by Jim Hanas
So it was understandable, if extremely difficult to understand (us not being her), that the actress would angle her bronzed legs slightly to the left and would grind her inline skates in the sand at Venice Beach upon hearing the news, and that she would then visibly claw at her halter top, dig her French nails into her calves, and cry, causing tourists who might otherwise have done so to refrain from taking pictures of her with their telephones.
Jacqueline
Cause: Sharp, icy wind
The air was cold and the wind was sharp, causing Jacqueline’s eyes to water in a manner resembling weep-based tear production — a fact she tried to explain to Rex, the bastard, when (of all the luck) she ran into him as she emerged from the food co-op, a basketful of fruits, brans, and probiotic solutions hanging from her bent right elbow.
“I knew you missed me,” he said, seeing the tears streaming down her red cheeks. “I knew you couldn’t live without me.”
“I don’t miss you and, yes, I can live without you,” she said, erasing the tears with her tightly gloved fingers. “It’s the wind.”
He smiled.
“Yes, I suppose our love was like the wind,” he said. “Subtle, omnipresent, powerful.”
“No, no, asshole,” she said, frantically running the heel of her free hand under each eye. “I’m not crying. The wind got in my eyes and . . .”
“Bracing, kind . . . ”
“I wasn’t even thinking about you,” she screamed as she swung the basket at Rex’s left temple, showering the sidewalk with clementines and five whole grains, which strangers happily helped pile back into Jacqueline’s basket as the paramedics loaded Rex onto a stretcher.
Roy
Cause: Communion with nature
The match bit Roy’s fingers like a bee sting, sharply and under the nail where no amount of blowing or hand flailing could make it stop. The match-carcass fell to the porch, still leaking smoke. Roy had been too busy laughing to notice the flame creeping slowly toward his skin, and he continued to laugh, even as he shook, blew, then finally snuffed out the match with his foot.
The backyard was filled with the smell of spent powder and an atmosphere of smoke hung a yard from the ground. The Lab and the shepherd scuttled through the mist and back to the porch with their tongues hanging out.
Roy wiped tears from his eyes and fumbled for another match.
“Where did it go? You don’t know, do you?” he teased the dogs as he adjusted the bottle rocket he had twisted into the ground at his feet, trying to find the optimal path.
They looked at him expectantly and pawed the bare dirt around the porch.
They did not know.
“Goddammit!” The new match again burnt Roy’s fingertips. He rubbed them together and put them in his mouth. He poured beer on them and fumbled for another match. The Lab and the shepherd waited, whimpering a little, waiting for the next bottle rocket to be launched over the trees. Roy leaned down and touched the match to the wick.
Hisssss.
Off it went with the dogs in pursuit.
POP!
The dogs bent their necks back in ways dogs’ necks aren’t meant to bend and Roy laughed and rubbed his eyes.
The dogs coasted to a halt, looked up into the sky, then at each other, then back at Roy. God, how these dogs loved him, he thought, as he sat down on the edge of the porch and cradled his face in his hands.
Acknowledgements
I’d like to thank the editors of McSweeney’s, One Story, Fence, The Land-Grant College Review, and SignificantObjects.com, where several of these stories first appeared. Special thanks go to Joyland’s Brian Joseph Davis and Emily Schultz for championing this collection and making it better at every stage — and to Richard Nash, for introducing us all in the first place. Finally, I’d like to acknowledge the tireless help of my wife, editor, and best reader Alexandra Ringe. None of my stories leave our book-filled apartment until she says they’re ready, and her hand can be seen in every one.
Joyland / ECW Press
Copyright © Chris Eaton, 2010
Published by ECW Press
2120 Queen Street East, Suite 200, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4E 1E2
416-694-3348 / [email protected]
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any process — electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise — without the prior written permission of the copyright owners and ECW Press. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Eaton, Chris, 1971-
Letters to Thomas Pynchon and other stories [electronic resource] / Chris Eaton.
Short stories.
Electronic monograph in EPUB format.
ISBN ISBN 978-1-55490-994-0
Also Issued As:
978-1-55490-995-7 (PDF)
I. Title.
PS8559.A8457L48 2010 C813'.6 C2010-906426-7
Developing editors: Emily Schultz and Brian Joseph Davis
Cover design: David Gee
Typesetting and text design: Troy Cunningham
The publication of Letters to Thomas Pynchon has been generously supported by the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund.
Letter to You
August 26, 2010
Dear [reader’s name],
I’ve gone about my life all backwards. Instead of starting with short stories, as most young writers do, when I was fifteen I wrote my first novel. It was horrible, I’m sure. But it didn’t stop me from writing a second. And a third. There may even have been a fourth, scribbling twenty pages a day under the pool table in my parents’ basement, but they have all been destroyed, and my memory is heavily imaginative. Sometimes I even imagine they might have been worth keeping.
