Fear the Fever – Hot Blood #7 (1996)

     Do erotica and horror go well together?  Should they?  I know that there has been a steady stream of sexuality in horror, but most of that seems to be there for the plausibility of having a moral to the slasher (sexual stalker) story.  It should appear valid on its face that we would not – if we have any interest in healthy psychosexual development – wed horror or terror to sexual arousal.  Because we can train ourselves to be aroused by things that just aren't right.
     Having written that little self-important cautionary note, I still went and read the seventh book in the Hot Blood Series, Fear the Fever (1996).  Not that I had ever heard of the series or read the other books.  I may be a fan of (well done) horror films, but I don't have much experience with the genre in short story or novel form.  Same with erotica; as a guy, I am much more acquainted with pornography.  Mind you, I don't mind pornography with a story (I think that there should be a reason for whatever is going on/being described/visually depicted, and that usually is accomplished by having some kind of plot-like element), but erotica seems to be of the mind to titillate without having the end purpose of serving as a masturbatory aid.  Who has time for that when there is so much in the realm of Literature I have yet to read?
     No, I went and had my library hunt this book down because Stephen Woodworth – author of the Violets series, starring Natalie Lindstrom – had a short story in it.  Same reason I went and read the book of zombie short stories back in December.  Sure, I could learn my lesson; read Woodworth's novels when they come out, avoid his short stories because I find the books (on the whole) lackluster.  But if I did that, how would I know what shape the erotic horror short story had been in 16 years ago?
     Like all of the short story anthologies I've seen, it was quite uneven.  The book opens with what is, effectively porn.  Porn with a story, sure, but porn.  Then it moved on to a werewolf sex story (where the werewolves were members of the undead, and that just pisses me off; I know there is a school of though that places them there, but I come from the D&D mold, and lycanthropes simply ain't undead...try turning one) which seemed to fit both the horror and erotica elements, but also fell short of explaining one key point.  Next was the story that drew me to the book, Woodworth's "Purple Hearts and Other Wounds".  Not great.  There are hints at what his writing style would become, sure, but it is too quick to move through its paces to develop any sense of dread or horror.  And Woodworth's Vietnam seemed to be one drawn from half-remembered scenes of Hamburger Hill (1987) or Platoon (1986) than any research on the war itself.
     From that point on there were some good stories sprinkled in with the bad.  Wendy Rathbone tried to turn the pain and struggle of a boy fighting his sexuality into entertainment (and it reads as unpleasantly as one would imagine).  Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee team up to write a story that would be a fitting episode for an erotic version of Creepshow (1982) or if Playboy TV did a version of Tales from the Darkside (1983-88).  It is also full of odd technical lingo (specific to fungi), which is infuriating because of the total disregard to actual functional biology.  John F.D. Taff plays with the idea of a magical tattoo in a story that really doesn't deliver.  He struggles with setting and characters – his forced imaginings of Bohemians feels worse than false, it feels like a purposeful lie.  And the moment that should be the most important, touching event in the story is glossed over in favor of moving the character to a sense of nothingness – he has no identity but wants to give his love to someone? – and then to being nothing.  This apparently is a problem for a lot of younger writers, but one that an editor should have caught and corrected.
     Lois Gresh doesn't bother to do any research on actual fetishists (she drew on her own, one-time experience with a man who professed a foot fetish) for her story, and it makes it unbelievable.  There are moments of decent erotica in it, but overall it is a disappointment.  Editor Jeff Gelb fills his story with interjections of music from the era in which he set it (why?) and doesn't bother to make any connective tissue between his long set-up and climax.  It is another story that plays false.
     "Two Hands are Better than One" by J.N. Williamson?  Here are my notes on it: Inarticulate writing meets...well, I don’t know what.  It reads a little like a masturbatory version of “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment”.  It takes a long time to tell no story, and it isn’t ever erotic.  It is just kind of sad.
     James Crawford delivers a better than average piece with "Untamed Sex".  I wonder if this was pitched to The Outer Limits (1995-2002) when it was on Showtime but they turned it down because – well take your pick between hints of bestiality and budgetary concerns.  It works more as a Sci-Fi story (kind of rote, but not poorly done) than erotica or straight horror.  Unfortunately it is followed by Patricia D. Cacek's "Metalica", which was more disturbing than anything else.  I took it – hopefully quite wrongly – as a woman living out the fantasy of being raped by her father (or reliving the event) by use of a speculum.
     It gets worse with Tom Piccirilli's "Call It".  He has a problem with tense (I often do, but I try to find my errors before I think I'm finished with a piece), which is problematic for the reader.  What is the greater offense is that there is not point for the story, other than to give the writer a chance to have a character listen to two people fucking over the phone. It still gets worse.  Michael Garrett takes a tender subject and tries to make it shock-entertainment, this time a boy discovering something terrible about his parents.  But it is all narrated (with absence of the responses of the other person in the room) by a boy who can only refer to his father as "My Daddy".  The ending is a prime example of a cop-out of the worst order.
     Nat Gertler tries for horror-humor with sexual elements in "Restin' Piece".  I guess if I found any of it funny I would have liked the story more.  I also would have liked there to have been a reason why the character hearing the story had a reason to be buying drinks for the fellow telling it.  “Flesh and Blood” by Elsa Rutherford was predictable, jumped around for no reason, and had a real high creep factor at the end.  Alan Brennert's "Fantasies" felt undeveloped, and had a bad ending.
     That left “The Secret Shih Tan” by Graham Masterson.  This story was overtly moralistic and exceedingly unerotic – the sex scene felt like it had been imported from something else – but what hurt it most was the absolutely modern setting, coupled with the uncle’s acceptance of the requirements of the book in question.
     Now, I know that nobody else is going to take the time to track this book down.   Well, I suspect more than I know.  I would caution against it.  For the few decent stories, there is just too much crap to make it worthwhile.  Yes, I know that regular folks can just read the good and leave the bad alone (in which case it may make a pleasant diversion).  But taken as a whole, Fear the Fever just left me fearing another collection of erotic horror.

▸    “The Five Percent People” by Lucy Taylor
▸    “Feeding the Beast” by Bruce Jones
▸    “Purple Hearts and Other Wounds” by Stephen Woodworth
▸    “The Sinister Woods” by Wendy Rathbone
▸    “Love Letters from the Rainforest” by Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee
▸    “Orifice” by John F.D. Taff
▸    “Sole Man” by Lois Gresh
▸    “The Portrait” by Jeff Gelb
▸    “Two Hands Are Better Than One” by J.N. Williamson
▸    “Untamed Sex” by James Crawford
▸    “Metalica” by Patricia D. Cacek
▸    “Call It” by Tom Piccirilli
▸    “Daddy’s Dirty Books” by Michael Garrett
▸    “Restin’ Piece” by Nat Gertler
▸    “Flesh and Blood” by Elsa Rutherford
▸    “Fantasies” by Alan Brennert
▸    “The Secret Shih Tan” by Graham Masterson

"The Hour of the Time" (2010)

     I gave a very brief review of Vincent Hobbes' short story "The Hour of the Time" on Goodreads.com on 29 March, 2011.  Very brief.

     This really feels like a story written in a single session with minimal
     revising. And it is entirely too easy to see where it is going because
     I've seen this story before (in different iterations).
     Hobbes manages to find a tone after the first couple of pages, but
     it is so brief that there isn't much to do with that tone.  I think he
     would have been better off developing the setting more and trying
     to see if he could have found a way to convey to the reader that
     the character of Charlie Hoag is one anyone should give a damn
     about.
    Okay for free, but if Hobbes were a friend I would have sent back a
    heavily edited version with notes on what may (because I'm not an
    expert) have made it a better written piece.

     Even with my name attached to it, I feel somewhat protected by the anonymous nature of posting reviews to places like Goodreads or Amazon.  However, in this instance, the author of the piece went and read my (if we are going to be frank about it) less than helpful review.  Worse – from my perspective – rather than rejecting my conclusion or commenting on where I may have missed the point, he decided to like the above review.
     Dammit, Hobbes!  Don't encourage my overly negative, hyper-critical style of commenting on...well, everything.  Seeing as how most of the people who left reviews for it were very pleased, I was clearly in the minority.  But I did read the story, and I'm not without some kind of expectations.  (I didn't pay anything for it because it is available for free on Kindle and Nook.)
     The real question becomes not what I think of this Hobbes' short story (which I do think is a little too obvious in its endgame and not interested enough in developing the setting or singular character), but rather how does one tell a story that the reader most likely has seen before in some other presentation?  As soon as I see that I am writing a story, or part of a story, that I know I am drawing from a single source, I get freaked out and either scratch-out/erase that passage or set the piece aside for a good long time.  I want to avoid frustrating the potential reader so much that my work ends up having little chance of ever getting to them.
     Hobbes finished this story.  It is readable and, after a rough start, finds a decent pace.  But I think he could have developed the specifics of it more to help me (and maybe other readers) get something new from this type of story.

