a movie or something.”

The offer was tempting, but even though Rachel’s words were reassuring, Garrett knew he needed time to process and recover.  “I should probably get home.  My parents didn’t know I’d be gone this long.  They’ll wonder where the Dudemobile” – Garrett’s nickname for the Bonneville – “has wandered off to.”

“Okay.  Well.  Call me later tonight?”

“Okay.”

Garrett turned and crossed the street to the car.  When he got to it, he turned.  Rachel was still standing by the door, watching him. She raised one hand in a wave.  Garrett thought she looked indescribably beautiful and profoundly sad in that moment.  His earlier sensation of growing younger while she grew older hadn’t been a mistake, or a symptom of his anxiety.  He could see her maturity in the set of her shoulders, the small smile that played at the corners of her lips.  There was suddenly a gulf separating them, one across which he had set sail the previous night.  He had completed the journey tonight, and now he desperately wished he hadn’t made the voyage, or could at least make a speedy return trip to the other side.

He waved at her in return and watched as she turned her back, walked into her house, and closed the door.  Garrett wasn’t normally prone to bouts of prescience, but he was suddenly aware of two truths, absolute and unequivocal:

He loved her.

And he wouldn’t see her again.

The gulf was just too wide.

*****

Current listening:

Bob Mould – Workbook (1989)

Now That I’m in the Future November 9, 2009

So, based on the overwhelming response to the writing I posted last night (one comment, on my Facebook – thanks, Maddy!), I’m not sure I see the point in pressing onward.  But I’m nothing if not obstinate, so here’s the next section of the second Garrett story.

*****

After pointless minutes of swinging violently between euphoric highs and suicidal lows, Garrett finally made the effort to swing his legs out of bed, throw on a t-shirt, and stumble downstairs to face the parental inquisition that was sure to follow.  His parents weren’t church-goers – they worshipped instead at the altar of Nine Hours of Sleep a Night – and Garrett fervently wished they were.  They’d be ensconced, as they usually were, in front of CBS Sunday Morning, watching Charles Kerault and passing sections of the Sunday paper back and forth over cups of coffee and plates of waffles.

“There he is,” Steve said, looking up from the “Metro” section.

“Morning, hon.” Kathy’s eyes were glued to the spinning ballerina on the TV, stentorian narration pointing out the trials she had endured on her long journey to the Met.  Ballerinas, conductors, sculptors, writers: it seemed to Garrett like every week there was an exposé on an artist who had overcome a tortured childhood or a severed limb or alcoholism to reach the top of his or her field.  A parade of human misery masquerading as triumph over adversity.  Perfect for Sunday morning, when the start of the week loomed on the horizon like a mushroom cloud.

Garrett flopped on the couch next to his mother and picked up the issue of Parade from the stack of discarded newspapers.  Billy Crystal on the cover, cowboy hat on his head, lasso in hand.  Garrett snorted and dropped it back on the pile.  It seemed the universe was in fine karmic form this morning.

“So?” Steve was peering at Garrett over the top of the “Neighbors” section, his eyebrows raised above the thick brown frames of his glasses.  Ever since Ghostbusters, Garrett thought his father looked like a less squishy Rick Moranis, and the resemblance seemed especially uncanny that morning.  Garrett stifled a laugh, unwilling to appear so good-natured as to be relishing interrogation.

“So what?” Garrett found himself suddenly interested in the ballerina tiptoeing across the TV screen.

“Playing it close to the vest, huh?  Very smooth.”

“Don’t embarrass the boy, Steve,” Kathy said.

“Hey, last night was a big night, right, G-Dog?”

Garrett was discouraged to hear his father lapse into full-blown Buddy Mode.  G-Dog had come about a year before, when Garrett had become enraptured with Public Enemy’s album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. In his continuing efforts to seem cool, Steve had listened to the cassette on the way to work one day.  Garrett doubted his father had made it past the second track before switching over to the more comfortable environs of the Cincinnati talk radio station he usually listened to, but the fact remained: from his father’s brief flirtation with rap, G-Dog and S-Man were born, to be dragged into conversation when Steve wanted to level the generational playing field, to seem more like the cool older brother than the pushing-50 father.  Garrett had outgrown his alter ego within a week.  Steve, on the hand, was unaware there was a statute of limitations on immaturity.

“It was fine, Dad.  A real barn-burner.”

“Hey, kid.  Six months is nothing to sneeze at.”

“No, you’re right,” Garrett replied. “There was absolutely no sneezing at any point last night.”

“Did you and Rachel at least have a nice time at Luigi’s?” Kathy asked distractedly, her eyes flitting between newspaper and television.

“It was Luigi’s,” Garrett replied. “Spaghetti.  Lasagna.  The usual.”  He got up from the couch and headed toward the kitchen. “I’m gonna eat and see if Nick wants to hang out.  Is that okay?”

“It’s Sunday,” his dad said. “Enjoy yourself.”  And then, almost as an afterthought, “Rachel called.”

Garrett froze, then swiveled slowly, like his feet had been fastened to a rotating dish in the floor. In a carefully modulated voice, Garrett said, “Oh, yeah?  When?”

“An hour ago, maybe a little more.  It’s on the pad by the phone.”

Garrett looked at the note on the counter.  It was Steve’s usual masterpiece of brevity: “G- Rachel called.  9:20.”

“Did she want me to call her back?” he asked.

“She didn’t say.  Just said to tell you she called.  So, she called.”

Garrett mumbled his thanks and stalked back through the family room and up the stairs to his bedroom.  So now what?  He wanted to call, but at the same time, not calling kept him in an oddly pleasant limbo.  It was true that he hated the ambiguity of their conversation last night – the thought that Rachel was just biding her time with him until someone better came along – but as long as he didn’t talk to her he could pretend that his doubts were all in his head.  Talking to her could end in confirmation of his worst fears, and it was strangely preferable not to know one way or the other.

On the other hand, maybe Rachel wanted to tell him that after having a night to sleep on it, she was now ready to commit herself to him, body and soul.  The truth was, she didn’t care that they were going to be separated by hours and miles – it was Garrett she wanted, she knew that now, and how could she have been so stupid the night before?

“Gah,” he grunted, and slammed his bedroom door.  He couldn’t remember what had been in the tape deck last night before he left, but he hit “Play” anyway.  The discordant surf guitar of the Pixies’ “Wave of Mutilation” cascaded out of the speakers and sloshed around his feet.  He took a deep breath and grabbed his phone.  Dialed a number.

“What’s up?” said the voice at the other end.

“Wanna hit the park?” Garrett asked.

“See you in 10.”

“She said that?  Really?”

Garrett and his best friend, Nick Martin, were stretched out on adjacent picnic benches near the swimming pool.  The brightly-colored confetti of children’s laughter came to them through the chain-link fence, accompanied by splashing, the lifeguard’s whistle, the muted mid-morning conversations of mothers and babysitters.  A few weeks ago Garrett had coerced the country club’s bartender to make him a piña colada, and he could taste it at the back of his tongue as the delicate scent of suntan lotion wafted on the humid summer breeze.  He and Nick had grabbed a hotdog and a Coke at the concession stand, and Nick’s questions struggled to be heard through the bun pocketed in his cheek.

“Yeah.  She didn’t want to make any promises.”

“Damn.”  Nick slurped noisily at his Coke and swallowed the rest of the hot dog. “So what’re you gonna do?”

Garrett hissed air through his teeth. “I don’t know, man.  It’s just messed up.  I thought things were coasting.  Turns out I was wrong.”

“This,” Nick said, “is why it pays to be ugly and unpopular.  Just one more problem I don’t have to worry about.”

“Asshole.”  Garrett launched the mustard-stained hotdog tissue at Nick, nailing him square in the center of his forehead.

“Douchebag,” Nick retorted, lapsing into a British accent for no good reason.  Garrett and Nick had been friends for years, and this was a habit stretching back as far as Garrett could remember.  It had been endearing when Nick was ten.  Now it just seemed weird.  The two boys had less and less in common as they grew older, but it was one of those odd childhood friendships that endures despite all laws of probability.  They were friends because they couldn’t imagine not being friends.

“Do you think I should call her?” Garrett asked.  “Seriously.”

“Man, I don’t know,” Nick said, losing the accent.  “I get that you’re worried.  I do.  But it’s Rachel.  She’s cool.  Do you really think she’s just waiting to fuck you over?”

