Post by P. H. M. on Jul 20, 2008 23:02:35 GMT -5
First, my usual annoying commentary--
So I managed to finally write a really not-solid piece of fiction not starting with the word "She," not being less than a hundred words, not being given up on, and not involving women at all really. It's poorly written. Yes. This is true. But it has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. And so I'm sort of proud of myself. So here it is. I hope you can tolerate it. It's like something I'd have written when I was fifteen, but then I was more free with my ideas anyway, and now this has sparked a bit of a revolution in my creative spirit, I'm even scheming up novel ideas (no lack of gratitude to the recent Jargonish books I've read, ie Songs of Insurgency and Dollhouse.)
RIght, so, here we are. Thanks for reading, if this is your first Madorean writing then please do hit up the google to see I don't always write this badly shortly after noting the name of this forum...
Listening to the Cranberries... Wow...
Last pack of cigarettes. Maybe forever. Quitting.
Over. Roger. Out.
-P. H. M.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
P. H. Madore
Sober As A Metronome
2nd Draft, 7/20/08
Draft History:
1st (HW), 07/18/08;
They hate it when you're this slick. Seems I've always known so but this morning it has dawned on me. Like a popcorn kernel in your teeth for two days before it finally comes out as something tangible, not a vague annoyance. Except I've felt this way my whole criminal life, just didn't know what it was.
Correction. They don't hate it, they hate you when you're this slick—a point requiring due justification.
*
Don't know what his excuse for pulling me over is, but I know this cop. Jacob Klinger. Ugly middle-eastern mix bastard, it's no surprise we all called him Kling-on. Especially given the way he used to latch onto one or another of us now and then when we decided to let up on him or just got distracted. Wasn't our favorite dork to poke fun at, or even really all that geeky, he just didn't have any friends and we didn't want to help him. Still kids then, and kids are cruel. After sophomore year he gave up on trying to fit in and started trying to do us in. Only way he could shine. My friend Pete said Klinger would one day be Officer Klinger. “He's too lazy for the mill and too stupid for college,” he said in a memorable moment of stoned lucidity. We feared Klinger more than we did our teachers as far as getting busted for anything went. A cat and mouse game where teenage worlds were at stake.
*
Now is ten years after high school. I graduated, if you're wondering, by the skin of my teeth.
Ten days ago I was released from the Baltimore County Detention Center in Maryland completely broke and homeless. A gigantic conflict with my prostitute-addicted French roommate led me there. Rather not remember or recount.
Lacking elsewhere to go, I uprooted myself from the bench outside the Patapsco Avenue courthouse and made the dreaded collect call to my mother. A ticket would be waiting for me at the Greyhound station, she promised, all I needed to do was get my sorry ass there and I' be home in twenty-something hours.
Home is a smaller city in rural New England where the economy's been down so long people have forgotten there ever were a few mills, a shoe factory, a railroad, and thousands of people. Now there are rows of tenement houses, abandoned concrete buildings where commerce used to live, broke-down basketball courts, low-income housing, and crime. The New American Nightmare, basically. Life up to this week was spent running from all this. Have lived everywhere and haven't intentions to stay.
*
First thing my mother says to me is that she's glad I'm alive. Got the postcards from California and Alberta. “The rest must have gotten lost in the mail,” she lies. A thing between us is that these were my two strong, honest, and sober periods, neither of which lasted more than a period of months. New Englanders have a way of ignoring things so as to avoid the possibility of becoming or appearing intolerant, or judgmental. Mom, old leprechaun that she is, hasn't ever been an exception.
Second thing is not to worry about paying her back for anything, including the carton of smokes in the cupboard she bought me in anticipation of my arrival. I tell her she's an angel, a doll, and within minutes I'm on the phone with trusted friends scheming up my way back on the road. Once she's asleep I take my mother's car to a place way out in the woods to solidify my escape plans. Cashing in a favor or two will be required. It's been so long but so few things have changed around here that I highly doubt I'm totally forgotten.
“Paulie, yer alive you mothafuckah!”
Business doesn't take long. Of course my oldest best friend, Josh, will front me as much as I need. Even help me get back in business by putting others out. Things have changed, he explains, “Frankie Pierce ain't around no more.” In his eye there is a twinkle so murderous it's cunning as he says this. I don't feel as anxious as I expected to. Soon numbers, dates, and the rest get set in stone and his woman is fast asleep on the leather couch. We're swapping stories of the decade lost between us. Inevitably Pete McCall is brought up and we smoke a joint in his memory. We don't trip anymore on the fact that Pee was the only of our trio who'd live forever as a legend—he died in a shootout with Staties trying to move seven smuggled Chinese AK-47s for a plantation owner in Machias. We both believe the whole thing was a setup. Pete's woman had just gotten pregnant, there was ten grand to buy a house with in the deal for him. He might have gone straight thereafter, worked the mill with his father. We're both glad he didn't live to see that mill close, his father go broke, become a drunk and lose his wife to cancer. Josh has him on a cash pension plan, he says, “Whatever the old bastahd needs. I loved Pete like family, like you did I know, you was just itchin' so bad to bail outta this bitch, I never did blame you.”