Fast Ships, Black Sails (2008)

     I'm not sure why I chose to read Fast Ships, Black Sails (2008).  I certainly don't have a history of reading a lot of pirate-themed tales.  But I have been trying to work at crafting better short stories, and reading some more contemporary ones – I cannot stick with reading ones that are almost exclusively from the 19th Century – should give me a better idea as to where to contemporary market is.  Several of these authors are, apparently, more than a little successful.  It couldn't hurt to take a look.
      Having written that, Fast Ships, Black Sails is a very odd collection.  More science fiction and fantasy stories with sea-going (or space faring) elements grafted on than tales of pirate living (and pirate dying) than I expected, that is sure.  I would suspicion that editors Ann & Jeff VanderMeer did not have a wealth of choices when they put this together, but also that their collective taste is quite broad.  The only author whose name I recognized was Michael Moorcock (I've noted previously that I had never read anything by him), but some have had quite a lot of success it would seem.
     Some of the stories – "Boojum", "Pirates of the Saura Sea", "The Whale Below", and “Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar Pirates of Sarsköe” – felt like they were conceived as novels or novellas and condensed in order to find publication.  This isn't much of a complaint, but rather an observation that there seemed to be much more in the backgrounds that the authors wanted to write about, and that the pacing may have been better if they were allowed to run more than 50 pages.
     Some of the stories were just horrible.  Waldrop's "Avast, Abaft"  steals from Gilbert & Sullivan, has no narrative flow, and (worst of all) has no fucking point.  Moorcock's "Ironface" felt more like a couple of pages of notes with the veneer of prose to hide the fact that he had nothing going on.  Thanks for the notes on a guy in a setting, Mike, but where was the story you were going to submit?  "Pirate Solutions" has the less than savory pirates=hackers theme, but it also has odd jumps in terms of whose narrative it is and a total lack of concept for what is propelling the activity (or, if there is one, it is completely at odds with the rest of the tale).  Connell's "We Sleep on a Thousand Waves Beneath the Sea" is a poorly written story that seems to fight having any sense of self until the very end, and not because the author was trying to be clever. 
     You want something even worse than horrible.  Okay.  When anyone asks me what the worst thing I’ve ever read (that wasn’t self-published), I will point to Aylett’s “Voyage of the Iguana”, an unfunny, mostly unwritten, yet terribly long excuse of a story.  Just a piece of shit.  I'm sure he thought it was smart, clever, and sly.  It isn't.  It is the equivalent of used toilet paper: it is shit on the page.
     There were some stories that just weren't what I thought they'd be.  Barnhill's “Elegy to Gabrielle, Patron Saint of Healers, Whores and Righteous Thieves” never comes together as a story (which I thought it would), remaining a shadow of someone retelling a tale.  Howe's "Skillet and Saber" gets a little too caught up in the dread of forced sodomy, decides that a lot of the characters don't need to be developed, and the ending should try to work in a staple of the pirate mythos.  Freer & Flint's "Pirates of the Saura Sea" had some good elements, but felt like they were more interested in the setting than the story. Blaschke's "The Whale Below" tried to mix technologies (airships and flintlocks) to poor effect and was overwrought with the author's need to make the crew as Spanish (or maybe Portuguese) as possible, but there was a rather decent story trying to escape those traps.  Swirsky's “The Adventures of Captain Black Heart Wentworth” was much more straightforward than I expected; you give me rats as pirates, firing guns at ducklings, and I am expecting it to be much more tongue-in-cheek. 
     So, what really worked?  Hughes' "Castor in Troubled Waters" has nothing to do with pirates and everything to do with British pub humor.  I know only a little of that brand of storytelling, but this short story was witty and winning.  Vaughn's "The Nymph's Child", while a little too friendly with its dragon fantasy element, is well written and engaging.  Batteigger's "A Cold Day in Hell", where Ice Pirates (1984) meets...well, pirates on the ice.  A good example of how to sell a setting with little notes through the story rather than trying to hammer it out in huge chunks.  And, of course, Nix's “Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar Pirates of Sarsköe".  So much of the setting is missing (the characters in this story apparently have appeared in a novella prior to this adventure, so I'm betting he felt it was as developed as it needed to be) as to make the reader curious more than frustrated.
     Overall, I don't think I can recommend Fast Ships, Black Sails.  But how many collections of short stories are full of must read writing?  There are some good stories, and it is certainly telling how some people approach telling stories in a shorter format (and that the editors let them get away with it; Naomi Novick, I'm referring to you and your blatant abuse of the comma).  For the regular reader of Sci-Fi and fantasy, most of these will be in your comfort zone.  But there isn't a lot of examination of what it means to be a pirate, or the life of a pirate.  And I was kind of hoping for a little of that.

▸    “Boojum” by Elizabeth Baer & Sarah Monette
▸     “Castor in Troubled Waters” by Rhys Hughes
▸    “I Begyn as I Mean to Go On” by Kage Baker
▸    “Avast, Abaft” by Howard Waldrop
▸    “Elegy to Gabrielle, Patron Saint of Healers, Whores and Righteous Thieves” by Kelly Barnhill
▸    “Skillet and Saber” by Justin Howe
▸    “The Nymphs Child” by Carrie Vaughn
▸    “68̊ 07'15"N, 31̊ 36'44"W” by Conrad Williams
▸    “Ironface” by Michael Moorcock
▸    “Pirate Solutions” by Katherine Sparrow
▸    “We Sleep on a Thousand Waves Beneath the Stars” by Brendan Connell
▸    “Voyage of the Iguana” by Steve Aylett
▸    “Pirates of the Suara Sea” by David Freer & Eric Flint
▸    “A Cold Day in Hell” by Paul Batteiger
▸    “The Adventures of Captain Black Heart Wentworth” by Rachel Swirsky
▸    “Araminta, or, The Wreck of the Amphridrake” byy Naomi Novik
▸    “The Whale Below” by Jayme Lynn Blaschke
▸    “Beyond the Sea Gate of the Scholar Pirates of Sarsköe” by Garth Nix

The Best Car (2012)

     This is some real-life inspired fiction.  While there is much about this that resembles my life, it is far enough from the real truth that it would be an unrecognizable accounting for anyone who was present to the era for me.  But the car was real.

