Baseball Season Is Over

There are certain things that every man must do in his life. It’s different for every man. Some men aspire to literary greatness; some pine for the glories of rare athletic feats. But for me, I just wanted to catch a foul ball at a Major League baseball game.

It finally happened a couple of years ago, in the most fucked-up, convoluted way possible. This is me we are talking about, after all.

Every single goddamned word of this story is true.

I was dating a hot blonde from Philly who for the sake of her pride and my safety shall remain nameless. We were pretty serious — she came to Pittsburgh every couple of weekends, partied with me and my Southside friends, there were talks of marriage, whatever. I was drinking A LOT back then … and hot blonde was no teetotaler. I have long maintained that two alcoholics can not coexist in a loving relationship, and I’m pretty sure there were never two bigger drunks in the whole recorded history of human civilization. Our favorite drink was vodka; our second-favorite drink was more vodka. Our preferred method of birth control was alcohol and malnutrition — a winning recipe, as to this day, to my knowledge, I have fathered no bastards.

She wanted to take me to a Phillies game. She was insistent upon this. Being that I was/am a loser with no adult responsibilities, I did the 5-hour drive to Philly one weekend, to cash in on the offer. Only problem was, I had a throbbing toothache that made driving difficult. The pain was so bad, I had begun to suspect the infection had spread to my brain. My tooth was literally rotting out of my head.

Now, my father is a dentist. Thinking I would kill two birds with one stone, I arranged for him to fix my tooth a few hours before the game. As he fired up the drill, I said to him: “Look, I have a date in an hour, is this going to, like, interfere with that?” He said, and I quote: “Oh, you’re definitely not going to be able to eat, drink, or talk for at least the next twelve hours.” Pzzzz! Shot of lidocaine, right in my jaw. My whole head immediately went numb. My father is kind of a dick.

I decide to drive to the game anyway. I pick up hot blonde at her friend’s house, blasting Sonic Youth out of my sweet-ass Honda Civic. She has a bottle of vodka in her purse. As luck would have it, I have a flask of vodka in my jeans. I also have some Percocets my dad gave me for pain, in addition to my usual cornicopia of anti-anxiety medications. Hot blonde has her own mini-pharmacy of random pills, which she proceeds to grind into a fine powder using the blunt end of a knife. So I’m driving through downtown traffic with a paralyzed right arm and a flask of vodka between my knees as hot blonde snorts rails of Vicodin and Xanax and God-knows what else off the dashboard. I do not recommend this.

By some miracle we get to the game without causing a ten-car pileup, and it’s just a sea of cardinal red and oily Philly douchery as far as the eye can see. Which is fine — I grew up in that environment, and am sort of an oily douche myself. I am wearing a purple shirt and wraparound sunglasses. Hot blonde has settled on an ensemble of stiletto heels, a mini-skirt, and a cutoff shirt that barely clears the undersides of her breasts. To say we looked out of place is an understatement. You could have spotted us from a low-flying aircraft.

The seats are great. First base line, three rows back. I probably could have — and, given his play in the World Series later that year, perhaps should have — spit on Ryan Howard. I immediately locate the one vendor in the stadium who is selling non-watered-down beer (Railbender Ale, 7% alcohol by volume, thank you very much), and by the end of the second inning I am completely shithoused. It has not yet occurred to me that we are playing the Atlanta Braves, a hated NL East rival. I’m more concerned with the kid sitting directly in front of me, a 10-year-old boy with blond hair and apple cheeks who’d brought his own glove to the game. It was like something out of a movie. A very bad, very feel-good movie.

“I’m going to catch a foul ball,” I manage to say, or rather, to moo like a cow, “and when I do, I’m going to give it to this kid right here.”

And maybe it was due to the copious amount of alcohol and drugs we had just consumed, or to the absolute confidence with which I had made my declaration … but hot blonde BELIEVED ME. She actually thought I was going to do it!

What happened next is kind of hard to describe. I remember hearing the crack of the bat — Atlanta was batting, I don’t remember the player — and then what can only be described as a “hubbub” in the stands around us. Everyone stood, so I stood. The ball was coming our way. The gentleman directly to my left — a Braves fan — got his hand on the ball, but he couldn’t quite wrap it up; the ball banged off his hand, ricocheted off the back of my seat and curled around to the front of my chest, suspended in mid-air. I didn’t so much catch the ball as reach my hand out and pluck it out of the air.

Total silence in the stands around us. No one really knew what happened, where the ball went. I looked at the ball in my hand, looked at hot blonde, then back at the ball, then at the people in my section, and let out a war cry of victory which, due to the drugs in my system, sounded less like a war cry and more like:

“BLUUUUUUURRRGGH!”

I believe the people in the stands may have thought I was retarded, because they erupted in a thunderous applause the likes of which I have never heard.

Now, one thing I learned from this experience is that when you catch a foul ball at a baseball game, you have maybe 6 to 10 seconds where YOU ARE THE MAN. Play on the field has stopped, the next pitch has not yet been thrown, and you are a member of this mini-community in the stands, you have beaten the odds, you have just come up with the ball, and people are happy for you. But those 6 to 10 seconds are all you get, and after they’ve passed, you are just another shlub at a baseball game, sit the fuck down, you’re blockin’ the view.

I was not about to let those ten seconds pass and then fade off into obscurity. I remembered my promise, tapped the kid in front of me on the shoulder, handed him the ball.

“Here.”

