“The writer stares with glassy
eyes
Defies the empty page
His beard is white, his face is lined
And streaked with tears of rage
Thirty years ago, how the words would flow
With passion and precision
But now his mind is dark and dulled
By sickness and indecision
And he stares out the kitchen door
Where the sun will rise no more…”
~ Rush “Losing It”
This story is dedicated to the
person who (along with the Kinks) told me, “Don’t forget to dance.”
Oh, I’m still dancin’ and this little ditty is concrete proof of that.
d
The laptop screen was blank, and it had been that way for
many an hour.
His hands rested limply on the battle-scarred keyboard. He
discovered an errant Dorito crumb that was living in-between the “N” and “M”
keys. He pondered it for brief moment before flicking it away with an exasperated
sigh.
The clock sitting in the right-hand corner of his desktop
read 7:24 AM; his deadline was a little over 12 hours away and not a word had
leaked from his brain onto the digital page set before him.
“Fuck me,” were the only words he could think to utter in
this confounding moment.
He stood up and began to pace and to think which is what he
did. Of course he had heard of Writer’s Block before, but he had never suffered
from its crippling effects…such as not being able to put a goddamn word on the goddamn
page no matter how much wanted and/or needed to.
Inevitably his thoughts shifted from the topic at hand, the
topic he should be focusing on, the topic that would make him some cold, hard
cash, to her. “You can think about the woman, or the girl you knew the night before,”
the great Bob Seger once sang.
And think he did…
Emily was her name; the vast digital wasteland of Tinder,
where respectability and romance go to die, was their meeting place. Not a
rom-com “meet cute” by any stretch of the imagination, but one has to take what
they can get in today’s impersonal, electronic age.
Emily was unquestionably adorable, and built like a teenage
camgirl to boot, but she was a hyperactive, over-medicated flake who talked way
too much nonsense for his liking. He was at the point in his life where he knew
damn well that the steak mattered more than sizzle. And, ultimately, this was a
person who he just couldn’t spend an extended amount of time with.
He desperately craved a woman in his life who had that subtle
combination of beauty, style, and grace that was nigh impossible to find. While
Emily certainly had the beauty part down cold (which is the easiest to come by,
really, being just a genetic roll of the dice) the style and the grace parts
most certainly eluded her as the Accelerati
Incredibilus so deftly avoided the Carnivorous
Vulgaris for many a decade.
So, after their third date he expeditiously deleted and
blocked her number from his phone on the drive home from her apartment the next
morning. He was in no way proud of this act of cowardice, but this was
something he was wont to do during his latest spate of dating tomfoolery.
Not long after, he realized IT was no longer in his possession…and that Emily had IT.
The IT in
question here was his well-worn, paperback copy of Kurt Vonnegut’s Welcome to the Monkey House. After
reading this wondrously diverse collection of short stories his freshman year
of college he decided that the life of a writer was the one for him. He also concluded
in that moment that Kurt Vonnegut was the fucking man, and he set out on a
quest to consume every word the man had ever put to the page.
Why he gave IT to
her in the first place was a hybrid of intellectual hubris and male ego –
trying to be the big, impressive guy he never felt he truly was when push came
to shove. Emily mentioned in passing that she had never read any of Vonnegut’s
work, but she had heard nothing but good things about it. So, he showed up to
their first date with his copy of IT
for her to read, telling her rather pompously that IT was the best place to start if she wanted to understand the man
as one of the most important authors of the 20th century.
The ridiculous notion that he was having issues writing for
the first time in his career because IT
was no longer in his possession struck him while he was waging the constant war
against the insects (Ants? Roaches? Some devilish hybrid of the two??) that
lived and bred under his microwave. As he was brushing a few of the doomed
creepy-crawlers into his sink to drown them in the unholy Charybdis of his drain,
the thought became stuck in his addled brain, and it would not leave no matter
how stupid or superstitious it seemed to be.
“Native Americans have totems, and the Irish have Lucky
Charms. I mean, four-leaf clovers…and other dumbasses have rabbit’s feet and
all that, right,” he stammered to no one other than himself, trying to convince
himself of this madness.
Another thought occurred to him then: Perhaps he could just
replace IT; just buy another copy of
IT?
To test this tenuous theory, he drove to the closest
bookstore and picked up a new version of IT
which sported a detestable, art-nouveau cover. While he waited in line,
staring at this cover he hated, he realized that this was not going to work. He
needed his original copy of IT; the
one he bought in the rapacious college bookstore many moons ago.
