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duckbeater · 2 years ago

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Story Assignment / Did You Prevail?

Peter Handke’s memoir A Sorrow Beyond Dreams is notable for its brevity and also the brevity of its composition. In less than 90 pages he examines his mother’s suicide, sketches something of her backwoods youth in interwar Germany, sympathetically evokes her enervating middle years (child-rearing, poverty, spirit-killing monotony), then analyzes her life’s coda—a time of curiosity, social reinvention and zest. By elevating her consciousness, she apparently collapsed all that’d come before, made it ugly and non-negotiable. To quit the past required a whole bottle of sleeping pills.

Handke’s analyses is forensic, delicate and rational. You believe he loves his mother not from sentimental asides or fantasies of saving, but by his devotion to the truth, which, given his mother’s unhappiness and pettiness and lack of education, has a nearly universal meaningless. What did her death mean? Who could it possibly affect?

Anyway, he finished the book in two months, and included the odd occasional all-caps abstraction. When I’m walking around at night I sometimes think, “NEAT, CLEAN and JOLLY,” or “WEAK-KNEED,” or “GREAT FALL,” or “MEANWHILE HAD GONE OUT OF EXISTENCE,” and know I’m occupied once more with my little sorrow beyond dreams.

—

“Man,” I texted Mackie, “I’ve been awake since 3AM. It’s 5 now. Jerked off 2x. No sleep.” I hit send before deciding my intentions. I don’t think we know what to say to each other, but we’re always saying things to each other, and it’s never, “Was thinking about you, how great it’d be to be turn over and just talk to you in the dark.” I don’t know if he’d actually ever say that to me—seems wishful. Mackie is not very nice and he lives very far away.

—

Went to a party on Wednesday. I wore dark blues down to my briefs, and navy small shoes with no arches. I got off the train hobbling and talked myself up in the alleys on the way to the two-story condo where we’d celebrate night 4 of Hanukkah. I’d slept with the host, obviously, and one or two friends in attendance. I’m not really a part of this group, I’ve just—I guess I’ve penetrated it, as they say.

I had rehearsed convos in my head. I had slammed a blue-bottled beer before getting on the train and felt woozy but competent, just a little in pain. Everyone there seemed leagues more jovial and put together and interesting and adult than me, I felt, immediately on opening the door. I had forced an earring in a closed hole and my left ear was berry red and throbbing—a part of why I felt so juvenile. Grown men don’t just press past the barrier of healed skin. It made a small gratifying popping sound as it cleared the other side and felt hot-hot, and it’s a sensation I’ll repeat (it’s a sensation writing repeats).

For a while, to get out of the heat and press of my successful and attached gay cohort, I hung out with the only female in attendance, Bernice, a noted fag hag (I believe she condones this use), and stroked a paw of the small dog seeking refuge in a pillow-pile beside me on the over-plush couch. Because I felt lonely, I wanted to ask, “Bernice, why do you exclusively attend these kinds of events? Why do you exclusively attend events where you’re shunted to an oversized couch with a social incompetent? What’s the deal with you and gays?” Instead we talked about our jobs. This inadvertently dimensionalized Bernice for me.

“I’ve done so much bullshit work for the last decade,” she snorted, “and in 2022 I got hired as a special projects consultant for an absolutely broken renewable energies firm.” She explained the firm’s stultifying snags on ESG semantics, its optical insecurities, how it quavered on progressive politics, waffling on bygone talking points. “I was loaned out,” said Bernice. “Um, so my firm actually salaried me. I could say whatever I wanted in the vaunted halls of the executive suites and the buffet boxes of free sports tickets and the Connecticut mansion parties. And I called them cowards. I really busted their balls for weeks and weeks—on op-eds, white papers, social media posts, ‘the state security alignment’—I’m sorry, I mean the police—and also, who are those tadpoles in DC—”—“Lobbyists,” I breathed—“Lobbyists,” she breathed back, “I called them out on how based and cucked and knob-choked they all were on the teeny fucking penises of the DC lobbyists. I wanted them to feel so small and stupid and dry and bad, for what they were making, which was millions every day, millions on millions, while I—finally—afforded a Kia. I hate feeling poor. At our age? Don’t you?” “Yes. I hate it.” “Right. So I made them feel poor, a little bit.”

