by Julia Scott
Boy, was I good at rhyming. It helped that my grammar was bad (“pieces” —> “it”) and sometimes archaic (“And down they did come and did break”) and that there happened to be a town named Hoodit. Juggling Jake is still in the slammer in the Hoodit county jail for selling damaged goods on eBay.
—A.T.
A JUGGLER NAMED JAKE
There was a juggler named Jake,
Who everyone called a fake.
He tossed in the air,
Plates by the pair.
And down they did come and did break.
He went to a town called “Hoodit.”
And there he learned how to do it.
Not toss up the plates,
That he did break
But take the pieces and glue it.
by Amy Tan
A. J. JACOBS
TWO FEGHOOTS
(AFTER PYNCHON)
Jacobs and his mom.
A. J. JACOBS is the author of the New York Times bestsellers The Know-It-All, The Year of Living Biblically, and The Guinea Pig Diaries. He is the editor at large of Esquire magazine, a contributor to NPR, and has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Entertainment Weekly. He lives in New York City with his wife and their kids. Visit him at AJJacobs.com.
Here’s an embarrassing little chapter of my writing life. When I was twenty-two, I tried to emulate Thomas Pynchon. The results were not pretty.
In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon goes on a weird ten-page detour that tells the story of dwarves (as he put it) who stole fur coats, then auditioned to be in a biblical epic directed by Cecille B. DeMille. They wanted to play slaves on a galleon. DeMille rejected them.
Pynchon ends the story with the sentence: “For De Mille young fur-henchmen can’t be rowing.” Which turns out to be an elaborate pun on the phrase “Forty million Frenchmen can’t be wrong.”
I don’t even like puns very much, but I thought Pynchon was so darn clever, I wanted to try to craft my own stories that ended in excruciating puns. (I’ve since found out this an actual genre of literature called the Feghoot.)
My Feghoot attempts were so bad, I have kept them safely in my hard drive for years. Here are two. The first one isn’t just bad, it’s culturally offensive.
—A.J.J.
1.
I met a man from Kentucky. He told me “Ya know, ah often go flyin’ with mah wife, mah nephew and mah niece. But mah wife, she gits turned on when she’s up in the air, so as soon as we take off, she and mah nephew go to the back of the plane to do some hanky panky.
So I asked him, “Do you do stay in the front of the plane to do some hanky panky as well.”
To which he replied, “No. Mah niece and I land.”
[No man is an island]
2.
Fanny was off to the market. But before she went, she asked her husband, Clive, for some money.
OK, said Clive, as he gave her three pounds. “But I’m very short, so I need whatever change you get back.”
Fanny came back with a big sirloin steak and a bottle of scotch. How much change did you get, asked Clive.
Only twopence, said Fanny. “But something’s been bothering me all the way home. The checkout girl had a big hairdo that stuck way up to the ceiling. I know there’s a name for that hairdo. I know there’s a word for it. What’s the word, Clive?”
“The pence, my dear. Then this word.”
[The pen is mightier than the sword]
CHRIS COLIN
MY WIFE MOVED TO CHILE
CHRIS COLIN is the author most recently of What to Talk About, as well as What Really Happened to the Class of ’93 and Blindsight, named one of Amazon’s Best Books of 2011. He’s written about chimp filmmakers, ethnic cleansing, George Bush’s pool boy, blind visual artists, solitary confinement, the Yelpification of the universe, and more for NewYorker.com, the New York Times Magazine, the Atavist, Outside, Wired, Smithsonian, Mother Jones, McSweeney’s, and Afar, where he’s a contributing writer. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and kids.
Poetry is a lonely slog. Its practitioners toil in obscurity for years, and only a fraction ever publish, usually in some equally obscure local journal.
Other poets, I’m talking about. Me, the first poem I ever wrote won a prestigious contest and was published in a prominent anthology. I was twenty-two. Like Whitman and Dickinson before me, I drew from a deep well of fascinating feelings, plus used the tab button a bunch to make the poetry that much better. The highest quality is essential if you’re writing about how your girlfriend, whom you call your wife to sound more significant, goes to South America for a while.
The rules of the poetry industry surprised me. Instead of paying, this anthology charged me $50. And when it arrived, the address seemed scrawled by a child. It was bound, in the sense that your fifth-grade report on sharks was bound.
Some might say I fell for a moronic scam, and paid for the publication of the only poem I ever wrote. Wordy! Quicker just to say I’m a published poet.
—C.C.
My Wife Moved to Chile
At the guy with two cowlick’s apartment
I watch the game.
The guy with big knees is blocking the set
with one of his knees.
The guy who’s shy and has a phone book wants to know
Who can believe
there’s a guy in the world named Marty Schmucker,
Marty Schmucker, good god, marty schmucker.
I laugh so long, tinny,
you know I’ll die if I stop.
They are chums, they say why sit so far away buddy?
Far away?
This is not far away.
The guy with two cowlicks speaks
over the game of a story he heard:
A man had won the lottery and lost his ticket.
One trillion clams.
He’s tearing apart sofa cushions
as we speak.
