Typewriter

This is something I'm working on, possibly for grad school applications. It's got promise. The narrator is unbelievably irritating, so I'm sorry. 

We fancied ourselves uniquely unsuited for squalor. Even together in the Gleesons’ half-empty loft, sharing a queen-sized bed with covers that smelled like someone had died in them we chuckled high-mindedly at the way that they considered bologna a worthy sandwich meat, we disdained the white bread that they made their toast with and laughed at the way they considered Sunny Delight a fruit juice. We had nothing but our terror and our scorn.

            Gavin was fourteen, gangly even though he hadn’t hit six feet. I was sixteen, still reaching the deep and unbroken defiance of mid-adolescence. I was thick, soft, I ate too much and knew it, daydreamed too much to turn out well. Neither of us had reached periscope sight of talking to an honest-to-god female that wasn’t forty-five and chain smoking in the middle of the Tennessee valley.

            The Gleesons lived outside a town called Barstow, if a town of three hundred people with a post office and a gas station even has an outside. Reggie Gleeson, our uncle, was a man so thin we called him Waluigi when he wasn’t around, after the Mario Brothers character. Unromantically, his wife Dana, the lady that replaced our mother’s sister after her sudden and cancerous demise, was similarly deathlike. In the evenings they would hunch like the skeletons of folding rulers around a coffee table that appeared to have been stolen from an abandoned Goodwill and watch shows I had thought belonged only to souls so tragically infirm they could not change the channel themselves: late-night pap like Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy and 60 Minutes.

            Dana worked the desk at the Post Office, a job that provided security without adequate compensation. Reggie welded casings for air conditioners in a factory ironically without air conditioning. This fact was the main topic of dinner every night until I nearly lost my mind and was told that I would take dinner in my room. Gavin, in solidarity, took his dinner in the loft as well, despite the chill of the Ozark winter.

            Grief is for those with the luxury to change their surroundings in order to alleviate that indulgent whim. We had no time to be luxurious or indulgent.

            We found the typewriter in the woods shortly after my seventeenth birthday. It was alarmingly teal and slightly rusted but the keys worked fine. We didn’t know how much ink was left in the ribbon but when we found that there was enough to hammer out obscenities we gleefully did so onto water-stained paper for a few minutes. We were a strange sight, my brother and I, hunched over a derelict piece of obsolete technology in the middle of the bald woods in early December, chuckling cloudily to each other in the brittle air as we took turns hammering vulgarities like pagan prayers into the paper.

            “We should write something,” Gavin said. “We can be famous.”

            The idea smashed into our little world like a torch into a well. I lit upon the idea; I, the ungrateful reprobate who spent more time devising ways to trick our blankly idyllic legal relatives into believing we’d done our homework than actually doing the homework, and Gavin, the sweet, quiet, trusting boy that followed my every move and mimicked me, sometimes to the phrase.  I seized on it.

            “We can write a movie.”

            “Why not a novel?” Gavin asked. I hesitated.

            “Nobody makes money with novels.” I said after a moment. My teeth chattered and I clenched them. “Poe died alone. Melville killed himself, I think.”

            “Who’s Melville?”

            “Herman Melville. He wrote Gulliver’s Travels.”

            “Oh.” Gavin ran his slender fingers along the edge of the blue typewriter. “Do movie writers make money?”

            “Tons.” I picked up the typewriter. It was heavy, and the cold metal burned through the sleeve of my jacket. “They’re riding around Beverly Hills in Ferraris and having sex with supermodels all day.”

            “How do you know?”

            I didn’t. “You remember Louis? His grandpa was one.”

            “Lou Vargas? He was a liar.”

            “Yeah, but he was telling the truth about this. His grandpa wrote,” I couldn’t think of whatever film Alex had said, so I picked one that seemed to be a hit, “forty year old virgin and made like twenty million dollars.”

            Gavin hadn’t seen that. Neither had I, just posters at the Walmart in Jackson we went to every couple weeks for things we couldn’t get at the corner market.

