James Kendley - Patricia Carragon
Casey Clabough - Michael J. Solender
Revenge of the Cinefiction
James Kendley
The Man Who Murdered Poetry
My great-great grandfather, Jonas Alexander Boyles, murdered poetry and betrayed everything for which he claimed to stand.
I've been told that I favor him.
Two of my great-great grandfathers are wholly unknown to us. One was a Cherokee who embraced Christianity to escape the Trail of Tears, but it didn't buy him much time; he was shot dead in Atlanta two years later. Two of my great-great grandfathers fought for the Confederacy and two for the Union, and one half-wild Kentuckian seems to have fought for either as the mood struck him. My surname comes down from Jonas Alexander Boyles, who sometimes claimed to be a colonel in the U.S. Army but in fact had no military record at all.
A tintype of Boyles from the late 1880s shows him bearded and balding, with the high, narrow forehead and sharp nose still prevalent in our family. I've seldom thought it easy to read character from a photographic portrait, but you can see the stubbornness that had helped this fierce, wiry little man become rich in a wide-open town like San Francisco.
The oil portrait of his wife, Greta, hangs beside him in an absurdly rococo gilt frame. She looks to be in her early 60s, a heavy woman with a broad peasant face and iron-gray hair pulled straight back. When I was a child, she looked like a stern, bloated saint in a darkened cell, a saint whose eyes followed me to any but the most acute angles possible in my grandparents' long, narrow dining room.
Family lore says she was a barmaid Boyles picked up in a Colorado silver town on his way West. His grandchildren, my paternal grandfather and grand uncles, never met Boyles, and they passed down no stories of the relationship except that Boyles remarked after Sunday dinners that he married Greta because she was the only woman who could make him clean his plate. They remembered her as a kind, indulgent grandmother, but they had heard of only her most outrageous acts in relation to the outside world: bodily tossing a maid into the street and then throwing the girl's clothing from a window; assaulting one of San Francisco society's lesser lights for paying too much attention to Boyles at some social function; and publicly referring to a newspaper publisher as “that wormy, half-witted little bastard.” This last was apparently in response to the newspaper's obliquely linking Boyles to the Black Dragon Tong. Boyles had made his best contacts in the silk, spice, and jade markets by delivering coolies to transcontinental railway work gangs, his only proven relationship with San Francisco's nascent Chinese power structure.
Greta remained vehement in denials of her husband's public misdeeds, and in her dotage, she demanded that my great-aunt Hecuba draft incoherent letters to politicians long since dead and newspapers long since shut down, letters quietly destroyed when Greta drifted off again. She was senile and helpless by Black Tuesday, but she lived until 1940 at my great uncle's home in Fresno. Records of her birth were destroyed in the bombing of Frankfurt, but if we are to believe the age she gave on her marriage certificate, she was 105 years old when her heart finally gave out. I see no reason to doubt her; she admitted to being a full decade older than Boyles.
Boyles and Greta were a large fact of life in my childhood. I felt as if I knew them, partly because his only printed work, Coolie Tales, was the first book I ever loved. After my mother went off a pier in a gentleman friend's rental car, I read Coolie Tales again and again, leaf by brittle leaf. After the desiccated spine split and fell away, pages started to pull free from the binding. I kept the pages together in a wooden cigar box.
Coolie Tales was a world unto itself, a consistent, unchanging realm filled with demons, ghosts, and enchanted beings. They really had nothing to do with the long rows of gray coats and little red books on the television screen, and they had much less to do with the hypothetical Chinese who could line up four abreast and march around the Earth forever. The Chinese Boyles wrote of were magical beings who lived outside history and outside the edges of maps on classroom walls. As such, they lived only within the context of Coolie Tales, so his attempts to degrade the Chinese on one hand and to invoke the power and mystery of Chinese tradition didn't puzzle me at all. As I read the book over and over, phrases like “yellow heathen” settled in comfortably with “sons of the T'ang and Ming.” There is no reference to his own involvement as a flesh-peddler, but his translation of “coo-lee” as “bitter labor” is telling.
His poems, true to the title, seemed based on folk stories from Chinese workers, although two poems were glosses of classical Chinese works and one, “The Thrice-Damned Monk,” was a melodramatic adaptation of a story from a 1776 collection of mysterious tales from Japan.
The title poem starts this way:
When spikes and hammers clatter down
And picks are laid to rest,
When skinners lead the mules to feed
And Sol sinks in the West,
Then all the coolies gather 'roun'
To clamour for “chow-chow.”
The shades who kneel in Chæron's keel
Could not make such a row!
The coolie bangs his tin with sticks
While leaping through the air.
In depths of greed he'll howl and plead
And pull his coal-black hair
Or deal the others bites and kicks
And blows from either hand,
Then try to steal his neighbor's meal -
Or spill it in the sand.
But when “chow-chow” is stowed away,
They sit around the flames.
The coolie hears the lays of years
As old ones tell the names
Of emperors returned to clay
And warriors strong and brash.
Their strange tales fill the night until
The embers turn to ash.
It went on for another eleven verses, and that's about as good as it got. Ten of those verses were synopses of poems in the collection.
Coolie Tales warped my poetic sensibilities, but Boyles was a great storyteller. In “Lee Po's Washbucket Bride,” a doggerel ballad of a boy with unnatural desires for inanimate objects, Boyles was wry and restrained; the poem was oddly touching and funny as hell. In “The Goose-Necked Ghost,” a chilling tale of a murdered wife's vengeance, he gradually piled horror upon horror in stilted hexameters and specious imitations of Chinese honorific speech, building up to a bloody climax and a vague, haunting denouement. In the last poem, “Shanghai Mornings,” he described dawn breaking over the harbor and the first stirrings in the bustling city. It was wildly romanticized, and his topography was so far off that it was clear he had never been there, but the poem betrayed his sense of wonder, a yearning for the unknown.
