Baltimore pastoral
Norm's father was a drunk and he is a heroin addict. His mother, Anna, took the beatings and she lives with two sons who don’t speak to her or to each other. One sits in his room, drinks beer and watches television, the other lives like an alley cat, thin and sly. He slinks between neighborhoods and drives other peoples’ cars. He hides his works under seat cushions and stows away the crack pipe in holes in the upholstery.
He says he is going to get clean. He doesn’t mean it. The life suits him, the cheap beer in boxcar bars, the in and out familiarity of Central Booking and the Baltimore jail. He gets arrested for stupid stuff, loitering, driving without a license, uses the jail time to detox, then goes back to it when he is released. You can go for a long time on heroin, years lost to its pleasures, the nodding in front of the TV set, the corner deals. His friends are prostitutes and homeless men and when the nice naïve lady moves in across the street, lonely on her stoop, the clothesline burning her hands as she wrenches it too hard, he sees an opportunity. She sees self-destruction incarnate, the desperate eyes and trembling hands.
He has an easy way, she tells herself, and easy way and a light touch. And when he’s sober, Norm has a talent for carpentry. He works with his hands and she’s always been a sucker for that, the three dimensional knowledge, the things of beauty that men can create. Wasted, wasted, wasted. She must reveal his goodness to him, save him from the streets.
From the prompt "Promises." We're repeating prompts this last week of the Round Robin, with various choices on how to go with the prompt ranging from a new approach, a rewrite, or the insertion of a new sentence every three sentences. I went with the new approach. Here is last week's take. This one is based in reality.
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos. I'm working on fourish hours of sleep and have no idea about the quality of this one. A little too much tell and not enough show, but that's how it goes.
Image by ktylerconk.
Wholly present
It wasn’t my life that I wanted to drop, it was my memories, the same old soundtrack in my mind. Purge, purge, purge. Familiar people were a reminder. They made it hard, not only to forget, but to forge something new. I loved them too much and they reminded me of me and so I had to get away from them.
I hoped there would be men to beat me up, not lovers, but dangerous youths with mean streaks and a hatred for the weak and the old. Maybe they wouldn’t live long, which would be a blessing for them, not to be stuck with the repetitive pace of retracing their steps. The first few beatings are beautiful, right, but after a while they would see that they were just trying to recapture the thrill of the neophyte, the gasp of that first imprint of fist upon flesh, the feeling of power in bruising and bone breaking, their bare hands miraculous in their pain-giving prowess. After trying to make the feeling new again and again and again, they would start to falter and age themselves, victims for the next set of youth with dead eyes and sculpted bodies.
The elements would punish me, too, the sun carving out wrinkles and paling my eyes, the wind making my cheeks rosy as a ragdoll's. My skin would form a true protective layer, thickening itself against the cold air. I would open myself up to the kindness of other people, religious strangers who would make up stories about me for their own edification, who would create a different narrative, one that would be out of my hands, perhaps sadder than my actual story.
Meanwhile, my family would mourn me as if I were dead.
I thought about it, the selfish escape, the endless punishment. Punish me – yes. But why punish those who love me in spite of myself? I unpacked the bag and prepared myself for years of work, years of talk and feelings, all this effort just to be here and to teach the boy how to present in his own life.
From the prompt "You dropped it."
I'm posting every messy Round Robin prompt, a prompt a day until the RR ends. Unless I tell you otherwise, this is the original 12-minute prompt edited only for clarity and typos.
Image of the sign at the Evansville, Indiana Greyhound bus terminal by albany_tim.
Before the bombs hit
The joke between Tina and her friends that year was that they wanted to experience sex at least once before Armageddon, before the Russians and Americans exchanged missiles over the Atlantic in a fiery aerial dance. This was when The Day After was on TV, with its bodies and radiation sickness. What was sex like? When were you supposed to have it? Was it about walls and submission, the girl protecting her reputation, her body, until she finally acquiesced? Could you want it? When would they find out, crack the mystery?