“That’s the problem, isn’t it?”  The two of them were silent for a moment, Garrett sitting forward and scuffing the toe of his Converse sneaker in the dirt.  Swings squeaked in the nearby playground.  “I don’t think she’s waiting, no.  But I don’t think she knows what she wants.”

“Bitches,” Nick said sympathetically.

“Bitches,” Garrett agreed.  He caught Nick’s eye and they smiled. “This sucks.”

In the rare moments when Nick engaged in reflective thought, his eyes squinched tight and his lips pursed so tightly that they nearly disappeared beneath his nose.  Garrett was surprised to suddenly see this infrequent expression on his friend’s face. “Maybe,” Nick said, and it sounded, against all odds, like he was choosing his words carefully, “you just haven’t convinced her.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she likes you, right?  She said so.  She thinks you’re the shit.  But she also knows she’s heading off to IU.” He spread his hands and wiggled his fingers like he was casting a spell. “At IU there’s bound to be lots of other guys –“

“Hey, Nick … “ Garrett tried to interrupt.

“Excusez-moi, mon frère.  Let me finish.  There’ll be lots of other guys.  She thinks maybe – maybe – one of them will be better than you.  And she thinks this, why?  Because she hasn’t seen the best you can give her.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”  Garrett wasn’t sure if he should be offended.

“Well, look.  You’ve squired her around Edgewood, you’ve done movies and dinners and shit, but what reason does she have to think there’ll ever be anything else?  What have you really shown her?”

“The Übermensch,” Garrett whispered.

“Shit, yeah!” Nick exclaimed, and socked Garrett in the shoulder.  The other boy scarcely noticed.

“I have to be Super Boyfriend,” he said.  “I have to convince her.”

“That’s right, man.  She’ll doubt you unless you show her there’s no reason to doubt you.”

Garrett stood. “I gotta split.”

“No problemo, man.  Plans to make.  I get it.”

Garrett clapped Nick on the shoulder.  “I owe you, man.”  And he sprinted for his parents’ car.

*****

Current listening:

Tom Waits – Small Change (1976)

The Part You Throw Away November 8, 2009

As promised – and against my better judgment – I’m going to begin posting what was originally intended to be (and which may or may not continue to be) the first follow-up story in a series of related episodes revolving around Garrett’s hapless attempts to fall in love.  This represents the first few days of my still-stalled attempt to write a novel in thirty days.  As I wrote yesterday, I may still pick it up again, but it all depends on A) what kind of feedback – if any – I get from you kind folks, and B) how I personally feel about it now that I look at it after taking a few days off.  So, here’s the first few pages.  Enjoy.

(P.S. You can find links to all the parts of the previous story right here.)

*****

June 1991

If there were a line, a demarcation, where sea met sky, Garrett couldn’t find it.  He could see the waves tumble onto the beach from the base of the dunes where he stood, but as his eyes drifted toward the horizon and the whitecaps receded from view, he strained to find the point where slate-gray sky turned into slate-gray sea, the hinge on which the aquatic and the empyrean swung.  Rain was on its way, but in this moment Garrett hung suspended in ash, in asphalt, looking for a crack at the horizon into which he could latch his fingers and let in some sunshine.

This was a year ago, when Garrett had spent two weeks in the Outer Banks with his parents. He had spent most of the time sitting on the beach listening to The Cure’s Pornography on his Walkman and waiting for his sentence to end.  In retrospect, he realized that this habit hadn’t done much to alleviate the purgatorial nature of that vacation.  But that day especially, as he looked for a way to poke holes in the gray scrim that stretched from sea to sky, had seemed to stand still.

This is how Garrett felt when he woke just after 10:30 on Sunday morning.

This is not how Garrett felt the previous evening.

June 22 – the night before – marked his six-month anniversary with Rachel Nelson. He had known and been indifferent to Rachel for years.  They had attended the same elementary school and junior high, and had even traveled in the same circles in high school – those reserved for the chorus nerds and drama geeks – but it wasn’t until her senior year that Rachel became even vaguely interesting to Garrett.  The previous  summer, Rachel had spent several weeks visiting her older sister at Antioch College, a hippy-dippy liberal-arts school that specialized in turning previously staid, apolitical youth into progressive rabble-rousers fond of Che Guevara t-shirts and the ACLU.  As a result of three weeks in Yellow Springs, Rachel returned to Edgewood at the end of July with a penchant for the music of The Velvet Underground, the art of Andy Warhol, and pot.

On the first sweltering day of school that August, Garrett had slouched into the choir room and was virtually struck dumb to find the previously-plain Rachel Nelson caterpillar metamorphosed into a butterfly with smudged eyeliner, blue jeans torn out at the knees, black Converse hi-tops, and an Iggy Pop t-shirt.  It wasn’t love at first sight, but Garrett suddenly believed in destiny.

Their courtship was conducted over the next few months in a runalong rush of conversation about music (Elvis Costello’s solo albums just weren’t as good as his work with The Attractions), movies (the pottery scene in Ghost had reduced both of them to tears of laughter), and books (she got him interested in Kerouac; he turned her on to Lovecraft), and when they suddenly found themselves making out in his parents’ car on a December evening after seeing Edward Scissorhands, it didn’t really surprise either of them.

Six months on, and Garrett wanted to do it up right.  Unfortunately, in a town of 15,000, “doing it up right” meant something entirely different than it would have meant had they lived in a more cosmopolitan area.  He took her to see City Slickers at Cinema 6 (the same four-screened dump that had been the site of his ill-fated date with Steph nearly two years previously), and then they went to Luigi’s, the one decent restaurant in town, where the tablecloths were actually linen, and the menus didn’t have pictures of the entrees.

Dinner came and went, Garrett tried not to balk at the cost (which he would be paying for out of his meager salary bussing tables at the country club), and, when the waiter had left, he made a show of lifting his water glass and proposing a toast.

“To at least six more wonderful months,” he said.

With a flourish, Rachel swept up her half-empty glass and made an ostentatious show of clinking rims with Garrett. “Hear hear,” she proclaimed, her phony British accent dragging each word into double syllables.

Garrett watched as she took the straw between her lips. “I like the way you do that,” he said.

“Shut up.  Jerk,” she said, kicking him beneath the table.  Then, for added emphasis, she opened her mouth wide and bit down on the straw, grinding it between her molars.

Garrett winced. “Okay, okay” he said, smiling.

“You mean that doesn’t turn you on?” Rachel asked coyly, batting her mascaraed lashes at him.

“Strangely, yes,” he said, and grabbed her hand.  Her fingers were still wet and cold from the water glass.

They sat that way for a silent moment, his fingers wrapped around hers across the table, and Garrett wasn’t entirely sure what he was feeling.  The familiar warmth he felt every time he met her green eyes was smoldering in his chest, and he felt his breath stuttering slightly as she smiled at him.  He hated that in these moments the song that invariably came to mind was Foreigner’s “I Want to Know What Love Is.” Try as he might to think of something else, Lou Gramm’s soaring vocals perfectly echoed the starbursts that happened behind his eyes whenever Rachel, in her numerous and varied ways, let him know they were meant to be together.

But at the same time, Garrett know that in the space of two months both of them would be heading to different colleges.  Rachel had been accepted to the University of Indiana in Bloomington, and Garrett was headed to Ohio University, nearly six hours away in Athens.  It wasn’t transcontinental, but for two eighteen-year-olds without transportation, it might as well have been on the other side of the world.  He didn’t want to lose her or these moments, and his awkward toast had been his way of broaching the subject.

“So, I was thinking,” he said, and trailed off.

“Dare to dream,” Rachel responded, and squeezed his fingers before letting go.

“No, really.”

“Oh.  Okay.  What’s up?” This was another reason he liked her.  They were both fluent in the language of sarcasm, teasing and mocking each other incessantly, but Rachel could always tell when Garrett was being serious, and she never pushed the joke too far.

“Well, I was thinking, you know, about this fall.”  He paused, trying to read in her eyes just how reckless he should be in moving forward. “And school.  And us.  You know?  What do we do?”

“What do we do about what?”

“About, well, us.” Garrett felt the dam breaking and, rather than try to mend the seams, let it fall.  “All through this winter we waited to get our acceptances and then we got them and we started making our individual plans, but we’ve never really talked about what happens in August.  Do we stay together?  Do we break up?  If we stay together, how do we make it work?  If we break up, what happens next?  We haven’t talked about any of this and it’s going to be here before we know it and I feel like I need to know what to expect.”

