The Rake Magazine

Tag: fiction

  • Campfire

    One
    muggy Minnesota morning during the summer straddling the scrawny divide
    between my fanciful childhood and jaded adolescence, my best friend
    Robby and I found religion. It’d been hiding, not surprisingly, inside
    the whitewashed pine chapel of Lake Bronson Galilee Lutheran Bible
    Camp.

    Robby
    and I first met, with a magnetic force, five years earlier at a
    baptism. Hayseeds both, we each had Elmer’s Glue skin, John Deere
    green eyes, and an electric shock of curly blond hair. We also shared
    a passion for C.S. Lewis’s stories, a furious love of outdoor
    exploration, and a consuming need to spend time together. Bible Camp
    was just an annual extension of that need.

    The morning we discovered religion, head counselor Neil finished Rise And Shine services by directing all campers to join hands around the chapel’s suspended oak cross in a chorus of “Sing Hallelujah to the Lord.”

    Robby took my hand in his.

    Seven
    measures into the round, late morning humidity oozed in through the
    levered windows. Sunlight beamed through the bible stenciled into the
    center of the most prominent stained glass window, angelfying each
    crooning countenance. Robby’s slick and gamy hand swung gently with
    mine in time with the music.

    Just
    before the last bit, Neil twirled his finger in the sunlit dust,
    indicating we should repeat the entire hymn, splitting the stanzas
    between the boys and the girls. With exponential vigor the music
    bounced from us to the chapel walls and back again. This swirl of
    echoes tugged at me with an insistent, muscular strength.

    Something
    was at work. The song, the sunlight, the heat, Robby’s hand,
    collectively they pierced through my skin, infusing a soulful mood. I
    felt sheltered, peaceful, and poised.

    “I
    feel…religious,” I thought. Not a jarring revelation, as I was after
    all in church, in bible camp. But God wasn’t really what I was there
    for, and yet, in some form, He appeared anyway. How odd. Eventually
    Neil axed the air, and everyone filtered out into the muggy broth,
    eager to shed their clammy church clothes for swim trunks.

    But
    neither Robby nor I could recede easily into camp tomfoolery. He too
    had felt simultaneously elevated and anchored by the music. While
    changing in our cabin we discussed that feeling, then religion, which
    inevitably fell to talk of Heaven.

    “Maybe
    it’s like Narnia,” Robby gushed. “Aslan, enchanted candies, talking
    animals!” Any other camper would have saved face by chiding this
    fancy, but I admitted I had a similar hope. Heaven had to incorporate
    some childish magic, or it’d just be eternally dull.

    Later
    that day we sprawled on our coconut-scented beach towels on the coarse
    pebbles above Nestea-colored Lake Bronson. Our conversation hadn’t
    stopped, so naturally we came to hell. On this subject we knew only
    what we’d been taught by rural Lutheranism: whoever accepts Christ as
    his savior has a free pass through Heaven’s Gate, as long as he asks
    regularly, meaningfully, for forgiveness of all sins. But within
    individual families, the rules were murkier.

    Robby’s
    family was bent meekly inward toward his father, Herald, who ruled
    fiercely, religiously, using confusion as a tool and hell as a strap.
    And occasionally he used an actual strap.

    “Sometimes,”
    Robby confessed, “like when we stole those crabapples, I’ll think,
    ‘What if I died, right now? Would I wake up in hell just because I
    haven’t, yet, told God, sorry?’”

    “It’s
    a puzzle,” I admitted. “And what about all the sins we forgot to ask
    God’s forgiveness for? What happens to those when we die?”
    Robby frowned. “It’s not like we see a priest; nobody’s hearing the sins and asking, ‘Sure that’s all of them?’”

    “Right,” I said scraping sand from my taffy. “It’s just God and us.”
    Lutherans
    are proud to have removed the Catholic’s confessional middleman, but at
    that moment I feared perhaps we’d been too efficient.

  • You Know How It Is. Or Maybe You Don't. Maybe I Don't. Maybe, in Fact, None of Us Does

    What does it mean that I have to sit and think for several minutes, and eventually have to count on my fingers, to figure out exactly how old I am?

    I don’t know what it means, but I know it’s appalling, the fact that I have to do it, and the number I eventually end up with.

    I’ve been gone. You may have noticed. Perhaps you did not notice. No big deal. No skin off my teeth. I’ve been out of it. It being, I suppose, things in general. I’ve been mulling and muddling in somewhat equal measure, although if I’m at all in the business of truth-telling I guess I’d have to say muddling has mostly been winning out over mulling.

