Moving On: Bloodhound for the Muse

I haven’t been blogging but I have been writing.

My novel, 85A, is getting kick-ass reviews and I’m on to my second book, Bloodhound for the Muse: A Scrappy Brooklyn Writer’s Scrapbook.  85A is also available in Barnes & Noble stores, not just the website!, all over NYC.

Raw material for the book can be found at my  new blog of the same title as the new book.

Mom, if you’re logging on, please don’t let me know you’re reading Bloodhound for the Muse.  It makes me self-conscious…and I reserve the right to be ribald!

85A – Good Review!

It’s about time I got good at self-promotion.

Not obnoxiously so.

But enough to sell the book.

In that spirit, here’s some news:

85A got its first review – and it was good!

4 out of 5 stars from the NY Book Journal – an online journal that celebrates its reputation for “Honest, Scathing, Realistic Reviews”! Maybe I can man up to Michikio Kakutani next! (No, my balls aren’t that big!)

I’ll paste the review below, but first let me point out that 85A is available for pre-order on Amazon and will drop June 15:

Characters:
Seamus is a sad, angry teenager. Upset by the way others treat him, he tries to show them up, but ends up defeated each time. As a character he is recognizable. We have all been there at some point, trying desperately to have people notice our talents, when all they see are our faults. He does everything a teenager would do. Curses every chance he gets, defies those that dare to discipline him and hides his true feelings. While you at times agree with his feelings, you end up wanting to serve as a Big Brother, telling him things will get better. Although you will have to read the book to see if they actually do.

Storyline/Formatting:
The store flows really well. You constantly want to see what Seamus is going to get into or how his mind is going to process events. The way it is written really does get you in the mind frame of an angry, misunderstood teenager, and while a lot of it is pretty heavy in terms of thoughts, it’s spot on. It would be odd to read about an unhappy teen in a rose colored setting. The heavy use of profanity is a bit jarring at first, but as you continue reading it becomes second nature, and at times comical. (You go back to your own teenage years and how you spoke).

Seamus’ parents were written perfectly. In the ’80’s when parents didn’t want to recognize their gay son, blaming them for their own unhappiness was quite common. While upsetting to read about, their depiction stayed true throughout the book.

Language:
This book is NOT for the mild. The language used is pretty extreme.

****

Not to be a diva, but the only thing I don’t like about the NY Book Journal review is that it didn’t touch on the issues of race, class and urban cultures that 85A tackles.

Buy the book, you’ll see!

P.S.: Last night, we saw Green Day’s American Idiot on Broadway.  I’m not a pop-punk fan, but it was a damned good show and I was floored by how many of 85A‘s themes and subject matters resonated with Green Day’s rock opera, which was never an influence. Could this be yet another example of the hundredth monkey effect?

Exile Re-Release Promo

Jagger is on Larry King Live right now. They’re talking about the re-release of Exile on Main Street, the 1972 album that changed my life.

I’ve heard five or six additional tracks. I’m on the fence. They kick ass but I don’t want them fucking with the integrity of the original.

I just pre-ordered The Stones in Exile DVD on Amazon.

BTW, Mick Taylor was playing in Buenos Aires when I was there last week. I still have to blog about that.

Gloomy Days Continue

Ain’t that an ugly shot?

But that’s what it’s been looking like outside the window lately. We’ve had days and days of rain, which is to be expected in April.

I’m not saying I’m a sunny day/summer person. Far from it. I don’t look forward to the mornings where I’ll have to take an extra 15 minutes to blanket my pasty skin in 65+ sunblock.

But I used to like rainy days. I was just saying that to Julius yesterday when he was complaining about the weather and I said rainy days give us a chance to go inside and reflect. Hours later, I found I was doing nothing but falling asleep over any of five books I’ve been trying to get myself to read. Then I got mad at myself for not accomplishing more. Now I see what he’s saying about hating rainy days.

On Saturday night, it rained too but we went and saw The Secret in Their Eyes, the Argentinian film that won Best Foreign Language Film at the Academy Awards this year. It was captivating from first to last and we talked about it for hours at Fiorello’s afterwards. Julius said that the movie teetered on the brink of becoming too many things at once – a comedy, a detective story, a heartrending love story, a polemic on 1970s Argentina, where the right-wing had fabricated a government takeover by the left like the right is doing in America today – but the movie knew when to pull back to its central narrative.  These are the kinds of stories I like best: ones where there’s a specific focal point – in this case, the thwarted sentencing of a rapist/murderer – that somehow also binds in a multitude of other subjects. And the film psyched us up for our trip to Buenos Aires the week after next, where I’ll be celebrating my 36th birthday.

We also discussed Flannery O’Connor. I said I’ve had a hard time reading her these days. She was a force of nature, one of the greatest writers in American literature and her stories are so demonically possessive. Even though she was a hard-core Catholic, she grew up in the Bible belt and she peoples her stories mostly with Pentecostals, unhinged white trash and unromanticized poor black characters. She had no trouble being violent and graphic in her narration since she began from the premise that man is in an unredeemed state and she made it her mission to show just how wretched that state of being is. In an essay on O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” Harold Bloom says, “We would be good, O’Connor thinks, if someone were there to shoot us every minute of our lives…[She's] someone who can entertain us so profoundly [that she] can damn us pretty much as she pleases.”

True, but, see, this is exactly what I don’t like about her. Her talent is so seductive that we’re willing to take her scourge, much in the way people find so much fascination in Jonathan Edwards’ Calvanist sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God” that it’s now a central piece of the American literary canon. We should also note that O’Connor was infected with lupus and died at the age of 39. For fourteen years, she felt the Hand of God ready to pluck her from the earth at any moment. In the meantime, she left these Southern Gothic morality tales, maybe as a way of frightening us into our rightful subjugation. But what good does it do anyone to live that way? Could it be that her degenerating health had left her feeling condemned to such an extent that she, in a religious fervor, saw fit to condemn all humanity in a misery-loves-company kind of way?

