Lovvet

Here’s something I wrote, it’s sort of a self-indulgent piece of nonsense that’s sort of vaguely about the futility of creation.

Lovvet

Lovvet looked up and saw everything he couldn’t be. Out through the bars of his cell an assortment of colors, sounds and stars unattainable through modern, metaphysical, spiritual or technological means gawked at him as he did at them. Teasing him for his uniform, not the one he wore but the one he imagined. How dare he place himself in well-pressed grey pinstripes when he belonged in dusty scavenged shreds of fabric? What sort of being such as he has such thoughts? How dare he demand dignity from a universe that offers none? He was closest to where everyone belonged. Near the dirt where we rose from, where a freak accident of chemistry made something inanimate, not. A fleshy circle of something wrapped itself around a blob of something else and then committed the affront to the universe that is life. If there was a God, he’d look down with a, “What are you doing, that’s not what I’d planned,” snatch it out of the muck, crush it between his fingers, and dust them off like nothing had happened. He’d of smote down life and continued watching with bloodshot eyes the roiling darkness of everything, grinning and drooling like he’d meant to do all along.

Lovvet groaned, from his throat, like a handful of dirt tossed against cement, and set himself to digging under his bed looking for some form of something to expand the mural he’d begun to assemble on the inside of his cell wall. The collage of liberated limbs. He flipped through a new looking magazine and a small tan girl’s left calf, purple sock running halfway up her ankle, shone out; separating itself from the rest of her frame. He was not aroused, though the thought crossed his mind that there were others who were. Men down the hall would see the girl’s leg as roasted, instead of tanned, as sultry instead of innocent, as showing skin instead of having skin.

His cellmate, Roger, wouldn’t see the girl, he’d only see the paper she was printed on, he’d assess the value of a piece of paper with a little tan girl’s leg on it. He’d file it away mentally and physically in the chasm underneath their bunk hollowed out by some inmate long ago for making hooch out of stale bread and cafeteria apples. He’d place it somewhere between a winter catalog from a department store, where sensibly clad men and women wore coats and scarves, and a prized lingerie magazine filled with artificially sweaty women flaunting their skin and parts unaware or ignoring the thoughts they were inspiring in the heads of thousands of bald men who would lock them away. Or perhaps, Roger, thinking sensibly for the environment he was in, would place it in a special pile, where children played dress-up, wore neon one-piece bathing suits and were unable to runaway from those who would save treasure troves of cigarettes for them.

Lovvet was allowed occasionally by Roger, free of charge, to dip into the detritus of his supply for his collage. Roger would place himself opposite of his supply, back to Lovvet, staring through the bars of their door at the panopticon of the guard tower in the center of the yard. Not used to, but accepting of, the threat of it’s two-way mirrored face. From here, Roger would walk the line between paranoia and sensibility, leaning towards one side or another before firing out a limb to retain his balance, and equalize.

“It’s all only a second away from being gone Love, all someone has to do is look at the right time and it’s all gone.”

For a moment Lovvet remembered the shutter, the leaden blue-gray assembly of panels which, at the press of a button would drop down over the front of their cell. It wasn’t solid, but chitinous, razorblade slats of light from the block managed to cut their way into the cell along with the noise and confusion from outside that always accompanied a shutter drop. Lovvet recalled the last time this happened and amid the usual gasps of rage and surprise was one cry of pain, which, after the shock had died down he’d found out from a guard was that of a man on the bottom row cells, who sitting down on the floor with his feet through the bars was unable to get out of the way before the shutter dropped. In his mind’s nightmarish version of the prison his feet were severed and a nearly comical spray of blood would push back anyone attempting to get near his screaming torso. The reality was less grotesque but no less debilitating, a yellowing bruise that expanded around the front of his ankles and two-legged, wavering limp that advertised his weakness to everyone around him.

A few low-voiced reassurances later and Roger would be back to his usual prideful boasting. Telling Lovvet how he’d manage to scrounge every piece of print Lovvet touched, leaving out no detail. More than few were swiped from this person’s desk during this or that parole or discipline meeting. This page of an appliance catalog featuring a woman’s hand about to shove a painfully orange carrot into a juicer he’d ripped out and shoved down the front of his pants during a meeting with his public defender while he was on the phone. A dried circle of something dulled the green of the woman’s fingernails and suggested to Lovvet the truth behind this story. Much of it was traded for, and Roger always refused to admit what he’d given up for a few of the more valuable pages, instead choosing to ignore the question and move on to another story of victory over the roving eyes of this place.

