When I think to the root of the majority of my problems it seems that they all stem from how I spend so much time with my characters and they magically always do what I say.
Earlier today I picked up Mark Twain from rehab. The vain old pirate was in such a state when I threw him in there last month that he checked in with his pen name, thinking that would afford him any anonymity. "Thanks for the ride. I've got so much to tell you. I brought all your drafts with me and I think that the world won't be ready for Breakfast Anytime until you're dead."
"Oh, stop. I learned it from watching you."
And when you have a girlfriend they just don't do that. I'm an drinker with a writing problem. The last thing I want in the world is to have to talk to anyone. This doesn't even begin to plunge the depths of what a terrible person I am. My ideal girlfriend would be a female nightingale.
The male nightingale sings out both day and night for the female to come to find him. The female nightingale scurries on to him. There is nothing so amazing or beautiful to me in this word as birds. I wish I had three hundred of them in my apartment, flying around. Birds are also my perfect embodiment of true love because they are so beautiful and amazing but if you hold them as much as you would want to you would kill them. Actually, before you could kill them they would peck you till you bleed and recoil from the pain.
Mercutio tells Romeo to borrow Cupid's wings and Romeo tells him he is too hurt by the wound of Cupid's arrow:
Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, Too rude, too boist'rous, and it pricks like thorn.
And the line from the balconey scene that every single movie version leaves out is where Juliet says she loves Romeo so selfishly that she is like the creep who ties a leash on a bird and loves it so much that the creep squeezes it to death.
Jul. 'Tis almost morning. I would have thee gone- And yet no farther than a wanton's bird, That lets it hop a little from her hand, Like a poor prisoner in his twisted gyves, And with a silk thread plucks it back again, So loving-jealous of his liberty. Rom. I would I were thy bird. Jul. Sweet, so would I. Yet I should kill thee with much cherishing. Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, That I shall say good night till it be morrow.
I would love to have this bird in my apartment, but I would feel terrible about keeping it in a cage. I would want it to leave me alone during writing time, but if the female were in fact soundless it would be such a joy to have it fly into the room, perch its beauty on my laptop, look down--not reading over my shoulder which is an evictable offense in my apartment--at the keys and smile the way only birds can.
But to keep this bird from leaving me I'd have to clip her wings. This is slightly less dispicable than I once thought. You don't clip their actual wings, just the tips of their feathers. However:
Clipped birds appear insecure and less confident in their flightless condition than their unclipped counterparts. It is assumed that the bird's sense of well-being is negatively affected by its inability to escape from predators.
If I had the perfect girlfriend I would spend all my time feeling terrible for having clipped her wings and made her insecure. And if she were not clipped and insecure I can think of no reason why she would not fly out the door the second it opens.
This is more or less why Annie and I didn't work out. She would fly in during writing time, start chirping about something that has nothing to do with Shakespeare, bother me, shit all over everything and fly out. The fact that I just said that about a human being--a past love!--is living proof that I may be the worst person living on the planet.*
The bliss of the existence I have in my head is entirely base on my cavernous ignorance. You would think that this winged girlfriend I've just invented--the Plato's Republic of lovers**--should exist somewhere and should make me very happy.
My assistant is just such a creature. She's beautiful, brilliant and very fun. She can explain plato to me and then we go out dancing. She listens, silently and with the intensity of a she-nightingale, to my stories and she helps me with my novels.
I wish that I wanted anything in this world as much as she wants a boyfriend. I cannot be this boyfriend to her for some strange reason that I am trying to figure out. Not because I don't want to be that cliche guy, like my grandfather, who takes advantage of his assistant, but because I'm probably convinced that if I found someone who treated me well I would turn into an unstoppable force of ego and churn out shit writing that I've deemed brilliant because my girlfriend smiled when I read it to her.
Instead I prefer to be like my other grandfather--from whom I inherit my love of birds--who spent hours a day tending to his bird feeders because the only thing he loved and worshipped more than my grandmother were the birds whom he could attract with the calls he practiced and the food he left out for them. He loved their feathers and their habits. He had nicknames for them (the goldfinch I have tattooed on me is his accountant "Mr. Goldischmidt") and loved seeing them fly in and out of his life.
___ *The other Irish curse is that when you finally come to a wording that strikes you with God's truth you can't help saying it.
**Let's not pretend for even a second that I've ever read this work, which I think is a book but which might be an essay. The girl at my coffee shop explained to me once that at the end of describing Platos ideal republic he (they?) decided that the ideal republic can only exist on paper.
Ahh! What a joy--what a breath of fresh air for the cabin-feverish fall--to have someone drunkenly, accidentally email something to you that they meant to say about you. It's like those disney movies where some kid gets hit by a car and can all the sudden hear animals think.
he is so obsessed with his book he doesnt realize how it takes over relationships. his book is beyond the point of reason and of course there is no telling that to him. It seems like he´s gone a bit cuckoo. his main character is Mercutio and somehow dante and giotto also make appearances i think he is trying to tie in every single philosophy into a coming of age novel and i tried to tell him, its really really risky and hard to write a book on subjects like this when there are scholars who will tear it apart.
I thought at first that my self-doubt had taken to emailing me in the middle of the night so that I had one more reason to sleep in and skip writing.
Ok, my phone actually rang because I was drunk dialling batgirl as I walked by her apartment. I wanted to give her a piece of my alcohol addled mind. Somehow that turned into me telling her Italian folk tales in bed.
I remember telling myself when I met her, "Don't get involved, Brendan. She's obviously one of those girls who never knew her father and she'll only respect you if you reject her." And then I said to my other self, "Brendan, are you really going to hold it against a girl because a man neither of you have ever met is not a great guy?" And then I said to my other self, "Clearly the best idea right now is to invite yourself over, yell at her and then leave."
Telling stories and putting a girl to bed is the closest thing to a fatherly quality that I have. Telling stories before I put girls to bed is the source of all my grief.
When I got there I got in bed and told her that no matter what she might think is going on here, that I am not just some asshole she can use to make some other DJ jealous. Especially not some 39 year old with three kids and another girlfriend.
Her reply was so perfectly worded that I stood up, found my glasses and held a lighter in my left hand so I could put it in my notebook: "Brendan, if I wanted to use you to make him jealous you were right there last night and I could've used you. But I didn't because I am not interested in you."
This girl is a very talented actress and I will only be disappointed when I see her movies because she gave me her best performance.
Dante has created a hell for me where all of the girls I meet will take turns saying to me, out loud, the things that I was too chicken to say to girls during my Nikki obsession. Oh, the spurns! And yet how educational to watch from the other side.
It wouldn't even help if this guy told her that he has someone else. It's an obsession and it has nothing to do with anything in New York City, but it resides in the psyche of a girl I've known for maybe two weeks. And what the fuck am I supposed to say to this other guy who technically works for me? What would he say to me? :
Why the devil he came between us is beyond me. But the fantastic part of having an obsession is that you can make anything relate to it. Her father, this girl, that guy, batgirl, Mercutio. We are all peppered.
My walk of shame outfit was a wifebeater and the limp, beaten wings of my cupid costume. It was on the way out the door that she gave me a great smile and reminded me that we have a double date with Ben and Jo tomorrow. Awesome.
A desperate and delightful phonecall reached out to me in the darkness of a rainy saturday night. My princess called out from a courtly mascquerade ball on the Lower East Side. "When are you getting here??" I told her midnight. "Come sooner! I...I'm having a situation!" With delight I sprang into action and made my costume (cupid) out of a novel that Annie left here when she moved out and which I had heretofor used to prop up my air conditioner.
But being Irish I have an abiding spirit of tragedy that sustains me through temporary periods of joy.* I wrote her back in reference to the man she was on a date with when I met her (okay, it's actually his birthday party that we're going to) saying that should he be there with another woman that is fine, however, "If 1 of us gets the feeling that 1 of us is being used to make some1 else jealous, one of us might pull the fire alarm&leave in the herd w/o saying goodbye."
She did not receive this message. Downtown cupid arrived in wings made from the torn pages of "Miss Lonelyhearts" and pricked himself with the tipped bullets of a Vietcong bandolier but without knowing it, Cupid pricked his fairy princess while she had her eye on the birthday prince.
The birthday prince was there with someone else. "Can you believe we're both dressed as bat girl?"
