From the Archives - Guitar Man

Introduction

In 1986, I took a high school creative writing class. The teacher, Mr. Kroop, wore Jams and played whale music and didn’t do a lot of lecturing; instead, he gave out gobs of assignments. We seemed to have something due almost every day. One day he assigned us a character sketch. I think my effort came to more than that, in its primitive way. (Note: by “sketch” he meant only in the literary sense. The drawing below had nothing to do with the assignment and Mr. Kroop never even saw it.)

Guitar man – February 3, 1986

Olga leaned back in her chair. It creaked, threatening to collapse. She belched loudly, and then slumped over the little built-in desk. She was in a meeting at an alcohol rehabilitation center, where she had been sent as part of her sentence for shoplifting at a Liquor Mart. Having smuggled in a flask of Jack Daniels, she was too inebriated to pay attention to the lecture that was being given. Plus, she spoke almost no English.

A bearded man came around passing out magic markers and big sheets of butcher paper. Olga assumed they were to write lists of some kind. Goals? Reasons to do better? Excuses? She wasn’t feeling inspired to write anything, and nobody would be able to decipher her Cyrillic characters anyway. So she just slumped at her desk, her cheek resting on her arm, watching the proceedings unfold sideways. The bearded man said something to her which she ignored. Then she happened to spy, on the wall, a framed picture of a man playing a guitar.

Something was weird about the picture. It was sideways. Of course, Olga’s head was turned on its side, so the picture ought to look sideways, she reasoned, but it just wasn’t right. It was, like, double-sideways. She sat up and looked at again, with her head straight. Now it was upside-down! She shook her head a bit as if to clear it. She looked again. Yes, she had been drinking, but not that much, and the picture was definitely upside-down. What was this, some kind of joke? Some kind of trick? Or a result of very haphazard janitorial service? Was this some visual aid, to be used in some group exercise, serving perhaps as some metaphor? Well, it didn’t matter. Not Olga’s problem. And then she remembered something she’d learned once in an art class, decades ago, back in the old country. Something about drawing upside down, and how it helped you draw what you see, not what you suppose something looks like. Olga realized that, with her butcher paper and marker, she was in a position to draw this right now. Upside-down.

She hadn’t drawn anything with a marker in ages (a spray can being her preferred medium), and she held it tightly in her fist like a toddler with a crayon. She drew rapidly, looking at the framed picture rather than her paper. Once in a while she glanced down and was thrilled to see her drawing taking shape and looking, actually, a bit like a work of art. Some of the lines kind of did their own thing, some petered out instead of joining anything up, and she noted with a frown that the guitar player’s right hand looked a little palsied, but all in all it wasn’t bad. Now if she could just not screw up the face! She focused on the lines and tried to forget what they were supposed to be leading up to. Halfway through finishing his head she couldn’t go on—there was too much goodness on the paper to risk screwing it all up. It had to be considered Done.

She turned the paper around so it was right-side-up and gazed upon her work. Had she really just drawn this? How much time had passed? She realized suddenly that the room around her was in motion, chairs scraping back as people stood up. Somebody was collecting the papers. No! Not hers! She started to roll it up but her fingers were fumbling. It was like she’d used up all her skill and had nothing else left for this task. She stood, stepped back, and tripped over her chair. Her arms flew back and she caught herself from falling, ending up in a crablike position. Her contraband whiskey bottle flew from the pocket of her baggy overcoat and spun across the floor. This caused massive commotion—with all the alcoholics in the room, that bottle was like blood in shark-infested waters. Olga lumbered off toward the exit as if in flight, embarrassed and ashamed to have her smuggling operation discovered. The door swung closed behind her, letting out a little sigh.

The bearded man shook his head and strode toward the abandoned whisky bottle, which was still half full. Nobody raced him for it, but all eyes were on it. Suddenly there was motion again at the double doors, a struggle from the other side, and they started to open together. Olga staggered through, a look of fierce determination on her face. The bearded man practically sprinted for the bottle, but to his surprise Olga marched right by him. There was a large sheet of curled paper near the chair she’d overturned, and she snatched it up, rolled it into a tight scroll, and—flashing a defiant and satisfied look—strode off, in her galumphing way, back out through the door.

—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—~—
Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - This Is a Short Story—NOT!

Introduction

When I’ve lately searched my archives for an old essay worth posting, it’s felt like I’m down to the absolute dregs. One thing I’m resolute about sparing you are the short stories I wrote during high school, which are painful to read. The following essay, which I wrote in college, examines the difficulty I had with fiction, while sharing some personal history I hope you’ll find amusing.

This Is a Short Story - October 21, 1989

This is a short story.

Actually, it’s not. It’s just another ... well, whatever you want to call it. Essay, report, letter: whatever it is, it ain’t fiction. A family member reported recently getting shivers when reading about my life, and wishing it was fiction. Hey, if my memoirs make you uneasy, you should read my short stories! Or maybe you shouldn’t.

See, I’ve always had problems with fiction. A few years back, I could write it pretty readily—but it was really, really bad. My characters were either boring, unbelievable, or undeveloped. The situations were worse. Real life provides all this for me; I just have to write it all down. The only trouble is, I have to patiently wait for characters to show up and situations to happen, which takes too long … unless I delve into my past.

I’m probably the only 20-year-old alive who’s ready to write his autobiography. I could write a new volume every twenty years until I’m dead. So instead of the story I was going to try to write this evening, here are some reminisces.

 At my high school, most students hung out in packs (I’d say “cliques” but that’s such a stupid word). Within these groups, everybody tried to look like everybody else, so most of my peers in high school could be easily categorized: jock, egghead, stoner, hic, punker, cheerleader, reject, etc. I always had a strange fascination, almost an admiration, for those who took great pains to distinguish themselves and stand aloof from everyone. Take this guy in my Russian class, Timofey. That’s not really his name, but it’s the English phonetic spelling for his Russian name. Outside of class, he probably went by “Tim” which doesn’t fit him nearly as well. Who knows, maybe he adopted “Timofey” beyond the classroom … I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

Timofey made punk rockers look like Eddie Haskell. He wore this black leather jacket with a painting on the back of a pit bull with an arm sticking out of its mouth. Big block letters spelled out, “Pit bull for sale: loves children.” As you read that, it sounds stupid. And it was. But the fact that he wore that thing, without copping any kind of rebellious attitude, was unique. Unlike punkers, he was friendly and outgoing. His hair was even wilder than his jacket: a kind of square shaped, white ‘do with little vertical curls set in epoxy. I’m not kidding, epoxy—I asked. He was really funny not just to talk to, but to look at. He might have been smart; I couldn’t tell (though it was said that he was the first Russian language student in 20 years to fail the class). 

I guess the real reason I kind of respected the guy was that he wasn’t trying to relate to the punkers—in fact, they wouldn’t go near him. Where you would expect them to look at him with awe, their expressions seemed to say something like, “Gawd, that guy’s WEIRD!” He singlehandedly made their own poses look pretty weak; after all, most of these rote punkers would have cleaned up just fine and could be installed in a church service pretty readily. But not Timofey. I mean, how do you get hardened epoxy out of a kid’s hair?

When I started high school I was as judgmental and easily shocked as the next rank-and-file member of the nerdy wannabe-elite. Having Timofey in class, and finding him harmless, helped me let my guard down. I was also led toward greater acceptance of the unusual by this punk rocker chick named (in Russian) Masha. She had this way of looking at you with a half-smile, curling her lip like Billy Idol, as though she was kind of inwardly laughing at you, except you knew she wasn’t even paying attention to you, so she must have been laughing at everyone, at this class, at this whole stupid high school scene. I had a sizeable crush on Masha, even if her bleached, gelled, and shocked-up hair wasn’t set in epoxy. My only issue with her is that she almost never came to class.

So, yeah, exchanging pleasantries with Timofey and Masha (yes, they’d actually talk to me!) really expanded my worldview, to the point that when my brothers’ friend DT began an eerie metamorphosis into an unrecognizable hybrid of comic book villain and standup comedian, I rolled with it. He stopped wearing bike race t-shirts in favor of a big long overcoat, which accentuated his 6’4” 200-pound frame (which was itself a recent thing—he seemed to suddenly grow giant overnight). DT dyed his hair red—but not a realistic redhead red, but a lustrous dark black-cherry-red right out of a color comic book. Then he wore the old-school Steve Dallas sunglasses, let a good three days of razor stubble build up on his face, and clenched a cigar in his teeth. Maybe you never saw him like that, and if not it’s probably a good thing. You would’ve hated it, probably, because this was DT, a guy we all knew, a guy we didn’t want to laugh at like a strange exhibit from the Ripley’s Believe It Or Not museum. How are you supposed to hang out with a guy who looks like that?