The Best Car

     I avoided getting my driver's license at sixteen.  There were several factors that contributed to that delay – I didn't want to take driver's ed at school, and quickly quit the Len Scaduto course in which my father enrolled me; I knew I wouldn't have regular access to a car, at least not until my mother replaced her rapidly aging '86 Ford Tempo with something reliable; I had no means of income for gas or insurance, and I was thoroughly uninterested in working to acquire money; I had friends who could and would drive me places – but none of them were the real reason I didn't get my license.  I avoided it because having one would have meant I could be pressed into service at any moment, wholly subject to my father's whims and his imagined state of health.  I bore witness to my older brother being awakened in the middle of the night – anytime from midnight to four a.m. – for a not so emergency trip to the hospital because our father had a headache and wanted drugs to make it go away.  By the time I was old enough to understand his need for injectable medication to combat his maladies I was also aware that he was being administered doses that would kill a regular, healthy person.  Moreover, he needed such treatment at irregular times; whenever was worst for everyone else would perfectly fit his schedule.  My father lived a life that was, without question, wholly about himself.
     Living in fear of having a strange dictate – to drive my father to the hospital or his doctor's home, which meant that he would be getting a dose so large that it couldn't be recorded without alarming hospital staff – was something that I knew was abnormal.  Every part of it, really.  I have to assume that most children, even in the heady years of adolescence with a need to establish independence from their supervisory adults, would not be alarmed by the call to be of service.  Children are supposed to love their parents, sons to love their fathers, and so there should not have been a reason for my very real need to not be made to serve as courier to wherever the drugs were stored.  Still, there it was.  I knew that if I could avoid the license I couldn't be forced to take him, and I should then have been able to get my license without any need of driver's ed once I turned eighteen.  I drove occasionally without a license, in the parking lot of the apartment complex and once to a job interview – a job in which I lost all interest once it was clear they wanted me to work forty hours a week while I was still in school – so I wasn't wholly unfamiliar with the operation of a motor vehicle.
     My father only tried to get me to drive him to the hospital once after my brother moved on to college.  He woke me up at one a.m. and told me I needed to get dressed and take him for some relief.  I was told that he had waited hours before deciding it was so bad that he couldn't possibly sleep, apparently unaware of the fact that if we had left at 10 p.m. we could have been back to the apartment by 2 a.m., and that would have allowed for some sleep.  Waiting until one was essentially a type of sleep deprivation, so long as one allows that the thirty minutes of sleep I may have gotten to that point would effectively be worthless.  To this day I think of it as a kind of terrorism, and I had no desire to bend to the will of a terrorist.  I told him that he had plenty of options other than me.  He could call a cab – roundtrip fare would have cost less than twenty dollars.  He had a friend in the building next door that he could have called and she probably would have taken him.  If he felt so bad that he had no choice but to go to the hospital, he could call for an ambulance – we had learned that the insurance United provided would cover the cost of the ambulance if he spent at least a night in the hospital and be a little more than one hundred twenty five dollars out of pocket if he didn't – and spend the night there. 
     Whatever it took to allow me to try to get some sleep, something that never came easy back then, that is what I suggested.  He pleaded his case for about fifteen minutes upon which time he must have realized I was not going to drive him; he had no winning counterargument to "I am not driving without a license" and so he simply went back to bed.  When I saw him the following afternoon, he was fine.  More than that, he never got so sick that he needed to be taken to the hospital or his doctor from his headaches.  His condition was, as I suspected without any cause, was wholly dependent upon his ability to have others service it.  I did not want to be tethered to it, made to serve without any attention directed back at me, and thus I decided to similarly rely on others when it came to needing to be driven places.  To be fair, if I couldn't get a ride I would usually walk or ride my bike.  I appreciated the efforts others made for me, but I was sure as hell not going to be helpless without them.  And I wasn't going to make it all about me.  Not always.
     That was a lesson learned while without a license.  In an effort to retrieve a hastily mailed letter, I got a friend to drive me to its intended destination where I could steal it from the mailbox.  When it wasn't there, I told him we would have to try again the next day.  He smiled and said, "Not going to happen.  You had your chance to get it.  If it that important, find another way to get there before anyone gets the mail."  Well, there was no way I could walk or bike there in time unless I ditched school to do it.  I missed a lot of days of high school, but never so I could commit a crime.  The letter got delivered, and the consequences of it fell much more lightly than I would have thought.  Still would have liked to have had the chance to get it back before it was read, but that is a bell that cannot be unwrung.
     The only reason I ended up with a driver's license before I turned eighteen was that my father got demoted at work and couldn't afford to keep us living where we were.  In actuality, that pay cut served as his chance to hand me off to my mother while – unbeknownst to anyone – he started squirreling money away for a Harley.  He went to live out in Winfield and I was shipped up to Oak Park.  Rather than transfer to the local high school – mine was so familiar with my brand of bullshit that I got away with most of the things that would cause them to expel other students – it was decided that I should finish where I started.  The first week my mother drove me to and from school every day, three hours sucked right out of her day; she tired of that by Tuesday.  The second week I was allowed to sleep at a friend's house but not really fed, and that was about as bad as anything I had experienced to that point.  The next week school was on break, but it was also when the road work for my driver's ed started. 
     Knowing that I was to be moved twenty five miles north, there had been a real push to get a license in my hands.  I cruised through the classroom sessions, and the school decided to cut how much practical experience I needed because I would often be inaccessible.  I had four days of driving over two weeks time before the school said i was ready to get my license.  What did they care?  The check had cleared months ago.  I didn't feel especially confident, but I knew that I could not rely on a mix of commutes from my mother, accommodating friends, and simply not going to school to make it to graduation.
     My father cleared a day so he could be there when I took my test.  He had some work he had to do on the car, an '84 Subaru GL Wagon – the last of the non-boxy wagons – that had been handed down from my brother.  The red wagon had been replaced with a blue one, this time a stick, which made it somehow more masculine in my brother's eyes.  They were both little station wagons, so I can't imagine either dripped with masculinity.  And he traded the near burgundy red one for powder blue.  I didn't care, because what I needed was a car that would handle the sixty to seventy miles a day that I would put on it.  My father gave it a tune up, replaced the brakes, and properly inflated the tires before I arrived.  The car was at our old apartment where my father continued to rent garage space.  He wasn't going to abandon his collection of tools, but he also couldn't bring himself to package them up and not be accessible.  His tools were different from his son.
     He drove us over to the facility in his Jeep Wagoneer.  I'll never understand why he didn't want me to take the test in the car I would actually be driving, but in retrospect I imagine it was a sense of ownership that he needed to impress on me.  He would be fully in charge because it was his vehicle.  Anyway, there was almost no wait at the testing facility.  I got one question wrong on the written – I don't know which and it still bothers me that I don't know – and sat patiently waiting for a chance to go out on the road.  I was assigned a man who looked like he could have been my guidance counselor's ugly, angry older brother, which meant that he was thoroughly unpleasant all the way around.  He started off by barking "Horn singal!" at me, which apparently meant that he wanted me to sound the car horn to prove that it worked.  I lost points there, in parallel parking, and the three point turn, but was still set to pass.  Unfortunately, when I pulled into a space to park I was about a foot into the neighboring space.  So that was a fail.
     What to do?  I had a car sitting and waiting for me.  I needed a license so I could go to school and graduate and do something with my life.  Jesus, without the license I might have to actually finish at a different school and meet new people.  The horror of it all.  Normally – or so we were told – I would have to wait a week before any possible retest.  Fuck that.  My father and I pled my case, my need for a license.  Never mind if I might actually be a danger to others on the road, I had places to go and a means to get there; I just needed a license in case I got pulled over.  A younger, less angry man came out and agreed to let me retest right then.  I passed with no problems and got the damn laminated piece of paper.
     My father took me back to the garage.  He had to run a quick errand, but he would meet me up at the school and make sure I made it to my mother's in one piece.  That was fine with me.  I was young and stupid and eager to prove that I could handle unsupervised driving even though I had almost no experience and absolutely none with the car with which I was entrusted.  I pulled out of the parking lot and was pulled over about a minute later.  The officer said I had failed to signal and I pointed out, very politely, that I didn't signal because it was a bend in the road and there was no other way to proceed on it; who the hell wouldn't know where the car was going?  He grumbled a little and told me to "be more careful". 
     About a quarter of a mile later he pulled me over again.  "I ran your plates.  You aren't from around here.  Your car is registered up in Oak Park."  To him that meant I lived near black people and therefore crime.  I must be some kind of criminal.  I pointed out to him that I had lived in his sad little retail-reliant village for four years, my father maintained his garage there and it was where I had to pick up the car.  Furthermore, I went to the high school about five blocks west and one block north.  I showed him my school ID.  I had every right to be there, but officer asshole wanted to prove something.  He grumbled again and then said he was going to write me a ticket for the illegal turn.  I laughed at him and said something along the lines of suing him for wrongful prosecution – or something similar I could have borrowed from Ghostbusters – and waited for my ticket.  About a minute later he came back and gave me license and told me to get back to where I came from.  At least I didn't get that ticket.
     My father showed up about thirty minutes after I got to the school.  We headed north, me following him because despite making the trip innumerable times I had never paid attention to which streets I needed to use.  Somewhere after I exited on 1st Avenue I lost him.  Shit!  I crept along, terrified both by the prospect of being lost and the other, more confident drivers flying by on my left.  I made a wrong turn on Madison and thought for a moment that I had crossed the border with Chicago – instead of it just being Forest Park – because of all the signs for liquor stores and bars.  I got myself righted and made it to my mother's.  My father showed up about twenty minutes later.  He decided to stop and get something to eat.  Not a lot of concern about it, either.
     From that point on, the car was mine.  I owned that car – actually, my brother owned it until it spent a winter in an O'Hare employee parking lot letting its underbelly get salted away – and made myself powerful among my friends by being able to drive places.  More than that, I had to drive places.  I took the opportunity to give pretty underclass girls a ride home, girls who never would have spoken to me otherwise, and learned the dangers of treating parking lights as headlights.  I got to spend almost every Sunday with a girl I was in love with – never mind that she was dating my close friend with whom I would help work stuffing Sunday Tribunes on Saturday night – because I had a car and he had destroyed his.  The car allowed me to feel as though I were a real person and not subject to the threats and whims of others.
     It was, without question, the best car I will ever have.  It isn't just about its primacy.  I kept a bag of clothes in the back so that I could spend the night wherever I wanted – there wasn't any insistence that I needed to be home.  With the seats folded down it was like a miniature covered pick-up; it certainly could carry a heavier load than my best friend's truck.  While I was aware that it could also double as a fantastic 'fuck wagon', I had nowhere near the confidence to test it out in such an endeavor.  My relationship with that car was about me, and I don't think I would have wanted to invite anyone else into something so intimate and risk how I felt about the beast. 
     And it was a beast, a might monster hidden in a partially rusted out and neglected body.  That wagon drove over a tree and a mailbox in one motion.  It didn't even damage the car.  Never mind that that tree was about six inches in circumference at its thickest or that the ground was so saturated with rain that the wheels sunk three inches into the ground, tearing up the lawn like it was only an ephemeral covering for the soil.  It took some hasty work – and a pair of baseball bats wedged under the rear wheels – to free the wagon from that muddy mess.  As I drove my friends away from the scene of the crime – conspicuously close to where I had tried to steal a letter only a few months prior – me grinning and they in near panic, I excoriated them for not keeping their eyes on the road.  They knew my attention would be elsewhere, yet not one of them said anything until we had already laid waste to the tree en route to the mailbox; some twenty five feet of non-road and none of them felt the need to say a damn thing. 
     We were muddy, and scared, and exhilarated.  My car – utter perfection in a compact, unassuming form – had inflicted damage and remained unharmed.  It was beyond perfect for the feelings of an empowered adolescent; it was freedom to do anything, yet it never occurred to us that there was much more to do than use the car to drive.  Driving was both a necessity and an expression of freedom, and we were free.  When relating this story to the acquaintance who lived near the scene of the crime, she could not keep herself from bursting into a near hysterical laughter.  Apparently, all her neighbor had said when seeing the damage the next morning was an exasperated "teenagers".
     That wagon drove a thousand miles one weekend trying to keep a relationship together, and not one in which I was directly involved.  It made a trip to a Boy Scout camp just to rescue a friend to see the premiere of Jurassic Park on the big screen – but the friend blew me off – on my birthday.  It made two trips out to Iowa City while I was scrambling to get courses and a place to live, and three more while I was there for a year (not attending those courses).  It was my means of being something other than trapped.  My father was disengaged from my life for the most part and there would be no threat to be his driver as he saw fit.  My mother was content enough to let wander around with it so long as I kept her marginally informed and made appearances at home. 
     That '84 Subaru GL Wagon in near-burgundy will forever be the best car I will ever have because it was the only one that gave me a sense of freedom, a sense that I was something other than trapped and small.  No other car – and most that followed were absolute pieces of shit – can be that for me again.  Like the car, life has worn me down.  Instead of freedom, a car has become a responsibility, a necessity to travel to places not accessible by the CTA or Metra.  The subsequent cars became the beasts that bore me to and from work, which immediately lessens the value one can assign to it.  It was the freedom to continue to go to the school where I had a small band of intensely close friends.  It became the means to access pretty girls in high school, and if I had any confidence back then it could have been so much more.  It became to embodiment of what I wanted to be able to see in myself.  Small but tough, reliable, versatile, and efficient; with over one hundred fifteen thousand miles on it, the wagon still got about twenty seven miles to the gallon.  Neglected for a winter, it was destroyed.
     I would like to say that the lesson is that one cannot neglect oneself in a similar manner.  That is how time gets away from people, they get busy living the workaday and miss the moments that we think should define us.  It isn't, though.  I simply miss being able to sit behind the wheel of a vehicle and know – or be astonished by – it survive a run-in with a sapling and a mailbox and be no worse for wear.  I want it to be the metaphor for how the seemingly small shit that comes down on me like rain is nothing that I can't overcome, with nary a scratch (or smelling fine if I want to be consistent in mixing my metaphors).  I know better, though.  The little things are the ones that will kill you.  They will eat you away, piece by piece when you aren't paying attention.  They will die like that wagon, a victim of the services that made the lot accessible to those moving their cars in and out on a daily basis. 
     That wagon is the best car ever because at the time I was driving it, I was still full of potential and promise.  Never mind that it was well past its prime, it was new to me.  It was the vehicle that could help carry me forward, but it died an inglorious death.  And whenever I notice that its promise is gone, I feel somehow despondent over how I have accorded myself.  I have recaptured none of what I felt with that car.  That freedom is somehow gone forever.  The road is dark.  The trees are tall and healthy.  The mailboxes are wrapped over in brick and mortar.  There will be no second coming of that old hope, but the smallest remnant of its flame resides within me because I had experienced it and done so well.
     Even if, in the full accounting, it was just a car passed down to me because my brother had moved on to something better.

