The Memory of Fruit

I am 35 today.  This terrifies me.  Saying "I'm 35," sounds so foreign.  J'ai trente cinq ans. But then again, I don't feel older or maybe I do.  The oddity of being a 35 year old undergrad studying for the GRE, stressing about grad school....I am living now like I should have in my twenties.  I am dedicated to grabbing the life I always wanted, the life that always slipped through my shaky fingers and haze of my twenties.  I am 35.  I have been to Spain and Amsterdam.  France is next, I will get there. 
While in Spain, I had a novel idea...literally, an idea for a novel.  I asked my teacher if my final assignment (a 12 page short story) could be the first 12 pages of my novel.  He agreed.  I was so excited.  Zany characters and existential plot lines dominated my thoughts while journeying through the Mediterranean coastline. I returned home, and couldn't write it.  The fire was gone.  It felt painful, typing empty words about flat characters. I regretted ever telling my teacher my plan.  I wanted to email him and tell him I would be turning in a regular short story and this novel thing was too much for me.  I composed the email twice, then hit cancel.  Yesterday afternoon, I opened my laptop.  Carlos started talking to me in his low voice full of poetry and history...his loss he couldn't accept.  Amanda annoyed me with her self involvement but bled my skin with her need to find something more than her southern life.  Resentment boiled for Maria and her cop.  A new character began to dance with bulls and red wine, glowing gold. I wrote.  I felt it.  This world became real.  Last night at around 2 am, I emailed my professor the first chapter of my novel.  I am wondering if this chapter could be self contained as a short story.  I could send it out to journals. I am in love with my novel again.
I suspect, as I continue to write, that I will encounter discontent and a willful urge to give up. Hopefully, I will be patient and wait for Carlos, Amanda, Vincente, and Maria to sing to me again.  It is their story.
A short snippet:

After a few slugs, Vincente ran around imitating the dance of a bull fighter.  He held his tan coat out teasing an invisible bull.  The sky glowed soft, sending flakes of gold into his eye. The town below was dark, with only a streetlamp here or there shining.   “I don’t need school like you.  I am going to be a matador.”  They were fifteen.  By sixteen, Vincente had left Orihuela.  He became famous. 

Rough Rough Draft

I read a book today...yes, today...The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock.  It was crazy.  His shifts in point of view drove me mad and made me feel like I had ADD.  I don't know if I eventually got use to it, or if the writing evened out.  It is Pulp.  It is good.  I road around backwoods, Appalachian roads, with broken muderous people and whores, and hung out in Florida with a former preacher and his crippled brother turned circus freaks then hobos.  Then there was Willard and his prayers and sacrifices and his boy Arvin and his sick wife.  I liked it.  I read it in one day.  My mom had cataract surgery and I stayed with her to help her recoup.  She slept and I read.  My own unfinished pieces were calling me and I ignored them.  Instead I read and registered for the GRE.  Finally, I opened my laptop and read through my unfinished CNF piece.  My fingers began clicking the keys.  I didn't stop until it was done.  I have finished the first draft.  It is rough in places and needs some help.  After reading about all those broken characters and their broken lives, I felt just enough pain to write about my own.  I let go of existential lyrical stylings and wrote the damn story.  I liked The Devil All the Time.  There was no philosophical exposition about each character.  No looking beneathe the surface, yet it was there, revealed through the actions and backstory.  It made me think about all the intellectual conversations I have had.  How pointless it really was.  I can ramble on about this or that and my feelings and this great work of art or novel, and try to pin point who I am and what makes me,well, me.  But really, do I know?  I write.  I hang out with friends.  I like intimacy.  I want to make good grades and go to grad school.  I will be 35 next week and was told, this past Tuesday, that I am not ovulating as often anymore and that I have a tilted uterus.  I rather just tell the story...there is depth in the story.  No explanations.  Well, if you know me, it now makes sense why I don't like those Ode to the Uterus poems or motherhood/blood=eternity poems.  I don't have to try and figure it out.  The doctor gave me facts and there was the answer.  So....my rough draft is done.  Now comes the editing...the adding and subtracting.  And I think I am going to keep reading Pulp, for a little while.  The characters are far more interesting.
There is pretty lyrical writing in the piece but I am going to share a short funny excerpt from "All the Pretty Queens":

 Bob came and got me with strict orders from my mom to take me to my grandma’s.  My grandma was crazy and racist and liked to talk bad about family members to me.  Bob had tried to convince my mom to let him take me home.  “Sorry kid.  I tried."
             "No! Mimi is crazy.  She will talk about sex and call everyone whores!”

             He laughed and said “Just tell her- Mimi, I am dogging the whole football team and my favorite is the boy who is black as the ace of spades.”

All the Pretty Queens

This memoir piece is difficult.  I am trying to connect memories to stories to experience by juxtapositioning it with me at 23, out of my mind, a young straight woman in gay bars seeking to find anyone who knew my brother.  I am creating scenes to develop the story, but since it is "Non Fiction", I have to be honest.  I cannot dip into my imagination and basically make shit up.  I am having to rely on language, scenes, characters(real life people), and images to bring emotional intensity.  Yes, this is what one has to do for any writing, but in fiction I can make up all these things. This is a challenge.  Of course, it is interesting to me because I lived it, I felt it.  I have to make it come alive to others, make them live it, feel it. 

