Shaking

Janice Eidus talks to Stephanie Hart

Janice Eidus — Mon, 16 Jul 2012 12:06:47 +0000

Past contributor, Stephanie Hart published a collection of memoir and short stories earlier this year. Mirror Mirror, collects vignettes that explore Hart’s life in ways real and imagined. It is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble in print and digital formats.

Fiction editor, Janice Eidus, recently interviewed Hart. The exchange follows:

JE – What was your experience of writing memoir like?

SH – I found that exploring and reimagining the distant and recent past was a process of discovery. I can compare it to tip toeing into a dark room and turning on the light. People and places came alive to me in a way, which felt both familiar, and in some respects entirely new. I was living the experiences this time from the vantage point of the present; I could feel the heartbeat of the moment and then stand back and reflect upon what had happened.

JE – Why did you decide to write this book in the form of vignettes?

SH – I have written each vignette as a complete story in itself with its own rhythm and intention. By linking the vignettes together I felt I could make the narrative whole all the more powerful.

JE – Your book is a combination of memoir and stories. How do feel fact and fiction compliment each other?

SH – By working from both memory and imagination, I believe I have been able to bring my family members and friends to life in greater depth than I would have if I had relied only on heard and remembered facts. The stories about my grandmother in 19^th Century Moscow are based on a felt sense of her character and personality. I could feel myself entering her consciousness on the eve of her wedding. I was able to walk with her down the winding dimly lit streets of Moscow feeling her love for the city.

JE – Your book is divided into sections, which travel in time from your childhood to your adult life, back to the imagined lives of your grandparents and great grandparents lives in 19^th Century Russia, and again to the present. What connections would you like readers to make between past and present?

SH – The vignettes are organized in way that will allow readers to see past and present on a continuum. Despite differences in culture and century, my relationship with my parents in Manhattan of the 1950s and 60s has a definite similarity to the relationship between my mother and her father in Newark of the 1920s and the relationship between my grandfather and great grandfather in Odessa of the 1890s. This alternately harsh and tender love from parent to child is the framework for many of the stories.

JE – There are many stories about family members, especially about your mother. Do you consider the mother/daughter relationship to be an important element in the book?

SH – Yes. The mother/daughter relationship is a very important element in the book. As a child I saw my mother as larger than life, dazzlingly beautiful, fashionable, a charismatic figure like a queen or a fairy princess who would dispense kindness or cruelty on a whim. I write about learning to move out of her shadow, establishing my own identity, and coming to see us both as separate entities with our own dreams, fears and aspirations. It was an enlightening journey getting to know us both not only as mother and daughter but as individuals in our own right.

JE – Are their any themes that recur in the book?

SH – We come from the past; we learn from the past; we can’t escape the past and all the experiences that make us who we are today. Don’t be afraid to hold up a mirror to your own past; you will discover joyful moments, painful moments, and revealing moments. While recalling the past can be life changing, inhabiting the present is equally important. In a story called “Decisions, I describe myself sitting in a Jazz Café in New York with friends distracted from the moment by my racing thoughts. Finally I become attuned to the music, which “… sounds like jangling bells and then begins to jump and spin and swell into a caravan of joining rhythms, the only sounds there are.”

JE – Has examining your life and the lives of your family members been a healing experience? Do you believe your stories would invite other readers to do the same?

SH – Writing this book has been a form of artistic healing for me. I came to know my parents, my grandparents and my great grandparents as people distinct and separate from me yet at the same time intimately connected to me. By writing and reflecting on painful moments, I was able to let them go and extend compassion and forgiveness to my parents and myself. I believe my stories have a universal appeal. Readers relate to them and naturally recall their own family backgrounds in a way that is both healing and enlightening.

JE – What are you working on now?

SH – I’m working on a novel about two brothers who grow up on the Brooklyn waterfront during the 1920s and 30s. One brother becomes a political leader in his community while the other brother leaves Brooklyn to become an architect in San Francisco. The love and contentiousness between them plays out against the backdrop of World War II and McCarthyism. I am interested in the way historical events affect the lives of ordinary people.

JE – Do you have a set writing schedule?

SH – Since I have a heavy teaching schedule, I find that working in the morning is most productive so that my creative process doesn’t get fusedwith lesson plans. While walking on a track in the gym, I let stories take shape in my mind and then come home and begin to type.

JE – Where does your inspiration come from?

SH – My need to know and understand the people I write about and of course most importantly to know myself. I think in pictures and am inspired by the visual world around me; I have a need to look and listen. In one of the final stories of the book I let time narrow and almost stop…”In a moment I fully inhabit I hear chimes, I feel the wind, a motor hums; birds sing and stop. I hear a rake, a hammer and a whistle…I see a profusion of blue flowers, fists of delicate petals.” Small details as part of the fabric of memory are my greatest source of inspiration.

_____________

Stephanie Hart teaches writing at the Fashion Institute of Technology and Parsons The New School for Design in New York City. Mirror Mirror A Collection of Memoirs and Stories is her third book. She is also the author of Clouds Like Horses and Other Stories (which contains some of the stories of Mirror Mirror) and the young adult novel Is There Any Way Out of Sixth Grade? A member of Poets and Writers, and the Authors Guild, her stories and essays have appeared in anthologies such as Mondo James Dean, The Best Stories from ducts.org, and literary magazines including The Sun, Jewish Currents, And Then, and ducts.org. Stephanie was born and raised in New York. She lives in Manhattan.