Dreamers (Original Text - Part Thirteen) (1997)

     The original "ending".  Well, actually there is another section that was started after this one, but is is very weak and gives an unfortunate happy ending to Jason and Melissa.  Then in 1998 I started a sequel of sorts to "Dreamers" that meant to explore the relationship between Jason and Stacy Andrews, his ex-girlfriend.  That was abandoned because it was poorly conceived (and not just because I knew nothing about the kind of relationship I was trying to describe).
     Anyway, Part Thirteen.

XIII

     Dave Burke left the group first.  He didn't have any choice, but he was the motivation for the rapid deterioration.  There were other reasons, the are always other reasons for everything, but nobody would deny that it was Dave Burke's murder that orchestrated the collapse.
     The days afterward were as destructive as the actual crime.  Sean didn't seem to shaken by the murder and that grated on Vicki.  Larry Pudenski argued two sides, with Burke not being too great a loss and Sean being the most likely killer.  Dave Burke didn't have a philosophy, wasn't a great contributor to society.  On the other hand, Sean would want him dead for not only being white but also because of the relationship with Vicki.
     The funeral was hard for everyone.  It was Burke's cousin who had to give the eulogy, but asked Jason to write something to express Dave's involvement with the group.  That wasn't easy.  Jason and Melissa had already begun the process of removing themselves when Burke was killed.  Still, Jason wrote how important someone can be when they are simply willing to be there for everyone else, whenever needed.  And that was how Dave should have been remembered.
     Vicki sold her house and moved back to New Jersey.  She found a better job closer to home, to her family.  She said goodbye to everyone, but spent more time with J.B.  The two had known each other longer than she had known the others, and it was to J.B. that she had a real attachment.  They swore they would stay in touch.
     Sean moved out before she sold the house, angry that she took Burke's murder so personally.  He never liked Dave Burke or Jeff Binghampton, and he thought it would be a good thing that there would be no group to distract Vicki from him.  Unfortunately, he found out that it was that very group that gave Vicki the strength to be with him.  He moved on, though with some regrets.
    
     "Four weeks.  Maybe you are psychic."
     "Jason," Nancy said in a soft voice, "it was a robbery.  And nobody knows what is going to happen to us.  I was just being childish."
     Jason, Melissa, Nancy, and J.B. had gathered at a restaurant after the service.  Unlikely as it seemed, everyone was taking care of Jason, not the other way around.  Larry Pudenski and Mike Carver couldn't even make it to the funeral with work keeping them busy.  That may have been what was affecting  Jason.  Their mellow conversation was interrupted by a striking blonde in a plain black dress.
     "Excuse me.  Are you Jason?"
     Jason offered a weak smile and nodded.  He offered her a seat at the table and she accepted.
     "You don't know me.  I worked with Dave.  My name is Anika."
     "The infamous Miss Lang.  Dave mentioned you more than once."
     "I didn't know if I should have been at the funeral or not.  Dave and I only went out a couple of times.  He was a really nice guy.  I really liked him."
     "He was a great friend.  He was better than any of us gave him credit for.  I never gave him credit."
     Anika didn't seem to have heard Jason.  "I think I could have loved him."
     "I'm sure you could have, Anika," Melissa said.  It pained her to see two people in pain from the same source but unable to see it as clearly in the other.
     There was some more conversation and Anika stayed to share a meal with them, but she could not bear to stay there with them.  They had a stronger relationship with Dave and she felt like an intruder.
     "That's the kind of girl you should be with, Jeffery."
     "Well, her obvious pain and loss aside," J.B. quickly countered.  "Yeah.  She's got the looks.  She's nice, and intelligent enough."
    "What would Brad do?" Jason asked.
     "He'd go after her and get her."
     "He's a hell of a brother, isn't he."
     "Don't give me that, Jason.  I'm not going to use Dave's death to get laid."
     Jason shrunk back, hurt.  That wasn't what he thought he was suggesting.
     "It is an unfortunate circumstance, how you met her," Melissa said.  "But you can try to make something out of it.  Something that involves more than you trying to fuck her.  You actually shared a person in common, and you can approach this from a more emotionally healthy place."
     "I thought I told you I don't do that."
     "Well, apparently life is short.  And it wouldn't hurt you to change before it's over."

Dreamers (Original Text - Part Twelve) (1997)

     So one of the things that will likely forever plague me as a writer is being consistent in the tense used.  I am bad at it.  Didn't try to fix it since I am putting the original text up here.  You are forewarned. 
     On the other hand, this is probably the best section to serve as a stand alone. I also think it is the last one I included in the version I printed up in 1997.  There is one more, very rushed section to come after this one.

XII

     "What exactly is your problem, Pudenski?"
      Larry Pudenski was as much in Jason MacLeod's face as Jason was in Larry's.  This was an unsightly confrontation happening in Vicki Souser's living room.  Everyone else was in the basement, at the pool table of watching a movie in the adjoining room.  It was a large basement, but Larry was wise enought to bring the fight topside.
     "You, you sanctimonious bastard."
     "You're already drunk, " Jason quipped.  "You came here with some bug up your ass and started drinking right away."
     "You know what I'm talking about."
     "But do I know what you're talking about?  That is, can I apply the knowledge of what I know to that which you are referring?  See, I'm still functional."
     "She called you."
     "Jason stopped smirking.  "Okay, you're right.  She called me.  She asked if she could stay at my place if she came into town."  Larry was still glaring at him, so Jason thought he should diffuse the situation.  "You called her, then."
     "Yes, I did."
     "I hadn't told anyone.  I hadn't decided if I should say yes.  I thought she should wait until you found someone else."
     "Fine.  Then I'll tell Melissa."
     "I'd like tot hink you were joking, Larry.  I'd like to dismiss how you try to convince everybody else that Melissa is too good for me.  Lynn didn't call me for some devious reason."
     "Why then?"
     "How did you leave things, Pudenski?  She didn't think you'd be real receptive to the notion of her visiting."
     "What, because I was in love with her?"
     "Then talk to Lynn about it."
     Larry stepped back a pace.  "You didn't tell Melissa that Lynn wants to spend a week at your place?"
     "I will, when I can think of a diplomatic was to say it."
      Wait here, buddy."
     Jason grabbed Larry's arm as the latter was turning to go back to the basement.  "Why does everyone want to make this more difficult than it needs to be?"  Jason sighed.  "Are you able to handle seeing Lynn and not sleeping with her?"
      "Who said I wasn't going to sleep with her?"