Rachel sat back and smiled slightly, the right end of her lips curling up in the way that usually drove Garrett crazy, but which he was too distracted tonight to notice. “You worry too much.”

“Rachel –“

“No, just.  Look.”  She picked up her straw wrapper and twisted it around her forefinger.  “I don’t know what’s going to happen, Garrett.  And so I don’t worry about it.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Sure it is.”

“For me it’s not that easy.”  He was suddenly having trouble meeting her eyes, and his gaze skittered across the tabletop, briefly taking in the water glasses sweating through the linen tablecloth, the salt and pepper shakers, the tiny candle, the fake roses. “I worry about losing you, like, all the time.”

“Garrett, I like you.  I do.  But –“

That single conjunction caused his eyes to swivel upward. “But what?”

“But I can’t make you any promises.  I wish I could.” Garrett started to interject, and Rachel grabbed his hand again to silence him.  “Just wait.  Things might turn out great.  Maybe we’ll get where we’re going and figure out we’re miserable apart.  But we might just as easily get to school and realize there’s a whole lot of other people out there we’ve never met.  It could happen for you just like it could happen for me.”  She let go of his hand.  “So I don’t know what will happen.  And I like you too much to lie about it.”

“But, Rachel,” Garrett could both feel and hear an edge of desperation inching into his voice, and he tried to tamp it out.  In the same instant, he suddenly heard himself say the thing he’d been hanging onto for the perfect moment.  This wasn’t that moment, but he said it anyway. “I love you.”

And now she looked at him with undisguised sadness. “Oh, Garrett,” she said.  “Let’s not do that.”

He drove her home without talking, and Rachel knew it was serious when he didn’t even bother to stick a tape in the car’s deck.  It started to drizzle, and the crows’ wings of the windshield wipers punctuated their stony silence.  At her house, she half-heartedly invited him in to watch a movie, and was relieved when he declined.

That was their six-month anniversary.  Garrett got home, crawled into bed, and welcomed oblivion with open arms.

But now here it was, Sunday morning, and the hornet of last night’s conversation furiously banged itself around in the Mason jar of Garrett’s skull.  He lay on his back and stared up at the ceiling, putting off for as long as possible the moment when he’d have to get up and face the world.  The stars and planets that glowed comfortingly above him at night were now just cheap vinyl stickers, and that transformation seemed to too perfectly mirror the overnight change in his relationship with Rachel.

He spent some time trying to spin their conversation in a positive light.  She said she liked you, idiot.  That it was entirely possible she’d be miserable without you.  She just doesn’t know, and she’d feel bad lying to you.  She’s smart and she’s honest and if she didn’t care about you she would’ve just lied to you because it’s easier.  Think about it.

And he did think about it, and it was comforting for a while.  But if there’s one thing Garrett was rapidly discovering about his own brain, it’s that the orderlies who wheeled his thoughts around were often cruel – or at least criminally negligent – in the ones they brought to him for his perusal.  Because now, the file marked “But If” was handed to him, and its contents read like this: But if she really liked you she’d be willing to make the commitment.  And if she really loved you she would have said it back.  She didn’t try to comfort you because she’s planning on bailing the first chance she gets.  You’re just the transition until she finds something better.  Think about it.

And so Garrett thought about that for a while, and in the end, he didn’t know which to believe.  His first inclination was surrender.  Garrett knew he hadn’t learned much from the Steph debacle two years ago.  He remembered feeling powerful and in control as he drove away from her that night, ready and willing to strap on his boots and initiate Operation: Reclaim Girlfriend the very next day.  But of course he hadn’t.  The task was too daunting; his lie about the tape too humiliating.  He gave up before he had even begun, made himself forget about Steph, and chose instead to look forward to the day when he would be imbued with Swayzian or Crusian savoir faire, and all this awkwardness would be nothing but a memory.

*****

Current listening:

David Byrne – Feelings (1997)

Last movie seen:

Poltergeist (1982; Tobe Hoober, dir.)

Tears from the Compound Eye November 7, 2009

So, I’ve stalled – and stalled hard – on National Novel Writing Month.  In stalling terms, I’m like a car that’s swerved sideways across two lanes of traffic on the northbound Hollywood Freeway at 5:05 P.M. on Friday evening.  And leaking gasoline.  A big part of the problem rests with my sneaking suspicion that what I’m currently writing isn’t any good.  I was able to soldier away on the initial draft two years ago because I was surprised at how good it was – funnier and more emotionally resonant than I figure my amateurish writing has any business being.  I was having fun writing it, and I was getting solid, frequent, and positive feedback from a group of people whose opinions I trusted.

But what I’m doing now?  Not so much.  Here’s where the story was going next: I wanted to write not so much a novel as a cycle of related stories.  Basically it would be snapshots of the Garrett character at various points of his life – starting at age 16 in 1989 and continuing until middle-age or later – and each snapshot would tell a different story about how Garrett was never able to get his romantic relationships right.  They’d be funny (or so I thought) and profound (or so I thought), and by the end the reader would have watched Garrett grow up and try to get his life right.    It would be a collection of individual stories, but taken as a whole, the stories would add up to a life.

That was the plan, anyway.  I’ve written a wholly disappointing second story, and am currently lying battered and bloody by the side of the road a couple pages into the third.  I’m going to post the conclusion of the initial story below, and, starting tomorrow I’ll post the second story (in two or three installments), which I wrote last week.  At that point, based on my own re-reading of the story as I post it (and whatever feedback I get from people), I’ll decide whether it’s worth continuing.

So, without further ado, the conclusion of the original story.

*****

Garrett was finding it hard to drive slowly without it being obvious that he was trying to drive slowly.  He wanted to prolong his time with Steph, and was even willing to risk being a little late in order to make the evening last that much longer.  To that end, he found himself driving at least five miles below the speed limit, being extra cautious at stop signs, and in a move that he thought skirted dangerously close to transparency, actually stopped the car and rolled down his window before venturing through a railroad crossing.  He thought he could probably admit to Steph that he was dawdling in order to spend more time with her, but he somehow thought it would be more special if the evening magically, of its own accord, seemed to elongate, as though his mere presence were enough to warp the fabric of time itself.  But if she asked about his unusual procrastination, he had decided he would proclaim a desire to keep her safe, thus the need to drive slowly, look side-to-side half a dozen times before passing through an intersection, and be especially careful of runaway locomotives.

There wasn’t much conversation.  At first he thought she was embarrassed, either at him for crying or herself for making the first move.  He imagined her head filled with second thoughts, doubts, regrets – all the conflicting voices that he found nattering away in his own head on a daily basis.  It wasn’t long, though, before Steph rested her head on his shoulder, and Garrett discovered, for the very first time, the beauty of silence.  He didn’t feel like he had to struggle for something to say, nor did he feel like she was bored or disappointed.  It was a silence so rich and comfortable he could have rolled around in it, like velvet, like silk.  Luxuriant was the word that surfaced from somewhere in Garrett’s subconscious, stored away, he thought, from a book he had read, or maybe from one of those “Calgon, take me away” commercials.  It honestly could have been either.  As he paused for an unusually long time before entering downtown Edgewood’s traffic roundabout, she broke the silence.

“Do you have your tape with you?”

Things were going so well that Garrett had actually forgotten the deception allowing him to get to this point.  Suddenly reminded of it, anxiety began to prowl his perimeter once again.

“My tape?  No.  I left it at home.”

“Too bad.”  She looked up at him with a mock pout on her face.  “I wanted you to sing to me.”

Garrett made a face.  “I wouldn’t wish that on anyone,” he said, and flicked on the radio.  “I’ll see what I can find on here.”

He dialed backward past a country station, the top 40 station, talk radio, another country station, and finally settled on 97.7, the distant college station.  Most of the time he was lucky if the ratio of static to music was fairly balanced; tonight, things seemed to be in his favor as the final churning, distorted seconds of “Gigantic” by the Pixies filled the car.  It was musically a little rougher than he would have liked for this evening – it was miles away from the mix tape he had compiled, and a bird of a completely different feather than the “mood music” his dad had once lectured him about (“Marvin Gaye and nothing but, trust me on this one, Garrett”) – but he figured as long as “Too Drunk to Fuck” by the Dead Kennedys didn’t come on, he’d be in good shape.

