The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  From Annotations

  by John Keene

  Multeities, Disjunctions, Intense Polysemic Pleasures

  By the autumn of his childhood they had abandoned their prefab in the ghetto for a ranch house in a suburb whose property values and lack of crime could boast of national renown. No one, you understand, carped at the size of the required down payment, since it was assumed that they would eventually own their own property. Ignorance is incapable of concealing itself. Out there many of the Blacks were descended from the slaves or servants who had once managed those estates, so tensions were bound to abound when the educational system finally integrated. Douglass School. Few Negro families had settled land as far out as Red Bud, though even Franklin and Jefferson Counties had shown a minimal Black presence since well before the Civil War. This unconcern with the questions of whether a “there” was there, or of what this “there” consisted, remained unnamed until a later encounter with what they were denouncing as “pragmatism.” History has been kindest to the charming old German quarter, where the wealthier or more committed ones had hidden in their rathskellers those dark fugitives headed north for freedom. Information, he first noticed, in a series of notes that someone had inscribed in the narrow, running margin. “Missouri Compromise.” Out there then one never needed to lock one’s doors or speak to one’s neighbors for weeks. Once a week a man, bearing more than a minor resemblance to the president whose name became a curseword, delivered orange juice and grape drink and lemonade just as they had observed in the movies. My address, Madras. Hush Pup­pies, bell-bottom denims, a Bengal-striped shirt, though you refused to be photographed in platforms. A fulvous swatch of velour that tired the eyes, your sweater was the only one lighter than your skin. “Dibs on your Tootsie­Roll” was all they had to say to quash any attempts to deny them, so you broke it into morsels as had been demonstrated on TV, and went home without anticipating a “Thank you.” Boys should not flap their arms when they run down stairs, or cover their mouths when they laugh, made less to correct a child’s deportment choices than to allay a parent’s useless fears. “Though the crust may be brown the bread is still white.” Lacking any real conception of evil, a child is prone to explore the limits of her will. He fought back but they laughed at him, so that he discovered his skill as jokester, but he kept in mind the example of Richard Pryor. Mode for Joe. The father eventually began to dwell on the numerous half-veiled jealousies this move and its aftermath induced. Often, he would speak of Captain Wendell O. Pruitt, and the other Tuskegee flyers, who had never been properly honored. Just remembering the treatment of all those distinguished Black airmen filled his eyes with tears of awe and bitterness. Benign neglect. Who stood and saluted when the flag flapped high, who sang the anthem without anger. Time is no equalizer. As you will recall she was a blond divorcée with two attractive kids, whom she appeared to love more dearly than she did the thought of them. Although working-class and Irish, they quickly ignited a friendship, which differed from what we had encountered in the city. Civility offers an acceptable way to evade the issues at hand. Name us anonymous. “Grumio erat coquus,” he yelled out in earnest, to the consternation of a number of his classmates and the instructor. Chalk hurled at the head was the usual punishment, though kneeling while hoisting a dictionary was not unknown. My mind is the sandbox that my thoughts play in, or the court in which they exercise their claims to reason. Nine, the magic number. Quietly they strode through the grounds of the Eden Seminary, the thrill of actually being there far more compelling than anything they encountered therein. Reinhold Niebuhr. Accordingly, along with the doctrinal classes the Opus-Dei brothers offered scale-model construction; however, journalism more thoroughly captured his mood. By then it was the Bicentennial, and you were playing “John Henry” in the program at the Loreto-Hilton, which entailed memorizing a medley of songs, and learning how to swing an invisible hammer. Hurry up this way again. More the name of the Algonquin Golf Club where one caddied than any other identifiable aspect, and the waiting buckets of crawdads which made the traipse across the greens go more quickly. Of course, the city’s importance had diminished progressively since the days when it had served as the gateway to the West, though one’s perspective on this fact waxes as one gains distance from it. DeSoto. Having abandoned it for the far more sterile suburbs, they were drawn back to that laboratory of human interaction. Against closure. As a result those endlessly engaged in the quest for happiness usually constitute the unhappiest lot. Anthropology offers us among its many conclusions that boys throw a certain way, girls another.