He deposited the faux IT
on the magazine rack in the check-out isle, hiding the latest, tabloid
indiscretions of the royals and internet “celebrities” from public consumption
then beat a hasty retreat to his parked car.
There was only one thing left to do now: check the blocked
messages and calls on his phone in the hopes that Emily tried to contact him
after he callously “ghosted” her. If she did this, perhaps he could sweet talk
her into returning IT? That seemed
unlikely, but it was all he had in these desperate hours.
A furtive glance at the dashboard clock revealed that it was
now just past 2 PM…six desperate hours left until his deadline. Wouldn’t be a
cakewalk but could be done. He just needed IT
back in his possession as IT was
certainly the key to unlocking all this Writer’s Block bullshit – of this he
was now certain.
Upon checking the “BLOCKED” box on his phone, there were
indeed several confused and angry messages from Miss Emily. She called him
every foul and derisive name under the sun…and then heaped on a few more for
good measure.
He was all those things, and more. No doubt. But right now,
none of that mattered. He needed IT
back and he would wriggle his dumb ass through the maggot-infested bowels of
Hell to get IT. His life, nay his
career and reputation, were on the line here.
He shot her a text: “Hey, can we talk?”
He glared at his phone for what seemed like an eternity,
almost willing her to respond to him in his hour of dire need. Finally, a
response did come: “Who is this?”
Not a good start. He quickly typed his name, hoping that alone
wouldn’t send her into a spasm of indignant, feminine rage.
After a few dragging moments: “Talk about what exactly??”
15 minutes later he was driving to her place with a shit-eating
grin plastered on his face. The text conversation went as well as could be
expected; she was surprisingly amenable to what he needed. I mean, IT wasn’t hers in the first place, she
admitted. And IT was still sitting
in the back of her car, unread, as far as she knew.
As soon as he pulled up out in front of Emily’s place, he
understood why she had been so accommodating: she was fucking with him in order
to exact some sort of twisted revenge. There she was, cute as a button, sitting
out on her postage stamp-sized patio (where they had feverishly made out only a
week or so ago) methodically ripping pages out of IT then placing them on the small, Weber grill at her feet.
When she noticed him pull up, she smirked then dropped what
was left of IT’s carcass on to the blistering
grill below her then slammed the lid on top of IT with a definitive clanging sound, almost as if it were a death
knell.
His initial instinct was to pounce out of the car in true
costumed crime-fighter fashion in an attempt to save IT from the flames, but all he could muster was a plaintive, “Why,”
as he was lowering his driver’s side window.
Emily, the demoness, the book-immolator, smirked her wicked
smirk once again and spat, “Because fuck you that’s why.”
She turned on her heels to go inside, but before she did,
she had one last searing dagger to thrust into his heart: “And try trimming
your pubic hair sometime, asshole!”
He drove off. Sadly. Slowly.
He was beaten. IT
was gone...nothing but cinders now.
d
The ride home was indeed a somber one. There were no shit-eating
grins to be witnessed, not even when his favorite song in the whole entire
world (Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again”) came on the radio.
Upon returning home, he sat down at his desk. Nothing came. Not a
blessed syllable. He had notes and research and interviews and statistics, but
he could not think of one goddamn way to make that information coalesce into
something both informational and intelligible.
So, he sat.
And he sat.
And he sat.
And he sat.
While he sat, his cell phone erupted with wrathful, screed-like texts
and pleading, plaintive voice messages from his editor who wanted to know,
simply, where in the flying fuck her story was.
With the prevalent thought of “Hang
on tightly, let go lightly,” he tossed his buzzing cell phone out the
window.
“That’s where I filed my story, lady,” he deadpanned as he watched his phone hit the concrete below with
a shattering CRACK.
“Why the hell can’t you FIND IT!?”
He actually screamed the last part, and that shriek scared the bejeezus
out of a little girl on the ground below who wanted nothing more than to
understand why it was suddenly raining smartphones.
It was at that moment he decided to go for a drive. A long drive to nowhere.
In the midst of that drive, he came across a massive, high-tension
pole that, for some reason, he desperately wanted to drive smack dab into. For
a fleeting moment, he had the ridiculous notion that maybe, just maybe, doing
that would somehow lift the curse of IT
and magically cure his Writer’s Block.
So, he drove smack dab into the pole.
It didn’t feel good, and it cured nothing.
Nothing at all.
d
For a time, all he knew was haze. Confusing haze and agonizing pain.
