Oasis

Dec 24, 2007 - 11:10 AM PST

“As a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and
simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are too.”
– F. M. Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
* * * * *
Claire dries the last pan and slides it back in the cupboard by her knees. A slurry of rice and celery chunks blocks up the drain grates, but the clog proves no match for her pernicious thumb. Shaking off the traces of water still clinging to her fingertips, stifling the faucet, she smiles as the sink empties itself. Claire checks the clock on the microwave. 8:11—nearly two hours. She considers having some Merlot, and then quickly abandons the idea, lacking a drinking companion. Only drunks drink alone.
Falling into a loveseat set next to an ageless wood-burning stove, her basement apartment’s single but bountiful supply of warmth, Claire finalizes her lineup, deciding on a sestina and two sonnets. Not that she needs forms, but during her stint in college that replaced her senior year (and at the state’s expense), they pushed her beyond the ambiguous free verse which occupied the better part of her classmates’ work. It seemed like all they cared about was venting their bitterness on paper and making other people read it. Workshop drove her crazy. She made a point of trying to focus on how the language itself was working, but when her poem was on the block, they invariably ended up arguing over whether or not they liked her style.
FINE, so you don’t like that fucking metaphor. IT’S NOTED! MOVE ON!
Copies of revisions of her recent work clutter her coffee table, except for a modest spot where her ankles rest. Claire reads one of the most recent drafts out loud, enunciating. She envisions the shadowy faces and soft red candles, the billows of cigarette smoke that dance in the spotlight, and eventually, those shallow fucking snobs, who after worming their way into the best table in the bar, would hurl their snide remarks at anyone who they didn’t know by name.
In the past, their scoffing has driven her away for months at a time, but her first poem was published a couple weeks ago in a university review out of Memphis. Claire laughed when she got a check in the mail last week—she’d forgot all about it; that piece of paper was the only thing that proved she was a good, or, at least, a potentially good, writer. While this mile marker did nothing for her courage, it did give her the ammo to call those pricks out if she ever felt like seeing who in the room was a published artist, who had some authority to publicly critique others.
Claire had recently become accustomed to hitting the bottle a bit prior to her sets, igniting her meek exterior into a smoldering state of passion, flashing with every crack of consonance, slowly but steadily arising from underneath of her anxieties until she becomes to the audience as she sees herself inside: liberated. Though Claire used to greet this release with feelings of resentment (as it is a dependence), she has surrendered to the reality that any salvation from her social paranoia is a welcomed one, but like everything else in her life, she knows that it is all under her control.
Claire has no posters of Ani DiFranco or Buddhist prayer flags tacked up in her flat. She has a quaint sense of style, finding solace in shade-loving plants, vacant walls and lots of calm. The hint of incense is a nice touch, but scented candles are overboard; they linger for days. Sliding some drafts into a folder, she glances around the room and remembers how things would have looked in the past—overwrought with red, the year before, from Scott’s communist propaganda, or what should have been her sophomore year, living with a disgusting trio of spoiled suburbanites who refused to take out the garbage until it was overflowing onto the floor, the cat dragging things off to God knows where. She checks the microwave again—8:20, and curses time for slowing down so much when she begins to pay attention, while taking off in bounds the second she turns her back. Since their break-up, Scott had gotten engaged. Claire got an invitation, but had yet to free it from the stiff, pinstriped envelope that bore her name as familiarly as the letters she still kept. Lots of things behave like time.
She hates her microwave. It was a graduation present from a relative that thought it might be useful in the dormitory to which she would never go, a reminder of everything that mom and dad had wished for her, despite her own basic interests. Except for a degree, Claire isn’t missing anything. While never enrolled, she routinely attends lectures in the fields of literature and history. A critical theory professor once cornered her the day after an exam, for which she was absent, in order to fly under his radar, explained the policies of the university, how he could get his tenure revoked if anyone reported what she was doing, and only smiled and looked the other way when she came back the following week. All these memories bombard her head like a gnats on a summer night, like the twinkling of a migraine setting in.
