ChrisGibson
JUB Addict
Originally, in quite altered form, a rougher version of this story appeared here some time ago. Some read that one, and some did not. No one on this forum has read this version before, so here goes...
There are so many stories that teach us that what we go through in life, and our battles and confrontations will lead us to have more strength and fortitude and be more victorious in the end, and I don’t think that’s true for the majority of people on this planet. Sometimes what we go through just makes us weaker and sadder and more pathetic, and we don’t necessarily gain any fortitude or strength from it.
-Patjim Statovici
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
-T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock , 1917
THE SKIN OF THINGS
FIRST
ESSAY
O N E
“I was too sleepy, too worn out from the days, too obsessed with trying to get beneath the skin of things. “
- Donovan Shorter’’
IT’S no good if we’re not honest. That’s the thing. After the last book was finished, the one that nobody read, I convinced myself that it was fine if I never wrote again, but that was bullshit, and even as I said it I was looking for the next story. I thought, how nice it would be to write about dragons or witches, maybe produce the next Lord of the Rings. And this is not so that I could escape. I never want to escape the world. I want to climb right inside it. The truth is the world is a magical place, and most of us simply don’t have the eyes to see it.
I was looking for the magical country, the one to start the new book in. I looked for two days. I walked in circles, up and down the neighborhoods outside of downtown, late at night while only the ivory colored moon floated like a lozenge in the black sky. I burned incense and candles when the same full moon made the whole city crazy, and the children at the school kicked each other, held up a knife to one teacher and broke into another teacher’s car. That was the same time when Grindr and Adam4Adam and every other sex app suddenly blew up with men desperate to fuck in strange places, and I’d like to say I was too wise or maybe even too moral to take them up on strange offers, but the truth is I was too sleepy, too worn out from the days, too obsessed with trying to get beneath the skin of things.
I was still looking for the root of this thing, the little sand grain in the pearl that makes one tell the story. And it was as I drifted off to sleep, with a memory of sand and grey blue water that the root came. Or the grain. And grain is a better word. For that grain of sand in the oyster is nothing but an irritation, and it is that irritation that causes the story.
I have heard the old phrase, I do not know who said it, that writing is easy, open up a vein and bleed. I have also heard someone dismiss this and say writing truly is easy. Between these two lies there lies the truth. The difference between the idea of writing and actual writing, is the five hundred feet I must walk from the steps of the Masonic temple where I am watching the moon, to this toilet where I am clicking away. The space between thinking of writing and writing is taking that little grain, which is longing, which is something next to sadness, which could quickly overwhelm you, and creating the book from it. There isn’t any other way to create something worth making. The book is filled with a whole maze of shit you just don’t want to see, or that you do not know if you can bare the full sight of. The book is a horror piece.
Now that I’ve said all this, let me set my sights on the very first thing, and you will wonder what is so horrible about it. I set my sights on Cade, and the horror of him was knowing almost right away that I loved him, knowing that he was the first interesting thing I’d seen in a long time.
Cademon Richards is tall, with a head of curls and very deep blue eyes. Deep blue eyes are a trope, and they are a white person’s trope. Not something I’d cared too much about before. Not until his, and his smile, and his slight beard, and his knitted cap and the whole business of me wondering if I was just interested in a type, a sort of white boy I had never known, but only seen in videos and comedy sketches set in Oregon. But I saw him at work. He was one of the few men in the elementary school, and I was in the kindergarten. We were the only males working with tiny children, and maybe there was some ancient mammal thing in me that is attracted to good providers, but I saw him dandle a four year old and laugh as he swung him about. I saw him leading them into the cafeteria for snack time, and pushing open their little milk cartons, poking their juices with the little straws, taking the cellophane off of their fruit cups, and I was… in love seems the wrong word. But it is not far off.
How do you tell the truth of the story of us and leave the boring parts out? Even as I tell our story, we are surrounded by half stories and half people, and it’s not nice to say, but it’s true. Oprah and everyone who ever wanted to make money out of saying it tells you that everybody has a story and everybody is interesting, but neither of those things is true. Our lives are filled with the dull and half dead, and I want to leave them out. See, coming to Cade was the opposite of the dull and the half dead. The day I saw all six feet of him him in a tee shirt over a long sleeve tee shirt, in corduroy, missing only a knit cap and perhaps a bong, laughing and taking care of those children, was the day I began to hope something interesting was about to happen.
