{ 32 } The Truth Is Never Pretty

Hey there, Super Fans!

I've got a new find for you. I guess it's really not a "find" since I never lost it, but I have had it tucked away for a decade. It's another one of my "This Happened to Me" pieces, like "Billy."

A few distinct key differences: where "Billy" was raw and real and my soul laid bare, this piece is slightly more... embellished. For example, the main "me" character is way more shallow than I have ever been.

Next, "Billy" has an ending, a very concrete ending. This story ends with an adverb: "then." Why, you ask? Not entirely sure. Maybe it was due to laziness, maybe that I was all I had to say, or maybe because it's a story that doesn't end. Maybe it's still being written.

Also, in "Billy," the antagonist is dead and had been for awhile when I wrote it. In this piece, the antagonist is very much still alive. And that's why I waited to publish this piece. I wanted him to read it before I let all of you, because it's not exactly flattering. So, it only took a decade (original creation date is September 2005!), but he finally read it and I got the green light.

A quick bit of backstory: when I wrote this piece, I was surfacing back from one of the biggest meltdowns of my life. If you've ever seen me meltdown, you know that's saying a lot. There was so much hurt and anger and sadness and confusion going on, none of which was made better by the free-flowing alcohol and severe lack of responsibility. It took years and years for some of the hurt to heal. But it finally did, like it always does. I'm just glad (most) of us lived through it.

Enough of that. On with the show.

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SAM

Enter, page one, our first character: Sam Dumpy Mousekiwitz. From henceforth he shall be referred to as “Sam,” “Dumpy,” “Dumpy Mousekiwitz,” or “Mr. Mousekiwitz,” but never again as the name in full. Here is the last time you will see it in print in its entirety, so take in its full magnitude and remember it well: Sam Dumpy Mousekiwitz.

Of course, this was not the same Sam I had fallen in love with a year before. No, that was Sam the REAL ROCK STAR, self proclaimed. Never mind the fact that he could barely play guitar and sung no better than a sty full of sow. He did, however, possess that certain je ne sas quoi that only rock stars have, including the abilities to do copious amounts of drugs, drink like a fish, and throw temper-tantrums at the mere thought of not getting what they want.

I had initially fallen in love with him, as stated a year before, as a way to give in to my rebellious urges. Sam was the king of Robert Smith hair, a self-perpetuating alcoholic, and hotter than the ever-blazing fires of Hell. I wanted him bad, but alas, I was spoken for and he was only nineteen.
Regardless, he eventually aged and I eventually singled and, after a painful lust year, I finally acquired my prize.

In the beginning it seemed ideal: me, a punk rock princes with my gorgeous trophy rock star on my arm; him, a slobbering drunken mess with a fabulous older woman there to clean up after him. It was a match made in Hell and I relished every hardcore minute of it.

We spent the vast majority of our time together drunk and on his couch, surrounded by a never ending parade of other drunks. Sam still wasn't old enough to patronize the local bars, but I was more than happy to float through the days on our blurry oasis. The closeness of our persons and the constant state of intoxication, however, were beginning to cloud my judgment and make me overlook certain unavoidable, damaging traits that Sam was beginning to acquire.

For example, the sexy army pants he most commonly wore had been replaced by a heinous pair of orange (orange!) slacks from J. Crew (J. Crew!). What was happening?

Sam also had a black leather punk jacket, meticulously adorned with pins, paint, and patches. The delicious leather jacket was one of the things that helped define Sam as a rock star. Every shiny bit of metal that graced its surface was actually a medal, a badge proving he was worthy of stomping around town, throwing up on sidewalks, and screaming his particular brand of “music” into microphones. The jacket may have been a typical and traditional uniform, but it was also one of the very reasons I had initially been attracted to him, as ridiculous and petty as it may seem in hindsight. What can I say: I like shiny things.

However, more and more recently, the jacket was shoved to the back of the closet in favor of a disgusting red and black striped knit sweater, frayed at all edges from the constant picking, twisting, and tearing that Sam's busy hands would subject it to. It was hideous.

The change in clothing was nothing compared to the physical changes Sam was going through. His passion for drugs had waned and every night without an illicit substance coursing through his body became another inch around his waist. I didn't know it at the time, even though it is abundantly clear now, that this sickening, fat, terribly dressed thing I was dating was no longer Sam, but Dumpy Mousekiwitz.

Dumpy was Sam's alter ego. Or perhaps Dumpy was the dominate one. No matter: I did not like what I was seeing, and it was completely unacceptable for a woman of superior quality, me, to be dating this repulsive creature.