Claire sighs and sets down the sestina, knowing that further review will only weaken her delivery. She almost bought cigarettes for the first time earlier that day, because she likes the way they make her voice crackle and deepen. In the end, she dismissed the idea, for fear of becoming addicted, and because bumming them from other people is so endearing to her, a universal, common ground. With nothing to do for over an hour, she begins to wish that she had decided to buy the cigarettes, and then repressing this idea, she searches for her current book, a Bronte anthology, but realizes she is not in the mood for reading. This is Claire’s daily war: one hour after the next of filling the empty spaces. In the past month alone, she had read two collections of Miller Williams, one of Dylan Thomas (for the second time), a biography of Paul Simon, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, a splash of Plath, most of Donne, and even a slice of Balzac. Her library card got revoked over a scratched CD-ROM, “¡Español, Ahora!,” that she had barely even used. Now Claire has to find others to check out her materials. This reminds her of high school, waiting around the liquor store for Mr. Right to get out of his car and add a jug of cheap burgundy to his list.
Her steadily-acquired insight makes one thing abundantly clear to Claire: solitude when used to refine one’s own mind, is the most divine gift of all, because it can make a person totally oblivious to their place in reality; solitude makes a person the best there is, or the worst. The only thing that truly separates purebred tripe from backwater genius is the public affirmation of success. She is petrified of exposing her work to her closer friends, and that is why these awkward Sunday evenings have become the focal point of her week. Scott once said that she was twenty-three going on eighty—that she had given up without ever really trying. “Maybe it is time for some of that vino,” she grins, “that sanity be kept.” Claire’s mother always tells her that she ought to get a cat.
* * * * *
As night finds its force, someone is groaning in the dark, tangled in the grimy linens that had previously covered Ted’s futon. Disappointingly, it is only himself returning to consciousness. Coughing up a lungful of yesterday as he runs his weathered hands through his hair, he feels fragments of leaves and bark spiraling from their former resting places and onto his shoulders. Ted spits his phlegm into a small garbage can next to the warping aluminum frame and single-ply mattress that make due for a bed. His fingernails are black, possibly from treading through the forest on all fours the night before, and whether it is from dirt or overexposure to the cold seems to be the present point of the young man’s concern. Apparently, frostbite doesn’t sting so much when you’re blackout drunk; he might determine which cause it was for sure, if he could just remember where he put the cassette tapes.
Breakfast is always a cigarette. Fumbling with a match, Ted squints against the sulfur hit to clarify the numbers on his digital alarm clock: 8:26. Apart from the dull glow of his cherry weaving through the darkness, from his mouth to the overflowing ashtray, the room is motionless. The only sound is the humming of a distant box fan (as distant as something can be in an efficiency). Ted finally lurches upward, and meanders across his efficiency toward the single light switch. He trips over Nietzsche and tiptoes around Foucault, he brushes by Calvin and evades Sun-Tzu. There are so many belief structures covering Ted’s floor that he no longer bothers to clean up accidental spills; he just buys a new book. He read L. Ron Hubbard’s Dianetics just to deal with some nacho cheese that was starting to grow mold.
Ted is almost afraid to face the light, and for good reason, because when he does, all things become inescapable: the sections of wallpaper he had feverishly ripped away (he could recall the sound and feel of the act, but not the motivation), the other spots where he made cave drawings in chocolate syrup, which might explain the fingernails, the uprooted sapling, now thriving in his toilet tank (no explanation could really do this justice), and a credit receipt for throwing knives; where had those walked off to, he wondered?
None of this is the least bit unsettling for Ted, however, because when the lights go on, all he sees are six micro-cassettes, laying on his dresser, neatly labeled in sequence and zip-locked, and he knows that all of it had been completely worth the personal sacrifice on his body and mind. Ted snuffs out his smoke in a Huber bottle cap (something usually within arm’s reach) and he then takes a piss; he only had ninety minutes to get something together.
A cold beer in a hot shower is a union of perfection; one is distracted enough to let the water work its hidden charm on the neck and spinal column while concentrating on sucking down the bottle’s contents before it can get too warm. Some days, intoxicants constitute Ted’s entire caloric intake, and so it is a good thing that there’s actually significant nutritional value in malted hops, with which Ted had become more closely acquainted over the winter, after the autumnal harvest of mushrooms had run dry. He hadn’t smoked any herb in a long time—he found it far too unproductive for his writing.
