When you write a story, you first have to attract attention with a weird and barely intelligible title. I hope I succeeded. HFTRAWfE might not stay the title of the story, but that's what it is for now.
I'm still writing it. I'll post here the parts that are finished, or at least presentable. Nothing I ever write seems to be finished, but that's part of the fun. Or so I tell myself.
How Father Tam Ruined Ash Wednesday for Everybody,
Part 1: Two Edies
I crashed a Halloween party Justin hosted and that's how we met. It was around the time that the Barrymore/Lang "Grey Gardens" hit the cable networks and we both dressed up as Little Edie Beale, both with bald head skull caps under white scarves. He confronted me about not shaving for the part. "Little Edie with a beard? Blasphemy," he told me. "This is my fucking gala, so you will go and find yourself another costume. There can be only one Little Edie." So I followed him all night, at first because it annoyed him and then because it was funny. A white Whoopi Goldberg screamed “Look! Two Edies!” and then we were the belles of the ball. Both of us could do Little Edie’s accent, or at least Drew Barrymore’s impression of it. We had impromptu spats about what cat food is made of and where Long Island republicans go when they die. His condominium’s expansive party room was packed and we worked it like pros.
Also, I am not really a drinker. A bowl of sangria sparkled deep red and all I tasted was fruit punch, so I had waaay more than I realized. Tanked, I was forbidden to drive. I couldn't get my boyfriend on my cell phone and at the time I lived way, way up in North Austin. Nobody else at the party lived even close. Our mutual friend, Miss Lyvinda Prahcheks (I was her escort that night), asked Justin if I could stay with him for the night, swearing to him I was house broken and not an ax murderer.
“He's a cuddly, mostly harmless teddy bear," she said.
"Wait. 'Mostly harmless'?" he asked.
She paused a moment and adjusted her teased Nancy Sinatra circa 1965 hair. "Oh, it's nothing," she assured him. "It's only that he can be -- how should I put this -- quite generous with his penis.”
Later when we became friends Justin would claim that she described me as "a wanton debaucher who would fuck a mud puddle if it had bushes around it.” I was outraged; that was a blatant misrepresentation of Miss Lyvinda's propriety.
"Why can't you take him back to your place? You invited him," he said.
"Yes I did, and that was ungratious," she admitted. "For some reason I thought you two would bond or something; what could I have been thinking? Of course I'll bring him home, let him sleep it off." She retrieved her cellphone from her bra. "But excuse me one moment, darling, while I leave myself a reminder to call several people to cancel the omelet du fromage brunch I was hostessing tomorrow."
Justin rolled his eyes. "Lyvinda, it will not work."
"Oh of course it will, dear. I'll simply call and leave messages at the first light of dawn. There are only nine people who have RSVPd, maybe ten. Well, fifteen at the most. Anyway, I'm sure they will understand. I will remind them that you are one of my dearest, truest, most understanding friends. And I'll gladly bring poor, sweet, soused Carla all the way back here in the morning to pick up his car."
"I'm immune to your arts, Miss L. I don't even know him, for fuck's sake."
"Of course you don't, darling Justine. I shall take him home immediately. But first let me inform that particular King Leonidas" (she pointed to a buff man in a crown and a toga) "that I will be unable to meet him later tonight for the astronomy lesson I'd promised. We were going to watch Jupiter make its way through Cassiopeia, but it will have to wait until the next time such a conjunction occurs. In 2019. One hates to disappoint the King of Sparta, especially one so ... well, so Spartan, but of course it must be done."
So after the party Justin took me to his apartment and let me flop onto his sofa overnight. He made it clear that this was a one night, platonic event, just one Edie helping another, and that if I made a single advance upon his person he’d have Jackie Kennedy disown me. So that night I slept on his sofa and kept my unmuddy penis to myself. He was still asleep when I got up that morning and went for breakfast tacos. I didn’t remember to unlock the door so when I got back I rang the bell and pounded on the door until he opened it. He fussed and steamed about waking him but I pushed my way in. I found plates and loaded them with tacos. This whole time, he walked circles around me, using all the polysyllabic words in his arsenal (some totally made up) to detail how affronted he was. When he noticed that I was sitting at his table eating and laughing at him, he sighed his infamous weary sigh and sat across from me.