Then there is the real issue.  Vulnerability.  I am putting me onto the page.  I am putting my brother, Bob, and other real people on to the page.  I want to make them beautiful.  I want readers to fall in love with all the gay young men who died far too soon.  They were the beginning, they were infected before there was even a name for it.  They didn't know it was out there.  They were just being young and wild back when it wasn't so dangerous to be young and wild.  And it got them.  And of course, it is about me and my love for my brother and my later disenfranchisement from my family and the belief that burned in me that my brother would make everything ok, make me sweet again, innocent again, beautiful again, and loved again...if only he were still there. Vulnerability- here I am naked.  Please read.  Here are my family secrets- Please Read.  What will my family think of this?  Or my brother's friends,  I want to do this right for them, they loved these people, too, and knew them better-including Bob- than I did.

The other issue is....me.  It is hard to write this.  I relive it.  I believe I am strong enough now to delve into my childhood and re-examine my twenties, and to look at the loss again.  I have to go slow so it doesn't cut me.  I have to go slow so I can savor the memories of my big brother. 

Ok...Time to go back to it.  Time to write.  Deep Breath.

Excerpt from "Arlene"

            The flight attendant announced that they would be taking off.  The plane began to move forward.  Arlene got nervous.  The nervous turned to panic.  She wanted to jump up and start screaming.  She knew that these days they wouldn’t just let her off the plane.  The air marshals would come in and handcuff her.  Her chest started rattling.  She had COPD but had quit smoking 20 years ago when first diagnosed. It only acted up when she was scared and her heart was pounding.  She often told Sara that if she could quit smoking then Sara could quit that heroin.  Sara always got mad.  Arlene loved smoking.  She’d smoke while doing laundry, washing dishes, taking the dog for a walk.  When Sara was little, she’d bathe her with a cigarette dangling out of her mouth.  Arlene started coughing.  She pulled her bottled water out of her bag and gulped it down.  The COPD was in the same stage that it was when she quit smoking.  It stopped progressing when she quit.  Sara didn’t like to talk about it.  Sara smoked cigarettes in the house.  The plane was moving fast.  Arlene realized she forgot her fear by thinking about Sara.  Everything was always about Sara.  She had been going to family night at different treatment centers for years.  When Sara wasn’t in treatment, Arlene wasn’t sleeping.  She was pacing the floor, screaming at God to help her baby, and if the phone rang, her heart began to hurt and worry washed all through her.  Everything was Sara.  Now Sara had over two years clean and had that beautiful little baby Angel.  Arlene needed to live again.  This is why the trip.  The trip across the sea and out of the country.  Arlene needed freedom.  Arlene needed a life.  Arlene needed to be Arlene again and not just Sara’s mom.  The plane was in the air.

Lonely Spain

I returned from Spain 2 weeks ago.  I still do not feel normal, and I may not ever again.  Not the normal I was used to before my flight across the sea.  Spain...it was lonely.  It was beautiful.  I swam through the waves of the blue Mediterranean, my feet smacked the pavement of Madrid, my eyes cried in front of a Van Gogh, and my breath escaped to Guernica.  I spoke French in Alicante, chomped chocolate in Villa Joyosa, worshipped Christ in a church in Orihuela, and watched monuments burn during the Fiesta of Sant Joan.  Still, I felt lonely...inbetween the exploring and fire, lonliness prevailed and I hung out inside my head.  Would I do it again?  Absolutely.  I was there to better my writing.  Did it work?  I am not sure, yet.

I am working on three different projects.  One is a novel, inspired by Spain.  I am going to turn in the first 15 pages for my final assignment as part of the class in Spain.  It is the journey of a laid off Alicante teacher, his wife Maria, a cop in Madrid, and a spoiled rich American woman. The teacher loses his wife and his job, and his identity.  It is his search to find a place in this world that has completely torn him apart. The other is a short story about Arlene.  She is an older southern woman, who has never been anywhere, and her whole life revolved around her drug addict daughter and poorly written mystery novels.  Her daughter is now clean and she is determined to find a life.  But she doesn't know how.  The third is a creative non fiction piece.  I am hoping to submit it to an upcoming competition.  It is about me, in my awful early 20's, hanging out at after hour gay bars running up to older gay man and asking them if they knew my brother who died of AIDS when I was 14.  It tells the back story of me and my brother and how no one in my family ever told me he was gay or sick and how at 11 years old with my father in the drunk tank, I had to ask my mom about my brother.  It is about my search for redemption through his friends, wanting to know my brother when I was older.  We will see how it turns out.  How any of them turn out. 

I wrote poetry for the past year.  Terrible, crazy, nonsensical poetry.  I am happy to be back to prose.  I have been told I have a strong voice in my pieces, a voice painful, strong, and beautiful, like a violin.  I do not know if those compliments are true.  I do know that now when I write, I obsess over if the voice is there, whereas I use to just write.  Compliments are great for my ego, but I am not so sure if they help my writing. 

So Spain.  It is over.  And no one really wants to hear about it.  Maybe 5 minutes and then they are bored.  I have my pictures and my memories.  My grandma has pictures of Elvis to send to Sylvia, my host mom in Spain.  I miss Sylvia.  She was kind.  We spoke French because I don't know Spanish and she doesn't know English.  We both know French.  She is another story for another time.

I think I came back different.  Memphis seems different.  I am different.  How?  I am not sure yet, maybe my writing will show me.