___________________________

Novelist, short story writer, and essayist Janice Eidus has twice won the O.Henry Prize for her short stories, as well as a Pushcart Prize, a Redbook Prize, and numerous other awards.

Janice’s 2008 novel, THE WAR OF THE ROSENS, won anIndependent Publishers Award in Religion, and was nominated for the prestigious Sophie Brody Medal, an award for the most distinguished contribution to Jewish Literature for Adults.

Read an excerpt of THE WAR OF THE ROSENS (PDF)

Buy it from Amazon

Janice’s latest novel, THE LAST JEWISH VIRGIN was published in the Fall of 2010. Read about it here. Marion Winik, NPR commentator, called it “Twilight… with a sense of humor, a brain, and a feminist subtext.” JANUARY MAGAZINE named it one of the top 10 books of 2010. Buy it from Amazon.

asterisk

Letitia Moffitt — Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:00:10 +0000

It’s winter and the ceiling fan, not in use, has become a big asterisk above my bed, a qualification to my life. I wonder what it’s telling me. Is it a “yes, but,” or is it more of a “by the way”? Does it mean this terrible, lonely year is a mere blip, a statistical aberration, or is it marking me in general as a freakish anomaly? I wish I could ask someone, but the first person I think of asking is several hundred miles away, lying alone in his bed, looking up at his ceiling, which is a big blank space. He doesn’t mind that, I guess.

I go downstairs, an attempt to see below, but I find only more empty rooms. There’s no small-print explanation. There’s no sign anyone has ever been here but me. Ominous despite its form (flower, snowflake, star), an asterisk forces you off the preset path of your narrative and into something you weren’t expecting. You don’t have to follow an asterisk, but most everyone does, seeking the hidden meaning. I trudge back upstairs, lie down, look up, wonder if it isn’t an asterisk about me but about God. Maybe it’s saying “yes, He moved mountains, but He was on steroids that year” or “results may not be typical,” so I shouldn’t expect miracles, not even a little one, though it would make all the difference right now. One sentence, a really short one, wouldn’t even need a verb: Me, too.

Of course, an asterisk about God or life wouldn’t actually correspond to an explanation, would it. You’d just be teased, left wondering what that was all about, maybe nothing more than an unusually clean and symmetrical Rorschach test. I stare at it every night, these long winter nights, and wish for summer’s heat again so I can turn on the fan, the asterisk gone into blur like the past, keeping God in his unpunctuated heaven and me in a breezy, unqualified life.

_____________________________

Letitia L. Moffitt was born and raised in Hawaii. Her work—fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction—has been published in literary journals including PANK, HTMLGiant, Black Warrior Review, Aux Arc Review, Jabberwock Review, Coe Review, The MacGuffin, and Dos Passos Review. Her recently completed short story collection has been a finalist for prizes from Livingston Press and Black Lawrence Press, and she is currently working on a novel. She received a doctoral degree in English and creative writing from Binghamton University in New York, and she currently teaches creative writing as an associate professor at Eastern Illinois University. Read her online serial novella, Redwood, at redwoodnovel.blogspot.com and follow her blog atelectronwoman.blogspot.com.

They Spelled Your Name Wrong

Ellie Smith — Tue, 10 Jul 2012 16:00:10 +0000

Our friendship was just beginning the month you died. We enacted the juvenile plays of high schoolers trying to impress each other. Staying after school in a time before cell phones, we waited on the wide concrete steps until our parents or older siblings came to pick us up.

You found a smashed hamburger on the sidewalk, and kicked at with your bright yellow sneakers.

“Dare you to eat it,” you said, looking up at me with piercing blue eyes set against flaming orange hair.

“Eww! No,” I cried in overstated disgust, shifting my book bag to the other shoulder. “I wouldn’t eat it even if it were fresh. Cafeteria food is toxic.”

A few weeks later your senior boyfriend wrapped his car around a telephone pole and went into a coma. You came and found me in the lunchroom with a card to sign for him.

You sat down at my table and we chatted amid the babble of the cafeteria. You talked about joining the track team – the spring season was just beginning – and how you’d go to the hospital after school.

The next morning on the way to school I saw your picture on the front page of the local paper. I stared at it, not comprehending.

Katie, they spelled your name wrong.

It happened at track practice. You collapsed, but were dead by the time you reached the hospital.

At the funeral the priest said you were in a better place now, but I didn’t believe him. You looked pretty, but fragile as you lay in your casket. And when we closed the lid, we wrote on the smooth wood with sharpies and magic markers like an eternal yearbook: BFF, don’t ever change, I’ll miss you.

_____________________________

Ellie Smith is a graduate student at Carlow University’s MFA in Creative Writing program. Her focus is on creative nonfiction, and she recently completed a memoir chronicling her experiences working as a barista at Starbucks. She currently works as a substitute teacher and writing coach. Ellie lives in York, Pennsylvania with her husband of six years and their two dogs.

Four Poems by Darren Demaree

Darren Demaree — Sat, 16 Jun 2012 13:00:17 +0000

THE CURDLE OF FOAM ALWAYS SUBMITS

Worth more with fermentation
& lit blue below the shuffling feet,
the garden of useless particles

creeps the party like a storm
without lightning, clinging
to the pant cuffs, begging

to be taken towards the lawn,
towards the blades of parsing.
All words are church to the nothing

below our ankles. Began to begin
the party, soap, moving water,
swallowing all flashing lights,

I begin to think about my own body,
as I watch the continuing fold
& unfold of the stomped mist

& though no thoughts of trade
rest long in my mind, I admire
the humanity of such a failing thing.