Boyles dedicated Coolie Tales to his wife:
FOR MY BELOVED WIFE, GRETA,
My Muse and Mentor,
without whom these tales of wonder
never would have seen the light of day.
Despite that and three sons, he disappeared one summer morning three years later. He disappeared completely, as if he had dropped into a crack in the earth somewhere between the front steps of his house and the back door of his warehouse. My great grandmother was called upon to view corpses from wharves and beaches, and she was called upon to visit hospitals and insane asylums, but Boyles never showed himself again. Greta sold his house and business for what she could, paid his debts, and turned to raising her three boys.
She knew the whole time. She didn't discourage wild talk of Boyles being murdered by men he'd helped Shanghai, or finally getting crimped himself, or finally running afoul of the Tong, because she knew what had happened. Boyles had been careful about his money, and the $40,000 he'd taken with him was all in gold, gold that didn't appear on any ledgers. He had taken his horn-handled Bowie knife and his old railroad watch, leaving behind the engraved sterling pocket watch with her likeness inside.
She knew.
I imagine his employees knew, and half of San Francisco must have guessed, but his picture was still on the wall in 1993 because Greta had kept her mouth shut in front of the boys until long after World War I, long enough for Boyles to become a family legend.
For as far back as anyone can tell, half the men in my family were scoundrels and the other half stayed home and wished they'd had the balls. By the time I figured out which I was, it was already too late. During reunions, the men in my family invariably drifted to the tintype and the portrait in an unacknowledged rite of homage or catharsis or both. When I was old enough to join them, small and brown in their rough semicircle of Sans-a-Belt slacks and oversalted Margaritas, Greta had begun to look serene and triumphant. I noticed for the first time that the light patch that outlined her head had faint striations like those in painted halos and bad examples of Kirlian photography.
Boyles, on the other hand, looked hard and ascetic, seeking some truth forty-five degrees to his left. As a child, I wondered if the photographer's studio had faced the wharf, the bank, or the bordello.
When I graduated college, I considered vacations to Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Taipei to search for some trace of Boyles. By the time I left Japan in fall of 1993, I didn't even want to know. I suspected that the poor bastard had never found what he was looking for, and I just hoped I wouldn't stumble over his bones on my own merry way to Hell.
Patricia Carragon
The Superhero
Linda thought she was dreaming. She panicked, yet couldn’t intervene. Her strength and will weren’t part of the plot.
She saw an eight-year-old girl with burnt copper hair running from a man. He was tall and thin, but his face was a smoky blur as if a supernatural presence erased it. The scenery was dark like the cape he wore. The child’s legs moved with the ease of a gazelle, yet she couldn’t outrun the man. His hands pulled her arm. Her escape ended as she fell.
The child screamed and kicked her attacker in the groin. His hands released her arm. The girl escaped and ran towards a nearby well. The man caught up and pushed her in. She fell into its deep cavity. Her heartbeat muffled her screams. In circular patterns, she floated downwards until she plunged into the water. The water was surprisingly warm and soothing. However, she knew the man wanted her to die. She had to find a way out and did. A large tunnel enabled her passage to freedom. As she crawled, she saw a light in the distance. The closer she got, the narrower the passageway became. But the light blinded her as she crawled past the opening. A pair of gloved hands pulled her by the head. She thought that the hands belonged to the man in the cape. And her heartbeat drummed out her screams.
Linda woke up in her hospital bed. She was dreaming and the anesthesia wore off. Her daughter, Susan, was crying in the nurse’s arms. Her daughter’s hair was the same color like the girl in the dream.
A few days later, Linda and her daughter were released from the hospital. Linda’s son, Billy, was in the waiting room with her husband, Frank. Like Superman or Batman, Billy was on another mission to save the universe. His kryptonite energy filled the room. Wearing his makeshift Halloween cape, he jumped from chair to sofa and back.
His Daddy did little to control him. His mind was elsewhere, worrying about another kid to feed, clothe and educate. He had to have his cigarettes and his Friday nights with the boys. This pregnancy wasn’t in his plans. He lit another cigarette to pass the time.
When their name Kaplan was announced, Billy bounced up, dropping his DC comic books. Like a bowling ball ready to make a strike, Billy almost bumped into a nurse before greeting his mother and sister. Startled by his mother’s appearance, he cried, “Mommy, where’s your stomach?”
Linda smiled, saying, “Billy, I’d like you to meet Susan, your new sister. You can call her Susie for short.”
With a toothless grin, her son admired the pink creature’s copper-like curls. He observed how much Mommy loved his sister by the way she held her. His sister looked tiny and fragile. Should Mommy accidentally drop her, Susie would be in trouble. He feared that the “meanies” from his comic books might suddenly snatch her. It was his crusade to protect Susie.
Frank had to take his family home in a cab. Linda was in no condition to travel by subway and bus. The cab dropped them off by their dreary apartment just west of Broadway. Their block was bland. Not one tree was planted to break up the monotones of gray and beige brick. Their five-story building resembled a tombstone. It also lacked an elevator. Walking up four flights was difficult for Linda. She had to stop on each floor for rest. Relief came once she got to 4D. Frank never offered to carry the baby. And Susie cried non-stop. And Linda was too exhausted and upset to notice.
Frank’s unlit cigarette dangled from his mouth. The movement of his lower lip made Linda nervous until his match lit the tip of his Lucky Strike, calming her husband’s impatience as he fidgeted with the keys.