“Who’s this?” Steph asked, as “Gigantic” ended, and the next song began to fade in, all jangly guitars, a clattering drumbeat, and ooh-ooh falsetto vocals.

“New Order.  This is a great song: ‘Temptation.’  Really super great stuff,” he said, warming to the subject and a chance to show off.  “The members of the band used to be in this other great band called Joy Division.  This was the late 70’s in Manchester, England, and Joy Division were this super depressing four-piece who played this kind of chilly, sorta claustrophobic stuff that was almost punk but not really fast enough to be punk – does that make sense?  Anyway, their singer was epileptic and he used to have, you know, seizures on stage, and  I guess it was getting worse and worse because the night before their first U.S. tour, he killed himself.  And the rest of the band, rather than just quitting, renamed themselves New Order and kept playing and over time turned from, like, this dark, depressing band into a weird dance band.  I mean, a complete turnaround.  Really weird, but still really good.” Garrett suddenly caught himself.  At some point he had crossed over from showing off into the realm of the spooky obsessive.  He sounded like what he was: a rabid fan who often found life easier to deal with if encountered through headphones.  “Whoops.  Sorry,” he mumbled.  “I get carried away sometimes.”

“You love music, don’t you?”

“I really do,” he replied.  He paused for the briefest of seconds before continuing, then thought Why the hell not?  I’ve gotta start being honest sometime. “I get confused about life a lot, and sometimes it’s all that makes sense to me.”

“I like that about you,” Steph said simply.

“Really?  I think it makes me sound a little, you know, kooky.”

Steph furrowed her brow and squinched up her lips in a look Garrett had never seen before.  It said, Don’t be an idiot, Garrett. “It makes you different, but who cares?  So many guys at school, they don’t really care about anything that matters. Like, they want to win the game or whatever, but think about it, Garrett: Two years from now we’ll be graduating, and who’s going to care about the touchdown you scored or the test you aced or how many beers you drank?”

“Or the fact that you were student body president?”

“Exactly.  None of it lasts.  And you’re better than other guys because of what you care about.  You love music and it helps you and you don’t care what other people think.  You don’t hide it and pretend to have it all figured out.  You are who you are, and that makes you the most honest guy I know.”

As Garrett’s chest constricted, he thought, This is how it must feel when a bird has a broken wing.  It wants to fly, but it can’t. As encouraged as he was by her words, the stupid tape kept him earthbound.  He imagined his confession, the way it should sound, and his thoughts were corrosive: Funny you should mention honesty, Steph, because – this is really funny – you know that tape I gave you?  It’s not really me.  And you know what’s even funnier?  I can’t really sing, I’ve owned a guitar for two years and can barely pluck out “Ode to Joy,” and when I was eight my piano teacher told my parents they’d be better off spending their money on something else.  The most honest guy you know is actually a complete fraud. He saw in an instant that this was how self-loathing starts: not in the actions of others, but in the lies we allow ourselves to tell.  He didn’t have a reply for Steph; he wasn’t courageous enough to tell her the truth or strong enough to keep up the lie.  So he smiled through gritted teeth, and kept driving in silence.

They passed through downtown Edgewood and out the other side, and now Garrett was in a hurry to get Steph home.  The faster he got her home, the faster he could concoct the story that would kill the band.  He hadn’t mentioned the names of anyone else in it, which meant the story couldn’t be corroborated with anyone at school.  It would be easy.  He’d say the other members lived in Hilliard, over an hour away.  It was too hard, he would tell her, to keep meeting for rehearsal.  Nothing more complicated than that.  It was too far and too hard with school, and maybe they’d reform the band in college.  He could find it in himself to tell one more lie, and this time it would be a good lie, a lie to save his standing with this girl he liked so much and who seemed to like him, really like him, who laughed at what he said and made him feel comfortable in his own skin.  One lie.  He could do it.

And he raced down the country road, doggedly pursuing the twin beams of his headlights.

And “Temptation” ended.

And the radio station advertised its call sign: “You’re listening to 97X: The Future of Rock and Roll.”

And tremeloed guitar uncoiled from the speakers.  The Smiths.  “How Soon Is Now?”  The first song on Side 2 of Meat Is Murder. The first song on Side 1 of the tape he had thrust into her hands two days ago.

Garrett had never known his reflexes to be so sharp.  As soon as he recognized the unusual, distinctive riff, oscillating from speaker to speaker, he snapped off the radio. “Almost home,” he said, and faked a yawn.

But Steph was sitting up, looking at him strangely, lips pursed in concentration or puzzlement.  She reached out to turn the radio back on, and Garrett briefly wondered if he could turn it into a game: playfully slap her hand, distract her, get her to forget what she had just heard.  But he knew it wouldn’t work, knew it would only delay the inevitable, and he let her click it on.  The song had kicked in, the backbeat of the drums sharply underpinning the guitar, and Morrissey’s unmistakable voice on top of it, singing the lyrics which couldn’t be confused for anyone else: “I am human and I need to be loved, just like everyone else does.”  Garrett watched her out of the corner of his eye.  Did he dare hope she’d think it was a funny prank?  Or a bold maneuver to win her over?  He watched for laughter, for tears, for a swung palm rapidly approaching the side of his head, anything that might indicate what was coming next, and how he should act in response.

“What is this?” she asked.

Once again, Garrett didn’t have an answer.

“Garrett.  What is this?”

Could he sell it?  Say it was him?  The college station was one of their biggest supporters?  No.  These were the thoughts of the condemned man, and they would only make matters worse.

“The Smiths,” he muttered.

“What?”

“It’s The Smiths.  One of my favorite bands.”

“How …?” She stopped.  There was no need to ask, and no need for him to answer.  It was all so obvious. “Get me home.  Now.”

He reached for the radio, hoping to turn it off and end the torture.

“Leave it on,” she said.  “I want to hear.”

So Garrett drove, letting the rest of the song play out.  He didn’t know for certain what would come next, but he could guess.  All he hoped at this point was that she wouldn’t tell her friends.  Embarrassments like this had a way of sticking, and even though high school would last only two more years, ridicule could make even five minutes last an eternity.

The song was ending as he pulled into her driveway, and she finally reached forward and turned it off.  Garrett parked, but instead of flouncing out of the car the way he expected her to, Steph turned to him.

“So the tape isn’t you.” It wasn’t a statement.  She wanted him to confirm his guilt.

“No.  But Steph –“

“You lied to me.”

“I just –“

“How stupid do you think I am?” Her voice shook with anger.

Garrett didn’t answer, merely ran his hands over the steering wheel.

“Garrett.  How stupid do you think I am?  Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”  Again, and this time it was a shout: “How stupid do you think I am?”

“I wanted you to like me.” It was a feeble retort, and he knew how pitiful it sounded, but he didn’t see how he had any option left available to him but the truth.

“I did like you, Garrett,” she said.  “I liked you a lot.  Didn’t it mean anything to you that I said I’d go out with you before I’d even really listened to your stupid tape?  The night you called I’d listened to, like, two minutes of it.  But you called and you asked if I wanted to do something and I said yes.”

“I know.” Try as he might, he couldn’t keep the whining despair out of his voice.

“And I was really looking forward to it.  And I still hadn’t listened to the tape.  When I did listen to it, I liked it, and I was impressed, but what really mattered is that you chose me. This smart, funny guy had given me a tape he could have given to anyone.  The tape didn’t make me like you.”  Her voice was shaking again, and even though Garrett could tell it wasn’t with anger this time, that didn’t make it any less devastating.  “The tape made me trust you.  It made me think you were different.  But you’re not.  You’re as shallow as everyone else.  What a joke.”

She fumbled for the door handle.

“I’m sorry, Steph.  I just.  I wanted you to like me,” he repeated, lamely. “I didn’t think you even knew who I was.”

“Whatever, Garrett.  You lied.  And that makes you the stupid one.”

She pushed out the door and slammed it.  He watched her stalk to the house, and in the screening room of his imagination he saw himself rush after her, grab her, spin her around, apologize profusely, and then they would fall into each other’s arms as the orchestra swelled.  But of course that didn’t happen.  Steph walked through her front door without so much as a glance over her shoulder.  She didn’t even hesitate, which would have afforded Garrett the opportunity to think she had at least considered turning back to him.  But no.  The front door closed, final, definitive.

