Novel: A Section

One night, I called Big Jeans, and he was breathing heavy. “I think I’m breaking up with my boyfriend,” he said. “We’ve been dating for twelve years and we can’t stop fighting about every small thing.” I tried to say something, but it was hopeless. I was only seventeen. I didn’t have any reason to believe that what I knew was true. Adults were supposed to know what to do. I made soothing sounds. “I think I need to be with someone,” he said. “Can we meet at Cawthra Park?” If I left the apartment, I wouldn’t be able to get back in until Shiva came back. It was getting colder, but I trusted I would figure something out.

I waited at Cawthra Park, towards the darker back, rubbing my legs with my palms. I waited for twenty-five minutes. I began to feel like an idiot. I looked at the yellow leaves stuck to the concrete benches of the park, and fruitlessly kicked at them. Then Big Jeans’ shadow fell upon me and I looked up at the goateed, smiling face. “I bought some coke,” he said, his words slurring a bit. “Come back to my apartment and we can do it.”

He lived in a cylindrical tower of white brick. The hallways were curved and narrow. Outside of his place, there was a spider plant sprawled across the black-stained carpets. Inside, was a hushed room with brass lanterns, soft brown furniture and over-designed, busy curtains draped along the walls. There was a large white shelf with a blue light shining down on a jumbled mass of plants. Nestled in the plants was a few ragged orchids, and between some rubbery leaves, a cat’s yellow eyes blinked. Big Jeans let me do two lines – we used his old red and white health card to cut the lines – and he made me some peppermint tea, and then, with a CD of Patti Lupone singing “Bring in the Clowns” playing on his stereo, he punched me in the face.

It was a playful punch, but it was still a punch. And then he said, “Let’s wrestle,” and before I could stop him, he had pulled me off the chair and was squashing me onto his scratchy, roughly knotted rug. We didn’t have sex – not that night or any of the nights after – he just wanted to crush me under his bouncery bulk. I had no idea how long it would last. At first, I made moans and gasps as his weight crushed my lungs, and I tried to squirm out of his grip. But when I stopped making sounds, he stopped pushing downward, too. “There,” he said. “That’s it, Champ.”

Novel: A Section

I’ve written 33,000 words so far! I need another 20,000, but things are going o-kay as long as I pretend the deadline of the end of the year for the completion of my first draft isn’t rushing upward to smack me in the face. It’s hard for me to choose something to excerpt because I’m at the point in the novel where everything is tied to everything else, and pulling a piece out is like ripping out someone’s intestines and then hoping to order it in some sort of display of coherent beauty on a chopping board or bedspread. But here’s something I’ve written. Please remember these innards are still bleeding softly, and they are baby intestines, fetal intestines, not fully formed; so don’t be too harsh in your judgements as you pick through them and notice all the shit that is inevitably spilling out.

We spent the evening generally avoiding one another. Cam was drunk and he and Josh were sloppily making out in a Muskoka chair while the mosquitos flung themselves against the moths in the porch light. There were beer bottles like bowling pins along the patio ledge. Ainsley was reading more fashion magazines and taking pictures of dresses with her phone while Joel mussed her hair. He clacked through the satellite channels on the TV. Richard’s room was the only one on the second floor, and I could hear him flicking lights on and off and, occasionally, the gunshot creak of his bed as he sat on it. I smoked the roach that someone had left in an ashtray, and passing by Cam and Josh, wandered down to the lake. It was calm and still, the lake surface, like velour out to its other side where someone from that enormous mansion had spilled its baseball-stadium white krieg lights on it. Where the water touched the beach, I could see – in the weak reach of our porchlight - the tiny quivering of its surface as water dippers barely disturbed it by running across and the occasional burp of oxygen from the tadpoles sleeping among the weeds.

