GONER
I love this word: GONER. It is a self-contained cartoon: A person looking down a long street, mouth open in astonishment, hand over eyebrows to shield against the sunlight as a fast-moving vehicle races off into the horizon. GONER contains long lines leading to and from the horizon. GONER contains drafty breezes of exodus — those strange whirlwinds of coolness and warmth that dance in the bewildered wake of an urgent departure. Exhalation of space once occupied, now freshly vacant. GONER contains its own implied exclamation point, making “GONER!” redundant. GONER contains the seed of an ellipsis, which can grow to the full dot dot dot as your personal style allows. Hooray for GONER!
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I was surprised last night to find that I once attempted to write a novel. In a box full of papers and junk from Tampa I found a stack of papers with a fully outlined, partly written novel of a dozen or so chapters. It’s about a sado-masochistic relationship between an older woman and a younger man. It interweaves elements from my life in 1992 with a story from a call made to the Apology Line around that time.
I remember almost none of what I wrote, but here and there are turns of phrases that I still use today. If not for the occasional recognizable sentence I might question whether I wrote this stuff at all. The quantity is amazing to me. page after page after page of stuff for which I have no memory.
It’s funny to recognize the elements. As part of the story one of the characters required a particularly unusual, distinctive name. I used the name of someone from my sister’s high school –someone I never knew for anything except her unusual first name. I couldn’t even tell you what she looked like, but her name floats through this story disembodied from its source.
Other characters in the book step from the page as people I worked with, people I remember but never knew, or those who are what the FBI would simply call “persons of interest.”
I question the integrity of leeching off reality for works of fiction. “Write what you know” is standard advice for anyone crafting a story, but at what point is one simply using the people in their lives for their own gain, or for their own reputation?
The writing is overblown. It is an avalanche of words. Where one word would suffice I use twelve. Where one short sentence would communicate the story I fill a full page with two paragraphs. Sentence after sentence sodden with multiple superlatives. Funny how this now-obvious weakness must have felt like a tremendous strength at the time. O lost!
But the story has its moments. The death scene is particularly interesting to me, as are other moments. Gonna think about this.
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Summer must be here because the aural rape of the Mr. Softee truck is back. Noise pollution is too gentle a description. The Mr. Softee noise is sometimes so loud that it hurts my stomach. It’s some of the most violent noise I experience, and while many people find it annoying I think my reaction is probably stronger. Maybe I have noise allergies. I am not a loud person. I can not compete for attention on volume. As I explained to someone recently: If you want to win an argument with me, just yell louder. It doesn’t take much, and you will always win, whether you are right, wrong, or something else. We don’t even have to be arguing about anything — just yell and you will win. I have literally run from the Mr. Softee truck. Once last summer I was on 29th Street walking toward the bridge when the Mr. Softee truck came barreling down the street blasting its noise at full bore, as loud as possible. I covered my ears and do not exaggerate when I say I that I ran. I ran to the corner and walked one block over to 30th Street to start my trip over. But the Mr. Softee truck appeared on 30th Street a few moments later, blasting its noise in search of customers on that street. That one day I could not escape, and I remember crouching a little bit each time the noise blasted the silence away. I haven’t noticed it yet this year, but in the past the Mr. Softee music was so loud and abrupt that it set off car alarms, turning a quiet street into an auditory hell hole. I’ve been in various places where the cacophony simply rapes my mind, like a chain flossing my brain. Often this happens at nightclubs and bars, but everyday scenes have no shortage of possibilities for gut-crushing noise. Noise and nasty odors affect me most in the gut. In fact, all sounds seem to affect me there, which partly explains why I don’t like listening to certain types of music while eating. Noise doesn’t have to be loud, either, to get into me. Sounds of people arguing, engaged in spiteful sounding bickering, is as violent to my system as a parking lot full of blaring car alarms. With Mr. Softee I know the sheer volume makes its impact but the character of the sound is equally obscene. The timbre is just nasty to me, and every pick of that amplified music box feels like a smacking and spitting onto my face. I once worked in an office that was under construction. Workers were tearing it up and re-building, producing plenty of simultaneous noise. Jackhammers, drills, workers yelling obscenities. I worked very long hours like that, because it took a full 10-hour day to accomplish about an hour of work. And I remember not eating there for days. It reminded me of trying to sleep in coach class on an Amtrak train. I would set aside 14 hours in which to get 5 or 6 hours of sleep. On a Greyhound bus the number of hours required tripled, and it was amazing to get 5 hours of sleep in a 24 hour stretch. I can tolerate individual loud sounds. I remember once in Virginia waking to the sounds of a mighty jackhammer drilling a hole in a parking lot. I loved that sound. I found it musical. It went to my gut, just like all sounds, but its purity had a cleansing feel about it. Polecat, — or skunk, as it is sometimes called — is my favorite scent. Certain textured scents of horse shit make my eyes water, but not not quite in revulsion. I loved the smell of horse shit in Elfers, Florida; and cow shit in Rheatown, Tennessee. |
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I found a twenty dollar bill on the street yesterday. The episode felt like a hidden camera sociology experiment. It was on 5th Avenue near 59th Street, in the middle of a weekday. Very crowded with tourists. I saw the $20 bill sitting on the sidewalk, and I stopped walking to assess the situation. Was anyone else around looking for the twenty dollar bill they just dropped? No. Was this a set-up or a trap of some sort? Didn’t seem so. Was there fishing line attached to the bill? Hah. No, it did not appear to be a grown-up version of a trick you’d play on a grade school substitute teacher. In the few seconds it took for this thought process to transpire I saw at least two people walk past and look directly at the money without stopping to pick it up, and without even giving the slightest pause. There was no mistaking it. The bill was not wadded up or obscured. It was folded in half but anybody could see a twenty dollar bill sitting there for the taking. So why did those people see it without pausing to even acknowledge it? Maybe it’s because I had already stopped, making it appear I had dropped the money and was waiting for the crowd to clear before picking it up. That was my first instinct, after all — to look around for someone who might have dropped the money. Maybe that’s what the others did, and on seeing me they felt that picking it up could lead to an altercation. After a few seconds I bent over and picked it up. In case I was on camera, or in case someone somewhere had reason to question my action, I grimaced a bit in a “finders keepers” way. I was reminded of an incident that happened last year. Walking through a very crowded Rockefeller Center, a tall man pushed into me, deliberately taking a pair of glasses out of his pocket and throwing them to the ground. Very poorly acted, he tried to make it look like I ran into him and broke his glasses. His goal, obvious from the start, was for me to give him money for new glasses. The glasses were already damaged before he threw them to the ground. Even if I had not noticed this I think the mutilated condition of the glasses would have tipped me off. They could not have been that badly damaged for having fallen such a short distance. And his clumsy attempt to make it look like I ran into him was a complete failure. Who falls for this shit, I wondered. My instinct was to say “Nice try,” but instead I fakely apologized and kept walking. He followed me for a half a block, running into people in a well-rehearsed attempt to bring scornful attention to me. Through the crowd he yelled “That guy broke my glasses! Sir, you broke my glasses, what am I gonna do?” No one seemed to buy his cunard and he came nearer to me, tapping my shoulder. I can’t remember his words but he implied that he couldn’t afford new glasses (neither can I, pal — but I didn’t say that). I repeated “It was an accident, I’m sorry.” He acted thunderstruck at my apparent callousness, splaying his fingers against his chest and grunting “Aaaaw!” He was trying to make me feel like a heartless brut. I escaped into the post office and he did not follow me into the building. I have since seen this same person working Rockefeller Center with a pair of destroyed eyeglasses in his shirt pocket, looking for people to scam.
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