    I don’t know what to tell you: there’s an honest statement if ever I’ve uttered one. And here’s another, as long as I seem to be in the mood to speak the plain, hard truth: Good Lord, I sure as hell do eat a lot of soup.

    The winter was interminable. There were stretches that I suppose I could say were like a dream. Perhaps they were a dream. I’m not sure I can tell anymore.

    You know what the "PF" in PF-Flyers stands for? I’ll tell you what it stands for: Positive Foundation.

    How do you like them fucking apples?

    I taught my dog to talk, but he’s still a pretty tight-lipped character. I can’t get a whole lot out of him. In the last 24 hours he’s spoken to me twice, and on each occasion his utterance took the form of a question.

    The first question was this: "Those Chinese kung fu sneakers in the closet –you ever wear them?"

    The other question was this: "You ever hear of a broad named M.F.K. Fisher?"

    To both questions I responded with "Why?" and received nothing in the way of a reply. I’ll say this for my dog: he keeps his counsel. One morning I asked him, as I do each morning, "How did you sleep?"

    "So-so," he said. "A phrase was running through my head all night in my dreams."

    "What phrase was that?" I asked.

    "Mist oppeternity," he said, and then turned his attention to his morning meal.

    I chalk that last business up to the Krazy Kat book I gave him for Christmas.

    I’m full of questions these days, but my dog is unfortunately of little help, keeper of his counsel that he is. Still I ask. I go on asking.

    "How did we ever agree that ‘time piece’ means a teller of time?" I ask. "Or, for that matter, how did we ever agree that ‘a teller of time’ or even ‘telling time’ means anything at all?"

    Sometimes I just go through the dictionary and recite words to the dog, trying to build up his vocabulary. "Bulldozer," I’ll say. "There’s a beautiful word. As is hourglass. As is pitch pipe, which is actually two words, referring to the invention of Jacob Kratt, Sr., who as a young man worked for a time at the Hohner harmonica factory in Trossingen Germany, and who later, in America, worked for Thomas Edison in Orange, New Jersey before opening his own harmonica factory."

    To which my dog will either say nothing or will say something like, "Big whoop."

    I’ve had a lot of dogs, and I’ve managed to teach almost all of them to talk. My current dog’s name is Leon "Blood" Runnells. I met him at a junior college in Kansas, where he had come from Fort Wayne, Indiana to play football, this because he didn’t have the academic chops to get into a division one school.

    Leon was a complete monster on the football field. Other guys on the team were terrified of him. They weren’t much more comfortable with him off the field. His old man was some sort of badass Special Forces character, or so Leon claimed.

    "You think I’m crazy," he would say. "You should get a load of Leon, Sr. This shit’s football. My old man, he’s a warrior. He’d cut your nuts off and leave you to bleed to death in the sand, and you’d never even get a good enough look at him to make a positive I.D."

    Our Leon –my Leon now– was also notorious for having once told Lou Holtz to suck his dick, this after some booster had paid Holtz a boatload of cash to fly out to Kansas to make some sort of motivational speech, after which he’d been persuaded to swing by and lay some rah-rah bullshit on the football team.

    Anyway, Leon couldn’t cut it in the classroom, even at the junior college level, and he also suffered some kind of degenerative hip injury near the end of his first season. They were prepared to cut him loose and send him back to a dead end job in Fort Wayne. Around this same time he learned that his old man had been killed in Kosovo or someplace like that, and poor Leon took all this bad news pretty hard and started running the streets. He eventually ended up at the local animal shelter, where they cut off his nuts, implanted a chip in his neck, and put him up for adoption.

    When I visited him the first time he had turned into such a docile, good natured fellow that I took pity on him, paid the three hundred bucks, and took him home with me.

    Truly, his reticence aside, a guy couldn’t ask for a better dog. It’s crazy, I know, and people who knew him back when probably wouldn’t believe me if I told them that I now share my bed with that legendary badass Leon "Blood" Runnells and that he greets me every time I come in the door like I’m the greatest thing that ever happened to him.

    At any rate, I guess I’ve had my say, even if it wasn’t what I wanted to say, and was more than I had any intention of saying.

    I’ll just leave you with this: I’m here now, and there ain’t a damn thing Zen about it.

  • Identity Crises… Literary Edition

    When she was in second grade, my girlfriend was informed by her teacher that E.B. White was a woman. Ostensibly, she was using the initials ‘E.B.’ to hide this fact, because books written by women, of course, didn’t sell as well as those by men.

    "No," I said, fifteen years after the fact. "You’re wrong, like usual. Or rather, your teacher was wrong, but I’m putting it on you."