The door swung open. Linda walked in and went into shock. Before she went to the hospital, she dusted, vacuumed, mopped, scrubbed and swept the apartment. She even washed, starched and ironed her new curtains from Macy’s. Linda was always fascinated with anything Dutch, from wooden shoes to windmills. Her kitchen was blue and white and had Delft knickknacks on the walls. The embroidered white curtains had a Dutch boy and girl: her dream of having a son and daughter.
Walking through the apartment was her nightmare. The dusted furniture and vacuumed rugs were home to cigarette butts and ash, food droppings, scattered magazines and The Daily News. The waxed linoleum had water and grease stains by the sink and table. Dirty dishes were pilled up in the sink and on the table. Crumbs were everywhere. An empty corn flake box fell behind the stepladder. Her husband hung her Dutch-style curtains inside out. Chlorine stains were in the kitchen sink as well as in the bathroom sink and tub. Cigarette butts floated in the toilet. Ashes formed a ring around the bowl.
Frank turned on the TV. He finished one cigarette and lit another. Fresh cigarette smoke mixed in with the old. He didn’t hear Billy asking about Mommy’s sadness or Susie’s crying. He preferred dwelling in his own self-pity and cigarette smoke.
Linda placed her daughter in the crib. Susie was still crying. Her new home wasn’t to her liking. Linda sensed this and wondered about the dream she had while under anesthesia. After Susie fell asleep, Linda took refuge on her bed and cried.
Billy quietly stood by the bedroom doorway. He wondered if any man of steel or caped crusader could rescue Mommy and Susie from Daddy’s cigarette world.
Casey Clabough
Gold Thong
I only put it on when I'm desperate to get out of a big slump . . . All of them [Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, Johnny Damon, Robin Ventura, Robinson Cano] wore it and got hits . . . The thong works every time.
--Jason Giambi, #25, formerly of the New York Yankees
My opinion of Shay Garehart changed after he loaned me the Gold Thong. But I'm getting ahead of myself. That's what professors tend to do, mind you: lurching in our generally uncoordinated pompous geeky manner toward our answers and conclusions, usually without the necessary degrees of perspective and lived experience to make them accurate or even relevant.
Not Shay Garehart. Shay the studly writer and campus super scholar—hated and envied by many, some of whom find themselves pining for him nonetheless. I'm not gay, at least not consciously, but I must admit I once counted myself among that latter group, the members of which vehemently curse his name even as many of them find themselves drawn on by a reluctant longing.
As you might imagine, Shay doesn't look or sound like an academic at all, but he negotiates the ponderous mire of a college campus better than any pencil-necked, egg-head lectern-boy or sloppy neurotic feminist I ever saw. He runs rings around us all even as we mumble through our meetings and classes while seeking simultaneously to embrace and problematize the latest discursive fashions on the research front in the hopes of getting ahead, or at least pulling even, in our various fields of inquiry.
Not Shay. Perhaps I felt an initial bond with him on account of flattering myself there might be a little of his manner—a very, very meager portion of his magnetic eccentricity—lurking somewhere inside me. I recall last year how the campus sororities had selected us both as judges for Hopwood College's Miss HC Contest. The third judge, a befuddled elderly dean who did not seem entirely certain why he was there, and myself had waited as the contest's start time came and went, and still no Shay. The mindless pop music blared on from the massive speaker cabinets and the sorority presidents nervously conversed onstage in their evening dresses while the audience grew antsy.
At last he arrived, sauntering down the auditorium aisle with a smile and an easy swagger. Rather than the irritated boos I half-expected to shower him, I was surprised to witness his greeting articulated by a booming chorus of cheers from the undergraduate masses.
He waved at the sorority throngs as he came on toward the judges' table, voice ringing with goodwill: “Hello girls! Hello!”
A particularly buxom lass in the front row squealed excitedly and jumped up and down, gravity accentuating her charms, while holding a large sign over her head which read "I Gare!"
He slapped me on the back, a little too hard I thought, and sat down next to me, casting a subtle nod and knowing wink in my direction.
"Let's get this meat market going!" he hollered at the stage and the audience applauded again.
The elderly dean scowled, but it didn't matter; Shay had gotten tenure the year before.
A swanky, slightly tipsy MC proceeded to approach us one by one with the request that we rise and introduce ourselves to the clamoring young hordes.
The elderly dean went first, muttering something lengthy and incoherent, and when the mic proceeded to come before me I stuttered slightly but received a generous measure of applause, which caused me to blush despite the overwhelming ridiculousness of setting and circumstance.
Then it was Shay's turn.
"Shay Garehart, writer," he said, leaning toward the MC's offered mic, and the ovation thundered.
Then he grabbed the mic from its complacent faraway-eyed owner. "Good people," he said, the warmth of his slight southern accent filling the auditorium, "I want you to know I got the automatic dial on my cell set to 911, 'cause tonight I'm fully expecting to witness a talent overdose!"
Wild cheers ensued as he tossed the mic to the MC and rolled his hips in a little victory dance, which concluded with a smooth foot-slide to the left. Laughter, applause, and high-pitched squeals of delight made up his garland of approval as he resumed his seat.
To say Shay Garehart possessed a strong rapport with the students was a gross understatement, but oh how he grated upon the tender frazzled nerves of his colleagues. Likely he knew too well the extent to which he inhabited our heads: the unspoken measuring stick of academic success. How we hated his good looks and the apparent ease with which he had published the five books before the age of thirty-five. How we despised his strong youthful body and relaxed demeanor, and the fact that visiting writers and scholars had read his work and knew who he was, seeking him out at receptions while ignoring the rest of us. How we hated the awards he received and his natural inborn freedom and creativity—his damn near sorcerous ability to conceive and then subsequently implement new and sometimes lucrative ideas. But more than any of this, we hated the fact that he seemed to evince limited or only playfully half-serious interest in the rest of us—in our concerns.
“He never comes to our parties,” someone inevitably would say.
"He's stuck up," another would add.