It would not be fair to say Lovvet encouraged Roger’s episodes of paranoia, but he did nothing to assuage them. He was no prison cell psychologist, lying the man down in his bunk and slowly picking away at the walls of his psyche, uncovering this trauma or that neglect. He was not either, a tormentor, calling out imaginary demons for Roger’s detriment. Lovvet could imagine himself denying Roger his only respite, his collection, with minimal effort. All he’d have to do is point towards the tower every time he saw Roger’s eyes flick towards the space under the bunk. “I think I see someone watching Roge,” would be all it took. The simple lie, that he could see anything at all in that tower, would send Roger rushing to his bunk in a quavering mass of irrationality, rasping and moaning over the preemptive death of his life’s work. He imagined saying this every time Roger attempted to go for his stash. He would apply the straightjacket of paranoia, crossing the arms of Roger’s sanity across his chest until, he was sure, he would go mad. This he never did, choosing instead to quietly agree to his pleadings for, if nothing else, the sake of his collage.

The collage was a school project. Lovvet added to it when he could, assembling Frankenstein monster’s on the wall. In the center was a scarf model with eight arms, each from a different hand. A commercial, prison-cell Shiva surrounded by a Picasso painting of other disembodied people, this person’s nose slapped on the forehead of another person’s face. The whole assembly looked juvenile, all hashed haphazardly from this or that sticky substance. It was something you’d praise a seven-year old for assembling but gawk shamefully or smile politely from any other source. It was something that warranted a pat on the head. Lovvet added to it now, taking an earring and pinning it with a wad of spit to the chest of the scarf model.

He’d started it when he’d first gotten to this place, it was something to pass the time, then it was an obsession, then it was just there, occupying that space of wall, the only space of wall that could be called legitimately hidden. It was not that he expected it to flip some mental switch and inspire the sort of effervescent certainty of feeling he imagine children felt. This piece of children’s art, a grammar school collage, was not the secret to recapturing the wonder of youth. Still, Lovvet expected something from it. It was a sort of therapy he’d prescribed to himself. In attempting to psychoanalyze his predicament, setting himself down on the bunk, instead of Roger, and whisper out loud, “Try creating something.” He’d been growing it steadily, and everyday he looked at it hoping to be able to find something out. He hoped one day to add a piece, a finger or a toe or an elbow, step back and have it hit him in the face, to have it be obvious. Have the reason for everything be offered to him right there.

He’d be fine even if it wasn’t him, if Roger, regardless of whatever state of paranoia he was in jumped down from the top of his bunk, caught the mass of glossy appendages and said, “You must be pretty angry Love.” Instead there was nothing, as there had been, Lovvet worked and Roger whimpered, sniveled and collected. There was no support system for him there. He didn’t know why he thought it’d be full of men who felt like he did. There were prisons like that, he’d figured. Full of men who’d killed their father’s in retribution for abuse, who felt justified or defiant or righteous; full of men who murdered their wives, who felt jealousy or rage or passion. Those men existed, certainly, but not where Lovvet was. He had assumed he was going there, but those places were for crimes of passion, where men moaned of their innocence. Here, there was no innocence, imagined or otherwise. Here were men who killed because, for that particular man, it was the only sense there was.

Lovvet saw a head on a pillow. An old lady, her head disembodied now, as if in a jar. Her hair was a perfect salt and pepper that didn’t exist outside of magazines. She smiled at Lovvet and the jagged edge of the ripped magazine betrayed her sea-foam green, freshly pressed photo-shoot pajamas. Her shoulder was tensed, Lovvet suspected she had an arm wrapped around her only slightly balding husband of countless imagined years.

—

He’d killed his mother. Smothered her in her sleep one afternoon as she napped on the plastic covered floral print couch, her eyes were closed and her mouth was open. When he turned the pillow over there was a wet spot in the shape of a horseshoe where saliva pooled in the corners of her mouth as she slept. He looked at his mother and tried to cry; tried to summon to his face the tears he knew were required of him. He contorted his face, scrunched his forehead and squeezed his tear ducks with the corners of his eyes. He called the police and waited for them, sitting cross-legged in the middle of the driveway with his hands already behind his back, still trying to coax the drops from his eyes.