Nightmares (2011)

ORIGINAL FICTION

(very short story)

9040 W. 140th Street (the red arrow is pointing to the balcony for Apt. 3B, where I lived from May 1989 to February 1993), Orland Park, IL  60462.  This is where I did, in actuality, write a letter much like the one I use in the story.  That little red door is to the entryway with the mailboxes, where – much like the unnamed narrator in the story – I could not retrieve a letter I too hastily committed to sending.

Nightmares

 
     "I had another nightmare."
     Part of me – hopefully hidden and on the inside only – cringed at this.  Joe had nightmares all the time.  Well, maybe not all the time, but certainly with enough frequency that his close friends could be assured that he would have at least a couple a month.  Even his casual acquaintances were likely aware that he had memorable nightmares, by his estimation.  I likely would be categorized closer to the latter than the former, but I know he has had them.  He had been having them since at last his early teens.  But there was something about his nightmares that just didn't speak to me.  It was all I could do to offer a shrug.
     "It was much worse than usual."
     Well, usual for Joe meant something like monsters or demons or something that really scared him.  Not in the monster movie or horror film way, because his conjured beings struck at his core being in his dreams.  To my mind, however, it just wasn't that interesting.  Maybe it was because I usually had some sense of dreaming during my own fits of nightmares.  As soon as one knew there is nothing at risk in the dream, the nightmare could be experienced as theater.  How could Joe not see that his monsters and demons could not exist in the waking world?  He wasn't some kind of delusional.
     "You aren't saying anything."
     "Sorry, Joe."  I looked up to meet his gaze.  He looked a little haggard, but that could have just been him being less than diligent in his grooming that morning.  I'm sure he would have looked more put together if he had been going in to work.  "I guess I don't have anything to say about that."
     "Don't give me that shit.  You have nightmares, too.  I know you do.  I thought you would be a little more sympathetic about this."
      It shouldn't have surprised me that Joe still thought enough about me – my meager moral character – to think that I would be some kind of sounding board and support for him.  It did, but it shouldn't have.  I dropped my head to hide my smirk.  At least I managed to find enough within me to feel guilty about it.
     "Yeah, Joe, I have nightmares."
     "When did you have one last?"
     "Last night.  Why?"
     Joe didn't expect that.  Maybe he did, but my estimation of his reaction was that he didn't expect that to be my answer.  I shouldn't be so cavalier about assuming what Joe expected.  He asked the question and "last night" was a foreseeable answer, so maybe he had been expecting it as a possibility.  One would not associate idiocy with Joe. 
     "Fine," Joe finally managed.  He looked as though he were shocked by my response, but maybe he wasn't.  "What was your nightmare like?"
     "It was surprisingly a lot like this, but with different people."
      Joe thought on that for a few seconds.  I guess he decided I hadn't really told him anything, so he said, "What the fuck does that mean?"
     "It means that my nightmare – really all my nightmares – are a lot like my real-life.  You know, waking life.  You aren't in them, so you can take that as a compliment if you want."  I threw that last bit in because I assumed that people don't aspire to be in the nightmares of others. 
     "I still don't understand what that means.  How is it a nightmare if it is just like life?"
     "Maybe because I'm living a fucking nightmare, Joe."  I paused for effect, smugly thinking that this is what one should do when making a show of one's personal failings.  "If you think I can dream something worse that what I'm living, you have too much faith in my imagination.  The only difference in the nightmares is that I have to deal with the people I'm avoiding.  Or the ones avoiding me.  I think a lot of it is mutual by this point in time, but there are social confrontations between those people and me in my nightmares."
     "You want to talk about it?"
     "No.  There isn't anything to be gained in that discussion."
     "You might figure out what they mean."
     "I know what the meaning in them is, Joe.  I think I do at any rate.  Seeing as how they pretty much match-up with real life, I don't think there is much need for interpretation."
     "They still have to be about something."
     "You want to know what they're about, Joe?  You want to know that they stem from the knowledge that in my life, only one person ever loved me.  Seriously, one person.  And not even family.  You come from a marginally functional family—"
     "Hey!"
     "Hey yourself, Joe.  There is nothing in your family dynamic that even approaches being damaging to you or your emotional well-being.  Enjoy that.  Not everybody gets that."
     "If you were never loved, you'd be some kind of a monster."
     "I am some kind of a monster, Joe.  The one person who loved me broke my heart the night he told me that he would fuck me over in a heartbeat if it meant he had even the slightest chance of getting laid."
     "How old were you when this happened?"
     "Seventeen."
     "What?  Was this your dad?"
     It was not my father.  Mind you, I kind of knew that my dad placed his own sexual satisfaction ahead of any kind of relationship with his sons earlier than that.  He made me swap seats with him on our flight from Seattle to Anchorage so he could sit next to an attractive woman.  He ended up fucking her, too.  At least he had fun on that vacation.  Still, even with his self-centeredness, it would have been undoubtedly better for me if he had found a way to love me.  The closest he came was trying to be proud of whatever meager accomplishments I had as a child because those reflected well on him.  No, I learned later that the only person he was capable of loving was himself.  I knew somebody else like that, too.  He married the person I dread most in my nightmares.
     "No.  My best friend.  Was my best friend."  I paused, but this time it was to contain my emotions.  I didn't want to start crying in front of Joe.  Not that he'd think that I'm weak or something; it's just that he knows that I'm mostly emotionally dead inside and I'm sure that seeing me crying would be a little weird for him.  "In late May of '86, when it wasn't certain that we'd ever see each other again, I told him that I loved him.  You know, in a friend sort of way.  Nothing sexual about it."
     "I wasn't assuming there was."
     "Anyway, he told me he loved me.  We made a little plan that we'd always be there for each other.  Forever."
     "What happened?"
     "I think that he assumed – if he remembered it at all – that our declaration of that eternal commitment was just kids stuff.  I'm sure he had no idea how fucked up my home life was.  His dad may have been a dick – the guy threatened to beat me with a belt when I was nine – but his parents certainly loved him.  His brother probably did, too.  There was a degree of involvement in his life.  Anyway, I think that he began to grow up and didn't understand how much I needed him to always be there for me.  No matter what."
     "So he told you he would rather chase pussy than be there for you.  Then what happened."
     "Then I went home.  Nobody was there.  My brother was at Madison.  My dad may have been working, but I'm almost positive he was at his girlfriend's that night.  I cried.  I wrote a lengthy, rather hateful suicide note.  Then I went into my father's bedroom, took his little .22 pistol, put it to my head, and pulled the trigger."
     Joe sat silent for a few seconds.  "Didn't check to see if it was loaded?"
     "No, I did.  There is a lot that I am compressing in my retelling here.  I was crying most of my walk home from the party where he told me that I didn't mean as much to him as the chance of sex did.  I got the gun out and made sure it was loaded before I started writing the letter.  It is very important that it be conceived as a letter, because I actually mailed the fucking thing.  Written with a DOS version of Word Perfect."
     "Holy shit!  That is a long time ago."
     "Not really.  In a lot of ways, its yesterday.  Something being a long time ago assumes that you fill the span between then and now with living.  If you don't, then it will always be close.  If you don't do anything with your life, it will be yesterday.  Anyway, I wrote the suicide letter without ever mentioning that I was killing myself.  Wrote the thing for someone with whom I had no real relationship.  Printed it out without proof-reading it; back then you had to run spellcheck, the program wasn't set to let you know whenever you fucked up."
     "I remember."
     "Put it in an envelope.  Addressed the envelope.  Put a stamp on it and ran it downstairs to the entryway where the mailboxes were.  Went back upstairs and checked the gun again.  Sat at the edge of my father's bed facing the TV – it was off – and pulled the trigger."
     "It didn't fire?"
     "Nope.  And you know that thing they say about jumpers, the ones that survive?  How they immediately regret the decision to jump the instant they jump?"
     Joe nodded.
     "Well, I experienced something like that.  It scared the fuck out of me.  It emotionally drained me.  I'm not so proud as to hide from the fact that I am terrified of dying.  Still am.  And there I was, not dead, after I had found the strength to try to kill myself.  For a couple of seconds I thought about finding the other pistol he kept hidden in his room and trying with that one.  If I couldn't find it, though, he'd have been really pissed that I went digging through his things.  I really only wanted to kill myself in his room because if I did it in my room or the front room, there would be a chance he wouldn't notice right away.  If I was going to be dead, he should know about it.  Didn't leave a note for him, though."
     "What was in the letter?"
     "How the fuck should I know?  I didn't keep a copy of it."
     "How did it start?"
     "'I don't know why I'm writing this to you except that I have the feeling you hate me.'  Not my best work."
     "You remember that?"
     "Yeah.  Like I said, in many ways its yesterday.  I couldn't tell you what else was in it.  It was three pages long.  The plan, such as it was, was that she would have to ask my best friend why I had sent her this letter and he would have to tell her that I was dead.  In that way, both would be hurt – yes, I'm aware of how stupid it sounds now, even then the next day – and neither would have the full picture.  I tried to get the letter the next morning so it wouldn't be sent but the mailman came before 11am.  Or one of the neighbors took the outgoing mail to the post office; there was a woman who did that from time to time.  Also spent two days trying to convince my friends to help me steal the letter out of the mailbox after it was delivered.  Even got them to drive me over one day to try, but it hadn't arrived yet."
     "Slow mail."
     "Tell me about it.  Then it was embarrassing dealing with her after that.  But I found a way to make her deal with me and even having contact as fucked up as that felt better than being alone all the time.  She was the one who talked me out of my plan of enlisting in the Army or killing myself, right and proper, after graduation.  She didn't know that she did, mind you.  To her it was just an off hand comment.  But I was so starved for any kind of attention I interpreted it as having much deeper meaning."
     I didn't want to talk about it any more.  I never want to talk about it.  I knew a kind of constant fear of every having to deal with this person ever again.  After a short while, Joe wanted to talk again.
     "So, that is your nightmare?"
     "In a sense, I guess.  Its emblematic.  My nightmares, the ones when I'm asleep, involve having to deal with her.  Or my best friend.  Or some of my other close friends from back then.  Or the only woman I've ever loved, whose parents once offered to pay me to sleep with her because it might break up her relationship with her boyfriend.  They did not like him.  My nightmares harken back to a time when I still had promise and potential, a time when my life could have been anything other than utterly wasted.  Come to think of it, if I ever do kill myself, that's the line I want as both my note and on the headstone.  Not that I think anyone would pop for a headstone.  'There was a time when I had potential and promise, and friends expected great things from me.'  My nightmares are just dream versions of the truth of my situation.  That I have no meaningful emotional connections because I pissed them all away.  My nightmares remind me that I am unloved, Joe, and that the people who might have helped me save myself from that simply ran out of patience long ago."
     "Oh."
     "Yeah.  And I may have hidden the point, but I am a monster because I effectively used a total hateful impulse to manipulate someone into my life.  And I wasn't especially kind to her while she was enduring all my bullshit.  Can't be that pissed that she grew tired of it.  Or that she threw me out of her life.  Just wish she had done it face to face."
     "She do it over the phone?"
     "No, —"
     "Because I'm betting this is before email and texting."
     "There was email.  She had an email account through the university.  No, she had her roommate do it."
     "Ouch."
     "Could have been worse.  She could have had her boyfriend do it.  Or my best friend.  Important thing is that she doesn't have to deal with me anymore.  And my nightmare is as much that she would have to deal with me, me like I was then, as much as it is that I would have to deal with her.  Or any of a number of people from back then.  But she is the easiest one to explain."
     "So, your nightmares are what, just talking to her?"
     "They tend to be a little more involved than that.  They are still nightmares, but I don't think there is any substitute imagery.  The things that scare me are the truths of my life.  I would like to be able to hide from those in my dreams."
     "Ah."
     "You still want to talk nightmares, Joe."
     "Yeah, I do.  But not with you.  Yours are kind of fucked up."
     "Thanks."
     "You should probably see somebody about them."
     "They're just dreams, Joe."  I said this last bit with a forced, wry smile.  "They don't mean anything."