“Maybe he’s just got a life," I sometimes would offer. "Look at everything he does. How does he do it?”
Indeed, how Shay spent his time had become a popular topic of interest and wide-ranging speculation among my own particular circle of campus friends. There were stories of secret trips to beaches and other countries, of affairs with students and faculty wives, of half-crazed pedagogy, of terrible things he had said to and about colleagues. But then there were the equally compelling and numerous tales that balanced and discredited these rumors: the books, the sky-high teaching evaluations, the student publications, the financial loans and ghost writing he performed for hard-pressed colleagues.
Ever did the enigma of Shay Garehart appear to expand and deepen as he strode carelessly across campus, a book or two beneath his arm, a twinkle in his eye, and a ready smile for life, the universe, and everything.
*
It was during the recess following the talent component of the Miss HC Contest that I tentatively hazarded to feel Shay out on the matter of his hazy campus identity. He eyed me with amusement as he professed that such topics were of little moment to him since they hadn't much to do with life's primary concerns.
"Don't get me wrong," he explained. "I think academics are OK people and all, but, come on, they're academics. Their lives are boring. Listen to what they talk about off campus: stupid school shit mostly, or how little Rudy crapped her pants but got over her cold. Fuck that, man! That's not how I'm spending my time off the clock!"
Just then a stunning slinky blonde appeared behind him and, bending over his shoulder, whispered in his ear, softball-shaped breasts pressed against his back. I could have sworn I saw tongue as she pulled away. Shay laughed loudly and swiveled in his chair to playfully make cat claws at her as she retreated smiling and melted into the audience.
"Not a student, I gather," I commented dryly, having reluctantly withdrawn my eyes from the back of her departing form.
"No," said Shay with a chuckle. "I got her at church."
"Church?"
"Sure. Think about it, my man. We live in a backward southern city with a large fundamentalist university on the opposite side of town. Odds are most of the attractive chicks are going to be down with J.C. You got to know the kind of game you're playing if you're going to score big."
"So you go to churches to pick up women?"
"Why not?" he shrugged. "Sunday morning's a slow time of day anyhow; beats nursing a hangover. The formula is to tell the Sunday school class or whatever that you're on the fence about coming to J.C. but still have your doubts. Apparently it's some kind of glory to God or something for them to win over new followers. They basically trample each other trying to convince you to join their particular herd. I can tell you, man, it ain't hard at all to pick and choose the phone numbers."
Shay grinned. "Then it's on me, so to speak," he said, "to do the converting: from J.C. to Shay-Gay, that is!"
I laughed uneasily, but even as I did Shay suddenly seemed to turn serious. "You know, every night I fall asleep thinking my life can’t get any better . . . .”
He paused, as if for effect, his expression one of baffled marvelment, before adding, “but then it does. It's like I can’t help it, man. It must be magic or something.”
Oh, how we hated Shay Garehart! How his unconscious grandeur cut us wide and deep!
But this opening has run a little long and, as I say, all of that changed with the Gold Thong, which brings me, at last, to my story proper.
*
I might have departed the Miss HC Contest feeling every bit as bitter, envious, and fascinated toward Shay Garehart as many of my campus friends if, having delivered the contest trophy to a bareback tri-delt and sung her praises over the PA system, he had not pulled me aside confidentially as the auditorium emptied.
"Look," he said when we were alone, the slight drawl in his voice earnest, "this ain't any of my business, but I hear you been told you got to get going with your pubs."
Shay's comment took me off guard and I stammered. "Is that common knowledge?"
"I don't much give a damn what passes for knowledge around this place," Shay said, irritably making a dismissive gesture, "but if you need any help, feel free to call on me. I've been known to scribble a line or two."
Flustered, I thanked him awkwardly as he turned to go.
"Wait," I said. "A question. Writer's block. What do you know about writer's block?"
Shay faced me again, his expression more serious than before and tinged with a slight degree of reproach, as if I had just uttered something offensive and forbidden. "It's the writer's worst bane," he said. "You got all your info ready but the engine won't fire. Many is the time I've tucked tail and turned from the computer screen to the bourbon bottle in despair at not being able to find those precious words."
"Is there a solution for it?" I asked. "A trick or something you know about?"
Shay considered this for a moment with downcast eyes, hand upon his chin, before his gaze rose to meet mine, expression grave. "The Gold Thong," he said at last.
"The Gold Thong?" I repeated.
"It's the last line of defense with me and my writer friends," he elaborated. "First, there's the cop mustache. You're not allowed to shave until the words start coming the way they should. It's predicated on pressure, you see. So long as you don't write, the hair above your mouth grows. Eventually you wind up with a stupid fucking mustache that makes you look like a highway cop, especially when you wear sunglasses. It's worked before--for me and others."
"But if that doesn't do it," Shay continued, "or if you're in a rush, then it's time to break out the Gold Thong."
Again my face told a speechless tale of incredulity.
"I know it sounds ridiculous," Shay said quickly, "but it's the bonafide secret weapon--the doomsday motherload--when it comes to writer's block. Now, in point of fact, no one knows where the Gold Thong came from, but it's saved me and my whole circle of writing buddies many a time."
"How does it work?" I asked, helplessly enthralled despite the insanity of what I was hearing.
"You just wear it," Shay said with a shrug. "Wear it and plant your ass in front of the computer until the writing comes."
I must have looked uncertain for he continued. "Look," he said, "I know you read fiction, even though it's not your field. Wil Hickson's book Grab You a Handful? Gold Thong. John Towne's novel Jane Anor, Space Nurse? Gold Thong. There's even this woman scribbler–a rough old dyke down in Texas who does children’s books. Word was she hit the wall when it came time to finish up the last volume of a trilogy about an androgynous cat that does homework for its little-girl-owner by working math problems on this calculator that has those super-sized number pads for old people. Now from what I hear, that old gal wasn't too keen on men--to put it mildly. But when the going got tough and the writing deadline loomed, guess what she had on under them men's jeans?"
