even recall writing them. It had, after all, been ages, another life, another city, a whole marriage ago.
As I read these absurd ramblings of a seemingly depraved and disordered mind, what I remembered was sitting at mydesk during my lunch break, often with my shirt and tie off so as not to drip mustard on my dry-cleanables, squinting at a set of slides I’d been handed moments before, trying to concoct some vaguely plausible narrative or motive for what the bodies in the pictures were getting up to and still get out for a quick smoke before 1 p.m. A tableau featuring two aproned girls, a dude in a chef’s hat, and a cornucopia of veggies became “Bottom Feeders,” and a story about two competing female pool sharks and an audience of, for some reason, nude men was called “Eight Balls in the Side Pocket.” None of this rang a bell, though I confess the fable “Good Pet, Bad Bitch” did remind me of the cages I saw when, as I child, I went to adopt a puppy and had nightmares for months after. Was that the key? Scrolling through the links, I found my own work reused over the years, without royalties, for murky foreign sites like
Asian Auction, Whores de France,
and, most grimly of all,
Ass Atlas of Romania.
My ex-wife had despised those writings, refusing to read them and wondering aloud about the spiritual damage they caused while also complaining about how little they paid. As for myself, well, they really had nothing to do with my “self.” My real, primal motive had not been lust but fear, fear of the mailman and the phone and whatever bad news they might bring. I also wrote ad copy for a yoga center, edited grant proposals for a choreographer, and proofread legal documents: That didn’t make me a dancing Buddhist lawyer.
But isn’t this always the case with writing, even the most supposedly personal? Nothing ever turns out as I intend. Nothing I wrote yesterday looks familiar. I can hardly believe it’s my handwriting in the morning or unscramble what I scribbled when I dreamed that big idea the night before. And like dreamwork, fiction takes the bits of real life and its concerns, both grand and petty, recent and ancient, remakes them, and presents the results as a clueless puzzle that only leads us deeper into the dark.
Shortly after I penned those gems, my wife left me for someone who she said better understood her needs. I moved to New York, quit smoking, burned through several aborted careers, and produced a pile of fiction that I called by my name but that seemed as inscrutable as Romanian porn. What the hell was I talking about anyway? But that night, for the first time in a long, long time, perusing “Confessions of a Bi-Babysitter” and “Yanna: Milkmaid at the Stud Farm,” I actually found my own work sort of compelling.
It seemed I wasn’t the only one. As I pored through the evidence, I detected a second set of fingerprints. Someone named, or screen-named, “delayeddelights” had repeatedly searched for, posted about, and responded to “me.” Like a towered princess in a distant galaxy, delayeddelights had even sent a number of distress calls out into the universe, wondering where I, or he, was. Finally, past midnight, and years out of date, MFA sent back a hello. I stood guard over the dark screen for a while, watching the far horizon for a response, then had cookies and iced mint tea. I was busy flossing when her light flickered on and she asked, with a parenthetical, side-ways smile, if I’d like to chat.
As it turned out, delayeddelights was a 20s F living in Wburg, where she was a student and a part-time dog-walker. She’d been in high school when she first discovered my work, a middle-class kid lost in the vast suburban reaches of Long Island, strugglingwith some sticky young feelings and ancient pitch-black urges she couldn’t talk about with her off-line, real-time peers. Angelic in the photo she sent—blond, slender, freckled, laughing in the sunshine with a puppy—she
As I read these absurd ramblings of a seemingly depraved and disordered mind, what I remembered was sitting at mydesk during my lunch break, often with my shirt and tie off so as not to drip mustard on my dry-cleanables, squinting at a set of slides I’d been handed moments before, trying to concoct some vaguely plausible narrative or motive for what the bodies in the pictures were getting up to and still get out for a quick smoke before 1 p.m. A tableau featuring two aproned girls, a dude in a chef’s hat, and a cornucopia of veggies became “Bottom Feeders,” and a story about two competing female pool sharks and an audience of, for some reason, nude men was called “Eight Balls in the Side Pocket.” None of this rang a bell, though I confess the fable “Good Pet, Bad Bitch” did remind me of the cages I saw when, as I child, I went to adopt a puppy and had nightmares for months after. Was that the key? Scrolling through the links, I found my own work reused over the years, without royalties, for murky foreign sites like
Asian Auction, Whores de France,
and, most grimly of all,
Ass Atlas of Romania.
My ex-wife had despised those writings, refusing to read them and wondering aloud about the spiritual damage they caused while also complaining about how little they paid. As for myself, well, they really had nothing to do with my “self.” My real, primal motive had not been lust but fear, fear of the mailman and the phone and whatever bad news they might bring. I also wrote ad copy for a yoga center, edited grant proposals for a choreographer, and proofread legal documents: That didn’t make me a dancing Buddhist lawyer.
But isn’t this always the case with writing, even the most supposedly personal? Nothing ever turns out as I intend. Nothing I wrote yesterday looks familiar. I can hardly believe it’s my handwriting in the morning or unscramble what I scribbled when I dreamed that big idea the night before. And like dreamwork, fiction takes the bits of real life and its concerns, both grand and petty, recent and ancient, remakes them, and presents the results as a clueless puzzle that only leads us deeper into the dark.
Shortly after I penned those gems, my wife left me for someone who she said better understood her needs. I moved to New York, quit smoking, burned through several aborted careers, and produced a pile of fiction that I called by my name but that seemed as inscrutable as Romanian porn. What the hell was I talking about anyway? But that night, for the first time in a long, long time, perusing “Confessions of a Bi-Babysitter” and “Yanna: Milkmaid at the Stud Farm,” I actually found my own work sort of compelling.
It seemed I wasn’t the only one. As I pored through the evidence, I detected a second set of fingerprints. Someone named, or screen-named, “delayeddelights” had repeatedly searched for, posted about, and responded to “me.” Like a towered princess in a distant galaxy, delayeddelights had even sent a number of distress calls out into the universe, wondering where I, or he, was. Finally, past midnight, and years out of date, MFA sent back a hello. I stood guard over the dark screen for a while, watching the far horizon for a response, then had cookies and iced mint tea. I was busy flossing when her light flickered on and she asked, with a parenthetical, side-ways smile, if I’d like to chat.
As it turned out, delayeddelights was a 20s F living in Wburg, where she was a student and a part-time dog-walker. She’d been in high school when she first discovered my work, a middle-class kid lost in the vast suburban reaches of Long Island, strugglingwith some sticky young feelings and ancient pitch-black urges she couldn’t talk about with her off-line, real-time peers. Angelic in the photo she sent—blond, slender, freckled, laughing in the sunshine with a puppy—she
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