And she was a racist! People don’t like to admit this about her. They say she uses the n-word as a way of satirizing the south and its limited assumptions about class and race. This is a pleasant theory and it lets a great writer off the hook, but it’s debunked when you read her correspondence, which shows that she uses these epithets without the slightest irony.

I told all this to Julius and he said I should write fiction from a Buddhist standpoint. “What would a good Buddhist do if he or she were mugged on the street?” I told him that, in theory, the ideal reaction would be to take it on the chin – get up, dust yourself off and recognize that we’ve somehow created this karma in this or another lifetime and now a karmic debt has been erased. That’s the theory anyway.

He said, “You should write a story about that!”

I said I’m afraid. I believe in the laws of attraction. If I focus on such a situation, I fear I might attract such a situation. I’ve lived in big cities all my life and, while I’ve been attacked on the streets, I’ve only had actual money stolen from me once. It was in Barcelona. It was a setup. A guy asked me for directions and, while I was explaining that I was a foreigner, his Spanish friend came up, flashed a fake police badge, went into my wallet and took out all the American dollars and Spanish pesos he could before shoving the wallet back into my chest and pushing me away. It all happened so fast, I didn’t know how to react. I tried reporting it at the hostel but they all but laughed at me for thinking you can catch a petty thief in plazas that crawl with petty thieves. It turns out I got off easy too. The next day I saw the typical American tourist walking through the Plaza del Sol in a sunhat and golf shirt with his expensive camera dangling from a strap on his shoulder. A guy ran up out of nowhere, busted his nose, grabbed the camera and tore away, leaving the tourist gushing blood while the wife screamed like she had bats in her hair.

These things can happen in Brooklyn too and I’d rather not imagine them into existence. Call me superstitious but lots of people have stories of focusing these instances into being. But Julius also told me that I seem to stay within a certain comfort zone as a writer. I don’t want to move into the terrible, lest it become the actual. And I have to admit that I’ve come to the point in my life where, if I had to choose, I’d take happiness over writing. Fortunately, I don’t have to make that choice.

But the weather forecast says it’s going to be gray all day. Half an hour ago, Mom gave me a call and told me a lot of news about a lot of funerals that are either taking place or are about to take place any month now back home – one of them being of a girl my age whom I went to school with and who caught a lupus-like disease years ago and now has only five months to live. My father, whom my mother has been married to for 52 years and whom I have no real relationship with anymore, has a melanoma now that looks to be advancing. One of my sisters and my brother-in-law have been living together in hate for over a decade but haven’t divorced for fear that the other would get the sons and the property – and one fallout of this has been that one of my nephews, a former straight-A student, has been acting out and has been kicked out of school. And I read Flannery O’Connor’s “The Geranium” today and liked it…

And I can’t wait to head to my meditation cushion and come back to a peaceful center.

Rules of Engagement (And Detachment)

I’ve been away from the blog lately.  It’s been a heavy week.  Haggling with the publishers over the marketing of 85A hasn’t been the least of it, but that’s sorting itself out now.  To counterbalance stress, I’ve been taking a lot of time to meditate, work out, read the Tao Te Ching, and go to Prospect Park.

Plus, as I was telling someone yesterday, my blog’s been having a bit of a content crisis.

I mean, I could blog in real-time about current events but I don’t want this to be a news blog.

- Sure, I could go on about how it’d be a crime if the Arizona governor didn’t veto the new anti-immigrant bill, not to mention the birther bill that’s reared its ugly head.

- I could comment extensively on how Sue Lowden, the GOP’s senatorial candidate in Nevada, so confidently counseled Nevadans to barter chickens if they can’t afford health insurance!

- I could applaud Sherrod Brown and Ted Kaufman’s proposal to break up the banks, as well as Jon Stewart and his gospel choir crooning to Bernie Goldberg and Fox News, “Go Fuck Yourselves!”

- I could hold forth on how I agree with Newt Gingrich that calling someone militant is not an insult (shit, look at me!) and that students who don’t want to be in high school should be allowed to leave at an earlier age to go to work.

But, like I told my friend, I don’t want the news to take up more than 45% of this blog.

I’d like the catalysts for my posts to come more from the inside than outside.  Otherwise, my blog would be nothing more than an extension of The Huffington Post, which is doing a good enough job on its own, thank you.  One of the good things about engaging so much with the news of the world is that you never run out of things to write about.  The danger is that it can so quickly devolve into soulless rants.

Plus there’s enough going on right at home for me to blog about…

Julius proposed.  I accepted.

Now, we were already engaged.  We’d already talked about it like it was a done-deal.  But those conversations went something like this: “Wanna?” – “Yeah, you?” – “Yeah.” – “Okay.”

Also, last week, I did something different and actually logged on to Facebook.  I saw that my relationship status read “In a Relationship.”  But I’m more than “In a Relationship.”  So I looked for “Domestic Partnership.”  But my only options were “Single,” “Engaged,” and “Married.”  I selected “Engaged” as Julius was walking by in his underwear.  He said, “You’re more than just engaged.”  So I selected “Married” and sang in falsetto: “We don’t need no piece of paper from the city hall…”

Julius actually got on his knee on Saturday night, though.  That’s one thing that we gays still have to figure out when it comes to marriage.  Which one is supposed to pop the question?

There was no ring.  I don’t want one.  Not even at the wedding.  I’m more than happy with the pewter one I bought years ago on Bleecker Street for $12.  (See headline pic.)

On Sunday, I rented “The Ick Factor” episode of Sex and The City, where Miranda proposes to Steve over beers.  I wanted Julius to see it so I could show him the kind of wedding I want.  Two words: NO FRILLS – just like Miranda and Steve’s wedding.  Shopping for a quick wedding dress on her lunch hour, Miranda tells the shop assistant: “No, I told you, no white, no ivory, nothing that says virginal.  I have a child.  The jig is up.”  In front of a few friends, they get married in a community garden and later have people come for drinks at a bistro.  Classic!