Now, gentle readers and scholars of the author's demented psyche, since second grade I have hidden from myself the intense love I apparently have for bat girl. She was Barbara Gordon, Commissioner Gordon's daughter. A librarian by day and dressed in skintight shimmers by night. Maybe it's weird to harbor unfulfilled perversions from second grade, but wouldn't it be weirder if out of no where you woke up one day at 25 and discovered you had an intense and degrading sexual attraction to a character on a 60s TV show you've never seen before? Do. Not. Get. Me. Started. On "I Dream of Jeanie."
Folks, this is not one of those replacement-desire, Sigmund wants a cigar in his mouth type things. She is wearing the actual outfit donned by Yvonne Craig and purchased a red wig to go under her cowel. Had I spent 1/20th of my childhood batman hours studying, say, times tables or state capitals, I'd be the Space program and not sitting in Brooklyn on my fifth day off this week.
Inside of me is little Brendan, eight years old, rushing home from school to find Bat Girl waiting for him! He rushes over to her and, like the mime-sceptic, runs crashing into the glass of the television set. Batgirl continues acting in her universe just on the otherside of the invisible divide. Sit back from the television set, little Brendan! You'll destroy your eyes and spend the rest of your life crawling around the floors of dark apartments of women who are not batgirl, searching for your glasses.
Mercutio's advice ("If love be rough with you, be rough with love. Prick love for pricking and you beat love down.") Somehow spawned a conversation with a plump young librarian who was not Barbara Gordon. She asked me about my costume and that sparked a conversation about how she's reading eight books at once and that somehow (alcohol) led to me screaming, "What the fuck kind of librarian are you? 'It's a book about how women should have the right to chose?' That's not a fucking thesis. That's a subject. That's like saying it's a book about mathematics. What's the fucking thesis?"
I went to Kenyon. I have a degree in drinking and bullshitting the semantics of books I have not read.**
We all--birthday prince, batgirls, plump librarian--returned to the bar where the prince and I DJ. Soon after arrival she wraps her gloved hand around my arm, bats her eyelashes at me and says, "I'm drunk. Can you take me home?"
Imagine for one second how many years I've waited to hear batgirl say that! There is only one answer I've rehearsed. But the answer that came out was: "Right now? Right in front of your ex? What a fantastic idea! However, I cannot leave yet. I propped her up on the plump librarian and implored the bartender to loosen my tongue the Mexican way in case I had to rid myself of other childhood fantasies later.
The rest of the night is inconsequential. I awoke in her apartment and crawled around in the dark of noon to find my glasses. When I got back home, I considered how many $7 budweisers and cabs I wouldn't have paid for if I had just stayed home like I should have when the inkling of doubt crept upon me before I left the night before.
I got an email from my assistant, saying she had to resign.*** I went to put something down in my notebook and discovered that I lost it, my drivers, $80, my princess, a forgotten childhood fantasy, and my assistant all in one night. And the auld triangle went jingle jangle all along the banks of the royal canal.
*This quote is engraved on a stone that sits on my family's kitchen table and is attributed to Yeats. I am also currently listening to a playlist that has five different versions of the Irish song "The Auld Triangle" which Pete turned me on to. It's a pub song and each person has a different version of the lyrics because it is learned in bars by drunks who tend to lose a few muses as they go along [If the three original muses are: Aoid? ("song" or "voice"), Melet? ("practice" or "occasion"), and Mn?m? ("memory"). Then by drinking we lose Mneme and therefore forget forget how much time we've spent with Aoide and Melete.] According to Google books, Yeats never said anything like this and the lyrics to the song are nothing close to the versions. The internet is destroying the Irish quicker than they can destroy themselves.
A hungry feeling, came o'er me stealing And the mice were squealing in my prison cell And the old triangle, went jingle jangle Along the banks of the Royal Canal.
To begin the morning, the warder bawling Get out of bed and clean up your cell And that old triangle went jingle jangle Along the banks of the Royal Canal.
The screw was peeping, the lag was sleeping While he lay there weeping for the girl Sal And the old triangle went jingle jangle Along the banks of the Royal Canal.
On a fine spring evening, the lag lay dreaming The seagulls wheeling high above the wall And that old triangle went jingle jangle Along the banks of the Royal Canal.
The day was dying and the wind was sighing As I lay crying in my prison cell And that old triangle, went jingle jangle Along the banks of the Royal Canal.
In the female prison there are seventy women I wish it was with them that I did dwell Then that old triangle could jingle jangle Along the banks of the Royal Canal.
**I consider this a great feat and have no interest in filling my brain with concepts that have not been wrestled with. Proust is the most brilliant novelist that ever lived and his novels are completely unresearched meditiations on his own upbringing. Concepts flushed out and rearranged until they swirl together and create their own meaning. Which is what bullshit is.
***This is the third woman to leave me soon after reading my work. How am I not supposed to get a complex about this??
My research assistant quit today. I am looking for a new one. The position is open to anyone who went to a better school than the author and preferably someone who has access to a major research library or any college library whatsoever. Drafting letters, researching agents, rephrasing letters I've written to agents to kiss the asses of new agents, etc.
In my research I've learned more than a few ways about how the Irish speak and how that informs their thinking. Nearly everything in Irish comes in threes and it is one of the few languages metered this way. We get the sonnet and iambic pentameter from Italian where EVEry OTHer STYLaBLE is STRESSed. It's not like that in Irish. There is a theory I've spoken of before about how the Irish swear so much because it's the only way to get that extra syllable in there. Therefore "that house" becomes "that cunt's house" before we even meet this cunt. From this theory I'm starting to believe that St. Patrick made up the otherwise meaningless holy spirit just so it would make sense to the clovered people.
The lesson of this week is that I'm not so good on paper. The people I know who think I'm an asshole are usually people I've never had a real conversation with.
Brendan,
I greatly appreciate the chance to read your query. I'm sorry to report I'm just not the right agent for it.
I wish you tremendous success with this project.
Best,
An Agent who Read and Rejected Your Last Novel And whose Address Is: Madison Avenue, 84th fl
I would just like to be my own huckster like I was the other night with the princess. I'd like to walk into someone's office and explain Mercutian philosophy about how nothing is complete without its complement, how life and death, church and state, Montague and Capulet need each other. I'd like to read my scenes aloud and detail all the blood and sex and death and the love and do the voices I wish I could finish, half out of breath, sweaty and let them ask questions.
After the rain storm tonight I ended up in the castle of a beautiful princess. I had met her weeks before when she came into my bar on a date with my DJ. Her family is actually from Verona and they can't figure out why she won't marry the man her grandfather picked out for her--whom she's never met. She's half Irish and her mother is a gifted artist who had a beautiful iron balcony on her home in New Orleans before it was torn off by Hurricane Katrina.
She and I had a vespa ride/icecream date this afternoon and when we were at an icecream place on the water below the Brooklyn bridge, watching at twighlight as the city lights took over for the dimming autumn sky. It started to rain and she had to go to rehearsal. I took her back to her apartment in the Lower East Side and that's when I got the text message from my boss that just said "Call me."
I told her I had a wonderful afternoon, but that I needed to leave in order to maybe get fired or maybe just get yelled at. I went down the street to work and he wasn't there. Then I went to call the princess back and something occured to me.
I completely made this girl up. She was the Pan's Labyrinth that I created in order to escape my pathetic, worthless existence where I can't even run a fucking divebar on a busy night of the week. I also detest that I have recently become one of those twenty-somethings whose heart pounds in fear as they interrupt time with their loved ones to check in with work.
So I got back on the vespa and drove home in the rain. I took a shower because I wasn't soaked completely through just yet. When I came out I tried to decide which bills not to pay and whether or not I would get any writing done at all this week or whether I would just keep pretending. I'm on page 120 now and have been for weeks because I'm crippled by the idea of writing something and then having the characters walk over a bridge that wasn't built yet. That could set me back a month! Anyway, that's what i've been thinking about these past four weeks.
A women's damp jacket laid on the floor in my bedroom. My phone rang. It was someone claiming that I had borrowed her jacket to ride home in the rain from our ice cream date. "Is everything okay at work? Did you get fired?"
An hour later I went to investigate. It was, in fact, the very same girl I had made up earlier! Made flesh! I cooked dinner while she told me about rehearsals for the TV show she was working on. I played the opera record I had just bought either to help my Italian or so that I would feel more like a pathetic yuppie than a worthless loser.