Most of the time, other people don’t really get Ted. They look at him and see just another strung-out lollygagger, but could never understand how losing one’s mind might lead to a substantial vocation in life. Little did these outsiders know, he had been sacrificing neurons and nights of sleep on their behalves as well, but these days, martyrdom is a dying art inside of a culture that champions the visions of surrealist perspectives while denying their chemical origin. Hollywood is paved in the memories of the reckless—most of them, dead long before 33.
Ted slides the empty bottle behind the shampoo dowel and snags the “Head and Shoulders.” Soon enough, the knobs twist off and the tap grows quiet. A wet hand, whose fingernails are now just fashionably dirty, wrangles a towel off its hook and hauls it quickly behind the curtain, trying to prevent Ted’s sinewy nakedness from the meeting chill of evaporation. He then jostles his hair and limbs, chest and back, balls and crack, and slings the towel over the curtain rod to dry.
Even though all he eats is what he can get for free from various school functions, Ted is ripped from a pull-up bar bolted over the door to the bathroom with part of a foam swimming noodle duct-taped to a section of it. Each morning, at 5 a.m., before he goes to sleep, he works the bar with both his arms and legs for at ten minutes each. The last therapist Ted had seen declared that, aside from sex, there is no better remedy for depression than exercise. Swinging one-handed from the steel apparatus as he brushes his teeth, Ted imagines writing a poem about that group of pretentious tools that felt so enlightened last week at the one Open-mic he actually enjoys, which he entitles “Death Threat to Tools—A Requiem for Those in Range.” Lacking the time to really pull it off and make it sound serious, he forfeits the project to more essential matters.
Throwing on some clothes that smell clean enough, Ted hurries to pour out a bowl of shredded wheat and milk at his desk, and pops in the first tape, quickly lowering the volume to remove a hiss of distortion. Hearing his own voice ramble incoherently and howl, followed by declarations of his hidden identity in the universe, Ted laughs, and then shovels a few wheat squares into his mouth.
“God is an echo of myself. His wisdom is my doubt. [Crackle] Oh Fuck, a spider!”
Pump out a hundred or so pages of this, and Ted hopes he will get published. Aside from ignoring punctuation altogether, and using titles that sometimes were longer than the poems themselves, Ted knows he has very little to make himself appear clever. While his visible poverty makes others want to be impressed by his work, Ted is far from satisfied with himself, even if he can do more for his career by submitting poems to literary magazines on fast food wrappers than anything he has learned from his high-priced education. Effort and desire don’t mean squat to some editor who is thousands of miles away, but if anything even insinuates that the work is by an uneducated laborer who doesn’t really give a fuck either way,” they pounce on it.
* * * * *
The employees of the Genesis bistro have arrived a bit too late from their shift, due to the ridiculous obligation to shovel and ice the front sidewalk back at their workplace. Every table in the place is already taken by the typical medley of social outcasts and aspiring addicts, without ever occupying all the chairs, of course. Ilsa and Margo cast ominous glares at these two morons in second-hand sweaters, who are hoarding the largest table in the room all by themselves as they nurse a couple crappy beers. The girls’ glares intensify as though bolts of lightning would soon fly from their skulls, until the losers eventually concede their territory and squeeze in at the bar, where they belong. The ladies claim their prize, proud and victorious. Their gents are off tending to the usual formalities.
Joshua returns first with the round: white cosmos and shots of Blue Agave tequila. Not bothering to wait for their missing companion, the three find their beverage, raise them to the air, touch them on the table, and take them down in a single swallow. Margo gets up from her stool to keep the ball rolling. Ilsa casually snipes the remaining shot with a swipe of her slender, white hand—it was fair game.
“Aren’t they usually peeling the paint of the walls by now?” Joshua asks, gesturing to the empty stage. “Most of these kids have to get home pretty quick, before they turn into pumpkins.” Ilsa smiles disapprovingly, but give her some time. Antonio, their lost comrade, returns from the bathroom, grabs a stool, and is beginning to wonder where his drink is, when Margo hands him a Glennmorangie. She receives his kiss on the cheek in return with a painful smile. Taking his glass with a whiff of familiar approval, Antonio makes clinky-clinks around the circle, as if it were essential for him to truly enjoy his drink.