But I should back up. This was already turning out to be the most interesting year of my life. I have to say that, and so I was primed for it to become more interesting, and here the summer was finally coming with longer, warmer days after a winter we all thought would never end, and it was in that coming of summer he looked at me, and laughed, and I laughed back.
The first thing Cade ever said to me was, “You want a kid?”
He was not proposing marriage, he was walking down the hall with a train of tiny four year olds on their way to get snack, all garbling away, and I said, without missing a beat, “Which one do you suggest?”
“Oh, you’ll have to take your chances.”
I put my finger to my chin and looked on them as he looked at me.
“What about him?”
“No,” Cade said, “Trust me. That would be a bad idea.”
Then Cade turned red and said, “I didn’t say any of that. This conversation never happened.”
“What conversation?” I asked as they filed into the cafeteria.
Secretively, Cade placed a finger alongside his nose and said, “Exactly.”
As I headed down the hall, a blond four year old raised his hand and waved, calling, “Peace out!”
I’m not sure you know what that means, I thought, laughing, because it was a quarter past one, and even though the day was over at two thirty, peacing out, was exactly what I was doing.
“There’s really nothing wrong with shoplifting,” Donovan said. “No, listen, hear my point.”
They were all sitting around the table in the teacher’s lounge, but this was the lunch hour for the staff and class assistants.
“Stealing is, say, I walk into Barb’s house. I’m like, ‘I like that clock.’ So I take her clock. It is a personal thing I am taking from a person, right? When a thief robs you, there is this asshole coming into your personal space, violating it, raping it, taking what you worked for, and fucking with your security. That’s theft.”
“Yeah,” Angie said. “But—”
“But wait,” Donovan held up his hand. “Wait, I’m not done.”
“Say there is a neighborhood store, family store, mom and pop. You know who owns it, you know who’s getting the money…”
He stopped talking. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Cade, the man from the pre school down the hall. He had come into the room, and he had the look of someone who was not looking. He had just passed through a minute ago, and it seemed like there was no reason for him to pass through again. He was walking slowly.
Donovan continued. “That is theft. But, what about when it’s a corporation?”
“What difference does that make?” Angie said.
“Because I don’t care how many evangelicals get behind some Republican bill, corporations are not people. Wal Mart, by its very existence, is cheating and stealing from us and from the government everyday, so when you walk out with twenty to thirty dollars of shit hidden away in your bags, well good for you.”
“But what about if everyone did it?” Angie said.
Donovan could feel Cade’s eyes on him. He chose to ignore them. Or maybe he was playing for him.
“But everyone doesn’t do it, Ang. That’s the thing. And even if they did, you don’t think Wal Mart has already figured that out? No, when you think about that, think you’re stealing from Mr. Wal Mart, you just don’t know how rich Mr. Wal Mart or Mr Kroger or whatever is.”
Cade was gone now, and Donovan said, “Too bad about that. He’s like the only man in this building besides me.”
“There really aren’t any men in here,” Pam said in a tone of discovery. She frowned and began to count them on her hand while Amanda went scrolling over her phone and Barb said, “If you can count him as a man. He’s more like a baby.”
“I do,” Donovan said, meaningfully. “I very much count him as a man.”
“Oh,” Amanda raised an eyebrow, the same time Barb threw back her head and snorted.
“Isn’t he a bit you—” Angie started.
“Shut your mouth,” Donovan said. “And eat your chips.”
Donovan began very much to look forward to his chance sightings of Cade and the preschoolers. He told himself that there was something nice about the little kids and the teachers, but he didn’t stop telling himself there was something nice about the thinnish, tallish, vaguely bearded guy in the sweat jacket with the khaki pants and mellow half dreamy way about him as he took children to snack time, and marched them down the hall. It never occurred to him to wonder if he was gay. No man who made his living caring for little children would be otherwise. The same way that some people drooled over muscles, Donovan admitted he was turned on by seeing Cade reach for little hands and lift up little bodies, take away their cookie wrappers and rejoice in their tiny discoveries.
