unexplained excerpt

Lifted from the middle of a thing that’s mostly just beginning and end, and that will, at this latening hour, likely never be enough in-between to either stand on its own, or fall such that its ultimate unannounced demise is ever noticed. So the text to follow just sits here, bluntly excised, and unexplained, in that maddening limbo of still seeming to be of potential merit, purely on account of the vague promise of its ever truly being part of something more.

To not quite quote Paul Simon: A pocket full of scribbles such were, perhaps, promises.

That said, this:

The joke begins: Two guys walk into this bar …

I had this teacher friend while in Atlanta, right there just before the end, when the magic words stopped coming, and I compared a certain style of bikini bottom to the windshield of a car. At the time it made sense. Oh shit, I don’t know.

His name was Ed Foley. You can look him up, but you won’t find anything. In those days before this cancerous digital memory that now elevates even the quietest flatulence into a thundering online cloud of pointless foul indulgence, being no one just meant being no one.

So me and this guy, Ed, would go after work several days a week to this neighborhood watering hole in Midtown, where the pretensions of Buckhead were, at that time, limited largely to just myself. We would drink aggressively; I would buy. Ed was a writer. He was published. There was a middling review in Kirkus, a book signing at a Decatur strip-mall bookstore. He had no money. His words lacked a certain commonplace goldness; they did not shine in such a manner as to make the devout big-box shopper swoon.

“So what?” he’d carp, looking not quite mortally wounded each time I pointed this out, though his curdled demeanor invariably turned back to sweet cream about the time I ponied up for another round. “You want me to be some goddamn Grisham?” he’d snarl in the meantime. “Shit, like that’s going to happen. And you wouldn’t even hang out with me then, and you know it.”

He was right, of course.

“I might if you’d buy once in a while,” I shot back. I liked to raise my glass at this point, kind of like in a toast.

Ed would dismiss me, a wave of the hand. Often, he’d turn tail and march off to the bathroom, though he never forgot to nab his drink first. I think he suspected I’d tell the bartender to take it away.

In truth, I liked him because he was such a vivid failure. Ed taught remedial grammar and bottom-of-the-barrel composition classes on the community college level, and his unwillingness to compromise had an absurd charm to it, as if his dogged adherence to principle were the only thing keeping him from the full flower of success. There were any number of things keeping him down, but principle was hardly one of them.

“With me you’re slumming,” he liked to say.

“Not slumming,” I would counter, an exchange that quickly became ritual between us. “Just remembering. Vividly remembering.”

“Remembering what, you tyrant?”

“That you’re poor, Ed. You have soul, but you’re poor. You poor soul.”

“Ha, ha,” said Ed. “Trade ya.”

He was working on his sophomore novel then, a whole putting-to-rest of his Catholic wars, the school, the masses, the culture of cloister, the confessions (“I would make it all up, every blessed word,” he confided. “Really sexy stuff, crimes against nature, conflagrations of the flesh. Burn those years of wax right out of Father Bartlett’s ears.”)

The book, a period piece of sorts that never was finished, played heavily into that virgin-as-whore thing, except that the virgin in question – there was the whole reverence issue, I said to Ed. It would strain the necessary compassion requisite to indulgence among your target audience.

“Which is who?”

“You, I’m afraid. You are the only person who will read this nightmare.” I handed him back the bar napkin with excerpts from chapter five, scribbled down (with my ballpoint, as it were) while I was off taking a piss and opening my eyes back up through my nose, the little silver spoon of wonder.