I promised her a long time ago that I would read her some of the Italian folktales from my research when when I did I explained Fortuna and my understanding of life. She asked me a question and in searching for the right words I told her that I had written something about it before and I could read it to her if she liked.
I was ready for her to respond like the worthless, scumsucking agents who act like even hearing about something is a burden of pain on them. But her eyes lit up. She got into her pajamas and got ready for story time. I read her the prologue below to explain how wonderful and disgusting life can be at the same time and why nothing is complete without its complement.
She responded in such a way that I had no choice but to read more. And as I did I found myself slipping words in and wishing paragraphs were structured differently, so I did. I couldn't believe she didn't throw up in my lap as she lay in it. I read her the scene where Mercutio prays for his dead mother. I read her the story of Mercutio getting tossed out of church.
We were probably around the part of the story where some degree of nuditry could have been exchanged between us in the evening. But I shut my laptop and I told her this: It isn't easy for me to share my work in this format. I show very few friends because I hate the butt-sniffing bullshit that goes on and I secretly assume that they read about three paragraphs of it to decide if their friend if wasting his time or has any talent. I don't show it to my family because everytime a characters mother dies they take it personally. So I do the dumbest thing possible and I show it to girlfriends.
I showed Annie "Breakfast Anytime" and she broke up with me without finishing it. I gave Nikki her own copy of "Missing in Action" and changed the main character's love interest to her full name.* Those novels failed along with the relationship. She said I had to come back soon and keep reading. My knees felt like the refections of knees would in a puddle of water rippled as Narcissus's tears of joy rolled off his cheeks. It then occured to me that there are worse things than not working.
*Nik and I got in an email fight weeks ago where I felt like I had been misunderstood, as always. I said, "If you would just take the time to respond to the things I say and listen to me this would have been over months ago. Do you even read the things I write to you?" She responded, "No, remember? According to you: I can't read :)" I gotta say: that was pretty funny.
Here is how to write a rejection letter. Do not make some broke loser wanna be author waste paper and postage on a project you can never imagine selling! Reject him in early enough so that he can make fun of your lack of vision and you don't have to ruin your hooker-filled weekend in Atlantic city by bringing another manuscript with you!
Dear Brendan, Thank you for sharing your query with us. I wish I could respond differently but we're only signing a few projects per year and I did not feel like your book was a good enough match for the agency to move forward. As you are well aware, these decisions tend to be subjective and other agencies may find gold therein. I wish you the very best of luck in placing it elsewhere and look forward to seeing it in print in the coming years.
Not long ago I had a career, a job that I could have held for life and which would have improved financially each year. I was on television, I did radio interviews, my stories appeared in newspapers across the country and one time in Moscow. If you googled me you would find a thrilling selection of commentary. It's all gone now. The internet swallowed all of it to more room for youtube parodies.
Today I checked in with google because I'm vain. But also because I'm applying to grants to pay for my research and my research assistant whom I can just barely afford. I wondered how serious a person I would sound like if they looked me up. My name is abbreviated in all to keep google from turning this into a common search term. The only nice thing said about me is probably either written by Pete, random sarcasm or both.
Observer
Mr. Sullivan has held 27 jobs to support his writing career, from selling chapstick on the street to being a night guard in an art gallery ("That was my favorite job ever, because I just sat in a chair and read novels all day," Mr. Sullivan added.)[<--I was never a night guard and who the fuck sells chapstick on the street?] -- Publishing blog:
Hmm, maybe some of those "27 jobs" Sullivan's had since moving from Kenyon College in Ohio will actually, I don't know, give him real ideas to write about instead of what he learned in school? -- OE Message Board:
one of my bestest friends at kenyon who graduated last year got brndn sullvn into a club on st. patties day and got him more drunk than he already was. -- Portrait of the Writer as a crazed junkie [apparently this girl is a writer who lives in the city and I just like the idea that I've served her a drink somewhere and shared a polite chat about the book in her hands and then we both went home to talk shit about each other on the internet]
I think the cult of the writer as insane person is a relatively recent cultural meme...
Which brings me to Mr. Brendan Sullivan. Christ, could this guy sound more pretentious? Because talk about someone who’s trying too hard…it makes me wince to read. Writing has ruined his life, has it? Really? Really? This is a guy who can afford to go to one of the best colleges in the country (and, apparently, drop out of it to write), who can live in one of the most expensive cities in the world on odd-jobs (though you have to wonder why so many odd jobs…is he trying to lose them?), and can have an agent to publicly fire. Let alone, you know, eat food and surf the internet and read books and have girlfriends and watch TV, etc. Not to sound like your mother forcing you to eat your peas, but no one with his resources has any right saying that his life is ruined. You want to see a ruined life? Try here, or here, or here. Yes, I know it’s sometimes hard to gain perspective, but sheesh, can you at least make the attempt?
Did I really drop out of college? I don't remember that, but then again, apparently I'm a drunk. I don't even own a TV. I still hate peas.
-- man blog:
omg phil! brndn sullvn is SUCH a good dj. i go to all his performances.
i also liked my ex-roomate mike's comments about being asked about san francisco. kenyon really does bring people together. and out also out of the closet.
i also saw davy, chris loud, and paul narula last weekend. it was a real tdm evening.
As I gaze upon my bookshelves before bed and wonder which to take with me, I think with joy on those I have loved--truely loved to their final pages--before. Their titles do not matter--for some I love you might hate or they may be ones you have loved to a pathetic degree at the same time. There are those somewhat grand titles that I have taken to bed before and never finished, never struggled with to a degree of equal hatred to the love that somehow sustains them to me. When asked about them I gleen what I can in order to pretend that they loved me equally. But the creases of my own embarassment end often less than a third of the way through. We have the myth of the nun who can go to bed with just one book for life and be content in it--always learning new meanings and stories and writing about that ones granduer until her own ending. I smile at the mere possession of some well-recieved titles and speak knowingly of my possession of lesser books that others decry and smugly, snickeringly, smilingly I agree with them that--although they do not know firsthand--the gossip is true and this one is not worth losing sleep over. And someone inside of me--between the true lover and the dilettante--keeps me smiling (simply, smugly, snickeringly) as I walk through a library or another reader's shelves and spot the name or title of one I have loved, lost or lost interest in.
To: Whom it may concern Department J Ministry of Bad Advice
Here's my conundrum. I had a very good friend who is the only person I've ever heard of who created a 2 year relationship out of a drunk bar bathroom hook up. The girl is lovely and beautiful but somewhat young. Because of the nature of these things I've somewhat lost a friend over the matter because they spend all their time together. This is okay with me because I think she's wonderful and I thought she was wonderful to my friend. It turns out she cheats on his frequently and indiscriminately. I hadn't seen them together in months and last time we hung out she was offering herself to his other friends (myself included) as a polite smoker does with a pack of cigaretes.
This made me so mad! Here I've lost a friend and he worships her and she's boning all his friends. I refuse to tell my friend something that is none of my business but since we're not even really friends anymore: should I take the cigarette?
I found a new translation of a fantastic source book that takes place about 15 years after my new novel when the plague hits (1348). It is hilarious and irreverent and has stories about priests fucking nuns and tricky young women who chide their suitors with a single phrase. I was in the middle of pretending that all the stories in it were stolen from my main character. And then this came out. I want to throw up in my clam chowder. It's the same fucking source and now I have to get the script and figure out what these assholes are using.
I'm so far behind that there's already a youtube parody. Which means it happened at least this morning.
Man, I never catch a fucking break. My cousin resurfaced in Iraq last week and they sent him to the allied bases near London. I was so excited but I knew that I had to come through with my end. I immediately registered replublican and began voting against gay marriage just to honor the deal I had made with Dick Cheney.
But, since I wanted to see him and count fingers and toes before I voted for the partial birth abortion ban in Brooklyn.* So I flew in to London and it was just a few weeks after Amy got out of rehab.
I was, as you can guess, acting like Prof. Goldcock, showing off my cousin the Marine and talking about my record label and my Shakespeare series like they're an explosive force below Houston. My old friends from school there (both of them) were impressed almost to the tipping point of doubting my bullshit stories.
Amy wasn't returning my calls and it turned out she was in Amsterdam. My cousin really wanted to meet her and I was running out of excuses as to why no one had ever heard about me from the alumni office.
