Saturday, August 8, 2009

One Good Reason, Chapter One (cont.)

“So, you say you like Cambridge.”

“Yeah.”

“Good, good.” Newland watched the road ahead of him intently. “So, why are you really still here?”

I’d never felt guilty about lying to people in conversation. I didn’t think of it as lying, more as ad-libbing. The script wasn’t working for me, so I improvised. There was no use in making something up, though. He’d seen the car and what little I had in it. “You want the truth?”

“Nothing but.”

“Well, then, I’m out. I’ve got nothing in the bank, and nothing…” I reached down and pulled out a quarter. “…Twenty-five cents in my pockets. It’s that loan I took out for college, and it’s coming back to bite me.”

“Sounds painful.” Newland switched on the radio. “And, as I recall, your parents aren’t exactly loaded.” He scratched his chin. “So you’ve got no way of flying home. You can’t road-trip it, judging by the state of that heap back there. Besides, you’d need a VW. You just can’t road-trip it without a VW. So here you are.” He turned into the parking lot of a small apartment complex and the car came to a stop. “And here we are. Here, let me help you with that stuff.” We stepped out of the car and walked around to the hatchback.

I stuffed the CDs, and the iPod into my backpack and picked up my sweatshirt. “Can you stick the water in the bag and get that?”

“Yep.”

“Just leave the books here. I can go back and get them later.” Newland nodded and then led me toward the door. After a trip in the elevator and down the hall, we were at his apartment. The living area was small, but there were two bedrooms and a bathroom, and I was pleased to find that it didn’t smell like the Aveo. Having made that discovery, the place already felt like home.

“Let’s put your stuff in the other bedroom. I’ve been using it as a sort of office space, but from now on it’ll be your bedroom.” We walked in and dumped it all on the bed in a pile. Heaped together, it looked like even less. Newland gestured to a small bookshelf in the corner. “You can put your books over there. You want to get those now?”

“Sure, why not.” We turned around and walked back out of the apartment.

“So, do your parents know what’s going on?” He asked. I shook my head. “You’ve got to tell them at some point, man. You know that.”

“Yeah.” I pushed the button for the elevator.

“So?”

“So?”

“So, why haven’t you?”

The doors opened and we stepped in. “I want to wait until I’m stable, you know? Until I have a job and can say that I’m working toward being able to come home.” Newland opened up the hatchback and we started grabbing books. “They worried like heck when I left for college, and now they’re relieved that I’m finally coming back home. How do you think they’re going to react when they find out that I’m not coming back anytime soon?”

“How do you think they’re reacting now? They haven’t heard from you since what, a couple months?”

“It’s just been a month. I’m sure they’re fine.”

“I’m just saying,” Newland said as he closed the hatchback, “it’s going to be a while before you have any sort of actual money. You’ve still got that loan to pay off.”

“Well, yeah, at some point—” I started. Newland cut me off.

“And don’t you even think about defaulting on me. Trust me, man.” He put down his books and closed the hatchback. “You don’t pay off that loan now, and you’re going to pay for it later.” We headed back towards the building. “So first on the list is getting you a job.”

“And once we do that, I can start paying my share of the—”

“Don’t say it, man! You focus on paying off that loan, and I’ll handle the rent.” He backed into the door to push it open and I stepped past him into the lobby. We walked past the main desk for the third time, and I took a look at the girl sitting behind it at the computer. She stared at us, and I could see her formulating a theory for why we were bringing all those books upstairs. She was pretty cute. I hoped she thought I was famous.

A few minutes later, we were inside the apartment. We dumped the books on the bed. “I’ll get settled in later,” I assured Newland.

“Want something to eat?” he asked.

“No, no, I’m good,” I answered.

“I was just being formal,” He answered. “You’re going to eat.” He just about stepped from the doorway of my new bedroom to his kitchenette. He opened up the refrigerator and pulled out a plate of chicken wings. “You have no idea how good these taste reheated.” He motioned for me to sit down on the couch by the coffee table. “It’s so dorm room, I know.”

I sat down. “Well, after what I’ve been through, it’s good to know that some things in life always come back to haunt you.”