  Theses, Antitheses, A Welter of Theories

  Trundling through the pass of bald maples across the valley of ice, he felt bound irrevocably to the outside world and to some inner, still aspiring self. Schneeblick, so blink now. Daylight, reflecting off the soundless frosts cape of the nursery, transformed his hands into two bars of franklinite. The early, wintry sunsets arrived, and then, although they waited, nothing. O soul, sublime subject of bodily subtraction, which the sky has entombed in all this whiteness. He cowered in fear of the implications of such thoughts, yet brazenly continued to think them. His mother nevertheless purchased two pairs of long johns which inevitably curled and shrank. These scaled the calves like spiders, forcing one to wrench until they reached the socks. Indifference is not the same as ambivalence, which proceeds from different situational premises. Joliet, Père Marquette. Most winters pinched the flesh like pincers, yet a few hacked through the bones like scythes. Often the ground glared back as would a freshly Windexed mirror, so that when he fell, breaking what the doctor termed a “coccyx,” seven years of bad luck became part of the bargain. One loses 90 percent of one’s body heat through the head, though most worry about the throat, feet, and limbs. “Where did you leave your gloves this time?” which kept us silent, praying against frostbite. Catch-a-girl, kiss-a-girl. One could still go tobogganing down the steeper part of Art Hill, but there were lesser hills much closer in the more historic parts of Webster, where the dauntless ones could sled or ski-board on a stolen trashcan top. On your back, in the snow, making angels the sun would summon. White swath. Summer they awaited for its bounty of trips and excursions, such as a return to Meramec Caverns or Silver Dollar City, now, from what he read, not far from where the Klan was presently headquartered. A cathode bath usually proves easier than self-immersion in a written text, thus did the ends of those evenings eddy through that small, transfixing screen. On the other hand, you noted at the Monet exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, which you attended with your classmates and the chaperone, that although painting had once served as the transcriptor of the soul, it now mainly served to break the hold of mechanical reproduction. The effect is essentially Suric, or “Quranic” with the subject matter secular. What seized their interest without parallel was the spectacle of the soldier grinding with the half-asleep young woman, which they watched through the undraped hotel window, while their elders snored two rooms away. Boys view, voyeurs. Yet he persisted in his interpretation of the surface of the oil, or was it charcoal mixed with oil, since for something so thick and black that one can make little of it, appreciation becomes an effect rather than an immediate feeling of the picture, followed by a gradual perceptive glowing. A guide, unbidden. Now he sings, now he sobs. And so although the choice between competing options creates a thicket of perplexing problems, one still can envision that open meadow of narrative possibilities, as that New York poet of the process of makes clear in his expressively opaque treatise. “Stop where you are and do not move,” the policemen yelled out in unison. Dizzy, however, he dropped to his frozen, grassy bed, which they disdained as “so much unnecessary drama.” I’n-Shta-Heh. Mittened, parkaed, he etched the scene around him with a penknife on a board the reverend had discarded. Please read directions carefully before opening. Stripped bare of all life, all color, the outdoors seemed in mourning, so we crept towards the road on our tiptoes, cringing that our crunching might offend. Lester l
eaps in. They too were unable, remember, to categorize to their satisfaction the book of drawings, and went about dismissing them as the products of a “troubled” mind. Snowblink, now blink, see. One’s thoughts are the goads that drive one’s calf-like existence forward, strange, diaphanous gods reappearing day and night. Marronage. Seen properly as a field of multeities, characterized by the presence of so many disjunctions, one might learn to appreciate this experience if only for the intense polysemic pleasures that it offers. Worry later. And so it was at that time when you lacked any real notion of the “body” that your grandfather lay silent on his deathbed, cradling you in his still strong arms. Appalled, they refuse to believe that you have told, since they remember your vows of silence.