Somehow Julius missed the point.  He started talking formal wear, endless guest lists, banquet halls…

“No!” I implored him, “Just simple.  Sim-ple.  Repeat after me.  Sim-”

“But, Kyle, it’s a proclamation of our love!  Don’t you want to make it special.”

“Getting married is special enough!”

“No!” he said, “Look at Shah Jahan. He built the Taj Mahal as a monument to his bride.”

“That’s a mausoleum!” I roared, “She was already dead!  And he had two other wives besides her.  See what I mean?  Complicated!  That’s not what I’m going for!”

“But you’re not the only one getting married here.”

“Okay, you got a point,” I said, “But if I leave the wedding concept to you, you might as well plan for my post-nuptial mausoleum or rubber room too since I’ll be ending up in one or the other.”

We were at a standstill.

But at dinner last night, I had a proposition of my own.

“Okay,” I said, “You know how you’re more Shah Jahan and I’m more Miranda?  Check this out.  We do the actual wedding my way.  Okay, stay with me now!  We go wherever it’s legal, find a judge.  Okay?  Mike Levine will be my best man.  You choose yours.  We tie the knot.  We have people over later, maybe even a couple weeks later, who knows?  Then we honeymoon in India.  And we crown the occasion by going to the Taj Mahal.  Huh!  Huh!  Is that extravagant enough for you?”

He took a beat to contemplate the Taj Mahal and the mystical haze surrounding it.  “Okay!” he cheered.  Then he took another beat and said, “But can I at least send out engraved invitations?”

That much I gave him.

We haven’t set a date.  If I have my way, we’ll do it on the fly.  Love is love, regardless.

This morning, he told me he had a dream that our cat Marquez was walking across an interior design store, where all these harried gay designers were running around in a tizzy.  Julius said that he noticed that Marquez had Indian food stuck to his leg.

“What do you think that means?” he asked me.

I said, “Well, Marquez probably represented me since you always say that he’s just like me…you know – temperamental, particular, doesn’t like to be hassled.  And the Indian food probably has something to do with the Taj Mahal.  But I’m telling you right now, those futzy design queens aren’t coming anywhere near my wedding!”

85A: It’s Here!

Just when I thought I wouldn’t have anything to blog about today, I came home to find the UPS man pulling up to the house with a box containing my free promo copies of 85A, direct from the publisher!

85A back cover

My picture on the back cover isn’t flattering but I never could be photogenic on demand!  (Which, by the way, doesn’t mean I’ve never been photogenic, let’s be clear…)

If this doesn’t give me the kick in the ass I need to get moving on optimizing the novel’s website before launch, nothing will.

I’ll post an alert on the blog for when 85A’s official website will be up!

Thank You, President Obama

President Obama has signed a memorandum mandating that no Medicare-Medicaid hospital may deny visitation and consultation privileges on the basis of sexual orientation, gender identity or any already protected category like race or religion.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hailed the statement, sent to Secretary of Health and Human Services, Kathleen Sebelius, as “a major step toward fairness for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Americans. And ensuring that, in the event of a hospital stay, all Americans have the right to see their loved ones.”

(The following is lifted from the Associated Press)

In his statement, Obama said: “Every day, all across America, patients are denied the kindnesses and caring of a loved one at their sides — whether in a sudden medical emergency or a prolonged hospital stay. Often, a widow or widower with no children is denied the support and comfort of a good friend.”

He added: “Also uniquely affected are gay and lesbian Americans who are often barred from the bedsides of the partners with whom they may have spent decades of their lives — unable to be there for the person they love, and unable to act as a legal surrogate if their partner is incapacitated.”

Without the expanded visitor-designation rights, Obama said, “all too often, people are made to suffer or even to pass away alone, denied the comfort of companionship in their final moments while a loved one is left worrying and pacing down the hall.”

(End quote)

Thank you, President Obama.

I’m hoping that when I receive my weekly HRC update, Joe Solmonese will offer a special way for us to pay him thanks. Solmonese has already released a statement of gratitude with special reference to a lesbian couple who had been denied visitation rights in Miami when one of them was on her deathbed, “Discrimination touches every facet of the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, including at times of crisis and illness. The president’s action today will help ensure [the end to] such indignities.”

We also have the Obama administration to thank for how the stimulus plan ensured that 95% of people have paid less in taxes this year that in all 8 years of the Bush administration. Middle class taxes are at their lowest in 50 years!

Gee, Sarah, why aren’t you out there thanking Obama for this? How about the rubes you’re riling? They all say they want less taxes and Obama delivered. Why aren’t they flooding the White House with thank-you cards? Why aren’t you telling them to? Why are you inveighing against how relatively few households paid federal tax this year? We thought that’s what you wanted!

Another thing I don’t understand, especially in light of Obama’s newest memo to Sebelius, is why the White House is denying that potential supreme court nominee Elena Kagan is gay. Her relationship with her longtime partner is well-known at Harvard. The correct response to Republican opponents is not, “She’s straight.”

It would be, “She’s the candidate who would best serve the court. One’s sexual orientation shouldn’t keep them from aspiring to such a high position. That’s part of living in an equal and just society.”

Disturbance in Arizona

This week, the Arizona House of Representatives passed a draconian anti-immigrant bill that could give free rein to ethnic profiling throughout the state.

What is it about Arizona?  Much as I loathe John McCain, his opponent J.D. Hayworth sounds far worse.  (Notice how Sarah Palin didn’t badmouth Hayworth when she spoke at McCain’s rally.  She might be the biggest twit on the tour bus, but she knows she might need Hayworth later.)  A talk radio host, Hayworth is one of the titans of the bourgeoning industry of misinformation that conservatives churn out big and fast for Tea Partiers and other gullible nitwits.  I hope Democratic challenger Rodney Glassman knows how to roll in the mud with dirty dogs because he’s in for the pit fight of his life.