To engage with DT and his new look took some adjustment. After all, he didn’t create that image so he could blend into the woodwork. He wanted to be noticed, to call attention to himself, just like the young rebel teen punk who sports a foot high blue mohawk and a studded collar and says things like “I just wanna be left alone!” To give DT a hard time for his carefully arranged look would be no fun, as would pretending you didn’t notice. I think he wanted us, or at least me, to play along with his transformation. One time he dropped by my locker after school, even though he had graduated years before. This stands out in my high school memories as one of the finest, having been charged with real (well, fictitious) menace.

First of all, DT was obviously not a Fairview student—way too old. He came swaggering up the ramp towards the student center, this huge, creepy looking thug made even bigger by his massive overcoat, with that stubble and cigar, clearing a path of high schoolers as he went. They must’ve thought he was some kind of lunatic … they gave him plenty of space and then stood there gawking. About thirty feet from me, he called out, “Yo, DANA! Hold it!” I acted real nervous and looked around as if for an escape route, and when he reached me he said, “Tell your friend David if he calls me Mike again, he’ll wake up dead!” All the people around my locker sort of cleared out at this point, and gathered at a safe distance to see what was going on. DT looked around, and sort of put his arm around me like he was going to inflict some kind of pain if I acted up. He whispered, “Hey, Dana, what’s up? You wanna come look at that bike?” but we both knew people assumed he was saying, “It’s too late to back out now. I’ll go easy on you but you miss this next score and you’re dead meat.” I stammered out something like, “Hey, man, I don’t want any trouble.”

Then DT escorted me down the ramp towards the exit, his arm around my shoulders like we were friends but with the suggestion that this could become a headlock very suddenly. Once we were out of sight, we broke out laughing. To my delight, the next day I got some nervous questions from the guys in my honors classes, and I replied in a suitably evasive fashion. I felt like I’d made some important transition from standard nerd to somebody slightly more complicated. (Yes, it has dawned on me that my pose was about as ridiculous as DT’s, but no matter.)

So, I think I’ve known some pretty interesting people, who could be given code names and assigned roles in some totally fictitious story. Like, maybe Timofey and DT meet at a U2 concert and decide to sneak backstage or something. Except that’s dumb, they wouldn’t hit it off at all. Timofey probably wouldn’t be caught dead at U2, he’d be at a Fear concert or something, and DT would be too busy hitting on some girl in the t-shirt line to even think of sneaking backstage. And even if they did, they’d just get chucked out by security, and where’s the story in that? It’d be a really amazing memory if it actually happened to you, but stories have to be way more exciting than that, at least if they’re the type that could make me famous so I could go on “Donahue.”

So, I guess what I’m saying is, though I’d love to be a famous fiction writer, I really don’t know how, and to try to fake it makes about as much sense as changing my hair and outfit and hoping that’ll make me into an exciting, unique person. But faking it at fiction would actually be worse, because you’d read my stories and think, “This just sucks,” whereas Timofey’s hair, Masha’s tongue-in-cheek sneer, and DT’s costume were at least entertaining. So I’ll just keep reporting on that sort of thing, and hope you like it.

--~--~--~--~--~--~--~---~--

For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

From the Archives - fiction - A Hair Cut

Introduction

This is a short story from way back.  It was inspired by my move to the Bay Area in 1990, and my abrupt recognition of how different it was from other places I’d lived.  “Different” is perhaps less apt a word than “complete,” in the sense that the little pond I’d imagined the world to be had suddenly given way to a vast ocean.  I came away feeling embarrassed at my own parochialism.  Given the progress America has made in the ensuing 25 years, I trust a wake-up call as shocking as this would no longer be possible today.

A Hair Cut - October 15, 1990

Nick knew Steven from Colorado.  They’d been next‑door neighbors, but Nick mostly knew Steven’s parents.  Steven was ten years older.  When Nick was twelve, Steven opened a hair salon.  Nick stopped by to visit.  He didn’t go inside because Steven was in the barbershop chair with a blond girl on his lap and he was kissing her.  Nick did not want to disturb this.  He wondered if he would ever own his own business.

Years later some friends of Nick’s shared some gossip about Steven.  What they said didn’t seem right because Nick had seen the girl in the barbershop chair.  His friends said Steven was “that way.”  Nick did not know if this was true, and he liked the haircuts because a girl complimented him once. 

Five years later they both were living in California.  Nick had moved to Berkeley for college and Steven was in San Francisco.  Nick phoned Steven to arrange a haircut.  He hadn’t seen Steven in years.  Steven gave him directions.  “I’m in the Castro,” he said.  He mentioned this several times.  Was this for emphasis, Nick wondered?  Or was it just because the first time, Nick had said, “Kestrel”?  Nick didn’t know the city well.  He had no idea where the Castro was.

Nick took the Bart train to San Francisco and got off at the Embarcadero station.  The attendant at the kiosk was not helpful with the instructions for Muni.  Muni buses ran down Market Street towards the Ferry Building and up towards this neighborhood Nick had never seen before.  He waited a long time for the Muni.  Buses kept passing him and none of them said K, L, or M.  Finally Nick asked a passerby who said K, L, and M are on the subway line and you have to go downstairs.  Nick could have waited all afternoon otherwise.  He knew nothing about Muni.

The subway was awfully loud.  Nick had a book of short stories by Hemingway.  He liked how he could feel how the characters felt, and how they couldn’t help how they felt.

When Nick came up out of the subway at Castro Street, he was disoriented.  The street was busy with people and ran down a long hill through old houses like he’d seen in photos.  He looked in the window of a clothing store and one of the mannequins had a hockey mask.  Nick wondered why they would do this.  In whose eyes would this make sense?  He had to ask for directions, but he did not want to ask the people on the sidewalk.  He finally asked two children how to get to 18th Street.  They told him and he was thankful because they were just kids.  They were awfully nice kids.

He found the hair shop.  It was up a steep wooden staircase and down a short, dark hall.  He saw the hair salon to his left but the doorway had black bars across it and a padlock, so he kept walking.  Farther down the little hall was a strange, dark shop with lots of leather and chains.  He went quickly back to the hair salon and a big man with a thick mustache let him in.  Steven was not in the shop.

Nick was glad he had his book and kept reading.  Steven arrived and they shook hands.  Nick felt that he had never known Steven well.  He sat in the big black leather barbershop chair.  Steven’s old salon had had a smaller chair.  While Steven cut Nick’s hair he talked to him and as they talked they used the mirror on the wall so they could see each other.  Nick thought about how it was perfectly normal for people to look at each other when they talked.

Steven was great at cutting hair.  He used little sharp scissors and took a long time.  While he was cutting and they were talking Nick saw another man come into the salon.  He had short dark hair with tight curls and he was talking about his hair.  He said he just couldn’t do anything with it anymore.  He sat down and flipped through a magazine while talking to them.  Three times, Steven pinched his finger in the scissors and yelped.

“How do you like the dildo shop next door?” asked the other hairdresser, the one with the mustache.  Nick said that he hadn’t really looked at it.

“They’re very common here,” Steven said.

“It’s as normal as going to a hardware store and asking for a screwdriver,” said the man with the magazine.  He paused and then said, “I wonder if I meant to make a pun on screwdriver.”

Another friend stopped by to see Steven.  He had thick, tall blond hair and was muscle‑bound.  He did not stay long and after fifteen minutes or so the curly-haired man left too.  When he left he patted Steven on the belly, Nick couldn’t help but notice.

Nick’s hair looked very good after an hour or so but Steven kept cutting, hair by hair, until two hours had gone by.  He charged Nick sixteen dollars.  Nick wrote him a check and then did not know what else to do.  He was a customer but also an old friend.  Steven asked if he wanted to get some tea.  They left the salon.  As they walked down the steep wooden steps, an attractive young woman looked at them and gave Nick a big smile.

“Did you notice that this is a prominent gay area?” Steven asked suddenly.  Nick said that he hadn’t noticed.  “Well it is,” said Steven. 

The coffee shop, Nick noted, also sold beer and cocktails.  It was a curious structure with a corrugated steel roof, Christmas lights, and a patio.  Steven said Nick could get whatever he wanted.  There was a big chalkboard listing all kinds of different drinks.  Nick thought hot chocolate would be good because it was cold out, or maybe a latte.  Those were two dollars and Steven was paying and Nick bought house coffee which was eighty cents.  Steven asked if he wanted to sit outside and Nick said he did.  It was cold outside and getting dark and the coffee shop was beginning to look more like a bar.