His duties took him all over the building. Half the morning he was with kindergarten and the other half upstairs with fourth grade. He would come down the long stone steps of the old building to sit at the landing and look at the pre-k for just a moment in the hopes that Cade might see him for a moment, or at least that, in the roughness of the day he might see Cade and feel a little better about life.
So when he learned that pre-k ended a week or two before the rest of the school, that Cade would be gone, he was plunged into a minor misery, until the next day when he saw, in brown pants and a tee shirt hanging over his thin torso, Cade Richards.
“I would never have pictured that for you,” Barb said, reaching for a slice of the pizza that was the latest gift of the school during teacher appreciation week.
“Well, stop picturing it.”
“Well, you stop looking and make something happen.”
Donovan put his head into Cade’s room, there was Cade sitting at a desk, looking more official than a pre school teacher usually did, and Donovan said, “There’s pizza. So… yeah… You can come and get it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Cade smiled up at him. “Yeah. I think I’ll do that.”
“So, it’s Teacher Appreciation Week.” Donovan said. “Teacher Appreciation Week is, by the way, also the week when the principal evaluates all the teachers, and the teachers evaluate all the aids, so essentially it’s like, “Here, have some pizza. and by the way, this is how you’re fucking up week. You all leave a week before us?”
“Yeah,” Cade said, “I think we got two or three weeks and you all have four or maybe five.”
“Four,” Don said. “When do you all If you all come back?”
“Oh, Head Start is closing,” Cade said. “Like, for good.”
“What?”
“So are they going to put it in another location?”
“Head Start?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sure they will. But I won’t be there. I don’t think. There was one in all the schools, and that’s about to change. Why do they do stuff like that? Things work out too nice, and so they change them.”
“Because school boards, all boards, all they care about is money. They may talk about education and the children, but it’s the money that matters, and whatever makes money is what they’re going to do.”
“I need a cigarette.”
He turned to Cade.
“Do you have a cigarette?”
“In my car?”
As the principal walked through the lounge, Donovan murmured, “Can I get a cigarette?”
“Yeah. Let me finish the crust and let’s go.”
There are so many stories that teach us that what we go through in life, and our battles and confrontations will lead us to have more strength and fortitude and be more victorious in the end, and I don’t think that’s true for the majority of people on this planet. Sometimes what we go through just makes us weaker and sadder and more pathetic, and we don’t necessarily gain any fortitude or strength from it.
-Patjim Statovici
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.
I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown.
-T.S. Eliot, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock , 1917
THE SKIN OF THINGS
FIRST
ESSAY
O N E
“I was too sleepy, too worn out from the days, too obsessed with trying to get beneath the skin of things. “
- Donovan Shorter’’
IT’S no good if we’re not honest. That’s the thing. After the last book was finished, the one that nobody read, I convinced myself that it was fine if I never wrote again, but that was bullshit, and even as I said it I was looking for the next story. I thought, how nice it would be to write about dragons or witches, maybe produce the next Lord of the Rings. And this is not so that I could escape. I never want to escape the world. I want to climb right inside it. The truth is the world is a magical place, and most of us simply don’t have the eyes to see it.
I was looking for the magical country, the one to start the new book in. I looked for two days. I walked in circles, up and down the neighborhoods outside of downtown, late at night while only the ivory colored moon floated like a lozenge in the black sky. I burned incense and candles when the same full moon made the whole city crazy, and the children at the school kicked each other, held up a knife to one teacher and broke into another teacher’s car. That was the same time when Grindr and Adam4Adam and every other sex app suddenly blew up with men desperate to fuck in strange places, and I’d like to say I was too wise or maybe even too moral to take them up on strange offers, but the truth is I was too sleepy, too worn out from the days, too obsessed with trying to get beneath the skin of things.
I was still looking for the root of this thing, the little sand grain in the pearl that makes one tell the story. And it was as I drifted off to sleep, with a memory of sand and grey blue water that the root came. Or the grain. And grain is a better word. For that grain of sand in the oyster is nothing but an irritation, and it is that irritation that causes the story.