“Well, all right,” he said. “But after you eat, you’re going back to frolick with your fellow bears, or otters, or whatever you call yourselves these days. This complex has a strict no pets policy.”
“What arre you saying, motherr darrling?” I said as Little Edie, “I see moy days at Grey Garrdens arre limited.”
From then on I was his friend. So that next summer when his roommate Tyrone moved out, he asked me to move in.
About Tyrone I knew only two things:
(1) He was popular with the guys. If there was ever a case to be made that there is more to sexy than just looks, Tyrone was proof. Unless you had a Kardashianesque thing for black men, you’d never see a picture of him and go Whoa. Yet everybody I ever met liked him or at least wanted to sleep with him. His most effective come-on line was a single word: ‘Wassup?' He packed it with confidence and lust not seen outside of porn studios, so he never needed to elaborate. He could give you a head-to-toe then toe-to-crotch look and you’d know: he had just sexed you up and it was orgasmic on an atomic level so if you didn’t hurry and start kissing him right now, you’d regret it.
(2) I knew he was a slob. He lived with Justin a year and a half and never vacuumed, dusted, or used the closet, at least not for clothes. Even after he moved, proof of his popularity kept popping up in odd places: between the carpet and the wall, under the bathroom sink, in the closet; two had glued themselves to the bottom of the night stand drawer. But I had bright orange rubber gloves, bleach and no judgments. At least Tyrone made safe sex a fun part of his life. And a good thing came of it; his jetsam helped me convince Justin to tear out that old Berber and put in a bamboo floor -- laminate, but it looked awesome.
What Tyrone and I did have in common was an ability to love Justin. Justin had enough well-wishers to make his parties full and fun, but few friends. To transition from the one to the other required only one thing, the ability to understand that the grumpiness he made into a Zen art form was his way of loving you. Tyrone and I, along with Miss Lyvinda and a few others, were an elite squadron who possessed this super-power.
K-Karl (I was C-Carl) had Justin's 3rd bedroom at the residence. Working at night and sleeping through anything, he was a nice enough probably straight recluse and most of the time all that reminded us of his existence were food related notes like "bought icecream help yourselfs [sic]" or "low on rice will buy more 2morrow". To see him was rarer than a sighting of Nessie or albino dolphins. His coming and going was stealthy. Not sneaky, no: there wasn't anything furtive about him, but we'd hear him moving around in his room getting ready for work, then, *poof*. He was gone and nobody had seen him exit the apartment.
"Every so often I check his room to make sure he doesn't sleep in a goddam coffin," Justin said.
Then K-Karl's mother died and left him the house in Beaumont. He told Justin he'd move out at the end of the month and true to form, we came home on the 29th and all that was left of him was a check for the next month's rent and a note saying "thanx 4 ever thing" [sic]. That’s when we started looking for a new roommate.
Asking me to help with interviews was enormously out of character for Justin. I was stunned. "You're standing there blinking instead of answering me," he said. "If that's morse code, you're wasting your time."
"Sure," I said. "I'll be there, but ... why?"
"Because you read people, right?"
"What do you mean?"
He said this like he was accepting a crushing defeat: "What I mean is..." sigh "... that one of your talents is this eerie fucking ability to know what people are feeling and thinking." By 'people,' he naturally meant himself. "It's almost extra sensory and I don't mind telling you that sometimes it virtually creeps the hell out of me."
"Oh don't gush."
"That's why you're interviewing with me. I don't know how you do it but you can sense bullshit while it's still on the horizon."
"How I do it is the same way a flower can sense the sunlight. Through daily exposure."
He checked his calendar. "Our first interviewee tomorrow is G. Arroyo, 5:00. We show him the room, ask a few questions laced with subtext, then tell him we'll be in touch. Don't be late."
