by Julia Scott
“It was a surprise, wasn’t it?” he slurred. “I did it with electronics. With mirrors.”
[ . . . ]
But I am not alone now, either. I am not alone.
ISAAC FITZGERALD
EIGHTH GRADE JOURNAL
[Note from Isaac’s mom, Susan: “Sagging neckline on T-shirt denotes his chewing on collars is still an oral pastime. (Not yet smoking???)]
ISAAC FITZGERALD has been a firefighter, worked on a boat, and been given a sword by a king, thereby accomplishing three of his five childhood goals. He has written for the Bold Italic, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, and the San Francisco Chronicle. He is the books editor for BuzzFeed.com.
This is something I wrote for a class, which meant that in eighth grade I was handing it in to a teacher after every entry. And her name was Mrs. Jenkins, and she would then write comments. Don’t forget—that’s me in the photo. I’m an adorable, happy little kid.
Here’s how Mrs. Jenkins started the journal: “Keeping a daily journal is very helpful in learning to become a better writer. Remember that you write best when you are interested in, and know something about, the topic you choose to write about. Think about the events and interests in your life. I am looking forward to writing and sharing with you this semester.”
Clearly she had no idea what she was getting herself into. My journal quickly filled with drawings of hangmen and pentagrams on fire, poetry about drive-by shootings, and rap lyrics by the Beastie Boys.
No matter how bad it got, Mrs. Jenkins heroically tried to keep a positive outlook on my “art” by praising my vocabulary, poetic form, and attention to detail.
—I.F.
STEPHEN ELLIOTT
IT’S DUMB
STEPHEN ELLIOTT’s books include Happy Baby, My Girlfriend Comes to the City and Beats Me Up, and The Adderall Diaries. Elliott is the director of the movie About Cherry and an adaptation of his novel Happy Baby. His writing has been featured in Esquire, the New York Times, the Believer, GQ, The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2005 and 2007, The Best American Erotica, and Best Sex Writing 2006. He is also the founding editor of the popular online literary magazine the Rumpus.
I started writing poetry when I was about ten or eleven. When I was twelve, I started going over to my friend Dave Dorocke’s house, and I would read my poetry to his mom. We would smoke pot together. All my other friends would be in Dave’s room listening to thrash metal, while I was in the living room with his mom, smoking pot and reading poetry. At the time, she wore tight jeans and she had dyed-red hair and, to me, she was a sexual being. She seemed to really like my poetry.
When I was thirteen, I ran away from home and I was sleeping on the streets for a while. I left my poems with Mrs. Dorocke, and then she gave them back to me. I left Chicago and hitchhiked to California when I was fourteen, and in East L.A. a trucker stole my bag with all my poems in it.
But it turned out that Mrs. Dorocke had made copies of all my poetry. And a few years ago, she sent me all my poems back. It was about that time when I realized she was either a very nice person or she was delusional. I’m going to say she was very nice. She put a cover on it—an image of a skeleton hand-cutting roses. A lot of the poems are very dark.
There is no doubt in my mind that going to Mrs. Dorocke’s house and reading my poems, having her tell me how good they were, and getting that female attention is the reason I became a writer.
—S.E.
WENDY MACNAUGHTON
ART SCHOOL EMO
This is a self-portrait: me hitting on me. From learning to do double exposure in photography.
WENDY MACNAUGHTON is an illustrator. Her drawings and illustrated journalism can be seen in places like the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and Print magazine. She has illustrated several books, including Lost Cat: A True Story of Love, Desperation, and GPS Technology; The Essential Scratch and Sniff Guide to Becoming a Wine Expert; Meanwhile in San Francisco: The City in Its Own Words; and Pen & Ink: Tattoos and the Stories Behind Them. Her work has been anthologized in both The Best American Infographics and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2013. She lives in San Francisco with her partner, the writer Caroline Paul.