I have heard the old phrase, I do not know who said it, that writing is easy, open up a vein and bleed. I have also heard someone dismiss this and say writing truly is easy. Between these two lies there lies the truth. The difference between the idea of writing and actual writing, is the five hundred feet I must walk from the steps of the Masonic temple where I am watching the moon, to this toilet where I am clicking away. The space between thinking of writing and writing is taking that little grain, which is longing, which is something next to sadness, which could quickly overwhelm you, and creating the book from it. There isn’t any other way to create something worth making. The book is filled with a whole maze of shit you just don’t want to see, or that you do not know if you can bare the full sight of. The book is a horror piece.
Now that I’ve said all this, let me set my sights on the very first thing, and you will wonder what is so horrible about it. I set my sights on Cade, and the horror of him was knowing almost right away that I loved him, knowing that he was the first interesting thing I’d seen in a long time.
Cademon Richards is tall, with a head of curls and very deep blue eyes. Deep blue eyes are a trope, and they are a white person’s trope. Not something I’d cared too much about before. Not until his, and his smile, and his slight beard, and his knitted cap and the whole business of me wondering if I was just interested in a type, a sort of white boy I had never known, but only seen in videos and comedy sketches set in Oregon. But I saw him at work. He was one of the few men in the elementary school, and I was in the kindergarten. We were the only males working with tiny children, and maybe there was some ancient mammal thing in me that is attracted to good providers, but I saw him dandle a four year old and laugh as he swung him about. I saw him leading them into the cafeteria for snack time, and pushing open their little milk cartons, poking their juices with the little straws, taking the cellophane off of their fruit cups, and I was… in love seems the wrong word. But it is not far off.
How do you tell the truth of the story of us and leave the boring parts out? Even as I tell our story, we are surrounded by half stories and half people, and it’s not nice to say, but it’s true. Oprah and everyone who ever wanted to make money out of saying it tells you that everybody has a story and everybody is interesting, but neither of those things is true. Our lives are filled with the dull and half dead, and I want to leave them out. See, coming to Cade was the opposite of the dull and the half dead. The day I saw all six feet of him him in a tee shirt over a long sleeve tee shirt, in corduroy, missing only a knit cap and perhaps a bong, laughing and taking care of those children, was the day I began to hope something interesting was about to happen.
But I should back up. This was already turning out to be the most interesting year of my life. I have to say that, and so I was primed for it to become more interesting, and here the summer was finally coming with longer, warmer days after a winter we all thought would never end, and it was in that coming of summer he looked at me, and laughed, and I laughed back.
The first thing Cade ever said to me was, “You want a kid?”
He was not proposing marriage, he was walking down the hall with a train of tiny four year olds on their way to get snack, all garbling away, and I said, without missing a beat, “Which one do you suggest?”
“Oh, you’ll have to take your chances.”
I put my finger to my chin and looked on them as he looked at me.
“What about him?”
“No,” Cade said, “Trust me. That would be a bad idea.”
Then Cade turned red and said, “I didn’t say any of that. This conversation never happened.”
“What conversation?” I asked as they filed into the cafeteria.
Secretively, Cade placed a finger alongside his nose and said, “Exactly.”
As I headed down the hall, a blond four year old raised his hand and waved, calling, “Peace out!”
I’m not sure you know what that means, I thought, laughing, because it was a quarter past one, and even though the day was over at two thirty, peacing out, was exactly what I was doing.
“There’s really nothing wrong with shoplifting,” Donovan said. “No, listen, hear my point.”
They were all sitting around the table in the teacher’s lounge, but this was the lunch hour for the staff and class assistants.
“Stealing is, say, I walk into Barb’s house. I’m like, ‘I like that clock.’ So I take her clock. It is a personal thing I am taking from a person, right? When a thief robs you, there is this asshole coming into your personal space, violating it, raping it, taking what you worked for, and fucking with your security. That’s theft.”
“Yeah,” Angie said. “But—”
“But wait,” Donovan held up his hand. “Wait, I’m not done.”
“Say there is a neighborhood store, family store, mom and pop. You know who owns it, you know who’s getting the money…”
He stopped talking. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Cade, the man from the pre school down the hall. He had come into the room, and he had the look of someone who was not looking. He had just passed through a minute ago, and it seemed like there was no reason for him to pass through again. He was walking slowly.
