Spur of the Moment

by Theresa Alan

  “Shit! Ahh!” Ana knew, knew, that this would be the exact moment The Weasel, Deb, or the president of the company would choose to stroll by her cube. Getting caught surfing porn sites was, at best, humiliating, and, at worst, a fireable offense.

  She used every skill she’d developed playing video games, using her mouse to click the windows shut like she was zapping down enemy airships. Bam bam bam!

  Shit, shit, they just kept coming, multiplying like weeds, rabbits, talentless boy bands, and reality TV shows.

  Bam bam bam! Fire! Attack!

  At long last, she’d successfully killed off all job-losing porn ads. She quickly changed the address to www.bitchmagazine.com, which turned out to be the correct URL. But Ana was too tired to read cogent arguments about the lack of people of color in television or the use of strip clubs and strippers in guy-guy buddy movies. She was breathless from attacking the equivalent of a fleet of hostile war planes.

  42

  Surprises

  It was a lazy Sunday morning. Ana woke up first and watched Scott as he slept. She knew she should let him sleep, but she couldn’t resist the urge to kiss him. Mostly still asleep, he kissed her back. As he woke up, his kisses got stronger and stronger, his groping more fervent. She loved that he could be practically asleep and yet have some instinct so powerful he could grope her with a frenzy.

  “We’re out of condoms,” Ana whispered.

  “No!”

  “Wait here, I’ll be right back.”

  She hurried down the hall to Ramiro’s room.

  “Hey Ram, can we borrow some more condoms? I’ll buy more when I go to the store today or tomorrow.”

  He pulled open the drawer of his nightstand and as he tore off a strip of three, Ana noticed a large stack of loose paper on his desk. The top page had the words “Staring at the Sun by Ramiro Martinez” typed on it.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  “Is it a story? A novel?”

  “No, it’s not finished. It’s nothing.”

  “But if it were finished, what would it be?”

  “A novel, I guess.”

  “Oh my god, Ram, I had no idea you were working on a novel. All this time we thought you were a lazy slob and really you’ve been secretly toiling away on a great American novel. Your first novel. It’s so exciting!”

  “It’s my fourth, actually.”

  “Fourth! You’re kidding! What did you do with the other ones?”

  “They’re in the bottom drawer of my desk.”

  “Did you try to get them published? Did you try to get an agent?”

  “Nah. They’re not any good.”

  “How do you know they’re no good?”

  He shrugged. “They just aren’t.”

  “Have you ever let anyone read them?”

  “My first . . . I finished it in high school . . .”

  “High school!”

  “I’d just come out, and I gave the manuscript to my dad. I thought of it as a sort of peace offering. Like yeah, I’m a fag, but I’m also this prodigy.”

  “Yeah? So what did he say about the book?”

  “He said he was impressed that I could type three hundred pages but I had no talent and never would.”

  “You’re kidding. He wouldn’t say that.”

  “He said it like he was really sorry he had to tell me. Like he was just a doctor who had to tell a patient he had terminal cancer. I think if he’d said it in anger, I might have thought he was just trying to be cruel, but the way he said it, I knew he really meant it.”

  “Ram, you’re a great sketch writer. I’m sure you’re a good novelist. Maybe, you know, I mean your first novel, you were still in high school. It takes years for authors to develop their talent. Let me read it, okay?”

  He shrugged. “It’s your time.”

  Ana hauled the weighty manuscript back to her room.

  “Ram’s written a novel. Four of them,” Ana said to Scott.

  “Ramiro? A whole novel? He didn’t get bored with it after a paragraph?”

  “I guess not. I want to start reading it right away.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you mind?”

  “Are you saying I’m not going to get any?”

  “You will. Just not right now.”

  “Four minutes ago I was going to get nookie. And now, no nookie?”

  She nodded, happy he understood this turn of events in their entirety.

  “Life is so cruel and unfair.”

  “It’s a lesson best learned when you’re young. Now off to visit one of the million Internet porn sites if you must, but leave me to the manuscript.”

  Ana sprawled across her bed and tore into the story. It was immediately apparent that the story was autobiographical. In the story, a Mexican-American twenty-two-year-old guy has just graduated from college and travels through Mexico one summer, just as Ramiro had when he graduated from college.

  What struck Ana was that the book was so serious—not a joke cracked or fashion faux pas mocked. It was filled with breathtaking descriptions of everything from a peasant woman sitting on a blanket selling beaded jewelry to a pack of dogs devouring a kitten (she wouldn’t have minded if that last one had a wee bit less detail).

  The guy in the story, Tonoch, does a lot of reflecting about his past and his future. Time and again he brings up his father’s disappointment in him. He feels alternately angry and guilty about this.

  Tonoch is a theater major, and his father, a construction worker who didn’t have access to a college education, just like Ram’s real-life dad, is furious with Tonoch for pursuing the impractical dream of being an actor. He’d stopped paying for Tonoch’s education when Tonoch refused to major in business. (Ramiro’s dad had stopped helping him through college his freshman year when Ramiro declared he was going to major in philosophy.)