A few years before, Tina had discovered her grandfather’s stash of porn, little magazines, tantalizing, filthy, intriguing. She snuck them out of his room one at a time and studied the pictures and the stories with their bad prose and bad words and indistinct depictions of orgasm, always announced with a series of moans and Ahhhhhhhhs and Oh Gods and I’m cumming (a disconcerting spelling that she hated even back then).
The summer between freshman and sophomore years, she cracked the mystery, slipped into the stream. The college boy, the walk up a street she’d walked since early childhood, one of his hands on his bike, the other on her back, the stumble into the dark house, the smell of paneling and indoor-outdoor carpeting mixed with sweat and beer and the mildewy undercurrent of the ancient air conditioner. She was 14, he was 20. She let him do what she thought grownups did without discussion or worry.
Tina spent the rest of her nights that summer waiting in the dark by the flicker of the television set, listening for his knock, for the click-click-click of the bike as he wheeled it behind the house, for the whir and sudden stop of a skateboard in the street. She was waiting to rediscover the mystery, lost in the classic confusion where sex and love intermingled without cause.
Image: By Writing Salon Mistress Jane Underwood. The photo was the prompt.
Let's call this faction -- a nice mix of fact and fiction, the first step in leaving the past behind . . .
Foundation
The story was that he and Willard were drunk when they poured the foundation. It was a hot day, unusual for May, and the sky was cloud-veiled, the sun nothing but a glowing round cloaked in grey. The men mixed the cement by hand in a wheelbarrow, kept taking slugs from the whiskey bottle. Vi and the girls started out planting flowers, then prepared a lunch of liverwurst sandwiches, sugary potato salad, and coleslaw. Finally all there was left to do was to sit on the metal lawn chairs and watch.
Everything went down so easily. The cement had a nice resistance, just yielding enough, like Vi on a good night. It was a perfect mix, Willard agreed, as he passed the whiskey bottle back. Running a trowel over it was soothing, could almost put you to sleep. Dusk was enveloping the neighborhood as they wrapped up. One of the girls had fallen asleep on a blanket on the dirt, and the other one glowered as she kicked up clouds of dust in the rutted driveway. Al struggled with the wheelbarrow until he decided the hell with it, it was just a rusty piece of shit anyway.
Vi finally had to drive everyone back to Delaware, the men singing a song she didn’t recognize, the girls bleary-eyed and hungry. When they returned the next weekend, excited to start building the cottage, Al ran his hands across the foundation and groaned. It didn’t take a level or a plumb line to figure out that they had to start all over again.
Image: The house at Hollywood Beach, August 1957.
Baby, stick around
Thanks to washwords, Koe Whitton-Williams, tricia, Dori, Karen, Bobby Revell, Jennifer D., Melinda, Lorenzo, Candy, Ashe.Selah, lydia, timethief, SmallWorldReads, John Folk-Williams, and Jim for your encouraging words and comments. Your support makes the difference.
Here's a bit of writing inspired by the prompt "Alright, fine. Let's hear your explanation." Well, inspired by that and by reading my grandmother's burn notebooks, written during my grandfather's long hospitalization, where her anger over his vices and infidelities comes through, clear and Mercurochrome-bitter. I couldn't bring myself to change the names; they are too good to be fictional.
I just went to the track to look at the horses, to watch them ripple around the oval, to see their hooves beat the dust into red clouds. But once I got there, the action sucked me in. Before I knew what my feet were doing, I was standing in front of Les’s booth to place my bets. The air was heavy with money and I was feeling lucky. I’d win enough to pay off the rest of Atlee’s mortgage or maybe just enough to buy a smooth fifth of whiskey. Or even score a downpayment on a new washing machine for you, Vi.
Then I ran into Williard, who had a full flask and offered me a swig or three. Maybe the alcohol clouded my judgment. Maybe I couldn't see what an amateur that jockey was, but I think the race was rigged, that somebody paid him out to fall off the horse. Or maybe they slipped the little guy a Mickey, I don’t know. The end result is that I lost. The flask made a few more visits to my lips and I didn’t feel like going home just yet anyways.
You and the girls were at the cottage and I was planning on sleeping at the empty Tuxedo Park house, but then I remembered Molly. Molly with the blonde hair and long legs, Molly from the Tip Top Club in Salem, a nice easy-going girl. The Mustang knew the way from the track to the bar. It’s no coincidence that they call that car a Mustang. It has all the bucking power and smarts of a horse. It knows where to find the watering holes, knows the trail back home, too.