There was another Muskoka chair on the dock – it shouldn’t have been left there – and the canoe was jostling against the deck as I sat down in it. The stars were above, doing their insane speckled stars thing, and I fumbled in my pocket and pulled out my iPod and chose something to listen to. Something deep and liquid, a remix of a remix of a remix, something anonymous and ecstatic. As I pressed play, I looked up at the sky and I felt like its entire crsytallized weight was dragging me upward with the synthetic glowing sounds from the track, exploding and expanding my brain. The water around me looked wild and frightful, meters of black, breathless death, cozying up to our shore. And what was I looking at between the stars?

I stood up, my mind whirling out of sync with itself, but my body making the small necessary steps to get back to the house. When I got to the bottom of the deck stairs, the porchlight turned off. I fumbled up them and tripped on the last one and actually crawled to the porch door. I saw the TV turn off, and Ainsely and Joel head down the short hall to their room. It seemed like everything was receeding out of my control. I got up and stepped into the living room. It was dark. All I could see was the clock set to the wrong time, 7:21 am, and the light above the stove showing the grease stains from our pancakes, and the light leaking downstairs from Richard’s room. In my ears, the music had reached a hymn-like crescendo of machine noises.

I climbed the stairs, looking for some additional chapter, some way to end this night that seemed satisfying. I got up to the room and the light was coming from a bedside table. Richard was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling with a library book scrunched open his chest. He turned his head toward me. The book was Walter Benjamin’s Illuminations. He mouthed something, but I couldn’t hear it because of the kaleidoscopic shimmering in my ears. I pulled my earphones out.

“What?” I said.

Novel: A Section

I’m currently writing more of my thesis novel right now, and I need to take a little break. If you have time, read this new excerpt. If not, ruthlessly ignore it. I’ve decided to collect all of the sections I’ve posted in a new page of my tumblr, which can be found here. Or you can track the novel tag on my blog here. Enjoy! (Or tl;dr it. I’m not fussy.)

Oh, and just so it’s clear: all of this is made up. And for those people who think my taste has gone out of the window, and I’m writing in a crazy, sloppy, blog style - that’s the point, and it’s very intentional. As I’ve said before, I have no taste.

Joel invited me out the other day when I was supposed to meet my boyfriend Derek. Joel is this enormously tall straight dude with floppy hair and glasses and he always wears a Boston Red Sox baseball cap even though he couldn’t give much of a fuck about any sports. Joel is into records and smoking pot and pretty much nothing else, and while he draws the world’s most slowly drawn comic in his attic apartment and dishwashes, his way-too-hot and tiny girlfriend works as a marketing manager at Anthropologie. Joel has hands the size of my face, and he’ll often reach out to shake my hand thirty seconds before I’ve thought we were even close enough to say hello.

Anyway, so Joel and I are friends. Like the kind of friends who huddle together at dark bars and spend hours talking such arcane shit that it’s almost another language.

“I’ve recently been exploring math rock and punk jazz from the late nineties,” he’d say.

“I didn’t know you’d lost your penis on the way to the bar,” I’d say back.

Back and forth, insult, inside joke, half-referenced memory, obscure fact, insult, insult, insult. We’re like two old hens trading baseball cards. Stuff like that all the time. Joel likes me because I don’t look like a typical gay (at least to him) and I can keep up with him in all his stupid boy facts, and I like Joel because he seems to stare at boys even more than I do. I really don’t know what’s going on there. It’s not like he’s gay – I’ve seen the stacks and stacks and stacks of lady porn in his workroom – but he will just eyefuck some hipster dude in the worst way possible. And he’ll get gay boys to fall in love with him. Maybe like me?

Anyway, so we were at this bar, deep in the red light of some lamp, huddled on a brocade couch, with extremely loud shitty music of some kind – some fiddly hip-hop thing, all clicks and reverb and way too much pretention – and we were huddled together, sort of slinking into each other (maybe I am sorta crushing on him?), our leather jackets squeaking a bit as they rub together. And Derek comes in with his parka on because any temperature below ten degrees and Derek needs his parka. He looks at us sitting together. And Joel does that straight boy squinty eye thing where he also lifts his chin up. And Derek just turns around and goes back outside.