NO RESCUE NEEDED

The half-eaten
sandwich has no intention
of being tossed

or wholly eaten
& my feet appear in the sun
to have little blonde hairs

reaching to the trees,
bending back down
in a music-less dance.

This poem is bored
& lovely. Wind?
My daughter runs the yard,

yelling “Slide!” At the top
step, waiting for me
to count to three. I adjust

to the casual glee of it.
“3…2…1” She stuck the landing.

THE KILL, THE SOUP

Cleared traps, Emily
never allowed them open,
but oh, how those carrots

called out to avoid
the fast boil, the herbs
& lentil bastards.

Slow with her elbow,
the withering orange hardened
with a nice, crisp flavor.

WE WERE NOT AS OLD AS WE ARE NOW

We had no betters then, on Meadwell Ct., in our skinny apartment, with the neighbors that played only Spanish opera, and would have parties until three in the morning, until I asked them to stop, and they punched me in the right eye. We had no betters then, only scared writing, a lot of drinking, and sex like I imagine bandits had in the 1930’s, I was still so sure we might not get married, that you might leave me because at that point I wasn’t much more than a cute drunk who was missing a French requirement to get his Masters. We had no betters then, only a dog with one blue eye and one brown eye that was so afraid of cigarettes that he would run from a candle on the television. We had no better then, only snowstorms and Greek food from Anna’s, only cider with full bottles of Kentucky Tavern in it, and beers in the fridge in case they called off two days of school. We had no betters then, only planning for a future, only talking about it in abstract, like it was a story we were telling each other. We had no betters then, and we mostly ate nachos and fries from a place called Chubby’s, and when our parents would visit with their many, many questions, we would finagle a trip to the seafood place that liked to fry everything, including pickles. We had no betters then, we had each other then, and we have found no better since then.

________________________________________

Darren C. Demaree is living in Columbus, OH with his wife and daughter. He is the recipient of two Pushcart Prize nominations, and his first full collection, tentatively entitled “As We Refer To Our Bodies” will be published by 8th House Publishing this Fall.

The Proper Way to Husk a Coconut

LB Sedlacek — Fri, 04 May 2012 10:52:48 +0000

Removal of the gold wedding band
That’s the first step
Securing it in a shirt pocket –
Button closed.
Hold the shell high
Then slam it down on a steel pick
Peeling away the green halves
Cracked along the seam.
Then pick out a blond or brunette
From the gathered crowd
Huddling in pairs or in red windbreakers
Squinting eyes of blue
Hiding behind black sunglasses
Underneath the orange Hawaiian sun
Dispersed by the ever-present island wind.
Give her the coconut and a screwdriver.
Then show her the spot
To make a hole to drain the milk:
It really isn’t milk at all,
It’s water colored white by the coconut meat.
Then give her a rock, find the seam
Along the brown furry shell.
Show her just where to slam it
Breaking the coconut in half, forever.

photo by Aurora Toshiko King http://auroratoshikoking.com/

————–

LB Sedlacek’s poems have appeared in publications such as Pure Francis, Ginosko, Fickle Muses, Tertulia Magazine, Mastodon Dentist, Apparent Magnitude, and Sea Stories.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one

Oliver Lee Bateman — Thu, 26 Apr 2012 13:47:53 +0000

The hardest part about the past, at least for me, is that you’re in so much of it.

Remember that one Christmas when we were driving through North Dakota, which is mostly empty, and we passed that burned-out husk of an ice cream truck on the shoulder of the road?

You told me to stop the car so that you could take some pictures.

“There isn’t a town in any direction for fifty miles,” you said. “What do you think happened?”

I kept real quiet, because even then I didn’t know how I felt about you.

“Do you think the person inside there died? Do you think it exploded?” you asked.

Even though we still had a long ride ahead of us, we stood around for a while, maybe a half-hour or so.

The landscape was flat and white, with a horizon so far away I couldn’t bring myself to believe in it. Against that backdrop, the truck stood out like a sore thumb. As we drove away and it disappeared behind us, I began to realize that seeing it had really meant something to you.

To me, it was just another piece of junk.

___________

Oliver Lee Bateman is currently an Andrew Mellon Fellow at the University of Pittsburgh. Starting next August, he will begin serving as Assistant Professor of Legal and Constitutional History at the University of Texas at Arlington. He and his good friend Erik Hinton co-curate the Moustache Club of America, an online literary magazine that has published over 220 essays and short stories. He is a columnist for The Good Men Project and The Pitt News, and a regular contributor to Stymie Magazine.

Remembering Buddy

Vito Grippi — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:48:46 +0000

I was a student enrolled in Carlow University’s Low Residency M.F.A. program the day I met Lewis “Buddy” Nordan. He was scheduled to read at one of our events in Pittsburgh. Many of the other students had been excited about the event most of the day. Past students had come to town for the occasion. Nordan was a legend in the Pittsburgh area. He’d taught in Pitt’s creative writing program for more than 20 years. By the time I met him it was 2006. He was already thin, frail, the effects of his neuropathy had taken hold of his body.

Nordan rose to read and his hands shook. His legs, too skinny, shook as well. He walked with a cane. A slight smile showed itself through his gray beard. He squinted, moving the pages closer to his eyes. Then he spoke, his voice melodic, inflected with that patient, southern drawl that he made all his own. It was a voice smooth and steady and as large as Buddy’s heart. In the end we all rose to applaud him, tears in our eyes from the laughter.