I had learned early on that the best way to improve my own social status was to date the best of the best: the ceaselessly attractive, the hardest partier, the most well-known. I am a social creature and defined by the societies I am surrounded by. It was a dog-eat-dog world and if I couldn't be the top of the food chain then I had no business eating. This was why Dumpy was so damaging to my reputation. I simply could not be seen with a sloppily dressed blob masquerading as a human.

Let's zoom back to page one for a moment, when you, the reader, first met Dumpy Mousekiwitz. Let me set up the scenario for you: I was sitting on the trashy couch in the trashy house Dumpy called home. The room was always in a perpetual state of disarray because of the copious amount of liquored-up children that were always crammed in between the walls. This is not a complaint, because I was a constant fixture in the room also. This was the place to come to see people and to be seen.

When Dumpy entered the room, everyone gave him an affectionate smile. I say affectionate, but I really knew they were more pity smiles. The others saw that the change had happened, too.

I hadn't seen Dumpy for a quarter of an hour or so. I figured he had probably been off telling the latest round of revolving-door roommates how happy he was to have them living on his couch. He stood in front of me and declared that we needed to take a shower because he was “all dried out”.
Dried out? He looked like he was retaining enough water to put out a forest fire, if squeezed the proper way. Plus, the very last thing I wanted to do was leave the party to, of all thing, take a shower.

Then-


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{ 29 } Andy Made Me Write This

So, Andy forced me to write a thing. And I did. I hate it. What do you think?

-----
Sometimes you do the acid; sometimes the acid does you.

Renee felt her house shift below her feet.
Was that an earthquake? No, earthquakes don't happen in Nebraska.
 That's when Renee remembered the two hits of acid she had taken.
Oh, fuck. I'm fucked.
Renee looked at the walls of her house: they were melting. Bricks moving in and out, as if some divine hand was pushing messages through from the outside. Pets: melting. Hands: melting.

Milk, milk, milk. I need milk.

Renee picked up the phone and called Luke.
Luke! I need milk!
Luke, on the other end of the line, was not confused. He knew. He knew what Renee had done.
Hang on, baby. I'm on my way. With milk.

Time... Time... Time passes...

Renee: I'm fucking dying!
Luke: I brought you a gallon of milk!
Renee: It's solid! It's solid!
Luke: No! Renee! Sleep!
Renee: Luke. I'm okay. I'm not... melting.
Luke: Renee... You're not melting. Lay down. Go to sleep...
Renee:  Sleep. I should melt in to sleep...

And she did.

Renee slept. Sordid dreams.
But in the morning, all was okay. No melting.
-----

It's a short. It has an ending. Pffft.

{ 25 } Oh, CRAP!

I just realized it's been ten months since I last posted, and way longer than that since I posted anything substantial. Such a slacker. But, life gets in the way of living, you know.

I decided that I needed to provide you with some new fodder. So, I dug up some old fodder to entertain you. I now present you with a very short short story with an open-ended plot I originally wrote 6 August 2008 called "It's A Marvelous Night For A Moondance".  Enjoy.

* * * * *

It's A Marvelous Night For A Moondance


A thin line of smoke drifted toward the ceiling from the cigarette pressed between her fingers. Her head was pounding. It was the same thing, only a different day: tired, bored, and hung over.

She watched as the smoke curled and twisted in the slight breeze that was slipping under the bedroom door. What day was it? Monday? Thursday? It didn't matter any more. Everyday was like the last in her constant haze. All that mattered was that she was lying comfortably, smoking. In the back of her mind was a lingering thought that she had something she was supposed to be doing, but it was trumped by the feeling that her head was in a vice.

The phone rang and she disregarded it, closing her eyes. She mentally begged it to stop, but the phone didn't comply. Almost tempted to get up and answer it, she thought the better and didn't move. There wasn't going to be anyone on the other end that she wanted to talk to anyway. Her mom, a bill collector, maybe even a drinking buddy. None of them mattered. What mattered was that she didn't move. Her headache was too big.

Finally her smoke needed to be ashed. Where the fuck was the ashtray? The only thing she could see was her cigarette in the faint bit of light drifting in from the closed curtains.

She closed her eyes again. Movement was becoming a necessity if she didn't want to ash on the floor. The ashtray wasn't on the ground next to her. No, that was too far away. It wasn't balanced on her stomach. She'd be able to feel it. The only possible place it could be was on the bed, opposite of the direction she was facing. She slowly rotated her pounding head, eyes still closed.