I had to follow him all the way down the street in the cold, and I tried to grab his arm and he pulled away from my grip. “Hey!” I said, but he started walking even faster and he sort of slipped on some persistent patch of ice, but he kept running-walking, his butt sort of held high and walking in that fussy way of his like he’s a secretary out to do her boss’s errands.

I went back to the bar and got super-wasted with Joel and we talked for hours, and I eventually totally forgot that Derek and I had gotten into a fight until I was putting my key in our door with a slice of hot pizza in my hand and I heard stomping around inside. Derek was in the kitchen when I got in, cleaning my dishes. I went up to him, stumbling, and said, “What the hell are you doing? Those are my dishes, I’ll clean them. Stop being so passive aggressive!” And he slams the glasses into the sink and says, “I’m not passive aggressive,” and he goes into my room. I’m so drunk that I go to sit by the TV and smoke some pot. But while I’m lighting up a bowl, he comes out and says, “You are such a fucking asshole. I just looked at your Facebook. You left it open. You’ve been talking to that guy you’ve nicknamed Hipster Mustache.”

Novel: A Section

Well, for all of you who started following me after that Mae Martin clip - sorry to let you down, but it’s not wall-to-wall LOLs up in here. As some of you know, I’m working on a novel. I posted one section back in June and I thought I’d post another section of it for your … er, amusement? Edification? Something.

If you haven’t read the last section, or don’t really remember it, the only thing you need to know is that the main character is dating Derek, and he has a big crush on a guy he calls “Hipster Mustache.” The rest you’ll figure out. Enjoy!

Derek and I went to this event. It’s a queer cowboy night – all of these boys and girls dressing up in tablecloth plaid and listening to Dolly Parton on repeat (gay boys don’t really know any other country music). We’d been talking again. We’d even had sex, sort of again. But mostly talking, in that comfortable way about old topics we knew really deeply – reality TV shows, teen movies, clothes – and once you are talking to someone about nothing, and agreeing about a whole load of stupid things, you sort of forgive them for all of the big bad things. At least, that’s what I felt had happened between Derek and me. We even, as we walked to the bar, held hands on the street.

So of course, while we slow danced to “Islands in the Stream,” and I could feel Derek’s breath whistle in and out of my ear, and I could feel his hand grip me awkwardly and tightly around my waist, rapping his fingers on my shirt to maybe test that I was still there, I looked over Derek’s shoulder and saw Hipster Mustache grinning at me. He was standing with two other really tall dudes, and all three were sort of freakishly beautiful – you could stare at their faces for minutes and discover whole new categories of things that made them perfect. Like the guy next to Hipster Mustache, Neck Tattoo – he had these overly large doe eyes that sagged at the outer corners, making him look like some crying terrier, even as his mouth, with these delicate, pearl-coloured lips, curled into a sneer. Neck Tattoo was skinny, but he had broad shoulders, and a tattooed swallow’s bright eye peeked over his shirt and opened its mouth on his neck. His hair was perfect.

None of them had on anything cowboy related. And they seemed to look at all of us fake cowboys and laugh, or Hipster Mustache did. Cause the other two were sneering and rolling their eyes. And Neck Tattoo and the other one - Hitler Hair - didn’t look at me at all. They looked everywhere but at me. And this was the problem. Derek wasn’t attractive like them. He was cute, and he looked cuter because his cowboy shirt was a little too short and kept coming out of its tuck. But he didn’t have that sort of I-don’t-care beauty kind of thing. The beauty that plucks you out of regular life and puts you into some other dimension of being. That was Hipster Mustache’s and his bros shtick. That royal beauty. If you can’t tell we’re beautiful, HM seemed to say with his shallow grins, you don’t know anything.

Hipster Mustache caught my eye again and grinned. I was sweating now - I could feel an outline of sweat forming where Derek was holding me – and I pulled back and looked at Derek. His eyes behind his glasses were closed in what could have been bliss, and I saw all of the flaws on his face – the acne he got around his lower lip, and the way his beard grew in patchy on his cheeks, and his fleshiness around the nose and his forehead – he has a bit of a fat forehead – and for a moment I couldn’t even remember why I found him attractive. He opened his eyes to me and I looked at them and there was such fucking yearning in them, such fucking happiness, and I felt trapped by him. He was some schlubby dude who couldn’t even buy clothes that fit him, someone I had gotten myself saddled with and there was Hipster Mustache fucking grinning.