During this peroration I got trembly and blank, excited and critical. I let this leave me. I said, “Did you prevail?” and Bernice said, “The fuck no. But god damn! I made sixteen-kay in November. You ever make that much in a month?” “No, never, and I never,” I said. I told her how had I finally afforded a new car by taking a job at a bank. Bernice has also studied literature. (I don’t think she keeps a blog.) We cheersed saying, “Eat the rich,” [clink], “Eat the rich,” and that felt very correct. The dog licked my palm, perhaps mistaking our intent. “We’re not gonna eat you,” I said, and the dog chittered his teeth at me.

Later that night I made out with a guy name Andrew (such an indelible millennial name), and then never talked to him again though we’ve texted somewhat since.

Mackie asked what I was up to that night and I sent him a couple photo and video updates that were greeted by silence. The next AM he was sending obscure memes again. Out of jealousy, I told myself.

—

It’s odd—I didn’t really solve why Bernice exclusively hangs out with thirty-something gays who ignore her. (My last theory is that she enjoys recreational drugs: her gay friend group is really into those.) Past the obscure memes, I solicited Mackie for some explanation. He unimaginatively offered misogynistic trash, with the line, “Can’t pull but likes to watch.” Typing that up makes me feel very late and very closed-minded to the asexual community, although assuming Bernice is asexual feels as offensive as assuming she hangs out with queers for ketamine. Sometimes our friends, our networks, our densest and most particular milieus spring upon us by accident. And yet—she’s consulted for a living. She made $16K in November. She’s canny. Also clearly she hates straight rich white men. What gives?

I texted the host, thanking him for his hospitality; I texted Andrew, thanking him for his wonderful plump kisses; I texted other men who’d breeched my IG stronghold with accolades and complaints about my attention and comportment. A guy I’d “met” on Grindr and spoken to in the kitchen let me know I’d “rejected him” after he’d shared his album; that’d I stopped talking to him after seeing him naked. But—he was glad we’d met in real life, because he’d had the opportunity to confirm I did read books. He’d written: “When you talk, you use big words.” Embarrassed, I messaged him back saying, “I didn’t reject you. I’m just bad at Grindr. And yeah, I read books.” (Guys: the fact remains, I read books.)

I did reject him. His body repulsed me. He’d been overweight for years and undertaken marathon training, so all the skin on him was oozing and angry and stretched like taffy. Also I wasn’t that into his penis. Judging his fitness—his ripeness—his fuckability—based on something as arbitrary as cock-hardness and a sculpted torso—is the remit of the sexually unenlightened. I know! Not wanting to bang Stu because his body gave me the squick (and his body giving me the squick because of socially inherited standards of gay male beauty) drove me slightly batshit. I’d gone to Hanukkah Night 4 hoping for no part of that—hoping, indeed, for enlightenment. And still, I was confronted in the corner of the kitchen with a man who I had no intention of sleeping with, with him later asking me, “Why?” Also, I think that’s a party foul. If I’d been hideous on Grindr that’d be one thing, but I’d only been silent.

(I’d gone to Hanukkah Night 4, actually, fully with the intention of some very beautiful, intelligent man courting me, seducing me, sweetly asking if he might take me home. Mackie reminded me: “You went to a gay party hoping to get laid.” When I revisit our texts, I see that on Wednesday night, I did jokingly say, “Wearing blue briefs tonight in case I get laid.”)

—

Prevail in the sense of what.