Dreamers (Original Text - Part Eleven) (1997)

     When I get around to rewriting this story (and I mean thoroughly rewriting it), I hope to avoid hammering a term into the readers heads like I unintentionally did here with "the group".  Can't be that lazy in my writing.  Fine for a first draft to get the idea out there (and all I really have is the rough draft), but it doesn't help if one wants their work to feel complete.
     Anyway, another incredibly short section. 

XI

     Nancy didn't like not getting together with the group, especially when it was everyone.  Still, she decided to follow through on her decision to explore a relationship with a man she knew and respected.  He wasn't from the group.  He probably wouldn't have much interest in the group.  It would be a shame to lose him because of the group.  Besides, Nancy could keep who she wanted from the group.  In the long run, she could deal with most of them being out of her life.
     Jason MacLeod was almost part of that subset.  He would have been if he wasn't going out with Melissa.  Nancy's discoveries about his sexual tastes, and the subsequent conversations they had engaged in had been enough to make her question the friendship he and she shared.  Well, that wasn't entirely true.  They were still friends, and they would probably stay friends for quite a while.  Nancy could, in Jason's terms, afford such a friendship.  She wasn't bound by work or school constraints.  She came from a family with less money than Vicki's, but unlike Vicki, Nancy wasn't encouraged to work.  Her parents liked giving her money.
     Not everybody was like that.  Not everybody was privileged or damned, and maybe more information should be had before she rushed to judgment on Jason.  He was, supposedly, in a faithful and satisfying relationship with Melissa.  He He had come so close to telling Melissa he loved her the night before.  There was a chance that he had said it at some point when Nancy was out of ear shot.  But he had spent the night on the couch, and Melissa slept in Jason's bedroom with Nancy.  It was a good thing because Nancy felt disoriented all night, and Nancy had something Jason was reluctant to call Night Terrors.
     Nancy wasn't out with the group, so she couldn't talk to anyone in it about how she was feeling.  She didn't want to draw her new interest into their ways, at least not as it stood.  Worst of all, she still wanted to know what had gotten her all rattled.  She instead decided to patiently wait for her man.  The patience helped.

Dreamers (Original Text - Part Ten) (1997)

     I actually remember the dream that inspired this section, and suspect that I would even if I hadn't loosely adapted it for fiction.  Not a lot of dreams stick with me for years.  I don't think I did the original justice, nor do I think that I really got the elements I wanted to introduce as an author.  Still not horrible.  Not without problems, either.  I have let a couple of very problematic sentences stand as written in testament to that.
     There was a lot that was supposed to follow from this section, but I think it will have to be in a completely separate story as I can't see it making the cut in the rewritten Dreamers.  The entire angle of J.B. as the wannabe author goes nowhere and shouldn't have been introduced.  But it is there in the original text.

X

     It was a nice house.  The problem was he couldn't remember it being his.  It was Victorian design he thought.  He and his mother lived there.  Maybe.  It looked like the house in the movie "Casper".  It was just J.B. and his mother.  The inside was dusty and vacant.  As he wandered through it, he could not find a single piece of furniture.  No matter which room he ventured into his mother was just within earshot.
     It was a gloomy, depressing house.  J.B. couldn't have been happier that his friends would soon be over to take him out for the evening.  It felt like late fall or early winter, but there was no snow on the ground.  Cold wind blew dead and crisp brown leaves across the front yard.  The sense of death was scary.  His older brother's old sort-of girlfriend, from the days of high school.
     She was like a shadow lurking in the halls just outside of whatever room J.B. was in.  When they shared the halls, she would shrink back, almost into herself.  From time to time she would actually find herself capable of asking where J.B.'s brother was.
     "Where's Magnus?  When will he be back?"
     J.B.'s older brother, Magnus Bradley Binghampton, never went by Magnus.  Their grandparents called him Gus.  He himself went by Brad, but this girl always thought she was closer to him because she called him by his God given name.  J.B. himself always had trouble dealing with that.  Just as much as he did with calling her "Debbie".  He remembered it because she was blonde and the older brother wasn't all that into blondes, so each one stood out.
     "I don't know when he'll be back," J.B. snapped when she asked the question three times in a row.  He didn't think that the older brother actually lived in this house.  It didn't feel like it.  There was a certain air that he would have lent to the structure, and it wasn't there.  How fitting that he had managed to leave his high school baggage behind him, and tragic that J.B. was stuck with it.
     J.B. was off towards the front door before the eerie doorbell even rang.  He knew it would be a flock of friends, males and females, that imagined sense of belonging without attachment that could only be fostered in high school.  It was like a movie from the Seventies depicting the Fifties or early Sixties.  It wasn't real, but since it happened, it had to be considered real.
     He couldn't even remember the first six people who came through the door.  The seventh he remembered because he lost his virginity to her, but he couldn't put a name to the face.  That was probably just as well.  His closer friends were toward the back.  He saw some faces that seemed out of place, but they were good friends.  Just as Larry Pudenski was coming through the vast double doors everything seemed alright.
     "I didn't expect you to bring a small army."
     A strong gust of wind blew one of the heavy doors off its hinges. J.B. caught hold of the handle as it was blown inside the house.  He barely managed to keep his feet on the ground.
     "I certainly didn't expect that to happen."
     J.B. and Larry managed to put the door back in place, and everyone quickly had their fill of the house.  J.B. announced to his mother, who was in the house, somewhere, that they would all be leaving.  The entourage had already gone outside and most were standing by or leaning up against Larry Pudenski's ugly orange truck.  The only thing missing was for about a quarter of the guys to be wearing letterman's jackets.  That would have made it perfectly high school.
     Outside with them was Debbie.  She was next to what looked like a metal bike rack, but there was no reason for one to be at the house.  She was dressed well for the cold weather.  She had a loose knit hat and a scarf to go with he dull synthetic coat.  Her face was red from the cold and the wind.  She was a ghost to the group.
     "Where's Magnus?"
     "I don't know where he is."
     "When will he be back."
     J.B. made his way over to where she was standing so that the conversation was between just the two of them.  No one else was paying attention, but it was wise to use good form.  This close he could tell she had been crying.  She shivered with the cold.
     "I don't think he's coming back."  J.B. paused to let her take in that statement.  "You know, he's probably off with Chloe.  The girl he's in love with."
     "Oh."  She looked as though she had never even considered that to be a possibility.
     "Yeah, so you probably shouldn't wait for him," J.B. offered.
     "Oh," she said again, her face blank.  Then it filled with emotion.  "But I love him so much, I can't imagine him not wanting to see me.  Where is he?"  She went on and on.  In short order her words became little more than a cry with different tones.
     She fell into J.B.'s arms as he reached out to her.
     "Listen, —"
     But she just kept crying.
     "You'll be fine."  He gave her shoulder a squeeze.  She stopped crying.
     "Thanks, J.B.," she said.  She stood on her toes and kissed him on the cheek.
     He responded by quickly kissing her.  At first he only kissed her lower lip.  It was an odd sensation, but she didn't resist.  He kissed her again and got it right this time.  It was passionate in its trappings, but driven by nothing.  She felt warm in his arms.
     "Oh, J.B., I love you so much, ..."  She gave the same list had just given for his brother.