And then they switched to another song and the MC announced it would be a snowball dance. Derek hadn’t really noticed – he was back to resting his head on my shoulders. But when they called the first snowball, Hipster Mustache reached in around my lower hip and sort of lifted my ass and the rest of me away from Derek. He said, “I thought I’d never see you again outside of Facebook.” And I spoke, but it was like some other, weird part of me said, “Well, my master plan is working to perfection – I guess I’ve just got you wrapped around my baby finger.” I checked behind me, but Derek wasn’t there, so I kept slow dancing with HM. His biceps felt surprisingly bulgy even though they looked thin. He said something like, “Ha ha, I always thought you were an evil genius,” and that “always” was enough to get me to think he was probably the greatest person in the world.

Novel: A Section

(Hey everyone! If you are remotely interested, you can read a section of my novel. It’s still pretty rough; I’m only in the process of writing the first draft. This section introduces a character named “Hipster Mustache.” It’s in a very different style than the previous section, but that’s because there are two different narrative voices. I hope you like it.)

Read More

Novel: A Section

In case you are interested, here is a section of the novel-like thing I’m writing for my thesis. It’s still early days, so this will probably get revised and revised and revised. But I think it stands by itself now as an excerpt and a flavour of what I’m doing. I won’t give you any context because explaining the Big Ideas behind unfinished work always makes you sound like a blow-hard and dilettante, and I don’t think it’s necessary. So, if you are intrigued, here we go. (EDIT: I tried to add a break but tumblr is not letting me, for some reason. Sigh.)

*****

I had moved into Richard’s place, and it was a barbarian invasion. When I kissed Richard’s fingers, I would smell the bleach he had used to wipe away the shower’s scum and the turpentine he used to try to turn his paint-stained fingers a human colour. But I found it difficult to use less than four glasses for a drink of water, and a cupboard of dishes for a meal. I had only four shirts, and most of them roamed the apartment, sliding across the hardwood. It didn’t matter. Richard sat on that chintz couch when I hung up the few framed photographs I had, like the one of Mom and Dad standing above the gorge in Walla, her gloved hand holding her pleated skirt flat against the high place’s high winds, and Richard would cover his mouth with his book so that I couldn’t see how much he was smiling.

From this distance, even the arguments seem charming. He painted every morning for four hours, made lunch and hung up our laundry on the coarse rope that hung from the patio door to above the fridge. He was at work by 4pm. He thought my sleeping in and working until the sunlight scared me into bed was damaging our relationship.

“We only meet in the morning,” he said. The radiators were always broken, and even with a Joy of Cooking propping open the window in his “studio”, the heat was giving me a headache. Richard put only an apron over his long underwear. When he pushed up the sleeves, I could see the cadmium yellow and cobalt blue forever flecked in his forearm hairs.

I was pushing my face into our pillows with the embroidered edges. Richard had even monogrammed our names on our pillows; I always slept on a Richard. I wanted to carry our recent sex into my encroaching dreams rather than an argument. He looked down at me. “I just don’t feel we see each other enough.”

We didn’t see each other enough! But that’s the way it was: we wanted to sink so deeply into each other that any resistance seemed vaguely cruel. I felt it too. Only, I felt it at different times. At 3 am in the morning, when I was finally awake and capable of thinking, I wanted to tell him all of the things I discovered while smoking in the pristine air of thawing streets, like how the early crocus beaks were climbing from the dirt. I would play tinkling snatches of melody on the piano, half-pretending they were not meant to wake him up until he would moan from the bedroom, “Enough.”

The “enough” was too much. I wanted him to wake from the bed and to lower himself naked on the bench. We would play “Chopsticks” together, finally. I wanted him to shiver in the hot room. I wanted to watch him watch me. I wanted so much that he couldn’t imagine. My dreams both elevated and tarnished what existed between us.