I have written short stories, on the other hand, very intermittently. And largely, other than the five stories in here that will likely appear in some form in a novel-in-progress called Chris Eaton: A Biography (I’m sure you can guess which ones, all based loosely around the lives of other Chris Eatons I’ve been stalking on the Internet), I’ve written them because someone asked me to. One of the stories in this collection was written because a friend asked me to join a writing group, and I needed something to submit. And three of them were solicited for specific magazines, all of which met with disastrous ends before publication of my piece — one bankruptcy, one lack of interest to continue the publication, and one asshole. In fact, the first short story I ever wrote, “Mister Monsieur,” was in my first year at university. I was probably twenty. Through a girlfriend at the time who thought I was a writer, I was asked to compose something for a weekend insert to the New York Times. It should have appeared in the third of these, but the Times changed its mind after the second, and without their financial support, the whole thing folded. I believe the structure of the story had a very specific meaning at some point, but I can’t, for the life of me, recall it. I had also recently spent a year in Europe and mistakenly checked out of a hotel while keeping the key (the source of a huge argument with the woman at the front desk), and pieces of this small moment of my life have made their way into several things I’ve written, including that argument in the novel I’m working on now.
I guess I figured playing music was more fun than fiction, because in those four years at Mount Allison the only other thing I wrote besides songs was the first line of The Grammar Architect, which I wrote in the back of an English class on Modern Lit in my second or third year, initially composing a murde
r mystery of about five or six pages, and then editing it down to one sentence, and then building that back into a 224-page novel.
Then I moved to Toronto for an MA at York University (to which I don’t recall applying and discovered I had been accepted just a few days before the commencement of classes, so I showed up late and took the only classes that weren’t yet full). There I met people like Stephen Cain, Steven Hayward, Christian Bök, and Darren Wershler-Henry, and that got me into writing again. It was Steven Hayward who invited me to his writing group, for which I think I produced “Chasing Games.” One of the courses I took with him was supposed to be on Canadian Modernist Poetry, but in order to get the supposed context, we spent three quarters of the class studying what was going on in Europe. Learning about the writing constraints of groups like OuLiPo made it possible for me to get back into fiction. The section titles of this story all came from a real book on chasing games by a woman named Edith Fowke. I found it at a garage sale. I had no idea, at this point, that Edith Fowke was a folklorist of some renown in Canada. And I didn’t find out until recently that she died about a year after I wrote this, which I still find pretty creepy.
I believe it was Stephen Cain who asked me to write something for a magazine that never got off the ground, and in an afternoon in Stephen’s apartment, I wrote “Monster.” I think that was supposed to be the theme of the issue. Apparently, after re-reading several of the stories in here, one of my personal recurring themes is people who hate cats.
For several months during my MA at York University, I became obsessed with writing fake letters/e-mails. Mostly to people who didn’t exist, or to celebrities I pretended to misunderstand. I wrote to Jennifer Love Hewitt about her Scream movies, for example, and to Pynchon as if he had written Catcher in the Rye. I wrote to Captain Crunch and Mr. Sub (about what, I can’t remember). And I recall writing a complaint letter to Yoplait with pieces of hair taped to the page, which we can all be glad is not included here.
At one point, I found some university letterhead and even considered writing invitations to various celebrities to come to a presentation on rejection (part of a symposium where I first heard Christian and Darren read), which would just be me reading the form letters I got back from their staff. But in the end I must have chickened out, afraid someone would actually show up, or that I might offend my classmates. And yet, of all the letters and e-mails I wrote (aside from the complaint letters, which were highly profitable, probably more so than writing fiction), I only received two real responses. One was from Thomas Pynchon, or whoever had registered the e-mail [email protected]. I recall his response was simply Fuck you, whiner. By far the most exciting, however, was the letter to Levi Strauss. This letter was written shortly after the Supreme Court decision to ban cigarette advertising in Canada, and the reply in this book is the actual reply I received from Levi’s. The people I “quote” are mostly baseball players from the Cleveland Indians, which is a game I still tend to play, as evidenced by some of the China names in “Hungry Generations.”
Sometimes I feel bad about having wasted the time of the woman at Levi’s. Other times, I think she felt the joke was on me. But I guess that’s what got me back into writing more steadily. Over the next year or two, I wrote The Inactivist, and Burke, a chapbook that would become a novel called Columba St. and eventually The Grammar Architect. I guess I must have written “Serwold and the Artist” in there too, which is maybe my first artist in pointless pursuit, something I keep revisiting in my fiction and my life. After the success of The Grammar Architect, which was billed as a cover of Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes, I was approached by an editor at a fairly prominent Canadian magazine to try the cover experiment again. I was reluctant, but eventually was convinced and hit on the idea to turn James Joyce’s Dubliners into one short story, with short sections representing each of the original parts. In the end, it was a lot of fun, shifting the stories to my own city of Toronto while, I hope, capturing some elements of the themes and style in Joyce’s work. But by the time it was complete, the editor who had contracted me was gone, and the editor-in-chief changed the theme of the issue and decided not to use the story or pay me for it. He also didn’t even tell me any of this until I contacted them.
