Still Life with June

by Darren Greer

  I am not well liked here because I don’t offer any criticism whatsoever. Whenever my turn comes to speak about the story that was just read I invariably say “Pass.”

  Writers, especially bad writers, are a paranoid bunch.

  They would rather you took their story, gutted it, and left the remains in a heap in the centre of the room than say “pass.” You wouldn’t believe how many of them come up to me after group and ask me what I really I thought.

  “I know you passed,” they say. “So did that mean you didn’t like it? “

  “It means I passed,” I tell them. “I’m not qualified.”

  Several times there has been talk of asking me to leave the group. Not me specifically, but those who come week after week and never contribute. Recently a woman joined our group and took it over, just like that. She hates my guts. She had only been in the group about two weeks when she looked right at me one afternoon with her blue, blue eyes and said, “I admire writers. I admire those of us who come here and have the courage to read our writing in front of other people, and never speak about the contract.”

  This woman, whose name is Dagnia — a thirty-something blonde waif with a huge forehead and a piercing intellect that does indeed sometimes scare me — is always saying that word. Contract. She said it again. “The contract is: we take the risk of being rejected because others are taking that risk. I don’t think there’s room in this group for someone who is unwilling to take that risk. This group is for writers.”

  She uses that word like a club. They all do. If I ever do read anything to the group, it will be my “writers as scum” theory. But I won’t, because no matter how nasty I might get, they’ll applaud me. These people just love self-depreciation and mea culpa. That’s not to say I’m better than they are, mind you. That’s not to say anything at all.

  I’m not qualified.

  XX

  I’m relatively new to the writing game. One day a couple of years ago after a lifetime of relative misdirection that I won’t bore you with, I woke up and thought it might be nice to do some writing. Almost right away I sold a few stories, albeit to shitty little magazines that pay in cat-box liners. This approach isn’t very popular with the BIG BAD BOOKS writing crowd, who, the way they tell it, were all writing novels before they were out of diapers. The theory that writers are born and not made is pretty popular among the writers’ group at BIG BAD BOOKS. Which makes me, because I started so late, a bit like a guy who moves to a small town and has trouble getting accepted. If you weren’t born there you can’t say you’re from there, even though you live there now.

  People from small towns, and most writers I know, are full of shit.

  XXI

  This last is one of my favorite topics to write about.

  XXII

  Even as a writer I’m not immune to my own logic. Ergo, I am as full of shit as most writers and you should be careful about what you believe.

  XXIII

  Let me put it another way.

  A) All writers are liars

  B) I am a writer

  C) Therefore I am a liar. Consider statement A.

  XXIV

  You should be beginning to see why I am not a perennial favourite among the folks at the BIG BAD BOOKS writers’ group.

  XXV

  And yet, beneath it all, I think the real reason these people don’t like me, besides my compulsive passing and intellectual terrorism, is that they sense my arrogance. It’s always been a problem. When I was a boy in school I used to get beat up all the time because, even though I never said anything to anyone, all those great big dumb thugs could just feel my contempt for them. My father could feel it too, and I left when I was sixteen. I try to hide my contempt, I really do, but I almost always fail. Dagnia is especially sensitive to it, mostly because she has the same kind of contempt for everyone in the room. My contempt interferes with her contempt. It makes her contempt less effective somehow, to have another healthy contempt right in the room there with her.

  Dagnia is a good writer. Better than me, though it hurts like hell to admit it. She has published two novels, countless short stories, funny and moving articles in nationally circulated women’s magazines about the coming of early menopause. I have read both her novels and have to admit they’re pretty good. I have never told Dagnia I have read her books for two reasons.

  1) She hates the fact that someone can up and read her novels without buying them and putting a royalty payment in her pocket. Because both her books are short she is especially susceptible to BIG BAD BOOKS’s freeloaders like me.

  2) I am jealous of her success. I have tried, and failed, to write my own novel on several occasions. I’m just not good at sustained storytelling. I am, when it comes to writing, a premature ejaculator. I get a literary erection, write a few thousand words, and climax my epiphany all over the last page. Dagnia prefers a long slow screw, with a gradual orgasm a few hundred pages in and a little bit of snuggling and kissing afterwards for dénouement. This is a figurative metaphor, you understand. Other than through the characters in her stories, I don’t think Dagnia has ever been laid. As my eloquent old dad used to say, her cunt is as tight as a frog’s arse underwater.