A year later, he joined the fiction staff of the program and I enrolled in his workshop. I prepared, as best I could, for the six-month mentorship with the legendary Buddy Nordan. The Buddy in the workshop was different than the man I’d seen read a year earlier. His authority, his recognition loomed over our little group of aspiring writers. He was an amazing teacher. His critiques of our stories were sharp, witty, and when warranted, supportive. We shared many great stories, and many laughs in that room. I was in my last semester. Afterwards I asked Nordan to be my manuscript advisor. He was familiar with my work, and our relationship had grown immensely during our time.

Buddy was quick to offer support and praise when he felt I deserved it, but he was just as quick to pop me on the side of the head when he thought I was veering off track. At times it felt like training with a hardened ringside manager. He popped me a few times. I can still see the thick, shaky pencil marks on a manuscript he’d returned to me. “Vito, I don’t know what the hell you were doing here?” And I laughed out loud, as if he were sitting beside me. We were already so many miles apart.

Losing Buddy feels like losing a ringside manager.

He guided me through the writing of a novel manuscript required for the completion of the M.F.A. And after many revisions, phone calls, comforting words, and sharp critique, he signed off on the project. “It’s ready,” he said. “Maybe not ready for publication, but enough so you can stop paying these people.” We’d spent hours on the phone, usually ending with my whining and his words of encouragement. “It’s really fucking good,” he said to me one day. I had been ready to throw the thing in the fire. Buddy methodically pointed out all the areas he really liked on the spot. Small gestures, images that to me seemed so trivial, dialogue he could see. For him it was the tiny details, the small inflections of voice that told a story. If you’ve read his work, you know what I mean here. I thanked him for his support and told him I looked forward to seeing him at my defense.

Although I couldn’t have known by talking to him over the phone, Buddy’s health was digressing. The illness had already taken over most of his body. He was working on his own book, typing each draft letter by letter, using just one finger. His body was shutting down, but he carried on. I was later informed by people close to Buddy that things were getting pretty bad. He and his wife, Alicia, were moving to Ohio from Sewickley, to a retirement home that could provide him with the assistance he needed. Somehow my looming manuscript defense felt silly, trivial. I considered the trouble he would have to go through to come. But he assured me by phone. “I wouldn’t miss it for anything.”

Buddy arrived 30 minutes late to my manuscript defense. I had been forced to start without him–something I quietly objected to. I had planned remarks and in some ways, my defense felt as much about my relationship with Buddy as it did the manuscript (probably more). He arrived in a wheelchair, accompanied by his wife and a man he introduced as his driver, that comforting voice and the slight smirk on his face. I was seated at the head of a conference table in the same room we had held our workshop more than a year earlier. Buddy, from the far end, apologized profusely. “I’m just really happy you’re here, Buddy,” I said.

The defense carried on. Things grew tense when discussion turned to the manuscript itself. Some of the members of the panel found serious issues with parts of the book. Questions of motivation. Buddy shifted in his seat. He spoke out more than once, in my defense. The general consensus, though, was that everyone liked the book, but shared differences of opinion on many details. Buddy deflected most of those differences. His anger rose. He told the panel they were overlooking what was important. One member mentioned the title, a title that I can admit now, may not have been great. Buddy slammed his hands on the table. “The title? Who gives a shit about the goddamn title,” he shouted. Then he turned to me. “Vito,” he said, “I think you’ve written a beautiful book. It’s needs revision, but it’s beautiful and I’m not sure why these people don’t get it.” I wanted to laugh while tears welled up in my eyes. The situation was strange–strange much like one of Buddy’s stories. There are moments of complete awkwardness, discomfort, yet somehow there is always a hint of humor that tells you life really is a complex, strange beast. Really, their criticisms of the book were not that bad. They were fairly minor. But Buddy, there he was, in my corner.

The effort, the struggle he had made to come to the event.

Even as his body continued to crumble, his mind stayed sharp. I thanked him. He apologized he would not be able to make it to a public reading of my manuscript later that day. “It’s fine Buddy, thank you for coming to this,” I said. We left one another with a handshake, it was an emotional day for me for many reasons, but the deepest pain was knowing that I would most likely never see Buddy again. We spoke one or two times after that by phone. He had given me some information about publishing. His agent was no longer taking new writers. The publisher wasn’t really interested. We talked about writers, writing, his stories. During that time, Buddy had been writing new stories, work that many of us in the program had the pleasure of hearing, in part, at readings. But most of that work, much of the world will regrettably never get to see.

Working with buddy was life changing. He was a strong voice. He saw something in my writing that I failed to see on my own. This was important, as I had looked to Nordan’s writing for inspiration. His fiction has the ability to create real sentiment for characters who often say and do vile things. It’s a direct relation to the complexity of people, even the most vile at times make you feel real compassion toward them. Buddy loved his characters, even the ones who are difficult to root for, the racists, the murderers, alcoholics, and the ignorant. He loved the people around him that way too. When emotion was too complex for human comprehension, he broke into elements of magic realism, where time and setting no longer played by the rules of society. His stories were set in gritty, at times near grotesque settings, but it was the fine line he drew between the dirty, real, and the serious, with a slight touch of humor and the absurd that made his style so unique, so heartbreaking and bittersweet, so Buddy.

Rats swimming backstrokes in a flooded basement.