            “When I’m rich,” Gavin said, “I want to live in Colorado.”

           

            The most important part of writing a movie, I had heard, was the planning stage. We put the typewriter on a milk crate that lurked in the corner of the loft, and I stole some paper from the printer that Dana kept in the kitchen for recipes. We had a title, too. The Savants we called it, and we typed those golden sacred words at the top of the page very carefully. I didn’t know how to put page numbers on the script, so we just said that we would hire someone to properly format the mess when we’re done. Geniuses can’t be expected to keep up with everything, you know.

            When we went to the store for small things, Gavin and I observed everything that happened. When a family came through town, travel-haggard and caustically brutal with one another, we smirked at each other and wrote down their descriptions in a little moleskine notebook I’d purchased the last time we went into Jackson.  

            

Cilantro and Highway Robbery in the Form of Avocados

This is a somewhat mocking and satirical take on second person, post-modern and nihilistic novels about life and philosophy and masturbatory self-deprecation. It'll probably never go anywhere but is darkly funny and in way, kind of emotional. I'm in the throes of applying to grad school and this might get farther than what I'm submitting. Who knows?

            It is at moments like these where you find yourself amazed at your nihilistic existence, brought to tears by the sight of an earring back on your counter as you stand on a kitchen chair, pissing into your sink while the pest control guy blows up your upstairs bathroom. You didn’t fall in love with her until after she left, and she didn’t accept that love until she no longer wanted it. Specificity, you tell yourself. Specificity is what your life needs, not more of this ridiculous and unfocused existing you do an awful lot of.

            You bought yourself a cactus after she left. You named it too, but you forgot the name on three consecutive days of blind stupor courtesy of Ketel One and just called it Plant. It sat on your dresser and looked vaguely disapproving, if plants could look disapproving, and you remembered the Dmitri Martin bit about being less nurturing than a desert and tried to water the thing.

            You remember your mother, the poor fragile thing, throwing caution to the wind when she screamed at you. You told her you wanted to be a concert pianist, she said you might as well be a crack addict. “It’ll only be a matter of days,” she had muttered angrily at you, scrubbing her hands with surgical precision in a kitchen sink filled with tepid, chalkboard colored water. “It’ll only be a matter of days and you’ll be rolling bums for eight balls and stealing comforters out of Laundromats for warmth on the streets of Seattle.”

            “Why Seattle?” you always asked. She never answered. In her mind, Seattle may as well have been the world capital of squalor, the Timbuktu of downtrodden vagrants.

            She’d never been to Seattle but her uncle had choked to death on his own vomit outside Spokane in a heroin fugue after failing to sell even a single set of cutlery to an urban center of three million and a handful which I supposed in her mind was evidence enough for the validity of her prejudice. “You’ll be murmuring to yourself in the second person,” she said, “you’ll be fantasizing about strangling Anglican priests and trying to make some sense of life you’re Kierkegaard or Marx.”

            The closest my mother ever came to swearing was when she screamed tamales, very loudly and very seriously. The bus had broken down and she was on her way to an interview for a job putting stickers that said “grown in the USA” on oranges coming off Barbadian freighters. You were small and easily frightened and the word burned into your memories because in your New Jersey upbringing you hadn’t ever heard of a tamale and the first time you saw a roach coach helmed by a Mexican man named Salvador called “The Tamale Town” you sniggered to yourself in a worldly way.

            She choked back tears when you left and instead handed you a bundle of what turned out to be two hundred and forty-seven dollars in crumpled fives and ones and a hallmark card with a kitten on it that said “You’re a failure” and on the inside it said “Just Kitten” and she had written her name in careful, tight script. No “love”, no “best wishes” just “Just Kitten” and then “Elaine.” You pinned that card up on the mottled and broken wall when you reached Atlanta and cried so hard your throat hurt and your stomach roiled and then the first thing you did when you left your rank and musty room was to use some of that two hundred some-odd to buy a loaf of bread and some hard salami at a price your mother would have called piracy.