I keep telling myself, if you just write in the style (or concern) of Grace Paley, you’ll manage your output better. You’ll actually write, rather than not write, which—bizarre to point out—a lot of egregiously more talented writers simply don’t do. They either don’t read Grace Paley or they don’t take her example seriously. Can’t drop the kids off at the sitter? Disappointing a union rep? Grocery store reverie? Class action lawsuit? Neighborhood defense? Teaching Zoomers dialogue? Furious about parking? Guys being complete pricks? What’s for breakfast? (“Our shrinking family requires more coffee, more eggs, more cheese, less butter, less meat, less orange juice, more grapefruit.”) Seasons shift their responsibilities [planting, watering, raking, shoveling] and finally the apartment, the car, the stoop, and [even] the park demand a graceless apology and accounting for. How do you come by these treasures?

Paley gives you freedom to remark on the banal frustrations and the relentless petty drama of existing while renting. So too of dating while maybe dating others (a grace for the gays), and of wanting to attend an alderman’s fundraiser but maybe sliding one or more of your dates there, too—a Jane Jacobs by way of Nora Ephron. Maybe I only read her young writing. Perhaps I only read her young concerns. (No: She was 63 when she published the breakfast items above.) But everything feels fresh and hilarious and condoned. “You will sorely fuck this up, surely, but the lesson of living in the city will stick.” (I wrote that last quote, not Grace Paley.)

—

Later, Mackie texted, “Stop being annoying and text me back.”

I sent him maybe the 81st photo of me in my underwear, haggard, glasses, brushing my teeth, and the caption, “All clear.”

#grace paley #peter handke

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power-chords · 1 year ago

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Eighty years, said her father, glad to be useful. Once he had explained electrical storms before you could find the Book of Knowledge. Now in the cave of old age, he continued to amass wonderful information. But he was sick with oldness. His arteries had a hopeless future. And conversation about all that obsolescent tubing often displaced very interesting subjects.

One day he said, Alexandra! Don’t show me the sunset again. I’m not interested anymore. You know that. She had just pointed to a simple sunset happening outside his hospital window. It was a red ball—all alone, without its evening streaking clouds—a red ball falling hopelessly west, just missing the Hudson River, Jersey City. Chicago, the Great Plains, the Golden Gate—falling, falling.

Then in Russian he sighed some Pushkin. Not for me, the spring. Nye dyla menya . . . He slept. She read the large-print edition of The Guns of August. A half hour later, he opened his eyes and told her how, in that morning’s Times, the Phoenicians had sailed to Brazil in about 500 B.C. A remarkable people. The Vikings too were remarkable. He spoke well of the Chinese, the Jews, the Greeks, the Indians—all the old commercial people. Actually he had never knocked an entire nation. International generosity had been started in him during the late nineteenth century by his young mother and father, candle-holders inside the dark tyranny of the czars. It was childhood training. Thoughtfully, he passed it on.

In the hospital bed next to him a sufferer named John feared the imminent rise of the blacks of South Africa, the desperate blacks of Chicago, the yellow Chinese, and the Ottoman Turks. He had more reason than Alexandra’s father to dread the future because his heart was strong. He would probably live to see it all. He believed the Turks when they came would bring to NYC diseases like cholera, virulent scarlet fever, and particularly leprosy.

Leprosy! For gods sakes! said Alexandra. John! Upset yourself with reality for once! She read aloud from the Times about the bombed, burned lepers’ colonies in North Vietnam. Her father said, Please, Alexandra, today, no propaganda. Why do you constantly pick on the United States? He remembered the first time he’d seen the American Flag on wild Ellis Island. Under its protection and working like a horse, he’d read Dickens, gone to medical school, and shot like a surface-to-air missile right into the middle class.

Then he said, But they shouldn’t put a flag in the middle of the chocolate pudding. It’s ridiculous.

It's Memorial Day, said the nurse’s aide, removing his tray.

Grace Paley, "Enormous Changes at the Last Minute," 1974

#words words words #grace paley #short stories

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