Anyway, we met up with Amy and when my cousin went down the street she pulls out this tiny bag of weed that had failed her earlier as a suppository on the flight back. "We didn't want to get your cousin in trouble with his unit if he had to take a drug test," Blake, her new husband, said.
"Besides we ain't got much here."
I told them not to worry about it and that I wouldn't be smoking it anyway. Pot would be the perfect drug for me if only it didn't make me depressingly stupid for the three days that follow. They smoke and I tell them all about the new novel, which they are very excited about. Blake loved hearing about the order of the wandering students and Amy liked all of Arlecchino's boner jokes. She was so into them that I, with the sin of pride, opened my laptop and read it aloud:
They all but cover the grey stone piazza in front with their grimy shoes and shit-smeared faces, making the sign of the cross if only to remind themselves that this celebrity sighting is a hallowed occasion. You might find this display of affection endearing but this is Italy on a summer day and like an infestation that overtakes your entire palace it is not the vermin, but the vermin’s excrement that kills you. Imagine three-thousand people crammed into the square for seven or ten hours. The stench alone. Did maybe any of them breathe? Did any of them breathe out the fetid air from within their plagued bodies while whirring passed their rotten teeth? How many times do three thousand people relieve themselves in a third of a day? Forgive me for striking to anger so fast, but can we not wait for my cousin to feed his grave before you piss on it? “Your cousin sure had a lot of cousins. I hope they don’t eat all the food before we get there.” “They are not my cousins. They are peeping Toms, here to speak knowingly of my cousin’s corpse so they can later critique the statue that shall lie at peace atop his funeral monument.” “What does that matter at all?” “For some strange reason we human beings detest seeing something represented if we have first hand knowledge of it because we all believe our own view to be right. Imagine if you died and you saw your own life depicted on the stage by a troupe of mendicant players and had to watch your own wife depicted by a small castrato. Would you not rise up from your grave and protest as these thieves broke into song?” “Could I pick the actor who played me?” “No, Arlecchino. In death you have no choice.” “Couldn’t I have you put it in my will?” “How would you know?” “I have a few in mind. Perhaps we could hold auditions.” “No. How would you know when you are going to die?” “Fine. But remind me when I’m about thirty-five that I might kick-it at a moment’s notice and we need to find someone who is acting at my age.” “It is just as likely that you will die today, in this carriage as you would die at 40 when the actor of your choice might also be dead or retired.” “Maybe I could just keep a running list then?” Arlecchino and I alighted the equiphile’s carriage and bid him good day. The coagulating mass of humanity rubbed their mud and feces covered elbows against us. And me in my finest black velvet shawl. “What is wrong with these people?" Arlecchino says, "Cannot they see how terrible this is?” “A crowd does not see itself as scenery, everyman and woman here thinks everyone else is disgusting for doing the very act they’re engaged in.” “This is disgusting.” “I know, dear Arlecchino. But does the muse know she is a muse? Does Fortuna know why she walks upon her wheel? Could not we now, in this very act, be such as they?” “No, it’s disgusting because I’ve still got that stiff dagger from the ride over and now I’m poking it into the crowd as we pass.” “Hush, Arlechinno.” “I’m serious. Try not to follow me too close unless you’re looking to dig a well. It’s like being led by a divining rod. Why don’t the friars do anything about this?” “All priests are assholes, Arlechinno. You would be too if you lived in a town and knew all the sins of man. And ‘though they forgive it, they never forget.” “I’m going to have plenty to say at shrift if this little bird ahead doesn’t get off my perch.”
About halfway through they started laughing as heartily, like Cheech and Chong. I was so pleased that I didn't notice that the smoke was wafting under the door and when the next door neighbor clammoured for us to keep it down I screamed back at him, "If you think you can do better than me: write your own novel, motherfucker!" But my Norweigan is terrible--sorry, my modern Norweigan is terrible so when I yelled at him it sounded to his hears like Olde English.
Anyway, I don't want to get into the rest of the story. But the goddam British press ate it up:
After 12 hours in custody and a fine of $390 each, they were released and Miss Winehouse promptly eased her woes with champagne, according to reports.
The couple were arrested alongside an unnamed 24-year-old man after being found with 7.1g of marijuana in their suite at the five-star Radisson SAS Hotel.
The hotel's head of security complained to police about the scent of cannabis lingering in the corridor leading to the couple's room.
The trio were held until 7am before being fined and released, prosecutor Lars Morten Lothe confirmed. The unidentified British man was fined $268.
Despite asking for a taxi to return her to the hotel, the couple were instructed to walk the 228m.
In August Miss Winehouse was taken to hospital after overdosing on a cocktail of alcohol, ecstasy, cocaine and a horse tranquilliser, ketamine, forcing the cancellation of a Norwegian concert. The gig was rescheduled for last night.
I'm twenty-five assholes! Do they still teach math at the Open University??
*If you can say the final clause in that sentence without developing a wonderful taste in your mouth: you are not a real person. Assonance! Consonance! It's like a symphony in your mouth!
On my way home from Minneapolis I was reading Proust. Wait. That's a lie. I was actually barely concentrating on a book that quoted Proust.
However, despite my fake chapters below here is the truth: I am insane and I couldn't stand the way the story of Nikki ended.
When we broke up I swore I would never see her again. She woke me up for pizza--on the afternoon that followed a long night wherein I DJ'd very late--and I fell back asleep. She woke me up again crying saying she couldn't do this anymore. She's 30 and she doesn't want to be out all night partying and she wants a relationship that doesn't happen in bars. I'll admit I was in mid-bender at the time, but it was my annual 6-week writing vacation and I had just DJ'd the biggest night of my meanlingless career*.
But since I'm not a very good person, and I insist on controlling the story, I ran out. I picked up her blackberry on the way and deleted my number. I threw out my toothbrush. I grabbed the rest of the meaningless bullshit I had and I told her never to call me again. My hope was that she would take me seriously for once, my fear was that she actually would.
Two weeks later she showed up at my door in the midde of the night in Brooklyn, saying she just wanted to be with me again. I have since become the kind of person who writes things down so I don't forget them. And I should have made a note: "You asked her never to call you so that if she wanted to get back together she had to commit to it."
I let her in.
Four months later this breakup--this story without an ending--was still bothering me so I found out what hotel she was staying in on a business trip and waiting in the lobby in a three-piece suit with champagne and flowers. We were still seeing each intermittently and she called me the night before saying she was lonely and had nightmares. If your love reaction truly is the same as your body's reaction to amphetamines then it should take half as long as the relationship to break the addiction.
She let me in.
I said to her everything I needed to say about how I felt. And rather than fear that my words were misinterpretted by phone or text I saw her hear me. I saw her cry and I knew that I still mattered and that she loved me too. But that's not really enough.
With that out of the way I could see the rest of our relationship and realized we're terrible for each other. We had a fantastic time together and we were perfect for each other as young, idealistic artists.** I wrote a novel that I am very proud of, but which probably has an audience equally as large as this website's. She designed brilliant lingerie that is stunning and radically classical and it was great to watch. But what next? Now I'm writing a novel for a larger audience and she's designing lingerie for wider women. It's moronic to say any sentence that uses the term "sold out" but we both had a very educational year together and this year we are applying what we've learned. Because we're sell outs.
On the plane home I was reading Proust. The part that was in Bloom's book is in bold and the rest is below and it starts--coincidentally and counter to my footnote--when he is impatient and somewhat resentful of his grandmother's joy in having her first photograph portrait taken.
I allowed myself to mutter a few impatient, wounding words, which, I had perceived from a contraction of her features, had carried, had pierced her; it was I whose heart they were rending now that there was no longer possible, ever again, the consolation of a thousand kisses.
But never should I be able to wipe out of my memory that contraction of her face, that anguish of her heart, or rather of my own: for as the dead exist only in us, it is outselves that we strike without ceasing when we persist in recalling the blows that we have dealt them.
The Nikki I was in love with is dead. And as much as I had a hundred people telling me to stop hurting myself over it I had to learn it--I had to seeit--for myself. I have long believed that we like to believe in Jesus because when people die we somehow automatically forgive their sins. I know that she is dead to me because up until Minneapolis I could not recall any of her sins and thought only of my own.