On the patio there were lots of people who were dressed lavishly.  Even the plain t-shirts struck Nick as lavish.   A small group of people nearby were talking.  A young woman with short dark hair was talking excitedly to two men with earrings, thick spiked hair, and long overcoats.  “Yesterday, I . . . I saw this cute girl and I . . . I scammed on her and uh . . . cruised . . . uh, she came over and we . . . we made out!” she said at last, talking fast and seeming happy to finish her sentence.  She smiled brightly and the two men nodded.  Nick felt that she was very young.  Nick didn’t think anything was funny but he thought he might laugh but he didn’t.

Steven asked if he was cold.  Nick was in shirtsleeves and the air was cold but he said he was fine. Steven wanted to go in.  They sat in the bar and Steven talked about how bars were encouraged to sell food.  He also pointed out the corrugated steel ceiling, which Nick had not noticed.  Around him lively people milled about and every so often two men would kiss and Nick did not want to look like he was watching.

Two men approached the table.  One had several days of red beard and a turtleneck, and he had a thick musky smell.  The other was a small man with deep clear eyes and a brown leather jacket.  Steven introduced the short man to Nick and the man extended his hand.

“Hi Nick, nice to meet you.  You’ll like Steven, he’s very nice.”

Nick had known Steven for more than fifteen years but he didn’t say so.  Maybe he didn’t really know Steven that well anyway.

The other men left and then Steven was talking a lot about his father.  He said he hoped Nick did not dislike his father.  Nick had always been fond of Steven’s father.  He knew Steven’s father well.

“I don’t think my dad liked your dad,” Steven was saying.  “He never really knew your dad but he probably made assumptions.  My dad always said the new yuppies with their liberal ideas were ruining the city.”  He paused for moment and then began talking faster.  “But he really wasn’t bad about it or anything and he was really tolerant about a lot of things, too, like my being gay and stuff like that.”

The word stung Nick like a bee inside but he did not flinch.  He nodded casually.  The word did not shock him but to hear Steven say it did.  Nick’s neck and shoulders were all tight.  For a few moments his mind drifted and when it came back he found he was talking about money.  He wondered:  was he talking too much about money?  With his other friends it didn’t occur to him to worry about what he was talking about.  Then before he knew it Nick was telling Steven about his ex-girlfriend.

It was dark out and the bar was full and the music was blaring and the bar was full of cigarette smoke and they left.  They walked along the street.  A block down there was a Safeway and across the street were two gyms on the same block.  This was Market street, which had lots of buses running between this neighborhood and, at the other end, the Embarcadero where Bart had let Nick off, hours ago.  Clothing stores lined the street with elaborate window displays and Nick had to look because Steven was pointing them out.  Nick didn’t see any more hockey masks.  They passed a brightly lit deli and Nick walked right past it but Steven had stopped.  He had said something but Nick didn’t hear.  Steven repeated his question:  “Are you hungry?”

Nick was always hungry and everybody always knew it.  Steven bought soft uncooked noodles and some sauce and they went to his apartment.  The door to the street was small and stiff and opened into a long dark hall.  The hall ended in what looked like a carport but Nick only saw a large garbage can.  He thought that seeing a raccoon would not surprise him.  Inside, the apartment was pretty nice but it was all one room and had no windows except the one in the back door that had some kind of clear plastic film over it so it wasn’t really clear.

Steven explained that the concrete foundation was no good because it allowed moisture to seep through.  Steven had always fixed up houses, building walls and porches with concrete, and then he would leave them once they were all done.  He was planning to do a lot of work on this studio.  There was a block of concrete two feet high jutting out from the wall.  It was a mistake when they built the building, Steven explained; he was going to extend it up and put on a table top.

While Steven was washing two plates and a pot to cook the pasta in, Nick sat on the edge of the couch and tried to think of something.  In the apartment were a bed and a couch and a stereo.  On the wall there was a framed photo of somebody Nick thought he recognized.  He asked if the guy was from Boulder and it turned out he was but Nick could not have known him.  While they ate Steven got out a photo album so Nick could see if he recognized the guy on the wall.  Nick knew he wouldn’t.  Steven flipped over the pages of photos, and looking at them was giving Nick a crick in his neck.

Steven got up and walked over towards the kitchen.  He was talking about fathers again.  He asked if Nick knew Tim Glenn.  Nick had heard the story about how Tim always got his hair cut by Steven for years and then heard some gossip and suddenly he and his entire church condemned Steven to Hell and Timmy’s hair never looked as good again.  Nick hated that about the church.  He said to Steven that he sort of knew Tim but mainly through his little brother.

“Yeah, I just sort of thought Tim’s dad reminded me of your dad,” Steven said.  Nick thought about the two dads.  Were they similar?  Nick remembered a story about Mr. Glenn:  once, during dinner, he got so frustrated slicing a baguette, he took it out to the garage and cut it into neat slices with his band saw.  Maybe Nick’s dad would do this, except that the blades of power tools aren’t clean.  Maybe Nick’s dad would use a laser.  Nick realized he was no longer hearing what Steven was saying.

After a while Nick decided he had to get home and then he was worried about finding the Muni station.  Steven loaned him a jacket while they walked to the station.  There was so much to see, and it was all so vivid.  This was something Nick had been marveling at for the last few weeks, when he’d started wearing contact lenses.  Not that everything he saw was pleasant.  There were homeless people begging and Steven got all sore.  “It’s their damn problem,” he said.

At the entrance to the Muni station Nick gave Steven back his jacket and thanked him for the haircut, the coffee, and the dinner.  Steven smiled and they shook hands.  Steven was a nice guy, Nick thought.  And now Nick just wanted to get Muni over with and get back to Oakland.

Nick hated the Muni station.  It was dark and he sat on a concrete bench and somebody sat next to him.  He was a big man with golden red hair and a golden red beard and a black leather biker jacket with lots of studs.  Nick hunched forward over his book.  He stared at the page but could not read.  Another man walked over, short with a thin voice and a white shirt with a collar and a necktie.  He chatted with the red-bearded guy, saying he was only in the area for a day and he had stayed at such and such hotel.  Red said that was a good hotel and Short said he had had just a wonderful time and really liked the area.

“Yes, it’s a grand place to be, even if for only one day,” said Red, “or only one night.”  Short agreed, emphatically.  Red continued, “It’s even a good place to come to just to look at the pretty blond boys.”  Short asked, “To look at who?”  Nick knew Short had heard it fine the first time.  “To look at the pretty blond boys,” Red said loudly.  Short replied, “Oh, yes, even the Aryan-looking ones.”  Red said, “Yes, especially the Aryan-looking ones, but never, ever the skinheads.”

Nick hated being the brunt of Aryan jokes but he chuckled.  He wondered if a skinhead would bother him like this.  He wished he could think of something to say but then the Muni came and he walked quickly down to the last car and boarded.  He looked again at his book. His neck was really sore and the train started up and screamed in his ears.  The train was narrow and the seats were hard.  When they got to the first Bart station Nick got off the train.  He heard it slip away into the tunnel behind him and roar up to speed but he did not watch it go.

Nick was very glad to be back on Bart.  It was familiar and quiet.  He was glad to be able to lose himself in his book and he almost missed his stop.  Nick walked up College Ave towards home.  He passed the pizza place and the little bookstore he liked and the convenience store where he got change for the Laundromat.

The back of Nick’s neck was cold where Steven had trimmed it.  There was a breeze bringing fog in from the bay.  Nick got home and went to bed.  He lay in bed and tried to think about nothing.  When he woke up the next morning there was a stiff, cold breeze bringing a thick fog in from the bay and it wasn’t until he looked in the mirror that he remembered he’d had his hair cut.

Fiction - Doctor's Daughter

Introduction

I’m taking an evening class in fiction writing over at UC Berkeley, my alma mater. Our first session was last Wednesday, and the teacher had an ingenious idea. She broke the class into groups of three and had us each tell a personal anecdote to the other two students. Then she gave us ten minutes to write down our anecdote. As our homework assignment, she told us to take half an hour to rewrite our anecdote, but incorporating one of the two anecdotes we’d heard from a classmate.