Donovan continued. “That is theft. But, what about when it’s a corporation?”
“What difference does that make?” Angie said.
“Because I don’t care how many evangelicals get behind some Republican bill, corporations are not people. Wal Mart, by its very existence, is cheating and stealing from us and from the government everyday, so when you walk out with twenty to thirty dollars of shit hidden away in your bags, well good for you.”
“But what about if everyone did it?” Angie said.
Donovan could feel Cade’s eyes on him. He chose to ignore them. Or maybe he was playing for him.
“But everyone doesn’t do it, Ang. That’s the thing. And even if they did, you don’t think Wal Mart has already figured that out? No, when you think about that, think you’re stealing from Mr. Wal Mart, you just don’t know how rich Mr. Wal Mart or Mr Kroger or whatever is.”
Cade was gone now, and Donovan said, “Too bad about that. He’s like the only man in this building besides me.”
“There really aren’t any men in here,” Pam said in a tone of discovery. She frowned and began to count them on her hand while Amanda went scrolling over her phone and Barb said, “If you can count him as a man. He’s more like a baby.”
“I do,” Donovan said, meaningfully. “I very much count him as a man.”
“Oh,” Amanda raised an eyebrow, the same time Barb threw back her head and snorted.
“Isn’t he a bit you—” Angie started.
“Shut your mouth,” Donovan said. “And eat your chips.”
Donovan began very much to look forward to his chance sightings of Cade and the preschoolers. He told himself that there was something nice about the little kids and the teachers, but he didn’t stop telling himself there was something nice about the thinnish, tallish, vaguely bearded guy in the sweat jacket with the khaki pants and mellow half dreamy way about him as he took children to snack time, and marched them down the hall. It never occurred to him to wonder if he was gay. No man who made his living caring for little children would be otherwise. The same way that some people drooled over muscles, Donovan admitted he was turned on by seeing Cade reach for little hands and lift up little bodies, take away their cookie wrappers and rejoice in their tiny discoveries.
His duties took him all over the building. Half the morning he was with kindergarten and the other half upstairs with fourth grade. He would come down the long stone steps of the old building to sit at the landing and look at the pre-k for just a moment in the hopes that Cade might see him for a moment, or at least that, in the roughness of the day he might see Cade and feel a little better about life.
So when he learned that pre-k ended a week or two before the rest of the school, that Cade would be gone, he was plunged into a minor misery, until the next day when he saw, in brown pants and a tee shirt hanging over his thin torso, Cade Richards.
“I would never have pictured that for you,” Barb said, reaching for a slice of the pizza that was the latest gift of the school during teacher appreciation week.
“Well, stop picturing it.”
“Well, you stop looking and make something happen.”
Donovan put his head into Cade’s room, there was Cade sitting at a desk, looking more official than a pre school teacher usually did, and Donovan said, “There’s pizza. So… yeah… You can come and get it.”
“Oh, yeah,” Cade smiled up at him. “Yeah. I think I’ll do that.”
“So, it’s Teacher Appreciation Week.” Donovan said. “Teacher Appreciation Week is, by the way, also the week when the principal evaluates all the teachers, and the teachers evaluate all the aids, so essentially it’s like, “Here, have some pizza. and by the way, this is how you’re fucking up week. You all leave a week before us?”
“Yeah,” Cade said, “I think we got two or three weeks and you all have four or maybe five.”
“Four,” Don said. “When do you all If you all come back?”
“Oh, Head Start is closing,” Cade said. “Like, for good.”
“What?”
“So are they going to put it in another location?”
“Head Start?”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sure they will. But I won’t be there. I don’t think. There was one in all the schools, and that’s about to change. Why do they do stuff like that? Things work out too nice, and so they change them.”
“Because school boards, all boards, all they care about is money. They may talk about education and the children, but it’s the money that matters, and whatever makes money is what they’re going to do.”
“I need a cigarette.”
He turned to Cade.
“Do you have a cigarette?”
“In my car?”
As the principal walked through the lounge, Donovan murmured, “Can I get a cigarette?”
“Yeah. Let me finish the crust and let’s go.”