He looked at me with wide, blown-glass eyes, like I’d just brought thunder down from Mount Olympus. I don’t think he really understood what was happening. An official Major League baseball — straight from Cole Hamels’ glove! — with the Lena Blackburne rubbing mud still on it! — was now in his hand. It was all too much for him to process. His mother broke the spell by turning around and asking me earnestly:

“Are you giving it to him, or showing it to him?”

“I’m giving it to him.”

“Why?”

“Because I’m a grown-ass man, what the fuck do I want with a baseball?”

She stopped talking to me then. Her husband — the kid’s father — ordered two Miller Lights for me and hot blonde. Our tribute. We would feast and drink wine like ancient Romans come sundown.

But first, I called my sister. I got no more than ten words into the story when she said: “Wait, are you wearing a purple shirt?” Apparently she was watching the game on TV, and there was a bit of a delay. She saw the whole thing happen as I was telling her the story. And, according to my sister, the longtime Phillies announcer Harry Kalas, whose voice I had pretty much grown up on, said something to the effect of:

“Now that’s the power of sports. You see something like that, and it restores your faith in people. What a fine young man. A great day for baseball.”

A fine young man. I was twisted out of my fucking mind on vodka and prescription pills!

We didn’t make it past the fourth inning. We bailed on the game, went to a casino in the bad part of the city. I think some other things happened, though I can’t be sure. We ended up at a Holiday Inn just a few blocks away from the stadium. It was here, in a hotel room with a dogshit view of South Philly, surrounded by empty airplane bottles of liquor, that hot blonde asked me to choke her out.

“It feels really good,” she explained, placing my hands on her neck to demonstrate the appropriate technique, “if you climax while you’re being choked,” she added helpfully.

Remember what I said about two alcoholics not being able to coexist in a loving relationship?

Anyway, I had never asphyxiated anyone in bed before, and wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity — not on this day, not with the gods of baseball and young love, not with Dionysius, the trickster god of poetry and libations, smiling favorably down upon me.

I grasped her neck … and she stopped me. She whipped off my studded belt, snapped it once for good measure, and handed me the belt.

“Wait … you want me to choke you with A FUCKING BELT???”

“It’s better that way.”

“You’re fucking insane.”

And she was. And she is. But with hot blonde, it was always a good kind of crazy, a fun-loving crazy, never a mean or manipulative crazy. The kind of crazy that causes men to get in their modest vehicles on a random Thursday morning and to drive halfway across the state on a whim. The kind of crazy that makes you feel utterly, inexorably alive … until, utterly, inexorably, you’re dead.

So I get behind hot blonde, and now I’m fucking her doggystyle and strangling her at the same time, and after like thirty seconds of this she kind of slumps over and falls partially off the bed at an awkward angle.

I guess she’d passed out. But I didn’t think she’d passed out. I thought I’d killed her.

Now, please bear in mind, this was before nursing school, before I had ever seen a dead body, before I had even felt a pulse. Everyone likes to fantasize about how expertly and heroically they would handle such a tender situation, but I am here to tell you that, when push comes to shove, your survival instincts do not always match those lofty expectations. I gathered my clothes, fled the hotel like it was on fire, got in my car and drove to my grandmother’s house in Atlantic City.

I spent the whole day wandering around the beach like the walking dead. At one point it occurred to me that I could just wade out into the ocean and drift away into oblivion, just drown out the memory of killing a person I had loved, get stung to death by jellyfish, or eaten by a shark, and that would be that.

Later that afternoon I finally got the balls to call hot blonde’s cell phone. If it went through to voice mail, I was fully prepared to abscond to Jamaica with whatever pathetic sum of money I had in my bank account. In fact, by the fourth ring, I was already calculating the precise amount of money it would take to commission a puddle jumper to take me across the border and live the rest of my life as a fugitive. But she answered on the sixth ring.

“So,” she said. I could tell from her voice that she was already drunk. “You gonna come over tonight and smash me or what?”

It was like nothing had ever happened.

I miss those days. I miss hot blonde and her dumb Philly accent. We text sometimes, mostly to trade music, and to update each other on the losers we are dating. That was probably my last great Ernesto experience before I went to nursing school and became a passably normal and decent human being. Anyway, that’s my baseball story. I hope you enjoyed it, and will share it one day with your children.

Cooked

What I think happened is, the older brother had talked to the younger brother about building a bomb, and the younger brother was like, yeah sure, Islam, and maybe he was smoking weed at the time. Then one day the older brother came over with an extra backpack and said, here, you have to do this, and the younger brother didn’t really want to do it, he valued human life and stuff, but he’d talked so much shit to his friends and on the twitter that he was able to think, in that moment, hey, it’s really just a simple matter of moving an object a few feet, give or take, from point A to point B, and just leaving it there, not even really doing anything, not even looking inside the backpack, it had seemed so small, and weighed so little, and his older brother, who was always kind of a fuckup and a kook, had probably just filled the backpack with a few dozen nails and a computer chip that wasn’t connected to anything and spare parts from an old car and a few tennis balls stuffed with matchsticks that would just kick up some smoke.