But I have a friend who moved to Arizona six months ago and loves it.  She’s a nature lover and New Age healer, who has found a vast community out by Prescott where she can openly discuss astral projection, medicine wheels and all sorts of other occult practices that make mine and most other people’s eyes glaze over.  Lest we forget, the rise and fall of James Arthur Ray took place in Sedona.  (Did that story fall off the media’s radar screen?)

Martha Beck has lived in Phoenix for over a decade and has never publicly condemned Arizona’s ultra-conservatism (of course, she’s from Utah; Arizona must look like a nudist colony by comparison).  But in a chapter on the “essential self,” she did offer this discourse on a true-crime story from The Grand Canyon State:

Here in Wild West Phoenix, where real men still have obscene tattoos and keep rattlesnakes as pets, we recently experienced a rash of brazen burglaries.  The thieves entered empty houses to steal any jewelry, silverware, and electronic equipment they could find. In one home, their loot included an expensive camera. The thieves sold the goods at a swap meet later the same week, leaving no clues to their identity – except that they’d taken several pictures of one another burgalizing the houses, then left the film in the camera when they fenced it.  The police had lots of nice photographic evidence to help them find and convict the whole gang.

Many criminals do incredibly stupid things like this, because they’re actually conflicted about breaking the law.  It’s a rare thing to find a burglar who thinks it’s dandy if other people steal his stuff; when it comes right down to it, his deepest self believes stealing is immoral.  Your essential self will fight you by committing ‘stupid’ blunders when you violate your own values.  It’s as likely to happen when you try to be too virtuous as when you break the law.  Do you think it’s an accident that every time your mother-in-law arrives to take you to her Bible study group, she finds you naked in your backyard hot tub, singing the blues and drinking Kahlua through a straw?

I think not.

The Blue Rider

“Anne,” I said, walking into her office with a manila folder full of papers that had signature tags attached to them.

She looked up from the brief she was working on with a smile.  I smiled at her too.  The day before, which had been my first day on the job, she’d confided in me that people always tell her that she has the kind of face you always see at Irish weddings and funerals – sharp cheekbones, laughing eyes, ruddy cheeks, and a rugged chin.  I’d told her I’m Irish too, thinking this commonality might lead to a bond.  At least I’d hoped it would.  She was my new boss.  And now she was smiling at me.  I came forward like a courtier.

“You’d asked for the CEO Contract,” I said, opening the file, “This paper reads ‘CEO Agreement.’  Is this what you’re looking for?”

With vermicular ease, she traced her finger to the document’s title and said flatly, “This is the CEO’s contract.  See?  ‘CEO Agreement’?”

“Oh,” I said, tittering, “So CEO Contract and CEO Agreement are the same thing.  I didn’t know if there was technically a difference.  Got it now.  Here you go.”  I left the file in her inbox and walked toward the door.

“Kyle!” she hollered.  I turned around.  Behind the lenses of her glasses, I saw her eyes firing up like furnaces.  Anne took her glasses off and rubbed her eyes.  With the side of her face cupped in her hand, she looked at me, “You’re a smart guy, aren’t you?  I mean, you have a college degree, don’t you?” Anne breathed for a moment and continued, “You know, my other secretaries had far less education than you and…they caught on a lot faster.”

The yellow wall before my eyes suddenly stretched for miles.  I felt like the baby who laughed as a soldier tickled him under the chin, only to find a rifle jammed in his face two seconds later.  Anne did not move her head but she flashed the same smile she’d worn when I’d walked through the door.  I stood, gutted.  She said calmly, the spine of her glasses at perfect rest between her thumb and forefinger, “So what is it, Kyle?  Is it a lack of experience?  Do you think that’s what it is?”

I knew better than to answer.  True, I’d only graduated from college four months earlier but I’d worked in offices all through school.  I had experience.  And rent would be due in two weeks.  I needed this job.  I said nothing.  Anne continued staring, smiling, her Irish eyes glinting.

“Or is it a lack of confidence?” she said, straightening up and making the confident striking gesture of an orchestra conductor driving home a crescendo.

This is my out!, I thought.  Maybe she’ll have a heart for someone whose only fault is that he’s got to believe in himself more.  “Yes,” I hung my head, “Maybe that’s it.”

“Then get your confidence up and use some common sense!” she thundered and looked back down at her brief.

I went back to my desk, shaking in inferiority.  I didn’t know how I’d finish out the workday, but somehow I did.  It helped that this was only a part-time job and a temp job at that.

Just months before, I had graduated from University of Illinois at Chicago with a BA in English Lit.  As we stood in caps and gowns, everyone I talked to said the same thing, “I don’t know what I’m going to do now.”

I did.  I was going to be a writer!  I was already living alone in a garret in the dead center of Pilsen, where stray dogs outnumbered domestic dogs two to one, even if you included the packs of pitbulls that the local drug lords bred.  I’d walk out my door every morning to see the windows smashed in on all the cars parked on my side of the street.  If this wasn’t a nouveau La Boheme, I didn’t know what was.  I was already 23, which seemed a ripe old age, so I told myself I’d better get cracking on my novel if I ever wanted to be anybody.

Even at the height of that summer in 1997, I had no idea how cold and lonely my writing desk would be.  Life itself was cold and lonely.  My best friend hated my boyfriend and was jealous of all the time I spent with him, so she dumped me.  My boyfriend went on to dump me for his girlfriend.  Our mutual friends knew him first, so they went with him.  I thought I had a lot of friends in school, but I guess I missed the memo that our friendships would expire once school let out.  And the only models I had for artist life were the suffering auteurs screening at Facets and the too-smart-and-aware-to-be-happy intellectuals we’d studied in class.  Other people could be sunny and blond and make money and go to bars and dance clubs and run around with people who laughed a lot, but I was supposed to buckle down and be serious.  And although I was living in a neighborhood full of artists, I held myself aloof even from them, partly to avoid any possibility of rejection and partly so I’d be sure I’d be writing instead of socializing.  My writing desk became a lonely, lonely place.