They’d often ask him why, police and lawyers and judges. Why he’d kill his defenseless, sick, sweet mother as she slept in their own living room. They asked him who was he to play God and when he asked them what God they nodded their heads like they understood something and left the room.

His brother and his sister were allowed to speak to him. His brother cried because he was the youngest, and he always cried. Lovvet was jealous. He wished for the tears to jump out of his brother’s eyes and into his, to be able to sip them out of the red triangles at the corners. They sat in the small room, the two of them next to each other, across the table. Lovvet in his handcuffs, and his prison suit, his now stringy blonde hair splitting at the ends around his ears, as if avoiding them. His sister took his brother’s hands, lifting them from his lap and placing them on the table, with her hands over them, as if they were the centerpiece to a family dinner, the bouquet of flowers to be ogled while they told each other about their days.

“Why? Lovvet.”

“You know why.”

She slapped him then and his eyes watered. Lovvet moved his hands to his face and felt the moisture.

“Thank you.”

“For what? Lovvet?”

“Nothing. It was good seeing you both again.”

He had the guard take him back to his cell, and he wasn’t smiling, but he knew everything worked.

—

Thus he remained in his cage, wasting away his body and his thought. Occasionally, when Roger allowed it he’d search through the ever growing pile of refuse, which grew larger as Roger grew bolder and quicker. Here and there it spilled out now, an arm or a leg stretched out from underneath the bunk, feeling the stale air and thinking it was freedom. Roger grew frantic, unwilling to cull the herd, he shoved things more and more haphazardly underneath the bed. Lovvet recognized the danger and he wondered where Roger’s mind had gone wrong. Where the paranoia and the delusions had given way to the hoarding. How did things spin around in his brain? How did synapses and neurons fire across canyons and folds of grey matter to result in a man obsessed with acquiring things at the disregard of his own comfort and safety. What passed trauma marred the geography of his mind, sent tumbling down a ravine this vital part of him? Was it easy to pinpoint? Would some cursory scan of his mind reveal a simple chemical misunderstanding, a mixing of vials, the wrong hormone going to the wrong place? Was madness that simple? If it was, if a miscommunication was all that was to blame for Roger, what, Lovvet wondered, was the result of him? Had he gotten worse? What affect had his time here had on him? These questions he asked himself all at once and not at all as he peered at Roger, now stuffing some new treasure into the void.

Roger, curled up in his bunk, unaware for the crucial moment the only higher power they knew would be watching him. Lovvet was awake, and peered out the bars at his own dark cell block. He crawled down underneath, and looked into the seething mass of paper. His neck tingled, and he turned away from his search and towards the guard tower.

From their cell, which was on the second floor of the block, they could not see the base of the tower. Only the top was visible, and during the day, the bleaching light of the cell block kept the inside of the two-way mirror on the top dark to everyone who saw it. But now, as Lovvet looked at it in the dark, when those attending to the machinations of the guard tower were unaware, he saw what was inside, the fluorescent light inside the guard house betraying it.

A single soul, his back now to Lovvet, sat in a chair, reading. The man’s balding head reflecting the droning glare as he flipped absentmindedly through the pages of the magazine he read. Lovvet could make out a slender brown object leaned against the far wall of the room, a rifle or a broom, he suspected, unable to discern what it was. This was all he saw, and the reality of it surprised him. The room he imagined was bleak and impossibly big. Bigger, he now realized, than the small guard house could possibly allow. Instead of one balding guard dressed in the faded blue uniform, a phalanx of men, weapons constantly at the ready, stationed at each of the four windows of the room, staring out endlessly, searching for the numerous cells that made up their domain for any possible contraband. Instead he was witnessing this crack in the hostility of this place. The all-seeing overlord he imagined was a balding man, reading when he could be watching everything. He was, as Lovvet observed, unconcerned with the goings on of the potential for violence; an ant colony of men eager to swarm over the first weak carcass they would come across.

