During my 20s, a decade of unwarranted conviction in personal potential, I wrote a 550-page tome. Never could think of a title but that didn't stop me from self-publishing. Looking back, it was far and away the worst novel of the 20th century. I imagine my unconscious self sensed failure but I prevailed with a more favorable opinion by insisting it was a savant-like masterpiece. An inimitable, godlike work of genius. Simple brilliance. Sheer orb of light.
It wasn't.
I suppose my characters were okay as far as okay characters go but I couldn't get a handle on my subject matter. The only local critic who reviewed my vanity publication wrote, "This lackluster parable is a banal pastoral of white-town America that in many banal ways resembles the worst among those white-washed pastorals I've read."
Talk about smarts.
I funded the print run on a credit card at 17.5% interest and still have 1,500 copies stacked neatly in my basement. After reading the review I staged a hunger strike to protest unfair literary criticism. Lasted almost a day before cursing god, sucking open a pickled egg and weeping my way through a half rack.
*
Brothers and sisters, there may come a day when I bare my chest. Sometime soon I'll admit my blasphemy and blood, banditry and belligerence. Any minute now I'm liable to write it all down. How I've always wanted to be a Native American, how I embrace excess and asceticism, or how I really would have gutted that mean man with my buck knife on the outskirts of Dodge City when I was a horse thief and god how it was raining.
The day is fast approaching that I'll pony up. But for now I choose to hide. Many of my childhood memories are still in hiding. There's the neighbor's shed and rotted-out pine and nook where I'd sit between the Laundromat and gas station. And how could I forget the bathroom stall where I'd hole up all recess long to hide from the devious mischief of bullyhood?
My reign of hiding began when I was about the age my daughter is now and has persisted throughout my marriage and profession in public relations. I hide behind the vow. The smile. My pretense toward righteousness. I hide behind convention and a fake protestant work ethic. Humility, vanity and everything in the name of god.
My daughter Delilah likes to hide, too. Just the other day she pulled me into a corner behind her bed and shushed me with the smile of a noble conspirator. I asked what we were hiding from.
“Shhh,” she put her finger to my lips. “Mom and monsters.”
I nodded because both pose legitimate threats.
It pleases me that Delilah is too young to know me. I'll do what I can to prevent her from ever knowing me because I'm a mockery of who I appear to be and sham when compared to my dreams of becoming someone great – a sentiment I embraced when the world was flat and the sun revolved around us. Archimedes claimed that with a lever and somewhere to stand he could move the world. I leverage denial for a favorable lifestyle and righteously condemn anyone who refuses to sacrifice personal values for potential gain.
Jingle, jingle, jingle.
A small brass bell is tied to the hinge and jingles whenever someone pushes or pulls.
"Damn bell," says Sloan, pleased by the general absence until seeing me at the end of the bar. He orders gin before asking me what's up.
"Nothing."
"Writing?"
"Uh-huh."
"Another book?"
"Just thoughts."
"Like a dream journal?" he digs.
"Not an f'n dream journal!"
"Just had my fourth poem published this year."
"Third," I wheeze before burping with satisfaction.
"What's that?" he frowns.
"Last one never ran."
"Never ran because the journal went under before the issue was released."
"Being accepted for publication is different from getting published," I smile.
"Yeah?"
"Uh-huh."
Sloan interprets my flippancy as a personal attack. He's right, of course. How else should I respond to him spouting off about his publications? He walks in yodeling like some drunkard, all the while knowing I skipped out on work to write. Then he insults my output.
"Look here you little business bitch," he levels his glass after ordering another. "If I'd gone for money I'd be rich. You went for it but are poor."
"I didn't go for money," I groan.
"Bullshit."
"B.s. if I did!"
"Look at yourself," he challenges me.
My hair is flattened with aerosol to the left of a crooked part. I wear a wrinkled blue suit, checkered tie and snappy black shoes. I'm 5'11 but my license says 6 foot. My hair is brown but my license says blond. I have a smooth shave minus the patch I missed under my right ear and I'm squishy in places that I should be firm. I carry a computer bag stuffed with corporate briefs. I wear a fake leather cell phone pouch on my belt and dangle running shoes to throw Tink off my scent.
My word, I think while licking my palm to flatten my bangs. Maybe I did go for the money.
*
I met Sloan my first year at the university after deciding I was a poet. He had carved himself a name on campus as the most widely published undergraduate. Everybody coveted his list of credits. Then there was the mystique he enjoyed as the only one among our group of young writers who'd done any substantial jail time. He built a reputation by getting drunk and insulting poetry's biggest guns. I mean, there isn't an f'n poet since Rimbaud that Sloan hasn't denounced as an inferior meddler in his art and birthright. Once a professor told him to pipe down because he accused T.S. Eliot of being a nancy pants. When the professor tried to quiet the class's riotous laughter, Sloan called him a nancy pants. The professor was furious but Sloan refused to leave. Campus security escorted him from the auditorium.
Later in the semester a poem titled The teleology of nancy pants and other effeminate vagaries appeared in the campus paper. Sloan described it as "the world's first discursive analytic in strict dactylic hexameter" and dedicated it to the professor. Shortly after failing the class he quit school to compile a book-length manuscript of poems at the Xerox center. After becoming a finalist in the Yale Younger Poets Competition, his collection was published by a small Midwest university press.
