Dreams

by Richard A. Lupoff

  Don't panic, Jimmy told himself, think of something and if it's a lousy title we can always change it. Even so, what could he call the non-existent story that would satisfy Elster for the moment and hold him until Jimmy could bang out a quickie. He could pull an all-nighter and gin up something, something, and get a check from Grand Detective Cases, pay off some back rent, and not get thrown out of his room.

  Don't panic, but he did. He looked around desperately and spotted a female customer standing impatiently in line, wearing a navy-style pea jacket. It had started to snow outside and there were flakes on her shoulders. She was wearing a knitted cap pulled down over her ears. There were snowflakes on the cap, too. She had some kind of pin or brooch on the lapel of the pea jacket. There was a glittering black stone in it.

  "'The Diamond Brooch,'" Jimmy stammered. "It's 'The Diamond Brooch.' Jordan, you'll love it. I'll have it for you tomorrow."

  Elster frowned. "Sounds kind of old fashioned. You know we go for hardboiled in Grand Detective Cases."

  Jimmy felt himself sweating. "Don't worry about that, Jordan. That's just a working title. We can change it. I'll think of something hotter. Or you can change it. Story's the thing, isn't it? Isn't that what you always say? Story's the thing. Rose by any other name, isn't that so? You're going to love this one. I promise."

  "Okay," Elster said. "I'll take your word. I'll be in the office tomorrow, Jimmy. Don't let me down, please."

  Jimmy felt a tap on his shoulder. He half-turned, saw out of the corner of his eye Pierre Bonhomme, the manager of Crazy Crepes. "Gotta keep the line moving, Kerr," Bonhomme growled. "Customers are in a hurry. Gotta move the product." Jimmy knew that Bonhomme's real name was Peter Goodman. Corporate insisted that every Crazy Crepes manager have a French name, whether he was from Brooklyn or from Bangladesh.

  Jimmy grunted and turned back. Elster had disappeared into the crowd. Thirty seconds later Jimmy was building a Chocolate Decadence Love Dream Crepe for the customer in the knitted cap and pea jacket. For the first time he actually noticed her beyond her outfit and jewelry. She was a startlingly skinny teenager with a bad complexion. Couldn't have been more than fifteen.

  That was today. Now it was night. Jimmy was sitting in front of his computer staring at a blank screen while the cursor blinked and blinked and blinked at him. He shook his head and surveyed his room. He stood up and walked over to his dresser. Bent over and opened the bottom drawer. Removed some rumpled tee shirts and stood staring.

  He picked up a baggie of dried vegetable matter. Held it up to the light and shook it sadly, then laid it back in the drawer, humming a couple of bars of the "Down to Seeds and Stems Again Blues." Looked at a pint bottle of house brand scotch from the corner convenience store. Picked it up, held it to the light, turned around and dropped it in his waste basket.

  That left the bottle of Vieux Carré absinthe that Jordan Elster's boss, Zachary Grand, had sent to Jimmy when one of his stories won the Grand Publications Annual Readers Poll Grand Prize. What was that story? "Nashes to Nashes, Rust to Rust." No, that wasn't the one. Oh, yes, ".45s for My Lady." That was the one. He'd scored a great cover painting to go with that story. As soon as the issue hit the newsstands he got all his classmates in Jordan Elster's creative writing class to stuff the ballot box for him.

  Winning the contest brought him a cash bonus, too. Which of course was gone before the check had even had time to clear the bank. But the bottle of Vieux Carré – he'd save that. Vowed to open it only on a special occasion, and he knew in his heart that he'd know when that special occasion arrived.

  He took the bottle out of the dresser, shoved the drawer closed and went back to his desk. Behind the monitor the city's lights twinkled and pale snowflakes danced in a wintry wind. A brilliant green light caught his attention. It was probably just an advertising sign a couple of miles away. He held the bottle of absinthe in both hands. Viewed through the green liquid in the bottle, the LCD monitor screen took on the same color as the light that Jimmy had been watching out the window.

  He heaved a sigh and stood up. Took a couple of steps and started his coffee maker going. He could still afford top-grade Blue Mountain coffee beans. He was able to bring home leftover ingredients from Crazy Crepes at the end of each shift. That was a big saving for his food budget. And at least he didn't have to compromise on coffee.