In the end, it was my relationship with Buddy that plays out like a scene in one of his stories. Learning of his passing, the selfish feeling of not wanting to lose such a big-hearted, sharp man, while knowing that he suffered in pain for so long. Life doesn’t make sense sometimes. The minor things feel hyperbolic, truth disguises itself in subtle shifts of perception, a hazy sheen at the edges of our peripheral. Sometimes scenes pan out and the crows on the power lines look down on us and have their say, the dead speak out, lighting strikes a person twice. Sometimes we have to exaggerate, expand things, blur lines, to make sense of what is real and what is not. Buddy left us on Friday the 13th, and somehow that seems like the most appropriate way for him to go.

Buddy, thanks for the laughs, the tears, and the unwavering support you had for me and my writing. I will never be able to live up to it. Know that each word I type is in some way influenced by your outlook on this gritty, complex, and so often, darkly humorous world. We are all, in many ways, Sugar among the freaks, and we’ll be biding our time in the swamp until we can sing with you again.

For a beautifully written obituary, read this.

Returning to Earth

Peycho Kanev — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 14:00:06 +0000

And she walks slowly across the deep
grass. Back to earth she goes.
The stems part before her legs and then
gather again with a bow after her body.
In furrows the soil curves. Under her feet
stones patter in excitement, realizing their
perfect shape. Organic agitation and a verdant
genesis in the making, that’s what she is –
apotheosis of light. The sunbeams are stretching
ashamed, looking for a new object of worship.

________________

Peycho Kanev is the Editor-In-Chief of Kanev Books. His poems have appeared in more than 500 literary magazines, such as: Poetry Quarterly,Evergreen Review, The Monarch Review, The Coachella Review, Third Wednesday, Black Market Review, The Cleveland Review, Loch Raven Review, In Posse Review, Mascara Literary Review and many others. He is nominated for the Pushcart Award and Best of the Net and lives in Chicago. His poetry collection Bone Silence was released in September 2010 by Desperanto Publishing Group. A new collection of his poetry, titled Requiemfor One Night, will be published by Desperanto Publishing Group in 2012.

A Long Tale

William Henderson — Tue, 03 Apr 2012 14:00:03 +0000

One night I ask you what you think will happen if our relationship ends. Am I feeling uneasy about our relationship? About our chances at whatever going the distance means? Maybe. But I ask you what you think will happen if our relationship ends because I’m curious. And because I think you’ve thought about it. I haven’t. Or, I have, but only in terms of minimizing any affect Avery feels. I don’t think about it in terms of what my life without you will be like. No, not true; I have. I don’t want that life. I’ve found you; how could I think that I’m meant to exist without you? How could either of us think that?

I would ban you from the store where I work, you say.

That’s drastic, I say. I do not question whether or not you can even do this. You must be able to, if you are saying you would do it.

Other employees have done it. I would not be able to handle seeing you and Avery and not being part of your lives.

That would suck, I say, not being able to shop there. What I am saying is it would suck not having you in my life.

People do what they have to do at the ends of things, you say.

I think you’ll have an easier time moving on that I will, I say. You’ll have no problem meeting someone else.

Probably not, you say.

I know, I say.

I’m just being honest, you say. I’ve had to learn how to move on.

I cannot keep straight the ways in which you say you’ve been hurt. Each of your relationships seems to have been more intense and volatile than the one before it. So when you talk about your past, I pay less attention to where and when and focus instead on the chaos and anger inherent in your relationships with men and with yourself in places like Austin and Peoria and a city in North Carolina I do not think you ever name.

After breaking up with one man, you took great pleasure in draining the water from his waterbed.

A man you met at a club gave you a bracelet. When he said he didn’t want to see you again, he asked for the bracelet back. Instead of giving it to him, you threw it out of your car window one night while you were driving somewhere.

One man you kissed goodbye even though you knew the relationship was over. You kissed him goodbye out of habit, you tell me.

You’ve even dated a married man before. I’ve never asked you much about him, for obvious reasons. You don’t know that I am married. I don’t know how to tell you that I am married. I don’t know how to tell you that I married her after we graduated from college because I was afraid of what not wanting to marry her meant about me. She and I have already talked about getting divorced. I know I will have to tell you before then that I am married. I think banning me from the store where you work is the least you will do once you know I am married.

After about the fifth boy who broke your heart, you said enough. Fuck them. These men were cheating on you and dumping you. All kinds of evil things, you say. Each of these men, I think, added to the armor you have erected around your heart. I do not want to add to your armor. I am afraid of what will happen when your heart is fully enclosed.

They were all bad?, I ask. I always ask you if they were all bad.

Not all of them, you say. Sean and Todd were good boyfriends, but you weren’t even 17. Ryan was next. He was goth. He was 19. You were 17. You liked him, and you were interested in him, but you avoided anything that you thought was socially unacceptable. You didn’t want extra attention. I was still trying to blend in and not be gay, you say. Maybe this wasn’t you forever. Maybe you could be bi. After him, you had a girlfriend.

Josh cheated on you for money. He didn’t think it was cheating. It’s just sex, he had told you. I need the money. Some of the men bought him clothes, too. That’s how you caught him. You knew he couldn’t afford the clothes he was bringing home. You ended that relationship after you found out. He’s the one you kissed goodbye out of habit, I think. You treated your next boyfriends horribly. Most of them didn’t deserve how you treated them. They were great guys.

How did you treat them horribly?, I ask.

I did not treat them how I think respectful is, you say.

You do not elaborate on what you think respectful is.

