Here are a poem and two short fictions that have reached me by snail mail the past few days. Please read, enjoy, and share.
Maryland, NY
How did this hamlet get the same name
As a state? It’s confusing: whenever I say
And say “Up?” After all, Maryland is south
Or “down” from New York City, so I have to say
It’s a hamlet upstate, near Oneonta,
And most New Yorkers have a vague idea
Where Oneonta is, somewhere in the middle
Of the state, somewhere around Cooperstown,
Somewhere the green hills roll and summer fields
Wave corn and milk cows graze and barns
Sag and cave in the broiling sun
And the withering economy, and now
Maryland, pop. 200, might lose
its post office, the heart of a hamlet
with no business district, no main street,
no traffic light, but with the name of a state.
Verse Wisconsin 110
(October 2012)
Style
I
decided I needed a style of my own. Like Hemingway. Everyone could recognize
his style. That is, everyone who read literature. That is, only a few people.
But I would create a recognizable style of my own. Minimalism was in the air,
so I thought I would adopt a minimalist style. I wanted to keep narrative to a
minimum. That was also the advice of my creative writing instructor, Dr. Regina
Lemon.
*
Dr.
Lemon had been published in all the cool zines: Sawd Off, Minimalist
Review, Spite ’n’ Devil, and Parsimony. She also had a
paperback book out. It was called Screwy. The title was sort of a pun:
she was eccentric and got laid a lot. She also liked to screw screws into her
skin with a screwdriver. Her book was all the rage among Goths and Punkers. It
contained ads for S & M, B& D, and creative-writing outfits. That was
her original way of increasing profits. Some other writers dissed her for
prostituting her narrative. Others wish they had thought of ads first.
*
In our
workshops the instructor smoked joints and told us about her sex life. She said
she was just encouraging us to open up. She said the trouble with most novices
was that they were repressed. “Open up” was her mantra. If you read a piece out
loud and she thought it was too guarded, she would yell, “Open up!” Then she
would call on the next reader.
To read without interruption, the workshoppers competed
to write the most outrageous narratives. One girl wrote about the many ways her
father initiated her into sex, another wrote about the thrill of bulimia, and a
guy wrote about ways he’d try to enlarge his penis. The instructor said, “Wow!”
“How open!” and “Far out!”
*
I wrote
about how my uncle kept trying to get me to give him a blowjob when I was
thirteen. He would tell me he had a beautiful dick that I would like to see and
suck. He told me that he would give me a fifty for my efforts. He told me that
he would write a letter to Oberlin to admit me to college. But I didn’t want to
go to Oberlin. I did want a fifty, but I didn’t want to see, much less suck,
his dick.
My
instructor said that I needed to open up. She told me my story would work
better if I changed my uncle to my father, and if I sucked him off. “That’s
Oedipal,” she said.
I didn’t
tell her that the story was really about my father.
*
Then I
wrote a piece in which I listed all the girls in the workshop and the various
shapes of their breasts. I got the idea from the list poem, which was a staple
of my poetry workshop. Karen’s breasts are pear-shaped, I wrote, Debra’s
breasts are like cantaloupes, Annie’s breasts are like raisins on a breadboard,
and so forth. I finished my list with “Dr. Lemon’s tits are like Jennifer
Aniston’s.”
My instructor smiled and said,
“Make that like Angelina Jolie’s.”
*
That was
my last workshop. Since then, I’ve been working on my style alone. Is it
open enough?
THE END
I-70 Review,
Summer/Fall 2012
Star and Bit
Herman Kennedy was a bit actor who played Uncle Emil in
three episodes of the popular television series The Five Sisters. Like Herman, Emil is a German name and that
helped him feel comfortable in the role. The five sisters were named Gretel,
Gudrun, Gertrude, Gretchen, and Grace. Herman was particularly fond of Grace,
the youngest and the only child of their father’s second wife, Colleen; after
all, Kennedy is an Irish name.
Herman’s bit concerned Uncle Emil’s visit to the girls’
family for Grace’s Sweet Sixteen birthday party, to which the 30-minute sitcom
devoted three episodes, like the rising action, climax, and falling action in
classical drama. Herman, 45, played a man in his early 50’s, while Peggy Faust,
who starred as Grace, was 21 and “playing down” to a sixteen-year-old. Peggy
was also half-German and half-Irish, so Herman took a special interest in her.
Peggy Faust was a natural
redheaded beauty from Ridgewood, Queens, where German-Irish marriages are not
unknown. A drama major at Queens College, she had been discovered by Iris
Kwirn, the Broadway director who taught in the drama department. Herman had
seen Peggy play the roommate of Kimberly Smith on the college-campus sitcom Kimberly and liked her spirit and her
body.
In his first episode, Uncle Emil has an avuncular chat
with Grace in the Hartmann-family kitchen. Rehearsal time for a sitcom being
limited, Herman and Peggy
decided to meet before their first rehearsal in order to
practice their lines together and build rapport for their TV relationship.