Add to this that I didn’t know what to write and nothing I put on paper looked any good to me.  I didn’t feel cut out for this life.  It was all masochism, no orgasm.  But some intransigent part of myself kept telling me not to give up.  Sticking with it seemed impossible, though.

Before I went to the temp agency that sent me to Anne, I’d been working all year for another group of lawyers, who were always slamming doors and raging at everything in sight, including the water cooler, which was always replenished and never once broke down.  All the employees would bandage up their souls at the end of the day and amble home.  I wasn’t meditating yet, so my only modes of recovery were chain-smoking and doing Nyquil shots before bed.

But one day after work I ran into someone who’d gone to high school with me.  Her head was shaved and she was decked out in loose-fitting, Lady Miss Kier business casual and Cuban heels.  I asked her, “What are you doing now?”  She said, “I’m a designer.”  In that instant it occurred to me that maybe my problem was that I wasn’t using my talents in my day job like she was.  I gave her a huge hug and said, “Thank you for letting me know!,” before jumping on the 60 Blue Island bus to my apartment on Throop Street where I’d intended to craft a whole new strategem.

By this time, I’d understood that my torture-artist plan wasn’t working.  I’d already begun camping out in the Self-Help section of Barnes & Noble, where I read books like Manifest Your Destiny and Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow. I decided that, if she could be a designer, I could make my living as a writer. The next day, I’d gone into my job and given two weeks notice.  From there, I’d slapped my MasterCard on Kinko’s counter, revamped my resume, and had 200 copies spun out on the finest Silverstone card stock.  If the lilies of the field were more richly arrayed than King Solomon in all his finery, I could at least find a writing job.  The Universe would reward my ballsiness.  That’s what all the books had said.

The winners of the world were up at dawn, moving among the hordes to big jobs in steel-and-glass high rises.  I’d been right out there with them, demonstrating the audacity all the books taught me to have: cold calling, pushing my resume on receptionists and executives who would chuckle with bemusement rather than admire my chutzpah; and on job counselors at the alumni association, who could only offer blank stares whenever I’d beg them to tell me what I could do to make a living as a writer.

Months crept by and the universe still hadn’t coughed up the goods.  I’d weep and endure daily panic attacks.  I did not sleep.  Each day, as I tripped through the streets of the Loop trying to pitch my nascent skills to businesses, I felt at one with the winos whom I’d see blacked out on doorsteps over paper bags that were drenched in Wild Irish Rose.

The books I planned to write, the living I planned to make, did they all amount to a laughable pipe dream?  I looked at the real world and broke it to myself, “Maybe.”  I gave up throwing caution to the wind, defying the self-help gurus’ instructions.  I had rent to pay.  Although my dream to write books never waned, my resolve to fill the pages did.

Tail between my legs, I went through the battery of tedious, emasculating typing and software tests at temp agencies while the staff smacked gum and compared nail polish.  Yet even with my B.A. and prior office experience, not even they had anything for me in the booming Clinton economy.  But one day, an agency called with a part-time legal assistant’s job.  It only paid enough to cover rent and utilities but it was all I could find.  That’s how I came to work for Anne.

I came back to the office the morning after Anne assailed me for not seeing that CEO Agreements and CEO Contracts were so obviously the same things.  No sooner did I take off my coat than Anne screamed, “Kyle, Get in here!”  I rushed into her office

Anne took off her glasses same as she had the day before, “I…I’m at a loss for words here.  I had a stack of Professional Service Agreements for you to overnight to Nashville and now they’re gone.  Gone!”

I said, “Oh, dear.  Did somebody swipe them from your desk?”

She laughed and shook her head, her eyes on the desk, “You kill me, Kyle.  You just…you absolutely kill me.”

“I don’t…understand,” I said.

“I left them with you,” she smiled at me, squinting, “I left them with you and now they’ve vanished.  I looked in your desk.  Nowhere!  I looked in the cabinets.  Nowhere!  I called Nashville.  They have no record of them.”

“Nothing was on my desk, Anne,” my heart beat frantically, “Nothing.  I swear!”

“Never!,” she roared, “NEVER have I had this problem with my other assistants.  Never, never, ever!  I left them on your desk, along with a note with specific instructions as to what to do with them.”

“Anne,” I gulped, “I never saw that pile of contracts or your note.”

“I suggest you get back out there and look,” she stabbed her finger into the air, “And tell me why this happened and why this will NEVER happen again!”

I scrambled around the office.  I pulled apart every cabinet, every file.  I looked behind every shelving unit.  I looked under ever stick of furniture.  “Find anything?” Anne said, standing over me as I looked under a stack of phone books next to the credenza in the filing room.  All I could say was no. She said nothing in response but fumed all the same as she tore back into her office.

Anne came back out of her office and made her way to the door with her purse on her shoulder. “I have to go to a meeting on Fullerton,” she snapped.

“Anne,” I said. She stopped and framed herself in the open door.  I asked her, “Do you mind if I check your desk?  I don’t want to go through any of your personal items, but if there’s even an outside chance that…”

“FINE!” she screamed.  “I mean, I’ve already looked but another set of eyes, even if they are your eyes, might help.”

The door banged shut behind her.  I couldn’t believe I was living out this fate.  Taking lashes as a temp in the dingy office of the legal department of a for-profit hospital, where the only other employee was Anne.  I sifted through all the contents of every drawer of her desk and found nothing but a lot of legal clutter.  That is, until I dug into the left bottom drawer, where I found a stack of Professional Service Contracts and a note to me laying under a bottle of TUMS.

I took a deep breath and carried the contracts over to my desk.  I turned on my radio, which was set to 98.7, the classical station that I played as a way of cultivating a refinement I couldn’t find in these dreary environs.  A Tchaikovsky violin concerto was on.  As I prepared the contracts for shipment, I wondered how Tchaikovsky and all sorts of other great artists got started and what fate had so lovingly guided them to greatness.