I don't believe in anything that is not a contradiction. Anything that is absolutely true is most certainly equally false because everything is relative to the vantage of time and space.*** The Nikki I once knew is dead and she doesn't even work near me anymore. I feel terrible about this because I made a deal with a wizard I know in Brooklyn (owns a surprisingly profitable car service) to make me into the world's greatest author of Shakespearean fan-fiction. I told him he could have anything he wanted. Without my authorization he crept into Nikki's apartment that night while I was at work and switched her with a changeling corpse.
Now "Nikki" skulks about the city, feeding on the bloody fetal mishaps that surface in the trashcans of Bellvue hospital. Young girls everywhere are still searching for their cats. I feel partly responsible, so when I'm done writing each day I troll around Chelsea with a dust buster to pick up all the bloody cat fur that the evil zombie changeling has left behind.
But yesterday I was too late and a little girl with sandy blond pigtails stood there, mouth agape, when "Nikki" attacked and fought a local cat, Muffin. The little girl couldn't say a word but looked on in horror and then completely let go of the pink balloon she had one in school that day. As Muffin succumbed to "Nikki's" canine inciscors with a bloody death cry--worse than if you had stepped on its tail--the balloon drifted to the heavens on a cloud of the little girl's anguished sobs.
Time and space are the two things any artist needs to create. But I needed both of them to see exactly what we had created together: an improbable story of romance whose happy beginning existed fully in the time and space of its very happy beginning and that has nothing to do with its very sad and gorey ending.
______ *If I'm going to prevent myself from sounding like a horribly sexist monster I'm going to have to vent this one thing: Why is it that girls have the innate ability to have to perfectly adverse reaction to any joy you might find? (Mature, 25-year-old Brendan wants to smack 24-year-old Brendan "You finished writing two novels in the time it took her to read ONE! When a man claws his way from a shipwreck and manages to fight for his life and reach the shore alive what's the first thing he wants to do? SLEEP! Go back to sleep! This city's full of pizza!") Zelda's one thing, but can't you just imagine Corretta Scott King after the "I have a dream" speech? "Weh-heh-hell I'm glad you had a dream. I haven't slept a god damn wink since we left home, can we go now? Mama's hungry." No fucking wonder so many men are disgusting, cheating bastards--MLK at the forefront! What I'm saying is that I deserve a purple heart for not cheating on Annie.
**Obviously it's a cute idea to be young and trying to create something beautiful and have someone else young and trying not to accidentally procreate something beautiful. But what other possible outcome is it for two people who work in bars at night and spend their days in the frustration of their creative work (and the stupifying world of business that seeks to purchase our work in even more frustrating ways). When your only free time is late at night you're probably going to rent precious few movies and get your alone-time together in cramped bar bathrooms.
***Time and space, coincidentally are the two things artists need to create. That's straight out of Heisenberg: you can't know the location and velocity of an electron at the same time. If you observe it you will interupt it. But even if you observe where it is you can never tell where it is going. When you say where something is you're really saying where it once was.
My second greatest flaw has always been my inability to seperate well spoken words from truth. How many years have I listened to commedians as a voice of reason? How many times have I been in the middle of doing the right thing when a witty saying came to mind and made me do the opposite? Chris Rock says "Men don't have Platonic friends. Men have women they have fucked yet." And thus it was spoke.
Senior year in high school I sat behind the love of my life in my only advanced class* when a student brought up this same concept in "When Harry Met Sally."
I was about to quote Voltaire on the subject but it occured to me that I have never read any voltair whatsoever. It turns out Voltaire never said "A witty saying proves nothing." It also turns out that this meaningless post is the first time "Voltair never said 'A witty saying proves nothing.'" Has ever been spoken on the internet.
More than a witty saying, words set to equally enchanting music ring in my head. Tonight on the way back from picking up a card catalogue in Long Island**, I listened to H2O's record "H2O" which was the first piece of music that I ever worshipped as a whole. It occurred to me that I may have lived four or five years of my life in perfect concord to this record. I am not proud of those years. But they were not wasted.
Anyway, today I was appraising the influence of Motown on my psyche and I started to wonder if the stark beauty of the music and lyrics of "Ain't too Proud to Beg" had anything to do with my obscenely ridiculous trip to Minneapolis last week:
I know you wanna leave me, But I refuse to let you go If I have to beg and plead for your sympathy, I don't mind cause you mean that much to me Now I heard a cryin' man, Is half a man with no sense of pride But if I have to cry to keep you, I don't mind weepin' if it'll keep you by my side If I have to sleep on your doorstep All night and day just to keep you from walkin' away Let your friends laugh, even this I can stand Because I want to keep you any way I can Now I've gotta love so deep in the pit of my heart And each day it grows more and more I'm not ashamed to come and plead to you baby If pleadin' keeps you from walkin' out that door Ain't too proud to beg, you know it sweet darlin' Please don't leave me girl, don't you go Ain't to proud to plead, baby, baby Please don't leave me girl, don't you go Baby, baby, baby, baby (sweet darling)
These lyrics seem ridiculous without the music. I used to think that "Why do you build me up buttercup/just to let me down,' was a dishonest song but now I think that it is even more honest because it builds you up and lets you down. *Wherein she corrected my pronoun reference to "Ezra Pound" by stage-whispering "HE!" when I said "she." "**An effort to organize my research notes as Satanically as possible via furniture.
Prologue. At the moment preceding my immanent death a series of memories exploded into my consciousness. They were happy. They were sad and terrifying. They appeared to me as in a dream. Equally discombobulating and foreign for how closely they resembled people and places I had loved and hated. Just as you dream about your mother calling you to dinner and sit and eat with her as though nothing is wrong and your dream self doesn’t care or notice that you happen to wear a shirt that you could not have owned at the time of the story and, oh yeah, she is a hideous dragon who speaks in your mother’s sweet voice. Be not afraid, ye with blood flow in and not out of your veins. Although I thought myself close to death on many occasions: this time I know. You often hear of women who swear they can tell the precise moment of conception and I did not believe it until now. Looking down on the tiny scratch that would open up and bring me down to Hades, I felt it was a joke played on me. I laughed. But it was enough. Enough for what? Their faces ask. Just enough. “No, 'tis not so deep as a well, nor so wide as a church door; but 'tis enough, 'twill serve,” this, the saddest phrase of my life came to me as a send up. A premise. And I laughed again at this ridiculous world I was about to leave far too quickly. “Ask for me to-morrow, and you shall find me a grave man.” These visions came as re-visions on the memories I held so dear. But, like a new edition of a story you recall from childhood, I had watched them with joy and interest and wondered if time and further scrutiny had brought these stories closer to a reflection of the source. If you—unschooled in the pantheon of my royal family and the torture of the epic that is (was? No, not yet) my story—could sit and enjoy this with me it would seem disjointed in time but never in idea. Just as your pedestrian desire to eat when your stomach empties may remind you of the mother who filled it for so many years and that, in turn, may somehow remind you of a syphilitic dragon that you have never considered before. Even that may steer you to your years in school where some pressing embarrassment kept you from finishing the drawing of the amphibious monster who kept a young knight from the beautiful lady before him in the tower. In that sense you would call them contradictory. Good. That is how I know they are real. We can never hate anyone so much as the people we love and we cannot behold a rose without navigating its thorns. We might look (more fruitfully) for a summer that never meets fall or a life that goes on without death. Perhaps you have a friend from school who speaks so eloquently that she might convince the stars not to shine or the planets to cease their orbit around us. I do not. Instead I’m left with this mess. If it seems somewhat contradictory that’s fine. I don’t believe in anything that isn’t a contradiction. I am now like the drunkard at a fancy party who stumbles into a dim lit room and smiles—out of gaity, fear, or bravado—at the hideous and disheveled man he runs into there—only to find himself before a mirror. This man is a stranger to myself but had you ran into me at the party you would not have been startled at all because you see me exactly how you always have known me. Seeing this stranger makes me smile because this hideous alter ego had just breathed his last and I should never meet him again in my lifetime. But the comfort that I take away with me at the end of my relatively short life comes from the little joy I share with him as we made our symmetrical exits. He—so equally a stranger and equally uncomfortable wih our strange meeting— smiled back at me.
On my way home from Minneapolis I was reading Proust. Wait. That's a lie. I was actually barely concentrating on a book that quoted Proust.