Once the pain of movement had subsided, she allowed her eyes to flutter open. She had found the ashtray, but she had also gotten a first glimpse of the man lying in bed next to her.

She knew who he was. She hadn't brought a stranger home from the bar. No, she had brought him home from the bar.

He was in his boxers, sleeping peacefully enough: attractive face calm, hands crossed delicately over chest, breaths slow and rhythmic. Every inch of his body was relaxed and vulnerable.

It was then that her thoughts turned to murder.

* * * * *

{ 22 } The Lost Has Now Been Found!

So, if you remember back to Post #14, I introduced a story called "Billy" that I had written for a massive online writing contest called Field Report. Well, shortly after I had submitted said story, the proprietors of FR suffered some family tragedy. Despite being hailed as the best thing for writers since the invention of the actual written word from every blog about wrting to MFing Time magazine, FR went down.

And guess what went down with it? That's right, "Billy". The best short story I've ever written... primarily because it's the only one I've actually finished, but also because it's damn good.

Anyway, alright, no problem, I should have the story backed upped on at least ten sources, right? Right?

Eh, not-so-much. I thought I did, but an extensive search of Jihad (the desktop) and Mustachio (the laptop) turned up nothing. I even emailed the only address I could find for one of the original starters of FR in a desperate hope that he had a back up of all stories submitted. No dice. The IRL Billy was dead and the story "Billy" was lost. A winner am I.

But then something awesome happened: the BF's laptop stopped working. Doesn't sound that good, right? Probably not in the usual sense, but the death of the Mac forced him to back up and move all the files from the old Mac to the new. And that's when the amazing BF stumbled across "Billy".

Before you get in to this story, I AM still working on SSIBWO. And I have a new article on Examiner. Read. And read.

Without further ado, I present to you "Billy" in its full, unadulterated, lost-on-the-interwebs-but-found-by-an-awesome-BF-by-total-mistake form. Remember that this is a true story and I lived every sad, honest minute of it. Enjoy, cry, whatever.

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BILLY

I am fourteen years old. I am still too young to know about the world, so I hold beliefs and prejudices that have no merit or reason. Of course, I wont know about this until later, when I am old enough to realize that life doesn't fit neatly into a little, narrow box.

I travel to Arizona to see my friend Erik who still lives in the town I left four years prior. While I was gone, I was trying my best to fit in to a place where everybody had known each other from birth. Erik, however, had remained and was flourishing in those very same types of relationships.

"Wait until you meet my friends," he boasts. "You'll love them." And I do: funny, artsy, creative. All the things I had lost in the move, none of the things my new friends were. One of Erik's friends sparks my attention the most: Billy.

Billy is like no one I had ever met. As witty and spunky as Erik and I are, Billy tops us. We shoot some short films, as we used to do before I left, and Billy plays every part assigned to him as if he were born for the role. My trip down Memory Lane is now tinged with a schoolgirl crush on a boy I hardly even know.

My last night in town, my world is rocked. For our Friday evening entertainment, we’re going to an all-ages night at a club; a gay club. I am staggered. In my young, small-minded views, being gay wasn’t right. How could these people that I admire so much think that it was okay?

“You can be straight, but you don’t have to be narrow,” Billy tells me. While I'm not really sure what to think, Billy currently holds sway over my juvenile heart. If Billy says it’s fine, then I’ll go along for the ride.

* * *

I am fifteen years old. Billy and I have been holding a long-distance friendship, talking at least once a week. I hear about his girlfriend, about his new apartment, about his cat that he named after one of the crossdressers from the club. It’s light and fun and innocent, until reality slaps me across the face.

“I broke up with my boyfriend this week,” Billy tells me. I’m puzzled.

“Don't you mean your girlfriend?” I must have misheard. I was sure Billy had a girlfriend. He had mentioned her on more then one occasion.

“Well, I broke up with her too.” Pause. “I’m bi-sexual.” I swallow hard. How could this be real? How could this person that I cared so much for be something that I thought was so wrong? I panicked.

“I’ll have to call you back,” fell out of my mouth. I had a hard reality to face: either this witty, beautiful, lively boy was really something disgusting and to be hated, or I was being ignorant and blind. Had I really been narrow-minded all this time for no reason? How could I love something I thought I hated?

* * *

I am sixteen years old. I return again to Arizona to visit Erik. While he is preoccupied with his girlfriend and his job, I take a day to spend with Billy.