Lovvet looked up, dazed at the man in the tower, until a sleepy mumble and snort by Roger took his attention away for a moment. When he looked back he was being stared at. His eyes gazed intentionally down into Lovvet’s cell. Lovvet saw the man’s face in the brief moment. It was distinguishably middle-aged, older still than he had expected from behind. Lovvet could not clearly make out the man’s eyes, but either due to the veil of the two-way mirror or the distance between them, Lovvet was convened he saw two grey, clouded pupils, narrowed, not in rage or anger, but confusion and, then, Lovvet was sure, bemusement. Before he could even squint to verify this fact, whatever light it was revealing the miniature world above was snuffed out.

It was only a few seconds later when the shutter dropped over their cell. The paneled barrier dropped with purpose, scraping itself against the bars and waking Roger, who descended almost instantly from his bunk towards his stash. He saw that Lovvet was awake, and had his nose pressed up against he shutter, peering up through one of the thin slats, aching to see.

“What did you do Love? Why are you looking? What did you see?”

“I think there’s someone watching, Roge.”

Roger dropped to his knees, and then lay on the floor, face down. He crawled towards the darkness and paper underneath the bunk, and attempted to jam his head into the space. He bashed over and over his forehead against the steel of the bunk, in his panic unable to comprehend his size or the space underneath. His skin on his forehead broke, and moving his hand to the top of his head, Roger stopped his spasm at the sight of his own blood. He curled up like a newborn in the center of the cell.

 

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Some Fiction

Here’s some fiction I wrote pretty recently, if you care to take a look. I know it’s been a while, a lot of stuff has happened and none of it’s worth talking about. I need some incentive to write, so read this and tell me I can’t do any better or I can’t do any worse. Either of them works. Cheers.

Familiar

John hovered over his wife as she slept, his arms flanking either side of her, wondering what she’d do if she woke up to such a thing. He’d done this many times before, watching her sleep. It occurred to him it might be odd, to watch those who can’t watch back. Then he figured he was no peeping tom and kept up the habit. It was his wife, after all, his own wife, his old lady. She could not fall asleep while being touched, and was rolled over to her corner of the mattress, and John was relegated to the side. Tonight she looked familiar and he wanted her.

He moved his hands towards her sides, intending to grasp her at the waist. As he drew nearer, he thought of her eyes opening. He knew they had a color, but couldn’t recall it. He closed his own eyes and attempted to picture hers. They were colorless, in his head. Not grey, or white or black, but some dreamlike combination of all three. An unnameable lack of hue which existed only in the mind, in the absence of definitive knowledge. They were the color of ignorance, and it panicked him.

He rolled over and slept. At some point he dreamed, and woke up with the edges of it still in his mind. It was one he’d had before, a man on top of a younger woman, lying there, belly to belly, their arms held stiffly to their sides. There was no physical intimacy, but just staring at each other, blinking occasionally. Their stomachs pushed against one another in combative breaths. Sometimes the woman would out-breathe the man, but only temporarily. The man had stronger lungs and knew how to breathe so that his stomach rose forcefully instead of shallowly, out of the top of his chest. They’d lay there like that, and John would continue to watch them until he became aware of himself, and then they’d start to fade away and John would wake up feeling embarrassed, like he’d just seen something very private.

He’d always wake up in the middle of the night, from this particular dream. It never carried him through to the morning, he’d stare at the couple for what seemed like hours, watching them rise and sink with each other’s breaths and then wake up easily out of the dream, not joltingly or suddenly, just open his eyes to the darkness of his bedroom and to the breath of his wife, over on her side, out of arm’s reach. Occasionally he’d rouse her, the slightest touch waking her up, and she’d scold him, and turn back over, barely waking up enough to acknowledge what happened, and never asking him what was wrong or why he was sitting upright in the middle of the night.

She was not a bad wife, but he suspected he was a bad husband. John thought of marriage like he thought of breathing. He thought of it as pretending to be balanced and mutual when in fact it wasn’t. Yet, he was married, and he was sure there was disappointment spread over his union. It seeped into toothy grins and poured out of badly timed laughter.