At first this struck me as impossible—after all, my anecdote had nothing to do with the other ones. But as I thought about it, everything fit together very well, and it solved my biggest problem in writing fiction: coming up with an idea. Sure, half of this story started out as true, but the action now happens to someone else, and the story is merged with my doubtless faulty recollection of a secondhand tale which I then further fictionalized. I'm sure you'll agree that the result can only be considered fiction.

So here’s the story. (Yes, I went over my half-hour.)

Doctor’s Daughter

My name is Tara. I never liked my name—it always reminded me of “Taras Bulba,” like I came from an ancient family in the steppes of the Ukraine. (It could have been worse: my mom had considered naming me “Terra,” as in Earth. My whole life I’d have been thought of as a hippie!) I grew up in Etna, California, a tiny town way up north with zero traffic lights. Most of the folks in town were poor farmers or poor ranchers. My dad was the only doctor around and though he officially worked in the hospital about half an hour away, an awful lot of his work happened at the house, at night or on weekends. Many of the locals, who either couldn’t afford or didn’t trust hospitals, would save up their problems for when he got home. Often I ended up helping him out.

My mom pretty much stayed in bed, which is a long story I won’t go into. Suffice to say I never felt like my family was very normal. Not that the townsfolk were much to compare myself with. I had to remind myself that the families on TV probably weren’t typical either.

On a Friday evening in the fall, when I was about nine, I was bored, sitting by an open window waiting for my dad to get home from work. An unexpected rainstorm had blown in and I was watching the rain come down in sheets when I heard the hiss of a car’s tires on our street. I thought it was my dad but to my surprise it was a modern black sedan I’d never seen before. It turned onto our gravel driveway and pulled up to the house. A man in a nice grey suit climbed out, walked right up to our door through the pouring rain, and rang the bell. I ran down the hall to my mom’s room and called through the door: “There’s a man in a suit at the door!” My mom told me to call my dad and ask if he was expecting anybody. The doorbell rang again.

I phoned my dad. It must have been quiet at the hospital because they found him pretty fast. “Oh, shoot!” he said. “I totally forgot. That’s Ferdinand, the account manager at Fortis. I actually had an appointment with him tonight. Tell him to hang tight—I’ll rush right over.”

“Uh, dad, it’s pouring rain here. Should I let him in?”

“No, you shouldn’t. See if your mom will let him in.”

I rang off and with a sigh called to my mom again. Sure enough, she wouldn’t come out. I got to the front door just as the doorbell rang a third time. I peeked out through the mail slot. I could see the man’s nicely pressed charcoal grey woolen slacks, and his leather shoes with a nice design pierced all around the toe. “Um, are you Ferdinand?” I asked timidly.

The man knelt down and peered through the mail slot. “Yes. I have an appointment with Dr. Stevens. Are you his daughter?”

“Yes. I just called him. He forgot about the appointment but he’s on his way here. I can’t let you in because my mom is ... busy.” I thought of adding, “She’s cleaning her rifle and isn’t quite done reassembling it.” But other than my dad, I could never get a grown-up to take me seriously.

“Um, are you sure you can’t get your mom?” he said. “I kind of, uh, locked my keys in my car. I'm getting soaked out here.” I told my mom. She still wouldn’t come out. I reported back to Ferdinand. To my surprise, he agreed to wait it out.

I went to my room and stared blankly at a book. What business did this man have with my dad? Must be important if he was willing to wait. Was he a banker? Were we losing our home? A long while later I heard the crunch of tires on gravel as my dad arrived. I got to the door just as he opened it. He was staring at Ferdinand. “Oh, man, Ferdinand, look at your suit!” he said. “It’s all bubbly! It’s ruined!”

Sure enough, the fabric of the drenched suit was all fouled up. The wool was separating from the lining and had the texture of bubble wrap. Ferdinand looked stricken. Dad led him to the kitchen table, took his suit jacket, sat him down, and gave him a fresh dishtowel to dry his head and face.

Soon there were papers spread over the table, covered with lots of fine print and some charts. My dad never sent me away when he talked to other grownups; he was always hoping I’d learn something. The two men talked awhile, but nothing they said made any sense to me until my dad finally stood up and said, “You know Ferdinand, I wasn’t actually that interested in this meeting, to be honest. You were so enthusiastic I didn’t know how to say no. But the truth is, this fund has been underperforming for years and I was planning to sell it anyway. I’d actually like to close out my account.” And just like that, the meeting was over. My dad signed some papers, and then Ferdinand packed up his briefcase, wriggled back into his wretched bubbly suit jacket, and left.

“What was that all about?” I asked.

“Well, I somehow let this guy talk me into this meeting to go over my investment portfolio. When I showed up late, and then stupidly blurted out that his suit was ruined, I actually started to feel more bold. Like, ‘I’m going to Hell anyway for keeping this man waiting in the rain, so I might as well finish him off.’ Poor guy. His business must be really hurting to come all the way out here to talk about a portfolio of only a few thousand dollars.”

“But dad, he looked ... it looked important. I’ve heard you complain about money. Couldn’t he help?”

“Yes, possibly, in some indirect way. But it’s hard to take a man like that seriously after a long day of seeing patients.”

“Why? What do you mean?”

“Well, Ferdinand moves people’s money around all day, electronically, and if he’s lucky the numbers go up. There’s nothing tangible about what he does for a living.”

“What does tangible mean?”

“You can see it. You can touch it. Money is so abstract. It’s like this all-powerful force and sometimes it just gets me down. You know the first thing that happens when a patient comes into the ER? No matter how bad the illness or injury, the patient has to work out the payment first thing. We’re supposed to be providing care for these people but the first order of business is always sorting out the payment.”

I’m sure I’ve embellished my memory of that evening. I couldn’t possibly have remembered these conversations in such detail because I wouldn’t have grasped the concepts at the time. But I understood enough to feel kind of disappointed about the meeting. Not so much about the ruined suit, but because my did dismissed Ferdinand. I kind of wanted my dad to associate with people in nice suits who drive modern cars and talk about money and investments. That was part of the more sophisticated world, the TV world, that of course I dreamed of escaping to. Being a doctor, my dad should have had all kinds of money but it never seemed he did. I suddenly felt very tired, and after a quick dinner (grilled cheese, Campbell’s soup) I went to bed.

In the middle of the night my dad shook me awake. “Tara, wake up. I have a patient and I need your help.” I couldn’t believe it, and yet I knew the drill. I dragged myself out of bed, cleared the dining room table, and spread out a fresh clean sheet for the patient.

It was Drummond, a guy down the way who raised ostriches. Ostriches! He’d somehow cut his arm really badly on some machinery. His arm was wrapped in a giant towel that was totally soaked in blood. He’d injured himself during the late afternoon and then spent the next several hours arguing with his wife about going to the hospital. He’d never been to a hospital and wasn’t going to start now, blah, blah, blah.

Dad stretched him out on the table and removed the bloody towel. Then he went to the kitchen sink and washed his hands for like five minutes straight, got out his medical kit, filled a syringe with something, and started stabbing Drummond all up and down his arm with it. It was like a five-inch needle. “This is just Novocain,” he said soothingly, as though his patient wouldn’t want anything stronger. Blood was getting all over my fresh sheet. I would be doing all the clean-up, of course. At times like this I really resented my mom, sleeping away. After all, she chose to marry a doctor in a small town and should have known what would be expected of her. Somehow that duty had slipped a generation and here I was, a little girl who didn’t choose a doctor for a father, playing surgical nurse with real blood.

We waited around for ten minutes to let the anesthetic take effect. Then Dad got started on sewing up Drummond’s arm. My job was to hold it down. This took all my strength. Drummond was a tough old dude but was clearly in great pain, and couldn’t resist trying to recoil. Dad gave him a wooden tongue depressor to bite down on and Drummond snapped it in two with his teeth. I winced. Dad gave him two more tongue depressors, stacked together. Drummond snapped those, too, sending a shiver down my back. I don’t know how biting down is supposed to help anyway; maybe it was just to keep him from cussing. Finally Dad gave him a clean rag, the color of pink clay, to chew on.

When you’re a doctor’s kid you learn how coarse medicine really is. Putting in sutures, for example, is just sewing up a guy’s skin with a needle and thread. I had to pay attention and it was like watching my mom sewing closed the Thanksgiving turkey with twine or dental floss: just as crude as can be. (By his own admission Dad was only “okay” at sutures. At the dinner table one time he ranted about a surgeon he’d watched stitch up a boy’s face. “He was so good at stitches,” he raved, “it was like plastic.” Plastic surgery, he meant. I had to remind him I was trying to eat.)