His bi-sexual facade has ended: Billy is gay. All my illusions of us ever being together vanish as I read the “I Know What Boys Like!” sticker on the back of his car, visit his tiny studio apartment and glance at the naked man calendar on his wall, and accidentally stumble on to his collection of “adult pleasure” devices.

We sit under his black light as he makes me a tape of dance remixes. I have come to accept that Billy is still the same boy I fell in young love with two years prior, still charming and witty.

Except now, perhaps as a way for me to justify and embrace my new-found tolerance, instead of just calling him my friend Billy, my mind refers to him as “my gay friend Billy”. I don’t view it as negative. Actually, I don’t view it as anything. Simply, he’s gay, he’s my friend, and he’s Billy.

We drive around Phoenix in his car listening to The Violent Femmes. At every stop sign he slows just enough to say, “S-T-oh, I’ll read it later!” and off we go with a laugh. He tells me that he has begun working in a gay bathhouse passing out towels. I’d never heard of such a thing, so he explains the concept, casually describing the anonymous sex and drug use he enjoys there. He also tells me that he is HIV positive.

I am floored. Billy has yet again thrown me a curve ball. My mind races back to when he had first told me has was bi, then gay. Now this? I was right to be so fascinated by him, as every encounter we have ever had has forced me to grow up a little more. I was again faced with a choice: abandon him out of fear for the disease in his body that I knew very little about or continue to accept my friend.

* * *

I am nineteen years old. Erik calls me.

“Billy’s dead. I drove him back to his family in Montana to try and get better, but it didn’t help. The ass hole wasted a lot of my time and money just to come back to Arizona and OD. He had something I was supposed to give to you, some tapes of Disney theme songs in Swedish or something. I don’t know. I’m just glad it’s over.”

Speechless, I drop the phone. My gay friend Billy is now my dead gay friend Billy. I hadn’t spoken to him since I was last in Arizona, the night he had told me he had HIV. The night that I had learned that friendship saw no illness.

Trying to keep my voice from shaking, I press the phone back up to my ear. “Erik, why are you being so cold? Billy was our friend!”

“Not in the end,” he tells me. “His only friend was drugs. He used me and anybody else he could.”

“But, why didn’t you call me sooner? Maybe I could have helped, maybe I could have-"

Erik cuts me off. “No. We’re all better off without him. He just wasn’t the same.”

I crumble as I realize I did not get to tell Billy goodbye or how much he meant to me or how much he had opened my eyes. All that remained was the new title: my dead gay friend Billy.

* * *

I am twenty-nine years old. I have not been back to Arizona since the last night I saw Billy. I still have the mix tape he made for me in his apartment, but I can’t listen to it. The catchy, synthesized songs bring me to tears. I have spoken to Erik less times then I can count on one hand. Whenever I have, the subject inevitably turns to Billy, if only for a moment, and Erik reminds me that it’s better that he’s gone.

I never did get the audio tapes Billy willed to me. I don’t even have a picture to of him to see if the face I remember is really what he looked like.

All that is left is the memory I have of my dead gay friend Billy, the growth inspired by my gay friend Billy, the love and respect that I’ll always have for my friend Billy.

No matter what he became at the end, regardless of the title I will remember him by, he was and always will be one thing above the rest: my friend Billy.
---

{ 14 } Such A Tease!

Did you read post { 13 }, my write up of Twilight? Probably not. It looks long. I understand. It is pretty freaking good though, IMHO. I initially wrote it on my CrapTop, circa 1997, that has the ability to transfer things to floppy disc only. All well and good on my desk top, but the BF's has no floppy (and my desk top is still broken. Man, I'm lazy.). Actually, I don't think the BF has even seen a floppy drive in real life. Aw, the innocence of youth.

So what does that mean? It means that I had to retype the whole thing. That alone should make you want to read it. I did it all for you!

Moving on, a few months ago I found a website called Field Report. You basically write a short story about something that really happened to you, it goes up for peer review and comments, and the best story in each category wins a pile of cash. Right up my ally.

I wrote a short called Billy about my friend that passed away a few years ago. Mom read it and she says it all went down just like I wrote it. I have yet to have my friend Erik W. read it, though. He lived it too and is wanting my consult on a movie called Anything For Billy. Erik is the director of Flesh-Eating Ghouls from Outer Space. I kid you not.

Anyway, here's what I need from you: please, please, please go to Field Report, sign up (it's free!), read my story and "nudge" it. Then it has a better chance of getting reviewed by a larger audience. You can't actually give it a rating because it has to come up randomly. Still, nudges help! I was going to put the story here for you to read, but it really needs your support in the polls.

Show me some love, would ya?