Because there was nothing left to do, no other realistic alternative, he backed out onto the road in defeat.  Garrett didn’t often let himself feel optimism, especially where girls were concerned.  Optimism opened the door for disappointment, and up until that night he had preferred to go through life feeling pleasantly surprised when things went his way.  But now, driving home, fighting back tears he felt ridiculous for wanting to shed, the positivity he’d felt just thirty minutes ago clung to him like stale cigarette smoke.  He had liked thinking he had something to look forward to, and now that the moment was gone, he didn’t know if he wanted it back.  The hope was nice, but the cost – as he now knew ­– was steep.  He knew what he’d done wrong with Steph – lied, misrepresented himself, manipulated someone he truly liked – and he would never do that again. But at the same time, he was realistic enough to know he could do everything right and still end up disappointed in the end.

Garrett left the radio off, needing concentration to subdue the voices that compelled him to surrender to anguish.  He needed to try to look logically at the core of his dilemma.  And the core, he finally saw, was this: He wanted Steph back, to atone for what he had done, to see her smile at him, to feel like he had more in his life than the walls of his home and the tapes in his room.  But he never wanted to feel again the way he felt in that moment – Steph’s anger and sadness and hurt making his breath come in short, painful swallows, as though his lungs were running on guilt, and oxygen would only distract him from this strange new fuel that curdled in his bloodstream.

What he wanted and what he didn’t want were in unavoidable conflict with one another.  To pursue the former was to risk the latter; to avoid the latter meant never achieving the former.  But did he have it in him, to swallow his pride, to risk humiliation, to accept the blame that was his alone?  Could he do all that, not knowing the outcome in advance?  He didn’t know.  But what was that line he had read earlier that year in Macbeth, the one he had liked so much?  Yes: “Screw your courage to the sticking-place and we’ll not fail.”  Like everything else Shakespearean, he figured his interpretation left something to be desired.  But he liked the sound of it.

The country road unfurled before him in the darkness.  It could take him anywhere.

Garrett smiled.

He knew he wasn’t courageous.  But it was April, the night sky above him was infinite, and maybe it wasn’t too late to learn.

*****

For anyone just joining the story, here’s a recap of where you can find the rest:

Part 1: Let it All Hang Out (11/1/09)

Part 2: More Stars Than There Are in Heaven (10/15/09)

Part 3: Factory of Raw Essentials (11/3/09)

Part 4: The Coast Was Always Clear (11/4/09)

Part 5: Love, Hate, Love (11/5/09)

So now you’re caught up.  Tomorrow I’ll start posting the all-new story.  It’ll be the first time I’ve looked at it in a few days, so maybe it’ll seem more appealing to me after a little time off.

*****

Current listening:

Longpigs – The Sun Is Often Out

Current reading:

Douglas Trevor – “Girls I Know” (in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005, ed. by Dave Eggers)

Last movie seen:

Law Abiding Citizen (F. Gary Gray, dir.)

The Coast Was Always Clear November 4, 2009

Part 4 of my original draft, coming right up.  As for my progress in National Novel Writing Month, I’m nearly 8,000 words in (on my way to a 50,000-word target).  Just a reminder that I’ll start posting sections of the new writing – which is a continuation of the draft you’re reading now – once I’ve posted all of the original, just so everyone who wants to get up to speed with the plot can do so.  The section I’m posting tonight is just about the halfway point, which means I’ll probably start posting new writing by the end of the weekend.  We all caught up?  Okay, then.

*****

As it turned out, it was actually more difficult for Garrett to convince his parents to let him borrow the car than it was to talk Steph into going out with him.  His parents were big on “good choices,” and every action Garrett made outside the home had to be filtered through the lens of its relative prudence, discretion, and potential impact on his future.  They were not over-protective parents, exactly; Garrett wasn’t confined to quarters, and it was seldom that a request to do something with his friends was denied.  But not only was he the first child, he was the only child, and his parents were perhaps a little over-occupied with the notion that Garrett understood the consequences of his actions.

It would be reasonable to think of it as a guilt trip.  As far as Garrett could tell (and he knew this was just amateur psychology on his part gussied up as a rationale for him to feel irritated at their protectiveness instead of grateful that they cared, which was totally unacceptable at his age), they didn’t want to be those parents – the ones who said no, who imposed unfair curfews, who got into screaming matches over car keys, loud music, and traces of what might be, but never was, cigarette smoke.  They wanted to trust their first, their only, so in an effort to be the kind of parents perhaps they themselves had wanted, they removed anger from the home, banished irrational judgments, and replaced them with a brand of sarcasm and guilt shaded just enough to pass as good-natured kidding.  Garrett knew it was definitely preferable to what some of his friends endured.  Bill Fahrbach had once come home five minutes after his 11 P.M. curfew and found himself grounded for six months – from hanging out with his friends, from the Speech & Debate Team, from Drama, from anything, basically, that didn’t fall between the hours of 8 A.M. and 3 P.M.  And there were always horror stories of what other kids had to suffer.  They were whispered like urban legends and always dealt with kids a few years older, who had conveniently graduated and were no longer around to confirm or deny the rumors.  But they persisted, these extreme stories of beatings and starvation and confinement, unverified but convincing.  Garrett suspected many of these tales were started by parents themselves, the stories designed to make the punished teenager think, “Well, I guess things could always be worse.”

Garrett knew he had it comparatively easy, but even so, guilt didn’t come without its price.  The most egregious example of this had happened two years earlier.  After much tortured deliberation, he had asked Rachel Arnett to go with him to the big year-end 8^th grade dance at the YMCA.  For the hormonally frenzied attendees, Y dances were Christmas, Halloween, New Year’s Eve and six home football games rolled into one.  If there were chaperones in attendance, they didn’t make their presence felt in the poorly lighted room where the near-freshmen alternately swayed like stiff-legged, kneeless zombies, or furiously felt each other up in the darkened corners, their hands desperately seeking purchase on one another like mountain climbers about to slide off the face of Everest.  It was into this morality-free zone that Garrett led Rachel, and he knew, as tradition dictated it must, that he would finally experience a girl’s lips that evening.  All his past rejections would be avenged in one glorious moment – which he secretly imagined happening to the accompaniment of L.L. Cool J’s anthem of male sensitivity, “I Need Love” – and he would be, at long last, a man.  Or at least less of a boy than he had been mere hours earlier.

By the time the final song of the evening rolled around, the kiss still hadn’t happened.  Garrett and Rachel had slow-danced several times in the last three hours, and even though a kiss was practically written in the contract, Garrett was having trouble screwing up enough courage to take the plunge.  For one thing, timing was an issue.  More than once, he had found himself prepared, mentally and physically, for the kiss: his neck was a coiled spring, ready to strike, but equally ready to retract if she seemed at all resisting or reluctant (his other mental version of the kiss, this one without LL Cool J, involved her accusing him of rape).  But just as he was leaning in, “Nobody’s Fool” by Cinderella faded out and Bon Jovi’s “You Give Love a Bad Name” came storming on, and another moment was lost.

By the time the DJ called last song – Chris De Burgh’s “Lady in Red” – Garrett was beginning to despair.  But knowing this was the last song meant he could take his time.  He wouldn’t be interrupted at the end by Poison or AC/DC.  He was mildly disappointed that the kiss would happen to Chris de Burgh instead of LL Cool J, but he had taped “Lady in Red” off the radio a couple weeks ago and knew he had approximately four minutes and fifteen seconds to lean in and let the magic happen.

His hands were on her hips, her hands were around his neck, and they waddled in their tight circle, careful not to bump any of the other couples circumscribing their own awkward spheres on the tiled floor that alternated rhythmically between red, then yellow, then green, then blue, then back to red again.  The rate at which they danced bore no relation to the tempo of the music; from song to song, their turning was metronomic.  They shuffled slightly from foot to foot as they went through the motions of their clumsy pivot, and Garrett might have been embarrassed at his lack of grace, but it only took attendance at one dance to realize that no one was judging anyone else’s finesse.  At that age, especially among the boys, dancing was the great equalizer.  If you were there, and lucky enough to share four minutes on the floor with a girl’s arms around your neck, that was all that mattered.  So Garrett shuffled his way through half the song, and at what he guessed was roughly the two-minute mark, he ducked his head to the right to catch Rachel’s eye.  He wasn’t sure how this kissing business worked.  In the movies, you made eye contact, and the rest took care of itself, but Garrett was acutely aware that if he didn’t blink soon, it would look like he was crying.  He leaned in minutely, hoping it would get the ball rolling.  And it did.  Garrett watched Rachel’s eyes close, watched her lean in at a corresponding angle, and as the distance between them slowly contracted to an ever-diminishing point, he felt the gates of his future, in counterpoint, opening wide.