Before I leave, Josh says, “Hey, go see my old man tomorrow 'round lunch. Fill out some paperwork, get on his payroll. He'll be expecting you, probably talk at you for a few hours, you know how he is. Just in case you need an honest job for something.”
I walk out the door with five thousand dollars worth of product plus a digital scale in a backpack I remember from high school. Over the next five days the family thinks I'm landscaping for the rich leeches that still thrive here. Instead I'm slinging sticky green to welfare recipients and high school students. Target is only three grand. I have that second day, put it in an envelope labeled “Mom” and plan to tuck it under her pillow the night I leave under cover of darkness.
Re-up and keep doing the peddler thing.
*
Re-enter Officer fucking Klinger. In my rearview I see him excited, motivated as he approaches Mom's old LeSabre. Not the usual scee of a crime. I'd been doing the speed-limit, had a valid license, and was sober as a metronome. He did his whole cop thing, pretended to have never met me before, and made me get out of the car. Searched me, pulled out my cash.
“That's a lot of money, boy,” he says. “Only one kinda Joe has this kinda money around heah. Fuckin' crooks. You got a job?”
“Yeah, Kling-on,” I say—almost without meaning to. “I got a job. Here's our business card. Call and ask where I got all my money from,” I said smoothly. “I was actually going to go open a new bank account. Or buy a car. Whichever makes you less of a dildo,” I went on, feeling a bit crazed.
He called my bluff and lost—Josh's fahter could lie as any good fairy-tale'n Irishman and so did. Turns out I saved a rich guy's baby from a garden snake th same day I stopped some teenagers from breaking into another rich asshole's house. Both were eternally grateful, and the repeat business meant an obvious raise plus bonus for me.
I see the hate in his eyes. It too was alumni of our high school days. Not so much hateful of what I'm doing, but that I'm doing it better than he's doing his thing. He doesn't even bother with his warning bullshit, just gives my card back and walks away, sullen and again knowing his place.
So I managed to finally write a really not-solid piece of fiction not starting with the word "She," not being less than a hundred words, not being given up on, and not involving women at all really. It's poorly written. Yes. This is true. But it has a beginning, a middle, and an ending. And so I'm sort of proud of myself. So here it is. I hope you can tolerate it. It's like something I'd have written when I was fifteen, but then I was more free with my ideas anyway, and now this has sparked a bit of a revolution in my creative spirit, I'm even scheming up novel ideas (no lack of gratitude to the recent Jargonish books I've read, ie Songs of Insurgency and Dollhouse.)
RIght, so, here we are. Thanks for reading, if this is your first Madorean writing then please do hit up the google to see I don't always write this badly shortly after noting the name of this forum...
Listening to the Cranberries... Wow...
Last pack of cigarettes. Maybe forever. Quitting.
Over. Roger. Out.
-P. H. M.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
P. H. Madore
Sober As A Metronome
2nd Draft, 7/20/08
Draft History:
1st (HW), 07/18/08;
They hate it when you're this slick. Seems I've always known so but this morning it has dawned on me. Like a popcorn kernel in your teeth for two days before it finally comes out as something tangible, not a vague annoyance. Except I've felt this way my whole criminal life, just didn't know what it was.
Correction. They don't hate it, they hate you when you're this slick—a point requiring due justification.
*
Don't know what his excuse for pulling me over is, but I know this cop. Jacob Klinger. Ugly middle-eastern mix bastard, it's no surprise we all called him Kling-on. Especially given the way he used to latch onto one or another of us now and then when we decided to let up on him or just got distracted. Wasn't our favorite dork to poke fun at, or even really all that geeky, he just didn't have any friends and we didn't want to help him. Still kids then, and kids are cruel. After sophomore year he gave up on trying to fit in and started trying to do us in. Only way he could shine. My friend Pete said Klinger would one day be Officer Klinger. “He's too lazy for the mill and too stupid for college,” he said in a memorable moment of stoned lucidity. We feared Klinger more than we did our teachers as far as getting busted for anything went. A cat and mouse game where teenage worlds were at stake.
*
Now is ten years after high school. I graduated, if you're wondering, by the skin of my teeth.
Ten days ago I was released from the Baltimore County Detention Center in Maryland completely broke and homeless. A gigantic conflict with my prostitute-addicted French roommate led me there. Rather not remember or recount.