In the midst of this rumination, Anne walked in through the legal department door.  “Anne,” I said, my hand on the Professional Service Contracts, “I found them.”

She breathed a wind tunnel of relief, “Oh, Kyle!  Wherever had you left them?”

I smiled at her just as she’d been smiling at me, right before sticking all those shivs in, “I didn’t leave them anywhere.  Until this morning, I didn’t even know about them.  They were in your desk.”

Anne slapped her hand against her forehead and laughed, “Ugh!  Where was my head this whole time?”  She laughed some more and said, “So!  How can we keep this from happening again!”

My chin fell to my chest, “Anne, you had the contracts the whole time.  I didn’t even know about them.  If I had, I would have put them in their right place.”

“Well,” she raised her shoulders, “We’ll have to figure out a system.”  She proceeded to walk into her office and I overheard her make a call to a friend about how her 10-year-old daughter wasn’t turning out to be the student she’d hoped she’d be.

I walked back into the filing room, grabbed one of the Chicago Yellow Pages books and looked up theaters.  If paying jobs weren’t going to give me the experience I needed to build a writer’s portfolio, maybe nonpaying jobs would.  And where better to look for a nonpaying job than in a theater?

The first place I called was the Blue Rider Theater.  It was right in my neighborhood at Halsted and 18^th Street and I was in love with its namesake, Wassily Kandinsky’s group of malcontent painters.  A few years earlier, I’d gone to the Blue Rider to see a minimalist adaptation of A Room of One’s Own, where Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare’s sister and a dead-broke black woman hashed out how to make magic of a careworn world.  It made me want to create whole universes on the fresh canvas of a 95-cent spiral notebook.

“We don’t have assignments for writers right now,” the artistic director told me, “but we definitely need volunteers.  You know, stagehands.  I’m sure writing opportunities will crop up later, here and there.  Want to come by the theater Friday night?”

The next morning, the gruesome yellow walls, dented metal cabinets and mousy brown carpeting of the for-profit health care company’s Legal Counsel Office seemed almost bearable.  I wasn’t just a temp anymore.  Soon I’d be a writer in a theater.

Blue Rider was at the tail end of Sex Fest: 69 Plays in 69 Days.  Their lobby was papered with framed and unframed photos of hunky porn centerfolds, cumming cocks, hardcore T&A and coital scenes, some of which were taped up everywhere but at the insertion points.  I arranged and set up props while a visiting troupe of performance artists was rehearsing a lugubrious, eurythmic dance in aerobic leotards and chanting a la Greek chorus, “Learn to accept limitation and failure forever.”  I grimaced, thinking to myself, “So this is what life looks like after college.”

When we were ready to open the doors for the night’s performances, it seemed every stripe of person was turning out for the last nights of Sex Fest: yuppies, punk rockers, leather daddies, grandmas, whites, black, Latinos, Asians, garbage men, gas-station attendants, you name it.  After passing out programs to audience members at the door, I turned out the lobby lights and put the red velour dividing-curtain back on its hook.

An Englishman named Lawrence waited with me behind the curtain, carrying a box of latex gloves.  He clearly hadn’t taken a bath in years and it was such a relief when he adjusted his white lab coat and coke-bottle glasses and strode on to the stage floor, although I had to wait a while to inhale.

The house lights went off.  The strobe light went on.  Lounge music struck up.  An image of open labia shot on to a projection screen at center stage.  Lawrence hopped into the projector light.  The labia were on his chest now.  He shimmied up and down, flapping his arms to the squawk of the lounge music.  Two audience members openly demanded their money back.  Without further ado, Lawrence commenced with his monologue.

I couldn’t hear most of it from behind the curtain, but the word “fuck” made frequent and obstreperous appearances.  At one point, I peeked out from behind the curtain to find Lawrence handing out obscene postcards to the front row.  People even asked him to autograph them, just in case he made it big some day.

“Now for a lesson in art history,” I heard his voice boom. My ears pricked up high!  Finally, something from college!  I peeked out from behind the curtain. “I’m talking about Annie Sprinkle.”  A shot of Annie Sprinkle’s New York performance, where she revealed her clitoris for all to see and peer filled the screen.  After showing another couple volumes of naughty pictures and delivering several sordid soliloquies, Lawrence took a topless bow, his pasty love handles jiggling in the glare of the spotlight.

I could already see that my chances of having the Blue Rider hand me my big break as a writer was withering like the pink orchid that Annie Sprinkle had stuck between her legs in Lawrence’s picture.

Drucilla: American Ambassador to the Alien Invaders

Part of the reason I’m doing this blog is that I don’t want to keep all my writing in notebooks.  I’d like to write more to actual people, but I’m still casting around for material for fully formed pieces.  A lot of these posts don’t amount to stories but are more like real-life case files for characters that I might use in future pieces.

Often, if they’re stories at all, they’re more like Zen stories in that they go nowhere!

So, with that disclaimer, I’ll share some of my notes on Drucilla.

Back when I still lived in Chicago, I once shared an apartment at Division and Ashland with two guys named Steve.  One of the Steves was studying to be a Unitarian minister.  The other Steve dropped out of his job in corporate America and announced that he was moving in with two guys in Rogers Park who were giving him reduced rent in exchange for acting in their pornographic films.  (I’d seen Steve naked a couple times to and from our morning showers.  I can’t imagine those guys in Rogers Park were letting him do more than wear black and play bongos in these onscreen orgies.)  This meant that Unitarian novitiate Steve and I had to put an ad in The Reader for a roommate.

The ad was simple:

Two eccentric gay roommates in Wicker Park seeking respectful third roommate.

The first applicant was Pawel, a shifty-eyed writer from Warsaw who no sooner introduced himself than he told us he was having an affair with a priest.  “Give me two months,” he said in his deep Slavic accent, arching an eyebrow, “And you’ll see I’ll have him out of his vestments and back on the streets and into trouble.”  I remarked to Pawel, “Wow!  You speak English so well!”  I told Steve I wouldn’t mind having a ringside seat for Pawel’s version of The Thorn Birds.  But Steve said there’s a reason he became a Unitarian and Pawel, despite his worst intentions, would be bringing too much Jesus home.