"A gold thong?" I answered tentatively.
"You bet your ass she did," Shay said with conviction. "The Gold Thong, that is."
"There's only one, you see," he elaborated.
"I see," I muttered weakly, before rallying as best I could. "Look, it's true. I've got to publish some articles or I'm likely done for at this place, but I haven't written hardly anything since graduate school—at least nothing of any value. I just can't seem to get it going at the keyboard. Could you let me try this thing out?"
"There's no try to it!" snapped Shay. "All of us—Hickson, Towne, Van Holmes, that crusty old dyke down in Waco, yours truly—all of us wore it and beat the block to glory. The Gold Thong works every time. But it only works if you're truly hard-up and desperate—I mean really balls to the wall—and from what I'm hearing, you've definitely got that going for you."
"One more thing," he added, "before you commit for sure. The Gold Thong's been worn a lot. It's as dirty a garment as you'll ever see. It's got stuff on it—stains--who knows what all? And it smells. I mean it smells bad--just godawful. But here's the thing: you can't wash it. It can never be washed. In fact, you'll have to fork over to me a security deposit, which I'll be obliged to keep if the Gold Thong is washed or damaged in any way."
"We'll make it a modest amount," he said, placing a hand on my shoulder and softening his voice. "Us teachers don't make a hell of a lot, do we? But believe me buddy, it's better to risk losing a few bucks than have a mob of angry writers track you down to take it out of your ass if something happens to the Gold Thong."
"Alright," I said, troubled and ashamed by my own pliability, yet desperate and helplessly compelled beyond reason. "I promise not to wash it and we get paid at the end of the week."
"Alright," echoed Shay, shaking my hand as if we had just successfully negotiated some momentous life decision--and perhaps we had. "I know you'll be good for the security deposit so I'll have the Gold Thong mailed here priority right away. I'll bill you the postage, of course."
"Mailed?" I asked.
"Sure nuff," said Shay. "It's in the UK right now. Wales. A buddy of mine just used it to finish his creative writing dissertation. He'll be loathe to part with it, I can tell you. But I've got news for that limey, which you'd just as soon hear now too. The Gold Thong heeds no master."
"Heeds no master and grants no quarter," he said, smiling, eyebrows raised, before shaking his head. "Wales, England. The Gold Thong does get around, don't it?"
He winked at me again and, turning, sauntered up the aisle toward the exit, whistling "Dixie."
*
The transaction went well enough, I guess. Payday came and I reluctantly handed over the five hundred dollars Shay demanded. It was a far steeper security deposit than I had expected and more or less guaranteed I would be behind on my rent again. A shrug and an easy smile accompanied by a scattering of words of encouragement constituted Shay's brief rejoinder to my lament before he abandoned me to my doubts. Was all this really necessary? Had my writer's block come to this?
Early the next week I arrived home from class to find a small, slightly dented cardboard box stamped with British postage sitting by my doorstep. Pulse quickening, I bent to collect the parcel and remarked its lightness, which in turn made me shake my head in bafflement at why I might have expected it to be heavy. Inside the house I placed the box on my work desk in the back room, a little ill-insulated add-on meant to serve as a guest bedroom. Taking up the letter opener, I began cutting the tape along one of the edges. But then something made me pause. Placing the letter opener on the desk, I stepped back to consider the box: its British postage--the profile of some snotty nobleman--and my own address, wrought with the broad confident strokes of an overseas Sharpie.
What was it I was doing? I blinked, aware suddenly that something like hysteria had crept upward from my bowels to tug subtly yet insistently at the corners of my mind. But then, as if banished by my awareness of it, the panic subsided and I laughed suddenly, my voice loud and harsh amid the stillness of the little room.
"We'll just see about this," I said resolutely, and, seizing my laptop, headed for the sofa, determined to get an article going without any measure of Shay Garehart's support, including his ridiculous imported undergarment.
*
Hours elapsed. Dusk darkened the windows until only the cold pale glow of the empty screen illuminated the room, the blinking cursor mocking me in time. Blip, blip, blip, blip. On it went indefinitely, as it had so often of late, measuring out the tale of my futility like an hour glass possessed of inexhaustible sands. The muscles in my back ached from the uninterrupted hunched position I had assumed hours ago before the despairing screen, not unlike an unwilling attitude of prayer. The burden of my head waxed immense atop my tired shoulders, grown rounded and weak like an old woman's, yet with nothing to show for their fruitless toil and sacrifice. I felt tired and old. Tired and old and empty.
As my eyelids drooped a vision of Shay's youthful smiling face loomed, bobbing before the empty screen, the magnificent blonde Christian woman behind him, biting her lip suggestively and tracing the contour of his ear with a forefinger.
His drawl echoed in my mind. "Many is the time," it said, "I've tucked tail and turned from the computer screen to the bourbon bottle in despair at not being able to find those precious words."
With a groan I closed the laptop and staggered to my feet, palms pressed against my eyes. Stumbling blindly into the kitchen, I jerked open the cabinet next to the refrigerator, the hollow sound of heavy glass clinking as my hands rummaged for the right bottle.
I spied the desired decanter, could just make it out, resting undisturbed near the back, its small greeting card secured by a red band about the neck and flapping slightly as I drew the bottle forward. On the label was a black and white illustration of a cavalryman charging, saber drawn, beneath which a caption proclaimed "Especially for the South." This was the unopened fifth of Rebel Yell Shay had presented to me three years ago when I'd moved to Lynchburg.
"Just shut up and drink," prescribed the familiar scrawl inside the little card, "but don't be afraid to holler."