  While he waited for the coffee to brew he sat down at the computer again. He'd dumped the unpaid bills into a desk drawer. No need letting them depress him while he tried to write. The absinthe bottle stood at his right elbow, a few inches from the computer mouse. Every time he reached for the mouse he glanced at the bottle and smiled.

  He spaced down to the middle of screen, his the Caps Lock button and began to type.

  THE DIAMOND BROOCH

  By James Otho Kerr

  He looked up and studied the city lights and the dancing snowflakes beyond the monitor. The lights out there blinked at him like a herd of angry cursors. There are a million people in this city, Jordan Elster had told his class, and every one of them has a story to tell.

  In fact there were several million people in the city. Jimmy had corrected Elster mentally, not wanting to contradict him out loud. And if every one of them had a story to tell, that wasn't much help to Jimmy Kerr. He had not mastered the art of mind-reading.

  Even so, it turned out that the instructor, Jordan Elster, BA, MA, Adjunct Professor and Acting Chair of the Contemporary Media and Popular Culture Department, had been an actual magazine editor, and he was known to encourage his brighter students to send stories to his magazines, and as often as not he actually bought them.

  The magazine that caught Jimmy Kerr's attention was Grand Detective Cases, and Jimmy had wound up making most of his sales to Grand Detective Cases. It didn't pay the highest rates in the field and it wasn't exactly a prestigious outlet, but it was a real, professional market and could be a stepping stone to bigger and better things.

  Jimmy wondered if Elster had seen through his lie about filling in for a friend at Crazy Crepes. He hadn't challenged Jimmy's story, but he didn't seem convinced, either. And what difference did it make as long as he took "The Diamond Brooch" and cut Jimmy a check on the spot?

  He stared at the screen. The cursor stared back at him. He squeezed his eyes shut so hard that little sparkles of light, what the heck did they call them, phosphenes or something, seemed to dance inside his eyelids. An idea, an idea, my kingdom for an idea, he thought.

  An image popped into his mind. The skinny teenager with the bad complexion. The girl wearing that pin with the black shiny stone in it. Maybe there was a story there. He tried to bring the image of the girl and of the pin into sharp focus. He'd only seem the pin for a few seconds, he'd been busy making crepe concoctions, but he thought it had been faceted, like a cut diamond. But were there black diamonds? He'd heard of white diamonds, blue or yellow ones. But – black?

  And besides, pinned to the lapel of a scruffy teenaged girl with zits on her face? That didn't make sense. It had to be cut glass. It couldn't have been a real diamond.

  Never mind. Just assume that there was such a thing. He could always change it if he had to. Make it an emerald or a ruby or something. But for now it would be a black diamond.

  What was the story?

  Where would a girl like that get a black diamond? It had to be worth a couple of thousand bucks at least. She hadn't looked like a rich kid, had she? Some millionaire's sprout wouldn't go parading around midtown with zits on her phiz. Mama would have dragged her to the dermatologist at the first sign of an adolescent outbreak.

  Okay, so she was a poor girl. Maybe homeless. Maybe a runaway. She had some money, she'd bought the Chocolate Decadence Love Dream, hadn't batted an eye when he handed it to her. Laid a bill on the counter and waited for her change. Burned him for a tip, though, the rotten little chippie.

  What was a poor kid doing with a diamond brooch? A black diamond brooch. A startlingly rare, fabulously valuable blac
k diamond brooch.

  Huh. Maybe he was getting somewhere. He slid his elbows on the battered desk, thumped his forehead onto them and tried to think. Man, was he tired. He'd been up half the night, last night, slamming down shots at his favorite hangout, the Pitcher's Mound Saloon. Owner bragged that it was the city's only all-baseball bar. Twelve months a year, twenty-four-seven, there was always a ball game on the TV.

  The Pitcher's Mound belonged to Louis Ransome, Lefty Lou Ransome. He'd been a pro baseball player for twenty years. Been up and down the minors, from the Three-Eye League to the old PCL when the San Francisco Seals and Oakland Oaks used to battle it out in double headers, playing one game in each city on the same day, sharing a ferry ride across the bay between games.