Father Mike, a skull-hammered former prizefighter, ham-handed as always and tipsy from the sacramental sauce, navigated the center aisle like a man atop a gangplank. It was to be the first of the Christmas sermons, the yearly dog-and-pony show trumpeting the Savior’s arrival, the cast of characters, the inn declining, the star announcing. The Our Lord the Redeemer Mass Choir sang “What Child Is This,” weaving seamlessly a verse from Jesus Christ Superstar, the mob’s part from “Hosanna” (“Hosanna Heysanna Sanna Sanna Ho / Sanna Hey Sanna Ho Sanna / Hey JC etc.”), a nod to the hirsute youth contingent. [Ed. note: use cars outside church, secular music from passing kid’s transistor radio to establish time period, ca. 1971.] The defrocked nun with the baby kept silent, eyeing the sagging priest with the steely-eyed derision of the newly fallen.

“Asshole.” Ed, slamming down his drink, empty but for watery ice, eyeing the bartender, who stopped drying a glass to raise an eyebrow at me. I nodded.

“You offer people no hope,” I groused as Ed tongue-tested his new bourbon, forever suspicious that he was getting well and not top shelf. “No redemption. No light.”

“Holy mother of God, this from the unrepentant man of no religion,” Ed sneered. “Bartender, no more drinks for the godless ad jockey.”

The bartender, Ben, a friend as I would drink more, smiled, set a Bombay and tonic in front of me. “On the house,” he said. There was an extra chunk of lime on the bar napkin, because I liked it that way.

“Buggery!” Ed trumpeted. “Bartending butt monkey! Come on, now, man! Which one of us can’t afford not to be kept?”

“The tip jar,” Ben said, grinning, tapping the cloudy glass of the retired oversized pickle jar with a prunish finger. He was missing a couple of teeth; the yuppies didn’t typically drink here. “You, amigo, are cheap, and will be treated as such.”

“That’s the worst kind of reinforcement philosophy I’ve ever heard!” Ed hollered, getting to his feet. He was genuinely getting heated up. “Punish the one who can’t afford it and reward the scum-sucking bottom feeder in the linen suit!”

“Easy there, Mr. Hand Biter,” I said with a laugh. This was exactly why I hung out with him.

“Life,” Ben pronounced, with a grand nod of the head. “Barry here, he pays my rent. Now sit down and drink your dinner and shut the fuck up.”

Ed, pouting: “I just bet he does.” (I did, too. It wasn’t much. Three weeks of me at the gin teat, tossing out coins of the realm like confetti, and Ben was for once outpacing his bills.)

So anyway, these two guys are in this bar after work, a writer and an advertising wunderkind. The writer says: I’m working on a new book. The ad guy counters: so what? Me, too.

“You are not!” 

“Am so.”

“No, you are not. Not, not, not, not, not!”

“What are you, 12 years old all of a sudden? Anyway, I am too, you feckless art flunkie.”

This goes on for a while. It’s interesting to me, but I’m probably alone in thinking so.

Finally, from Ed: “You, a writer?” He snorted. He used to love to do that. It sounded like a horse would, I imagine, swallowing a chainsaw.

“I could be,” I said. “A writer.”

“Balls!” Ed declared. “Balls!” It was his thing. Maybe it says something, maybe it doesn’t.

So anyway, Ed is struggling with the title, having the good sense to realize that the current Mother Mary, Comfort Me thumbs its nose at any pretense of publication, given the subject matter. He’s going round and round: audience vs. art, audience vs. art, audience vs. …

“Oh, for the love of God,” I said. “Pour some Jackie Black in that yap of yours and shut it, man, shut it!”

Christ, he was a whiner. He’s dead now, by the way: a disease of some kind, something with his bones. I got a postcard last year from a brother, news to me he’d had one: wake, funeral, BYOB OK. I seem to have missed attending. Anyway, I hate corpses. I don’t even own a mirror.

So, to cut to the chase: these two guys are sitting in this bar, a writer and a whore. The writer says: I’m writing a book, a whole Catholic-trauma thing, an exploration of the wholesale failure of a vaunted institution to produce anything but debilitating guilt. I’m thinking of calling it I’m Sorry.

The ad man says: I, too, am writing a book (rolling eyes from the writer). And I also have a title already picked out as well: It’s Not My Fault.

Ha, ha.

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