Fiction Writing 1, Homework 2

“If you’re gonna write, you’re gonna need adventure,” says Mister Smartass for like the seventh time. I tell him to keep his fuckin’ eyes on the road. Besides, he picked me up hitchhiking, ain’t that adventure enough?

“Nope. You gotta live, man. Taste the rainbow. You get a story worth tellin’, you look my friend Lewis up. Works in publishing out in L.A.”

He pushes a Doors tape in and I study the cassette case. I figure I got twelve minutes ‘til “Light My Fire” comes on. Song drives me fuckin’ bananas. “Drop me off in the next town.”

He does with seconds to spare; I can hear that godawful organ intro as he peels away. It’s sunset now and I duck into some shitkicker bar for a beer and a sandwich, and as it arrives a comedy show starts, of all things. This guy Freddy Something gets introduced and he seriously takes the stage in a Groucho Marx getup and I can tell there’s gonna be trouble. Sure enough his lousy act gets him booed, then threatened; one drunken fool launches a bottle at him and nobody does shit about it, though it draws laughs as it explodes behind him. I form a sort of vaudeville hook with my hand, pull Freddy off the stage before someone kills him.

“Thanks, friend,” he says. “What’s your story?”

“Thumbin’ rides. Headed to Los Angeles,” I say, though truthfully I hadn’t considered where I was going.

“I got a Studebaker.”

“Yeah?” I look at him funny, but he’s serious. “You probably could use a career change anyhow.”

“You got that right.”

So we drive. Things are quiet on the interstate, but the first time we stop for gas we get into a wreck with a truck driven by a wiry fellow with a huge mop of curly hair, so black it’s almost blue, wearing these crazy mismatched patterns. Calls himself The Weirdo. We like him.

Both cars are fucked so we trade ‘em in for a station wagon. There’s three of us so we drive in shifts, one person asleep in the back, and we ride until The Weirdo gets hungry and makes us stop at this county fair. I meet Missy, a proper country girl; I buy her ice cream and she ends up heading West with us. She’s curvy – Freddy calls her porky under his breath, so I punch him. Just hard enough.

We’re gassing up again in Eastern California when I get jumped outside the station bathroom. “Been chasin’ you for days,” this dude wheezes, all beady-eyed and drunkenly. He’s got a knife, and I don’t see Missy or The Weirdo or Freddy anywhere. Just as my attacker lunges, a dog emerges from nowhere and bites his leg, snarls, chases him off. He acts all sweet with me and seems stray so we put him in the wagon.

In the end it turns out there is a Lewis in publishing; I tell him this story and he digs it. There’s a rainbow hanging over the bookstore parking lot during my book signing, and as I consider tasting it I get to hoping Mister Smartass will come tearing through the embarrassingly large “Meet The Author!” banner. I think he’d like my new friends.

Fiction Writing 1, Homework 1

My neck hurt.

I blinked hard in the discordant light, a combination of the awful florescence illuminating the train and, through the windows, the first syrupy fingers of dawn streaking an ashen sky. I was seated on a powder-blue bench in one of the shiny new subway cars, with its mechanized station announcements and scrolling LED signs all politely informing me it was now 5:11 a.m., that the next stop would be Neptune Avenue. Coney Island? I blinked again, harder.

The car was predictably deserted at this odd hour. I saw a pretty girl, maybe nineteen, in an unzipped hoodie exposing an iron-on “Lady Picasso” t-shirt epigram; a one-legged Dominican man, apparently asleep, four plastic grocery bags tied shut in a neat circle around his lone shoe; a thin man and a fat woman, crammed into a corner seat; and a cop. The latter waddled through the car, the nightstick at his hip sculling heavily through the air. His eyes lingered uncomfortably long as he passed the pretty girl, then turned his head towards me.

“Mornin’ sir. You been drinkin’?”

“Have I been drinking?”

I wasn’t sure why he was asking, but I don’t think he heard me respond. He nodded vaguely towards the couple in the corner, moved through the sliding doors separating cars, disappeared.

I eyed the couple a moment. They wore matching wedding bands of a tacky gold - the man fidgeted with his periodically. His oversized suit, wove from a nondescript brown linen, made him appear ludicrously narrow. His face was sweaty, pockmarked, actively unhandsome; his mustache, like him, was twitchy and willow-thin and crooked in posture. His wife, on the other hand, was heavy, but not inelegantly so. Her dress was close in color to his suit, but it clung to the folds of her skin gracefully. Her facial features were petite relative to her mass; she could have been beautiful, but something in the slenderness of her lips, the wrinkles on her brow, the severity of her ponytail signaled danger. Her husband angled his lean frame crazily to avoid touching her, sweeping his eyes desperately across ads promising impotence cures, laser fibroid removal, hasty divorces. Her stare, meanwhile, bore into his sunken cheek like a dentist’s drill.

The man leapt to his feet as the train pulled into the Surf Avenue station, only to tumble comically into his wife’s lap as the engine braked. She responded first with a two-handed shove to the small of his back, then by swinging her purse into his kneecap as she stood up. He assumed a look of contrition, humbly allowed her to pass him, and then stomped on the heel of her shoe as she exited the car. I never heard a sound from either partner, but I could see their silent war of jostling and tugging, slapping and jabbing, continue as they crossed the station platform. I craned my still-aching neck, watched until they disappeared from sight.

The next stop, Stillwell Avenue, was the end of the line. Lady Picasso split the second the doors opened; the Dominican slept on. I thought about riding back home, but changed my mind and left the train. I don’t know what it’s about, Coney Island at dawn, but I felt like an egg sandwich.