  Lou had been called up to the majors for a cup of coffee more times than he could remember. Never stuck but his name and his stats were in the official record book and he decorated his saloon with baseball caps and photos of himself in a whole wardrobe of different uniforms – Boston Braves, Washington Senators, Philadelphia Athletics, Brooklyn Dodgers, New York Giants, St. Louis Browns. He had a million stories. His favorite was about pitching for the Bushwicks, a semi-pro team, when he was fifty years old. They were playing the House of David on a night when the fog was so thick the batters couldn't see the ball until they heard it pop into the catcher's mitt. Ransome claimed he'd thrown a no-hitter that night and he had a yellowed clipping from The Brooklyn Eagle to prove it. Had it in a frame and kept it on the wall behind the beer pump where he could point it out to any lush dumb enough to doubt his word.

  Yeah, Lou had a million stories and he was always eager to give them away as long as the audience kept the cash register ringing.

  Why the heck couldn't Jimmy Kerr think of a story?

  He picked up the absinthe bottle and looked through it at the city lights beyond. Seen through the green liquid, the brilliant green light he'd seen earlier disappeared. When he lowered the bottle he thought he saw two green lights instead of one.

  Wow, that Vieux Carré is some powerful stuff. I'm seeing double just from looking through it.

  The coffee maker made a ding and he took a cup and added some sweet aloe from a free sample bottle he'd picked up at the supermarket and opened a packet of powdered creamer that he'd pocketed at Crazy Crepes and stood there looking out at the dancing snowflakes and the bright green lights. He was sure there were two of them, now. There had probably been two of them all along, he told himself.

  He drank a cup of coffee while he watched the snow and twinkling city lights, then poured himself another cup and settled in front of his computer, coffee cup to the left where he always kept a notebook when he wrote and absinthe bottle to the right, near the mouse pad.

  The mouse pad was one of a kind. It had the cover of the issue of Grand Detective Cases with his prize-winning story on it, ".45s for My Lady" and his by-line blazoned on the picture.

  He picked up his cup, drank some coffee, put the cup down and ran the cursor back to the top of the screen. Then he changed the name of the story from "The Diamond Brooch" to "The Black Diamond."

  He raised his eyes and peered out across the city. He was lucky to have this room, small and dingy as it was, on top of one of the city's hills. The room was drab but the view was spectacular.

  There was a clock radio on his night table. He looked at the clock. Oh, boy, he'd been frittering away the time when he should have been writing. He'd got off work at six o'clock, come home and eaten a couple of soggy crepes, drunk a couple of cups of coffee, listened to some boring music on the radio, turned on the computer, thought about rolling a joint, thought about opening the bottle of absinthe, looked at the snow, looked at the absinthe, drunk some more coffee, opened the file, and stalled.

  Four hours down, seven words written. And that included his by-line. Okay. Elster had a favorite lecture about getting started. He said that it was always tougher to start a story than to keep going after it was started. Once you've got your characters down and doing things, as often as not they'd practically write the story for you.

  But – how to get started?

  Elster said that every writer had to find his own way, but his own way – Elster's way – was something he called the Pin the Tail on the Donkey method. You picked up a dictionary, opened it at random, closed your eyes and pointed at the page. Then you opened your eyes and keyed in the first word you saw. Then do it again. And again. And pretty soon you'd see some kind of pattern, some kind of meaning in a meaningless sequence of words.

  Jimmy decided to try it.

  He called the row of tattered paperbacks and library discards that he kept on top of his dresser the James Otho Kerr Reference Library. He opened his fat, battered, red-covered dictionary and poked it with his finger.

  Giving

  Okay. That was a start. He opened his notebook, spread it on the desktop beside the dictionary, scrabbled through a souvenir coffee mug from Lefty Lou Ransome's Pitcher's Mound until he found a pencil that actually had a point on it and scribbled the word. He tried it again.

  Pincers

  Once more. Open the book, give it a poke, see what you get.

  Resume

  Hey, maybe this is going to work after all. Try another.

  Borough

  Jordan Elster hadn't said how many words you'd need before the magic lightning struck, but five seemed like a good number. Let's try it one more time.

