14 Fictional Positions

by Williamson, Eric Miles

  Skaters

  Looking back on it, me and my two younger brothers, Kent and Clyde, were pretty poor when we were kids. We didn’t really feel poor, though. If we thought we really needed something, we’d just swipe it. One time Kent swiped a pair of Adidas from Oakland Sporting Goods. Clyde copped off with the coolest water bottle for his bike you ever saw. My expertise was baseball cards and cans of raviolis. Pop never asked where we got the stuff, and we never told.

  We lived in a nineteen foot trailer next to the Mohawk station where my pop pumped gas, washed windshields, checked oil and fixed flat tires, and we had plenty of fun at that gas station. We’d make gigantic fortresses out of old tires, replete with turrets, towers, and scrap-metal drawbridges. Our tin washbasin moats shimmered with oil and antifreeze.

  All year long Pop stashed money in a holiday account, and each Christmas we’d go on a nifty vacation. We camped one year in the snows of Yellowstone. We spelunked in southern Missouri. One year we drove the old highways of the Midwest and swiped signs from abandoned gas stations. We spent a Christmas vacation going to all the missions in California, and late one night we snuck into the field at Mission San Jose and rolled a wooden wagon wheel back to the pickup, took it back and chained it to the front of our trailer. Eventually we got a deal renting a little apartment on Tahoe Keys, a lagoon-style setup on Lake Tahoe, and that’s where we ended up going every Christmas.

  It never snowed in Oakland and seldom got cold enough to freeze a puddle. But Lake Tahoe—snow everywhere! And the Keys—they froze over, and so we’d run and slide on the ice. The sky alternated between a sheet of white and crystal blue, and it snowed every other day. Mealtimes we ate hamburgers and hotdogs and cottage cheese, and Pop watched football games on the television. Nights he went to the casinos, and he took us to a play center that was set up for the kids of gaming parents. My brothers and I played pinball and pool and skeetball. Pop took us to see two shows, too: we saw The Osmonds, and we saw The Jackson Five.

  Days, though—days we played in the snow and on the ice. We noticed that there were dozens and dozens of kids skating on the ice that wove between the keys, and we went to ask some of the kids if we could use their skates when they weren’t using them. They said that the skates weren’t theirs, that they’d borrowed them. From who? we wanted to know. From the Admiral.

  The Admiral was a very old man, retired. He lived in a small apartment, alone, on the Keys. When we knocked on his door, we heard him shuffling around, and when he opened it, we couldn’t believe what we saw: he must have been seven feet tall. He was the tallest human being we’d ever seen. His face was gently wrinkled, and he had a full head of beautiful gray hair, and he smiled.

  “Come in, come in,” he said. “I’m the Admiral.”

  We could smell food.

  He noticed, and said, “Stew. You boys want some? Take a seat.”

  He had a banquet sized table in his little front room, twelve chairs arranged around it, places set with plates, bowls, silverware, glasses, napkins. Serving bowls arranged properly on the center of the table, a vase with flowers in the middle.

  “You boys skate?”

  We nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  “We’ll take care of that in a while,” he said. “It’s cold out there, and you need some good food in you to keep you warm.”

  I really wanted to see those skates. What I wanted even more was to have my own pair.

  We sat, and he served us what must have been the best beef stew ever made in history. We ate as if we’d never had a meal before. Stew, homemade bread, and lots and lots of butter, which we never got at home because it cost more than margarine. Man, we had butter oozing down our chins.

  He went to his fireplace mantle and brought down some pictures.

  “My wife,” he said, “bless her soul.”

  She was pretty and young and in black and white. He showed us another picture. “My boys and girls,” he said, and there were about a dozen of them flanking the young admiral and his pretty wife, the admiral in full military dress and holding a baby in each arm, another holding on to his leg. “And my boys and girls and their boys and girls,” and he showed us another picture and this one had dozens and dozens of people, all of them flanking the admiral. But his wife wasn’t in this picture, and the Admiral looked pretty old already, towering over all of them and smiling.