Dad finished up and sent Drummond on his way with an Ace bandage wrapped around his arm. “In about a week or ten days you can come back to have those sutures removed,” he said. “Or you can remove them yourself—just snip one and drag the whole thread out.” I was up for another half hour, cleaning up. A bed sheet really isn’t very absorbent and I was just smearing the blood around. I had to soak the sheet and towels awhile in the washing machine, on cold, before adding the detergent and starting it up. Like I said before, I knew the drill. I finally got back to bed at around three.

Fortunately, the next day was Saturday and I got to sleep in. That afternoon I was sitting on the front porch with Dad when Drummond came walking up our driveway dragging his kid’s Radio Flyer wagon behind him. Between dragging the wagon and holding his bandaged arm up over his head, Drummond was, I felt, lacking in dignity. “Good, keep that arm elevated,” Dad said. “What have we here?” The wagon was full of these giant eggs, the size of cantaloupes: ostrich eggs. Dad’s fee. Did Dad send Drummond away, like he did Ferdinand? No, he happily unloaded the wagon, acting like ostrich eggs were the greatest treasure on Earth. “Isn’t it amazing,” he mused, “that the world’s second-fastest land animal can also lay these giant eggs? Puts a hen to shame.”

Drummond didn’t say much, and was soon on his way. We would be eating giant omelets for months. I couldn’t help myself. “Dad,” I complained, “did you ever hear of money? What’s so great about these eggs?”

“Well ... just look at ‘em!” he said, still smiling.

Yeah, I know. You can see them. You can touch them.

dana albert blog

From the Archives - Letter from UCSB

Introduction

As a college freshman, I already had a blog. Of course, I didn’t call it that or think of it that way. Blogs hadn't been invented yet, nor were college kids using the Internet, but I regularly sent printed copies of little stories and essays to friends and family. To save paper and reduce postage costs, I’d use a photocopier to reduce four pages to fit on a single piece of paper.

In the beginning, before I had a PC, I wrote these on a typewriter, so I have only paper copies of the first seven or eight stories. All the way through college I kept paper copies, which now fill a two-inch binder. Leafing through this binder recently, I came across something I found amusing, from my first month at the University of California at Santa Barbara. When I first moved to Isla Vista, the run-down, sleepy beach community near the UCSB campus, I didn’t know a soul, and struggled to fit in while dreaming of becoming a writer.

Here’s the story, written almost twenty-two years—more than half my lifetime—ago. (As I typed this into the computer, I made minor tweaks, such as changing the names of the characters.)

Letter from UCSB — September 21, 1988

So I might know just what you’re thinking: this boy is churning out page after page of micro-print material. And that’s what it is: material. I’m not even sure I like it. What is the deal here? Well, I’ve come across some advice by a fella name of Scott Rice, who has dozens of helpful hints for getting stories published. (I’m sort of leaning toward becoming a writer, perhaps by default, since bike mechanics seems to be a limited field and math and science bore me to tears.)

Rice writes, “Getting into print is simply a matter of knowing your market. At ‘Redbook’ magazine, for example, they get about 36,000 short story submissions a year, but they publish only fifty. Simple math tells you that you should be able to crack this market by submitting 720 stories annually.”

I was really inspired by those words, since even if I took five days off a year, I could submit 720 stories easily by writing only two a day. The only problem I’m having is that I’m not really writing stories at all; it’s just material. Besides, I know nothing about the subjects dealt with in “Redbook” so my one story per year might not get maximum coverage. So it’s about time I tried my hand at fiction.

The trouble is, I never know where to start with fiction. So I’ll start with some vignettes about my real life, and see if they take me in any useful fictional direction. Here goes.

* * *

oooooI just sat there on the bucket-seat style sofa of my quaint Isla Vista apartment, turning redder by the minute. My new roommates, Steve and Alex, were rambling endlessly about my apparent pure blood. Steve, a thirty-three-year-old grad student, has the uncanny ability to speak on any subject with captivating skill and ease, but excessively so, to the point that after a long discussion, you somehow feel ripped off, like after long documentary that demanded your full attention only to destroy its own credibility with a huge generalization at the end. Alex, on the other hand, came from Ethiopia three years ago, which makes him a very interesting character all around, except that in Santa Barbara there are so many beautiful girls around that our discussion usually ends up being about girls, and Alex starts going into all these babe-getting strategies that I lack the nerve to ever put into play.

oooooAnyway, the current topic of discussion was my supposedly Aryan-like features, which my roommates contended would make me virtually irresistible to the ladies. Amid comments like, “Just let me have the ones that fall off of your arms,” and “I’ll just follow you around and pick up the pieces,” I was beginning to get a bit whelmed. Not overwhelmed, mind you, but thoroughly whelmed. The most disturbing comment was, “Just don’t let us down, huh?” To think that these two are relying on me to bring home enough women for all of us almost makes me lose all hope.

* * *

Not very much scene or setting there, alas, and no action. Certainly not enough for “Redbook.” Local color, that’s the thing. I’ll try harder this time.

* * *

oooooIn return for fixing his bike, my new roommate Steve took me to lunch at a small café on Embarcadero del Norte called The Blue Dolphin. Strangely enough, its menu lacked any seafood, featuring burgers and omelettes; certainly no dolphin here. The main attraction, not on the menu, turned out to be the waitress. Working solo, she had her hands full, running from table to table clearing dishes and taking orders. For Steve or me to mention our interest in the bodacious girl was completely unnecessary.

oooooSteve lowered his voice and said, “Hey, I happen to be a very smooth operator when it comes to the ladies, so I think I can arrange to have this one introduce herself to you. Heck, I think she’s eyeing you anyway. So you can just take it from there, how about that? And hey, don’t let me down on this one.” Immediately, two things came to mind: one, he’s planning to have a little fun at my expense, or two (more frightful): he actually thinks I can make a good impression.

oooooOur lunch was fairly uneventful; we sat at an outdoor table, ate burgers, and discussed the topic of laying tile (which he’d done all summer). In fact, he discussed this to death, and I decided laying tile was probably not for me. After we got the check, Steve excused himself and said, “Just wait right there. You’re my tip hostage.” Well, a few minutes later, out strutted the pretty waitress. Naturally, at this moment I was in the process of standing up to check on our bikes, and my grasshopper-like leg kicked the table, tipping over the catsup and knocking the silver napkin dispenser to the ground.

oooooAs I struggled to regain my balance, my face reddening, the waitress said, “So you’re Dana, huh? My name’s Carolyn. So, you like won the Coors Classic? You must be quite the biker then.” My roommate was nowhere in sight. I can’t believe he missed this glorious opportunity to scavenge some delight at my discomfort and embarrassment. My tongue had become as thick and fluffy as the omelettes my aunt makes (she whips the egg whites in a blender), so speech was futile. While I steadied the table with one hand, I offered the other in a handshake. It was a pretty fair handshake, really; her hand was wet from scrubbing tables, mine black with grease from fixing my roommate’s bike (which had got me into this whole mess).

oooooStill, my roommate’s words echoed through my seemingly hollow skull: “Don’t let me down on this one.” The words “Nice to meet you” fought their way out of my mouth, with surprising clarity. Originality of content, though, was at an all-time low, especially after I cleared up the little won-the-Coors-Classic fallacy. (Ever since my roommates found out that I’m going to race for UCSB, they’ve decided I’m world class and that the whole world should know it.)

oooooI felt rushed to take the conversation up a notch, because the waitress was now moving about the café with remarkable speed. In a last-ditch attempt to establish some kind of association with this pretty young thing, I moved around the restaurant with forced ease and composure. A heartfelt comment found its way to the surface: “They keep you pretty busy here, don’t they?” While her simple “Yes” was technically a response, I felt our dialog was not moving in the right direction. Another sincere thought made itself vocal: “I wonder where my friend went.” I couldn’t believe he’d missed what had just transpired. Why would he set me up and then miss the mêlée?

ooooo“He’s in the bathroom,” answered the waitress before disappearing into the kitchen. Steve arrived a moment later, looked at our table (which I had managed to restore to its original splendor), and said, “So, did the waitress clear our table?” I told him yes, she did, let’s go. Outside, the inquisition began. “So, what happened?” Steve asked. “What did she say? Did she introduce herself?”

ooooo“Yeah, she introduced herself, asked if we were into biking, I said yes, and that was about it.”

ooooo“That’s it? You didn’t talk about anything else?”

ooooo“Oh, yeah, there was something else. I asked if they kept her busy and she said yes.”

ooooo“Man, you have got to refine your technique.”

ooooo“Yeah, I guess I do,” I replied, almost relieved that, now that I had displayed my ineptitude with females, he would stop touting me as the next great hope of Apartment Seven. Little did I know that the legend was yet to be born.