  Unbend

  He tried putting the words together. Would they make sense? giving pincers resume borough unbend

  He heaved a sigh. Thought about the skinny teenager with the black diamond brooch. Did giving pincers resume borough unbend mean anything at all? Did the girl fit into that picture? He stared into his coffee mug and thought about filling it again but he'd lost track of how many cups he'd drunk. He could tell, though, that he was pretty damned wired. Not a good idea to drink any more of that stuff.

  In fact his hands were trembling and he could feel his teeth starting to grind the way they did when he'd OD'd on caffeine. Stupid, stupid dunce. He'd overdone. Nerves were quivering. He needed something to quiet them down.

  He looked in his wastebasket and picked up the bottle of cheap whiskey. Unscrewed the cap, inverted it over his mouth and got a whiff and a drop of the stuff, just enough to remind him of why it was so cheap, not enough to do him any good. He thought about buying some more but he didn't want to go out in the falling snow. Even so, if it would help him with his work, it might be worth getting snowed on. Then he looked in his wallet and decided that there was no point in even trying.

  He sat down at his desk and looked at the notebook near his left elbow. He wrote giving pincers resume borough unbend on an otherwise virgin page. Lot of good that was gonna do him. He looked right at the computer mouse, the custom mouse pad, the bottle of Vieux Carré absinthe. He'd meant to save the bottle for a special occasion, and now he decided that this was a special occasion.

  He looked at the monitor screen, hoping that the Green Fairy – Zachary Grand had told him that absintheurs called their favorite beverage the Green Fairy – hoping that the Green Fairy would have helped him by miraculously adding a couple of pages to his story. Or a couple of paragraphs. Or a couple of sentences.

  She had not.

  giving pincers resume borough unbend.

  Huh. Jordan Elster was right. He wasn't sure, but he thought a pattern was starting to emerge. Maybe the skinny girl with the bad complexion was from a borough. How many cities did he know that had boroughs? London, he thought, but he'd never been in London and certainly didn't know that city's boroughs. But he'd been in New York, even lived there at one time, and knew that city was divided into boroughs.

  What the hell were they? He could probably find the information in an almanac. Or for that matter, just do an internet search. But in fact he was able to drag the info out of his mental storehouse. The boroughs were New York, Kings, Queens, Richmond, and Bronx. Better known as Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, S
taten Island, and the Bronx, the last for no reason that he knew or cared to find out.

  In his mind he transferred Crazy Crepes from the city where he now resided to midtown Manhattan. That's where the action would surely be, and decided that the girl was from one of the other boroughs. Brooklyn. Why Brooklyn? No idea. Just seemed more interesting than Bronx – the Bronx, he reminded himself — or Queens or Staten Island. And he needed a name for her. Grabbed a book of baby names that he'd picked up at a thrift store and used when he needed a name for a character.

  Used the Pin the Tail on the Donkey method for a name for the skinny girl. Came up with a good one. Madeline. Where had he come across a Madeline before? A fellow student? Someone he'd once dated?

  Outside, the snow was still falling. It was accumulating on the window sill behind his computer. It was beautiful, would be beautiful for a little while, then turn to gray slush. But for now it was beautiful. Maybe Madeline had been a character in a movie he'd seen. Yes. Not one he'd watched on TV or even at some sterile multiplex. No. He'd seen it in a classic movie palace from the golden age of film, when he was an impressionable kid, before television had captured most of the audiences and killed most of the palaces. And it had been a movie palace. A haunted movie palace. "The Haunted Palace" by Edgar Allan Poe.

  For a little while he was a kid again. He had his allowance clutched in his hand. Standing in line with his pals. Buying a ticket. Going into the dark, the magical movie palace. A horror movie was playing. He envied the ushers in their resplendent uniforms, pointing their flashlights like royal scepters. The movie was from a Poe story. The Fall of the House of Usher. Vincent Price, the great Vincent Price, played Roderick Usher. And his sister, his wan, dying sister, Madeline, was played by Myrna Fahey. The lovely Myrna Fahey who had lived and died her role, succumbing at the age of forty.

  Yes. Movie ushers, House of Usher, Madeline Usher. He decided that the skinny girl was Madeline Usher from the Borough of Brooklyn. He couldn't call her Madeline Usher, could he? Who had directed the picture? He grabbed a Maltin reference book. Roger Corman, of course. Good. Madeline Corman.