However, despite my fake chapters below here is the truth: I am insane and I couldn't stand the way the story of Nikki ended.
When we broke up I swore I would never see her again. She woke me up for pizza--on the afternoon that followed a long night wherein I DJ'd very late--and I fell back asleep. She woke me up again crying saying she couldn't do this anymore. She's 30 and she doesn't want to be out all night partying and she wants a relationship that doesn't happen in bars. I'll admit I was in mid-bender at the time, but it was my annual 6-week writing vacation and I had just DJ'd the biggest night of my meanlingless career*.
But since I'm not a very good person, and I insist on controlling the story, I ran out. I picked up her blackberry on the way and deleted my number. I threw out my toothbrush. I grabbed the rest of the meaningless bullshit I had and I told her never to call me again. My hope was that she would take me seriously for once, my fear was that she actually would.
Two weeks later she showed up at my door in the midde of the night in Brooklyn, saying she just wanted to be with me again. I have since become the kind of person who writes things down so I don't forget them. And I should have made a note: "You asked her never to call you so that if she wanted to get back together she had to commit to it."
I let her in.
Four months later this breakup--this story without an ending--was still bothering me so I found out what hotel she was staying in on a business trip and waiting in the lobby in a three-piece suit with champagne and flowers. We were still seeing each intermittently and she called me the night before saying she was lonely and had nightmares. If your love reaction truly is the same as your body's reaction to amphetamines then it should take half as long as the relationship to break the addiction.
She let me in.
I said to her everything I needed to say about how I felt. And rather than fear that my words were misinterpretted by phone or text I saw her hear me. I saw her cry and I knew that I still mattered and that she loved me too. But that's not really enough.
With that out of the way I could see the rest of our relationship and realized we're terrible for each other. We had a fantastic time together and we were perfect for each other as young, idealistic artists.** I wrote a novel that I am very proud of, but which probably has an audience equally as large as this website's. She designed brilliant lingerie that is stunning and radically classical and it was great to watch. But what next? Now I'm writing a novel for a larger audience and she's designing lingerie for wider women. It's moronic to say any sentence that uses the term "sold out" but we both had a very educational year together and this year we are applying what we've learned. Because we're sell outs.
On the plane home I was reading Proust. The part that was in Bloom's book is in bold and the rest is below and it starts--coincidentally and counter to my footnote--when he is impatient and somewhat resentful of his grandmother's joy in having her first photograph portrait taken.
I allowed myself to mutter a few impatient, wounding words, which, I had perceived from a contraction of her features, had carried, had pierced her; it was I whose heart they were rending now that there was no longer possible, ever again, the consolation of a thousand kisses.
But never should I be able to wipe out of my memory that contraction of her face, that anguish of her heart, or rather of my own: for as the dead exist only in us, it is outselves that we strike without ceasing when we persist in recalling the blows that we have dealt them.
The Nikki I was in love with is dead. And as much as I had a hundred people telling me to stop hurting myself over it I had to learn it--I had to seeit--for myself. I have long believed that we like to believe in Jesus because when people die we somehow automatically forgive their sins. I know that she is dead to me because up until Minneapolis I could not recall any of her sins and thought only of my own.
I don't believe in anything that is not a contradiction. Anything that is absolutely true is most certainly equally false because everything is relative to the vantage of time and space.*** The beautiful thing that makes me believe in this story is that we've since switched. Now she's now dating someone even younger than me who lives above where I work. I see them often, stumbling home in front of from another pharmacutically enhanced night (this is at 9 in the morning). It's friday night and I'm having another wild, empanada-enhanced night at my desk, having finished my research for the day and applying for grants.
Time and space are the two things any artist needs to create. But I needed both of them to see exactly what we had created together: an improbable story of romance whose happy beginning existed fully in the time and space of its very happy beginning and that has nothing to do with its very sad ending.
______ *If I'm going to prevent myself from sounding like a horribly sexist monster I'm going to have to vent this one thing: Why is it that girls have the innate ability to have to perfectly adverse reaction to any joy you might find? (Mature, 25-year-old Brendan wants to smack 24-year-old Brendan "You finished writing two novels in the time it took her to read ONE! When a man claws his way from a shipwreck and manages to fight for his life and reach the shore alive what's the first thing he wants to do? SLEEP! Go back to sleep! This city's full of pizza!") Zelda's one thing, but can't you just imagine Corretta Scott King after the "I have a dream" speech? "Weh-heh-hell I'm glad you had a dream. I haven't slept a god damn wink since we left home, can we go now? Mama's hungry." No fucking wonder so many men are disgusting, cheating bastards--MLK at the forefront! What I'm saying is that I deserve a purple heart for not cheating on Annie.
**Obviously it's a cute idea to be young and trying to create something beautiful and have someone else young and trying not to accidentally procreate something beautiful. But what other possible outcome is it for two people who work in bars at night and spend their days in the frustration of their creative work (and the stupifying world of business that seeks to purchase our work in even more frustrating ways). When your only free time is late at night you're probably going to rent precious few movies and get your alone-time together in cramped bar bathrooms.
***Time and space, coincidentally are the two things artists need to create. That's straight out of Heisenberg: you can't know the location and velocity of an electron at the same time. If you observe it you will interupt it. But even if you observe where it is you can never tell where it is going. When you say where something is you're really saying where it once was.
Renovations on the crackhouse outside my window are driving me to casual violence. The hammering noises haunt me in my sleep. It is like hearing the construction of your own crucifix.
Drew called me today. "What's your last name?" I told him. "Since midnight I've gotten two voicemail messages of computer voices saying, 'We have an important message for B-R-E-N-D-A-N S-U... press two if you know this person."
Sigmund Freud, in exhasperation at a conference, once said of the Irish: "This is one race of people for whom psychoanalysis is of no use whatsoever." I think it's funny enough, but probably only true because psychoanalysis comes from Shakespeare's use of characters who talk and in turn overhear themselves. The Irish will speak at length about any topic and never once hear themselves.
So in order to make sense of my trip to Minneapolis I asked some of the members of my writing group to write their interpretation of the events. It will take you a long time to get through it. And that's part of the point.
Chapter 1. By Stephen King
An unnatural mid fall heat wave brought a happy week to New York City, but also to the mold spores that love the young novelists lungs. He was up again that night, coughing at the almost-full moon, consumed by his work more than you average consumptive. In the night a vision came to him of a mercurial dream breeder and he snapped to his desk to begin to write about this. The fairys’ midwife.
Unseasonable lightning and the bright words on his computer screen lit the room in turns as he busied himself in his work. He had not felt this productive in months, not since his fiancé left with little more than a cryptic note of explanation. For many vacant weeks he expended himself in the awkward apartments of the busty and fragrant young graduate students in the department of his un-tenured professorship. His next novel would have at least please the chair of the Dept. of Supernatural Literature to keep his job intact for the spring semester. And this novel--like the students he taught and slept with—would come late…if at all.
He could never have them back to the house. What kind of host will entertain a guest in the most personal manner only to neglect them in the morning, hiding in his writing closet and hoping that they would sleep until he finished at noon? But all too many days he spent his writing time in cramped graduate student houses; politely he ate pilfered dining-hall cereal out of bowls that once matched the hopeful girl’s freshman dorm room.
No sooner had he considered his fiancé’s name than a blue flash pierced the room. Not from the tempest outside the window, but from the forgotten cell phone on the desk. It was her, sending out a message from a business trip to Minneapolis and complaining of loneliness and bad dreams, of all things. She had once been his greatest fan and these days the only communication he received from her came in responses to his writing, which to his own delight she insisted on seeing in the roughest of drafts. “Don’t be afraid. I am writing a dream creature for you right now. She rides a chariot drawn by ferry atoms and tickles young girls lips so they dream of kisses or of lawyer’s fingers who dream on fees.”
Happily he continued his story to write of the visions she gives to brave soldiers and how she whips and cankers the lips of naughty little girls who go to sleep with sweets in their mouths. He had to give her benevolence room for malevolence. That’s what pleased the department chair. Just then he got another message, “Another awful nightmare. I woke up screaming and grabbed my phone to call someone over to save me and I realized where I am. I’m so lonely.” He wondered for a second who she would have called. After four months of separation would he still be at least second on her list? “And I think your dream creature is here. Help.”