  Literature as a Guide to the Life Lived, a Deliverance

  On the template of night’s sky they visually traced the constellations, which proved far more difficult to perform at home than they had witnessed at the planetarium. Thus, the worn yet lyric intensity of each evening’s secret offering, what its occurrence might furnish beyond our small and sparsely lit furnace. Meate-chi-cippi. Lay teachers and priests, the latter becowled and armed with crisp, authentic British accents, appealed to the authority of the “Classical” European tradition, now besieged with conflict to the point of internal sedition, like so much once imparted by “masters.” Samuel Clemens. Throughout the boys a spirit of ridicule, beneath a veneer of respect, but only later would they fathom the immensity of their debt to these ill-paid, beleaguered pedagogues. Meachum Park. In the classroom Homer, Cicero, Melville, Tennyson, Hemingway, and Mauriac, while on the sly you perused Onstott, Heinlein, and Walker, yet those that would forge your aesthetic center in those formative years were Joyce, Tagore, Faulkner, and Morrison. Oozing, seething magma of presence, what I represents. “Gee, that’s interesting, I had never noticed any patterns there,” to which our silence was as much disproof as concurrence. Their theories to explain all manner of matter, though no theory to explain this thirst for theories. In the laboratory at the famous midwestern university, he prepared slides and learned the rudiments of neuroanatomy, sometimes growing giddy from the fumes of the rarefying benzene. Whereupon the accident with the microtome, which they shied away from shaping into a lawsuit. “J’averterai Bill dès qu’il sera revenu,” repeat it, to impress them. Ultimately although some tired of bandying about “Nigger Jim” or “pickanines” before him, most were reveling in the new climate of conservatism, which introduced far more subtle ways of impressing upon others one’s social and economic superiority. Time had come to begin applying to college, the next step to which the aspirations of their class had most logically led. Please remove seal before opening. “Harvard don’t keep on folks who can’t pay or charm their way!” she cackled, her face a cracking, crackling lantern. Who would leave the city of one’s birth without hesitation, lest one suffocate under the swaddle of so much past. Convogosa. The strain of our ruse quite rightly blinded us, until we lost sight of who we truly were. Many of them now worked at the post office, which had become such a trying job. One must, in other words, eventually come to terms with the provisional. According to the standards the images conveyed, your appearance was grotesquely disharmonic. High butt, narrow hips, broad shoulders, full lips. As a result you cut the cake or stollen into minuscule pieces, aiming to perfect yourself, yet deep down you knew the real rea­son behind your actions was to savor more fully each morsel. In this way a sense of economy developed, whose flip side became an inability to see the larger picture. “Happy Days.” Now you must talk up our quarrel. It is foolish, the perceptive film theorist noted, for them to invoke post-modernity when as a people they appear to have been bypassed by the modern. Besides, dialogue has proven so woefully insufficient, though we continue to invest our energies in it. Your cognizance linked these as a chain of incidents, closer observation made clear their antecedents, but what you sought, like any artist, were the very events themselves. St. Louis Blues. Afterwards, we dispersed to our pre-appointed stations in society, with many becoming doctors, bankers, or mechanics. This naturally obviated the need for friendly contact or regular, intimate phone calls. Hindsight is often crueler than an unforgiving lover; perfidy is the knife that wounds far more deeply than others. The parents were still whispering something about those two, which lent this all an aura of shame. Always the desire to be loved formed the nucleus, about which other events and moments, positive, negative, or otherwise, whirred like the elementary particles. Some men, women, certain trees, bare certainties. Were these accounts, as was projected for this aesthetic project, selected and set down as carefully as tesseracts, the cumulative effect would approximate that of a living, dazzling, eighteen-panel mosaic. Given the general trends towards ignorance and indifference, however, no one thought to challenge his methods, let alone his motives. We took turns reciting poems by the Black Arts poets from one of those volumes now growing dusty on the godmother’s bookshelves. “Man, you don’t even know the scrapple from the apple, and you ain’t gon’ get that out no old dead cracker’s book,” our reply a prolonged, anguished stare into a portrait of life dissolving before us. Thus his musings, when written down, gradually melded, gathered shape, solidified like a well-mixed mâché, and thus, upon rereading them he realized what he had accomplished was the construction of an actual voice. The final dances of youth, dim incandescence. Willow weep for me. And so, patient reader, these remarks should be duly noted as a series of mere life-notes aspiring to the condition of annotations.