CAROLINE PAUL
DEAR MR. NIXON
CAROLINE PAUL is the author of a memoir, Fighting Fire, and a novel, East Wind, Rain. Her most recent book, Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology, with drawings by Wendy MacNaughton, was published in 2013.
The year is 1973. President Nixon has just been reelected to a second term, the United States is still embroiled in Vietnam, Deep Throat has begun speaking to the Washington Post, and now Congress in investigating what will soon be the Watergate scandal.
We are on the cusp of an oil embargo and a stock market crash. Clearly we are a country disillusioned with our government and losing faith by the day.
But as you can tell, I was someone who believed in authority. I had concerns, and this was America—and so I decided to write a letter to President Richard Nixon. And he replied. I was nine years old.
—C.P.
Dear Mr. Nixon,
I am glad you won. We still get the magizines from New York. Can you send me your autograph?
I am going to tell you a knock-knock joke.
Knock-knock!
Who is there?
Warren
Warren who?
Warren Peace by Leo Tolstoy.
Will you please do something to help stop pollution in New York. Also will you help people in need? You should see how mistreated animals are! Horses are whipped, not with crops, with whips! Cats and Dogs are mistreated and not well fed. Then when the owners get tired of thier animals they kick them out of the house instead of giving them to the A.S.P.C.A!
Later, the animals die from lack of food and shelter. Sometimes, before the animals die, they give birth and then either die or leave their babies on thier own and then they die. Sometimes the babies grow up to be alley cats and then there are so many animals that are stray that
you must kill them! Some people keep animals in the city and then the animals go mad for the out side and soon die.
This must stop! If you don’t watch out the animals may soon over populate and what can you do? How can you stop and catch the animals to stop them having babies? You can’t I don’t think!
Caroline Paul
(and sister Alexandra)
TUPELO HASSMAN
THE ARMOIRE
TUPELO HASSMAN’s first novel, Girlchild, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Her work has appeared in the Boston Globe, Harper’s Bazaar, Imaginary Oklahoma, the Independent UK, the Paris Review Daily, the Portland Review Literary Journal, sPARKLE & bLINK, and ZYZZYVA, and has been published by 100WordStory.org, FiveChapters.com, and Invisible City Audio Tours, among others. More is forthcoming from Girls on Fire: Stories of and for Teen Girls. Hassman is the first American to win London’s Literary Death Match. She lives in San Francisco’s East Bay where she can often be found having a root beer on tap at the Hog’s Apothecary.
It’s always an old man. He comes out of the bathroom, “Pssst.” He’s tantalizing in the way of old men, the kind who wear one-piece worksuits that zip from neck to balls. You’re not waiting fifty years for the kind of wisdom that lets you get away with wearing what is basically a grown-up onesie. You’re ready for enlightenment now, and so you come closer and he tells you this, “You got to see the shit I just took. Long as my arm!”
If you can imagine me in one of those old-man crazy suits, which I have been known to wear, you’re ready to read this piece. And I do mean “piece.” My writing here is like that old man’s shit. Except that I am less proud of it. And except that the first person to peek at it was Vicki Forman, my creative writing prof at the time I pen-pooped it. Poor Vicki. Poor you.
When I was asked to be a part of Drivel, I figured I’d hand over a story I’d never finalized, an unpolished but still hopeful work, something to make readers say, “Well, that Tupelo Hassman, she can’t write a bad word if she tries.” I’d call out the faults of the submission, winking all the while at how there’s still gold in them thar hills, but that, seeing as how this is for Litquake and all, for a good cause, like a philanthropic prostitute, I’m willing to show my knickers.
But this piece has me in less than knickers. I’m naked here. Under fluorescent lights. After a bad night. An old man’s crazy suit around my ankles. Pssst.
—T.H.
When they split she had to move to a studio apartment with no closet. She hated it, the apartment, the move, the break up. She could afford neither, and neither could she afford the armoire but more costly was the feeling of having been defeated which was made more pronounced by the piles of clothes that surrounded her bed.
The armoire cost $400, delivery included, and was her first piece of furniture. Everything else was handed down or found on the sidewalks or in alleys on trash days. It had a full-length mirror and a closet, not shelves, on the inside. These were her only qualifications and it was the only one she found that matched them.
She was proud of it. Maybe too proud, and when he returned (as he always did) and before they could have one conversation she was sitting on the upholstered lining of the armoire’s closet floor, legs out, head resting on her winter coats as he marked the piece of furniture with their reunion.
KIERA BUTLER
THE ROUNDABOUT STORY OF CAPTAIN TORITO
KIERA BUTLER, a senior editor at Mother Jones, lives in Oakland, California. Having already penned the definitive work on Captain Torito, she switched gears and is currently working on her first book, Raise: What 4-H Teaches 7 Million Kids—and How Its Lessons Could Change Food and Farming Forever (forthcoming in late 2014).
The strange thing about this story is that I have no memory of ever being interested in anything maritime when I wrote this during Mrs. Sullivan’s fifth-grade class (I was ten). My guess is that I had either recently gone on a whale watch or just finished Joan Aiken’s great book Nightbirds on Nantucket, which I remember being sort of swashbuckling.