For herself and Ilsa, Margo unloads Scooby Snacks—low-balls of Midori, Irish crème, and Malibu—and another scotch for Joshua. No wonder they made such shitty tips, in hindsight; if it wasn’t this Open Mic on Sundays, it was The Slipper Lounge on Monday night, or The Seraphim on Wednesdays, but that one is music only, so there wasn’t as much to heckle at. Not so long ago, each of them would occasionally free themselves of their egos in the blinding stage light. Joshua wrote hilarious, fast-paced short fiction about explosions and ninjas. Ilsa had dabbled in free-verse poetry, and Margo, in songwriting. Antonio would simply orate on things that were better in other countries. Why had they stopped, when they had just started to try?
Now safe behind a thickening buzz, the group begins to grow somber and quiet. Calmness degenerates into boredom. They check their cell phones for the time and light cigarettes for one and other—anything to avoid a little meaningful conversation.
“Where the fuck is that guy with the glasses?” Margo asks, after a long exhale. “Those townies on the couch are leering all over the place like a bunch of ostriches. Hopefully they will just get them out of the way early, like they did two weeks ago.” Margo is here to hear her man play cello, but he hasn’t shown up yet.
“The busboy who resembles Keith Richards said that he was getting the set-up from down the street,” Antonio answered, brushing his nostrils. Ilsa sees this and frowns. Three relatively clean years and he was back in the toilet. That bastard still owes her money. She finishes her drink and lets it go.
Just then, the nut-job that had once cursed them out over the microphone, who is so nervous that he always shakes a little when he reads, now wearing an untucked dress shirt and wool pants (not to mention his decaying leather shoes), gets up, grabbing his belongings and bottle of beer, and slides next to the bohemian drama queen at an adjacent table, who is nursing an old-fashioned as she rolls a pen between her fingers. The guy lays his manuscript beside hers, and steals her attention from the page. Shocked, she looks back. Both smile in embarrassment and focus on their drinks. They start to have a conversation.
“Ooh!” Ilsa moans, finding some substance to which her circle could latch on, “This could be entertaining.” The guy starts talking, still having yet to make eye contact. Puffing up her chest and lengthening her neck, Ilsa begins narrating quietly, in the lowest voice that a Swede could procure. “Forgive my bashfulness, but are you some Rosalind reincarnate? When you read that archaic slime about the loneliness of virtue, my heart flutters uncontrollably; it’s so peculiar!” This is much better than the usual show.
“I’ve noticed you too,” Joshua excitedly chimes in, remembering to soften his scratchy, hardly feminine tone, “and when you invigorate the airwaves with senseless obscurities about the souls of the trees crying out to you, it makes my crotch burn!” They all snort and recoil under the attempted restraint of their glee.
“Hey, what do you say we vacate this establishment and regress to my domicile, for a plethora of copulation?” Antonio bellows, in an unnecessary exaggeration of his own deep Italian voice before they have time to fully calm themselves, and a bit too loud. Suddenly, they all stop laughing, because it actually happens. Like that, the guy gives the girl a cigarette, lights it for her, and they leave, smiling curtly as they walk by the giant table a pair of snub-nosed fuck you’s that needed no words. On the way down the stairs, they pass the fucking guy and his glasses, lugging a steel suitcase that houses the house sound system. Everyone starts applauding as Mr. Emcee hooks up the 4-track and checks the mic, and the quartet is mesmerized once more at the first introduction, the scent of fresh meat. They love Sunday nights.
* * * * *
It would be cruel to end our tale right here, although that is practically the case. Ted and Claire leave the bar, and go back to Claire’s apartment on Ted’s suggestion, claiming with a smile that his maid was on vacation. They would stay up all night talking about nothing, Claire, laughing at Ted’s twisted idealism and trying to determine what about him could so wholly infatuate her skeptical heart, Ted, holding back tears of disbelief over a source of inspiration he had long forgotten, and around dawn, they would expose themselves to each other with an intimacy they had never before experienced through sex, but only mourning.
The next day, over coffee and a bagel, they would resolve that both of them had too much going on at the moment with their writing to deal with a serious commitment. This was not to say that their night had been only a fling; both of them would make this abundantly clear to one and other, repeatedly, talking about how great it was up until the sex. They would begin to talk about their work, their day jobs, where they were from, and by the time Ted would announce that he needed to leave, both of them would feel remarkably better about the whole situation. Claire would give Ted her phone number; she would say he should call her again, both of them knowing it would be easiest for them if he didn’t.