Disjointed Fictions (3) In a room at a hospice on a planet in an outer and obscure spiral arm of the vast pinwheel of gas that is called, among other things, the Milky Way Galaxy, a man’s sister is dying. The man is aware that there will never again be anyone like his sister in the Milky Way Galaxy. The long-drawn-out sequence of mutations and selections, of false starts and dead ends, stretching over four billion years of geological time that led to the existence of his sister can never recur. Even if the Milky Way Galaxy were started over again and only random processes allowed to operate – when a particular molecular collision happens, say, or when the genetic material is altered by a cosmic ray – it is extremely unlikely that his sister would ever evolve again. As the sister dies, the man calculates the odds against her living again. By the time he has arrived at a tentative answer, his sister has completely oxidized. This man’s sister was a woman, a body, a writer. Imagine: This man’s sister was also another man’s sister. Believe this: This man’s sister once wrote a story about a planet on which the dominant life form were intelligent insects. This planet was six quadrillion miles from the planet on which the sister lived. The sister’s story took place in the year 1977. The intelligent insects were only just beginning to receive radio signals of The Forsyte Saga, a television series first shown by the British Broadcasting Company in 1967. The intelligent insects thought these signals must have come from a very interesting planet. The last line of the story reads: “But the insects were wrong.” Be a part of this: The story is not real. The sister is not real. The man is not real. The Forsyte Saga is not real. Halloween is not real. Insects are not real. These words are not real. A man is making all of this up. Tell me: If a man said to you, “Oh no, did you invite that big blowhard to our Halloween party?” would you: A) Lie and say “No”? B) Not say anything? C) Ask to meet his sister the writer? D) Say, “That big blowhard, as you call him, just happens to be our gust of honor”? If you answered D, was your use of the word gust: A) Intentional? B) Unintentional? C) Both of the above? Feel this: The pain of frustration that a man feels when he is trying to write a sentence about how a character feels at his sister’s funeral and can only come up with this fragment: Better her than me. Behold: Hark: Be my audience, my only friend: I have finished writing another story. It is not the story I wanted to write. They almost never are. This story is called “Ma Petite Soeur” and is about a Florida congressman flying to the funeral of his sister, a desertologist who theorized that all the higher forms of life were a product of planetary decadence. The Florida congressman thinks that his sister, who died of breast cancer, really suffered a kind of desertification of the body. This is not an especially good story, so I go to have it xeroxed at the copy center. I stand next to a young woman who is having her applications to graduate school xeroxed. She is tall, slightly chubby, with frizzy long brown hair and a scar on her nose. She wears a flannel shirt over a turtleneck, faded jeans, work boots, hoop earrings and a red kerchief. She reminds me of something else. Our eyes meet once. Neither of us really smiles. I look down at her application to graduate school and mentally note her name and address. I hand another man two dollars and receive some coins back in return. Then I go home and I write this letter: Dear Rebecca Archer: You do not know me but I stood next to you today at the copy center. You are the most beautiful lesbian I have ever seen. Good luck with your grad school applications. Sincerely yours, (my name) Guess what happens next. 17 FRAGMENTS IN SEARCH OF A STORY 1 Simon Garfinckel’s the name, parajournalism’s my game. No, no, I might as well admit it: I’m not and it’s not. So why should I try and kid you, right? As my Grandma Tutie always says, “Never kid a kidder.” And she’s right, of course. You? You’re a kidder, aren’t you? Otherwise why would you be reading a story like this when you could be sitting around thinking of something important like how the OPEC oil ministers are meeting in Jakarta and how the next rise in petroleum prices will affect your life. This story won’t affect your life one bit. The most that can happen is that you’ll say it was pleasant or fairly interesting or a big fat bore – but it won’t touch you. Not like the OPEC oil ministers’ meeting will. 2 My Grandma Tutie was born in Russia in 1907. Her cousin Tutie was also born in Russia, but in 1908. Grandma Tutie came to America. Her cousin Tutie went to Argentina. When Grandma Tutie’s cousin Tutie came to New York to visit her last year, we couldn’t tell them apart. They looked like two peas in a pod. (Yes, I know that’s a cliché, and no, they weren’t green, but let it pass, please). They even started dressing alike after a few days. To this day my Grandpa Schnitz isn’t sure if it was his wife or his wife’s cousin whom they put on the plane back to Buenos Aires. 3 I was an alternate delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1972, the one that nominated McGovern and Eagleton. I drove down to Miami Beach with my buddy Fritz O’Day, who was one of the soldiers who had invaded Cambodia two years before. We got as far as Dillon, South Carolina, the first day of driving, and then we had to stop at the motel called South of the Border because I needed a bed and Fritz had to squeeze a pimple under his beard. I was still nervous because we had passed a billboard that showed a man with a white hood and a burning cross; the billboard said THIS IS KLAN COUNTRY. But Fritz said not to worry, it was no worse than Cambodia. There were a lot of firecrackers in South Carolina and pecans in Georgia and oranges in Florida, and we got to Miami Beach the night before the convention. We stayed at Grandpa Schnitz’s condominium. He and Grandma Tutie can’t take the summers in Florida. 