So we moved on to the next applicant.  On the answering machine, she sounded like a straight-up valley girl: “Um, yeah, hi, like, I saw the ad and, like, I’m, like, looking too, so, like…okay, so, my name is Drucilla.  Give me a call.”  I had bad vibes about meeting Drucilla, but Steve urged me to keep an open mind.  I expected Malibu Barbie to be coming through the doors at any moment, swinging her spangled, spaghetti-strapped Coach purse.  Instead, a swarthy young woman in black jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt walked through the door.  She had a grungy white guy with her, who explained her situation, “She goes to DePaul.  She gets student loans and can give you a three-month deposit right here and now.”

I asked, “What are you majoring in?”

She said, “Well, I was in the theater school but I got cut, so now I’m a graphic design major.”  Drucilla looked down and only spoke when spoken to.

“Are you her boyfriend?” Steve asked the guy.

“No,” he said, “I’m just a friend.  She’s got a boyfriend.”

“Well, you’re one up on me!” Steve said to Drucilla.

Drucilla smiled and said, “Don’t worry.  I won’t be here too often.  My boyfriend lives, like, right around the corner and I spend most of my time over there.”

Steve beamed a smile back.  I could see the roommate connection sparking, but I felt that sense had to triumph over snow-jobs, so I jumped in, “Well, okay, we’ll be making our decision at the end of the week and we’ll let you…”

“I’ve made my decision,” Steve said.

Drucilla smiled at me now.  I weakened and unfolded the lease as she whipped out her pen and checkbook.

Drucilla moved in the next day.  I sat writing a short story by the living-room window as I heard Drucilla and her boyfriend hauling her mattress up the stairs, “Matt!  Like, you, like, have to, like, twist it that way and then this way, like, gawd!  I mean, I know you’re, like, a creative type, but, like, use your head!”  The minute they got the mattress into the room, she sat next to Steve on the couch and said, “So, whatcha doin’?”  He said, “Research for my thesis.”  She looked at his book, “Emerson!  Gawd, I hated that shit in high school!”  She lit a cigarette.  Her boyfriend Matt pushed back his hair and said, “Why do you hate Emerson?  He was a nonconformist.”

“Oh, whatever!” Drucilla said, blowing a smoke ring to the ceiling.

Steve jumped up off the couch with a halting gesture, “Drucilla!  Drucilla!  I’m highly allergic to cigarette smoke.  You can’t smoke in the house.  I’m sorry, I should’ve told you.”

Drucilla took another drag, “Fine!”  She clopped across the kitchen, opened the door, stepped out on to the deck and pitched the cigarette out into the howling winter wind.  “There!” she said, “Happy?”

Steve said, “Um, I hope the cigarette hit a snow pile.  Otherwise, the building could burn down.”

Matt stood staring at Steve.  Drucilla walked back into the room, grabbed Matt’s arm and said, “Well, there’s, like, more than one way to burn down a building.”  She giggled and they went back into her new room.  Sooner after, we heard girl screeches.  Steve and I decided to go get something to eat at Jinx.  The staff might have been the worst assholes never to deserve a tip, but at least with them, we were out of earshot of girly orgasms.  I said to Steve, “I think when she first showed up at the apartment, she was being coached.  That guy with her was coaching her so she’d pass the audition.”

Steve pushed up his glasses and said, “So that’s why she wasn’t talking until now…”

When we came back, the door to Drucilla’s bedroom was open and we smelled cigarettes.

The next day, Steve was out at an overnight retreat and I had been at a writing seminar all day and met a friend for dinner afterwards.  I came home at about 10 to find about 20 people sitting around our apartment.  Drucilla had decided to have a housewarming.  She’d forgotten to tell me or Steve.

“Oh, hi!,” she said to me, “Um, yeah, do you mind?”

I said, “I have to be up early for work.”

“Oh,” she said, knocking back a peach schnapps, “Yeah, no worries.  We’re going to Crobar after this, so…”

Since the damage was already done, I tried to mingle with the guests but her friends made it clear that this was a velvet-rope party and my place was behind my bedroom door, alone.  At about one a.m., they all trundled off to Crobar.

Drucilla went to Crobar and sundry clubs at about the same hour every night.  I’d be trying to get my winks in before having to wake up for work at 4:30, but was kept up by the sound of Drucilla strutting around the hardwood floors in clogs, playing all sorts of Lilith Fair crap from Suzanne Vega and Sarah McLaughlin, as she applied makeup and selected from her closet of tight clothes.  Sure, she had school the next day but that didn’t stop her.  And, anyway, as she used to always tell us, she was an insomniac and had to do something with all the hours she’d be up.

I once said to her, “If you’re an insomniac, it’s a sure sign that emotional issues are keeping you up at night.  You might want to see a therapist.”

Drucilla screwed up her face and said with a wave of the hand, “God, have you been, like, talking to Matt or something?  I’ll leave that introspective crap to you writer types!  I don’t want to be, like, some…like, depressed artist!  If I’m gonna be alive, I’m gonna go out and have fun!”

And, oh, what fun she had while living with us!  She loved our pad, with its skyline view, so much, she never spent time at Matt’s at all.  In fact, Matt spent most of his time at our place.  Even when Drucilla wasn’t home.  Often I’d be reading on the couch and hear a key in the door.  Matt would enter without saying hello, just like he wouldn’t say hello to me on the street.  He’d just walk into the living room and say, “Drucilla here?”  When I’d shake my head, he’d walk into her bedroom, shut the door and wait for her.  When we confronted Drucilla about Matt having a key, she giggled and said, “Oh, I guess you guys didn’t get my email.  Or maybe I just forgot to press Send!”