  XXVI

  The thing you must understand about Dagnia is that she doesn’t come to the BIG BAD BOOKS writers’ group for support either, or to read her stuff, though she occasionally does read. She comes to be worshipped, and to feed her ego by hearing all the shitty writers in the room read their pages of poorly organized, weakly executed, inarticulately framed and worded stuff. She is ruthless in her criticism. As soon as someone finishes a story, everyone sits up straight in their chairs and waits for the cannon to blast.

  It always does.

  She says the same things I just said. I stole them from her. “Poorly organized. Weakly executed. Inarticulately framed and worded.” She has a host of others. “Borderline pap. Soulless melodrama. Confusing and not lucid. Lacks conflict. Lacks catharsis. Too much conflict. Too much catharsis.”

  At the end of this literary carpet-bombing she always adds something positive, a weak afterthought. “I like the way you had your character lie to the man when she picked up the phone. A good sense of irony there.” Or, “You have a good sense of place.”

  This is by far her most common praise. It is, if you’re quick enough to catch it, more of her contempt shining through. Almost all writers, no matter how bad, have a good sense of place. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t have the desire to write in the first place. Place is what gets inside you and forces the story out. Dagnia knows that I know this, because every time she delivers that faint but damning praise I lower my head and smile to myself, and she always catches me at it. She stares at me with those blue, blue eyes. “What in the fuck are you doing here?” that look clearly says. “You liver-bellied, non-producing piece of contemptuous crap.” No mistaking her look for anything else. And I just smile some more, look away from that penetrating blue stare and wait for the next of Dagnia’s sacrificial cows to step up to the golden altar.

  XXVII

  The Blue Moon Grocery below my apartment is run by two Filipino lesbians named Rose and Amy. The thing about lesbians, Filipino or otherwise, is that they have this good cop/bad cop act going all the time. Or more like masculine cop/feminine cop. Rose is the masculine one. She wears baggy jeans and sweatshirts and has her black hair cropped close to her skull like a man. She has a man’s walk too — all swagger and stiff hips. And she talks like man: fuck this and fuck that and I swear on my father’s fucking nuts. Rose doesn’t talk at all the way I think a Filipino woman should, even a butch lesbian one.

  Amy, on the other hand, is a knockout. Svelte, shapely body with big tits; a stunner in anything short of a feed sack. Her hair is long, black, and gorgeous, and she refuses to work in anything other than a dress.

  Rose gets jealous when anyone, especially a man, looks at Amy the wrong way. Rose works the cash and stocks the shelves while Amy sits behind the counter on
a tall wooden stool, showing some leg and looking pretty. Sometimes she flips through a copy of Vogue or buffs her nails. If Rose sees a customer so much as sneak a peek at Amy’s shapely legs she flips her lid. “What are you looking at, you fucking sex fiend?” I don’t know how many times I’ve walked into the store just as some guy clutching his carton of milk or sack of milagro-bean-scented rice is running out of the place like it’s on fire. Rose is shorter than Amy, but stocky. She could kick the shit out of anybody if she had to. Therefore she never has to.

  I, of course, am exempted from Rose’s universal hatred of men. Because I’m gay, and because I once published a flattering story about Rose and Amy that upped the business in the store for a few weeks. Rose is the only person who knows all my pseudonyms. I let her read my stories occasionally. I still don’t give her the contributor’s copies though. If she’s interested, I make her buy them, like anyone else.

  XXVIII

  I always buy my cigarettes and milk at the Blue Moon Grocery. That’s all I buy there, though. I am not much interested in whatever else they have — the scented rice and okra and lychee nuts and jackfruit canned in bamboo syrup. Unlike many of my gay contemporaries, I am not into ethnic or foreign foods. I do not make chicken aubergine and sautéed eggplant for dinner. Chicken must be plain, no fancy sauces, and either broiled or fried. I still have not outgrown the twenty-year-old’s obsession with the ease and fill of Kraft Dinner. I don’t own a cappuccino-maker, and my coffee in the morning is made from second-growth under-nourished beans furnished in cheap blue-and-white packaging by Maxwell House. I have, I’m proud to say, never had a gourmet or shade-grown ethical coffee in my life, even though BIG BAD BOOKS has a shop that brews it right in the store.