Somewhere in Stephen Hawkings' observations of the universe and physics, there is a law that the first ten potential roommates you meet must all be liars or boneheads. You can never foresee the innumerable ways there are for people to be incompatible until that point. Mr. G. Arroyo exuded stale smoke, so when Justin mentioned the "non-smokers" part of our ad, he said, "I quit smoking 5 years ago." The next interviewee had manscaped his eyebrows into Joan Crawford arches of death, making his interview -- as far as I was concerned -- quick and perfunctory. There is something deeply askew with people, men or women, who shave off their eyebrows then re-draw them in with a brown crayon. The next guy made a good impression but too casually asked our opinion of the local buses, i.e. to find out if we owned cars. Justin's favorite (and by 'favorite' I mean least favorite) was the emaciated aging skater guy who rubbed his crotch and wondered if money was ever short, whether or not we could "work something out."
Justin went down the list scratching off names. "Access denied. Access denied. Fucking access fucking denied."
A few nights later I had a dream about a friend who had died, Michael. I was watching a National Geographic special that evening, then I dreamed I was standing in front of Ankgor Wat. Michael was squatting on a giant banyon tree root on the roof, grinning down at me.
"Come down here!" I said, throwing wide my arms like I would catch him. He held out a piece of paper between his thumb and one finger, then with a wide smile, let it go. I grabbed it out of the air. It was a page of paper fringed like the ones kids rip from spiral notebooks. On it was a wrinkled foil heart, attached with big, crude strips of tape.
"Michael! Michael!" I called to him, but he turned away and climbed the banyon tree. Then, like he was in no danger whatsoever, he hopped off, waved once, and slid down the other side of the roof.
He was gone. A doctor tugged me onto a gurney. The only part of him visible were two kind dark brown eyes over a surgical mask. He saw the paper and said four different things using only three words: "A foil heart," "A felled heart," "A fool heart," and "A full heart."
"This is fiction, right? I'm dreaming," I said as he wheeled me past a convenience store with large koi pond in its parking lot. "It's not the truth. Right?"
"The truth is dull," he said. "Like a fish. Slippery, hard to grab and hold onto. Fiction is a fish with handles."
"You're not my usual doctor," I said.
Even with his mask on I could somehow tell he was smiling. He patted my stomach. "It's okay. I'm the OB."
My clock radio came on to Michael Bublé singing "Quando Quando Quando" and I thought, Obie.
I'm still writing it. I'll post here the parts that are finished, or at least presentable. Nothing I ever write seems to be finished, but that's part of the fun. Or so I tell myself.
How Father Tam Ruined Ash Wednesday for Everybody,
Part 1: Two Edies
I crashed a Halloween party Justin hosted and that's how we met. It was around the time that the Barrymore/Lang "Grey Gardens" hit the cable networks and we both dressed up as Little Edie Beale, both with bald head skull caps under white scarves. He confronted me about not shaving for the part. "Little Edie with a beard? Blasphemy," he told me. "This is my fucking gala, so you will go and find yourself another costume. There can be only one Little Edie." So I followed him all night, at first because it annoyed him and then because it was funny. A white Whoopi Goldberg screamed “Look! Two Edies!” and then we were the belles of the ball. Both of us could do Little Edie’s accent, or at least Drew Barrymore’s impression of it. We had impromptu spats about what cat food is made of and where Long Island republicans go when they die. His condominium’s expansive party room was packed and we worked it like pros.
Also, I am not really a drinker. A bowl of sangria sparkled deep red and all I tasted was fruit punch, so I had waaay more than I realized. Tanked, I was forbidden to drive. I couldn't get my boyfriend on my cell phone and at the time I lived way, way up in North Austin. Nobody else at the party lived even close. Our mutual friend, Miss Lyvinda Prahcheks (I was her escort that night), asked Justin if I could stay with him for the night, swearing to him I was house broken and not an ax murderer.
“He's a cuddly, mostly harmless teddy bear," she said.
"Wait. 'Mostly harmless'?" he asked.
She paused a moment and adjusted her teased Nancy Sinatra circa 1965 hair. "Oh, it's nothing," she assured him. "It's only that he can be -- how should I put this -- quite generous with his penis.”
Later when we became friends Justin would claim that she described me as "a wanton debaucher who would fuck a mud puddle if it had bushes around it.” I was outraged; that was a blatant misrepresentation of Miss Lyvinda's propriety.