I've never forgiven Sloan's success and he's never forgiven my failure but in the early days we loved each other and pledged ourselves to poverty. We'd sit on the curb in old poet rags and poke fun at the dull world of businessmen who wormed their way around us. Now I worm my way around so Sloan pokes fun at me. He still recites Byron while doing push-ups. He still walks with his hands clasped behind his back. He still drinks from a flask and packs a shiv in his shin-high steel toe boot (the left one). As a self-educated anti-authoritarian, Sloan blurts a lot. Like how if you bore him he says "you bore me" and if you have any opinion about god or art or philosophy he'll crush you because those are his ideas that your views misrepresent.
Sloan doesn't think that kindness is a requirement for greatness so has no qualms with being mean. He makes fun of retards and plucks roses just to discard them. He prefers rain over sunshine and squishes bugs on purpose. I mean even when they aren't in his way, Sloan goes out of his way to squish them. Sloan argues that he writes poems but I think poems write him. Some days he gets drunk on gin. When he drinks too much poems write him under the table. That's where we met and it's mostly where we've been – although he's still a starving artist and I pretend to be a professional.
Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I'd made the tough decisions that popular artists make. Like eating cold beans from rusty cans and never giving up no matter what. I'd probably be writing mediocre poems in some shotgun shack about the wife I never married and daughter I never had. Yes, I'd be serenading the lonely muses or those sexy sirens would serenade me. On calm days I'd describe the sea as "tumultuous" because that word better describes it than "calm."
Uh-oh. Tell me I didn't abandon a poetic life of longing and despair for a life of despair and prosaic fulfillment.
"You didn't," Sloan assures me, "because real artists are born, not made."
"Wh, wh, what the hell does that mean?"
"Means no one's going to read your confessional bullshit."
"I'm not writing it for anyone to read."
"Whatever."
"Besides, confessional bullshit is popular."
"What do you have to write about that's popular?"
"Um, like stories about runaways."
"You didn't run away."
"Hitch-hiked to LA."
"You partied in Riverside a few nights before moving in with your grandpa."
"Got locked up in a loony bin."
"Psyche ward for upper middle class snobs."
"Still."
"I'm talking about getting buried in the front yard by your goddamn dad! You ever get dirt shoveled on top of you?"
"Um..."
"You don't know shit about confinement."
"Maybe not but I got demons cast out of me so know something about being free!"
The bartender fills my mug. Sloan orders another gin. F'n mother f'r, I think. No matter the personal tribulations of my life, Sloan one ups me on everything. Like how his dad was a drunk druggie who tied him to the bed to keep him from going to school because he didn't want Sloan to learn language. He didn't want Sloan to learn anything so covered him with dirt and fed him raw meat and kicked his ribcage when Sloan forgot to bark at strangers. Sloan one-ups me with all sorts of sordid stories. It's a bunch of b.s. but he tells it with such conviction. His eyes get watery and his nostrils flare and he'll do curbtime with anyone who contradicts him.
"Wanna know what's wrong with you?" he pulls another shot of gin.
I wince like he's readying to backhand me.
"You're too – wordy."
Wordy. A writer's ultimate insult. To balance language is to steady oneself among gods but its mismanagement is eternal buffoonery.
"M, m, maybe I am and maybe I'm not," I sputter.
"See that page," he taps. "I could write that in a couplet. Write your whole damn dream journal in a stanza. A single poem conveys volumes of prose."
I don't give a you-know-what about Sloan’s monomaniacal misperceptions of self because I have my own monomaniacal misperceptions to worry about. Like how a still small voice inside me says I'll become a master. This is why, despite a multitude of rejections and self-creamings over twenty or more years, I continue to write. Although I've never mastered anything, the voice says I'll master something soon. You know lots about mastery by being mastered, it whispers. I know that although precision requires practice, practice does not ensure excellence. Practice doesn't guarantee quality. Sometimes practice produces mediocrity. Other times dedication yields a below-average performance. Even a lifetime of failure.
I practice a lot and carry a black notebook with me wherever I go. It has an elastic band to hold my pages closed and the spine is sewn so it lies flat when I open it. It's a lot like Van Gogh's sketch book and very much like notebooks of the great Avant-gardes.
Unlike Van Gogh, I also carry a computer because some of my writing is the other kind. I mean words that don't come from the heart. Like most of what we say over the course of our endarkening lives. Like everything great art contradicts: the enfeebled vocabulary of commerce, the tactless language of business, the explicit nuance of public relations. What we say when there is no love. What we do to keep our ears.
I say a silent prayer to revolt against prayer's silent response. Silence, I doodle.
S-I-L-E-N-C-E
S-I-L-E-N-C-I-O
S-I-L-E-N-T-I-U-M
Once upon a time this life of mine didn't work. Now it barely works. Barely is my good beginning.
Calvin Haul's writing has appeared in a number of journals. Some of his plays have hit the stage. He describes THE JUDAS HOLE as his first publishable novel. He's currently working on something else and looking for representation. You can read Part One of "Barely" here and Part Three here.
Archived at http://www.girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/prose/short/67-ch-0809-barely2
