“What people are ashamed of usually makes a good story.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
There’s a poor orchard town near where my father grew up in the countryside. It’s one of the poorest places in the country. Most people found out about it when it got some attention in the newspapers after a famous serial killer and child rapist named Clifford Olsen passed through and beheaded a child and left the trophy to be discovered by school kids in the river that flows next to the highway that runs through the heart of the town.
We drove through that town on the way to visit our relatives since I was a baby. I remember driving when my parents were together and after they’d parted ways. I think it was one of the first places I used as a marker to measure certain feelings that upset me. When I was very small we nearly always stopped to pick up fruit to bring over for my grandmother to use in baking pies. After she died when I was five, we still stopped to pick up fruit, but usually just enough for the last stretch of the car ride. Memories aren’t photos in an album, they change every time you fondle them. I was getting good marks and then I wasn’t anymore. Holes weren’t filling in with certain things that bothered me. When I was big enough, we pulled off the highway and visited one of my favorite bridges in the world called Red Bridge.
You could climb inside the walls of that one-lane bridge and get up to the top staring a good fifty feet over that icy, glacier-fed river.
At the best of times I’m pretty lousy with heights. I was 21 before I had the courage to jump. I had a boyfriended girl up there with me, originally from the town, who I’d met in the city. She knew the parents of the beheaded kid and we’d been talking about how creepy and exciting the river felt knowing that such an awful thing polluted it.
The first time I stepped into a river when I was two or three my dad told me that you can never put your foot into the same river twice. That was a good fit as far as I was concerned. I almost drowned once floating down a river and after I quit struggling it was the most peaceful feeling I’ve ever felt in my life. You’re caught under something and struggling and struggling to get to the surface and grab some air and then you actually hear another voice ask why?
She’d never had the guts to jump and thought anyone who did was crazy. I wanted to impress her. At first it hadn’t worked out so well. I’d chickened-out over and over again maybe 20 times, but when she gave up on me and went to collect the little blanket we’d spread out up there I went for it. I figured suicide was the biggest decision you can make that you can’t ever regret.
She made a beautiful sound when I jumped over her and off that edge. I could hear that sigh-scream all the way down with my arms flapping like a maniac before plunging into the water and falling so deep I touched down on the pebbly river bottom.
The next time I visited that town I didn’t pass through, we stopped to visit that same girl’s folks.
We stopped by a friend of hers who had an apple orchard. The orchard had a pretty story behind it:
The parents of that friend who owned the orchard had wondered for years why all the pickers went to one particular tree on their lunch break for their own apples to eat. Finally they went over to that tree and tried one of the apples for themselves and discovered that the apples looked and tasted different. They had a distinctive creamy color. As it turned out, it was a new strain of apple which they named Ambrosia apples that became so popular that they became quite wealthy.
I’ve taken nearly every girl I’ve really liked through that town and bought them some of those apples from the roadside fruit stands.
On the flight back from New York with my wife a couple days ago, I was thinking about one of these girls.
On the trip we had together through that town she picked up the slack from my grandmother and used those apples to bake a pie.
I published a story about her in a magazine a while back. I gave some slippery details about her finding out I’d written a novel about her without ever having had a meaningful conversation with her. In the story I’d given myself a first kiss with her. 10 years after high school she’d read it and flew over to be with me. That was what happened.
But I’d left the piece open-ended.
Sometimes I’m interested in people who think leaving out vital material isn’t the same as lying when it achieves the same purpose.
It’s a different feeling getting away with a lie.
Different motivation too, I think.
It’s weird writing the happy part of a story that you know ends badly.
I’d left it optimistic and nostalgic and hopeful between us.
It had ended abruptly, severed with a warning she issued in a shrill tone: “You’ll always regret this. You’ll look back and regret this for the rest of your life.”
Most women I know that complain about their choice in men talk about how unsuccessful they are in finding a good match rather than succeeding in choosing assholes.
Every writer zeros-in on who their best muse is, who they’re really writing to or who they feel is looking over their shoulder. I’m not good with a Thinking Cap on my head. I end up feeling like Whitney Houston when I’m trying to sound like Billie Holiday.
Crack isn’t heroin.
The woman who published that story asked me how the story played out after meeting that girl. Was I still with her? “C’mon, she’d moved from Europe to be with you!”
That wasn’t entirely true. More to the point, she’d moved to be with an idea of us that had nothing to do with me.