But then there was smoke. He knew this smoke for it was cloying and clinging
and unmistakable. It was cigarette smoke – a dense fog of it enveloped the
hospital bed to which he was now bound by crazy wires and things that went
“BEEP” in the night.
The source of the smoke was man, shadowy, yet familiar, who was
seated at the side of his bed. Was this cigarette smoking man a man who was
Unstuck in Time? No…no…that was his character. Pilgrim. Billy Pilgrim.
This was the man himself.
“I tried this once,” the smoking man said in a measured accent
that was entirely hayseed…by way of New York City. “Didn’t take.”
“What…what are you…doing here?”
“Maybe I’m bored. Maybe I’m lonely. Maybe my afterlife, if I
believed in that crap, isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,” the smoking man confessed
while expelling more noxious smoke into the air.
“Maybe I have something to tell you…something you need to hear,”
the smoking man continued. “I won’t be long. Brevity being the soul of wit and
all that.”
He tried to sit up, to lean in closer to hear the smoking
man’s wisdom, but a shocking jolt of pain put an end to that.
“That’s what you get for playing chicken with a fucking
pole.”
While enjoying a quiet chuckle at his pointed barb, the
smoking man stood up. His head was now wreathed in murky cloud which made him
look like something out of a sci-fi cartoon.
“Look, kid, it was never about my book. The book possessed
no special mojo or magic. C’mon, that’s horseshit and you know it,” the smoking
man scolded.
“But it felt…so real. I mean, Writer’s Blo…”
The smoking man impatiently waved his words away like the nonsense
they were.
“Writer’s Block is horseshit too. It’s all about you and
what’s in your head.”
The smoking man paused for moment, taking a long drag on his
cigarette.
“You’ve got the gift. You know that. Don’t piss it away like
this.”
“Yeah, but…”
“The one thing you can do is be more kind to people. Karma,
as we know, is a real bitch,” the smoking man divulged.
Searching his memories, the smoking man chuckled again: “There’s
only one rule that I know of, babies — God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”
“I wrote that a while back. Pretty good stuff…now that I
think about it. You can be easier on yourself when you are dead.”
“Am…am I dead?”
“Not yet. But you’ll get there, kid.”
“Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot.”
“That business with Sports Illustrated back in the day…I
mean, why did you just get up and leave? You could have just asked for another
assignment. Most people would consider that a dream gig…”
After another long, ponderous drag on his cigarette, the
smoking man sighed, “I wasn’t very good at being an employee. I saw the future
in that moment, you see. A future chained to a desk writing shit I couldn’t
stand. And I didn’t like it. Not one little bit. So, I wrote what I wrote, and
I left.”
“The horse jumped over the fucking fence,” he recited as if
it was his own memory and not the smoking man’s.
“Yup. That’s it.”
With that, the smoking man, with his craggy face, porn
mustache, and shock of curly, brownish hair, grinned at him as dropped the
cigarette under his heel to extinguish it.
“See you around, kid.”
d
He awoke three days later.
The only reason he knew that was because the snippy nurse
who was now poking something sharp into his arm had told him so.
She continued to complain about smelling smoke and the like
as he tried to reacquaint himself with the really real world.
Aghast, the nurse bent over to pick up something clearly
horrifying off the floor. She found it, then shoved it in his face. It was a crumpled
cigarette butt.
“Jesus Christ! Was someone smoking in here?!?”
“I have no idea. I was mostly dead for three days. You said
so yourself.”
With an exasperated sigh, the nurse tossed the offensive butt
in the trash.
“Did anyone bring any of my stuff here,” he queried
hopefully.
“Your sister did the other day. It’s over there.”
“Is my laptop there?”
“I think so. You want it?”
“Please.”
The nurse rummaged through the bags left by his sister, soon
finding his laptop. She handed it to him but didn’t let go.
“Need to check your
online dating profile,” she asked with the hint of a curious smirk playing at
the corners of her mouth.
“No. Not at all,” was his curt reply. “I have an idea for
something.”
“Allllrighty then.”
So, she left him…as there were other patients to annoy and
cajole.
He switched on the laptop; it quickly came to life with a
musical jingle. The first notification that popped up was an email from Emily, apologizing
for how beastly she acted. She went on to write: “Maybe, just maybe, they could
grab a drink sometime.”
He deleted that fucking insanity as quickly as his index finger
would (repeatedly) hit the DEL key.
Upon opening his word processing app, he began to write…with
passion and precision.
The first words that flew onto the digital page were: “The laptop screen was blank, and it had
been that way for many an hour.”
THE END
Illustrations by Noa Cebalo