* * *

Well, that bit about the “legend yet to be born” seems promising as a jumping-off point for fiction, at least at first. But on closer inspection, what, really, do I know about achieving legend status with the ladies? Nothing. And while the story only described what didn’t happen with the pretty waitress, there could be nothing more. I need to write about something I know, in a realm where I might have some chance of achieving something exciting. So, cycling it is.

* * *

oooooI figured with all the rampant rumors circulating among my new roommates about my cycling prowess, I had to at least maintain some sort of fitness so I wouldn’t humiliate myself in every aspect of life. The only problem was finding a place to ride. Southern California, as near as I can figure, is just a bunch of small towns connected by huge six-lane freeways. The UCSB campus abounds with friendly-looking roads, seeming to promise canyons and prairies, only to betray me by dead-ending after only a mile or so. Please try to understand, it is very disheartening, not knowing where my next mile will come from. Turning around does help me brush up on my bike handling skills, but it fails to leave the mind free for drifting, which is the only way to log miles without going insane.

oooooAfter an entire afternoon of gleaning one tedious out-and-back mile after another, I finally decided that the dreaded, ominous US 101 North was the only path to cycling bliss. Perhaps in hope of gaining support toward my decision, I asked my roommate Steve—who had been at UCSB for a couple of years already—what he thought about riding on US 101.

ooooo“Well, heck, I’d never ride on it. It’s illegal, plus you’ll get killed on top of it all. But hey, if you’re gonna represent the US in next year’s Tour de France, you might not have a choice.”

ooooo“I’m not going to ride the Tour de France, next year or any year.”

ooooo“Sure you will, at the rate you’re going. I mean, you’re the premier rider on the national champion UCSB team. Hell, I think it’s great: there you are, putting it all on the line. Risking it all for dreams of athletic godhood. I’d never do it.”

ooooo“Well, I’m going to go ahead and tackle 101.”

ooooo“Good for you. Do you feel lucky today?”

oooooI set out, very timidly at first, feeling guilty about my reckless disregard for rules intended to protect me. Despite the ten-foot shoulder, I hugged the side of the road like a street cleaner, trampling weeds or the occasional shard of tire retread. Roaring semis rattled my bones to the marrow. I was a mouse in a herd of stampeding elephants, US 101 a vast safari.

oooooGradually, however, I began to lose my fear of the crazed drivers, shifting my hatred toward the brutal headwind that threatened to tear the “beer cooler” helmet from my head. Soon I learned that an eighteen-wheel tractor trailer truck pushes a lot of wind, and can provide enough of a wind-block that I can temporarily shift up a gear. Soon I was pedaling happily away, finally free to let my mind drift. I pondered what makes good fiction. Something has to happen, I decided. Something exciting. Reading about a cyclist just pedaling along … that’s no good. He has to get in trouble. A crash might be good. And maybe a gun-wielding nut should appear on the scene!

oooooA siren wailed in the distance, then drew closer, and then a highway patrol car whizzed by—and to my amazement, because I didn’t know this was fiction—the car lurched into a half-spin, screeching to a stop right in front of me. I braked too hard, flipped over the handlebars, bounced over the hood, and flopped on the ground, flat on my back. My head spinning, I looked up to see the stubby legs of a highway patrolman, capped by the holster belt which only partially eclipsed the huge man’s ample gut. His right hand twitched above his service revolver. “Just what in the hell do you think you’re doing, son?” he demanded, his booming voice hastening me to my feet.

ooooo“I, uh, was just out for a little bike ride,” I managed, sputtering a fine mist of blood and saliva as I spoke.

ooooo“WHY?!”

ooooo“Uh, for fitness…?”

ooooo“Fitness? Well, hell, that’s why they got jazzercise shows for, you know. Raquel Welch, aerobics, and all that other calaesthetic crap.”

ooooo“Um, I prefer my bicycle.”

ooooo“You kids these days, I dunno. I had a bike once. The Schwinn Stingray. I rode it on the sidewalk, or down to the A&P now and then. Look at you, you’re what, how many years old?”

ooooo“Nineteen.”

ooooo“You know what I rode when I was nineteen? A frickin’ Harley Davidson. What are you doing messing around on a highway on a danged bi-cycle?”

ooooo“It seemed like a good place to ride, sir.”

ooooo“My god, son, you’ll get hit, goin’ so dang slow out here. That’s why those little old ladies get hit!”

ooooo“Well, actually, sir, in the big scheme of things, since the earth is spinning at 600 miles per hour, I’m only going a little slower than the faster automobiles.”

ooooo“Is that right?” The officer scratched his head. “Wait a second, you aren’t tryin’ to be a smart aleck, are you?”

ooooo“No, sir, I would never do that.”

ooooo“Good. But I’m writing you a ticket anyway.”

ooooo“Okay, but Highway 101 is legal for bicycles from Goleta up to Buellton, home of Andersen’s pea soup.”

ooooo“Uh, yeah. I know that, I was just testin’ ya. Now look, the important thing is, you have fun. I mean, while you still have the chance. Hell, I was young once too. Just try to be a man about it, awright?” He got back in his car and sped away. I picked my bike up, climbed back on, and resumed pedaling, continued my reverie.

***

Was this enough of a plot? A cop, a bike crash, a lecture? No, not really. Rising and falling action, building to a climax before a resolution? Not quite. Does my character learn anything? No, but that’s okay, the story is at least done, it just needs to be typed. Only 719 more of these to go, and I’m on my way to a memorable career as a writer for “Redbook” magazine.

dana albert blog

Fiction - The Phantom Solace

NOTE: this post is rated R for mild strong language.

Introduction

What follows is a work of fiction, my second short story on albertnet. All the “work of fiction” disclaimers apply here. None of the places mentioned, words spoken, feelings felt, or themes explored in this post actually exist. Even the language used is my own contrivance. Okay, kidding aside, any resemblance of any character to any actual human, living or dead, is purely whimsical and/or jocular. The central plot elements of this story and actions taken by its characters are not to be construed as fact.

The Phantom Solace

Jose

I couldn’t believe this was happening, but here I was stuck in stop-and-go Father’s Day traffic, late for work. I’m not a father and I don’t watch Nascar but I should have known the two things would combine to make my life hell. All around me were crazy clean cars, like the idea of a perfect day for these dads would be washing the car, Armor-alling the tires, then heading out to watch Nascar. And because of this, I’d probably lose my job.

Losing my job would be bad enough, but I can’t take another lecture from Diekhoff. First it was about the shaved head, then about the tat, then about the chin stud, as if all these spa dudes really want to be taken care of by Doogie fucking Howser. He told me one more screw-up and I’m gone. This would be that screw-up—being late to work because I had to sit for twenty minutes behind a giant Ford Expedition with the whole rear window painted like an American flag.

So when I got to Wilkenson’s, twenty minutes late, I couldn’t bear to go in, and just sat in my car listening to the engine tick as it cooled off. After a minute or two this sweet Jaguar convertible rolled up and parked right next to me. The driver looked rich as hell, not just the car but nice shades, expensive shirt, and good looks. Why would he be slumming it here? And yet, here he was, and looking stressed. Maybe, just maybe, this was my twelve-o’-clock spa appointment, and was running as late as I was, and nobody would have to know I kept a customer waiting.

Pierce

I was in Calistoga promoting my winery. Not really my winery—I don’t know a thing about making wine—but the winery I have a financial stake in. When I first got into this, I thought I was just an investor, putting some money into a solid business, but of course it morphed into the typical celebrity scheme: using my movie fame to promote a totally unrelated product. Go to that well too many times and all you end up with is a trashed name. Paul Newman can get away with it—his films are so well respected he’d never run the risk of being remembered as the salad dressing guy—but I have the sneaking feeling my advisors are steering me away from acting, figuring it’s a better bet to gradually draw down my very finite stores of celebrity.

So, Calistoga. I was here to attend the grand opening of a tasting room right on Lincoln Ave. When I got roped into this I thought it would be a little ceremony among the stakeholders but if course it turned out to be this “grand opening.” The very phrase repulses me—it’s something you use for an auto mall or kids’ pizza place. And then, taking a walk when I arrived here yesterday evening, I saw they’d put a giant framed picture of me right in the window. It’s a terrible picture—I’m trying to look clever and cheeky and can’t even get that right, and might as well be wearing a goddamn bow tie like Roger Moore. The whole affair is just painful, like the idea that people should drink this wine because a big movie star is a financial backer.