  After we ate, we helped him do the dishes and set the table again.

  Then he led us to a closet and he opened it and inside were hundreds and hundreds of ice skates, white for girls and black for boys—hockey skates and figure skates and huge skates for grown ups. The blades sparkled and glittered like jewels, like something you were supposed to want but could never have.

  He told us to take off our shoes, and then he used a wooden rule to measure our skate size, and then he rummaged around and got us each a pair of skates. He led us outside to the edge of the frozen lagoon, and we sat on a bench while he put our skates on us, showing us the proper way to lace them up. Then he put on his own pair of skates and led us out onto the ice.

  “Be careful of ice that isn’t white, that’s dark,” he said. “If it’s dark, that means the water beneath is showing through, and that means the ice is thin and you might fall through.”

  In a single movement the Admiral glided on one skate what seemed to be all the way across Lake Tahoe, his skate glistening in the sunlight, leg outstretched, arms to his sides and sleeves fluttering in a breeze conjured by his movement. He was a young man again.

  We stepped out onto the ice, and wobbly-ankled and thrilled we scooted around, cutting tracks in the thin veil of snow from the morning’s drop. We were in a world we’d seldom known, a world without the smell of gasoline and solvent and oil, a world without the incessant ringing of the gas station bell, a world where we could move across space without dodging cars and 18-wheelers. We were free and clean and filled with thrill and peace.

  Every day we’d skate, and every day the Admiral would feed us, and every day we were not boys from the ghetto who lived on the lot of a gas station in a trailer but boys who skated.

  One day, late in the afternoon, the winter sun setting behind the Sierra Nevadas and the clouds in the sky orange and softly burning, Kent was skating far from Clyde and me, and I heard Kent scream and saw him fall through the ice. Clyde started toward Kent, and so did I, but when we got close to him, the ice started to crack beneath us, too, and so we could go no further. Kent’s head bobbed and dunked, and each time he came up he was screaming and his face was turning blue with freeze from the icy water.

  We heard a door slam against an apartment, and out sprang the Admiral, and he came on toward us from across the lagoon, speed skating with his left arm tucked behind his back and his right pumping across his chest, and we expected him to skid to a stop next to us, but instead he leapt over Clyde and me and splashed down into the ice-hole next to Kent and hoisted Kent into the air.

  The Admiral was so tall that he stood on the floor of the lagoon. He walked Kent over to the shore, cracking the ice in front of him like an ice-breaking ship with his arm.

  He took Kent inside, and helped him out of his clothes, and went into his bedroom and came back with fresh clothes. He built a fire in his fireplace and made hot chocolate.

  It was getting dark already, and we’d drank down our hot chocolate and grubbed all the cookies and cheeseball and crackers we could munch. We put on our sneakers and left.

  We’d left our skates outside on the Admiral’s porch, as per the Admiral’s instructions. After we said goodbye to the Admiral, and he’d shut the door, I circled back to the porch. I stood there looking at those skates. I imagined myself back in Oakland, at a fancy ice skating rink, pretty girls in little dresses swirling and pirouetting and admiring my grace and strength as I flew across the ice, and even though I knew what I was about to do was wrong, I reache
d down and swiped the skates I’d used, a nice pair of shined and glossy hockey skates, probably the coolest skates in the world. Kent said, “There are some things you shouldn’t steal,” and I almost put them back, but I just couldn’t.

  “What if the Admiral is dead next year when we come back? This is what: while the rest of you guys are slipping around on your tennis shoes, I’ll have skates.”

  The next year, we came back to Tahoe Keys for another vacation. I’d outgrown the skates I’d stolen, and I needed another pair. I’d felt pretty rotten about stealing skates from the Admiral, especially since I hadn’t gotten to use them even once. I was going to figure out how to get the ones I’d stolen back to the Admiral without him knowing I’d stolen them. We went to the Admiral’s apartment, and a younger man who looked just like the Admiral answered the door.