After I left the Tip Top, I was exhausted, so I took a snooze in my ride. That’s where I was last night, sleeping in the Mustang.
You can ask Molly if you don't believe me.
So real you can taste it
Let’s look at the facts as revealed here: I’m a stay-at-home mom with a preschool-aged son. A former librarian, I went to culinary school and from there decided to be a writer. My family is relatively new to Northern California, having moved from the East Coast almost two years ago. I’ve told you my name. Given my birthday (oh, those worries about aging, forcing me to seek comfort on the web).
And if you’ve been here for a while, you know about the defining story of my life, the lifeless premature baby I gave birth to at home when I was sixteen.
But what do you really know?
Jennifer recovering from a late night, 1988? Or another photo to continue the ruse?
How would you feel if I was actually a 25-year-old male advertising copywriter from Peoria? What if I really lived in Buffalo, NY? Or if I was pushing 70, mother to a multitude of now middle aged children, grandmother to teenagers, a Brit using the blog to flesh out a character? This "Jennifer" person you think you've been reading could be someone I’ve been keeping in my back pocket for years. writing to survive might be some kind of grand fictional experiment, an attempt to create a flesh and bones person out of ethereal imagination.
And my stories? What if these were figments, scraps from my mind, absolute fiction masquerading as angst-ridden past? It could be that you've been reading full-blown literary lies à la Margaret B. Jones, the wannabe memoirist who made up a gangland childhood. Turns out my parents have been married for forever, I waited until marriage (or at least love) to have sex, and I’ve never touched a drop of alcohol. Oh, and that isn’t my son, he’s a nephew (never mind that I have no nephew).
Would you feel betrayed?
Don't worry. I don’t have it in me to lie like that, though you'll mainly have to take my word for it and trust your gut. There were times in high school and college when I was a serial liar, self-serving and hidden. My mother believed the stories about my solo nights, even when my boyfriend's car was parked right outside the Little House ("Oh, the car? Dirk leaves it there when he goes to the Cassady's. Sometimes he's had too much to drink, so he stays at their place for the night." "That's exactly what I thought, Jenna.") Later, I hid my unfaithfulness from my college boyfriends, created a protective distance by pursuing empty hopes with relative strangers.
Living a life of lies is a dirty business. I was becoming unrecognizable, murky, untrustworthy, a bad friend. So I stopped lying and regained a hold on fidelity. And while those old kinds of lies are no longer tempting, I still struggle with my tendency to exaggerate minor facts or to deny my feelings. Attempting to be good is a life-long process.
There is a difference between making things up to avoid punishment and creating stories to entertain. Stories aren't lies (and sometimes the lies we tell in our life stories aren't fibs either). If the blog tale is well-told, the characters believable, the created world tangible, so real you can taste it, does it matter if it actually happened? How would you know if it did?
We’re taking it all on faith in this blogging world, want to believe that everyone is who they present themselves to be. For the most part, I think people are genuine. Yes, we have plenty of time to shape our online selves, but we’re generally real. Still …
There must be bloggers, perhaps ones you read every day, who have created fiction under the guise of truth. Their blogs are ostensibly about their day to day existence, may even include some pieces of fiction or poetry or personal essay, but some of the facts have been turned inside out.
Maybe the writer doesn’t want to be identified, or is playing, having fun being someone else. The character that demanded life is finally born in a blog, fully realized, solid, interactive (the fresh-eyed college graduate moving back to her hometown; the landlocked fly fisherman reminiscing about his days of streams and trout; the tech-savvy doting grandma with an herbal tea obsession, a minor character in a SAHM's life). Or they add a totally fictional detail, erase a husband, gain a Weimaraner, make a virtual move from Asheville to Albany.
And what of it? Readers are entertained, the writer has an enthusiastic, satisfied audience. These are tenuous connections we have, the lengths of spider's silk stretching across the ether from blogger to blogger. Many of us have never even spoken. In these circumstances, does the truth matter?