Newland turned back to the kitchenette and took out some plates from a cupboard underneath the counter space. After four years, I could still never gauge his reaction. He hardly ever smiled, he rarely frowned, and he never laughed. His mouth always stayed firmly in that straight line. He could get rich at the big-money tables in Vegas. “It’s so cheap that I don’t care, honestly. Try getting all of this for cheaper here in New England. You won’t.

“Well, I sure don’t mind it,” I said gratefully, looking around at the apartment. The walls were bare, just like our dorm room back at Boston U. No posters, no pictures, just paisley that followed us all throughout the building. If it were anything else it wouldn’t be Newland’s.

Newland placed the plates, along with a pair of forks, on the coffee table and sat down on the opposite couch. He stabbed a piece of chicken with his fork, then stopped suddenly and put it down. “What am I thinking? We haven’t said grace yet.”

“Shame on you for forgetting.”

“Right. I’ll say it.” We folded our hands and bowed our heads. “Grace,” said Newland, with an air of reverence. He lifted up his head and began shoveling food. It was a joke that stretched back to the first night we had spent at Boston U together, and it had gotten after a few days, but we hadn’t stopped. It was almost like an actual religious ritual to us now.

I picked up a wing and chewed it. “You’re actually right, this is good.”

“Told you.” Newland never stopped shoveling. I’d never seen him in a fancy restaurant before, and I couldn’t see it now. I continued in a similar manner. It was as if we had never left college, we’d just moved to a different area of the building.

“So, what’re you doing here?” I said.

“What am I doing here? You’re the one who’s been sitting in a car doing nothing for a week.”

“Four days,” I corrected him.

“You want to know what I’ve been doing this week, while you’ve been doing nothing?”

“Four days.”

“What? Newland finally looked up.”

“It’s only been four days.”

“Same difference. Anyway, your obsession with that little detail tells me that you don’t want to know what I’ve been doing.”

“I want to know,” I insisted.

He smiled one of his infrequent smiles. “I’ve been doing nothing too.”

“Explain.”

“It’s nothing, man! What’s there to explain?” He leaned back, already finished with his dinner. I had four wings left to go. “Okay, yeah, I do a little something. Work, you know.”

“Where do you work?”

“Best Buy. Hey, I bet I could get you a job there.”

I shook my head. “I don’t know computers.”

He shook his head back. “You know video games.”

“That’s seriously all it takes to get hired?”

“No.”

“Yeah, that’s what I thought.”

“You also have to look like a total geek.”

“That all? I could do that.”

“I know,” he said. “You totally look like you could work there. We’ve only got two guys in the gaming department. You could do music too, I bet. I’ll hook you up, man. Don’t worry about it.” He paused, mulling over what he had just said. “Well, we’ll get to that soon enough, maybe with your friend at the front desk. For now I’ll just work on getting you a job.” He looked at my chicken. “You going to finish those?” I slid the plate over to him. “Thanks, man.”

He and I talked about Best Buy for a few more minutes while he finished my chicken. I couldn’t see it happening, but Newland seemed to actually think it would. At least, I think he seemed to think so. I really can’t read him at all. After he was finished I walked into my room and started taking things off of the bed. Newland walked into his own room and returned a few minutes later with his guitar. It was a nicer one than the one he’d always had at Boston U. The name Takamine meant nothing to me; it sounded like an alcoholic beverage, but the guitar looked nice. He still used the same pick.

“You don’t mind if i—”

“No,” I answered. He took the chair to the right of my bed and started strumming. I picked up the bag of groceries and brought it over to the refrigerator. He strummed louder. I got the food settled into its new home and closed the door. I walked back to my bed and began to stock my bookshelf.

Newland stopped mid-strum and picked up a paperback. “Blue Like Jazz?” He scanned the back. “Is it any good?”

I took it from him. “It’s funny. There are some interesting thoughts in there, too.”

“Thoughts?”

“Thoughts about life, spirituality, astronauts, penguin sex, you know, that sort of thing.” I took it from him and put it on the shelf.

“Life,” Newland repeated to himself. “Jazz,” he said, after much thought, and started playing again. “Do you like jazz, Mick?”

“I guess. Why?”

“I play jazz with some guys down in the Square. We’re practicing tomorrow. You could come listen if you want to.”

“Maybe,” I said, vaguely. I had finished shelving the books and was now just sitting on the bed, listening to the music. The music was asking me too. I caved. “That actually sounds really good.”