Lacking elsewhere to go, I uprooted myself from the bench outside the Patapsco Avenue courthouse and made the dreaded collect call to my mother. A ticket would be waiting for me at the Greyhound station, she promised, all I needed to do was get my sorry ass there and I' be home in twenty-something hours.
Home is a smaller city in rural New England where the economy's been down so long people have forgotten there ever were a few mills, a shoe factory, a railroad, and thousands of people. Now there are rows of tenement houses, abandoned concrete buildings where commerce used to live, broke-down basketball courts, low-income housing, and crime. The New American Nightmare, basically. Life up to this week was spent running from all this. Have lived everywhere and haven't intentions to stay.
*
First thing my mother says to me is that she's glad I'm alive. Got the postcards from California and Alberta. “The rest must have gotten lost in the mail,” she lies. A thing between us is that these were my two strong, honest, and sober periods, neither of which lasted more than a period of months. New Englanders have a way of ignoring things so as to avoid the possibility of becoming or appearing intolerant, or judgmental. Mom, old leprechaun that she is, hasn't ever been an exception.
Second thing is not to worry about paying her back for anything, including the carton of smokes in the cupboard she bought me in anticipation of my arrival. I tell her she's an angel, a doll, and within minutes I'm on the phone with trusted friends scheming up my way back on the road. Once she's asleep I take my mother's car to a place way out in the woods to solidify my escape plans. Cashing in a favor or two will be required. It's been so long but so few things have changed around here that I highly doubt I'm totally forgotten.
“Paulie, yer alive you mothafuckah!”
Business doesn't take long. Of course my oldest best friend, Josh, will front me as much as I need. Even help me get back in business by putting others out. Things have changed, he explains, “Frankie Pierce ain't around no more.” In his eye there is a twinkle so murderous it's cunning as he says this. I don't feel as anxious as I expected to. Soon numbers, dates, and the rest get set in stone and his woman is fast asleep on the leather couch. We're swapping stories of the decade lost between us. Inevitably Pete McCall is brought up and we smoke a joint in his memory. We don't trip anymore on the fact that Pee was the only of our trio who'd live forever as a legend—he died in a shootout with Staties trying to move seven smuggled Chinese AK-47s for a plantation owner in Machias. We both believe the whole thing was a setup. Pete's woman had just gotten pregnant, there was ten grand to buy a house with in the deal for him. He might have gone straight thereafter, worked the mill with his father. We're both glad he didn't live to see that mill close, his father go broke, become a drunk and lose his wife to cancer. Josh has him on a cash pension plan, he says, “Whatever the old bastahd needs. I loved Pete like family, like you did I know, you was just itchin' so bad to bail outta this bitch, I never did blame you.”
Before I leave, Josh says, “Hey, go see my old man tomorrow 'round lunch. Fill out some paperwork, get on his payroll. He'll be expecting you, probably talk at you for a few hours, you know how he is. Just in case you need an honest job for something.”
I walk out the door with five thousand dollars worth of product plus a digital scale in a backpack I remember from high school. Over the next five days the family thinks I'm landscaping for the rich leeches that still thrive here. Instead I'm slinging sticky green to welfare recipients and high school students. Target is only three grand. I have that second day, put it in an envelope labeled “Mom” and plan to tuck it under her pillow the night I leave under cover of darkness.
Re-up and keep doing the peddler thing.
*
Re-enter Officer fucking Klinger. In my rearview I see him excited, motivated as he approaches Mom's old LeSabre. Not the usual scee of a crime. I'd been doing the speed-limit, had a valid license, and was sober as a metronome. He did his whole cop thing, pretended to have never met me before, and made me get out of the car. Searched me, pulled out my cash.
“That's a lot of money, boy,” he says. “Only one kinda Joe has this kinda money around heah. Fuckin' crooks. You got a job?”
“Yeah, Kling-on,” I say—almost without meaning to. “I got a job. Here's our business card. Call and ask where I got all my money from,” I said smoothly. “I was actually going to go open a new bank account. Or buy a car. Whichever makes you less of a dildo,” I went on, feeling a bit crazed.
He called my bluff and lost—Josh's fahter could lie as any good fairy-tale'n Irishman and so did. Turns out I saved a rich guy's baby from a garden snake th same day I stopped some teenagers from breaking into another rich asshole's house. Both were eternally grateful, and the repeat business meant an obvious raise plus bonus for me.
I see the hate in his eyes. It too was alumni of our high school days. Not so much hateful of what I'm doing, but that I'm doing it better than he's doing his thing. He doesn't even bother with his warning bullshit, just gives my card back and walks away, sullen and again knowing his place.