He could never tell what his wife was thinking, or if she was at all. The thoughtful and the vacant looks merged into a singularly neutral smile consisting of the corners of the mouth and dying silently before it could even consider the teeth. They spoke only of the future, children and houses. They talked about potential without capital and wondered about the future without the pretense of the present. It had been five years, and John didn’t know if that was a lot of nothing at all.

He worked at a car dealership, inherited it, really. It was his father’s. He did nothing, just showed up and signed paychecks. He was in a few cheap commercials on TV, where he’d rattle off some slogan with a bit of bravado at the end. “Get it at Tiegler’s or don’t get it at all! The only place where family counts!” Then he’d throw one arm around a hired child actor who was supposed to be his son and his other one over a woman who wasn’t his wife. He remembered the cameraman physically moving his hovering hand from the woman’s shoulder to her waist after he decided the last take didn’t go right. “Hug her in tight, make it look like she’s your woman,” he’d said, and then they finished the take. He’d sign a check with her name on it a week or so later, to be sent to her for her services with the company. He remembered feeling a bit guilty about it.

Later, when he saw them air he’d always catch a waver in his own voice he didn’t remember having, and they always showed his father’s face next to his so people knew it was a family enterprise they were running. It was a caricature of him he’d had drawn up recently from an old picture. The man making the commercial said he looked too serious for a silly local commercial like this one, said that people would be scared off by the harshness of his glare. He remembered his secretary saying they should give him a raise for how the commercial came out.

A family enterprise required a family at all costs. This was a sentiment of his father’s, a man who valued family above all else, and despised dysfunction, wouldn’t tolerate it. His father knew all there was to know about him, he could tell in that way fathers can without asking right out, and when it came down to questions of legacy, questions about the continuation of the family name, John’s father wondered why he hadn’t brought anyone home to show to him and his mother, to make him proud. John remembered his concern, was occasionally embarrassed by it, but only in that light way a son is embarrassed by the ribbing of a father.. He lacked the predatory nature useful in pursuing women. He was not shy, but his mind wandered in conversation, and he could not talk about himself. He existed in a constant state of grimy fingernails.

He was fourteen or fifteen, perhaps, just around that time when things started getting complicated; when shyness no longer became an excuse his father accepted. The next three years were an anxious time for his

—

He was seventeen years old and it was the evening. There was a wooden quality to his room, everything looked smooth and dry, and had swirls of something or other on it, dust or paint or just the natural color of the wood. His bed a cedar four poster his father had hunted down wading through the endless swath of garage sales that seemed to spring up every summer. It creaked like someone had died in it, the wood warping every time he hopped up on it, despite his skinny frame. His father had told him how much he’d paid for it, and it was much less than it was worth, he was sure. He would’ve of paid in cash and not taken no for answer, would not even believe no was possible. It could’ve been some housewife’s mother’s deathbed, for all John knew, pawned away in some deal to put food on the table. His father handing over the money to the man of the house while the wife cried, “It’s not just a bed Henry! It’s all I have of her left.” With that, his father would solemnly lash it to the bed of a truck he borrowed out of the lot.

His father was a judge of a man, had the look of a judge, but sold cars. Sold cars in the local dealership, was the best at selling cars, couldn’t not sell cars. His bosses, in the brief period he had them, would all comment that he was born to do this, and he would, of course, agree, but the man was a judge. His method of sale was to pair, irrevocably, the man or woman to their car. His father sentenced men to Fords and women to GMs with the confidence of righteousness. He’d slam the pen and the paperwork down on the table in front of them like a gavel, lean his head forward, offer his hand and say, “You’re looking at fifteen long years in this car.” He never knew anyone to question this ruling, often times, they’d smile, nod and sign pleased with what they’d have impinged upon them. He never knew his father to force anything on any customer, he’d simply gather the evidence and then tell them exactly what they needed; Exhibit A: baby on the way, Exhibit B: job on the outskirts of the city. He never knew his father to be wrong and no one else had either.

He sat up in his bed, the ceiling fan circulating the heavy air. He read a crime serial, Hardy Boys or otherwise and was still dressed from the weekend day of loping lazily through the neighborhood, not looking for anything in particular but welcoming anything he could find. He remembered the weekends in the summer, where it seemed the freedom of being off from school compounded. Summer weekends where he felt he would never be doing anything but just what he wanted to.