"Why can't you take him back to your place? You invited him," he said.
"Yes I did, and that was ungratious," she admitted. "For some reason I thought you two would bond or something; what could I have been thinking? Of course I'll bring him home, let him sleep it off." She retrieved her cellphone from her bra. "But excuse me one moment, darling, while I leave myself a reminder to call several people to cancel the omelet du fromage brunch I was hostessing tomorrow."
Justin rolled his eyes. "Lyvinda, it will not work."
"Oh of course it will, dear. I'll simply call and leave messages at the first light of dawn. There are only nine people who have RSVPd, maybe ten. Well, fifteen at the most. Anyway, I'm sure they will understand. I will remind them that you are one of my dearest, truest, most understanding friends. And I'll gladly bring poor, sweet, soused Carla all the way back here in the morning to pick up his car."
"I'm immune to your arts, Miss L. I don't even know him, for fuck's sake."
"Of course you don't, darling Justine. I shall take him home immediately. But first let me inform that particular King Leonidas" (she pointed to a buff man in a crown and a toga) "that I will be unable to meet him later tonight for the astronomy lesson I'd promised. We were going to watch Jupiter make its way through Cassiopeia, but it will have to wait until the next time such a conjunction occurs. In 2019. One hates to disappoint the King of Sparta, especially one so ... well, so Spartan, but of course it must be done."
So after the party Justin took me to his apartment and let me flop onto his sofa overnight. He made it clear that this was a one night, platonic event, just one Edie helping another, and that if I made a single advance upon his person he’d have Jackie Kennedy disown me. So that night I slept on his sofa and kept my unmuddy penis to myself. He was still asleep when I got up that morning and went for breakfast tacos. I didn’t remember to unlock the door so when I got back I rang the bell and pounded on the door until he opened it. He fussed and steamed about waking him but I pushed my way in. I found plates and loaded them with tacos. This whole time, he walked circles around me, using all the polysyllabic words in his arsenal (some totally made up) to detail how affronted he was. When he noticed that I was sitting at his table eating and laughing at him, he sighed his infamous weary sigh and sat across from me.
“Well, all right,” he said. “But after you eat, you’re going back to frolick with your fellow bears, or otters, or whatever you call yourselves these days. This complex has a strict no pets policy.”
“What arre you saying, motherr darrling?” I said as Little Edie, “I see moy days at Grey Garrdens arre limited.”
From then on I was his friend. So that next summer when his roommate Tyrone moved out, he asked me to move in.
About Tyrone I knew only two things:
(1) He was popular with the guys. If there was ever a case to be made that there is more to sexy than just looks, Tyrone was proof. Unless you had a Kardashianesque thing for black men, you’d never see a picture of him and go Whoa. Yet everybody I ever met liked him or at least wanted to sleep with him. His most effective come-on line was a single word: ‘Wassup?' He packed it with confidence and lust not seen outside of porn studios, so he never needed to elaborate. He could give you a head-to-toe then toe-to-crotch look and you’d know: he had just sexed you up and it was orgasmic on an atomic level so if you didn’t hurry and start kissing him right now, you’d regret it.
(2) I knew he was a slob. He lived with Justin a year and a half and never vacuumed, dusted, or used the closet, at least not for clothes. Even after he moved, proof of his popularity kept popping up in odd places: between the carpet and the wall, under the bathroom sink, in the closet; two had glued themselves to the bottom of the night stand drawer. But I had bright orange rubber gloves, bleach and no judgments. At least Tyrone made safe sex a fun part of his life. And a good thing came of it; his jetsam helped me convince Justin to tear out that old Berber and put in a bamboo floor -- laminate, but it looked awesome.
What Tyrone and I did have in common was an ability to love Justin. Justin had enough well-wishers to make his parties full and fun, but few friends. To transition from the one to the other required only one thing, the ability to understand that the grumpiness he made into a Zen art form was his way of loving you. Tyrone and I, along with Miss Lyvinda and a few others, were an elite squadron who possessed this super-power.