    After a quick Google search, we found that E.B. (author of Charlotte’s Web, the book they were reading) was short for Elwyn Brooks, and even though that’s still somewhat androgynous, the pronoun ‘he’ was being used in all instances. And there was a picture of a man, which was fairly incriminating, smooth cheeks notwithstanding.

    "This changes everything," my very sweet, feminine girlfriend said. "But you shouldn’t have told me I was wrong. I still love you though."

    This changes everything. Why do we form such set ideas about the authors whose books we read? To the point that, if we learn an unusual fact about them, our opinions change about their work? Like when I heard Roald Dahl was an anti-Semite, or Wallace Stevens was American (I’d thought Irish – I don’t know why), or Shel Silverstein is maybe the most terrifying person ever: All of a sudden I felt I had to reexamine their stories and poems, as if these personal tidbits might unlock some secrets hidden in their texts.

    But it’s unfair of us. Especially in the realm of fiction, where the entire premise of a story is that it doesn’t have to be real. (They have to be honest, they have to be sincere, but certainly not real.) I imagine the very reason writers like J.D. Salinger become reclusive is so that their biographies don’t get intertwined with their work. Still, I’ll re-read Catcher in the Rye or Franny and Zooey and think to myself, ‘This was written by a man who totally took himself away from society. What does that mean?’ And I suspect that thinking about this gives the narrators of these books, in my head, certain desolate, lonely voices that may not have been intended. That is to say, we mar fiction by involving its authors in their work.

    In the last year or two, the already-ailing literary world has been getting a ton of bad publicity due to some identity fraud. The most notorious example, of course, is James Frey’s admission that he exaggerated some facts in his Oprah-loved memoir, A Million Little Pieces. More recently, Margaret Jones confessed that she wasn’t actually a half-Native American raised by a black family in LA, as she posited in her memoir, Love and Consequences; and Misha Defonseca, author of the Holocaust memoir Misha, admitted she wasn’t raised by wolves in the forests of Europe during the war. (Is this new news? No — this isn’t new news.)

    Memoirs are supposed to be true, and these writers deserved to get called out. Apparently Mr. Frey was considering publishing his as fiction…and then didn’t. My theory? It’s because he can’t write a sentence. An excerpt? An excerpt:

    "I see my attendant friend and I raise a hand.
    Are you okay?
    No.
    What’s wrong?
    I can’t really walk.
    If you can make it to the door I can get you a chair.
    How far is the door?
    Not far.
    I stand. I wobble. I sit back down. I stare at the floor and take a deep breath."

    If we all go back to late high school/early college and take out our differential calculus text books, and decide to apply mathematic principles to literature, one might say that Frey’s prose is a derivative of Cormac McCarthy’s prose (aptly ridiculed here), which is a derivative of Hemingway’s prose, which is sometimes perfect but still sparse.
    Hem’s answer to what might be the best intellectual training for the would-be writer, taken from his interview with The Paris Review:
    "Let’s say he should go out and hang himself because he finds that writing well is impossibly difficult. Then he should be cut down without mercy and forced by his own self to write as well as he can for the rest of his life. At least he will have the story of the hanging to commence with."

    Frey had a good story (in minor need of embellishment, I guess), but not a lot more. Still, in the current climate of the literary industry, if you’ve got a good story, and it’s mostly true, it can still sell well in spite of shoddy craftsmanship.

    Rachel Donadio puts it well in Papercuts.

    The real damage, though, has been inflicted upon the fiction industry. Take a look at JT Leroy. Among other books, he wrote a short story collection entitled The Heart is Deceitful Above All Things (2001). It was met with ridiculous amounts of praise, and deserved every blurb. Then, in 2006, it was revealed that JT Leroy didn’t exist — he was actually an alternate personality for one Laura Albert, a middle-aged woman in California. (‘Alternate personality’ meaning, this was no mere pseudonym. Check this out.)

    Unqualified rage ensued. Pretty soon thereafter, the likes of Ian McEwan (Saturday, Atonement) was getting harangued for not citing his sources in his novels. Even though he did cite them.

    The point being, Leroy/Albert’s writings were published as fiction, which gives the author, in my view, the liberty to slap whatever they want to inside – or outside – a book’s covers. Albert never claimed the writings were autobiographical, rather it was assumed. And to make something imagined so personal that people believe it’s real, well that’s just good writing. (I’m not going to get into the battle over film rights, which does incriminate Albert just a little bit…or a lot.) Really, though, this is no different than Mary Ann Evans writing as George Eliot, or Amandine Dupin writing as George Sand…or E.B. White the woman writing as E.B. White the man.