4 Sometimes I wonder if I’d be happier if I did something besides parajournalism, so I said to myself one day, I said, “Simon, you’re wasting your life trying to write stories that don’t make sense. Either fall in love or find a job as a messenger.” So I got this job in the city. I had to deliver pulsating showers to rich women on Park Avenue and Sutton Place. Sometimes they had me install the showers too, and a couple of times I even had to demonstrate how they pulsated. It was an okay job. The rich women didn’t tip so hot, but I got lots of exercise and learned my way around Manhattan. I thought I’d get a lot of material for my stories, but I didn’t, and so there’s not going to be any more about that job in this story. 5 Grandma Tutie and I were playing pool in the basement once. Grandpa Schnitz and Uncle Wendell were watching us and playing cards to see which of them would get nexties. I was standing behind Grandma Tutie as she took her shot, and I wasn’t paying attention. I was thinking about changing my name from Simon Garfinckel to Fiedler Onderoof. Grandma Tutie’s cue stick went back and nearly poked out my eye. “Wow,” I said to Grandma Tutie. “Now I can play Oedipus.” “No,” Grandpa Schnitz said. “You play Uncle Wendell next.” 6 I drove Grandpa Schnitz to the dentist so he could get his choppers cleaned. He’s an old man, but he doesn’t have dentures. Grandpa Schnitz is very proud of his teeth and his gums. He claims that’s why Grandma Tutie was swept off her feet by him. “She was going with your Uncle Wendell first,” Grandpa Schnitz told me. “But Wendell had rotten teeth, really stinky, you know? So I came downstairs to tell her Wendell had the hives and couldn’t take her out to the poetry reading, and I flashed my piano keys at her. That was it. We were ball-and-chained three weeks later. Wendell was our best man; he had recovered from the hives by then.” “Come on, Grandpa Schnitz,” I said. “You’re just telling a story. None of that ever happened.” Grandpa Schnitz grinned at me ferociously. “An old man’s got to have some fun,” he said ruefully. “I expected you’d be the one person to understand that.” I nodded, and then we crashed into the back of a ’72 Dodge Dart. 7 I send my stories out to magazines and they come back with these rejection notices stuck to them. Sometimes there are coffee stains on my manuscripts. One editor just wrote back, “We get the feeling in your work of being told a story rather than entering one, and that is the problem.” As the Great Schnozzola himself might have said, “Ha-cha-cha-cha, dey missed de boat completililily!” Holy smokes, ladies and germs, have you ever actually heard of entering a story the way a guy enters a barbershop or a kitchen or a house of ill repute? Actually, once my Grandma Tutie tried to enter a story while she and Grandpa Schnitz were on a tour of the Hawaiian Islands. She tripped on her first step inside the story because it was as dark as hell in the there, and poor Grandma Tutie ended up in the Wing Wing of Oahu General Hospital with two broken hips and a stiff concussion. It ruined the whole cruise for Grandpa Schnitz. 8 Fritz O’Day threw away all his Vietnam War medals on Collins Avenue in 1972. A very sarcastic guy whose brother was a Wallace delegate from Tennessee exclaimed, “You’re throwing away America, son, and you’ll live to regret it.” Well, Fritz didn’t live to regret it, because one day he and Uncle Wendell were taking a constitutional on the Grand Concourse when some eleven-year-olds came over to them, bopped them on the heads, took their money and left them there to die. Uncle Wendell pulled through, but Fritz died because at the city hospital they stitched up his head with infected stitches and his brain turned to jelly. Luckily he died; otherwise he’d be a living vegetable today and I’d be stuck taking care of him. Now, whenever I go on the subway, I look out for ten- and eleven-year-olds. They’re the ones you’ve got to watch for. If they commit murder, the most they can get is eighteen months detention. It’s like they have a license to murder. Serially, something should be done. How come the OPEC oil ministers never discuss things like that, huh? 9 Well, this is my story, Simon H. Garfinckel’s, so if I want to have it this way, I can. The OPEC oil ministers have called an emergency meeting in Jakarta to discuss the problem of juvenile crime in the Bronx. Sheik Yamani, the Saudi Arabian oil minister, thinks they should fill those young punks full of gasoline so that they’ll never kill a good goddamned American like Fritz O’Day again. Doctor Lopez Portillo of Venezuela thinks that inflation, bad housing and bad breeding cause crime. “There are no bad boys,” he says. “only misunderstood murders.” Prince Khaleel of the United Arab Emirates gets on the conference table and starts jumping up and down wildly because I can’t think of anything else for him to do. The OPEC oil ministers vote 13-4 to end their participation in my story. Phooey on them, I say. 10 Grandma Tutie is going to Israel. Grandpa Schnitz is going to Palestine. They are both going to the same place. Because of pressure exerted by the OPEC oil ministers, it has been decreed