  Tonoch’s father had fantasies of his son getting paid handsomely and going to work in spotless white shirts with smart-looking ties. He wanted a son whose face didn’t get weathered from working outside his whole life. A son who never had dirt under his fingernails. But just as much as his father wanted him to be a businessman, Tonoch knew he’d be miserable with such a life.

  Tonoch was at the Temple of the Jaguar at the ancient Mayan ruin of Chichen Itza listening to the tour guide talk about the ancient Mayan people and thinking about how he didn’t understand how he could have gone through his whole life without having heard even a word about what his ancestors achieved.

  The Mayans had calendars, sporting competitions, markets, art, and a written language at the same time the Greeks did, but all we ever learned in school was about the Greeks and Romans and Egyptians. Never once had I learned about the Mayans. This temple was beautiful. It made me proud. Why did I have to travel 2, 000 miles to learn about my history, my people, my past?

  I tuned the tour guide out and simply took in the image of the temple. I wanted to drink in every detail. I wanted to carve a memory that would last forever as if that could make up for twenty years of having no memories to forget.

  The temple stood shrouded in a sky that was perfectly blue, uncracked by cloud or threat of rain. Or at least a sky that appeared to be blue. My eighth grade teacher, Ms. Adams, told us that the sky is blue is a lie, like the lie the Mayans never existed and never mattered. The blue color is a trick of light. The sun beams down every color of the rainbow, the reds and yellows’ longer wavelengths race down to earth to bake the soil while the lazy blues with their short waves get scattered around the dust and moisture particles, making the sky appear blue. So many things are distorted by color, the way the prisms of the world refract and divide it.

  Is it any wonder that the Mayans worshipped the god of the sun? It lit the world, yet only let us see what it wanted us to see. It’s best to stay on the good side of something so strong yet so cunning.

  When I was little, my father caught me staring up into the sun. He towered over me ba
ck then. He couldn’t know that someday I would grow to be seven inches taller than his 5’3”, that my broad build would eclipse his small frame.

  He told me I’d blind myself if I stared too long at the sun. I looked up at his looming black figure, haloed by the sun’s rays. My eyes had trouble focusing, adjusting from the light. It’s dangerous to look so close at something so powerful. You may not like what you see.

  “Tonoch” a.k.a. Ramiro was always doing that. Teaching you simultaneously about things like Mayan history and why the sky was blue while struggling to come to terms with his tumultuous relationship with his father. But Ana thought he pulled it off. She couldn’t put the book down, and not just because it gave an insight to Ramiro’s quiet pain that he’d always kept hidden from his friends. She genuinely liked the stories of Tonoch’s conversations with migrant farmers and shopkeepers and other Americans he met along his journey through Mexico.

  She spent the entire afternoon reading, using tissue after tissue crying through the sad parts. “It’s your father’s own issues! He’s just jealous that you are so smart and got the college education he never had! Stop being so sad and drinking too much and sleeping with guys that don’t treat you well!” she silently told the character in the book.

  In the end, Tonoch did what she advised. He found a wonderful man, a professor from the States who did research on Mayan history. The professor was in Mexico for the summer, but had to return to California where he taught in August. He asked Tonoch to come with him and Tonoch agreed. He decided that when he moved in with Manuel he would look for acting jobs and maybe find a job teaching English to people whose native language was Spanish. Tonoch thought that maybe he could get started with a happy life if he was hundreds of miles from his father’s disapproving gaze.

  Ana shut the book. It was nine o’clock at night. She was starving. She wiped the tears from her eyes. She felt drained. She wondered if Ramiro fantasized about moving away from his father like Tonoch did. But Ramiro was so close to his family, particularly his mother and sister, she couldn’t imagine him moving across the country.

  She walked to Ramiro’s room and knocked on the closed door.

  “Come in,” Ramiro called.

  “Oh, sorry Nick, I didn’t know you were here. Can I talk to Ram for a second?”

  Nick was sprawled across the bed. Ramiro sat in his ratty brown recliner. They had been laughing at something when she’d opened the door.

  “We’ve been meaning to get off our asses and go over to Sean’s place anyway. Ram, I’ll wait for you downstairs.”

  Nick left, and Ana took his place on the bed.

  “Hey, are you okay? Have you been crying?” Ramiro asked.

  She nodded. “At your book. It was really good.”

  “You read the whole thing?”

  “I couldn’t put it down. I haven’t eaten all day. I’ve just been reading.”

  “The book made you cry?”

  “Parts of it are really sad. The ending was happy, but I cried with sad happiness, you know? You should definitely try to get it published.”

  “No way.”

  “What do you mean no way? Why would you want to write a novel if you didn’t want to try to get it published?”

  “I have all these thoughts in my head. I need to get them down on paper, that’s all.”

  “But don’t you want other guys who have gone through this to read this? Don’t you want to see if you can get money and awards and stuff? Maybe you could start writing full time. I know you don’t want to work at the bookstore for the rest of your life.”

  “No. It’s not any good.”

  “Ramiro, I think it’s good. Why don’t you try and see if an agent thinks it’s any good or if a publisher thinks it’s any good?”

