As he placed his fingers on the keyboard of his laptop computer, for some reason the author remembered what it was like to insert a clean sheet of paper into a typewriter and spin it into place. He remembered taking a deep breath and striking the key that would be the first letter of the first word of the first sentence of the first paragraph of the first chapter of a new book. He looked out the window at the ocean, then back at the computer screen. “Let him talk,” he told himself, as he pressed the shift key and struck the letter “i”.
I must have been terribly dehydrated, for the dying cells in my brain urged me to wake up and find water before they expired in the desert of my drunken stupor. In my dream, everything swirled around me in a liquid universe in which little bubbles grew into big bubbles before exploding into a transparent, filmy mush. I watched the bubbles burst like liquid fireworks in an undersea sky for a while, caught somewhere between fascination and terror. Then I woke up. I was thirsty, and I needed to urinate. I needed to put my head, mouth up, under the bathroom faucet and drink.
I swung my legs over the edge of the single bed, and shivered as my feet touched the cold tile of the floor. I could hear my heart beating in my ears. I could hear George Body snoring in the next room. I could hear the neighbors loudly fucking in French downstairs. I could barely swallow, barely stand up. As I slept, a sadistic dentist had sucked all the saliva out of my mouth and throat, and injected my brain with novocaine. I crawled across the wall like a spider, reached the door, and collapsed onto the toilet in the hall bathroom.
Though I knew damned well that I was sitting bare ass on the toilet in the bathroom of George Body’s apartment on the Costa de Almería, listening to the soprano downstairs sing an impassioned aria over the teacup waterfall of my piss splashing in the bowl beneath me, it all seemed so unlikely that I could not quite accept that any of it was really happening. A month ago, I’d been in Santa Barbara, California, having dinner in a restaurant with my girlfriend, Jen, who was working on an MFA degree in a low residence creative writing program in North Carolina. She’d just set the manuscript of a short story printed in eleven point Times Roman on the table in front of her. “It’s called ‘What Bo Lost,’“ she said. She had finished the story that afternoon, and she planned to submit it to her online fiction writing workshop. The story was based, in part, on our relationship, she told me.
In the story, a young painter named Bonelle has an anxiety dream about a coconut topped lamb cake her mother always made for Easter. When her mother places the cake ceremoniously on the table after the meal, the entire family sees that the lamb has no tail. For some reason, they all think little Bo gluttonously ate the tail by herself, alone in the kitchen, before the cake was served. Later that day, Bo is in her studio working on a large abstract canvas. Her live-in boyfriend calls to say he has to work late and won’t be home in time for dinner. “Fine,” Bo tells him, and hangs up without saying goodbye. She grabs a tube of mars black and squeezes the paint out in a random pattern over the canvas, ruining the subtle effect of weeks of carefully applied washes and layers of color.
At home that evening she makes herself a cup of instant ramen noodles, reads for a while, then goes to bed early. Her boyfriend is not beside her when she wakes up in the morning. The clock on the night stand tells her that she overslept. On the kitchen table, she sees a gift wrapped box with a note from him. When she opens the box, she finds a pair of sheer panties with a fluffy white bunny tail affixed to the back panel. The note reads, “Sorry about dinner. I promise to make it up to you. Put these on and when I get home tonight we’ll you-know-what like rabbits.”
For a while she sits at the kitchen table staring at the panties with the tail. Then she makes herself a cup of tea and some toast with jam. After she eats, she washes the dishes. She goes into the bathroom and trims her toenails. Then she digs through her closet and pulls out her old Polaroid instant camera, which she takes with her back into the kitchen. She takes the panties out of the box and places them over her head, arranging the sheer back panel so that the fluffy bunny tail covers her nose. Then she holds the camera at arm's length, and takes a photo of herself. While the photo self-develops, she drops the panties and the box into the trashcan and puts the camera back in the closet. She packs a small suitcase, calls her best friend in Oregon, and disappears, leaving the photo on the table.
“Wow, Jen,” I’d said, after I finished reading the story. “That’s powerful, though I don’t really see what it has to do with us.” I remember Jen squinted as her mouth pinched and widened slightly.
“Okay,” she said, though we both knew that it was over between us. I moved out the next weekend.
I hadn’t turned on the light when I entered the bathroom, as it was connected to a loud ventilator fan. So I emptied my bladder in the dark. I wondered if the dawn would come soon. Then I stood up and felt my way to the sink, where I ran some water, cupped my hands, and drank from them. I splashed water on my face and dried it with a hand towel. I flushed the toilet. These were things I could understand.