But then the strangest thing happened.  As the pursed lips and closed, blue-eyeshadowed lids of Rachel Arnett’s eyes drifted inexorably toward him, he heard a voice in his head, as unwelcoming as the whine of a mosquito or the mushy chomping of Dylan Funderburg eating a peanut butter sandwich with his mouth open.  It was the reproving voice of his father: “Make good choices, Garrett.”  While it didn’t possess quite the sepulchral gravitas of Darth Vader’s commands in the Star Wars movies, it still rumbled in the way only Garrett’s father’s voice could rumble, and it was rumbling the sentence he used as a sort of multi-purpose incantation any time Garrett left the house: don’t cheat on that test, don’t drink beer with your friends, don’t speed, don’t buy tapes you don’t need, and on this evening, don’t, whatever you do, kiss that girl to the strains of “The Lady in Red” in the darkened YMCA multi-purpose room surrounded by dozens of other rutting teenagers whose parents don’t know well enough to warn them of the dangers of precocious canoodling.  And so, as the distance between their lips shrank to a speck no larger than the tip of a pencil, Garrett’s face abruptly detoured, and he planted a clumsy peck on Rachel’s cheek.  The song ended, he shook her hand like they had just brokered an important business deal, and he walked outside to wait for his parents to pick him up.  Even though he guessed another date with Rachel would more than likely end with the kiss he had been waiting for, he knew deep down that, in much the same way a particularly unpleasant song on the soundtrack can ruin an otherwise good movie, every time he met Rachel’s lips with his own, the moment would be accompanied by his father’s voice.  Even in junior high, Garrett knew continuing on that path would surely lead him to serious psychological trauma.

He went his way, Rachel went hers, and the first kiss would actually come a year later, with Melanie Light, after Garrett had managed to convince himself that “Make good choices” was just another parental variation on “wash behind your ears” – well-meaning and generally sound advice, but not something to be followed with slavish rigor.  What he eventually realized is that most of the choices he found himself presented with were ambiguous in nature, and it wasn’t always easy to brand them as definitively good or bad.  Garrett’s parents subscribed to the idea that each individual decision was a rock tossed into a pond, and Garrett would eventually feel the ripples from where he stood on the shore.  But Garrett found he couldn’t buy into that.  His choices were small-scale, low-key, commonplace.  He wasn’t deciding, for instance, whether to rob a bank or mug a homeless guy.  Sneaking a peek at the Algebra test of the kid sitting next to him might not be the most honorable action in the world, but it wasn’t going to bring his world screeching to a halt, even if caught.  And, truth to tell, that was the riskiest behavior Garrett engaged in.

Until Steph, that is, and the tape.  He knew his parents would look at is a bad choice, a deception, a lie, and it was, but Garrett chose instead to look at the big picture embodied in that decision: If Steph liked the tape enough to go out with him, and they really hit it off, and she fell in love with him – not the tape, and not the persona thrust upon him by the voice on the tape, but Garrett – then that seemed like a pretty good choice as far as bad choices go.  Both their lives would be enriched, and it seemed like splitting hairs to point out that the enrichment was enabled by deceit.  (If, on the other hand, Steph fell for him only for the tape, if she allowed herself to become involved with him based solely on the pretense that Garrett was a musician, if she didn’t actually like him at all, well, Garrett figured she had bigger issues to deal with than the fact that he had lied to her.)  By the time Steph said she could go out with him (on Saturday, and not Friday like Garrett had proposed, which meant more waiting) and he had to ask for the car, he knew to expect the upcoming gauntlet of guilt, but in the last year or so had developed the psychic armor necessary to emerge on the other side relatively unscathed.

Now, Garrett’s parents, Kathy and Steve, sat side by side on the family room sofa, and every time this scene repeated itself Garrett was reminded of the courtroom scene in the production of The Crucible he’d seen last year.  He’d loved the play and been fascinated when his parents explained Arthur Miller and the idea that the plot was an allegory for McCarthyism, but Garrett found its relevance to be far more personal in nature.  In the play, John Proctor was told his life would be spared if he admitted to being a witch, even though it was a lie.  Using the same tortured logic, Garrett often wondered if he could skip the usual interrogation by lying to his parents – citing a desire to go out, get roaring drunk, smoke as many varieties of cigarettes as he could get his hands on, have sex with the first carbon-based life form to cross his path, shoplift pornography, and run at least two red lights.  He would briefly entertain this course of action, hoping against hope that his parents might look on him as a teenaged Proctor and, appreciating his supposed honesty, grant him immediate amnesty from frivolous questioning.  It wasn’t realistic, he always concluded, and knew it would only end up getting him burned at the stake.

“Borrow the car?” his father asked, as though this were a completely novel request, the car having magically appeared in the garage overnight, planted there by elves or fairies, and he wasn’t yet used to its reality, its solidity.

“Yeah,” Garrett said, resisting the urge to shift nervously from foot to foot.  Even though he expected to be given the go-ahead, what would happen if they actually chose this time to deny his request?  Did he honestly think he’d stand a chance with Steph if his parents – or worse, hers – had to drive them around?

“You mean our car?”

“Yes, Dad. The one with the engine and the four wheels and the steering wheel.”

“Hm.  The one with the steering wheel.  Interesting.”  Steve stared off into the middle distance, apparently expecting to find exegetic runes suddenly blazing from the wood paneling, explaining to him with mythic precision how best to handle this demand from his recalcitrant son. “And you want to borrow it when?”

“Tomorrow.  Saturday.  April 25.  The day before Sunday.”

“And what are we planning on doing with this car, son?” His mom was fond of the royal we, as though the three of them were holding court in a cavernous throne room lined with suits of armor and imposingly serious portraits of Walkers from generations past.

“I’m just, you know, going out.”

“Gee, that doesn’t sound suspicious at all,” his father said with exaggerated sarcasm.  He was big on exaggerated sarcasm, all but nudging his listener in the ribs with a conspiratorial elbow.  “He’s going out, Kathy.  With the car.  And the steering wheel.”

“Are you going out by yourself?” Kathy Walker was kind and matronly, an effusive Midwestern mother, always a big hit with Garrett’s friends, and now she leaned forward expectantly on the couch, smiling broadly.  She already knew the answer to her question.  Garrett’s vague response to what he was going to do with the car let her know that something new was afoot.  If he were just hanging out with his friends, he would have said so.  This ambiguity was female in nature, and Kathy was tickled by her son’s linguistic contortions.

“No.”

“With friends?”

“Kind of.”  Garrett knew hedging like this would be as successful as the time he scrawled a large G on his bedsheet in permanent marker, safety-pinned it around his neck, and attempted to fly from their roof, but he clung to a fading hope that today he would be granted some conversational leeway.

“A kind-of friend,” she said, bemused.  “The plot thickens.  Will there be more than one kind-of friend in attendance?”

“No.  Just one.”

With the rough details of the transaction sketched, the interrogational ball bounced back to Garrett’s father: “If you were to describe this kind-of friend’s appearance in one word, what would it be?”

“Dad …”

“Would it be … handsome?”

All Garrett could do was sigh.

“How about manly?”

“Dad.”

“Neither handsome nor manly, then.  What are we left with, Kathy?”

“Butch?”

This was the part of the whole ordeal that Garrett never fully understood.  He knew why they subjected him to this, but he remained fuzzy on the methodology.  Watching them at work was like watching a bad stand-up routine, as they bounced lines off one another, entertaining no one more than themselves.  And Garrett, by virtue of being the lone son, was relegated to the role of the poor sucker in the audience singled out for abuse.  It was time to bring this portion of the show to a close, fast-forward to the inevitable lesson, and get on with his life.

“Okay.  Fine.  It’s a girl.  Okay?  Can I borrow the car?”

“Not so fast,” his father said.  “More details, please.  Does this girl have a name?”

“Steph.”

“Steph.” As though he were trying it on for size, dragging the letters out in contemplation, like he could divine her character though the phonetics of her name.  “Short for, what?  Stephanie?”

“Oh, God,” Garrett muttered in exasperation.

“No, I don’t think that’s it.  That would be some unusual abbreviation, right?”

Back to his mom, to hash out the fine print.  “What are you planning on doing with Stephanie and the car?”