Art school teaches you many things about making art. How light hits a sphere and casts a shadow. How to mix every color you need out of five tubes of paint. How to capture the contours of fabric on the page without looking at your paper. And how to shoot, edit, and screen video art so terrible that should anyone uncover it later in your lifetime, it could be used as blackmail.
But more than making art, art school teaches you how to be an art student. For example:
1.How to look discontented without looking like you’re trying too hard.
2.How to have disdain for everything. Except David Byrne. Then especially David Byrne. Then except David Byrne.
3.Anything can be art. (Especially when you only have five minutes before class and something’s due.)
4.No matter how many times you try to convince them otherwise, neither your angst nor your dream interpretations are of interest to your instructors. But you keep trying. With lots of self-portraits.
5.That sooner or later you have to grow up, scrap the emo junk, learn your art history, realize it’s a business, and start making really bad conceptual art.
The piece here was made when I was firmly rooted in number 4, just prior to learning number 5.
I call this Self-Portrait: Art School, Semester 1.
—W.M.
DAMIAN ROGERS
PERSEPHONE
DAMIAN ROGERS was born and raised in suburban Detroit and is now based in Toronto, where she occasionally writes lyrics for Canadian troubadours. Her first book of poetry, Paper Radio, was nominated for the Pat Lowther Memorial Award. She is the creative director of Poetry in Voice/Les Voix de la Poésie, a recitation contest for high school students in Canada, and the poetry editor at House of Anansi Press. She has been preparing since the 1980s for a cameo in a Jim Jarmusch film. He still hasn’t called.
I asked my friend Brett if he had a copy of one of my terrible high school poems (he’s a natural archivist, so there was a chance), and he came back with this thing that I’d completely forgotten existed. Oh, where to start? I was so proud of this poem that I rubber-cemented it onto purple—purple—card stock, which I carefully decorated with paint splotches and torn paper. Note also the jaunty placement of the poem, which further reflects my artsy instincts.
The poem itself is a classic undergraduate study of the moody, vain, self-involved drama queen (a self-portrait, naturally), all erotic innuendo and vague feminist subtext. I was obsessed with the Persephone myth, and as far as I knew, I was the only person who had the bright idea to mine this material in the first person. An innocent young girl married to Death! So sexy!
The first thing I notice about the poem is the fact that I just scissored the thing right up to its margins, revealing how little feel I had for how white space operates in a poem. (Perhaps, though, this was an echo of the claustrophobia Persephone endured in the dark and crowded Underworld? Yeah.) Also, I’m not sure the line breaks could be made any less effective than they are here. My favorite worst line is the portentous “It is time” hanging there all by itself. I bet I loved that. And I doubt I could craft a flatter line than “where my husband is.”
The phrase “whispering the name of my lover” makes me shudder now, as I remember a friend from university bitingly noting, “Damian never seems to have boyfriends, just ‘lovahs.’” I can’t even believe I’m admitting to that in print. The shame is so intense. Additionally, the references to a “cave of shadows” and “mouth of a flower” places this work within the fine tradition of Magic Vagina poems.
I do have affection for this earlier self; I must be gentle with her. She was so unsure and awkward and so hopeful to fit in with those who don’t fit in. And the p
resentation’s craft-project, ersatz-zine aesthetic is pretty cute.
Getting back to vanity, I’m trying so hard to look like I’m living in a subtitled movie in this photo. It was taken on the fire escape of the hippie cooperative house where I lived in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the fall of 1991. I was really into rocking “the French inhale” during this period. Oh, my Gauloises, there is no pretention like that of the nineteen-year-old would-be poet. As you can clearly see behind my head, the last leaves were holding on by their “fingernails.” And you know . . . slipping.
—D.R.
ROBERT ANASI
AMONG THE BARBARIANS
ROBERT ANASI is the author of The Gloves: A Boxing Chronicle and The Last Bohemia: Scenes from the Life of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His third book of nonfiction, Golden Man: The Remarkable Quest of Gene Savoy, is suffering in a strange publishing purgatory, where it awaits redemption. Anasi’s journalism, criticism, and reviews have appeared in many publications, including the New York Times, the Times Literary Supplement, Virginia Quarterly Review, the New York Observer, the Los Angeles Times, Salon, and Publishers Weekly. He has received a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, as well as a Chancellor’s Club Fellowship and a Schaeffer Fellowship from the University of California, Irvine. He is a founding editor of the literary journal Entasis. He lives in Los Angeles but misses the Brooklyn that was.
Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “A doctor can always bury his mistakes. An architect can only advise his client to plant vines.” For the most part, writers share the enviable position of the doctor. We used to plant our corpses in file cabinets; these days, in dustless folders that remain out of sight. At least until some grave robber like Julia Scott comes along, jostles our elbows, and makes us dig.
I brought this disfigured creature into the world at age thirty-one, years after I should have known better. As with most bad art, the impulse was noble. In college, I’d gotten bored with the standard-issue American short story. It seemed to me then (and still does) that writers were reworking mid-career Chekhov over and over and over again. I didn’t see the point in writing stories that had already been written, by a genius and generations of imitators. There was no space there, and I didn’t want to spend my life chasing somebody else’s dragon. So I started looking at short fiction from different traditions. One thing you could say about the stories of Kafka, Borges, Márquez, and Akutagawa—narrative realism they weren’t.
Unfortunately, I chose D. H. Lawrence as a model for this piece. At the time, I was under his spell. As far as I’m concerned, “The Horse Dealer’s Daughter” and “Odour of Chrysanthemums” are among the most brilliant short fictions of our old English language. Lawrence can be horrible, and is, for hundreds of pages at a time, but at his best he’s sui generis, jaw dropping, a miracle. That said, Lawrence is also probably inimitable. One of my biggest problems here is that in my effort to follow the master, I fall into heavy-handed Victorian-ish diction. There are other problems. Many of them. If you can stop laughing for a second, you’ll see them.
—R.A.
That was how it had gone all day. He opened the door and asked how she was feeling. He asked her if she wanted to come downstairs or if she wanted him to bring her something. She would shake her head, no. Then he would sit on the edge of the bed and slip his hand under the blanket to touch her flesh. In the touch she felt his concern but as something distant. He did not regard her fully. His hand lay warm and heavy on her stomach but he did not regard her fully, not any longer. In her normal routine, she avoided that knowledge but in her sickness it pressed her and she always seemed to be sick.
Back at their apartment when she returned from work, she barely had the energy to make herself a meal. In the morning mirror her face appeared hard and lined as if she’d been drunk the night before. It was ghastly to her, the lined face in the mirror. She didn’t recognize herself in that face. She was young; there was no reason for her to look like that. While she lay in bed in their apartment he roamed, vigorous and dissatisfied, walking from one little room to the next. In his pacing and sounds of frustration she saw the others in him. She could not live with that anymore. His brutality was extinguishing her.
[ . . . ]
It hadn’t always been like that. Once his vitality had drawn her. She had sensed new possibilities through him, a new life opening through him. Together they planned to do remarkable things. When they talked the words flew and joined, forming a brief and remarkable architecture in the air. It belonged to both of them; she brought something to him as he brought something to her. And she had never met such an attractive man. She loved the way his shoulders sloped, a little apelike, and the loose way his body moved when they danced made her laugh from desire. The unhappiness came to her slowly. He grew around her, filling all the available space in the little apartment. He grew and she suffocated. Over the months, she attempted to fight her reduction but her efforts were feeble. He came from such coarseness that she could not mark him. When she pointed to his atrocities he would take shelter in the bathroom and she found herself screaming at the white paint of the door. Or he fled the apartment to return a few hours later, whistling, as if nothing had happened.