Herman had attended St. John’s University, just down the Long Island Expressway
from Queens College, so he mentioned that up-front when he phoned Peggy to set
up their meeting at La Tartine, a little storefront bistro in the heart of the
West Village.
Herman arrived early and took
the table in the glassed-in corner of the restaurant, facing the door. When
Peggy walked in and looked at him, it was desire at first sight for Herman. For
her it was just a chance to size up another actor who at best might become an
occasional cast member, in this case a man twice her age, though he looked
pretty youthful in his black leather jacket and khakis. His receding hairline
had enlarged his forehead, he wore a fashionably scruffy beard, and he had a
slight bulge above the beltline. She imagined him made up with gray at the
temples, bifocals, and a corduroy jacket—a perfectly serviceable Uncle Emil.
Herman acted friendly,
constraining the physical attraction he felt for this lively young actress. She
was almost as tall as his six feet and had a trace of Queens in her
professionally trained voice. After they’d ordered, they both looked around the
restaurant, at the original tin ceiling and the water colors of maritime
Brittany on the walls, then out the window at the flow of pedestrians.
“You know,” Herman said, “we’re
only about two blocks from the brownstone where Carrie lived in Sex and the City. Lots of tourists,
mostly women from the ’burbs, take photos there every day.”
“Yes, and then there’s Magnolia
Bakery, just down the street from Tartine, where they go for the cupcakes.”
“A while back, people used to
visit the Village to see where E. E. Cummings lived.”
“And Edna St. Vincent Millay.”
“So you know the nabe?”
“A bit. Last summer I took
classes at H B Studios, a few blocks from here. I walked around with a
guidebook. I’d love to be able to afford a place in this area.”
“From the way your career is going, it won’t be long.”
“O, Herman, you’re sweet to say
that. Where would you like to live?”
Herman fell silent. He already felt that his career would
never take him to the level of success that Peggy would likely attain. To live in
the West Village would be a pipe dream for him. He started to wish that Tartine
served alcohol.
“I’m just happy to have a roof
over my head. Right now that’s in Flatbush.”
Flatbush, she knew, was a
neighborhood in transition, demographically challenged on one end and
gentrifying on the other. She placed Herman about midway.
“It must be so cool to see a
place, like, changing month by month,” she said.
“Sometimes cool, sometimes
depressing, and sometimes year by year.”
“That’s a pretty good line,
Herman. Have you ever been a writer?”
“Only when I’m auditioning for
my sitcom partner.”
Maybe this guy is more
interesting than a bit player, she thought as she lifted a forkful of quiche
Provençal to her mouth. But I wish he wouldn’t look at me so intently.
Maybe I should stick to our
script, Herman thought as he chewed his saucisson. I’ll never get anywhere with
this star, but, man, she’s a looker.
“So,
Peggy, how do you see this Uncle Emil of yours?”
“Well,
of course, he’s Dad’s brother, and there’s sort of like a sibling rivalry
between them. Dad wants me to be a conventional sixteen-year-old, smiley and a
little wild about boys but, you know, dutiful to her parents all the same.
Uncle Emil never had kids, was a plainclothes detective who took early retirement
and now sort of, like, butts in to his brother’s family’s life. He gets invited
to my birthday party just because, like, he’s family and lives close by.”
“A
detective, eh? Is he kind of suspicious about you, like a snoop? I see that
he’s always asking questions.”
“Yes,
it’s like he’s conducting an interrogation and the laughs are supposed to come
from the insinuating way he asks them and, like, the way I react to them. I get
to do a lot of eye-rolling and ‘O Uncle Emil’s!’”
“So
should we play it like a parody of Law
and Order? Like when the detectives are questioning a suspect or like a
trial scene?”
“You
better ask Stan, the director, about that. I’m not sure parody is, like, what
attracts the audience for The Five
Sisters.”
“Or the
makers of SaniLax. . . . Okay, how about I play Uncle Emil like Columbo’s
younger brother—sort of a wack-job who means well but can’t stop insinuating
that his niece is headed for trouble?”
Peggy smiled, and Herman
realized she might not even know who Columbo was. I’d better edit my references
more carefully, he thought, or I’ll emphasize the age-gap.
Man, I wish she was a few years older and I was younger.
Still, maybe I have a shot.
That
night Herman practiced his lines with unusual rigor. He imagined Peggy before
him as he read her lines and then spoke his lines with increasingly less
reference to the script as he memorized his part. He finished just before
midnight. Buoyed by a sense of accomplishment, he allowed himself a shot of
Jameson’s, and then another, though he knew he should stay on the wagon. After
Letterman, he went to bed, but thoughts of Peggy made him restless. Sleep came
fitfully, and then brought him a dream: a beautiful orange-haired young woman
beckoned to him from the stage of an empty auditorium, but try as he might to
leave his back-row seat, he was held in place by a seatbelt for which there was
no mechanism he could unfasten.