In general, as a kid I was much more into landlubbing stories such as the Little House on the Prairie books and Caddie Woodlawn. At any rate, I think I got bored about halfway through writing this story, hence the cursory treatment of the many dangers that befell the captain, “such as cannibals.” Also, I think I named the captain after Doritos.
—K.B.
Being a captain on the world famous ship, Santa Rosita, I have stumbled upon many a strange phenomenon. ’Tis why I decided to put the story of one of my adventures in writing. My name is Captain Torito. I come from Spain. Most of my journeys are to the Spice Islands. After the Turks took over Constantinople, it made it quite difficult to get from Spain to the Spice Islands, and back. However, I earned my living doing map work and other things of the sort, so I muddled through. And here my story begins; let it put knowledge of the demon the sea into your mind.
’Twas a right down windy day in the month of March. My crew and I were returning from the Spice Islands. I was mapping out a way to get back. “Hark!” I said. I had found the perfect route! I will explain it to you, my beloved reader, now.
I was to sail west of the Indies, until I came to the southern tip of India. I would sail around it, and then across the Indian Ocean to the Red Sea. I would then go north, until I came to a spot of land before the Mediterranean Sea. Then I would leave the boat at the spot of land, with guards. (Thieves, you know!) Then I would rent horses to take us to the Med. Sea. When we got to the Med. Sea, I would hire a boat to sail to Genoa!
So we sailed our route, running into many dangers, such as Cannibals, on the tip of India, and Turks near the Med. Sea.
However we did make it back to Genoa, with only one life lost. I got paid a rather large sum of money for my journey.
This concludes my story. I hope you thoroughly enjoyed it.
ANDREW SEAN GREER
COWBOY UP
Greer at the age of twenty-five with fellow MFA student Mary Park, who is still friends with him despite his early bad writing.
ANDREW SEAN GREER is the bestselling author of five works of fiction, most recently The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells. He is the recipient of the Northern California Book Award, the California Book Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and fellowships from the NEA and the New York Public Library. He once dated a cowboy.
When I graduated from the University of Montana with my MFA, I had a few thousand dollars left over from my student grants, and I decided I would live on this money while I wrote a new novel. That gave me about four months, which seemed like a reasonable amount of time. I was twenty-five. I was living with my new boyfriend in Seattle, in a house that looked out on downtown and the Cascade mountain range and whose rent was cheap because we had to take care of the owner’s Siamese cat, Vrtiska, who would only be silent when she sat on my lap. My boyfriend traveled constantly. I had no money to eat anything but tuna salad, and so did Vrtiska. And so, with the arrogance and passion of youth, I dashed off a novel about thieves who counterfeit cowboy art, and a car chase across the West.
I wrote eight pages a day, every day. It was called Cowboy Up or Fascinatin’ Tim. Fascinatin’ Tim was the villain. I believe the climax was at a geyser or a ghost town or something—I have not reread it in nearly twenty years. I sent it off to my agent, very proud. And he never mentioned it to me except once, years later, when he said he kept it in his bedside table as a reminder of where we all came from.
I abandoned the novel—I married the boyfriend. But I have to say, reading over the beginning of that novel, it has the charm of an old high school yearbook photo. Ugly and awkward and unlovable. But what a naive smile it wears on its face!
—A.S.G.
True story:
It was a costume dance to benefit the Olympic mountain range, but by some amazing coincidence, all the young women had come dressed as Spanish ladies. So then p
icture it: almost a hundred red silk skirts spidered with black lace, dancing across the room like toppled poison mushrooms, whole galaxies of beauty spots glimmering from frowning cheeks, countless rose-stenciled fans flapping away at furious female breasts, causing a sound like sprinklers on a college lawn as well as, more strikingly, near gale-force winds which lifted every one of a hundred mantillas straight into the air. The effect: an Old West bordello reunion. The mood: bitter feminine fury.
So how would you expect the men to act? First, we could hardly believe our good luck. The first sight was an impressive mountain chain of cleavage—“Alps on Alps” as Pope (I think) once put it. But shock soon followed. We men, dressed as bumblebees, fringed cowboys, fleeting political celebrities and appliances, couldn’t tell one from the other. That sounds offensive. I don’t mean to sound offensive; I mean to flatter. Sometimes when I talk about women, some of my twin brother Galen flashes through and I sound bug-eyed and lecherous. So please imagine the dance floor of the Seattle Brotherhood of Benevolent Antelope blooming with these Spanish poppies and you’ll see my totally male confusion. To have two women look alike is one thing (I’ve learned, from being a twin, that women think this about men, too). To have all possible women look alike is a dreary fantasy.
I’m really not used to talking about me. All the stories I’ve ever told have been about my twin brother Galen, whose life has been far more exciting than mine. Most of our years between puberty and that costume ball were spent together talking about his life, whispering and laughing, me always wide-eyed at his stories of seduction, him always leaning back into a chair and beginning, “Here’s our lesson for the day. . . .” He told me the tricks to his seductions. I learned how to dress to provoke, the precise aperture of a bewitching eye, the language of roses, love letters, wax seals and how to pine with perfection.