     *     *     *     *     *     *    

     Now awake, J.B. was torn between calling his brother and telling him about the dream, or using it as the launching point for his latest story.  He chose the latter.  His brother could read about it later.  J.B. had an awful of habit on not following through on things.  He dropped out of Med School in the sixth week.  He had no trouble making it as an EMT.  It was a shorter, safe route.

     J.B. fancied himself as being the next James Joyce.  He purposely copied Joyce's style because it was the one he admired most.  So long as there were praises to be sung for Joyece, there had to be so echoes to be passed along to J.B.

The 2011-2012 Reading Project to Date (August - December)

     I thought I would give a visual recap of titles covered to date as part of the 2011-2012 Reading Project.  Sure, it is much less loaded with serious titles than the 2010-2011 Reading Project, but it already has more non-fiction titles in the first five months so I have not abandoned hope.  There are quite a few types of fiction covered, too, so I don't feel as though I have locked into just reading types of books.  Sure, there are five Dover Thrift Edition titles in the mix (one quarter of the books read), but they are just so damned affordable.
     Anyway, feel free to comment on any of the titles you may have read and enjoyed (or hated). I feel rather confident that most people will have read at least three of these books.  Or just take note that this would only be six rows of books if I yanked the comic books and graphic novels out.  I would like to say that fourteen of the titles pictured were courtesy of the Forest Park Public Library and another four were borrowed from family members, so the 2011-2012 Reading Project has been quite economical to date.

The Imperial Cruise by James Bradley, Walking the Tightrope of Reason by Robert Foegelin, Great Short Short Stories edited by Paul Negri, and What Jesus Meant by Garry Wills

Conan the Barbarian Michael A. Stackpole, Seinfeld and Philosophy edited by William Irwin, The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, and Naked Heat by Richard Castle

Kremin issues 1-4 by Charles Moissant

A Study in Scarlet by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Ian Edginton, and I.J.N. Culbard, The Beast of Chicago by Rick Geary, and School issues 1-4 by Brian Defferding

Wrath issues 1-7, written by Mike W. Barr, mostly drawn by David Ammerman (Malibu Comics)

The Night Man issues 1-15 (Malibu Comics)

Rousseau's Dog by David Edmonds and John Eidinow, "Cat Calls" by Cynthia Leitich Smith, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain, "Rogue Hunter #1 – Gaia: Into the Abyss" by Kevis Hendrickson, and Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene, Richard Castle's Deadly Storm by Brian Bendis, Kelly Sue Deconnick, and Lan Medina, Lord of the Flies by William Golding, and The Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Greece by Robert Morkot

The Hellenistic Age by Peter Green, "The New World" by Patrick Ness, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, and The Audacity of Hope by Barack Obama

The Dead that Walk edited by Stephen Jones, "They" by Vincent Hobbes, The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, The Zombie Survival Guide: Recorded Attacks by Max Brooks, and Blockade Billy by Steven King

Dreamers (Original Text - Part Nine) (1997)

     I am pretty sure my intention was always to go back an develop the mini-scenes at the beginning of this section into full blown chapters.  I never did.  As a matter of fact, this is the last section where I tried to force to original concept of the story into what was developing.  It doesn't mesh well.  There is some decent dialogue, though.  Not great descriptive text, but I think I was trying to be very minimalistic with that.

If you are at all curious as to what page Nancy opens the Social Psychology book to, it would look very much like this.

IX

     It was a rule of life that could be depended upon.  Dave Burke didn't remember his dreams.  Technically, that was still true.  When he woke up, at five fifteen Saturday morning, he had known it was because of something in a dream.  It didn't feel scary, just something sudden.  Like a quick muscle movement in response to some imagined stimuli.  But he knew it was something in a dream.
     The day would be like this.  Burke didn't regret agreeing to work today.  First of all, overtime at eight and a quarter an hour was a healthy wage, and money was money.  More importantly, the shift he was taking belonged to Anika Lang, a young blonde who Burke desperately wanted to be better acquainted with.  A relationship can only go so far at the workplace, and Anika had always been friendly there.  She was going to a cousin's wedding or some such.
     Work.  Work on a Saturday.  No time for the band.  But people work on Saturday, one way or the other.

     Not more than an hour and half later, Larry Pudenski and Mike Carver were back at the warehouse setting up for the whole fleet of company vehicles.  An electrical explosion at one of the job sites set up for an emergency work day.  All other jobs, both company and side, would wait.  Mr. Pudenski and Don were already at the site.  It was just a matter, now, of getting the appropriate supplies and manpower there to fix what went wrong.  Or, more likely, to get the damage repaired and restore power; sometimes the source of the problems couldn't be addressed right away.
     For Mike Carver, it would be another day of lecturing.  He could tune it out easily enough.  The job was demanding; it would be the priority.  Neither Mr. Pudenski or Larry would have time, early on, to go off on a tangent.  For better or worse, the day would end at a bar or pizzeria with pitchers of beer.  Things could get worse than that.
    