Ripping open the bottle, I cursed Shay's name by way of a toast and took a heavy swig. Never having been a bourbon drinker—fruity rums and vodkas are my typical fare--I immediately wanted to gag at the brown liquid's remorseless overpowering odor and the terrible burning it inflicted upon my nose and throat.
But then, as I brought the bottle down, I could hear Shay's voice again, talking down to me, like a kid brother. "Hey, it's OK," it said. "It's not everyman can drink straight bourbon. Let me just run out and get you a wine cooler or something."
Cursing, I again brought the bourbon to my lips and guzzled. Eyes beginning to tear, I set the bottle down and stumbled to the sink, flipping on the faucet. As I eagerly leaned forward, however, my gut convulsed unannounced and instead of imbibing cool water, I found my parched mouth spewing forth the contents of my stomach. Desperately I gripped the kitchen counter, holding on for life, while the torrent of meals past poured forth, my throaty ejaculations echoing hollowly off the kitchen linoleum as my abdominal muscles writhed in a tangle like a bed of serpents.
At last the eruptions subsided and, emptied and breathing hard, I leaned forward again to partake of the faucet. How cool and comforting was the water as it passed between my lips and embarked upon its journey down my ravaged esophagus.
Then, suddenly, again, the convulsed unexpected agony of the stomach's contents desperately seeking liberation and I violently gagged anew, dry heaved, before collapsing to my knees before the sink, choked with frustration.
"Damn you, Shay Garehart!" I cried, sputtering and shaking my fist at the ceiling, tears rolling down my cheeks, insides all aflame. "Damn you!"
*
I arose late the following morning and passed the day in the company of student papers and multiple pots of coffee. When at last night returned and I felt once more myself, I poured a tall glass of water and headed back to my study.
Upon the desk it sat still, the package from Wales, patiently waiting. With a resigned shrug of inevitability I took up the letter opener, cut away the remaining tape, and tentatively proceeded to raise the top of the box. However instead of the shining gold fabric I had expected to encounter, I was greeted by a dense bed of packing peanuts atop which rested an anonymous note on a small slip of vanilla paper.
"Get ready to write, mate," it read, "and kiss those days of being a word wanker goodbye. God bless the Gold Thong and God bless Shay Garehart!"
Cursing under my breath, I crumpled up the note and tossed it into the waste basket. Then, with sudden resolve, I took up the box in both hands and, flipping it over, shook the contents onto the desk. A larger object tumbled out amid the blizzard of packing material, landing with a light thump. And there it was amid the scattered packing peanuts: a soiled crumpled lamé thong of gold, tastelessly adorned with black tiger stripes and set off by a flame-colored waistband. A heavy stale musky odor arose from it which turned my still-vulnerable stomach and I placed a hand over my mouth and nose as I backed away.
From a safe distance just inside the doorway I considered the garment anew and shook my head, incredulous at the nature of the circumstances surrounding me. My career had come to this? To hang in the balance of a thong?
"The Gold Thong!" Shay's voice thundered suddenly in my head and I started in spite of myself, glancing about wildly, half-expecting him to step forward from a dark corner.
*
For two days I could hardly bear to glance at it, much less consider putting it on. Yet its presence pervaded and dominated the house and my thoughts nevertheless. At odd moments when I was supposed to be folding laundry or making the grocery list I would find myself standing motionless in the doorway of the study contemplating the thong where it rested in a wrinkled mass amid the uncollected litter of packing peanuts.
Then, on the second night, I dreamed of it—a long exhausting affair of flight in which the thong flew after me, literally, for it had taken on the aspect of some predatory reptilian bird of ages past. On went the pursuit, down labyrinthine networks of dark alleyways and across vast paper recycling depots consisting of great hills and valleys of old student essays. Up I would climb, my hands sinking into a hillside of paper and ink, and at the top achieve neither pause nor rest, for the thong threateningly fluttered ever about me. Instead I would hurry down the opposite slope, rolling and sliding, falling, face and naked arms stained with the ink of a million printers.
The chase unfolded endlessly in the manner time may be drawn out or otherwise hindered in the netherworld of slumber, thus forming a seemingly eternal landscape of fear upon which we journey forever and from which there may be no escape save in waking. But then, as I climbed and clawed my way up yet another mountain of undergraduate detritus, hands riddled with paper cuts, the thong continuously diving and wheeling above me, a gold-colored chopper descended from the heavens and drew nigh, causing student documents to fly up into the air all around me, loose pages slapping me about the face and lodging in the folds of my clothes. A helmeted pilot in shades waved and gave me the thumbs up. It was Shay.
"Quit running from the thong!" he hollered, his voice barely audible amid the noise of the engine and whirring blades. He said something else I couldn't make out before nodding and smiling reassuringly.
"You're ruining my life!" I screamed, impotently hurling a handful of papers in the direction of the chopper, two of which immediately flew back and affixed themselves flat against my face, temporarily blinding me.
I peeled off the pages to discover the gorgeous blonde Christian woman had somehow joined Shay in the cockpit, straddling him and showering him with kisses, clad only in a red string bikini.
"Gotta go, champ!" Shay hollered, smiling and giving the thumbs up again.
Then the chopper departed, weaving a little lopsidedly, papers fluttering from the hilltops beneath its irregular path of flight.
*
Next morning, dark eyed and somber, I resolved to email the writers Shay had mentioned by name as having used the thong with favorable results and request information as to how exactly it worked--if in fact it did. It was not long before two of them responded, though the answers were not particularly helpful. Each sung the thong's praises, proclaiming it seemed to function via some untraceable mystery, yet their subsequent speculations as to the nature of its underpinnings struck out along divergent strands of analysis.