Of course what really happened is, the older brother and the younger brother had gone to the big race in Beantown, maybe they had taken the subway, or the T, or whatever they have there in Boston, and they’d dressed in silly costumes and left the backpacks inconspicuously aside a crowd of people, which happened to include an 8-year-old boy, this point being clarified on the news for maximum sadness, and the bomb had gone off, and instead of smoke there was fire, there was chaos, there were people running towards and away from the chaos and fire, there was a cop shot, a car jacked, all of it culminating in the younger brother’s blabbing on the twitter that very night about his being a “stress free kind of guy,” which, good for him, that quality will serve him well on Death Row, where there is sure to be a lot of stress, on his soul, on his stomach, on his digestive tract, all the way down to, or perhaps beginning with, his anus, although it is admittedly difficult to reconcile such a purportedly stress-free ‘tude with such a bloody senseless loss of life and limb.

What I think the younger brother should do is, he should take what really happened and flush it down and away like a dirty bath. Because it doesn’t belong to him anymore, if it ever did, it belongs to us now, and so does he. What he should do, moving forward, because things must always move forward, even in death, which is the ultimate forward move, is he should allow us to write this story for him. And when we do, as we have already begun to, he should smile a bit savagely and give us his best Charlie Manson grin and nod his head and say yes, yes, that is how it happened, I was the mastermind, my older brother the pawn, I hate America and don’t understand Americans and really despise your burgers and fries and your sporting events and your turbo-charged cars and brightly colored running sneakers and those star-spangled banners you just loooove to drag through the air after things like this happen, because if he does this, if he lets us have this, then surely the more religious of us will say, we should allow this madman to live, some things are so pure they must be preserved, and the kooks and the fuckups among us, the nutbag and nitwit contingent, will even lobby for him to go free after a certain measure of time has passed, although, for the vast majority of us, which is to say those of us who were not burned in or around the fire, it will be enough to read about his execution some years from now, and to smile savagely for maximum impact, to take our marching orders from Big Brother, in this way showing him the nature of our mercy.

A Game of Trolls

Yesterday was Easter. I drove with my parents to New Jersey, where most of my family lives. We were driving past a heavily wooded and vaguely menacing area called the Pine Barrens, when they started talking about the Jersey devil, a small, dragonlike creature that apparently inhabits the woods. I thought they were fucking with me, until I looked it up. “Nasty little bugger,” said my dad.

Easter is, of course, a children’s holiday. A time of bunnies and candy and colored eggs. For the adults, we had the season 3 premiere of Game of Thrones.

Over at Huffington Post, Arts Editor Michael Hogan has a blog post up recapping the episode. I found the piece to be affable, if punchless; it passed the time as I gave my grandmother her pills and sat down to eat my breakfast. But, since you can’t do shit on the Internet without the trolls crawling out of the woodwork, the comments section is a veritable free-for-all of geeksnark. A sampling:

allenmarion:

It’s unreal that you get to write a recap blog post with out [sic] even a basic comprehension of what is happening on the show and in the episode itself.

Worlsc:

The “Knightsguard?” Face palm. This is your job. Can you at least find someone to watch with you who has read the books?

khops:

Why someone who has never read the books and can barely follow a storyline gets to write a recap of this awesome show I will never understand. “Knightsguard,” honestly.

PhxJustice:

Joffrey & Margaery aren’t married yet. They are only betrothed to each other. Please pay attention if you are going to write about the series.

That last point is pretty legitimate. A significant source of tension in the King’s Landing story arc derives from the possibility that Sansa may still marry Joffrey (as illustrated in the Blackwater episode, when Cersei frostily tells Sansa that she’d better learn how to use her pussy as a weapon “if you ever hope to be Queen”). If Joffrey was already married, Cersei would have no use for Sansa, and would likely have her shipped off to Harrenhal.

But these commenters aren’t merely criticizing the errors Hogan made in his haste to publish the piece in the few hours since the episode aired. They’re questioning his right to review the series in the first place.

Because–great God in heaven!–he has not even read the books! How could Hogan, who never even picked up A Storm of Swords, possibly examine the subtlety of that scene in which Jon Snow tricks Mance Rayder into accepting him into the wildling army? Why does he “get to” write these recaps?

Said the trolls. The fun continued on Twitter:

Look, it’s not unreasonable to expect an executive editor at a major news outlet to avoid these sorts of mistakes. An editor shouldn’t need an editor. (And I think Hogan is nerd-baiting a little bit here by admitting that he hasn’t read the books and is using A Wiki of Ice and Fire as a reference.) But to argue that he–or anyone–is incapable of producing a serviceable recap because he or she hasn’t read the voluminous source material on which the show is based, is ludicrous hyperbole. He’s qualified because he’s an upper-level editor at HuffPost and he wanted the assignment. Believe me, those are all the credentials he needs.

(Note: I’ve been wanting to use that awesome rejection slip from AGNI–with the badass monkeydragon on its letterhead–since forever, and what better excuse than the GoT premiere? I’m trapped in Philadelphia until tomorrow, I am full of ham, and I think I may be acutely withdrawing from various substances. So, there you have it.)

More Common Body Part Terms

I have received “notes” on a rejected story precisely once, from Leading Edge magazine.

Leading Edge is, of course, the student-run science fiction journal based out of Brigham Young University. Per their submission guidelines:

Stories with sex, profanity, excessive violence, or that belittle traditional family values or religion will not be considered … We will not edit works that include sex, homosexual content, graphic violence, heavy drug use, excessive profanity…

Well, then!

I wonder if there is some weird Orson Scott Card connection at play here. Card, you will no doubt recall, in addition to being a raving lunatic and out-and-out bigot, is a noted alumnus of Brigham Young U.