“I figured,” He said. He and the music worked on me for another hour, and by the time I got to sleep that night, I was hungry for more jazz.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

One Good Reason, Chapter One

“It sounds like you have a bad ball joint.”

The initial shock of being on Car Talk had worn off two minutes ago and had been replaced with the shock of what Ray Magliozzi had just said. I was hoping the problem was something I could live with, preferably something I could drive with. This was not what I was hoping for.

“How bad is this bad ball joint, exactly?” I ventured.

“Are you on the road right now?”

“No.”

“Good!” Ray burst out laughing. Tom continued as Ray struggled to regain his composure. “Seriously, though, you should really get it looked at. This thing sounds like it’s going to fall off and any time—”

“And if it does that while you’re on the highway,” Ray cut in, “You’ll be dead!” The two burst out laughing, which translated to a mess of garbled noise on my cell phone. I had to laugh at the sheer lunacy of the situation, even though I was groaning inside. It wasn’t as if I had Triple-A. My car appeared to have found its final resting place.

“So, get it looked at and call us back when you’re stranded on I-90!”

“Well, thanks,” I said over the laughter.”

“Thanks for calling, Mick! Good luck!”

“Thanks.”

I switched off the radio and swore quietly. It was useless to think of what could have happened, and yet I did so. If I hadn’t gotten this car, I knew that I wouldn’t be in this situation. It wasn’t as if I knew this would happen, of course. At that time, I thought I was taking advantage of a great opportunity.

I was a college student, and I needed something to get around with. She was one of the few friends I had made at college, and she had just received a brand-new sports car as a birthday present from her rich parents. It was a 1995 Chevy Aveo, and it would have been headed for the junkyard if I hadn’t picked it up. Given the circumstances, I don’t think I could have intelligently made any other decision. At this moment, I regretted making it.

So what was I to do? To where would I hitchhike? I had no place of residence at this time. After graduating from Boston U with my degree in English, I planned to rent out an apartment and look for a job in scriptwriting. It’s a nice fantasy, but it didn’t turn out quite that way. I hadn’t planned on having to pay off a big college loan during college. Apparently, I had received an unsubsidized loan, which meant I had to begin paying interest immediately. Wonderful, I know.

The upside of not living in an apartment is not having to pay rent. The downside is having to sleep in your car. It had only been four days, but let me tell you, four days is plenty long enough to have to sleep in a car that smells like body odor and live off of a bag of groceries.

It was about that time that I began to feel hungry. That happens when you don’t eat. I opened the door and walked around to the trunk of the Aveo. I opened the trunk and reached into the aforementioned bag of groceries. Spending my last twenty-dollar bill on a bag of food and a jug of distilled water may possibly have been the most intelligent decision I had ever made in my life. I took a swig from the jug and fished out a bag of Doritos.

I walked back to the front of the Aveo and slid into the driver’s seat. Sitting in that seat made me feel stupid, quite honestly. The Aveo was facing a brick wall and was obviously not going anywhere. I almost felt like getting out of the vehicle and sitting on the pavement while I munched my Doritos. This is what it had been like for the past four days. At some point I planned on walking down the street and trying to get a job pumping gas, but first I had waited to see if I could get on Car Talk. I called the day the Aveo had broken down, and left a message describing what kind of junk heap I owned and what was wrong with it.

I received a call back the next day from the show’s producer letting me know that I had been selected to appear on the show, and that the show would be taped on Wednesday, which was in two days. Today, I had received another call an hour before the taping was scheduled. He didn’t tell me much beyond, “Have fun!”

In retrospect, they were four days wasted. Nothing had changed, except that now I was one hundred percent sure that the Aveo was done for. I switched off the car battery and took out the keys, dropping the bag of Doritos on the seat. It would have been pretty entertaining to hide behind the dumpster and watch someone attempt to drive the Aveo away, but everything I owned was in that car.

For the first time since driving into Cambridge, I took a good look around. About a dozen feet above the Aveo was the billboard that had first prompted me to call Car Talk. For four days now I had fallen asleep underneath the disembodied heads of Tom and Ray Magliozzi and the words, “Hear Click and Clack on Car Talk.”