  Rose appreciates my business because her cigarettes are a little more expensive than BIG BAD GROCERY down the street, but I pay for the convenience and I never look at Amy’s legs. It was who Rose told me about Dean.

  “I rented out the apartment finally,” she said. “The one above you.”

  There was no need to add that. There is only one other apartment in my building and, of course, it’s above me.

  “Oh yeah? Who’s in it?”

  Rose shrugged. “Some pianist.”

  “Some penis?” I said. I heard her correctly the first time. There are very few words in the English language that are perfectly legitimate but sound like something dirty. Pianist is one of them, and I just cannot pass up an opportunity to get the two confused. Other words I can’t resist screwing up are: Regina (in Saskatchewan), Koontz (the writer), testate. Juvenile, I know, for a thirty-year-old failed writer who is supposed to be tragically sophisticated, but I can’t help myself.

  “No, a pianist,” said Rose. “A piano player. He moved his stuff in this afternoon.”

  “A piano too?”

  “Yup,” said Rose. “Big fucking thing. Had four movers carry it up the stairs. I like tenants who have big, expensive things like that. Means they won’t be skipping out in the middle of the month. Not with that big fucker to lug around.”

  Rose is absolutely ruthless about receiving rent from her tenants. When I first moved in she told me I could do anything I wanted — wreck the place if I felt like it — so long as on the first of the month I had a cheque down to her in the store.

  “No eight days’ grace here,” she said. “And I don’t give a shit what the rent laws say. I get my money on the first day of the month, or you get your stuff piled on the sidewalk on the second day of the month. Got it, Jack?”

  I have never lived in an apartment in my life where I wasn’t chronically late with the rent. I have made more than my share of midnight moves, and still have a few outstanding liens against any property I might own by extremely pissed-off landlords who once thought I was a nice guy. But Rose scares me into paying the rent on time every month, and after a while I found I liked it. It is one less thing I have to worry about. No matter what happens I will not be sneaking up the back stairs on the tenth of the month or walking six blocks to buy cigarettes because I owe Rose money. Like at BIG BAD BOOKS, the threat of violence and punitive action keeps me honest.

  Rose told me that if this bozo kept me awake at night with his piano I was immediately to come and tell her about it. “I told him to keep it down. I’m not renting out fucking Carnegie Hall here. So if it bothers you, you come and see me, okay?”

  I told her I would, and I felt pretty good about things. That was Rose’s way of taking care of me. Amy didn’t say a word, just sat there buffing her nails and smiling brainlessly at me and Rose. I didn’t look at her legs once, and I bought my cigarettes. That’s why Rose told me she would kick the piano man out if he bothered me. This was our way of taking care of each other. This, according to that bitch Dagnia, would be our contract.

  XXIX

  Rose hadn’t told me anything about Dean other than that he was a penis, and I just assumed that he was old. By the end of that evening’s shift, I had a complete picture of him, furnished by a mind that has nothing better to do than imagine what people I’d never met look like. He was sixty, tall and thin and stooped, with an unruly shock of white hair that hung down over his eyes and that he was always brushing out of the way when he played. He wore a tux. (All penises wear tuxes.) I even invented a history for him. He was married and he used to play the piano naked with a candelabra dripping wax on the ebony sheen of the baby grand. His wife lay on her back under the piano, naked as well, and listened. Then she contracted breast cancer, had one tit cut off, and the other trembling in its cup as it awaited the same fate. She died while he was touring Europe. At the funeral he played her favourite piece — some classical song which if I actually went ahead and wrote the story about this pathetic penis I’d have to look up — and he sobbed during the entire performance while not missing a note. After he buried her he screwed a woman from the congregation — not out of any pent-up energy or sexual frustration caused by a dying wife with sawed-off tits, but rather in an effort to erase his memory of her. It didn’t work. He quit the concert circuit, had a nervous breakdown, and was committed to an institution in another city where they wouldn’t let him play the piano. He had just got out and moved into Rose and Amy’s shit palace above the Blue Moon, where he was to begin his gradual climb to the top again with his recently purchased and precision-tuned second-hand upright Kohler and Campbell. He practised for six hours every day.