"It's because you're not worrying about your hands or the keyboard," Wil Hickson's message hypothesized. "You're only worried about the uncomfortable feeling you're receiving down below."
John Towne entertained a different theory. "It keeps one side of my brain occupied when I'm writing longhand on my legal pad," he explained, "thus keeping the other side slightly off-center and out of balance, which is where its supposed to be for artists--or at least that's what my shrink says."
I was in the midst of reading the conclusion of Towne's message when the phone rang. It was Freida Bond, a friend and confidant from Hopwood, always in the know and much given to relating the sad minor circumstances that pass for campus intrigue among our humble circle of friends.
"I heard you got that awful thing from Shay," she said, her voice soft with concern, "and wanted to let you know that asshole's likely just playing an elaborate joke on you."
I was surprised to experience relief rather than outrage.
"You know Ted Fabrice?" she inquired. "That short guy over in Econ? Well, his wife's best friend took a ballet class at Virginia Tech with our wonderful Mr. Gay-hart. Apparently that's another way he picks up women, since he's almost always the only guy enrolled. But that's another story. Anyway, she says he found that thing one night on the floor of the men's locker room when he was changing for class. Says he had it on over his tights when he came out and was dancing all around, proclaiming he would let everyone touch it for a quarter. Then he took it off and was waving it over his head like a lasso or something.”
I thanked Freida and got off the line as quickly as I could, careful not to reveal anything she might add to her store of tales and pass on to the next listener.
"Well that's that," I thought to myself with a deep breath.
Or was it? Upon further review I found myself wavering. On one side stood the testimonials of two published writers. True, they were friends of Shay's. But what was in it for them to perpetuate the hoax? Also, I doubted seriously I occupied enough space in Shay's mind, if any at all, for him to concoct such an elaborate scheme at my expense. Doubtless he had, as he was often fond of boasting, "Bigger chitlins to fry." Though it had been related by a friend, the account of an idle campus gossip suddenly seemed rather flimsy in light of the alternative evidence from legitimate writers.
But there was only one way to find out and my ensuing long sigh of resignation was heavy enough to have contained oceans of apprehension and house all the despair of the world.
*
Before me I held the Gold Thong at arms length, employing only the very tips, the very nails, of my thumbs and forefingers, touching it as little as possible. Though its odor had subsided somewhat, its funky scent remained much in evidence and the garment itself hung stretched and filthy, hazy lines of grime lining its seams and the narrow inner strip of its rear enclosure stained with the skid marks of untold literary bottoms.
From it I glanced down to the open laptop on the sofa, its white screen blank, the cursor blinking, waiting with indefatigable patience. Letting go an exhalation, I brought the thong down before me and stepped into it slowly, one leg at a time. So far so good. Then a deep intake of air and I held my breath as I slowly pulled it up around my hips. This limited maneuver accomplished, I exhaled again and glanced down to consider the thing which now formed an aspect of myself. I was embarrassed to note that the silky feel of the lamé afforded a pronounced sensation of sensual comfort, while the elasticity in the waistband allowed the upper part of the thong to hug my midsection thoroughly enough. However the lower reaches, front and back, were loose—a good thing, I thought, in the back, where the narrow rear strip hung slightly below my bottom. On the other hand, the bagginess in the crotch made me feel a little, well, inadequate.
"Don't feel bad," I could hear Shay's voice remarking. "Look who broke it in good."
Shaking my head to dismiss the thought, I inhaled deeply yet again. Slowly, wincing slightly in apprehension, I lowered myself to the sofa and gently lifted the laptop onto that which I hoped would constitute the source of my salvation.
*
I sat there quietly, the shadows of the room lengthening, telling their story of time--of another day passed--the laptop's cursor verifying the tale in its own measured language. Blip, blip, blip, blip. Expectantly I waited, the windows growing dimmer, the light of the world abandoning my house to the pale glow of a small computer and all my future hopes.
Blip, blip, blip, blip. On and on it went and still nothing. I waited and waited, until after a time I became aware of a tightness forming inside my chest—a rising bubble of pressure which I knew intuitively must be home to my long-stowed and ill-dealt-with wrath—the essence of all my frustrations. Again, an image of Shay Garehart. Of his loud laughter as he considered my useless near-naked form on the sofa, clad in the thong and hunched before an empty computer screen. And, of course, at his side, the magnificent blonde Christian woman in her red string bikini, divine body coiled about him, pointing and laughing in complement.
Suddenly the bubble in my chest burst and out poured all my misbegotten hatred into a keyboard-pounding, expletive-laden email to Shay--an account of all my trials and agonies at his hands, concluding with the wild accusation that he was in fact a demon. No! The very devil himself!
"Damn you, Shay Garehart," I muttered under my breath as a final click dispatched the message.
To my surprise it was answered almost immediately. "Don't get your shorts in a bunch over this," Shay's message read. "Give it time. And so what if it doesn't work? This whole academic thing's a swindle anyway: a house of straw or, perhaps more properly, a shanty of flimsy old solar-powered pocket calculators."
"We all got our ideas," it went on, "of how things are supposed to play out in this life. Me? Just give me a fast yacht with its own margarita machine and a nickel-plated Zippo to light my hair on fire. Burn and fly, baby! That's what I say. Maximum overdrive—'til the bottle and tank run empty!"
I deleted the message with yet another curse and, flinging the laptop to the side, began to rise. Then Shay's voice was in my head, louder than it had ever been, hard and irritable at having been summoned from someplace infinitely more interesting and pleasurable.
"Just wear it!" it boomed with authority. "Wear it and plant your ass in front of the computer until the writing comes."