I turned around with my hands still shoved in my pockets and looked out upon Harvard Square. The place was a calm sort of busy, unlike the bustle of Boston. People were always there, but they weren’t in as much of a hurry. A man in a business suit was sitting on a bench with a briefcase by his feet while a Goth kid with chains hanging down to his ankles walked by, head down. Just outside the square, next to an outdoor cafĂ©, sat Murray Turnbull with his famous “Play the Chessmaster” sign. He was one of the many Harvard dropouts that made a living in Harvard Square.

I walked up to the chess tables to watch him play. He had a tourist in a Mets hat in check, and even to my amateur eyes it was obvious that the game was over. The guy exhaled sharply, smiled sheepishly and tipped over his king. He shook Murray’s hand and got up from the table, grabbing his backpack and camera from off the ground as he went. Murray asked me if I wanted to play, but I looked at the sign, noted that there was a small fee for playing the Chessmaster, and shook my head. “I’ll come back in a few days when I get a job,” I said as explanation.

I have never been a firm believer in luck, but if I was, then I certainly would have attributed it to the next few minutes. A voice behind me said, “I’ll take that game.” I turned around to see a pile of black hair that I recognized.

“Newland!” I exclaimed simply.

“Mick!” Newland simply exclaimed.

We stood in front of the chess tables for a few minutes. Finally, Newland said, “What are you still doing here? I thought you were headed out to Kenner.”

“Kenner’s on hold, my friend. I thought I’d stick around for a while. I kind of like Cambridge.”

“That’s pretty sweet. Where are you staying?”

“Uh…” I grasped for a lie, and came up with nothing. Newland’s brow furrowed.

“Wait, man, you’re not homeless now, are you?”

“Well, kind of.” I pointed across the Square to the Aveo. “I do have a place, right over there. It’s not much, but hey, it’s somewhere.”

Newland followed my finger and searched in vain for the building I was supposedly indicating. His gaze crash-landed on the Aveo. “Yeah. Right.”

“YeahIt’s all there.”

“We can’t have that! Man, seriously, that’s not right. Whatever happened to the writing?”

“That’s on hold too.”

“Listen, man, come over to my place. I’ve got an apartment over in Boston. I won’t even charge you rent. Ex-college roommate’s special. The deal’s this week only, but you can stay as long as you want.”

I shook my head. “No, really, I couldn’t—”

He cut me off. He always did have that habit, especially when I was telling him something he didn’t want to hear. “No, really, you could. I’m up there all by myself. It gets lonely. I’ve been almost missing the college scene. So, you want to be roommates again?”

“I don’t know what to say. Thanks.”

“No problem. I still owe you for a lot of things that went down during that little stint we had at Boston U. Boy, was that a moment.” He pointed to the Aveo. “That car run?” I shook my head in response. “Get all your stuff out of there and I’ll pick you up in an hour.” Newland started walking down the street. He still wore those Nikes. I’d always liked those Nikes. “See you then,” he called, almost as an afterthought, when he was about a block away.

Murray watched him leave. “Nice guy.”

I blinked. “You have no idea.”

It took me all of three minutes to get my stuff out of the Aveo. I set it all outside the Aveo and slid back into the driver’s seat. I turned the key and George Harrison starting singing to me. According to them, it had been a long cold lonely winter. I had to agree, but I didn’t appreciate him calling me “darling.”


Comments?

Boundless

This was already posted on my main blog, but it really belongs here, so I'm putting it here as well.

Time has a habit of hiding his face,
Turning away so as not to be found.
When, to reflect, we turn our gaze around,
He has passed by and left void in his place.

Though we may beckon him, he never stays,
Though we construct our own temporal bounds,
Endless refinement of eloquent sounds
Spanning five years was complete in five days.

I have no methods, nor know I of ways
In which to grasp the elusivist Next,
All I can tell is the Next has begun.

This ought not stop us from searching the haze,
Finding the charges inherent in text,
Don't close your eyes, don't pretend the job's done.

Monday, July 27, 2009

This Blog Needs An Introduction.

The title of this post was going to be "This Blog Needs No Introduction," but then I looked at the title of my new blog and realized that it wasn't a very descriptive one, so here is a little description:

This blog is a place created and designed to hold all of my creative writing. Be it poetry or prose, sonnets or stories, haikus or novellas, it all finds rest against this lovely wallpaper. Feel free to read and, if you feel so led, critique my work. I need all the help I can get!