Without thinking, he pulled the almost maxed out credit card from his wallet. It was intended for paper clips and mythopoeic teaching aids, such as reproduction Quiddich Sticks and examples of Muggle existence. He booked a ticket to Minneapolis without even bothering to check the weather out there. If his creature existed he must know. And if they’re love never would exist again he also needed to know.
Mercutio: Brendan, you are a lover. Borrow Cupid’s wings, And soar with them above a common bound.*
Brendan: I am too sore empierced with his shaft, To soar with his light feathers; and so bound, I cannot bound a pitch above dull woe; Under love’s heavy burden do I sink.**
Mercutio: And, to sink in it, you should burden love; Too great (O!)pression for a tender thing.***
Brendan: Is love a tender thing? It is too rough, Too Rude, too boisterous and it pricks like a thorn.
Mercutio: If love be rough with you, be rough with love: Prick love for pricking, and you beat love down. Give me a case to put my visage in, A visor for a visor!**** … Brendan: And we me well in going to Minneapolis, But tis no wit to go.
Mercutio: Why, may one ask?
Brendan: I dreamt a dream tonight.
Mercutio: And so did I.
Brendan: Well, what was yours?
Mercutio: That dreamers often lie.
Brendan: In bed asleep while they do dream things true.
Mercutio: O, then I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairies’ midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the forefiner of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomi Over Men’s noses as they lie asleep…
Brendan: Peace, pease, Mercutio, peace. Thou talk’st of nothing.
Mercutio: True, I talk of dreams.*****
+This scene begins as Mercutio tries to goad Brendan into doing something to impress his lost love. Mercutio is the opposite of most of Brendan’s friends. It’s not that he does not listen but he listens far too intently and turns your own words back at you. *common bound i.e. jump higher than the usual lover. ** Brendan puns here on Mercutio’s “soar” with the obvious bawdy on “empierced” and “shaft.” And turns “bound” from leap to imprisoned. *** Mercutio predictably returns fire with puns on “sink in”—as in coitus and “burden love” as in line on top of. **** Mercutio asks for a party mask to put his “visage” (face) in but betrays his own misgivings in calling it “A mask for a mask!” Also, obvious bawdy on “case” to put his face in. ***** Shake-speare reused these exact lines (with the exception of the character name “Brendan” and the location “Minneapolis”) in an ill-received Romantic Comedy.
Strange thoughts filled the dreams of Detective Sullivan. He had yet to win a case or find an apartment since his fiancé split. At night he in his office at Panopticon Private Investigations, guarding the waiting room chairs and company phones from the repo man. A sound pierced the room and he swatted around him, knocking over several mostly empty beer bottles and debauching soggy, tepid cigarette butts on a flat Budweiser river of ash. He awoke again later as the ash had dried into a carper that would get repossessed later that day anyway and wondered, aloud, what was the point.
Only then his alcohol scarred mind trudge through the facts at hand. He was late. For what? And what of those strange dreams? His evening’s spent alone in the office had clouded his senses and he was never sure where work stopped and dreams began. One morning he awoke thinking he had solved a case in his sleep. Instead he found the drunken scrawling of a madman on the paperwork at his desk. He was equally terrible at his job when drunk. “11:45” he had written on his desk. Directly on it with a letter opener. 11:45 what? he though, italically. Upon remembering, he tore out of the house in his best three-piece-suit.
The details came back to him in a cab to the airport. A phonecall. An ex-fiance. Terrible visions. And something about a dream creature? Certainly that belonged further in Sullivan’s dreams and yet that was the one element he was sure of. That and his ex crying out for him once more.
Like everything else in their relationship he arrived just a few minutes too late. He waited standby for the next flight, his heart pumping with raw adrenaline and testosterone as only she could make him. It focused his mind like a brilliant cougar. Dr. Cougar Sullivan, PhD. In minutes he ascertained her exact hotel room using an old detective’s trick. He Googled every hotel in downtown Minneapolis, disguising his beautiful voice: “Can you please connect me to Nikki Star? She is a guest in your hotel? No? Sorry, wrong number,” until he got it right.
He looked around for something else to distract him and saw only the flaccid detective novel he bought for his last flight (San Francisco, he popped the question at Alcatraz) and the laptop he brought only to save it from repo. With his heart still pumping he began once again to write the novel he had abandoned in law school
Detective Cougar searched his holding cell beneath the basement of the terrorist camp for a way out. For eight weeks they had tortured him with solitary confinement, hoping to make him go crazy—crazy enough to emerge like them: beared, hateful, crazy. Enough. The absolute silence would have overtaken a weaker man. They expected to find him cowering in the corner, talking to himself. But they did not count on one thing. Detective Cougar is in absolute love with two things: his fiancé at home and his own voice, which sounds to him like an orchestra of fine polished instruments all played by the nimble fingers of well dressed men.
The Kensingtons insisted that Nikki Dessex stay the night in their prairie manor just on the American shores of Lake Superior. Since the war their father’s families and fortunes have been tied together as though they were one and only a forensic geneologist could keep them from grafting onto each other even more so. They still referred to the bedroom just atop the stairs in the west wing as “Nikki’s room” since her tumultuous break up with Lord Target so many years ago. Like the reading of wills after wakes and the reunion of lovers after lost years, this trip back to her temporary home filled Nikki with equal parts joy and despair, happy memories and discomforting futures. Lady Kensington asked intently about her new life in the city and showed a voyeuristic interest in the details of her new lover, whom Lord Kensington kept mistakenly referring to as “Brendan” after an Irish servant she had fancied during her visit last fall. Only Lady Kensington knew how deed this thorn had pricked Miss Nikki. She had confided their engagement only with her. Each of the four times Lord Kensington mentioned the Irishman’s name by mistake, the Lady of the house refilled his teacup, spilling a significant amount on a spot of his pants where a younger man might have screamed.
Miss Nikki declined their generous offer and instead allowed their driver to take her to the inn where she would stay for the rest of the week. She had been taken each night by horrible dreams of terror and loneliness and in truth had not slept a full hour since she arrived and did not wish to awake in an even stranger bed that morning. Between the long ride back into the city and the long drams of wine from Lord Kensington’s estates she was certain she might find sleep.
At the door to the inn she stumble graciously for a moment at the door and thought, foolishly, that she recognized a man seated on a velvet fainting couch. It could not be, she thought. But there he was, wearing the three-piece suit of a gentleman.
“What on earth are you doing here, Brendan?”
“It is Lord Brendan now, my Lady,” he stood from the chair where he had sat these long eight hours awaiting her arrival and doffed his expensive Parisian hat. His servants carried her heavy bags up to the pricey suite. “And here is the long lost deed and title to prove I am a Kensington!”
Cigarettes today: 0 (VG) Drinks: 8 (NSG, but I must sleep away these dreams) Weight: 8 stone (Did I leave them in baggage claim?!)
Dinner with Stacey Kensington (hadn’t seen her since college). Nothing interests her, save caring for her new born and—once it fell asleep—showing me other seemingly lifeless pictures of it. I snuck into the bathroom and called a car service. When it arrived out front I had pretended that I had forgotten all about it and that I simply must take it, lest I worry about finding one later. Her new husband was away on business and since I was in town on business I thought it might be fun. The driver made a joke about my teeth, which has been stained purple by the wine cellar (did I mention he’s her new, rich husband?).
I left Minneapolis many years ago to pursue my own design company. I found it amusing and maybe depressing that all the other designers had started doing mass produced lines for our old company again. Once a season I did a freelance week for them and had to pretend like it was a favor or a kind of vacation from my own work. Truth is, this time I did need the vacation. Life had been cruel and unusual since I broke up with—
“Brendan??” There he sat in a red velvet chair in the lobby of my hotel. He hid sheepishly behind his laptop, wearing the very same three-piece suit he had on the day we met. “What the fuck are you doing here??”
“I—I don’t know.”
“How did you find me? What? What is going on?”
“I—I got your message about the dreams and I thought…I don’t know what to say. Can we take a walk or something?”
“Stop looking at my purple teeth!”
“I wasn’t. I was. I mean, I haven’t seen you in so long.”
“Are you doing this just so you can write about it?”
“No, I. I love you. I wanted to see you and I could never get you in New York. I had to come out here and find you because I have to know. You have to tell me straight to my face. Tell me you don’t love me. Say it once and mean it and I’ll go straight back to the airport.”