I have a considerable mean streak that I try to hold back when I write about women because I know how ugly it is.
Most likely it stems from the fact that I’m scared of women. All varieties. Old, smart, dumb, literate, young, moms, daughters, wives, mistresses, whores, girlfriends, sisters, political leaders, receptionists, dental assistants, nurses, poets, writers, actresses, pornstars, nuns, book club members, lesbians, cocktail waitresses, bus drivers, wrestlers, folk singers, talk show hosts, hobos, models, anorexics, pregnant, career-women, soft, cookie-cutter, snowflake—you name it I’ll raise my hand and bow my head in shame.
I’m scared of women because I’m so drawn to them. I’m obsessed by women in all their roles and sides and facets and devious complexity and radical ambiguity and appetites and narratives and surfaces and depths and noise and silence.
I know less about them as a whole the more I meet.
Punching your weight is a good rule.
I don’t bring much to the table. I like my femininity in the cute and dirty variety, like those first video game fairies with the glittery X-rated eyes despite G-rated roles.
Cuteness is depravity’s defense mechanism: Japan only overdosed on cute after getting nuked.
I think of women emotionally the same as I think of men, only I think of them emotionally as men who are drunk and high. After all, women have purpose.
“Love is blind, but stalkers often have an eye for detail” is how I opened the piece.
Before I started the piece, I had a few pages of notes that included several pretty lines meant to hide other elements I’d left out.
Salinger had this line about “letting all your stars come out” or something. I wonder why this is so scary to do.
When I look at them, relationships seem mostly about addiction. Chemicals. Junk. Power. Submission. Domination.
Even with all the little stuff.
Telescopes and microscopes uncover what you can find.
She’d said she looked forward to baking pies after we got married and had our own family and grandchildren.
I like opening my eyes underwater in a lake or in the ocean when I can’t see anything.
She knew she was going to live to be over a hundred, she assured me.
I love fortune cookies, but not for their wisdom.
She was glad I thought she looked the same as when I’d first met her at 13, but she was most pleased that I loved her eyes, because the rest of her would “perish” into old age and “decay” but “my eyes will always remain.”
It was speeches like these, the chilling inflection and frightening vocabulary, that first broke the spell.
Then there was the preemptive self-flattery: “Everywhere I go others inform me that my breasts are divine.”
Pleasant would have been my choice of words.
“My bottom attracts attention like you wouldn’t believe.”
She was on the mark with that one. I didn’t believe it. And even more so after just breaking up with a Puerto Rican dancer whose ass moved like a wrecking ball down New York streets in terms of the attention from men it commanded.
“Don’t you fancy how quirky I dress?”
From her attire, she looked a girl who proudly lived in a giant shoe.
I left out that I was so nervous before meeting her that about 8 hours prior to picking her up from the airport I accepted the offer of a perfect stranger for a random meeting and presumable “booty call”.
I think it’s the only time I’ve ever been the one not chasing.
This random girl somehow got very turned on discussing books. She was boyfriended also. It didn’t really matter except that he was a very respectful boyfriend, which in all areas except sexually pleased her just fine. “That’s my main problem with this guy. I want a good person who can really demean me. He can’t. We can connect emotionally and intellectually and he’s not intimidated by someone with my education and career and outspokenness. You know what I mean? He just can’t bring himself to really give me what I want sexually.”
“What do you want sexually?” I asked.
“A guy who isn’t afraid to come on my face, you know?”
“Right.”
It’s liberating in a slightly unsettling way to be attracted to a woman yet having no interest in fucking her. It’s not a state you’d like to occupy all that often, but it’s valid somehow too.
“Are you gonna fuck me or what?”
“Nope.”
“So you’re using me?”
We’d met on top of a hill with a really spectacular view. She’d laid out a blanket.
She asked about the girl flying in. She asked how I felt about the circumstances. She gave her point of view. She asked me if I knew who Mr. Darcy was. She asked if I had any intention of contacting her after that night. When I gave her a look, she informed me that she was making a joke.
I told her after that night I would never speak with her again and she saw very clearly that I meant it.
She asked if I was joking.
“There are no jokes, the truth is the funniest joke of all.”
—Muhammad Ali
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So it seems that you have a new novel called Song of the Shank, which is based in part on a real person, Blind Tom, a book that I understand took you forever to write. Tell us more about it.