For whatever reason, I decided to send my 10,000-word story “Wombie” to Leading Edge. Some weeks later, I received six pages of notes in the mail. A sampling:

These notes, clearly written by college students, provide a window into the minds (and perhaps souls) of my prospective young Mormon reader base. Some highlights:

Consider cutting out some of the expletives.

I will do no such fucking thing.

They aren’t necessary and detract from the story.

Indeed they are, and they do not. Also: fuckfart.

page 20 — since Chrissy’s name hasn’t been mentioned since the beginning of the story, I had forgotten who she was at first. Maybe say “her daughter, Chrissy” here or mention her name more often throughout the story.

(vigorously simulating tugjob)

on page 23, the description of the animal uses such advanced words that I have a hard time picturing the animal. Could you use more common body part terms?

The biggest word on that page is “intestines.”

I like how you show Dr. Sarvas’ character, it is quite easy to pick up on his dry humor, pissimistic (sic) outlook on life, and slightly egocentric personality.

“Pissimistic” is my new favorite word. Kolledge kids say the darndest things!

The beginning is rather slow, not much to put the reader in with

The story begins with an 80-pound rodent being wheeled into a veterinarian’s office leaking slime from its anus.

The climax is well paced with the bug popping out, attacking the cow, then trying to escape while the Doctor tries to kill it.

Well, duh.

Very interesting idea to have the invading alien race implanting themselves in native species.

Thank you.

Is there any special significance to the alien “Eie” call stuff? Is it just what they say, their vocalizing sound?

When reading these notes, I imagine a room full of buttoned-up 19-year-old virgins, all crewcuts and good Midwestern manners, beginning each workshop with a little prayer, and then delving into an earnest and loving discussion of a story in which a giant boll weevil dissolves a cow with its corrosive saliva, and it warms my rotten heart.

Not Fiction, Still Rejection

By Sharon Stephenson

So here’s how it goes down for the wannabe in nonfiction. Actually, most of the process is exactly the same as for the poet and the fiction writer. We just have fewer places to send our work, and therefore, less variation in our rejection letters. With knots in our bellies, we still send out our essays and manuscripts either by snail mail or through some online submission portal. I prefer putting my weird literary creature and its stuffy little cover letter into a manila envelope. I walk to the post office and buy enough postage to ferry my beloved envelope off to a literary magazine like The Sun, a North Carolina-based class act that does not accept online submissions, period. But if I just submitted to those stately gentlemen of the literary world who only accept manila envelopes sealed with my DNA-rich saliva, I would be cutting of my published nose to spite my publishable face.

Every writer has Submittable bookmarked, since Submittable is the online giant for getting your nonfiction up onto someone else’s screen. However, the only writers who don’t hate Submittable are those currently not getting medication for their obsessive-compulsive disorder, because if you just take a quick glance below–hell, the font is so teeny you can’t even read it–all you see is that red word.  That word, dear friend, is “Declined.” The “Accepted” is a pleasant old-growth forest green, but who cares?  The thin-skinned writer only sees red, the color of rejection.

A few places accept either online or snail mail submissions. Some of those few also ask that you submit your work only to them because they will get back to you in due course, and you owe them some respect. My conclusion, based on one data point, is that one of these publications is run by Lucifer and his Legion.

Painted Bride Quarterly had a call for submissions to a themed issue on costume. I sent my manila envelope, stuffed with hopes, dreams, a cover letter, and a 3,000 word essay in keeping with their word limit. Six months later, no thumbs up or down, and another literary journal had an open call for a themed issue, also on costume.

Now, I have friends who not only write but get published and make money to boot. Most surprisingly of all, I have friends sit across the desk and select what gets published. (Note: I cannot submit work to these same friends because that’s just weird.) These friends with knowledge, with credentials, said it was entirely cool to email Painted Bride Quarterly and ask them for a status report.

Hi,

I submitted an essay in hard copy format for the Costume issue in July. I may have inadvertently excluded my SASE. I’m not sure of your reading timeline for Issue #87, but I can resubmit electronically or just rely on the generous spirit of your staff to let me know the status eventually, even if no SASE made its way to your desk.

Please advise.

Best regards,

Sharon Stephenson

Pretty sneaky to use the old “I forgot my Self-Addressed, Stamped Envelope” excuse, I admit, but I didn’t want to anger Lucifer and his Legion any more than necessary.

Lucifer and his Legion did not respond. My friends in the business shrugged their shoulders. Who can force someone to have manners? A full month later, I emailed again:

Dear Kathleen Volk Miller, Marion Wrenn, and the rest of the Painted Bride Quarterly staff,

Good afternoon.  I submitted an essay in hard copy format for the Costume issue (#87) back in July. I may have inadvertently excluded my SASE. I’m not sure of your reading timeline for Issue #87, but in case I did not submit a SASE, do you notify writers who have made such an oversight?

Just a quick reply would be appreciated.

Best regards,

Sharon Stephenson

Those who know me would be able to tell that I was mad as hell at this point–the “Just a quick reply would be appreciated” speaks volumes.

A month later, still no reply. I decided to look up a phone number to ring Lucifer and his Legion. I was always checking the Painted Bride Quarterly website, and so I it was easy to pop over to find a phone number. But in the few days since I had last checked, the Painted Bride Quarterly special issue on costume had gone live online, with the print version soon to follow. Of course, my 3,000 word essay was not in the mix. By this time, the deadline for submitting to the other literary journal had passed.

