Chapter 1
Tonight’s post was born of an inability to sleep at 4 in the AM. The pollen count is high enough that I am miserable. I am not usually bothered by such things, but last night I was a bit. As I mentioned yesterday, I am not able to do any woodworking, as I am at my parents. I was busy today and didn’t even have time to visit the Woodsmith Store, as I would have written about that. So you are stuck with Ch 1 of a story that may never get a Chapter 2….unless I can’t sleep, or somebody expresses an interest in me continuing. (Note: I am still polishing up the final bits for Henry Wood, in my head, so it isn’t ready yet.)
The man mumbled some of the time, but often he spoke in clear nonsense. ”Ink blots, purple dots, taking Rorschach’s test. Little mice, roll the dice, more is often less.”
David found the man’s ramblings were like tiny droplets of creative rain. When writer’s block would set in, he would head to the market for fresh fruit and a helping of the crazy man in the torn coat and worn pants. In David’s third novel he had based one of his murder victims on his favorite poet. He wondered if he knew.
It wasn’t like David to talk to crazy people, or strangers, or his editor. He kept to himself. As long as the words were flowing, he needed little else but the comfort of a growing word count. He had typed his first novel on an old Maroon Smith Corona, which his mentor had purchased in 1935. The old English professor had never had a best seller, a good seller, or even a slightly fair seller, and held ‘money’ writers in disdain. He had given David the typewriter when he retired, and told him to put it to good use. If he had known that David would ‘sell out’ and become successful, he likely would have chucked it in the rubbish bin.
Because David was a superstitious man, he had begun every novel the same way. A stack of clean white paper, an eraser, and a yellow legal pad and pencil. The pencil would write a sentence on the yellow pad. It would be inspected for greatness, and if there was none to be found, a neat line would be drawn through the words, and another sentence would be written below. Once there was even the faintest whiff of clever or brilliant for interesting, David would gently roll a piece of paper into Monroe, the name he had given his prized typewriter, and bang the keys until that first sentence was now ‘typed’.
Everything had to be perfect with that first sentence. No typos, to be sure, but also the sound of the keys had to have just the right cadence. If it was too slowly, zip, the paper would be yanked out of Monroe, and another carefully put in it’s place. In truth, David liked the sound of quickly pulling a sheet of paper out of the typewriter, so the first page was almost always deemed unsatisfactory.
So David stood and listened to the man in the torn pants, the poet on the streets, the man and his face, to which, David had never asked a name. He listened to his deep baritone voice. The voice boomed, “The fires gates seem welcoming, the line is always long. Don’t fret, don’t leave, I know your fate, three coins and I’ll sing a song…three coins and I’ll sing your song.” It wasn’t the ‘Devine Comedy’, but there were people snickering. David looked at the crowd and his mind began to paint a story.
The woman with the nice breasts and long black hair, she was laughing at some remark, which the guy beside her had made. He wore a ‘Green Day’ teeshirt and torn jeans. He was trying to look casual cool, but it was obvious he was her designated nerd. Her jeans were tight, and left little to the imagination, though David was sure that the guy had imagined those jeans on his floor. David knew it would never be, because he could see that the woman knew it. All attractive woman have a designated dork, or nerd, or gay guy. Some have two. He was hers. She would spend time with him, if all her real guys were unavailable, or if she needed some compliments, or dinner. He would always pay, and she would say, “You don’t have to do that.” as she gently touched his elbow and gave it a light squeeze.
Next to the woman and her nerd, also snickering was a goth woman. She was generally angry and bitter, so goth seemed to be the way to go. She liked piercings. She liked rain. She liked politics, well not really. She liked going to rallies, calling Republicans Nazis, and getting drunk afterwards. If one were to ask her who the Vice President was, she wouldn’t have any idea. If one were to ask her about who had won ‘American Idol’, she would act like she didn’t know. She knew all their names and hid their cds in a box under her bed, behind another box, which contained clothes her mother had bought her, which had color. She would later die in an uprising in Uganda, while doing relief work.
David wasn’t sure about the death in Uganda part, but he felt confident that he had everything else pretty much on the mark. He decided to look for some good fruit buys. Fresh fruit feeds the body and the mind, he would often say, though usually only to himself, as he didn’t talk much. The plums looked especially tasty today, they had good color and would be right at home in the bowl next to the peaches and limes. Sometimes he worried more about aesthetics than taste or what he really wanted to eat. He gave Antonio, the fruit vendor, a twenty and told him to keep the change.
Antonio had been at the market since before David had made ‘The List’, and in those days, David did talk to people. When he got that first box of books, with his name on the bottom, he gave one to Antonio, who treasured it and gave him free fruit for a year. David alway felt badly about receiving gifts, and felt that Antonio was being much too kind, so when the royalties started to make life comfortable, he started to overpay. Antonio was a good man and he knew that it made David happy, so he let him, but it was hard for Antonio too. They were quite similar in that regard.
David moved through the crowd, saw faces, got quick flashes of what they might be like, and quickly decided he didn’t care for most of them. There was a woman, who quite obviously was a hoarder with cats. There was a budding rapper who was probably a closet math genius, and would later disappoint his friends by going to MIT. His mother would cry when he got the scholarship though, and he like his mother more than his friends. Plus she could kick his butt, and he knew it. There was the lonely guy buying dinner for one, or was that just a reflection in a window? Sometimes he couldn’t tell.
As he walked passed the last stall of the market he saw a woman, holding a bag. She was Asian, short black hair, attractive, and he drew a blank. Cliches seemed to fall off this woman like water off a ducks back, he thought to himself, then felt momentarily ill for letting the duck comment dance across his brain. Still he looked at her, almost to the point where he felt himself cross the line of lechery. He quickly assigned her the career of lawyer, with two kids, a loving husband, and a fondness for crosswords. David was quite sure that none of that was true.
He had filled his brain up with characters and now he needed to get home and show some of them the doorway into his next novel. Sadly though, when he entered this flat, sat down at the table, the pencil seemed too heavy to lift. The vodka bottle was considerably lighter.