     "I can't believe I agreed to do this."
     "You don't have anything else to do, and I could use the help.  Besides, you wanted some answers, right?"
     "The anger?"
     "Exactly.  Tit for tat."
     Nancy let a small laugh escape and turned back to the pile of books Jason had put in front of her.  "And you want to know what got me over J.B.?"
     "It wasn't sex.  He would have said something.  My guess is that you met somebody."
     "No.  I think its more that I've finally not needed someone."
     "Page two fifty eight, Social Psych."  This was met by only a blank look on Nancy's face.  "They gray book with the ferris wheel on the cover."
      Nancy opend the book.  Beneath a bar graph and a paragraph or two filled with green highlighted text was the sub-chapter heading in boldface: The Market Value of Physical Attractiveness.
     "That's not what I had in mind."
     "I need you to retype that entire sub-chapter so it can be photocopied."
     "Again, not what I had in mind."
     "I am paying you for this.  And you'll get your answers."
     She began to type the text into the computer, but not so carefully that spellchecker wouldn't be necessary.  Jason would be reading over other subjects in other books and typing them into another of his computers.
     "How does a poor boy like you afford three computers?"
     "I never throw anything away."  Jason gestured to an older model that sat in the corner of his bedroom collecting dust.  "That's from the late eighties.  It will serve to do this, but not much else.  No good for games."  He thumped the one he was working on.  "This is about three years old.  Its almost as bad as the first.  The beauty you are working with is the best prize I've ever won.  A three and a half thousand dollar computer, over five thousand dollars worth of programs and accessories."
     "That's a lot of luck.  Like with the stereo."
     "You're taking your luck from somebody."
     "Karma?"
     "That would imply you deserve it.  You cruise through school.  Don't give me that look, Jason.  You might bust your ass but you got all the breaks.  You have the school supporting you best it can.  You got Melissa the second you lost Stacy.  Somebody is on the downside of all that."
     "Good things happen to good people."
     "Attractive people are better liars than ugly ones."
     "That's not what it says, Nancy.  People are more likely to believe the lies of attractive people than they are the lies of those they find unattractive.  The funny thing is knowing that doesn't help much.  It doesn't say that they lie more, and it doesn't help to be suspicious of those to whom you are attracted."
     Nancy began typing again.  She would have just assumed to have asked how one could tell when wariness became suspicion.  When did it go beyond concern?  When did it stop being self-protecting and turn self-destructive?  That was what Jason was studying.  Sort of.
     Instead, she asked, "Why wouldn't you want to be with Melissa?"
     "I want to marry Melissa."
     That was more than Nancy expected.  She sat silent.
     "You're asking about last Sunday?"  She responded to Jason's question with a nod.  "It's a bit of a story.  You may know some of it already.  Okay, let's get a few beers and move to someplace more comfortable."
     "Your bed?"
     "The living room."
     Nancy found herself sprawled out across Jason's couch.  She had half a bottle of Rolling Rock in her left hand.  An empty bottle was on the floor next to the couch.  She had finished it before Jason had sat down in the chair opposite her.  He held a can of Schlitz  in his right hand and wore an odd grin on his face.
     "You are aware that I don't get to see Melissa much.  Not given how close we live to one another at any rate.  There is the assumption that I love her, that I am in love with her.  I won't dismiss those notions.  There are few times that I can find reason to not want to be with her.  Then there are my friends.
     "I need to spend time with my friends.  I know a lot of them from high school, or college.  They aren't like my colleagues.  God, I have colleagues.  But it isn't the same thing.  These friends of mine are slipping away.  Maybe that's natural, but it doesn't sit well with me.  If you didn't have the luxury of being able to take the time, you wouldn't be here today.  If you were Larry or J.B., or even Vicki, you wouldn't have that luxury.  And I wouldn't have the luxury to accommodate your free time if it weren't for your willingness to help me get some work done.
     "I spent a night with my friends.  Melissa would have spent it with hers up at Northwestern if you hadn't dragged her down to your parents' house."
     "I still qualify as one of Melissa's friends."
     "Yes, you do.  And she has a batch of friends from school.  Just like you and I did in Ann Arbor."
     "But you were a frat-boy."
     "I got better.  And I even found a better school without having to leave the Midwest.  Where was I?"
     "Friends.  Hers and yours."
     "I'll skip that.  Nancy, it was like you wanted me gone, wanted me trapped with Melissa.  Not a bad place to be trapped, but I don't want to have to give up the people who have meant so much to me for so long.  I don't want to be told that I have to be with 'the woman'.  Didn't it used to be okay for me to drop by unannounced and pick up some people to do something?  It was as though you wanted to expedite my exodus."
     "The anger?"
     "Sometimes its fun to be angry."
     "Therapeutic?"
     "No.  Probably a little harmful in the long run.  But it can be fun."
     Nancy finished off her second beer.  Jason wasn't done with his can of Schlitz.
     "Ready to go back to work, Miss Klein?"
     She smiled, although it was a bit forced.  Jason hadn't really said much.  There had to be more to it than Jason's lack of faith in the durability of his friendships.
     "You have another thing to answer."
     "What?"
     "It's about you and Melissa and a woman's needs."
     Jason blushed, but more than that, he dropped his beer.
     "Well?"
     "Off limits."
     "No, Jason.  You gave me bullshit about the anger.  I want an answer to this one."
     "It's about sex.  I can't imagine that there is anything I can say about the topic that would be unknown to you."
     "I don't know much about the sex between you and Melissa."
     "Thankfully."  He couldn't look her in the eye.  "What has Melissa told you?"
     She only smiled coyly.  It was most definitely not forced.
     "The woman's needs phrase refers to the fact that Melissa wants more physical contact."
     "You mean sex."
     "Not necessarily one in the same."
     This time it was Nancy who turned red.  She couldn't help but give a nervous laugh.  "Phone sex?  You talked Melissa into having phone sex with you?  And I'm guessing this is one a regular basis."
     "Well, I'm glad I told you.  Now."
     "Isn't that some sort of perversion?  Or sexual deviance?  Do you prefer it to real sex?"
     "Because this isn't where I wanted this conversation to go."
     "I'm serious."
     "No, I prefer real sex.  Very much so.  But there are time constraints, and it's still with her..."
     "It's twisted."
     "That's why we don't talk about, Nancy."
     "Does it mean a lot that it is with her?"  He nodded.  "Then it's sweet." 
     "I've gone from perverted and deviant to twisted in sweet in less than a minute."
     "Quick recovery, Dr. MacLeod."
     She was laughing and Jason was about to continue the banter, but he noticed something about her eyes.  It was actually in her eyes.  There was a flash of light, and he had no idea what it meant.  There was no reason for him to have known as not many people had experienced it themselves.  Nancy had.  It was something spectacular.
     Then she was on the floor, almost unconscious.  He was over like a shot.
     "Bad acid flashback?"
     "Something just happened – to someone."
     "Are you okay?  You look dazed."
     "I don't know who..."
     He helped her onto the couch.  She was going on about some sort of psychic event.  He didn't bother to try to explain that psychologists used psychic in a different context than laypersons.  She calmed down a bit, more to ease Jason's mind than because of any direct influence he may have had.
     "So, you're psychic?  Why aren't I analyzing your dreams, then?"
     Nancy gave him the bird.
     "Then what was it."
     "Someone we know, and something bad."
     "Do you like deluding yourself like this?"
     She propped herself up on an elbow.  "Would you rather talk about your twisted virtual sex life?"
     "Just the sweet part."
     "I know what I'm talking about."
     "You sound like J.B.  Did he ever tell you about when the werewolf stole him out of his bed?  I think he was five.  It just snatched him up in his blanket and ran off with him.  But something was chasing the werewolf.  Like a white knight.  The creature threw him under the stairs and escaped out the front door."
     "That's just a story."
     "A dream.  But he woke up under the stairs wrapped in the same blanket.  He thought he had a demon after him.  He might still; it isn't something we talk about, he and I.  There is too much there for me to read into."
     She almost forget that Jason was mocking her sixth sense.  She didn't believe in it, not very often at least.  Then there were times it couldn't be defined.  It was more than coincidence.  Maybe J.B.'s dream was like that.  It was a definite insight into his make-up as a person.
     "Should we call it quits for the night?  You're still shaken.  I'm going to call Melissa—"
     "From a different room, please.  I don't want to watch that."
     He had no immediate response.  It was too well timed.  Like the time his Chemistry T.A. had added "-less" to a girl's statement about how much she was worth.  He should have laughed.  He wanted to.  Unfortunately, he was beginning to feel some sickness in his stomach.  Like he had just lost his best friend.  Or someone had walked on his grave.  He sat down on the couch and quietly told Nancy as much.  He didn't like to think that perception could exist beyond the perceivable.  Her state had now affected him.
     "I am going to get Melissa here."
     "I should go, then."
     "No."
     "She and I are friends, but not even for you, Jason."
     "I'm touched, but I would rather stay working.  If you're right about this, maybe I could do a research paper on this para-psychological event into something publishable.  I could be the next Peter Venkman."  He didn't wait for her to ask who that was.  "Bill Murray in Ghostbusters."
     "No thanks."
     "Then I'm a concerned friend who want to take care of you, and wants his girlfriend to help out."
     "On one condition."
     He said he was open to suggestions.  He said he wanted a list of options to choose from.  He used a lot of words to say so.
     "Tell Melissa you want to marry her."
     "Eventually."
     "Because that's all that makes it sweet."  She could tell Jason wasn't listening.  "The only thing that makes any of this perversion at all acceptable is that it is very important that it is Melissa, and not someone else."
     "I don't want a lecture."
     "But I know sex.  You have to let her know how much you care.  Let her know that its about love, not your getting your rocks off."
     "When she gets here."
     "Because I'm scared to be here with you until then."  She drew him in with her eyes.  "Were you angry because you thought I was going to wreck your perfect little system?  You call her when you need her, and then you are done.  She's a fun little tool, and real sex is great, but since time matters a phone call will do it?"
     "She and I worked this out, Nancy.  It doesn't sound romantic, and it probably isn't.  It is part of the system.  You want me to throw that away for love."
     "You love her!"
     "I've never told any woman that I love her."
     Nancy wanted to say something meaningful.  "Not even your mother?  Or your sisters?  No one?"
     "Not since I turned twenty one.  Not even my Gramma.  Nancy, I consider you a good friend, but I'm not real comfortable talking about all of this.  I've told Pudenski I love him, because he's like the brother I never had.  I told Lew Pittman, too.  I haven't gotten beyond that."
     It gave Nancy a huge insight into Jason MacLeod.  He and Larry had been friends since they were five.  Llewellyn Pittman was a friend to both of them, but he died when they were all in high school.  Nancy guessed that it was just as likely that Jason told Lew how much he cared for him at the funeral as it was that he said it when he was alive.  Then in college he decided he wasn't going to tell anyone he loved them?  That would have coincided with Stacy Andrews.
     "Is this all about St. Andrews?"
     "I always hated that you called her that."
     "Your Catholic princess.  The light of your life.  Wasn't she still a virgin when you two started dating?"
     "At least we are beyond the idea that you're a psychic."
     "I still want to talk about that."
     "You're just better at talking about sex."
     "I believe I can paraphrase it by saying 'you preach what you know.'"  She was starting to feel better.  "I want another beer.  And I want to talk about St. Andrews.  And it would be nice it you would believe me about this feeling.  Iwas right about Lynn leaving Larry."
     "Nice alliteration.  And all you said was that Lynn was going to go back to New York."
     "She did!"
     "Four weeks later.  Then they didn't break up for another month."  He sighed.  "You know if I don't call Melissa now, I won;t be able to get her here."  Jason walked over toward the kitchen, looking for the phone.  "And no more beer for you."