I made no phone call. Instead, I wrote this blog and sent it to Martin. Then, I resubmitted my damn essay.

Sharon Stephenson is currently Chair and Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College. Her literary nonfiction has appeared in The Dead Mule and Real Time. She blogs at www.strangeandcharming.com.

The Golden Sentence

I came home to this letter after a long, hard day at the hospital. It was pressed into the space between my storm door and front door. It reads:

Dear Neighbor,

I am sorry I was unable to speak with you personally. I stopped by to share some encouragement from the Bible with you.

You don’t have to be sorry, neighbor. I’m actually quite glad I missed the opportunity to discuss my faith with you–and you should be too.

You don’t get much useful information on this here blog, but I’m feeling generous today, and so I am going to tell you how to get rid of these hostile intruders–swiftly, non-criminally, and with as little effort as humanly possible.

You are going to say a single sentence, and repeat it as many times as necessary until all the Bible beaters in the world slink off into the mists of history. Now clear your throat, look that creepy Mormon dead in the eye, and repeat after me:

“I don’t discuss my faith with strangers.”

The above letter is basically an advertisement for a book called “What Does the Bible Really Teach?” a copy of which currently sits on the back of my toilet, in the event that I find myself entertaining drunk knuckleheads at 3 in the morning, as happens far more often that it should for a man of my age. I was not aware that the contents of the Bible were any more a mystery to the world than the molecular structure of water, but then again, I was raised literate, and my eyes are connected to my brain.

Now, I don’t mean to join the growing chorus of militant atheists who, galvanized by the popularity of intellectual “heavyweights” like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, are every bit as steadfastly crazy and cruel as your average homophobic, woman-hating evangelist. I don’t mind religious people. I went to a Catholic college. I work at a Catholic hospital. I was an altar boy for ten years. I admire Christians–that is, the nine or ten true Christians who still exist on this planet. And yet, at no point in my Catholic upbringing did I feel the urge to pamphleteer my neighborhood with brochures bearing bitter chestnuts such as this:

WHAT THE BIBLE TEACHES: At death, humans cease to exist. “The dead…are conscious of nothing at all,” states Ecclesiastes 9:5. Since the dead cannot know, feel, or experience anything, they cannot harm–or help–the living. –Psalm 146:3, 4.

My God, you people are terrifying. Who said anything about the dead harming the living? That is an even bleaker view of death than the one I currently harbor, and I’ve been suicidally depressed for a record 864 days in a row.

And another thing: Who the fuck goes around ringing people’s doorbells anymore? That is absolutely insane. Were none of you people raised in cities? Doesn’t everyone assume, as I do, that everyone is a murderous cannibalistic necrophiliac until proven otherwise?

Stay away from these nightmare peddlers. I’d tell you to not answer your door at all, but that’s unfair: there may be Girl Scout cookies on the other side. And I would never want you to miss out on some cookies. Alternately, you can do what my friend Stephen used to do in college: invite these weirdos into your kitchen, and encourage them to preach the Good Word while you lovingly stir a pot of hot chocolate laced with LSD.

The Case Against Huck Finn

“I want to write books that unlock the traffic jam in everybody’s head.”
– John Updike

The first real book I can remember reading was J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. I may have been 11 years old. I was banned from watching TV for some negligible crime involving the family dog and a bucket of paint. My allergies were acting up and I couldn’t go outside. My parents were fighting, and so I pulled a book at random from a box I’d found in the attic, and went into my room to disappear.

I remember thinking: “This book is really interesting. It’s about people even more messed up than my family.”

And also: “I wish they would stop yelling.”

About an hour later, during a lull in the domestic warfare that came to define my childhood, my mother entered my room, and found me under the covers reading the same moldy paperback she’d kept in her possession since she was around my age. She thumbed nostalgically through the first few pages, found this line, and read it out loud:

The rest were standing around in hatless, smoky little groups of twos and threes and fours inside the heated waiting room, talking in voices that, almost without exception, sounded collegiately dogmatic, as though each young man, in his strident, conversational turn, was clearing up, once and for all, some highly controversial issue, one that the outside, non-matriculating world had been bungling, provocatively or not, for centuries.

“What’s going on in that sentence?” she asked me. (My mother worked in education, and was skilled at these sorts of cold interrogations.)

“It’s a bunch of people, standing around a train station,” I answered.

“Mm.” She licked her finger, turned the page. “And the word matriculate. What does that mean?”

I shrugged my shoulders. I had no idea.

“It means go to college.” She closed the book. Sighed. “If you don’t know a word, you should look it up in the dictionary.” Then her face softened. “But a lot of the time, you can figure out what a word means, by the words that are around it.”

She gave me back the book. I noticed, for the first time I think, how veiny her hands were. And I realized that she had been crying. “So you learned a new word today. Good for you. You should learn two words every day, for the rest of your life.” Then she went out of the room, latching the door shut behind her.

I think I learned more about books, and writing, and the bizarreness of people, from that five-minute exchange with my mother, than from the many thousands of hours I spent in English classrooms and writing workshops from first grade through college.

*  *  *

“And Joyce was a poor sick fucker who probably died with his balls somewhere up around his navel. None of that for me, thanks.”
– Hunter S. Thompson

A few years ago–five? ten?–there was a major controversy involving the teaching of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as part of a standard high school English curriculum. The controversy stemmed from Huck’s relentless (and distinctly naive) use of the word “nigger” to describe his friend Jim, an escaped slave with whom Huck travels, on a stolen raft, down the Mississippi River.