  We asked for The Admiral.

  “The Admiral died this summer past,” the man said. “He was my grandfather.”

  “We’re sorry,” we said, and we turned to go.

  “Wait,” the man said. “Did you come for skates?”

  We said yes.

  “The Admiral, in his will, said any child who comes for skates gets a pair until they’re all gone.”

  “We get to keep them?” I said.

  “They’re all yours,” the Admiral’s son said.

  We went to the closet and got pairs of skates our sizes.

  When we were leaving, the Admiral’s grandson said, “There’s a stipulation, a catch.”

  “What’s that?” I said.

  “When you outgrow the skates, you have to give them to a child who doesn’t have a pair of skates of his own.”

  Ten years ago, when I was living in Houston, Texas, an ice-skating rink went belly-up. I went to their bankruptcy sale, bought all their skates. I stashed them in my garage, sorted by size and type.

  After Houston, I’ve lived a lot of places—Santa Cruz, Portland, Seattle, Los Angeles, all over the southwest. Never lived somewhere that froze in the winter.

  But now I live in Warrensburg, Missouri. I’m waiting for winter, hoping the ponds freeze over.

  I have a debt to pay.

  The Teachings of Don B.

  I have always preferred not to speak of my ghosts.

  Ghosts, however, not only visit me, but disturb my life of love.

  I have many books written by dead people. In life, these people were not pleasant. In life, they were drunken sots. Poe, drunk. Hemingway, drunk. Faulkner, Carver—drunk, drunk. Joyce, Stevens, Kerouac, drunks. Now they are dead drunks.

  Now they are more dangerous.

  I am not a drunk, mostly. I am a good man, mostly. The significant snail that appears to be my liver is, in truth, the consequence of my writerly posture.

  The drunken writers, however, were bad men. They were thieves. They preyed on the confidence of young and beautiful women. They were lechers without remorse or regret. In life, they made public spectacles of themselves when they became too happy, and performed unnatural acts when they were sad.

  They lay in wait for me to fall asleep, when my girlfriends stay the night.

  Then they copulate with my girlfriends. My girlfriends never fail to inform me about this, in great detail, and not without something I cannot help but perceive as pleasure.

  My latest girlfriend could only have been described as what we men call a “doozie.” Her pubic hair was mowed into a geometrically sound welcome mat, happy sight for many, she once confessed, a weary traveler.

  My books are haunted. This does not please me.

  We, we professors of English, tell our students that the writers whose works we teach are somehow good people, because they have written good stories and good novels.

  They are not good people. They are very bad people, and should be avoided, especially after they die.

  Don B. was my teacher. He died. However, he has not discontinued his tutelage.

  On his death bed, I asked him, when he came briefly out of his liquor and nicotine coma, “Don, do you know where you are?”

  He said, “I am in the ante-chamber of heaven,” he said.

  He was Catholic. He had an ante-chamber.

  Don B. shamed bad students. He shamed good students, too. Don B’s cowboy boots were bigger than ours, and therefore we did not like him. Most estimates concluded that no less than 27 of our apprentice feet would be necessary to fill his left boot, 28 his right, sharkskin. He could outdrink us. Our wives said he could out-copulate us. He wrote better books than we did.

  When Don B. died, we were all very happy. He could no longer copulate with our girlfriends, our fiancées, our wives, or the married women we were sleeping with. Don B. was out of the equation. We were very happy students. Don could do things we could not, we had been told.

  Don was dead, and now he could not do those things. To our wives. To our women.

  Hemingway: double barrel shotgun in the mouth blowing off the back of his head, efficiently. Poe: passed out drunk on the street in Baltimore outside the bar, smoked on his own puke. Faulkner: tried to ride a nag three times and was finally bucked to his death. Carver, Kerouac, and countless others—writer’s disease. They were polite and courteous enough not to be Catholic enough to go to purgatory.