His father never announced himself when he came into his room, but John never failed to realize when he was being watched by him. He stood in the doorway, his arms bracing either side, and his chest forward.

“Put on a nice pair of slacks, I’m taking you out with me.”

“I’m reading Dad, and it’s almost eight.”

“Ten minutes.”

He left the room and John dug out his only pair of slacks. He set his book down and carefully folded the corner, as well as committing the page to memory. Repeating it in his head. He was at a good part where the plot of the whole book was to be revealed, where the twist would become apparent. The police officer was the villain the whole time, or the ghost was just gas from the castle moat making everyone hallucinate. He never felt too old for anything.

His father wore a work shirt, but without the tie. He had on an expensive hat, a navy blue silk fedora John had never seen before. He wore it turned down, low over his forehead. It looked a bit funny against the rest of his father’s unfamiliar outfit, but not so much you’d laugh upon seeing him, he wore it with too much dignity for that. Just enough so you’d know he didn’t wear it often, didn’t know quite how to wear it, but he made you appreciate it through sheer force of character. John knew his father went out, figured he’d had friends, but had never met them. He imagined they all sold things, not cars, but something different, each one of them a facsimile of his father. Wearing a different colored tie and shirt but hawking premium cigars, or houses, or swimming pools instead of cars. He pictured his father as the leader of this cadre of salesmen. Leading them into battle against the consumers, clad in pinstripe armor wielding fountain pens and watermarked stationery as sword and shield. They got into his father’s car. He refused to borrow new cars from the lot, like all of his coworkers did, and had bought his own, sold it to himself like he was looking at a customer.

“Where are we going?”

“A club, I have some friends waiting for us there.”

“What kind of friends? Guys from work?”

“And a few girls I want you to meet.”

They drove on through unfamiliar country, traveling through the hinterlands between the suburbs and the city, where white picket mingled with chain link, and the summer air mixed with the smog of the city gave off a scent like pine dipped in motor oil. It was late for John. He dozed off on the drive and when the slam of the car door woke him up he squinted out the window as he reached, still semi-blind for the door handle.

The place looked professional, but moved visibly on the inside, rattled inside of itself. It was a few stories, and had no name save for a neon sign that read “Open.” The light in the windows did not move. They entered side by side, John’s father nodded to a doorman who John felt was staring down his throat to the center of his stomach, and did not like what he saw there. He grabbed John’s father’s shoulder.

“How old is he?”

“I say he’s eighteen.”

“He won’t be drinking then.”

“That’s not what he’s here for.”

John looked for men with shirts, ties and silk fedoras with women in floral patterned dresses but found none. Instead he saw a mass of different textures. Velvet and marble and oak. The place was a gaudy shrine to opulence, and much richer than it appeared from the outside. People wandered around in circles. A man who John couldn’t fit his arms around had at his arm a skinny woman who smiled nervously through browning teeth. They sat down at the nearest table, his father looked him in the eyes and told him to wait while he found his friends.

A woman who John guessed was a waitress came by after awhile, walking through the rows of tables in a short dress and glancing to see if the people around were satisfied. When her eyes met John’s, she cocked her head and came over.

“Do you need anything, sweetie?”

“No, I’m fine I think.”

“Don’t worry, we see your type all the time.”

She patted him on the shoulder and left, smiling like she’d done a good deed. Like she’d reassured a small child who was about to get vaccinated. John was quiet until his father returned with a girl. She had a slight gap in her teeth and a nose that was too small for her face.

“She’s hasn’t got blue eyes, but she’ll do, won’t she John?”

Within a few minutes he was upstairs with her. She laid down on the bed and John stood in front of the closed door waiting for something to happen. She told him to come over and he sat on the edge of the bed with his back to her. She put both hands on his shoulders and sat up as she pushed him downward onto the pillow. He laid back and closed his eyes like she told him, but didn’t know how he should touch her. His arms flinched at his sides, indecisive.

It was as brief as one would expect, and when it was over, she left him lying there, feeling empty and full and waiting for his father to come get him. When he did he remained in the doorway as he had earlier in the night, and again told him to put on his pants, but with a different tone, both prideful and mocking.

When they drove home later his father didn’t speak but smiled to himself as if having solved a large problem.