On my way to the grand opening today, just a few blocks from the place, I completely lost my resolve and swung off the road into the first parking lot I saw. No sooner had I pulled up and stopped then this young guy with a shaved head jumped out of his ratty old car parked next to me. He asked me, “Hey, did you just get here for a spa appointment?”

He obviously didn’t recognize me. I was strangely impressed by this. But a spa appointment? I’d thought this was the parking lot of a motel, but checking out the sign now I realized it was actually a motel and spa. I looked the guy over. He was a wiry little man, but looked strong, wore a thin white t-shirt over a tight tank-top. I’m pretty sure he was Hispanic but so many Californians still get dark tans—just like in Hawaii—it’s not always easy to tell. He was really jumpy, seemed really upset about something. I told him no, I wasn’t there for a spa appointment.

He looked crushed. “Dammit, I’m really screwed now,” he said. “I’m super late. My boss is going to fire me. No, worse, I’m going to have to work through the end of my shift, and then he’s going to lecture me, and then he’s going to fire me. Fuck, fuck, fuck! I can’t take this.” He whacked the top of his car and said, “Fuck it, I can’t take another lecture. I’m gonna have to no-call/no-show.”

He wasn’t really talking to me, but I was intrigued. “Excuse me, but what did you just say?” I asked. He looked startled, like he’d forgotten I was there, and then said, “I said I’m gonna have to no-call/no-show.” I asked what that meant. “It means I’m not going to show up to work, and I’m not even going to call and tell them. That way I’m sure to get fired and I’ll never have to talk to anyone there again.”

My god, what a brilliant idea. Just to walk away, leave it all behind. Could I do that? Well, why the hell not? If this kid can seize his freedom that way, surely I could too, couldn’t I? I wouldn’t even suffer the same consequences. I’m sure everybody would run around and rearrange things to smooth it all over with me, and that would be annoying, but those first few hours of a no-call/no-show would be even better than a spa. And suddenly I had an inspiration.

I asked the kid, “How long does a spa treatment normally take?” He thought for a second and said, “Depends on what you get. The guy this afternoon is doing The Works with a half-hour massage, so about two hours.” I asked him if he went in through the lobby, or what. He smirked and said, “What, you think I’d scare the ladies or something? Huh. Well, I do go in the back so I don’t track mud on the carpet.” I said, “Okay, here’s what we’ll do. Take these”—I handed him my sunglasses—“and we’ll trade keys. You take my car, and hell, I’ll give you a couple hundred bucks, and you go take a break. Have a nice lunch, go for a drive, whatever. And I’ll cover your shift. Anything goes wrong, I’ll deal with it. Leave the car across the street, maybe a few blocks down. Don’t steal the car or you’ll just make real trouble for yourself. Leave the keys behind the front left tire. Oh, and leave my sunglasses in the glove box.”

The kid laughed out loud. “You think you can do my job?” he asked. I shrugged and replied, “So what if I bugger it up completely? How’s that worse than a no-call/no-show?” He stared at me, a grin forming throughout his face, trying to decide if I was serious. He put on my sunglasses. The tortoiseshell looked good with his skin tone but the look was of course completely off; nobody that young wears Persols. The effect was just right: a totally unconvincing disguise. He looked at his reflection in the window of his car and chuckled. I pulled out my wallet, took out a couple hundreds, and held it out to him. He hesitated, eyeing the bills in my outstretched hand. “Come on,” I said, “when are you going to get a chance like this?”

Dana

The traffic on Highway 37 was totally heinous. There was a billboard about a big Father’s Day NASCAR race and I thought that was the problem: all these dads celebrating by watching NASCAR. Even in the Bay Area, that did make more sense than dads going to get mud baths and massages. I thought I’d miss my spa appointment completely, but after the exit for the fairgrounds—which got really bad—it eased up. Even so, I was fully half an hour late getting to Wilkenson’s. I had the family drop me off and ran on in. The woman behind the counter shook her head and did one of those backwards inhaling-type sighs and said she thought they could still fit me in. She gestured to the door leading to the men’s bath house and said, “Just go through there, and Jose will take care of you.” She was frowning, though, as she peered towards the door.

I went inside. There was a little dressing room with wooden lockers to my right, then a long hallway with curtained massage rooms off of that. At the end was the mud bath room, and a tall man was standing there. “Just, ah, put your clothes in the locker and grab a robe,” he called out. Two things struck me right away. First, nobody calls out in these spas. Everybody knows to just whisper, to preserve the rarefied, enchanted feel of the place. I’d have expected him to walk out to me and greet me. The other thing that surprised me was that he spoke with a thick Irish brogue. I mean, how many spa valets named Jose speak in a thick Irish brogue?

I undressed, donned my robe, and strolled down toward the mud room. Had I heard the valet’s name right? Sure enough, on a chair at the end of the hall was a handwritten sign—“Jose ‘The Mud Guy’”—and a few tip envelopes labeled “Jose.” In the mud room I saw a tall man with thick dark hair, just starting to go grey, meticulously styled. He was wearing a short-sleeve linen shirt, casual but very elegant, and khakis rolled up at the ankle. He was barefoot. He stood at one of the large, blocky concrete bathtubs of mud, dragging a shovel across the mud to rough it up. He turned to face me, and gave me a little nod, and I got a strong shock of recognition. He looked exactly like Pierce Brosnan.

He finished stirring the mud and leaned the shovel against the wall. It started to tip over and slide down the wall, and he caught it. He frowned and took it over to a corner and set it there. Then he came back and looked at me uncertainly. “Okay, then. Ah … first, you take a shower,” he said. I tried not to stare. Finally I had to ask: “Are you … are you Pierce Brosnan?”

A pause. “The name’s Bond,” he said. “James Bond.” Then he winked, and with that wink I knew this wasn’t just a lookalike, but the real actor, in the flesh. It was that rare eyelid-only wink, as opposed to the kind most people do where the whole side of the face crinkles up. No mere mortal has that facial fluidity, that practiced charm. I didn’t know what else to do, so I hung up my robe and stepped into the shower. Soon enough he had the water going, and after a brief rinse I stepped out to where he was waiting by the mud tub. “Step on in there,” he said. “Lower yourself in, wiggle yourself down then.”

I squished myself down into the hot, vaguely sulfur-scented mud. It was coarser and lumpier mud than I’d bathed in last time, and the tub was shorter, but as always I enjoyed the delicious sensation of having absolutely neutral buoyancy. Soon my limbs and hands were completely buried, and Brosnan—Pierce Brosnan!— scooped more mud up to completely cover my chest. He thumped it down and said, “There we go now. Enjoy.” I lay there and pondered my situation. What possible explanation could there be? But soon the heat and ooze of the mud made me sleepy and, like Alice on her downward plunge, blithely accepting the shelves of knickknacks lining the rabbit-hole, I decided just to roll with it. What’s not to like about having a famous actor be my personal valet for awhile?

I closed my eyes and let my mind drift, taking in the soothing rumble of the machinery, the low, anodyne spa music (halfway between elevator music and what New Age musicians play at street fairs), the stillness of the room. After a few minutes, I felt something against my cheek. “This is a mask,” Brosnan said quietly. At first I pictured a Greek theatre tragedy mask—nothing would have seemed odd at this point—but quickly realized he meant a facial mask for cleansing my pores and whatnot. But he didn’t spread it all over my face; he dabbed it on my nose and then spread it on my cheeks in thick lines, starting near the nose and going outward. He did three of these on each cheek, then disappeared for a moment and returned.

“Here,” he said. I opened my eyes. He was holding out a hand mirror, like the barber does when he invites you to check out your new haircut from the back. I pulled my right arm slowly from the mud—it make a loud sucking sound like when you pull your shoe out of a thick mud puddle—and took the mirror. I examined my reflection. My face was painted to look like a cat’s.

“How does it look?” Brosnan asked. I said it looked just fine. I handed him back the mirror, then closed my eyes again. I sensed him leave again, and when he returned he placed something cool on each of my eyelids. “These are cucumbers,” he said, a light note of wonder in his voice, as though he were remarking on this fact to himself. I wiggled down further into the mud, and then heard something being dragged across the floor.