“Let’s go get a drink,” he would say. Her illness puzzled him and he ignored it unless she complained. He expected her to be well in a day or two and seemed oblivious as one crisis faded into the next. If he would only hold her and say, “I love you. What’s wrong?” He filled their apartment as she struggled for breath. He reduced her. He took her and reduced her to a corner of his life. Some little corner where he occasionally watered her, cocked an eye at her and wandered away. In the place where she was kept he found uses for her. She made a useful extension, a pseudopod in his sprawling empire. He used her hands and mind to serve him. In bed, he ignored her and this made her hate his use of her. After the first happy months he only coupled with her rarely and then like a beast. A quick act of shame and he withdrew to an enormous distance. Still, he told her she was beautiful, he admired her skin, a thick and unmarked white. Against her pale skin her hair shone with darkness, a cloud of night against her glossy skin. She felt his admiration and could not understand why he did not desire her. She wondered what she had done to drive him away.
JOE LOYA
DO IN REMEMBRANCE
Loya’s prison ID.
JOE LOYA is an essayist, playwright, filmmaker, actor, and the author of the memoir The Man Who Outgrew His Prison Cell: Confessions of a Bank Robber. Besides being a commentator on radio and TV, he has published essays in the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Utne Reader, Newsday, and McSweeney’s. Loya published the prison zombie apocalypse novel The Red Mile under the pseudonym the Zombie Whisperer. Any day now he’ll be done editing his short film Animal Style. He’s currently working on a memoir about being a good father with a dark, criminal past, titled Dada, Tell Me a Zombie Story. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and daughter.
What you are about to read is the first short story I wrote in prison. I’d quit crime. Decided to become a writer instead. I’d come to look at the whole heist mania as bipolar grandiosity, and urgently desired to write a story that would explain how my obsession with darker themes eventually drove me mad.
I was raised by a Southern Baptist preacher. Reading the King James Bible daily was compulsory. Supplemented with nineteenth-century sermons by British preachers. My Irish stepmom fed me classic novels by Russians and French authors translated into British English. By the time I was in my teens, I decided I wanted to be a theologian, so I got busy studying philosophy and Greek.
That’s why when I started writing in prison, I could only write like those dense texts I’d cut my literary teeth on. I thought literature had to explore the greater themes, heavily reference Dostoyevsky. With an arch William Buckley-ish tone. It certainly had to have sentences interspersed with six or seven commas like my boys Henry James and James Baldwin bot
h wrote.
Which explains why, when I found this story for Drivel, the following prison memory leapt to mind:
I was once offered prison wine so foul I prepared to drink it standing over my cell toilet in case I threw up. I gazed into the cup. Looked like twelve ounces of pulpy ketchup-colored vomit. I pinched my nose. Guzzled it all in two large swigs. I stamped my feet and shook my head as if two midgets were fisting my nostrils. Horrible taste. But most enjoyable drunk of my prison life.
Yeah, this story for me is like that pungent pruno. Uncomfortable like a midget fisting my nostrils. You can thank me later.
—J.L.
The photograph is slightly blemished with the distinct graininess of age, but it is still obvious to the casual viewer that in that abbreviated moment we three children were innocence personified. We three are celebrating my fifth birthday at McKenzy Park, off-balance on clumsy roller skates, wearing bright party hats, holding and hugging each other in celebration.
Marcy, K and myself all linked together: me on the left registering a goofy grimace of cooties repulsion as Marcy clutches me and plants a sloppy kiss on my cheek. On the right K is balanced by his nervous grip on the backside of her sweater, displaying a baby toothed smile with gaps, rupturing in laughter, his full eyes generously focused on the camera. I’ve insisted on setting this filmed memory in a frame and placing it on my desk. This is my effort to remain faithful to the old motto of the Benedictine Order: Keep Death Daily Before Your Eyes.
After school, on my front lawn, K and I would argue and wrestle like little boys often do, only to soon find Marcy beside us, first refereeing, then mimicking our stagy macho posturing. This calmed us and invariably we patched up whatever rankled us. Marcy would then set her cheap transistor radio on the porch step, turn it on and sing to us her version of some popular top-forty song. K and I twirled and danced hand in hand, in frenzied fraternal celebration like two of Snow White’s lucky dwarfs enchanted to fellowship by the voice of a future princess.