I was never required to read Huck Finn in high school. I read the book on my own, some time after Franny & Zooey, and was sufficiently moved by the novel that when Halloween rolled around, I dressed up as Huck. That summer I wore the costume, or a modified version of it, as I explored the woods by my house with my dog. I don’t think I wanted to be Huck. I think I just wanted to be his friend. To find him in the woods somewhere.

Huck Finn is a lot of things–sad, funny, brilliant, maudlin, offensive, warm, clumsy, tedious. What it is not is an easy book to read. It’s a downright difficult book–and not just because of its folksy, racially-charged language. The book has no engine, no narrative thrust to keep the audience engaged. It is rather like the raft Huck and Jim travel on–meandering downstream, pausing to grill fish, occasionally finding adventure. Twain himself tired of the book midway through, put it in a drawer, and spent the next few years in bed. It is also a book with a famously bad and unwieldy ending.

Now, am I seriously arguing that children shouldn’t be required to read Huck Finn merely because it is a challenging work of literature? Yes, that is precisely what I am arguing–especially when there are shorter, equally rewarding books dealing with the same subject matter–many of them written by Twain himself. Tom Sawyer, Detective, anyone? Pudd’nhead Wilson?

*  *  *

“If a child does not like a book, throw it in the trash.” — Maurice Sendak

It makes no fucking sense to force children to read books they don’t want to read. It’s actually quite cruel–a lazy, yet elaborate form of torture. It is the equivalent of making a child work hard for a gift, over the course of many years, only to rob them of that gift just as they’ve developed the wherewithal to enjoy it.

Of course, that’s how school works. The point of school is to spread the gold from the sand, and identify and validate those students who are willing to fall in line with arbitrary rules and requirements, while penalizing those children who are unable or unwilling to march in lockstep, thus sentencing them to various low-paying vocational tracts, or worse, state universities.

Which is why students are assigned The Catcher in the Rye and not Franny and Zooey. Or Grapes of Wrath and not Travels With Charley. Or Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge and not Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Or Hemingway and Henry James instead of Kafka and Camus. God forbid children derive actual joy, and even original thought, from crawling under a tree and engaging deliriously with a work of fiction. We have them reading The Great Gatsby, for God’s sake. The Great Gatsby!

Which brings up a somewhat problematic question that’s been weighing on my mind for some time:

Why require children to read novels at all?

*  *  *

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.” –Edgar Allan Poe

Recently I was asked by a fellow writer to provide a quote supporting the idea that short stories–despite the apparent rapid-fire disappearance of journals like Ontario Review and Grand Street–are still a viable medium. Leaving aside that this question presupposes, a priori, that short stories are still valuable, I will attempt to answer the question in the context of the short story-vs-novel educational dilemma.

First, the short story market is not disappearing; if anything, it is expanding, at a vastly disproportionate rate to our culture’s interest in the form. I should know; I spend a grotesque amount of time submitting to, and being rejected from, practically all of them.

What is disappearing is the average person’s–and even the above-average person’s–tolerance for writing that does not engage the imagination on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, page-by-page basis. In such a stifling literary climate, it is a wonder that people read any books at all. What the novel has become is a niche interest, nothing more. An eccentric, though still well-regarded hobby. The novel’s value in shaping today’s culture, or in clarifying its vision of itself, is questionable at best.

The short story, by contrast, is unique in that it packs all the pleasures of long-form fiction into a savory, aromatic dish that can be ingested and enjoyed in about the same time as it takes for you to leash up your dog and go looking for adventure in the woods.

*  *  *

“The difference between journalism and literature is that journalism is unreadable and literature is unread.” — Oscar Wilde

My ideal high school English curriculum looks something like this:

9th Grade:

• Roald Dahl, Skin and Other Stories (short stories–student picks any two)
• Shirley Jackson, The Lottery (short story)
• Gabriel Garcia Marquez, A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings (short story)
• J.D. Salinger, Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, and Seymour: An Introduction (two novellas)
• Mark Twain, The Prince and the Pauper (short novel)

10th Grade:

• Franz Kafka, The Metamorphosis (short story)
• Stephen King, Different Seasons (four novellas–student picks one)
• Alice Munro, Runaway (short story)
• John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (short novel)

11th Grade:

• Albert Camus, The Stranger (novella)
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Notes From Underground (novella)
• Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich (long short story)
• Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (novel)

12th Grade:

• Michael Chabon, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (novel)
• Jonathan Franzen, The Corrections (novel)
• Spike Lee, Do the Right Thing (film)
• John Kennedy Toole, A Confederacy of Dunces (novel)
• August Wilson, Fences (play)

There. Now isn’t that a colorful pile of literature? Doesn’t that look like a damn fine way to spend each school year? Aren’t these books more dynamic, more relevant, more beautifully written and joyfully consumed, than crap like Jane Eyre and Washington Square? Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if kids came home with these books, and their parents snagged the books for themselves.

It may be a random list. It may be an incomplete list. But it is an undeniably lively list, and if a kid can’t get excited about at least a few of these books, then what you have on your hands there is a dyed-in-the-wool simpleton, and no amount of lovingly rendered prose is going to prevent him or her from working in a gas station and watching The Big Bang Theory.