that the two nations of Israel and Palestine shall exist in the same space simultaneously. Now there is no more war in the Middle East. Everyone can go about his or her business. Nationhood is all in the mind. At a séance, I contact the spirit of my dead buddy Fritz O’Day. Fritz says he hopes the idea of coterminous nationhood will spread. Then people like him will not have to invade places like Cambodia anymore. People like Fritz can be put to better use rounding up pre-teen hoodlums and forcing gasoline down their throats. I ask Fritz what being dead is like. “It’s all right,” he tells me. “It’s better than being in the army.” 11 Grandpa Schnitz gets on the wrong plane and lands in Ghana in the year 1967. There are cows on the runway. Grandpa Schnitz does not know what to do in Ghana, but eventually he cuts a few records and becomes Ghana’s top pop singer. His hit singles are “Ghana, Build a Mountain” and “Kwame, How I Love Ya.” Then he wakes up and he is sitting next to Grandma Tutie in the present, whenever that is, in an El Al airliner. 12 If it isn’t obvious to you by now that I’m not qualified to be a short story writer, then you must have taste up your ass. I’m floundering while my story is foundering. How do I put this all together to make some sense, to give Simon Garfinckel’s view of the multiverse? Maybe if I had more experience in life, my stories would be better. I should have traveled more, but I have a phobia about traveling. I’m scared to ride on planes because I think I’ll wind up in Accra, Ghana, in a different year. I’ve been scared to drive ever since Grandpa Schnitz and I were in that terrible car accident. I’ve never been as far east as Boston or as far west as Pittsburgh, so longitudinally I don’t have much range. Latitudinally I’ve done a little better; I’ve been as far south as Miami Beach (when Fritz and I went to the Democratic convention, remember?) and I’ve been as far north as the Concord Hotel in Kiamesha Lake upstate. Yesterday I got a letter from my Grandma Tutie’s cousin Tutie in Argentina inviting me to spend the summer (their winter) in Buenos Aires, but I don’t think I’ll go. I think I’ll just sit in my room and write stories. If God had wanted me to be in a different hemisphere He wouldn’t have given me all these phobias. 13 Confession: There never was anybody named Fritz O’Day. I never had a good buddy whom I went with to the Democratic National Convention in 1972. That was all fictional. I suppose I’ve always wanted one very close friend, somebody you could talk to and who would listen, somebody funny and cute and who invaded Cambodia. Not that I’m totally gay, mind you. But I’d probably have done something with Fritz in that motel room in Dillon, South Carolina, if only he’d asked me to. But I do have a Grandma Tutie and a Grandpa Schnitz. That part is real. And my name really is Simon Garfinckel. I told you it wasn’t because in these short stories you’re not supposed to use people’s real names. I don’t want to get in trouble here. Come on, you knew all along that nobody could make up a name like Simon Garfinckel unless it weren’t real. 14 They say honesty is good for the soul, so I’m going to tell you something else. While it’s true that I have a Grandma Tutie and a Grandpa Schnitz, they’re not married to each other. They are only machatunim, as we say in Yiddish. Grandma Tutie was my mother’s mother and Grandpa Schnitz was my father’s father. They see each other occasionally, but they’re not really very close. I decided to marry them off to each other to give this story a semblance of unity and structure, which, heaven knows, it cries out for. Yes, I’m beginning to feel much better, getting these things off my thirty-six-inch hairless chest. Perhaps I should stick to confessional writing. What I really need is to find something I’m good at. 15 Do I have to tell you I don’t really have an Uncle Wendell, or that I don’t even know anybody named Wendell except for the old TV host Bill Wendell who used to be on the program It Could Be You? 16 This story should be a real hit by this point. But it’s not. It’s another failure in my long endless stream of failures starting with my first premature ejaculation. I’m probably the only guy in the world who ejaculates prematurely when he masturbates. By this point I’m really depressed. I can’t pinpoint the cause of my depression, but I think it centers around you. Why is it we seem to get close to people, open up to them all our secrets, and then despise them for knowing so many of our weaknesses? I also feel bad because I don’t think Grandpa Schnitz likes me very much. I sent him a birthday card but he didn’t say thanks or anything. I also wrote to Grandma Tutie in Florida even though she didn’t write me. All my friends – all two of them – have gotten letters from Grandma Tutie by now, and after all, I’m the one who’s her grandson. I wish I knew why I have this compulsion to be liked. 17 I just wanted to say goodbye. I’ve taken an overdose of sleeping pills and will probably be dead soon. I’m going to join Fritz O’Day in the Great Beyond. No, that’s not right – I remember now, there is no Fritz O’Day. I wonder if Grandma Tutie will cry when she finds out. I can’t concentrate on my story. I suppose that’s for the best. It’s funny, though, because now I think and all these thoughts are jumping into my mind, really important things I’d like to say, not trash like this story. Oh I’m scared. I wish you could come her and hold me, but nobody can enter a story, right? Try not to think too badly of me. I can’t write any mo
Copyright © 2001 Richard Grayson |