  Don B. is not polite. He is Catholic. He is taking advantage of his spiritual condition. He lingers in purgatory like a frat boy at last call.

  Initially, Don B. was an unhappy ghost. He appeared at a drinking session being conducted between George Blaise and myself. We were both his students. We were his drinking partners. Don B. had copulated with both our wives, George’s and mine. They were no longer our wives. Not because of Don B’s attentions. Because of the attentions of other writers of less renown.

  The first time he schtupped one of my girlfriends, he told her, she told me, “My ghostly phallus is prodigious, if without substance.”

  “He had this strange white penis,” she said. “Rather magnificent, actually.”

  Don B. came to George Blaise and me of a drinking evening. Don B. was sweating. His nose was purple. He seemed to be crying. George Blaise, like Don B., is Catholic.

  “Purgatory,” George Blaise said, and lifted a Scotch in toast.

  “Unpleasant,” I said.

  “Most,” George Blaise said, “unpleasant.”

  George Blaise and I were sweating too. Our noses, we knew, were in danger of purpling as we aged.

  “My purple nose, like my sweat,” Don B. said, “is better than yours. Far better.”

  When my newest girlfriend, my horticultural doozie, awoke, she was demonstrably and visibly shaken.

  “What, my dear,” I said, “is the matter.”

  “I have been schtupped by one of your friends,” she said. “One of those writer guys.”

  This was not the first time this had happened to me.

  I shrugged. Someday, soon, I plotted, I too would schtupp one of the women of my writer friends.

  “He slapped my fanny and woke me up,” she said, “though I may have yet been asleep.”

  I lowered my eyes, knowingly.

  “He said,” she said, “‘There is nothing to fear. I am a friend of Eric’s.’”

  My clenched fist betrayed my dislike of feminine confession, to which I have played Father Confessor more times than is tasteful, or pleasant.

  “He fondled my breasts,” she continued, in earnest sincerity, “most expertly.”

  “Perhaps,” I intoned, “perhaps we should discuss the nagging problem of my spine.”

  She continued without let or mercy.

  “But then,” she said, with enthusiasm, “then he unzipped his jeans and revealed his splendor. ‘How do you like them?’ he asked me. ‘Long?’ and it was long. ‘Fat?’ and it was fat. ‘Circumcise
d? au naturale? rippled? smooth? hooked? symmetrical? ochre, umber, sienna, viridian, cobalt blue, tie-dyed?’”

  My girlfriend took my hand, tenderly.

  I will not tell you what she decided upon. I have great respect for my girlfriend, as I have for all people of the other sex.

  “I can no longer sleep at your home,” my girlfriend told me. “Without being unfaithful.”

  “You could refuse the amorous ploys of Don B.,” I said.

  “There have been others,” she said.

  I smiled a smile I have smiled many times before. “But I am your man. You could refuse,” I said.

  She smiled, and I did not like or appreciate her smile, and she slowly shook her head. “No,” she said, and her smile did not wane. “No. No, I could not refuse.”

  When Don B. was alive, we sat at the bar drinking. I was divorced, and he was schtupping my ex-wife.

  “I do not regret schtupping your wife,” he said.

  “Ex,” I said.

  “Now,” he said.

  “She, as well,” he said, “has no regrets about the schtupp.”

  I drank.

  “I taught her things from which you doubtless benefited,” he said. “Or should have.”

  I said, “Indeed.”

  “I will always be a teacher,” said Don B.

  I had read Don B.’s stories, written under his pseudonym, William W. “How I Schtupped My Student’s Woman,” and “How to Schtupp Appropriately,” and “Schtupping: a Professor’s Guide.” I thought I understood them.

  Our drink of preference was Scotch, Don B.’s and mine. He was my teacher. My guide through the perils of the nine circles of writerly hell. That was before he began schtupping my girlfriends.