“You know, I could really use a spa treatment myself,” Brosnan said. I gathered that he’d pulled up a stool and sat down right next to me. “I’ve been under a lot of stress. Not pressing stuff, but … more a gradual accumulation of things. Kind of a, ah, minor crisis of identity you could say. Nothing I can quite put my finger on, but a general sense of dissatisfaction.” He paused. “Since nobody would believe you anyway about me being your spa attendant, I might just get a few things off my chest, if you don’t mind.”

I slowly gave a very small nod, not wanting to disrupt my cucumber slices. Brosnan sighed deeply, then said, “That ‘Mama Mia’ movie took a real toll. My god, what an embarrassment. I really hope you didn’t see it. I hope nobody saw it. My agent really felt it was the best way to get some distance from the Bond character. Which I gather it did, but my God, what a disgrace. I don’t know how or why I let myself get sucked into that. It was a humiliating experience. You know what they called me on the set? ‘Colonel Chunky.’ I couldn’t even get their respect! I’ll probably never get a good role again after that travesty. What an ass I was in that! So now I’m working on a goddamn sequel, to the ‘Crown Affair’ movie.

“Not that ‘Crown’ was a bad movie. I have some great memories of that, those were some good times. Now, Rene Russo”—he sucked in his breath—“that is one gorgeous woman. It made me nervous, like a bloody teenager, just being with her on the set. But a sequel? Is this all I have to show for my life—recycling my old roles, one version of secret agent after another, trying to recapture my prime, when it’s hard enough just holding my looks together? I turned fifty-seven this year. Christ.”

He was silent for a time. “But you know, the truth of it is, I’d have gladly done more Bond pictures, before Daniel Craig took over, if only they’d given me some better scripts. I gave up on Bond because the last film I did was pure shite. I was driving a stupid car around by remote control, and then Craig gets to beat the crap out of people. Why didn’t I get ‘Casino Royale’? Why didn’t I get the revamped franchise, the return to decent, basic plots?

“There was a scene in ‘Casino Royale’ that was pure genius. Some rich gobshite mistakes Bond for a valet parking guy and throws him his keys. Bond takes advantage of it—now he can get into the resort, and once he’s in he deliberately crashes the car in the parking lot, thereby getting back at the rich gobshite while luring all the security people away from their posts so he can infiltrate their office and steal the surveillance tapes. Brilliant scene, such a clever, efficient Bond. Why couldn’t I get that kind of movie?

“It’s not because of my age. Roger Moore was older than Sean Connery; he was fifty-eight when he did his last Bond. The writers could have played with the age thing, like with Connery’s Bond in his last one. He tells Moneypenny, ‘I’m to eliminate free radicals,’ but doesn’t mention those were orders from his doctor. Great line, that.”

He sighed. “Well, I guess I should let you get to your mud bath,” he said. I’d have liked to hear more, but didn’t want to ask. As it was, I felt like an eavesdropper. So I just lay there and enjoyed the sensation of neither sinking nor floating, and having tiny air bubbles, trapped in arm and leg hairs, creep along my skin before making a slow dash for the surface. I felt a bead of sweat slide against my cheek until it hit my facial-mud cat whisker.

Time passed. Much more time than I’ve ever spent in a mud bath. In fact, I was being gradually poached alive. Finally Brosnan’s voice said, “Okay, come on out.” He wasn’t doing bad as spa attendant, but I did note various minor breaches of protocol. For example, he was supposed to give me needless instructions about how to pull myself out of the mud, and to caution me about moving slowly (lest I faint away from the sudden shift in temperature). I wondered if he would learn the ropes over time, or if this was a one-shot deal.

He gestured toward the shower. This time he had the water running in advance—see, he was learning!—and I began the labor of excavating the mud from my body. Wilkenson’s has peaty, tufty, almost crumbly mud that really lodges in the hairs. My thoughts rambled: something about a spa treatment really sets the mind wandering, and Brosnan’s soliloquy had only enhanced this. I pondered how much of his own hygiene he still has to do. Surely nobody outsources the removal of caked mud from his armpits?

I stepped out of the shower. Brosnan looked me over with the frank, appraising eye of a tailor. “What happened to you?” he asked. Puzzled, I didn’t reply. “Your physique,” he went on. “You look like you’ve got the frame of a much larger man.” I suppose I could have felt hurt—he’d just commented at how rail-thin I am—but I was actually flattered. Pierce Brosnan, no less, had just called me a man! I’ve never felt like I made it past “guy.” True, I’ve passed forty, and my hairline is making a slow retreat as my scalp gradually surrenders to age—but I still feel like just a guy. “I’m a cyclist,” I explained. Brosnan give a little nod—a slight lift of the chin.

Next he led me to the mineral bath. It was a basic bathtub, and for bubbles had a perforated mat in it, with a little bubble-making machine at one end, a vacuum-cleaner tube coming up out of the water. I climbed into the tub. It wasn’t quite long enough, so my knees stuck out the top, the left one brushing against the bubbler hose. “You know, over at Solage they have proper tubs. I’d say you have in inch or two on me and I wouldn’t settle for this,” he said. “Economic downturn, eh? Let me get you some water.”

When he returned I’d already closed my eyes, and now I felt something cold on my forehead. He’d balanced the cup of water there. I took a drink and set it carefully back on my head. I felt very poised, like a girl walking with a book on her head to improve her posture. What a brilliant idea, I thought. My spa had become a validation of my health and balance.

Eventually Brosnan returned and summoned me from the bath. I climbed out. “So … I suppose you have your massage now?” he said, looking decidedly uneasy. “No,” I replied, “first there’s the towel wrap. I inclined my head toward the little curtained cubicles off the hallway where the towel wrap beds were. “Ah, of course,” he replied, leading me to one. I lay down on the huge white towel. There was a brief awkward moment—me naked, he a famous movie star—before he asked, “So I just wrap you in the towel then, and that’s it?” I nodded. “Seems kind of pointless,” he said. I replied, “Yes, it’s completely pointless, which is what I love about it.” He thought for a moment and said, “Right. Yes. We’ll wrap you up then.” He swaddled me in the towel, gave me a little pat, and left the cubicle, closing the curtain behind him.

Pierce

I glanced at my watch. That’s one thing I didn’t like about Daniel Craig in “Casino Royale”—how he pronounced it “Oh-MEE-ga” when it’s “Oh-MEH-ga.” But all in all he did a great performance, I have to hand it to him. Anyway, it had been an hour and a half, and any minute the masseuse would come around, and the game would be up. I took a moment to put a few twenties in an envelope marked “Jose,” put on my socks and shoes, and left out the back door. I walked around to where Jose’s car was parked. It was a crappy little thing, Ford Fiesta or something. I had to stick the key in the door to unlock it—kind of nostalgic, really. It was baking in there. I was surprised to find it was a stick-shift. I got the engine going and the AC, which instantly filled the car with a damp, moldy smell. Backing out, I noticed a string of beads hanging from the rearview mirror. A rosary! Good for him. I swung out onto the main road and headed toward where I hoped my car would be. Slowing for a stop sign, I instinctively double-clutched, than laughed at myself. I’ve still got it!

Dana

I lay wrapped in towels for a really long time. I think I actually fell asleep. Then I felt the slight breeze of the curtain being pushed aside, and opened my eyes. A fifty-something man with light hair and wire-rimmed glasses whispered, “How is everything?” I said fine. “My name is Mark, and I’ll be working with you on your massage today. Are you ready now or would you like a few more minutes?” I sat up: I would not be needing a few minutes. The spell was already broken.

Mark led me into another curtained cubicle and I lay on my stomach on the massage table, resting my face in the little padded ring. I guess I hadn’t really expected to get a massage from Pierce Brosnan, but I hadn’t ruled it out. At least this Mark guy was a professional masseuse. That’s not such a bad thing.

Jose

Believe it or not, it all worked out. I didn’t crash the rich guy’s Jaguar, though I drove in fear the entire time. I didn’t scratch the guy’s sunglasses either. After a nice long drive through the wine country, I parked across from Brannan’s and sat in there having a Coke, keeping an eye on the Jag, and next thing I knew, the rich guy parked my car right behind it, got out, and hid my keys behind the front tire. He found his keys, got in his car, put on his shades, and left.

When I got back to Wilkenson’s, my twelve-o’-clock was just starting his massage. Everything was fine! Nobody said a thing! I checked in with the receptionist and she was as blah as ever, no mention of anything wrong. Unbelievably, the rich dude had actually covered my shift! And you know the best part? He must have done a great job, because the customer tipped me sixty bucks!

dana albert blog