Note: This reading list is obviously lacking in non-Western voices, for the simple reason that I myself am somewhat of a simpleton, and have a limited interest in anything that doesn’t involve vodka, puppies, or football. My list is also notably light on female authors; I could have–and perhaps should have–included Toni Morrison, Amy Tan, or Ayn Rand…but high school students already read those authors, and I wanted to do away with the old, established curriculum and create something new here.

You may also notice that my list does not include such “classics” as The Odyssey, The Iliad, The Canterbury Tales, or Romeo and Juliet. You may even have a problem with this. To which I say: fuck the Classics. They are impossible to get through without massive quantities of wine and weed. The Classics are what college is for.

High school is for discovering the pleasures of reading serious fiction, and developing and refining those tastes, and experimenting with queer fashion choices, and sneaking cigarettes and blow jobs in bathrooms, and other worthy, wholesome pursuits.

The Reacharound

I used to have this friend, he was a terrible person, let’s just call him Christian.

When I first met Christian, he was in his mid-twenties, just bumming around South Side playing pool and being a wastoid. He claimed to have his GED, but he could have been lying. He lied a lot. He drank even more. He was malnourished and weighed maybe 116 pounds soaking wet and holding a sack of laundry. Not that he ever did laundry. His teeth were rotting out of his head.

I hung out with Christian because he always seemed to have girls hanging around him, and this fascinated me. Here was a guy who had absolutely nothing going on for him, and yet, he regularly banged girls who were light years out of his league. He wasn’t a musician or a writer or an artist of any sort. He wasn’t even really a “player.” He was just a piece of shit with a cell phone.

But I learned things from Christian. I watched him. I studied his game. And one thing I took away from Christian was that he didn’t hesitate to just throw a girl his battered pre-paid Nokia phone and say, “Put your number in there.” Whereas most guys would be tentative, wait for the “right moment” to strike, Christian just got right in there. He was aggressively open about the people he accepted into his life, because Christian had figured out a simple, beautiful truth–that when you have lots of girls in your phone, good things tend to happen.

*  *  *

When artists, and particularly authors, hear the word “networking,” their tendency is to react as if someone just kicked shit in their face. The prevailing wisdom, I think, is that to foster relationships with such “industry types” as agents, editors, and even fellow artists, is somehow antithetical to the creative process. As if such a practice were businesslike, disingenuous, and overly shrewd.

Reaching out to people, however clumsily, should not be an outcome-based proposition. When I started this blog, I sent nice emails to Austin Kleon (author of Steal Like An Artist and Newspaper Blackout) and Shaun Usher (creator of the influential website Letters of Note and the lesser-known Letterheady). I also sent the link to HuffPost Books and Boing Boing. A whistling cyber-silence ensued. Did they deem my site unworthy of a mention on Twitter? Did they openly mock me to friends? Does it matter if the first girl you text, or the second, or the tenth, doesn’t respond? I have an abundance outlook. Think about this stuff for too long and it paralyzes you.

*  *  *

A few months ago I received a vaguely menacing letter from a public library in Alaska. The letter was addressed to Christian, and came with a court summons demanding payment for some books he had borrowed, and apparently never returned. The books he had checked out were hilariously and distinctly in the wheelhouse of a guy like Christian: “Where the Wild Things Are” by Maurice Sendak, “Where the Sidewalk Ends” by Shel Silverstein, and something by Bukowski.

Dinner at 8

We’ve all been there before. You go out to the mailbox and find a featherweight S.A.S.E. You rip the envelope open to find what appears to be a standard form rejection from Interim Magazine, official literary publication of UNLV. It’s printed on good bone-white card stock. You hold the letter in your hand, finger its sharp corners. It exists. You flip the card over, only to discover an enthusiastic, handscrawled note from the Interim editorial team…

Check the backs of your rejection letters, people. You could find interesting things there. To prove my point…

I have about a zillion of these cards from Black Warrior Review. It’s one of my favorite literary journals. I submit there all the time. Besides being based out of the awesomely named Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and rocking an equally awesome bold-Impact-fonted letterhead, and featuring some of the best poetry and fiction produced south of the Mason-Dixon line, they also nominate for the Pushcart Prize and to the Best American series.

I almost threw this rejection away–really, how many of these things can you keep before they become a fire hazard–until I needed a piece of scrap paper to use as impromptu stationery, as is my practice. You can imagine my surprise when on the back of this particular card I found this perfectly-rendered doodle of a pig.

That pig’s god mad personality. I just love his enormous ears and twirly tail; his broad, bold snout and curiously absent eyes. How he tilts his head just slightly, and peers into my soul, as if to say: “Good show, chap. Thank you for your work. I am delicious.”

I am a strong advocate for the Old-World process of mailing stories to editors and receiving physical rejection letters in return. But one drawback of this antiquated system is that you can’t readily capitalize on personalized rejections, when they do come. It’s easy to reply to a thoughtful, emailed rejection with a quick word of thanks and a promise to submit more work in the future. But how to respond to a pig? If I were to, say, tweet at the editors of BWR–

@BlackWarriorRev Thanks for sending the pig along with my #rejection. Dinner at 8?

–there’s a good chance they might not know what the fuck I am talking about, and may even alert the authorities. Oh, I’m sorry, was I not supposed to link to a picture of myself holding a hog’s head in one hand and a bloody chef’s knife in the other? Excuse me, Miss Sensitive.