—

John lay know, again, in his own bed, and became aware that he’d brushed lightly up against his wife in his quiet recollection. She turned over to him and briefly opened her eyes before returning to sleep. John was looking past them, through her forehead and attempting to glimpse at the machinations beyond the taunt layer of skin there, but in his effort he noticed now, her eyes weren’t blue.

Bring Your Dad to School Day Version 2.0

Edited.

Bring Your Dad to School Day

The kids eyes’ scanned the room and stopped on faces that didn’t belong. There was a sense of wonder and anticipation unique to the school room being outside it’s normal parameters. Even twelve year old’s recognize monotony and look forward to days where things are going to be different. Today was one of those days, and they had spent all day being told interesting stories by various parents about the plethora of inconsequential jobs and they used to support their children. These twelve-year old’s still retained the nubile sense of wonder that occurs in waves when they see a squirrel bury a nut or hear a baby giggle, thus, they were thoroughly impressed by Tommy’s dad who was a police officer and Johnny’s dad who was lawyer.

Dad can see his son and knows he’s waiting for Dad to cause a scene like he always does at these things. He’s not exactly excited to introduce his father to all his peers. He’s not going to be able to hand out plastic fireman hats and deputize all the youngsters into some inconsequential “American Youth Firefighters League of America” or what-have-you.

His father is the kind of guy who’s idea of babysitting is to drag his son to the local Starbucks and make him sit quietly while he contemplates whether or not his main character’s motivation is appropriately outlined to potential readers to accept the fact he murders his wife. Dad does this instead of sliding down some “awesome” yellow pole, throwing on a weathered fireproof jacket and slinging an ax over his shoulder so he can effectively break down a door and save a dog and her puppies from a fiery demise.

His father is the kind of guy who brews coffee at three in the morning so he can finish a chapter that will be denied by fourteen different publishers because it isn’t “mainstream enough.” His father will then sleep until his son gets home at two-thirty and wakes his dad up to tell him he’s hungry. His father will murmur something along the lines of, “hot pockets in the freezer” and then pass out for another two hours. When he wakes up he’ll find his son watching TV in the living room and remark about how it rots his brain and he should try creating something. This experience is in stark contrast to a hypothetical fireman who rises promptly in the dead of night to put out an electrical fire in a tenement building full of under privileged inner city youths and then have a catch in the yard with his son later that afternoon.

Dad is not a fireman. Dad is a writer. A real one who slaves away at odd hours creating what he insists on, and will in fact be, the great American novel. He doesn’t churn out the kind of plot-driven action adventure schlock with two-dimensional alpha male leads with names like “Ken Stone”. His type of writing is full of words you have to look up in the dictionary and tragic heroes with inescapable flaws. His Dad isn’t clean-shaven with strong jawline a chin you could cut glass with. His Dad tried to grow a beard to hide his lack of a chin but ended up just looking like he taped pubic hair to his face. His Dad couldn’t break open a door with a chainsaw. His Dad drives a fuel-efficient Japanese car instead of a big red truck with a ladder attached to it.

So, when Dad comes in and presents to the class, He’s not going to regale the children with stories of courage in the face of danger and inspiring stories of survival. Dad’s going to come in a tell these gosh darned kids about how they should be reading Hawthorne instead of watching Gossip Girl on TV. Dad’s going to come in, and preach about how television is ruining the lives of America’s youth through reality TV and Lifetime original movies. Dad’s going to tell them all about how they’re aspirations of being professional athletes and movie stars are misguided and realistic and they should start looking into a fulfilling alternative career path. Dad’s going to ask them whether or not their enriching their lives through the creative arts. Dad takes upon himself the noble and thankless task of providing twelve-year old children with a dose of reality. If they stay after class, he will inform them of the truth about Santa and Christmas’ origins in the form a pagan tradition involving animal sacrifice around a pine tree.

Dad walked in the room and the teacher looked up with a smile and back down again with a scowl.

“Hi, sorry I’m late, I’m Joyce’s father”

Dad knew it was kind of a girl’s name, Dad didn’t care.

“You’re just in time, it’s your turn.” The teacher spoke without looking up.

Dad addressed the class with all the machismo he could muster. He reared himself up before his big, subversive opening line. He was tired, and his voice cracked because he forgot to clear his throat first. He pressed on anyway and ignored the guffaw subsequent smirk from the back of the room.

