Still Life with Beer

Usually I go downtown to the bar (Bell's) at six on Sundays, and usually by the time I've had one or two beers, I'm starved and so I must go home and eat. This Sunday, however, I ate early, and so I stayed there for four hours. Usually I'm the one coming into the bar and then leaving, but this time I was the one sitting solidly on a bar stool (and then on a picnic table in the beer garden) watching other people coming and going. I got to see how people like me look to the dedicated drinker: jumpy, uncommitted, unrelaxed, like birds unwilling to settle into perfectly good nests. The other people's bar lives indeed seemed smaller than my own, as their bar lives were contained within mine. By remaining there, I felt solid, dedicated. I offered comfort to my sister for an hour; she's having a nervous breakdown and is waiting for the meds to kick in. I finally got to hear the story of how Shawn lost her job at Stryker---it was indeed unfair, but maybe for the best. Shawn gave me some movie picks and then she and Steve went home to get ready for work the next day. Gina came in with a handsome guy; they shared a cigarette, made fun talk, then left. Mr. Magson was at a different table talking to some of his pals (including Gary & Geno) the whole time, so after three and three quarters hours rejoining him for some groping felt like a reunion. My older brother Mikey hung in there with me the whole time, and why not? He and I were the first borns in a big family; we've always been interested in seeing who shows up next.

Martial Arts & the Tortured Writer

I've studied martial arts for seven years, but I've never written a story about martial artists. I'm not bragging when I say I could break open a skull in any number of ways using traditional Okinawan weapons or whatever object I could find lying around. This is true for anybody who's been studying for seven years to crack open skulls, crush wrists, blow out kneecaps, dislocate jaws. And yet, I've never written a story involving the destruction of a skull, knee, wrist, jaw. After seven years, anyone could swing nunchaku with enough deadly force to make the wood sing in the air, but that sound has never appeared in any story I've written. My sensei says I should now test for my second degree black belt (my nidan), but I resist. Maybe it's all the bowing and sitting seiza (my legs go numb) or maybe because I just don't feel like a warrior and don't want to stop cracking jokes long enough to feel like one. I resist going to Lincoln Nebraska with the gang and paying a $225 test fee, though it will mean the opportunity to work the Okinawan man who heads up our style, Kinjo Kaicho Takashi. My classmates are among my best pals, and though my knowledge of the whole art is miniscule, I take comfort in the notion that I could defend myself or someone else against a dangerous attacker by deftly inserting a barbeque fork into his eyeball or by whacking him on the side of the head with a citronella candle in such a way that his teeth loosen. The weapons training keeps me in such good shape that I can be dragged by a donkey across a field on my belly without repercussion. So why have I never written a story about a martial artist? And why have I not yet agreed to take this test? Do artists and warriors occupy different camps? Are the strategies for success so different that a writer should throw her lot in with one gang and resist the song of the other? Or have I just got to stop fussing, take the test and then get working on a different kind of story?

Reject me, please

Each day I run to the mailbox to get my magazine rejections, but there are no rejections. Day after day, no rejections. I've sent a hundred stories and essays to magazines in order to receive rejections from them. Nothing! I send the stories away to places where the stories apparently sit in piles with other stories, perhaps on sunny window sills, perhaps on dusty shelving, perhaps on the floor where dogs rest their noses on them. I got so frustrated this week that I sent a big stack of stories to my fancy New York agent and said, can't you help me publish these? I figured that she had forgotten she was my agent and that as soon as she received my stories she would remember me and say, "Oh, you? Are you still here?" and then she would dump me, provide me with a big fat rejection, something to cry good and hard over. But she sent me a nice note saying she would do anything for me, anything except send out my stories, which I could do myself. She's right. I can sit here and wait for my own rejections.

Drug behind a donkey

Jack wouldn't have made a run for it if I hadn't left the barn door open. I should have thunk. He saw the trimmer, knew he was due for the trimming, remembered he was 700 pounds of solid muscle and I was a gal with a lot of distractions, and so he bolted for freedom. But I'm also a gal with a hell of a grip and I was wearing Carhartt overalls and jacket and so I just decided not to give Jack the experience of getting away from me. He drug me over the Ford 8-N tractor (clunk, something hit my head there), across the stones on my belly, then more comfortably over the snow. I had a few thoughts: folks get killed this way, glad I'm wearing my Carhartts, hope he doesn't trample me, this is easier than writing, so much easier than writing, hope I don't get a concussion, this is so much easier than talking to my brother Tom on the phone when he's been drinking.) Finally, somewherein the snow, I dug in the tips of my toes and got him stopped. "You son of a bitch," I said up to him from the ground when he looked down at me, still yanking on the rope. He didn't mean to be a son of a bitch, and by way of saying how upset the whole thing had made him, he pissed all down his leg. He then shat. My farrier, the trimmer, Scott, waited patiently. Jack didn't get the experience of getting away from me, however; he had the experience of me just holding in, sliding along behind him, unshakable, solid, reliable.