Cowboys and Astronauts

I used to collect butterflies. It was just something I did for a couple of summers, when I was nine or ten years old. I had a blue butterfly net, a few dozen jars, a cork board, some pins. I’d go out early in the morning, when it was still foggy and cool, and catch not just butterflies but beetles, sawflies, grasshoppers, ladybugs, and even bees.

As far as I know or can tell, I was the last American child to collect butterflies as a hobby. It’s one of those things you hear about kids doing, or read about in books, but never actually see in real life. Like helping old ladies cross the street; or obtaining merit badges in archery. Or reading.

*  *  *

When people tell me they don’t read books–better still, that they “hate reading”–I don’t understand what the fuck they are talking about. How can you hate reading? That’s like hating air.

For one thing, reading is one of the most relaxing things a person can do. In this age of nonstop stress and stimulation, when it seems like life is just a series of panic attacks, or one giant, prolonged panic attack, reading is one of the few activities you can engage in independent of family, work, or other horrific and loud distractions. It’s so relaxing, in fact, that it puts you to sleep. I know I can’t personally lay down on the couch with a cup of tea and a good book, even a great book, without winking off in less than an hour.

The other thing about reading is that it’s an aggressive, and even a competitive, activity. There are very few books that can keep your attention the whole way through. At some point–usually after the first 140 pages or so–there is always a temptation to put the book down and never pick it back up. The book may begin with an intriguing premise, but then the author makes a questionable decision, goes off on an ill-advised tangent, fails to properly braid the strands of his story into a cohesive, suspenseful whole–and then you have a decision to make. The author has challenged you; and now it’s you against the author. So you power through. The book will not defeat you. You finish the book, you put it on your bookshelf, and you say: “I read that.” It’s a mini-accomplishment. You did that shit. It’s hard to read a book. It takes time. Time–the one commodity that all of us have, and don’t have, in spades.

*  *  *

More and more it occurs to me that people simply don’t give a fuck what I’m doing with my writing. I tell them about a conversation I had with my agent, or the revisions I’m making to a story, or an idea I have germinating in my head, or a magazine I am thinking of sending my work to, or this blog, and they politely nod their heads and try to think of a way to steer the conversation down a more fruitful, less conflicted path. They never know what to say. I might as well be talking about ET tubes and CVP waveforms and indwelling catheters and runs of v-tach. There are a few people who I would call friends who know, more or less, what it means to have a story accepted by a magazine; but from the rest, even from the most well-meaning of friends, the best you can hope for is that polite, uncomfortable head-bobbing, a kind of grim acknowledgement of semi-success.

Used to be, someone would introduce me to a group of people, and begin by saying: “This is Ernesto, he is a writer.” What it meant to them, I dare not say, but it would mean something. These days I’m almost embarrassed to tell people I write–and downright mortified to describe myself as a writer. I might as well say I’m a cowboy, or an astronaut; it’s a carved-out area of the American jobspace that doesn’t really exist anymore; at once too specific and too vague to count for anything. I’m sure there are people on this planet who earn their livings wrangling cattle, or getting shot into space, or dreaming up stories and poems and plays out of thin air, but I don’t know them, you don’t know them, and so, do they really exist? Are they real?

*  *  *

There was this little weird guy who used to come into the Beehive, who I was always kind of afraid of. He was even shorter than me, and waifishly thin, and he always wore a three-piece suit with a pocket watch and a tie, and he had a pencil-thin mustache that looked like it was drawn on, and I think he would walk with a cane. I was afraid of him because it always seemed like one day he would walk into the Hive, with his beta-male rage, and instead of a cane he would have an automatic weapon, and just open fire on the place, just wipe us all out.

I mention this freak because, at the time when he was coming around, I had just gotten a story accepted by Morpheus Tales, a little UK horror magazine that is actually one of the bigger horror markets. He came in one day, I gave him his coffee, and he said, almost as an afterthought, “Congrats on Morpheus Tales, man, that’s really cool.” It was so out-of-the-blue that for a few seconds I didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about. I hadn’t told anyone about the acceptance, after all. (Adding an extra layer to my confusion is the fact that I write under a pen name.) Yet somehow he had seen my story–it was about a vampire masquerading as a tattoo artist, who uses a special tattoo gun to collect blood from his clients–and he’d kind of put two and two together and realized that the writer who worked behind the counter at his favorite coffee shop had published a story overseas; and we had a moment, him and me, a moment of understanding between readers. And the moment conveyed: I got you, man.

Few weeks later, I banned him from the Beehive. I had to. He was running around the back room, goosed on acid, hitting girls in the legs with his cane.

*  *  *

One day I went out to the garage to retrieve my blue butterfly net and it wasn’t there. It was the first day of summer vacation, and I wanted to get a head start on all the glorious insects that had descended on our humid enclave of Philly. I asked my parents where my butterfly net was, and my mom handed me a brand new basketball, and my Dad said coldly: “You’re too old to be running around chasing butterflies like a fairy.”

And the thing is … he was right! I was too old to be prancing around in some meadow, swinging my faggy blue net around. He didn’t have to be such a giant dick about it, but even then, I knew what he meant. It was developmentally inappropriate.

Many years later I came home from San Francisco to announce my intention to write fiction for a living, and it was as if I was coming out of the closet to them. I am lucky my dad didn’t throw me out of a window. I think my mother cried. “You were always so happy running after bugs in the yard, with your little net,” she said into her tea. “You could have been an entomologist.”