  He shrugged. “It’s not even finished.”

  “It felt finished to me. That’s just an excuse. You’re just afraid of rejection.” As she said it, she realized what a dead-on statement it was. It was why Ramiro was so hard on himself, why he never thought anything was good enough to be declared finished. “That’s why you never finish anything. Nobody can tell you you have no talent if you never finish anything and let anyone see it.” He didn’t respond. “I’m going to see if it can be published.”

  “Ana, whatever. Nick is waiting for me. I’m glad you enjoyed the book, but really, don’t waste your time.”

  The next day after work, Ana stopped at the Tattered Cover bookstore and went to the section on writing. She spent half an hour flipping through books and finally selected one that discussed how to get a novel published and another that had a listing of literary agents.

  She went home and promptly started reading the book on how to get a novel published. It had a section on deciding whether or not to get an agent and another section on how to get an agent. The book said that you might not need an agent for a nonfiction book, but that most publishing houses wouldn’t look at a manuscript if it wasn’t represented by an agent.

  The way to get an agent, it said, was to type a one-page query letter talking about the book and a little about yourself and what else you’d published. It suggested putting down any literary magazines you’d had short stories published in, if any. Since Ramiro hadn’t been published, she focused on his experience writing comedy.

  Dear ________,

  I’ve recently completed a 120, 000-word novel about a young Mexican-American man’s journey through Mexico to discover his history and, most important, to determine what he should do with his future. In Staring into the Sun, Tonoch has recently graduated from college with a degree in theater, a course of study he pursued despite his father’s disapproval. Then again, being a gay son to a fiercely traditional Mexican man means Tonoch may never earn his father’s approval—or his forgiveness. As Tonoch travels through the vibrant warmth of the Mexican landscape, seeing beauty in everything from ancient Mayan ruins to a wizened old woman selling jewelry displayed on a brilliantly colored rug on the dusty streets of Mexico City, he begins to understand the history of his people, where his father is coming from, and what he wants his future to hold.

  I believe Staring into the Sun would appeal to fans of Richard Rodriguez, Ian Frazier, and Sandra Cisneros.

  I’ve been a writer and performer for the last ten years and founded the Iron Pyrits improv troupe in 1994. I’ve been a staff performer at Spur of the Moment Theater in Denver for the past four years. This is my first novel.

  Please let me know if I may send you Staring into the Sun in part or in its entirety.

  Regards,

  Ramiro Martinez

  Ana only sent the query to agents who accepted e-queries to save money on postage. She created a new Hotmail account just for Ram’s book. Email was better than mail anyway: If the agents mailed letters replying to her query to Ramiro, he’d know what she was up to. She’d told him she was going to do it, so it wasn’t like she was lying, but this way, if she couldn’t sell it, Ramiro wouldn’t know and he wouldn’t have more evidence to use to “prove” that he had no talent. If she could get it published, on the other hand, Ramiro would know that his father was wrong and he had talent after all.

  She picked ten agents, a mix of men and women, who said they represented fiction writers to send the queries to.

  The book about getting published had said that it typically took a week or two to hear if an agent was interested in seeing the manuscript, then two months to hear back on whether s/he was interested in representing the book. Then it could take up to a year for a publisher to decide to buy it.

  Ana checked the new email account the next day, and three agents had responded. One said she wasn’t taking new clients, one said he didn’t think the book sounded right for his agency, but the other one said she wanted to read the manuscript in its entirety!

  Ana was a goddess! In just one day she’d gotten someone interested in reading the manuscript!

  Okay, she’d probably only heard back so quickly because email was the kind of thing you c
ould respond to instantly, but the important thing was that she’d gotten an agent interested in seeing his book. The agent still needed to agree to represent it, so it wasn’t like there weren’t more hurdles to overcome, but Ana beamed with pride that she’d written a query letter that had enticed the interest of an agent. Take that, Big Weasel! Who says I can’t write killer copy?

  Over the next several days, she heard from all but one of the agents. Four of those six said they weren’t interested, which really pissed her off. She hated that Ramiro was getting rejected when they hadn’t even read his book. She was sure they were just being prejudiced against gays. But two others said they wanted to see the manuscript, so she dutifully used the office copier to print off more copies, then she lugged the manuscripts to the post office to mail. It cost nine bucks a pop to mail these puppies, but it was worth it if she could help Ramiro make a name for himself in the literary community.

  The postman took the packages she’d put the manuscripts in as if they were just a few more boxes and didn’t hold someone’s future in their taped-up confines. She, however, watched the manuscripts tossed with the other mail with much more reverence. Like coins tossed in a fountain, they held the contents of a dream.

  43

  Fairy Tale Middles

  The last month of Marin’s life had seemed so surreal to her. She still couldn’t get over the sound of a director yelling “cut!” It was just like in the movies, except this was her real life! The thing that excited her most about her foray into Hollywood, however, was that she’d finally learned what the hell a gaffer was. She’d always seen gaffers listed in movie credits, but until now their role had been a complete mystery. (They do the lighting on the set.)