K-Karl (I was C-Carl) had Justin's 3rd bedroom at the residence. Working at night and sleeping through anything, he was a nice enough probably straight recluse and most of the time all that reminded us of his existence were food related notes like "bought icecream help yourselfs [sic]" or "low on rice will buy more 2morrow". To see him was rarer than a sighting of Nessie or albino dolphins. His coming and going was stealthy. Not sneaky, no: there wasn't anything furtive about him, but we'd hear him moving around in his room getting ready for work, then, *poof*. He was gone and nobody had seen him exit the apartment.
"Every so often I check his room to make sure he doesn't sleep in a goddam coffin," Justin said.
Then K-Karl's mother died and left him the house in Beaumont. He told Justin he'd move out at the end of the month and true to form, we came home on the 29th and all that was left of him was a check for the next month's rent and a note saying "thanx 4 ever thing" [sic]. That’s when we started looking for a new roommate.
Asking me to help with interviews was enormously out of character for Justin. I was stunned. "You're standing there blinking instead of answering me," he said. "If that's morse code, you're wasting your time."
"Sure," I said. "I'll be there, but ... why?"
"Because you read people, right?"
"What do you mean?"
He said this like he was accepting a crushing defeat: "What I mean is..." sigh "... that one of your talents is this eerie fucking ability to know what people are feeling and thinking." By 'people,' he naturally meant himself. "It's almost extra sensory and I don't mind telling you that sometimes it virtually creeps the hell out of me."
"Oh don't gush."
"That's why you're interviewing with me. I don't know how you do it but you can sense bullshit while it's still on the horizon."
"How I do it is the same way a flower can sense the sunlight. Through daily exposure."
He checked his calendar. "Our first interviewee tomorrow is G. Arroyo, 5:00. We show him the room, ask a few questions laced with subtext, then tell him we'll be in touch. Don't be late."
Somewhere in Stephen Hawkings' observations of the universe and physics, there is a law that the first ten potential roommates you meet must all be liars or boneheads. You can never foresee the innumerable ways there are for people to be incompatible until that point. Mr. G. Arroyo exuded stale smoke, so when Justin mentioned the "non-smokers" part of our ad, he said, "I quit smoking 5 years ago." The next interviewee had manscaped his eyebrows into Joan Crawford arches of death, making his interview -- as far as I was concerned -- quick and perfunctory. There is something deeply askew with people, men or women, who shave off their eyebrows then re-draw them in with a brown crayon. The next guy made a good impression but too casually asked our opinion of the local buses, i.e. to find out if we owned cars. Justin's favorite (and by 'favorite' I mean least favorite) was the emaciated aging skater guy who rubbed his crotch and wondered if money was ever short, whether or not we could "work something out."
Justin went down the list scratching off names. "Access denied. Access denied. Fucking access fucking denied."
A few nights later I had a dream about a friend who had died, Michael. I was watching a National Geographic special that evening, then I dreamed I was standing in front of Ankgor Wat. Michael was squatting on a giant banyon tree root on the roof, grinning down at me.
"Come down here!" I said, throwing wide my arms like I would catch him. He held out a piece of paper between his thumb and one finger, then with a wide smile, let it go. I grabbed it out of the air. It was a page of paper fringed like the ones kids rip from spiral notebooks. On it was a wrinkled foil heart, attached with big, crude strips of tape.
"Michael! Michael!" I called to him, but he turned away and climbed the banyon tree. Then, like he was in no danger whatsoever, he hopped off, waved once, and slid down the other side of the roof.
He was gone. A doctor tugged me onto a gurney. The only part of him visible were two kind dark brown eyes over a surgical mask. He saw the paper and said four different things using only three words: "A foil heart," "A felled heart," "A fool heart," and "A full heart."
"This is fiction, right? I'm dreaming," I said as he wheeled me past a convenience store with large koi pond in its parking lot. "It's not the truth. Right?"
"The truth is dull," he said. "Like a fish. Slippery, hard to grab and hold onto. Fiction is a fish with handles."
"You're not my usual doctor," I said.
Even with his mask on I could somehow tell he was smiling. He patted my stomach. "It's okay. I'm the OB."
My clock radio came on to Michael Bublé singing "Quando Quando Quando" and I thought, Obie.
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