“This is just like the time you leapt into the shower after me, fully dressed. I can never listen to a word you say so long as you keep acting like you have stage directions.”
“You know that’s not true.”
“We don’t even like the same kind of movies.”
“So, you broke up with me because horror movies are boring?”
An early fall wind swept over the prairie and up the quiet streets of Minneapolis, Minnesota. It might be the first workday of the year where the shop clerks and associate professors of the twin city would travel through the network of clear tunnels that connect every building on the second floor. It brings a solemn joy the otherwise chilly citizens to travel each day together like hamsters.
Even through the thick curtains of their hotel room, the designer and her husband could not ignore the full moon, which shined in through the fresh clean prairie air through the cloudless sky. At home in New York they never would have noticed any change in darkness at all, but here it spoke to them as clear as I to you. Its message was obvious.
The couple awoke in a tangle of limbs in the strange bed. Their mattress came with a remote control that they hadn’t quite figured out and they slept on a flaccid bed of feathers and semi-inflated plastic. The radio blared at 6:45, wrenching the couple to awaken. The wife slapped the alarm twice more. Her husband grumbled over to the tiny coffee machine on the bathroom and began his writing for the day. It was her business trip and yet he was the only one working.
He had pushed back his deadline with Random House two weeks in a row. It became a self fulfilling prophesy of his that the young minds at creative writing programs across the country would soon take his place, making him only the fifth foremost writer of early renaissance fan fiction.
The wife left in silence for her meeting. Her old firm hired her as a consultant for the week and her husband went along only because he loved and supported her with a perfection that she mirrored as only people in my stories can. When she left the room he felt an emptiness fill him. It pulled tighter and tighter as he watched her walk across the skyway across Nicolette Mall and down 7th St. South.
He returned to the story. In it, a patron of Dante loved his work but wanted to set it to music like an opera played by nimble fingers on the polished instruments of well-dressed men.
At lunch time he went to call room service, since he was still the world’s foremost author of late renaissance fan fiction he had a tremendous amount of money in his gold-lined pockets. But that full moon still hung low in the morning sky. As a denizen of New York, he rarely considered the cosmos in his daily life. On hot days he took the airconditioned subway. In blizzards he rode underground. When the moon was full it changed nothing more than the shaded icon on his desk calender.
He asked room service to leave the cart and when they were out of sight he pushed the cart out of the room and into the elevator that would connect them to the hamster tunnels. He pushed and pushed, through malls and department stores, over streets and into until he arrived finally at her office as she sat on a bench next to a potted plant in the front terrarium. “What on earth are you doing here? What about Random house?”
“Random house,” he said as he offered her a grape from the fruit tray, “can wait.”
On the planet earth each mating pair is actually made up of three and sometimes four to six human beings. This insures the survival of the species because often one or both mates are still semi-attached to the mate they had before or have already begun to attach to the one who will come after. Both male and females emit a fluid that sticks to the other and thus it is not uncommon for pairs to practice mating with the use of a plastic bag that limits, but does not completely prevent, transmission. Primitive scholars often said “the two become one flesh” and on Sundays even in the 21st century this gets repeated.
Human couples also tend to speak their own language with one another which takes years of work with a fine tuned ear to decoded since many of the words may sound familiar and yet mean their opposite. The most famous example comes from High Fidelity: “Charlie! You bitch let’s work this out!”
“I love you and from the time I met you I wanted to be with you for the rest of my life. You could have told me anything and we would have worked it out and we even practiced. We made each other run drills and say exactly what was on our minds at any second. I was there to listen. And then even you admitted we broke up for no reason.”
“It doesn’t matter now. I’m seeing someone else.”
“What does that have to do with anything?”
There is no way of knowing if humans even make sense to themselves, let alone each other.
My desire for her was like the forest to Smokey the bear, and I burned an inferno without her. In her devilish smile I saw a heaven and hell which made me know without a doubt why Adam even wanted to taste the fruit. Back in Tennis Camp as a kid, when Voltaire was my doubles partner, he told me always “Be the candle, not the moth.” And I was. What kind of month rides coach? I was being the candle, a portable candle. All I had to do what plant myself in the lobby of the hotel where I tracked her down and wait.
I always think things are going rather well if a girl starts crying. They usually do this at the end of a movie they like very much or after talking to a father whom they do not. And presto! There you are and your greatest feature is your existence. She cried at lunch and I was sure she would come around by supper. I even got my shift covered the following day so we could drive up to North Dakota that weekend and visit her parents (and father!). Then I got a text from her in the afternoon while I was working in a coffee shop. “I don’t think you should stay in my hotel tonight.” Jeez, It’s like you have to be a detective in this story just to get a chapter written.
I then got trapped in the rain in the only bookstore in town that did not link up to the hamster tunnels and I went back to her hotel to wait much later and she was not home. I started crying because I had no one to call. In despair I phoned the Dept. of Supernatural Studies and my old research assistant picked up. I apologized to the way I had treated her and then I cried and cried into the unused second double-bed in the hotel room until I heard her key in the door.
She opened the door to the bathroom on my final morning while I was in the shower.
“Hello Mr. Soap. I’m leaving for work. Thanks for the hot cocoa. I’m not hungry enough for the muffin yet so why don’t you have it?” In the back ground I heard Matt Lauer’s smartass unfunny voice. After what happened last night I was starting to feel like an urban couple’s cliché. I can’t stand listening to Al Roker’s stupid jokes and lack of any real news on The Today Show but in the other room my laptop is downloading the week of The Daily Show that I had missed.
I wiped the soap off my face and we gave tender goodbye kisses on the cheek. “Thanks for letting me stay last night. And thanks for not turning me out all week. It was important to me and I understand it now.” We spent our last night together—ever—in separate sleep number mattresses, changing our the levels with remotes, drinking champaigne and watching Spiderman 3 on pay-per-view while eating a week’s worth of pillow chocolates. I have had far less luxurious break ups.
The movie was terrible. We made fun of it together at first and made each other laugh at its ridiculous levels. As the film set in, though, we enjoyed completely different things. Nothing even changed. What I used to think didn’t matter didn’t matter, but now that things are different things are different. It’s basic grammar. We were everything each other once needed back when she was trying to start a lingerie line and I was trying to finish a novel.
We’re not trying anymore. Not in our careers or in our relationship with each other. We’re writing novels and running lingerie companies. I realized that the better we got the worse we’d be for each other. How am I supposed to help her with accounting when she is just as unlikely to help me with Shakespeare research?
I wanted to force this conversation because I thought if she could (over)hear herself saying these things it would make a difference. I am a writer who doesn’t know what the next word in his sentence is until it comes out. One concept I hadn’t thought of brings me to another and I tie them together just as I did when I flew in to Minneapolis to bring her the pages I had written about Mercutio and his dream creature.
I come from an oral culture and just as I explain this story to you without describing the clothes we wear or what color the rug is (or even the name of the hotel?) I also don’t see so well. I thought if she could hear me or even just herself then everything would be fine. Instead I saw for myself that it would never work out. I also saw what insane lengths I had gone to. I saw what people I had hurt. This trip cost me a little more than a thousand dollars and it was worth it to finally know.
It is beyond stupid to think people who don’t read are somehow worth less than others. But if you have one person who has learned to train themselves to obsess over every detail, struggle through red herrings and troublesome parts—they are not likely to get along too well with someone who does not.
I loved every single new thing I did with Nikki. We traveled to great places and (after obsessing over the details and where I saw the story going) I did ask her to marry me and she said yes. I even discussed it with her parents. I was even kind of excited when we started to have problems. Can you possibly love Hamlet if you didn’t want to slam the book in your teacher’s face at one point? Would you even care about Romeo & Juliet if you left the theater before Mercutio gets killed?
Now, gentle readers and scholars of the author's demented psyche, since second grade I have hidden from myself the intense love I apparently have for bat girl. She was Barbara Gordon, Commissioner Gordon's daughter. A librarian by day and dressed in skintight shimmers by night. Maybe it's weird to harbor unfulfilled perversions from second grade, but wouldn't it be weirder if out of no where you woke up one day at 25 and discovered you had an intense and degrading sexual attraction to a character on a 60s TV show you've never seen before? Do. Not. Get. Me. Started. On "I Dream of Jeanie."