“We’re just going to a movie,” Garret said.  “That’s it.  I’m picking her up, we’re going to a movie and then I’m taking her home.  We’re not stopping for cigarettes or alcohol or cocaine.  I’ll leave at 6, I’ll be back by 11, and I promise you won’t see my picture on the evening news.”

“Garrett, we just want to make sure you’re not going to get in trouble.”

“I know, Mom.  I really know.  You have no idea how much I know.”

Steve again. “We just want you to make good choices, Garrett.  You’ll be out there, just you and Steph and the car, and it’s tempting to let certain things happen …”

Once upon a time, Garrett would have interrupted his dad to protest, to defend his honor, to make the case that he did have some semblance of control.  Experience had taught him, though, that it was better to just suffer in silence and plan on sending his father the therapy bills he was sure to incur later in life.

“… but you have to understand that you’ve got a bright future, and even though it might seem like it’s the present that matters, you can’t lose sight of the future.  Right?”  And here he turned to Garrett’s mom for the tag team.

“Your father’s absolutely right, Garrett.  It’s okay to want to have fun and let loose with your friends or your girlfriend – “

“She’s not my girlfriend, Mom.”

“That’s all the more reason to be careful, Garrett.  You don’t want to jeopardize all the fantastic things you could do with your life by getting in trouble with a passing fancy.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Are we being too hard on you?” Kathy asked.  This was another one of the stops on the usual itinerary, the rest area labeled Victimization, located directly between Shame and Permission. “We just want what’s best for you.”

“No, it’s fine.  I appreciate your concern.” He’d been reading from the same script for so long that he sold the line with Oscar-worthy aplomb.

“Okay.  But have a good time.  You and Steph.” And here his dad, amazingly, as though oblivious to the rest of the conversation, winked at him. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“You can take my car, Garrett.” She was referring to the burgundy Pontiac Bonneville, the one Garrett hated. “There’s plenty of gas in it.”

“Okay.  Thanks, guys.  I’ll be careful.”

As Garrett retreated to his room, he marveled again at the process.  He loved his parents, but they were unlike any other parents he knew.  He was past the point of wondering if he had been adopted; now he was willing to accept a full-blown alien abduction.

*****

Current listening:

Aztec Camera – Dreamland

Factory of Raw Essentials November 3, 2009

Here’s Part 3 of the story that leads up to my contribution to National Novel Writing Month.  The picture represents how I feel about churning out another 1,700 words tonight.  Enjoy.

*****

It was not, all things considered, a memorable phone call.  In terms of Garrett’s telecommunications experience, it ranked somewhere above the time his neighbor had called to accuse Garrett of soaping her windows, but below the time The Record Alley called to tell him he’d won ten free albums in their monthly drawing.  But, to be fair, Garrett had envisioned the moment for so long and endowed it with such mythical importance that it would have been anticlimactic even if angels had descended the moment Steph answered the phone.

In his memory, the call went something like this:

“Hi, Steph.”

“Hi, Garrett.”

Two full minutes of whitenoisestaticinterferencesnowonatwoAMtv.

“Well, bye, Steph.”

“Bye, Garrett.”

He was certain he had humiliated himself on at least six different occasions and probably insulted her parents in the bargain.  He had no empirical evidence for this; just a vague sense of disquiet and foreboding, the same as he felt while watching his Algebra II teacher return tests, moving inexorably up and down the rows toward the mathematical Bermuda Triangle of Garrett’s desk.

In reality, the conversation sounded more like this:

“Hello?”

“S-Steph?”

“No, this is her mother.”

“Oh.”

A pause.  To Garrett it felt as long as the missing 18 minutes in the Watergate tapes.

“Would you like me to get her for you?”

“Oh.  Yeah.  I mean, yes, please.”

A rattle.  Muffled voices.  Then, clarity.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Steph.  It’s Garrett.”

“Oh.  Hi.  How’re you doing?”

“Oh, you know, good.  I’m good.”

“Did Matix chew you out?”

For the briefest of moments Garrett considered asking Steph about her hand on his knee earlier in the day, but decided he wouldn’t, in case it had been an accident.

“I’m a little sore, yeah.  She gave me detention.  Told me I was ‘a distraction to the learning process.’”

“Oh, God. She’s a distraction to the learning process.”

Garrett had no idea what she meant, but he had just enough savvy not to ask.  He could hear Steph chewing.

“You’re not eating dinner, are you?”

“No.  Just a snack.  I got back from my game a little bit ago.”

“Did you win?”

“No.  The girls on the other team were huge. Like, Amazon-huge.  We were scared.  Honestly.”

“Well.  I’m sure you tried your best.”

“Tonight wasn’t my night to pitch.  Melissa and I sat on the bench and made fun of the other team.”

“Oh.  Well, I’m sure you did really well with that.  And, if you had pitched, that other team wouldn’t have stood a chance.”

More chewing, and Garrett suddenly found himself in uncharted waters.  Did he ask her out?  Try for more painful small talk?  Hang up, claiming an upset stomach?  Steph, swallowing, took the reins.

“So, I listened to the beginning of your tape …”

She trailed off.  Garrett began to panic.  What did that mean?  He scrambled desperately to attach meaning to the unspoken end of her sentence.  His next words would be like stepping onto the frozen lake near his house in late March: negotiating the right path would get him to the other side, but one faulty step and he’d end up with frostbitten toes.

“Just the beginning?” As soon as the words left his mouth, he felt his boots begin to fill with water.

“Yeah.  Part of the first song.”

Part of the first song. Crap.  Did she think it was so bad she could only stomach part of one song?  Garrett tried to imagine what Bill Murray would say in this situation.  He’d have the perfect joke – the one-liner that would let them both off the hook – but Garrett figured this was not the right situation to begin quoting Ghostbusters. This is what he managed instead: “Oh.  Um.  Did you, um … like it?”

“I liked it a lot.  At least what I heard.  I wanted to listen to the whole thing, but the stupid bus driver saw me with headphones on and threw a fit.  Then, on the way back, Katie wanted to talk about Daniel – you know Daniel McLear, on the track team? – so I couldn’t listen to it then, either.  But it was really good.”

Without thinking twice, Garrett dashed across the lake, hoping he would know what to do on the other side.

“Yeah?  Thanks.  Really.  I’m glad you like it.”

“Is that really you singing on it?”

Garrett felt a twinge of guilt that he hoped he wouldn’t have to pay for later. “It’s really me.”

“That’s so cool.  You’ve got a great voice.”

“Aw, thanks.  It’s okay, I guess.  No one else really wanted to do it, so I’ve been working at it.  I take lessons.  I’ll get better.”

“Well, I can’t wait to listen to the rest of it tonight.”

“Steph, do you want to do something with me tomorrow night?”

If he had taken the time to contemplate that move, it never would have happened.  It was out of his mouth before he even knew he was going to say it, and once it was out, he wished he could immediately reel it back in.

“Like a date?” Her words, he thought, were carefully neutral, and he had no idea if “date” to her was an inviting prospect, or as deadly and pernicious as the Black Death.

“Yeah, but you don’t have to call it that if you don’t want to.  We could just be, you know, friends at the movies or friends at dinner, or friends at, um, you know, hanging out.”  Two pastimes in, and the well had run dry.  One half of his brain continued the conversation; the other half prayed for divine intervention and the appearance of an instruction manual.

“I think that’d be a lot of fun, Garrett.  I’ll let you know in school tomorrow if my mom and dad say it’s okay.  Okay?”

Oh, God, Garrett thought, more waiting. But she had said yes, and that was the important thing.  “Sounds good to me.  So have a good night, Steph.”

“Oh.  Okay.  Well, see you tomorrow, Garrett.”

It was only after hanging up that Garrett heard her disappointment at the prospect of ending the conversation.  And sometime later, in his darkened bedroom, staring up at the glow-in-the-dark stars and planets that festooned his ceiling, granting it a depth and limitlessness it didn’t possess during the day, that he thought of all the things he should have said.  He tried to recall the positive moments from the conversation so he could replay them on an endless mental loop, but all he seemed able to remember was the awkwardness of his voice in his ears, the drowning man desperation of his thoughts, the way he must have come across like the relative no one else in the family ever wants to talk about, the one locked in the attic and fed through a slot in the door.

But then, as though beamed from the farthest reaches of the universe stretching above him on his ceiling, this thought, which made all the others irrelevant: Hey, dummy.  She said yes.