As I exited the bathroom, I heard Body tapping frantically at his laptop, writing yet another of his antifictions. He sighed, typed some more, then chuckled to himself.
Yea, I get Boyd out of Body. I had a dream just now. I woke up, I often fall asleep during the day, I have insomnia. In my dream Bob Dylan was with me. We were in this house I was living in with my brother, Mike. Bob looked at my hair, which was all over the place. I think I had just woken from a dream. I went into the bathroom to splash water on my face and to wet and push my hair, I had hair, into some kind of order. About that time, I heard someone talking. It was two young men, Gen Z aged young men, and a young woman. One of the young men was talking with the woman. He said, "Yea, I've read his poetry. He isn't very good. His images are lousy." I realised he was talking about me! I got in his face and said, "Who the hell do you think you are? Get out of here." He said nothing but smiled, which really irritated me. Then I noticed some other young woman on my bed half awake. I shook her and said, "I don't know who you are. I don't have anything against you, but I want you out of here, too." I then saw some other person about forty years old, maybe a little older. He said, "I noticed you have a copy of "Watership Down." I said, "I didn't know I have a copy of the book." "You have a lot of books. Have you read any of them?" I said, "I've read a lot of them, some years ago, some I intend to read." I looked around for Dylan. I couldn't see him anywhere. Then I woke up and walked down to the corner for a Caramel Latte and talked to the manager whose nameis Kayley, who is in her late 30s or early 40s. I gave her a copy of the CD that Sally Day recorded of my poems and a book of my poems that I signed; "I hope you find something here that you like." Nick
"We're constantly in the state of becoming."
Bob Dylan
I've had such days, though I'm not sure who I was exactly. I was never Bo. I wasn't George Body. I wasn't Jen, but I have felt that way. People will waste your time if you let them. It is why I left the workshop in San Francisco, that and it was so expensive to live there. My job at Mel's Drive-in wore me out. If I hadn't left San Francisco I would not have been in Los Angeles when our younger sister asked our mother to move to Atascadero and live with her, apparently she needed a live-in baby sitter. I worked at a rare record story in Glendale, California, for a while, then at a Jewish deli at the Beverly Center until we all decided to move to the Central Coast. I had begun to write poems that were authentic, real poems about real experiences in my own voice. I needed to get out of Los Angeles for perspective. My brother, Mike, wanted out too.
Los Angeles wasn't what it was when we first moved there from southern Indiana in 1961. Then you knew you were in one town and not another, there was no urban sprawl to speak of. Burbank decided to make an outside mall of San Fernando Road. Our favorite coffee house and cabaret had been sold to someone who turned it into a comedy store with Jay Leno's hands all over it. My brother was driving to Century City every day and back; I had to take three buses to get to work. I won an Honorable Mention in the Montalvo Poetry Competition judged by poet William Stafford. I'd done all that I could do in Los Angeles. I disliked Venice, California, especially the Beyond Baroque Foundation. I attended a publication party I was invited to at Helen Friedland's home in Brentwood. I went there with another student who was attending Cal State Northridge. When I got there a Venice poet approached me and said, "I know why you're here. You're here to meet people, editors perhaps, so that when you submit a group of poems to some magazine you will have a better chance of placing one." I said, "Yes, that's why I'm here and that's why you're here too." My friend from CSUN asked me, "Tell me that isn't why we came here?" I said, "Yes, that's why I came here and that's why your father, who is an actor, throws parties now and then to know what's going on at the studios."
I was working on an Master's Degree at Cal State Northridge at the time, but wasn't into it, and disliked the courses I was taking. One class, a short story writing class, with Wallace "Wally" Graves bored me. A young woman showed up one day in her pajamas to class. Her parents had purchased a condo for her just off campus. Another woman who hated me sat next to me. She wasn't a lesbian but may as well have been one. When I told the woman who wore pajamas to class if she wanted us to take her writing seriously, she might put something on to convince us she wasn't asleep, the lesbian somehow discovered where I lived and wrote to me. "You have a small heart," she wrote. I would later publish her first book of poems throughout which she bashed men. I had had enough of Los Angeles.
What I lost, what my brother lost, what our mother lost, was ourselves in all that urban sprawl. I decided to go on a diet and I cut all my hair off, like girls used to do in high school when they broke up with a boyfriend or when one of them broke up with one of them.
I wasn't Bo, I wasn't George Body, I wasn't Jen, but I have felt like that.