“What’s the last book you all read?”

In the kind of unison that Charles Manson or Jim Jones had probably expected from their followers, they all responded with a variety of forced reading appropriate to their age level.

“Let me rephrase, what’s the last story you read that you didn’t have to read?”

No cult-like response this time. Silence except for Ashton in the back row with the glasses that were so thick they probably let him see through walls. So thick they cut off his peripheral vision. So thick he probably wished he were blind instead. He rattled off the names of three or four science fiction novels you’d find nestled snugly in the Young Adult Fiction section of your local Barnes & Noble.

Dad shot him a smirk. Mostly out of pity because he will keep reading those dime a dozen science fiction novels until he graduates to Isaac Asimov or Orson Scott Card. He will pursue a career in Computer Science in hopes one day someone will show up and offer him a red pill or a blue pill. This will never happen. He will work in a cubicle the rest of his life and settle on a slightly overweight wife. This will be the first and only woman he ever has sex with. He will rear two children who he will want to look up to him, but won’t. Their idols with be pop singers and rappers. His wife will finally lose those thirty pounds she’s been trying to get rid of her whole life and gain the thing she was lacking when she settled for Ashton, options. She’ll cheat on Ashton because she has the opportunity to. They will get a divorce and claim they don’t want to bring the kids into it, but will be forced to. They’ll finally settle on joint custody. Ashton will die of heart failure in a moderately priced assisted living facility.

“What’s the last TV show you watched?”

Two-dozen hands shoot up. Heads lean back and faces light up. Prepubescent brains light up and fill two-dozen frontal lobes with names of reality TV shows, sitcoms, dramadies, and made-for-TV movies. Said names will not be uttered in Dad’s presence.

“What’s the last TV show that furthered your understanding of the world we live in or inspired you to continue your life in a more intellectually curious and generally inquisitive manner?”

Twenty-three hands go down (Ashton). Shoulders slump and smiles fade. Prepubescent brains stop sparking. Minds wander.

It’s about this time that Joyce begins to squirm like a three-year-old in a barber’s chair. Joyce looks around at his peers and then looks at his father continuing his talk to what might as well be empty seats. Joyce just wants to go home and watch TV. He hopes his Dad will just get bored of talking here in school instead of at home and he will be able to avoid getting yelled at for watching cartoons again. Joyce just doesn’t get why his Dad is always yelling at him for liking sports and wanting to play basketball instead of doing creative writing exercises. Dad keeps telling him he needs to do something called “hone his craft”. Joyce doesn’t know what the word “hone” means or what his “craft” might be. It doesn’t make sense because they stopped doing arts and crafts in like, kindergarten. Joyce wasn’t ever that great at that stuff anyway, he could never get the Popsicle sticks to be perfectly straight on the sides of his house. He just wasn’t good at that stuff, anyway.

The next five or ten or sixty minutes is a incomprehensible rant to everyone in the room but Dad and Ashton. Ashton hangs on every word and Dad begins speaking directly to him. He gets more attention that he’s ever gotten by any student or parent ever. Ashton nods and smiles after every line like he knows exactly what Dad is talking about and no one has ever spoken to him like this before, Dad later tells Joyce he should be friend’s with Ashton and invites him over for dinner.

At some point a bell rings and twenty-three students sprint for the door. Ashton stays and thanks me for the presentation. The teacher hurries him out of the room and shoots Dad a disapproving glance as she does so. Ashton will be inspired by me. He will write a story. He will put everything he has into said story. He will spend more time and effort on it than anything he ever has or ever will spend time or effort on in his whole life. Someone will read it. They will lie and tell him it’s good. Later Ashton will hear someone mocking his story’s all-around silliness and pointlessness behind his back, they will laugh at Ashton. Ashton will be so discouraged he will never write anything ever again.

Dad drives his son home.

“How did you like your father’s presentation?”

“Cool I guess. When am I going back to Mom’s place?”

“Why are you so anxious to go?”

“There’s something really good on TV and you don’t get the channel it’s on.”

“Ah, well, you go back tomorrow.”

When he gets home Joyce goes into his room and watches TV until he falls asleep with it on.