Manuel broke up with you because you weren’t there for him when he needed you to be. Something had happened, and you had had to move, and you and your sister moved into a place together. This is not the first time you have told a story about something that had happened without elaborating on what that something is. I want to ask. I’ve wanted to ask. I’m afraid you won’t tell me, and I’m afraid of what you not telling me means.

We didn’t get a house phone for a few days, you say, but once I got a house phone, I called him and said this is where I am living, this is my address, and it had been like five days since I had talked to him, but he had ended up meeting a guy I had hooked up with before. And I said in the five days I was gone, you met someone? And he had. He wanted to be with him. Manuel was an illegal. This man could help him get papers. You couldn’t.

You got even with Manuel, you say. You dated his best friend, Juan, for a really long time. Five months or so.

Five months is a really long time?, I think. Each time you tell me about Juan, I think, five months is a really long time?

Juan wasn’t out. Not many people knew about you. And while you and Juan were dating, you and your sister were beginning to do crystal like fiends. So when Juan told you he wouldn’t do drugs with you, you ended your relationship with him. He wasn’t going to break up with you because of the drugs, but you knew he didn’t approve.

I left him because I wanted to be selfish, you say, and it destroyed him. He came to my work. I would come home, months later, and he would be waiting just to talk to me, and I wouldn’t give him the time of day. Sometimes I would pick up the phone for him, and we would talk. I didn’t think our relationship should have ended the way it did, but I didn’t know what to say to him, and I didn’t know how to apologize.

Did you even want to apologize to him?, I ask.

I wanted to say that I had told him from the beginning that I am a fucked-up person, and I didn’t think it was good for him to be in a relationship with me. And at that point in my life, it was all about me. It wasn’t about him. He was a nice and genuine person, and I was the dick. Because I wasn’t there for him in the way he needed me to be, I wonder if he went on to be a dick. I guess I did to Juan something similar to what Manuel did to me. I ended a relationship for selfish reasons.

Is breaking up with Juan because he wouldn’t do drugs with you selfish?, I ask.

I don’t think choosing drugs over a person is ever the right thing to do.

But you did it.

It was a poor choice, you say.

I think it’s you knowing who you are. I don’t think it’s a poor choice.

To not drag someone else along with you?

Yes.

I’m sure in the end I hurt him a lot less than if he had had to watch me go through it.

Yeah, I say. If you did cocaine or heroin, we wouldn’t have lasted beyond the reveal.

No, we would not have.

There’s no way I would have brought that into Avery’s life.

Just like if I was with anyone who did crystal or coke or anything, I would say that I had been down that road and you can continue on your own. I can’t be with you. But with marijuana, I don’t find it very addicting. There’s not an addiction to it. I’m not addicted, rabbit. Weed is nothing like what I’ve done. When I first started doing drugs, it was E, ecstasy. From E, I went to GHB. I thought GHB was kind of cool. You could just put a few drops in liquid. But I didn’t like it. I threw up from it a few times. I got sick on it easily. Weed is not like any of that.

And crystal?, I ask. You and I have not talked much about your crystal meth addiction. I don’t talk about it because I’m not sure I want to know much about it. I don’t know why you don’t talk about it. Maybe you don’t want to talk about it, or maybe you don’t want to be reminded of it.

The first time, I had been seeing a guy, and he did crystal, and I didn’t know what it was, but I did it with him. I only did three-quarter bags of it. It was just for the time I was with him, probably only two weeks.

I think that I wouldn’t even know how to measure a quarter bag, let alone what crystal looks like. You don’t tell me which of your exes is the one who introduced you to crystal. I hate him, and I don’t even know his name.

But it wasn’t until I was living with my sister that I got back into it. Mostly crystal, but when I couldn’t find crystal, I did coke. I’d even do E, if I had to. That’s when it got out of control. When there was no longer any sense of trying to maintain normalcy and to keep it at a suitable level. Both of us were walking around fucked up and doing it together. I mean, even when I was with Reggie, I was always the one in control. I did less, just a little bit, because I had to keep an eye on him.

I think you must have used the name Reggie before, but I cannot remember it. Maybe he is the one who introduced you to crystal. I do not think I can ask, because I think you will ask me why I can’t remember.

Reggie was always way too fucked up. So I had to be the one who could drive us home in case something happened, and he took too much, and there were times when he had seizures because he took too much. I knew that’s who he was going to be and he was going to overdo it. But in the same, that’s how I got to know people, so it was very easy, once I wanted to find drugs, I knew who to go to. Those were the people who came to our house. I knew who the dealers were.

Then I remember Reggie. He had a house wired with video cameras. He always knew who was standing outside his front door. There were cameras inside too. He was a dealer, or maybe he was just a heavy user. I think maybe you lived with him for a while. Or maybe you were just there all the time. I think he was abusive. Maybe he hit you? Or maybe you and he fought a lot? What kind of scale can you use to compare someone like him against someone like me? What kind of equation could you possibly employ?

That was my bad drug phase, you say. That was the one where when I left I would have dreams, and in my dreams I would be high, and when I woke up, I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t actually been high. And for about two years after that, I would have times when things would get rough, my mind would go right to, I wish I could do a line. But I never fell back into it, and eventually it’s gone away, but I can still remember so many of my high experiences and many great euphoric-feeling times on it. But pot never makes me feel like that. You know, in a weird way, my mother’s cancer pulled me out of it. I had to be the one to step up and take care of her. I couldn’t take care of her while I was high.