Yet another disastrous end. Thankfully two of the three stories eventually found homes in great independent publications like Strong Words in Toronto and Sing Statistics out of the United Kingdom, although the latter was about fifteen years later. And the third, the first short story I ever wrote, finds its way here.
Enjoy,
Chris
Letter to Thomas Pynchon
December 16, 1998
Thomas,
Apparently it’s your fault I can’t get published anywhere. I’ve already had rejections from two publishers of disputable taste, and both made the comment: “Pretty funny stuff, but hasn’t Pynchon done this already?” Sometimes I wish I had a time machine, so I could go back in time, like in that movie, The Time Machine? Then I could go back to, say, 1980, and publish my book first. And when you walk into their office with your piddly manuscript, all you’ll get is, “Sorry, Thomas. I can see you’ve spent a lot of time on this. But hasn’t Eaton done this already?”
Damn right. Get ready for the future, baby, cos this is it! I write like a poorly edited rap video, with lots of booty slapping and ceaseless bravadic finger-pointing! I’m the Beat of a totally new generation (with a repetitive bass libido):
I’m writin’ words, now;
I’m high as birds, now;
I am the first, not the second nor the third, now.
Your tired thesaurus
Won’t come before us,
And you will learn by your rejections to abhor us.
You know what I’m saying? You can’t seem to even duplicate yourself these days. Why not give the new kid a shot? I didn’t even like Catcher in the Rye.
Chris
Hungry Generations
The Marples is gone.
The cinema on Norfolk is gone.
Bramall Lane, Atkinson’s Department Store, and the entire top of Angel Street: all gone.
Nine pubs, two breweries, eight schools, and the Woolworths.
The Spiritualist Church is replaced by a hole in the ground, which immediately begins filling with water.
The lot where the kids play cricket and rugby, or threaten each other with imaginary concealed weapons, or sit on each other’s chests and rub the backs of their heads in dog shit, is ripped entirely from the earth, where the pockets of soil coalesce into a flock of birds, an octopus, a steam engine, and later — years later, of course, once Chris Eaton’s father realizes his calling, and the little hero himself is, at the very least, alive — is developed into the Kelvin Flats, a housing development for people who can barely afford it but are convinced to purchase anyway.
Change. It takes so little time. For centuries, England has been an island resistant to outside influence. The Brits are the ones who spread their ideas, their discoveries, their philosophies, their Earl Grey. A cultural exporter. Civilization is what you call it. Just imagine where the Americas would be without them. But war brings the world together. Especially a world war, which by its very name belongs to everyone. This isn’t just a case of England vs. Germany. Or even England vs. Germany and the Soviet Union. They have the World Cup for that. They have the Olympics. This is just the world — and mostly Europe, really, at this stage — returning Britain’s favor. Here’s your salad bowl. Your casserole of colonialism. The seeds of change, carried across the North Sea on the wings of giant, misguided, post-historic birds that buzz like insects and are easily distracted by bright things. KABOOM! There goes the tannery. KABLOOIE! Two tasteless bakeries and a sweets shop; a cobbler that specializes in galoshes; a boutique that sells nothing but marmalades; his father’s elementary school, just days after he started attending it. No one has any idea what’s going on. Nei
ther, coincidentally, do the Germans. Their ponderous, humming birds have been trained to follow the river but are caught in the gleam of the streetcar tracks below. When they let their cargo fall, they believe they are somewhere else entirely.
Maybe even in a different time.
Of course, on the Sheffield outskirts, near the Firth Brown Steelworks and the factories, they’re expecting this. They realize things have to change. Sheets of armored plate, for the boys at the front, are abandoned on their assembly lines, and the employees lie like corpses under the stairs and pray that no hit will be direct. Closer to the center, in those downtown areas wars are not supposed to touch, the air raid sirens fall on deaf ears, particularly in the movie theaters, where half the city’s high society has spilled out to forget about such things, to catch one of the year’s best hopes at an Oscar: Chaplin’s Great Dictator. But just as the little tramp is first mistaken for the enemy Führer (“Strange, and I thought you were an Aryan.” “No, I’m a vegetarian . . .”), there’s an announcement from Heeley Bottom, and then Sheff Park. The projector switch is clicked, and the screen flickers spastically to a white so bright the audience has to shield their eyes.
Outside, the city is ablaze with new growth. Those who dare to venture forth from the cellars and underpasses are caught up in shoots of brick and mortar that project upwards faster than they can furnish each floor. They’re trapped somewhere around the fifth and can’t see the ground for the fire that spreads like canal grass. Anything wood, which is out of date stylistically, is coming down faster than you can say “bangers and mash.” The city’s remaining men — the ones unable to fight on the mainland — surround the blaze with buckets of earth and sand, making sure those seeds are buried good and deep. Here’s where Meadowhall Centre will erupt from the ground like an urgent sapling. Here’s where they will rebuild the football stadium. This spot directly under our feet, after a little over a decade of near-silent germination, will be the site of the Kelvin Flats. At thirteen floors and a third of a mile of solid depression, it will be one of the most popular locations for suicide jumpers in the area.