  The Secrets of Summer

  by Bret Easton Ellis

  I’m trying to pick up this ok-looking blond Valley bitch at Powertools and she’s sort of into it but not drinking enough, only pretending to be drunk, but she goes for me; like they all do, and says she’s twenty.

  “Uh-huh,” I tell her. “Right. You look really young,” even though I know she can’t be more than sixteen, maybe even fifteen if Junior is working the doors tonight and which is pretty exciting if you consider the prospects. “I like them young,” I tell her. “Not too young. Ten? Eleven? No way. But fifteen?” I’m saying. “Hey, yeah, that’s cool. It may be jailbait, but so what?”

  She just stares at me blankly like she didn’t hear a word, then checks her lips in a compact and stares at me some more, asks me what a wok is, what the word “invisible” means.

  I’m getting totally psyched to get this bitch back to my place in Encino and I even get a medium hard-on waiting for her while she’s in the ladies’ room telling her friends she’s leaving with the best-looking guy here while I’m at the bar drinking red-wine spritzers with my medium hard-on.

  “What are these little fellas called?” I ask the bartender, a cool-looking dude my age, wondering, gesturing toward the drink.

  “Red-wine spritzers,” he says.

  “I don’t want to get too drunk, though,” I tell him while he pours a group of frat guys another round. “No way. Not tonight.”

  I turn and look out at everyone dancing on the dance floor and I think I banged the DJ about a million years ago but I’m not too sure and she’s playing some god-awful nigger rap song and I’m getting hungry and want to split and then here the girl comes, all ready to go.

  “It’s the anthracite Porsche,” I tell the valet and she’s impressed. “This is gonna be great,” I’m saying. “I’m totally jazzed,” I tell her but trying not to seem too eager.

  She plays some Bowie tape while we drive toward the Valley. I tell her an Ethiopian joke.

  “What’s an Ethiopian with sesame seeds on his head?”

  “What’s an Ethiopian?” she asks.

  “A Quarter Pounder,” I say. “That really cracks me up.”

  We get to Encino. I open the garage door with the garage opener.

  “Wow,” she says. “You’ve got a big house,” and then, “You’ll take me home afterwards, later?”

  “Yeah. Sure,” I say, opening a bottle of fumé bla
nc. “Some chicks are stupid but I like that in a fuck.”

  We go into the bedroom and she’s wondering where all the furniture is. “Where’s the furniture?” she whines.

  “I ate it. Just shut up, pop in a coil and lay down,” I mutter, pointing her toward the bathroom, and then, “I’ll give you some coke afterwards,” even though I don’t say what afterwards means, don’t even hint.

  “What do you mean? A coil?”

  “Yeah. You don’t want to get pregnant, do you? End up giving birth to something awful. A monster? Some kind of beast? You want that?” I ask. “Jesus, even your abortionist would freak out.”

  She looks at the bed and then at me and then tries to open the door to the other room.

  “No way.” I stop her. “Not that room.” I shove her toward the bathroom door. She looks at me, still pretending to be drunk, then goes in, closes the door. I actually hear her fart.

  I turn the lights off, with a Bic, light candles I bought at the Pottery Barn last night. I take off my clothes, touching myself, already stiff, stretch out on the bed, waiting, starving now.

  “Come on come on come on.”

  The toilet flushes, she uses the bidet and then she comes out, shoes in hand, and seems shocked to find me lying on the bed with this giant hard-on but she plays it cool. She doesn’t want to do this and she knows she’s way out of her league and she knows it’s too late and this turns me on even more and I have to giggle and she takes her clothes off, asking “Where’s the coke? Where’s the coke?” and I say “After, after” and pull her toward me. She doesn’t really want to fuck so she tries to give me head instead and I let her for a little while even though I cannot feel a thing, so then I start fucking her really hard, looking into her face when I’m coming and, like always, she freaks out when she sees my eyes, shiny black, and she sees the horrible teeth, the ruptured mouth (what Dirk thinks looks like “the anus of an octopus”), and I’m screaming on top of her, the mattress below us sopping wet with her blood and she starts screaming too and then I hit her hard, punching her in the face until she passes out and I carry her outside to the pool and by the light coming from underwater and the moon, high in Encino tonight, bleed her.