  That much, at least, was right.

  I know because the walls and floors in Rose and Amy’s shit palace are paper-thin. I could hear a mouse fart in Dean’s living room, to say nothing of an entire piano concerto played with the sustain pedal to the floor. Believe me I knew. Juxtaposition also knew. For the first couple of days after Dean moved in, she was a raw bundle of nerves. You think people are complicated? What about cats? You can spend two years with a cat and not know that she hates Chopin. Imagine trying to figure a human out, even a boyfriend, if it takes two years to figure out your fucking cat is not a fan of classical music. That in fact classical music makes her hair fall out, sets her teeth on edge, and makes her stop going in the litter box. She pissed on the carpet and the smell was impossible to get out. My whole place smelled like cat urine. And all because that old fucker upstairs couldn’t keep his marbles straight, ruined his career, and had to start all over again in a dumpy one-bedroom apartment on Lime Street above a lesbian-owned Filipino grocery called the Blue Moon.

  XXX

  This is my daily routine. I get up late, go to my cheap thrown-together-from-parts 486 computer, check my e-mail (mostly unsolicited advertisements for Internet porn sites, companies that guarantee me credit no matter what my rating is like, and people telling me how I can make millions off this new technology called the World Wide Web). After deleting all the unwanted electronic correspondence (except the gay porn sites, which I might visit if they have free pictures and don’t require a credit card) I pour a cup of Maxwell House and sit down to write. I write in rubber boots because Juxtaposition c
an’t resist my feet when I am at my desk. Don’t ask me how long I write. I write until I stop. Sometimes I write for eight hours. Sometimes three. Sometimes for ten minutes if things are really not going my way. Then I get up again, make something to eat, watch soap operas, feed the cat. Sometimes I go back to bed. Sometimes I visit the Internet porn sites sent to me that morning and masturbate at my desk. Sometimes I read over what I wrote. If it is Thursday I go to my writers’ group. If it is not Thursday I go for a walk along Lime Street and watch the dogs fight in the park. Sometimes I go to BIG BAD BOOKS even if it isn’t Thursday. I read the new book by a writer four or five years younger than I am who won ten awards for his first novel and I let the jealous bile burn like acid inside my guts for the rest of the day. Then I go to work.

  XXXI

  My shift at the Sally Ann Treatment Centre begins at six. I cannot be late. If you are late for a shift at the centre you can be fired on the spot. The guys in the centre have to be on time for everything as part of their program, and that means that everyone who works there has to be on time too. Setting a bad example is not allowed. I have never had a job in my life where I wasn’t a half-hour late every day, except for the Sally Ann. Like BIG BAD BOOKS, like Rose and her rent, I am kept in line by more threats of action, more punitive measures. My life has never been so well organized.

  As soon as I get into the centre I relieve the day guy from the office. Then I sit at the desk and play computer games until seven, when I go upstairs and walk the floors, check the dorm rooms and the smoking room and see if the guys are behaving themselves. If the guys are behaving themselves — not using drugs, not fighting, not fucking their brains out — then I go downstairs and play computer games again. If a guy is doing one of the above-mentioned things, I take my walkie-talkie and call over to the main shelter for some muscle. If he’s using, we put him out into the street. If he’s fighting we break it up. I’ve never caught anyone fucking his brains out, so I don’t know what I’m supposed to do in that case. I am, by profession, a rat. If a guy is telling “war stories” — elaborate, euphoric and detailed accounts of his drug-using days — I record it in the log for the counsellors to read in the morning. If a guy seems depressed, or manic, I record that too. Anything out of the ordinary I record in the log so the counsellors can read it when they come in. Most times I write on the hour what all the other Resident Assistants write in the book on the hour.