I'm still trying to figure that one out.
Shadowplay
The year was marked by the scent of patchouli. It roped and twisted its way into my room, coated the curtains, soaked into my skin. Some pseudo-hippy incense-burning chick with Camarillo brillo hair lived in the room next door and I put up with a lot of unwelcome odors. Pot smoke, sweat masked by scented oils, cigarettes and sandalwood. My least-favorite scent is an amalgam: Fall Term 1987.
Fall Term 1987 wasn’t limited to the waftings of pseudo-hippy chick. There were hints of puke (my own, my friends: we drank a lot), late night clothes exuding flat beer fumes and the remnants of cigarette smoke, the sticky 18th birthday remains of Coco Lopez and rum. That fall I comforted myself with baked potatoes clotted with butter and sour cream, used their earthy scent as an antidote to the disinfectant-sharp dining hall air.
Then there were the freshly opened condom packets; musty sheets left to go grey on the bed; my roommate’s apple shampoo; and the dangerous pull of Carl’s room across the hall. His walls were bare. In fact, the room was practically empty, save for a dead rose propped up in the empty whiskey bottle on his college-issue desk. I remember the smell of alcohol on his breath, sweet as molasses, as he unlocked the door.
He introduced me to the band Joy Division and to the previously unknown pleasures of the grownup crush, revealed the depths of my ability to obsess about certain kinds of men -- rebellious, prone to dressing in black, ready-made blanks for my projected fantasies. I wrote a short story about him for a freshman composition class that began "Carl is tall, dark, and handsome. Not classically good-looking ...." It was true. He had a Jeff Goldblum look, the dark-haired, smart, slightly nerdy ectomorph with his thick orange turtleneck, heavy boots and thrift store coat. He smelled like whiskey and cloves. The pull to Carl was obsessive. Single-minded. And pointless: I had a boyfriend and Carl was almost completely uninterested in me.
The real danger was Alonzo. Twenty-six, a senior from South America attending our small college on a sports scholarship, Alonzo was friends with Carl, but seemed to prefer the company of freshman girls. Rangy and tall, with hair like the young Kafka, Alonzo hung out in the dorm, crashed our parties, insinuated himself into our budding social lives. “Come on! What’s the problem?” he’d ask, eyes bulging, hand outstretched for my roommate Martha, making an offer we couldn’t refuse.
By the spring semester Martha had dropped out of college to get treatment for her eating disorder. I was unmoored, lost without my fellow drunk from a dysfunctional family. One snow-fresh February night Alonzo offered to take me out for a Procolino’s pizza. Afterwards (his intensity, his forcefulness) I reluctantly went back to his place, a windowless room in a Spanish professor's basement.
Shadowplay II (Gordana & Marko Zivkovic)
The professor wasn't home. Alonzo switched on a desk light, turned on the clock radio and reached for me. I could smell his cologne in the air. Polo. Not a good sign.
You know where this is going, right? It’s an old and very common story. I hesitate to call it rape, rape with its violence and violations and death threats and nightmares. This was more like coaxed coercion. Alonzo, all exploring tongue and crawling hands, used his knee to push me onto his thin camping mattress. I protested. He insisted, did what he brought me there to do. (I recently found out that Alonzo had been inducted into the college’s athletic hall of fame. The entry noted that he was so eager to get a U.S. education that he was willing to sleep on the floor. Yeah. That's right.)
Afterwards, the room damp with forced intimacy, I focused on the radio. George Michael was singing Faith. Martha loved George Michael. She also had a crush on Alonzo, similar in intensity to my crush on Carl. Now there was something between us. Another lie. I already had a moat of lies between me and my boyfriend, a series of flirtations and one night stands that I excused by thinking of his early treatment of me, as payback for the 1 a.m. visits, the nights he lost to bong hits and Elephant beer. It was getting uglier and uglier, wasn’t it? What was I becoming?
Alonzo the conqueror drove me back to the dorms in the professor's car. I headed for the showers. The coed bathroom was empty, no need to shout all-clear. Little blue toiletries bucket in one hand, towel tossed over the curtain, I turned the hot water on full-force.
I couldn’t wash the smell of him off me fast enough.