The same day she told us this, Matt sat back on our couch with Drucilla, watching MTV’s The Real World, saying over and over, “That guy’s a faggot! That guy’s a bum-gunner if I ever saw one!”  Steve grabbed the remote, clicked off the TV and said to Matt, “Get out!  Get out!”  Matt stood up and went chest to chest with Steve, who took off his bifocals and said, “I’m under legal obligation to tell you I have a black belt in karate.” Matt paused, grabbed his rucksack and said, “Come on, Drucilla.  Fuck them!  Let’s go.”  And she ran out after Matt.

The following evening, we sat Drucilla down and cited our every objection – the keys, the smoking (I didn’t mind, but Steve was allergic), the loud (and bad) music, the unannounced parties, the dirty dishes stacked up in the sink – and she burst into tears, shouting, “This is not a home!  It doesn’t feel like, like, like…a home!  I pay rent here too, you know!”

I said, “Drucilla, if we’d known that you were going to act this way, we never would have let you live here.”

She said, “Let me live here?  Let me live here?  I live here!  Nobody lets me live here!”

I said, “That’s an impressive bit of drama, Drucilla, but unfortunately the evidence is against you.  Steve and I chose you as a roommate.  We didn’t have to.  We let you live here.”  Drucilla ran to her room and cried her eyes out.  We could hear her howling and howling between whimpers.  I said to Steve, “She’s got to go.”

Steve said, “But, Kyle, she’s crying!  We can’t just tell her to pack her bags!”

It worked!  Drucilla’s well-timed tears made me look like the bad guy.

Drucilla’s mom was over all the time too.  She’d also given her mom a key without telling us.  I didn’t mind her mom so much, though.  Her mom was a simple Mexican woman in dowdy clothes who worked in a ball-bearing factory on the near-south side.  Drucilla’s dad was a first-generation American from a Nigerian family whom her mom met soon after she’d crossed the border. Now he was long gone to parts unknown but at least he’d stuck around long enough to marry her mom and get her a green card.  Drucilla’s mother had won a housing voucher from a HUD lottery and moved to Palatine so Drucilla could go to good public schools.  Hence Drucilla’s valley girl voice.  Not that every girl in the north suburbs talks like that, but Drucilla overdid it to fit in at the mall and the accent stuck.  The hardship Drucilla’s mother faced helped me see that Drucilla must have faced some hardship herself, the kind that kept her up all night years later.

But, shit, she was keeping us up all night too!

And one day I came home to find a puppy in our living room!  Drucilla introduced her as Lola, a Chihuahua-Cocker Spaniel mix that Drucilla had bought at an Old Town pet store after her application got turned down at the Anti-Cruelty Society.  I don’t want to say anything against Lola.  She was a sweetie-pie of the first water but she speckled turds all over the kitchen floor and yip-yip-yapped all night and day.

“What can we do?,” Steve said, “Drucilla’s right.  She pays rent too.”

Around this same time, Steve had invested in a surround-sound flat-screen TV, which he installed in the living room where the cheap-o USR used to be.  The other Steve, who’d ended up leaving the Larry Flynt apartment in Rogers Park, came over one day and decided to unload his best Ikea couches on us before moving back to his hometown in Pennsylvania.  Drucilla went from not going to school much to not going at all, now that we had a better furnished apartment, which she was paying her part for with student loans.  Other than for bathroom trips, she only left the couch to go to last-call parties at Crobar.  The rest of the time, she spent watching MTV on full blast while petting Lola, the yapping lapdog.

By now, I was staying away from the apartment as much as possible.  When I was home, I’d walk to my bedroom a sickly green as all the trash TV crashed in from over the airwaves.  Drucilla would glower at me when I’d reach into my bag for earplugs and shut my door.  “Read any good books lately?” she once quipped as she ate cheetos, knowing I was going to abstract myself behind closed doors with Proust.

One day, I walked in and found Drucilla watching MTV Europe.  To keep a modicum of peace, the two of us kept a nodding acquaintance and sometimes even chitchatted.  I petted Lola, who couldn’t help but shower everyone and anyone in sight with kisses, though Drucilla would have preferred that she’d bite both my hands off.  When I looked at the screen, I saw some chick talking to the MTV VJ in a Swedish Chef accent, “Oh, yeah, yeah, we like hip-hop here, yeah, yeah, sure.”

I said to Drucilla, “Are they in Holland?”

She tssked and said, “I don’t know!  I don’t give a fuck what they call those countries.”

“So, I take it you’re not a fan of the U.N.?”

“The what?” she asked. “Is that another one of those Euro-trash places?”

“The UN?” I said.

She said, “Well, I mean, I don’t know!  I don’t give a shit about those other countries!  They could, like, explode off the map, I still wouldn’t give a shit.  I’m an American girl!”

“That’s not a good attitude to have these days, Drucilla,” I cautioned.

She said, “I don’t care!  Seriously.  I’m serious!  If aliens came to the planet and said, ‘Show us to the American girl.’ I’d, like, say, ‘Here!  Here I am!  Right here!  I’m the American girl!’”

Two days later, for the first time ever, all three of us were sitting on the couch watching TV together.  The news broadcaster was reporting on how two planes had crashed through the World Trade Center that morning and another had crashed into the Pentagon.  Hundreds were killed.  The sky was conspicuously absent of the sound of planes flying en route to O’Hare.  Like a lot of people, Steve and I were wondering if Chicago was ever on the hit-list.  But Drucilla told us that what pissed her off most was that, now that this has happened, she couldn’t watch her favorite TV shows.

I moved into my own place two weeks later and didn’t watch TV for a full two years after that.  I never saw Drucilla again, though I heard she was badmouthing me around town for being such a prig.

Julius and I were talking yesterday about how what made America great were its immigrants. Not the Tea Party types and the assimiliationists who all but say that other countries don’t matter, and who shout from the rooftops that America should never apologize for invading them.

But at least we can rest assured that, if space aliens ever invade America, Drucilla has promised to step up and represent us.