Suddenly the Gold Thong seemed possessed of an immense weight, an impossible heaviness, as if crafted of a substance possessing a density vastly greater than iron. From the half-risen position in which I had paused to heed Shay's words, I began to sink slowly back toward the sofa, midsection guided by a force resembling a pulley or, perhaps more properly, an invisible tractor beam. And as I sunk, the nature of the Gold Thong altered. No longer did it hang baggy and loose but suddenly seemed possessed of an incredible gripping elasticity which it now employed to constrict itself about my thighs and groin. I gasped as my legs went numb and found myself dropping the short remainder of space toward the sofa's cushions. The distance couldn't have been more than a few inches but the fall, as though unfolding in dream, seemed to exact an eternity.
When at last my bottom struck the sofa the concomitant sensations of weight, elasticity, and timelessness vanished suddenly. Woozy and rubbery, I felt as though my body had just been released by an incredible power--something beyond the world—a force that if it were a hand might deign to crush reality itself in the palm of its terrible grasp. There I lay, helpless, breathing hard, uncertain of what had transpired—unable even to think, to order my thoughts. My eyes blinked rapidly, focusing unsteadily on the computer screen—on the cursor that blinked continuously upon its white field of nothingness. Blip, blip, blip, blip.
Then it came. Unannounced. Silent lightning from nowhere. The first sentence.
Michael J. Solender
A Matter of Convenience
“What about transfers?”
I ask the pharmacist, a perky redhead with a ponytail swaying in perfect rhythm to a MUZAK instrumental of Norwegian Wood. The faux-Beatles version flows through the low fidelity speakers at Walgreens unrecognizable to all but the most ardent Lennon and McCartney fans.
“Excuse me?” she says, looking puzzled.
I pointed to her chest where her name in boxy letters is centered on a huge piece of plastic. It is sandwiched in between the question: “Transfers? Ask me!”
“Transfers. Your badge says ask you about transfers. Can you get me a job in Miami?” Being a weekend smartass flirt is one of the few pleasures suburbia and middle age affords me.
The light bulb goes off and she breaks a wide grin. She seems genuinely pleased that I’m not fixated on her chest for nefarious reasons. “Oh,” she says, hanging on that one syllable making it sound as if she is starting a clunker with a dying battery, “No one ever asks me. It means prescriptions, we can take a prescription filled somewhere else and move it here to this pharmacy where it’s more convenient.”
Every retailer in my five mile containment zone is consumed with my convenience. It is incredibly comforting, this suburban fixation with access, proximity, speed, and ubiquity. If Marx were hanging out in American subdivisions today, he would likely say that convenience is the opiate of the masses.
“I see. Ah, I don’t actually have a prescription to transfer but I do have one that needs filling for my daughter,” I shift back into my deferential, geeky dad mode and signal to the pharmacist I’ll wait, pointing to the four plastic retro chairs arranged in a small square on a patch of chipped linoleum next to the pharmacist’s high wall.
“OK, shouldn’t be long,” she says, slipping on cheaters and eyeing the scrawl by Dr. Lindbladt, an antibiotic cream for a nasty gash my daughter got from an out of position mid-fielder trying to reclaim position on the soccer pitch.
Noting neatly stacked rows of incontinence pads, hemorrhoid wipes and fiber therapy bottles that surround me, I rethink my decision to wait. A minor respite I think from an endless list of weekend honey-dos, my Walgreens detention is a minor distraction on a Saturday filled with inconveniences in spite of my area retailer’s best efforts.
My mindless daydreaming is interrupted by the partially muted exchange between the pharmacy technician minding the drive-thru and a customer that I can’t see but can clearly hear is unhappy about something.
“I’m sorry m’am we can’t take them back once you’ve left the premises,” I hear the technician telling a woman, I presume is a senior.
Seniors are ubiquitous at Walgreens, they come in, clutching circulars that market cans of tuna and other senior staples like apple sauce and caramel chews. The notion that drug stores even sell food is lost on me.
Coolers of beer and soda I understand. Chex Mix, baked beans and Triscuits hardly qualify as pantry necessities to me.
Yet the few times I am forced to stop for sun block or batteries, the shuttle-bus for Sunrise Assisted Living is sprawled out across three handicapped spaces in the parking lot. Blue haired women, in a five to one ratio with aged gents wearing toast colored sweaters, cram the aisles clutching walkers with faded tennis balls on the rear legs. Each of them pushes a buggy filled with mountains of chocolate and dozens of tiny, single serve cans of ravioli.
“No m’am we can’t exchange these pills for new ones.” I hear the pharmacist, the same one who I am waiting on for my prescription, talking to the drive-thru lady. I’m starting to get annoyed.
My quick run to the drugstore is now approaching one hour. OK, I did stop at the sporting goods store for golf balls but that was fifteen minutes, tops. I’m coming up on forty-five minutes at Walgreens and I start to pace in front of the glass partition, hoping the pharmacist will see and take pity on me.
She finishes up with the drive-thru lady, walks out from around the counter, my daughter’s prescription in her hand.
“I am so sorry sir, unfortunately we are out of this cream,” she pauses gauging my reaction which judging by the slack I feel in my own jaw, must be one of incredulity. She continues, “I can call it in over at Woodlawn, I’ve checked and they have it. It can be waiting for you when you get there.”
“Woodlawn?” The Woodlawn Walgreens wasn’t even three miles, but in a super busy strip mall that at this time on a Saturday would be jammed. “If that’s my only option, OK, I understand,” I was too frustrated to be a smartass. I took the prescription and headed towards the door.
I really just wanted to go home and then hit the range to bang a few balls. My weekend golf these days mainly consisted of an hour at the driving range. Five hour rounds on the course simply took too much of my precious time.
There was no way I could walk in the house with golf balls for me and no prescription for my daughter, my wife would be most displeased.
Off to the Woodlawn Walgreens I went. Lord knows what inconveniences await me there.