*****

Current listening:

Moose – Honey Bee

Emergency Performance Art Piece November 3, 2009

Two days into National Novel Writing Month, and I’m proud to say I’ve been able to keep the commitment for 24 hours.  I’m not entirely pleased with the direction it’s going, but I guess the whole experience is about getting it all out and revising later.  Last night I posted the beginning of the story I started writing two years ago – and which I’m continuing to write now through the end of November – and the next part is the section I posted here a couple nights ago.  I won’t repost the whole thing again, but here’s a link where you can find it.  More to come tomorrow, and I should start posting all-new writing in a few more days.

*****

Current listening:

Son, Ambulance – Key

Let it All Hang Out November 1, 2009

So today marks the beginning of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and I haven’t backed down.  Just to catch everyone up – especially if you’re too lazy to scroll down two days to this post – I’m writing a 50,000-word novel, but I’m cheating just a bit.  The rules state that you have to start from scratch.  I’m not.  I’ll still be writing my 50,000 words, but I’m going to start roughly 15,000 words into a draft of something I began over two years ago, and which people keep telling me they’d like me to finish.  NaNoWriMo gives me the excuse to finish it, and the definite timeline to make it seem manageable.

As I said two days ago, my intent is to post the novel here as I write it.  It breaks down to 1,666.66666667 words a day, so that’s what I’ll be aiming for, rain or shine, in between meetings and classes and running and paper-grading and movie-watching and whatever else I’ve got going on.  That’s roughly four double-spaced pages a day, which is entirely doable.

I’m going to hedge just a wee little bit, though.  For people who are interested in seeing how this little adventure plays out, I’m going to post the first 38 pages of the draft, one section at a time, for roughly the next week.  This will serve three purposes: 1) It’ll give the uninitiated a chance to read what I’ve written so far and get acquainted with the characters, 2) It’ll give people who haven’t read it in a while a chance to refresh their memories, and 3) It’ll give me a chance to figure out if my new writing is complete and utter shit before I post it here.  It’s entirely possible that if the new stuff doesn’t work out, I’ll bail before I waste too much time on something that’s clearly not going anywhere.  I figure I’ll know after a week (or several days, at least) if it’s worth plowing ahead, so posting the beginning will, most importantly, give me the chance to work out the kinks before posting all-new stuff.

Got it?

Okay, then.  What follows is the first few pages of the draft I wrote in 2007.  Enjoy.

*****

Garrett’s garage always smelled like Christmas.  No matter what the time of year – even in the trough of summer, when the days in Southwestern Ohio stood still in the shimmering 90-degree heat, tar bubbles percolating along the seams in the driveway, the humidity so thick it seemed as though you could suck water out of the air with a straw – the garage smelled like pine needles.  It was a bizarre phenomenon owing to the fact that for a period of three or four days in January, this is where the Christmas tree would be stored.  Eventually Garrett’s dad would don his heavy workman’s gloves and drag it into the woods behind the house.  But until he had mentally prepared himself for the task, for the knowledge that he would have to cut his holiday temporarily short and drag himself out of the La-Z-Boy and away from the television, the tree would be propped up in a corner of the garage, shedding needles and pungency at the same rate.  Ten years of this had made the Walkers’ garage smell like a pine forest, and as Garrett stepped from the house into the oil-stained garage on this April afternoon, he couldn’t help but think of gingerbread and tinsel and the droning voice of the pastor at the Christmas Eve service marking his annual dialogue with God.

He liked the garage because of its smell, but also because of its acoustics.  The cement floor, the wood paneling, the boxes that lined one wall – all these things helped deaden and flatten any sound uttered in the room, even when both cars were gone and it seemed like there should have been an echo.  Even better, no noise seeped into this space from the outside.  In the house, even with the windows closed, you could always hear chirping birds or cars speeding past or senile Mr. Guest mowing the same strip of lawn over and over again until the ratcheting cough of his lawnmower became so commonplace it faded into the background like the ticking of a clock.  The garage, on the other hand, was virtually soundproof.  And Garrett wanted – needed – the garage to be flat and soundproof for his experiment to pay off.

He had a small cassette recorder set up in one corner of the garage, and a larger recorder – the kind his mom, thinking it made her hip, referred to as a ghetto blaster – set up in the opposite corner, armed with a blank cassette.  He had chosen the small recorder because the sound wasn’t great; it was tinny, all high-end treble, and even in the best circumstances the music it played might as well have been blaring from an old car with blown speakers.  If he had planned everything correctly, and he thought he had, this would work, and work well.

It never occurred to him that he was being dishonest.  Or maybe it did, briefly, but for Garrett, insecurity trumped dishonesty any day of the week.  All that mattered at that point in time was achieving a recording that was as pristinely corrupted as possible.

He approached the ghetto blaster.  Took a deep breath.  Pressed “Play” and “Record” simultaneously with the index and middle fingers of his right hand.  A red light appeared on the face of the ghetto blaster; a faint whirring emerged from its mechanical depths.

Garrett padded in his athletic socks to the second tape recorder, silently counting in his head, marking the progress of the blank cassette spinning away behind him.  He reached the recorder at the same time he reached “five.”

Showtime.

He laughed loudly, projecting his voice over his shoulder toward the ghetto blaster’s small, largely ineffectual microphone.

“Are we ready to do this, guys?  Okay.  One, two, three, four!”

He pressed “Play” on the small cassette recorder.  He had painstakingly cued up The Smiths’ second album to exactly three seconds before the beginning of the first song on the second side; the music – tremeloed guitar oscillating between left and right speakers – immediately filled the silence of the pine-scented garage, to be captured on the blank cassette cranking away in the opposite corner of the room.

*****

Current listening:

Sons & Daughters – This Gift

Seven Years of Letters October 31, 2009

I’ve never been particularly inclined to write a novel before.  I like writing, and I’ve certainly played around with short stories and poetry, but the commitment I think it would take to slog through a novel has always been daunting to me.  I’m kind of lazy, and the work ethic I know it would take to be a novelist – on top of the work ethic I already have to have as part of my job – has been about as appealing to me as going outside and licking the sidewalk.

But here’s the thing.  A little over two years ago I wrote the first fifty pages of something that could be a novel.  It features a kid named Garrett.  I shared it with a good number of people, and its popularity surpassed anything I could have anticipated.  These were people I respected – acquaintances, yes, but not many of them friends, and very few of them would have felt obligated to pat me on the back the way some people might.  Ten days ago I shared it with some new people, and they enjoyed it, too.  I posted an excerpt of it on this very blog not too long ago.  You can read it here.

In the two years since I wrote it, I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out where to go next.  I’ve considered and discarded a lot of ideas, some because they didn’t seem very entertaining, some because they weren’t very good.  And I have to admit that the weight of expectation has settled heavily on my shoulders.  People like the story in its current state so much that I feel the only realistic outcome of further writing will be disappointment.  I can’t be unveiled as a fraud and a charlatan if I don’t try.  I can coast on those 50 pages for the rest of my life, if I want to.

Earlier this week, though, I think I figured out where to take it next.  I think.  Maybe not.  But it seems more promising than anything else I’ve come up with, and I’m suitably excited about it to feel like I want to at least give it a shot.  I don’t necessarily feel any more confident about my ability, but I figure if I wait to feel confident, I’ll never get anything done.

This development just happens to coincide with the beginning of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), which starts tomorrow and runs through November 30.  I have no idea when or how this got started, but there’s a website that sponsors a novel-writing contest.  The goal is to write a 50,000-word novel (roughly 110 pages) during the month of November.  You write it on whatever software you wish, update your daily word count on the site, post excerpts, and then upload the whole shebang at the end.  I think you get a certificate if you complete the challenge, but obviously the real reward is just the act of finishing the novel.

My thought, as of Saturday afternoon, is to take the plunge.  It’s 30 days.  I can fake a work ethic for one month, I think.  You can’t use any writing completed previously, so I have to figure out how to make my continuation of the established story a logical place to begin.  I think I’ve got it worked out.  And even if I don’t, this will be good for me.  I’ll post it here as I write it, just to keep myself honest.  The main thing, though, is simply to keep moving, keep writing.  Or, as screenwriter William Goldman says, just get the fucking train over the mountain.

Here we go.

*****

Current listening:

Jenny Lewis and the Watson Twins – Rabbit Fur Coat