Do you think if you hadn’t been given a reason to stop, you would have stopped on your own? Or do you think you would have just self-destructed?

I was only a few steps from self-destructing. I lived on that ledge for a long time. If anyone I worked with actually had any sense or any experience with drugs, and if they hadn’t thought I was some kind of Puritan, they would have known I was high. And I would have lost everything. It could have ended badly. I could have ended with felony convictions. At so many points in time, I had more than enough on me that I had been pulled over – and there were times I was so close to it. Like there was a time I didn’t see a red light until I was just under it, and I slammed on my brakes, and I was a little bit out, and what pulled behind me was a cop car. And I looked down and I saw what I had in my lap, and I knew what else I had in the car, and if they had searched me, it would have been over. When the light turned green, I went ahead, and they went to the left. But at the time, I was high, and I was thinking, you know, in a high way, that this was meant to be and I didn’t get caught because I wasn’t meant to get caught. I probably should have seen it as a lesson, as a wake-up call, but that’s not how I saw it.

You know I don’t judge you when you tell me these things, right?, I say.

Yeah, you say, they are all parts of me. Distant-past parts, but still parts.

With Robbie – Roberto – you did everything but let him fuck you. You knew he liked you a lot, maybe even loved you. He bought tickets for the two of you to fly to North Carolina to see Ani DiFranco. You and he were living in Austin. You had a good time at the show, and in the hotel later, you let him fuck you. You felt obliged to put out. Just the once, you say, and when you got back to Austin, you didn’t wait long before breaking up with him. The show, though, was amazing, and well worth it. You were 24. You broke up with him shortly after getting back to Austin. You broke his heart.

He is one of the 17 of us you’ve let fuck you. He is a link on a chain that has ended with me, I think.

Do you regret any of the 17?, I ask.

Do I regret any of them?

Well, you say you don’t do that when there isn’t emotion involved, but with 16 of us, it didn’t work.

Yeah. It didn’t work.

So would you go back and undo it if you could? Would you go back and tell yourself that the relationship is shit. Don’t do this with him?

I wouldn’t take any of them back, I guess, you say. Where does that question came from?

I think about things like that all the time. If I could, would I go back to a younger version of myself and tell him that everything turns out OK. Or go to my freshman year in college and do things differently, knowing that any decision I changed may mean Holly and I never meet, which would erase Avery, but I wouldn’t know before making any changes.

I think that if I had a time machine, I would go back to the moment before you first used crystal and stop you. That’s what I would use my time machine for.

You met Manny during a threesome. He was the third brought in to play. I don’t remember who the other man was. You loved Manny. You saw a future with Manny. You expected that when he said forever, he meant forever, so when he told you that your mother’s cancer was too much for him to handle, you were surprised. Once your mother’s health improved, you had planned to come back to Austin and move in with him. By telling you he couldn’t handle everything, you felt that he took everything away from you. Because of him, you have made a living out of leaving.

What kind of sign would you have wanted?, I ask. A big yellow one?

A sign that said he was going to abandon me.

Maybe he thought you were abandoning him, I say. Maybe he did it for you, I say. Go. Take care of your mom. Don’t worry about me.

No, you say. After I had been with my mother for a while, he and I talked on the phone, and then got back together, but never saw each other, so that didn’t work. Being abandoned is a real fear of mine, you say. It’s happened before. I think it could happen at any time.

You have dated three men in Massachusetts before me. One you saw in a Starbucks, then saw online, then asked out on a date. The last guy, Simon, told you some story about wanting you to move into a house his father would buy the two of you. He went away on an internship. You and he dated for about three months, maybe less.

As you excavate the bones of your former relationships, I look for any resemblance to me. A sliver of who I am, of what I’m not telling you, is in each of your stories. Assemble all these slivers and you will see the relationship you do not know you have with me.

Would you do anything differently?, I ask.

No, you say. I made it through life. I made it to where I am. I’m good. I’m OK. The exes who were dicks to me, I don’t wish them any ill will. The guys I was a dick to, I feel badly for that. There are other ways to get out of a situation without treating someone the way someone else treated you. What is it, an eye for an eye leads to a blind world?

I have never heard that before, I say.

I don’t think about legitimate times when it wasn’t working. I think about times when it was a crap excuse, or a selfish reason. Just because pain gets passed on, doesn’t mean you have to do it intentionally, you say.

Maybe you just latch on to unavailable men, I say.

Are you OK hearing about my failed relationships?, you ask.

Yeah, I say. I’m glad you share them with me, I say. It’s hard to remember them all and all of their circumstances. You’ve had many failed relationships. I don’t want to be one of them.

Well, I try to get invested. I go into things with the intention of being in a relationship. I think I get hurt more because I invest emotion in relationships that don’t have the possibility of really going where I want them to go.

I don’t say anything. I don’t think you want me to say anything.

What are you thinking about?

Nothing, I say.

No, not nothing. Your little rabbit brain is racing.

It’s your past. I’m sorry you’ve had such a rough go at it.

It got me here, you say.

It got you here, yes, I say.

However long the road, you say, it leads to the right place.

And you have found the boobie prize, I say.

The which prize?

The booby prize.

The booby?

The booby prize. I am the 25-cent prize at the bottom of the box of Cracker Jacks. It’s not really a prize. It’s worth like a quarter. You’ve paid $2 for the box, and the Cracker Jacks are stale, and the prize is something that doesn’t even work or breaks after the first time or something.

I love my prize, you say.