When Herman played Uncle Emil,
the bit went well, though the sound track gave most of the laughs to Grace’s
eye-rolling and “O Uncle Emil’s.” In the second of his episodes, Uncle Emil
attends the birthday party and gets to dance very briefly with Grace, looking a
little foolish trying to match her spontaneity. Herman relaxes and just lets
Emil’s struggle between his inner devil and his detective’s controlled demeanor
play freely. Then he’s on the fringe, giving a few approving nods when Grace
kicks up a storm dancing with a teenaged boyfriend. Somehow his bit wins
plaudits, and Stan Intaglio, the director, talks to Herman about extending his
role beyond a third episode.
As
Herman left the studio, he ran into Peggy at the door.
“Hey,
Peggy, you were awesome!”
“Thanks.
You were pretty good yourself.”
“How about a drink?”
Her cheerfulness changed to
wariness for a moment, and then she smiled and said,
“No, thanks. I’ve got a date.”
“How
about tomorrow? Lunch in the Village again? I’ve got some good news to tell
you.”
She
paused and then said, “Let’s make it a cup of coffee. How about Donegal about
an hour before we shoot tomorrow?”
“Cool.
See you then.”
Peggy’s
reserve made Herman’s elation over Stan’s words leave him like the air from a
punctured tire. He knew he should have dropped the idea of meeting with Peggy
as soon as she’d said she had a date, but his hunger for her gnawed at him. And
the Donegal, a dingy Irish pub down the street from their studio—what she’d
proposed made him feel defeated. He
headed to the Donegal alone and knocked back a couple of boilermakers. He liked
the buzz he felt on the way to the subway and on the trip home to Flatbush.
That
night he learned his lines with a vengeance. In the third of Herman’s turns,
Uncle Emil joins the family to clean up the morning after the party. He’s
disheveled and hung over, his condition making him the butt of jokes from his
brother and sister-in-law.
Grace briefly sticks up for him, but when he tries to hug
her, she makes a face that indicates he stinks and should stay away from her.
The laugh-track mocks his untoward behavior and unkempt appearance. He then
sheepishly makes his exit.
“Jesus!” Herman said after he’d
finished learning his lines. “If I don’t play this bit like gangbusters,
there’s no way Uncle Emil will be welcome on the show again. Maybe Stan has
already changed his mind about me. No, I’ve still got a shot.”
At the
Donegal an hour before shooting Uncle Emil’s third episode, Herman felt
anxious. He’d fought his whiskey thirst at home, knowing it would be best to be
sober when meeting Peggy. At a table away from the bar, they ordered coffee.
How Herman wished he could pour a shot of whiskey into his cup, but he
concentrated on Peggy. She looked so young and vital, and she was just across
the table from him.
“You
said you had some good news to tell me,” she said.
“Yeah .
. . did Stan say anything to you?”
“About
what?”
“About bringing
me back for other episodes. Cool, eh?”
“Oh,
yes. That is good news for you.”
“I
figure if I hit it out of the park today, he’ll offer me a new contract. So
let’s make sure we score during the clean-up scene.”
He raised an imaginary liquor glass
as if to click it against her imaginary glass, and then he lowered his hand on
hers.
She felt his clammy fingers on
the back of her hand and stifled an impulse to
withdraw it in revulsion. She smiled vaguely and said,
“Look, Herman, you’re a good guy and an awesome actor, but, like, I’m at a
point in my life when I’m not looking for complications. . . .” They both knew
that “especially with an older, less successful man” was the implied conclusion
to her sentence.
He knew
he’d blundered. Shrugging, he replied, “Sorry. My enthusiasm for playing Uncle
Emil got the better of me. I’ll behave.” And then he smiled at her in a way
that hardly reassured her.
The
scene went reasonably well, but Peggy seemed uncharacteristically stiff as
Grace, and Herman felt all too much like he was Uncle Emil. After the shoot was
over, Stan left the set and went to his office. Herman followed, fearing the
worst, and knocked on Stan’s door.
“Oh,
Herman, I’m glad you came,” Stan said. “I just wanted to thank you again for
all you’ve added to The Five Sisters.
Our ratings with Uncle Emil have been good. If we can work you in again, I’ll
be in touch with your agent.”
“Thanks,
Stan. Isn’t there anything definite you can offer me?”
“Not
right now. Sorry. And I’ve got to get out of here right away to meet the wife.”
Stan
turned back to his desk to gather papers to put in his briefcase, a sign for
Herman to leave, and he did. He wasn’t stupid. He knew that Peggy must have
told Stan
that he’d tried to come on to her and that she didn’t
want him around anymore. The star
must be served. The bit player had lost her approval and
lost his job.
When he
hit the street outside the studio, Herman needed a drink. He reached the dingy
Donegal but passed it by. He didn’t want to run into anyone from the cast of The Five Sisters. He’d already met one
sister too many in there. He struggled to put the vision of Peggy Faust out of
his mind until he’d replaced it with the bottle of Jameson’s waiting for him
faithfully in Flatbush.
THE END