One Saturday night, you ask if I can pick you up at work at midnight. You do not have a car, and when you can’t easily get home, you ask me to get you, regardless of how late it is or how early I have to wake up.

Sure, I say. I get you, bring you home, and you do not wait to take a shower. You take off your clothes, and you take off my clothes, and you push me onto my back. You straddle me and lower yourself onto me. We are having sex, and I am thinking that I will stay the night with you, and I see your phone light up. There is a text. You stop moving, and you reach for your phone. The text is from your best friend.

He wants to come over and get some weed, you say. He’s going to be here in a couple of minutes. It won’t take me very long.

You get off me and get dressed. I do not know what else to say but OK. While you are downstairs with your best friend, I consider getting dressed and going home, but I don’t. You come back, take off your clothes, and get back on top of me. We finish. After, when we are in your shower, you tell me that your best friend was hoping I would go home so the two of you could get high. He’s having some problems, you tell me. Do you mind?

No, I say. I can go home.

OK, you say. I will call him and tell him to come back. You cup my cock in your hand and you kiss me. Don’t be jealous, rabbit, you say; it’s you I love best.

I think you and I are kind of each other’s keys to overcoming our biggest obstacles within ourselves, if that makes any sense, you tell me one night.

I kind of think that we might potentially represent a happiness if we could just get out of our own way. It’s like, OK, Will, I’m going to put someone in your path that fits. But to have it fit, you’re going to have to make some changes. You can’t hide who you are anymore. And I represent someone to you who you can’t control. You can’t be my everything. I’m in something that’s not going to disappear unless I do something about it. Taking a chance on you is a risk. To work as a couple, we have to grow as people.

Well, yes, I am suddenly becoming a parental figure. It’s not something you could have told me years ago or even last New Year, you know. Oh, this is what’s going to happen to you in this coming year. You’re going to meet this man who, you know, kind of has another world on the side, and he’s going to want to bring you into it, and you’re going to say yes.

Why is that again?

Because you love him. You love him and then you’ll meet his child that he’s not going to tell you about from the beginning and you’ll be pleasantly accepting and invite them up and put on a movie. And I’ve learned to accept a lot more things. Before I push something away, I’m trying to make if it is something I should be pushing away or if I am thinking about pushing it away because it could bring a feeling of rejection. Doesn’t mean I’m not going to have any more mental breakdowns.

You can, I say. I think this is one of the most honest conversations we’ve ever had. I did not think loving you any more than I do was possible, but this conversation, this moment is proving me wrong.

But if I’m keeping up with my bucket, then there shouldn’t be an opportunity.

To make telling each other how we feel about things easier, we conceive of having buckets into which we put things that bother or upset us. These buckets, you say, are very small, and must be emptied regularly. We have to ask each other what’s in the other’s bucket, and we must be honest about anything that might be in the bucket. In time, you say, the buckets will always be empty.

It’s Buddhist, this thinking – address what you feel when you feel it; do not wait until you cannot handle your feelings. I only link the buckets to Buddhist thinking later, after you are no longer in my life and I have begun meditating with a Buddhist monk. We meditate together for two hours a couple of days each week. I am learning how to handle my feelings. I do not remember what anger, frustration, desperation, and mania feel like, as if the pathways in my brain where these emotions lived have been erased.

I hope we won’t have to turn around 15 years from now, and someone will ask, how did your relationship work, and we’ll have to say, well, we had these buckets and they’re really small buckets so you can’t put very many things into them, you say. And we would just empty them. And every time we’d see each other we’d say, I love you, what’s in your bucket. But, Will, there’s been nothing in your bucket.

No, I say. Do you feel you’ve done something bucket-worthy?

No. But I don’t think we normally do. I don’t think if I would look at things in my bucket, I would say, well, you knew this would hurt me. I think that’s the issue with why things end up in the bucket. We do something, and we don’t realize how the other one might perceive it. And for the most part, it’s turned out to be misperception, you know.

For a lot of other people, it would have been enough to throw in the towel. They wouldn’t have given the other person a chance to talk or explain.

I’m glad we did, you say.

Me too. It’s nice to hear you say you love me.

Do I not say it often?

You do.

OK. Good. I don’t time it. I mean, I haven’t been keeping track. I know for a while there I felt I was saying I love you a lot, and I thought, maybe I’m saying I love you too much. If there’s such a thing, I don’t want to wear it out.

The incongruity between how we will be – or not be – at the end of our relationship, and your certainty that I am the one to whom your road has led, is not lost on me. I’ve been on a journey, too. I had thought you were my destination. Now I think that you will be part of my path itself. I cannot see where our paths will diverge, but I feel a divergence is coming.

__________________

William Henderson lives in Boston where he takes care of his children, blogs about love (hendersonhouseofcards.com), rarely reads directions, and wonders why life leads you where you’re led. You can find him through his blog or on Twitter, @Avesdad.

Shaking One is out now

Vito Grippi — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 14:30:33 +0000

The new issue of Shaking is out now. It features work by Curtis Smith, Kristopher Jansma, Travis Kurowski, Emma Briant, Jennifer Taylor, Dana Staves, Anna Mavromati, Cameron Cook, Alexander Freeman, Patty Somlo, Susan Grier, Eric Ramseier, Stephen Hartunian, David Beckman, Jim Johnston, Traci Parks, Patrick Ross, and Bitsy Sanders.

You can currently grab a copy from Amazon or the Createspace store. Ebook versions and other distribution channels are to follow. If you know of a bookstore that would be interested, we’d love to hear about it.