Search Results for: trapdoor

Trapdoor: Chapter 1

A week later, Volley Santino would stride into Tony’s Barber Shop and get his head shaved.

“Volley?” his boss at the plant would exclaim, the Monday morning after that. “Zat you?” Volley’s live-in girlfriend would move out, citing certain unspecified “irreconcilable differences” but unable to hide a final shudder of distaste at his pale, stubbled noggin. His kid brother would bark his kid-brother laugh and tell Volley that it really did not look that bad but he’d never find a rubber big enough. And Volley’s Ma wouldn’t be able to speak at all; she’d just stand there, wringing her hands, blinking back tears, uncomprehending. (After all, it had not been even four months since she’d “loaned” him the seven hundred fifty bucks he’d needed for the Ultra Membership in Head’o’Hair, Limited.)

Like, who the hell cared? They didn’t have to live with what he’d been trying to live with, did they?

But all that would come afterwards.

Now, at this moment sometime after midnight on a warm Saturday in May, Volley Santino was possessed of this marvelous thatch of thick black curly hair, ever so slightly gone gray at the temples. Volley was sitting on a barstool in McGarrity’s Pub in New Brunswick, New Jersey, at the end of the bar closest to the heavy oaken door, and whenever the door thwupped open and shut, a fringe of bangs tickled his narrow forehead in the sudden breeze.

This place had a great selection of jukebox oldies — currently The Drifters and “Up on the Roof” — but, sadly, lacked a mirror behind the bar, which would have allowed Volley to marvel at all dimensions of his tonsorial splendor. Limited as he was to the tactile, his fingers ran ceaselessly through his hair; and with the full force of his mind, he was attempting psychokinetically to manipulate the fingers of the auburn-haired woman at his right to do the same.

Pssst — yo! whispered Volley’s mind, all sibilant urgency. You wanna, like, touch my hair? Go ahead. Come on. Touch it. Touch it. You know you want to….

But it wasn’t working. The woman’s fingers remained curled obdurately around the stem of her wine glass, and she remained deep in superficial conversation with a guy to her right. A guy, as it happened, with a thick mane of wavy, straw-colored hair. He also had a nice mouthful of straight, white teeth that kept flashing at the woman — on, off; on, off — like the guy got a firefly-butt transplant in his jaw or something.

The woman turned to her left a bit to sip at her wine. Not for the first time, Volley glimpsed a corner of the self-adhesive name tag plastered to the saffron fabric of the blouse over her left breast. Hi, Volley knew that it said, My Name Is APRIL.

Volley ran a hand through his hair, took a swallow of his Bass ale. His own name tag lay in shreds on the bar’s surface, torn and re-torn victim of his awkward, nervous-fingered attempts at conversation.

He and April had walked to McGarrity’s together from the Hyatt a couple blocks away. There, they –plus nearly a hundred of Volley’s fellow Ultra Members — had convened for the first day of a weekend Head’o’Hair seminar on the topic, “Managing Your Hair Future.” April, of course, was not herself a client-member of Head’o’Hair but rather one of the seminar leaders. Her specialty was a series of exercises which, she maintained, would “stimulate and revivify the vital oils and natural proteins of your scalp.”

“Okay guys!” she’d exhorted them, repeatedly, from the little platform at the front of the seminar room. With a telescoping steel pointer she’d drawn their attention to a flip chart which depicted, in ovoid plan view, a generic male scalp (the nose pointing to the left, sniffing at April’s armpit); a dozen blue Xs and black Os were scattered, apparently at random, across its surface. The generic male scalp reminded Volley of his own scalp immediately after the Head’o’Hair Ultra Implant treatment — like a parched tan lawn dotted with plugs of optimistic zoysia.

“Okay guys!” April tapped a couple of the Xs and Os for emphasis. “Listen! These” — tap, tap — “are your scalpic neurosensory nodes.”

Scalpic? The whole seminar was full of gibberish bullshit like that. But with his Ultra cohorts Volley went dutifully through the motions of massaging the Xs with his thumbs and fingers and the Os with the heels of his hands. He (or, okay, his Ma) had, after all, paid good money for this thing, the complete Head’o’Hair package. And April had, after all, been very persuasive, muscles rippling authoritatively beneath her glossy-black Spandex leotard as she leaned from side to side, puffing her cheeks in and out in histrionic exertion, probing, pushing, rubbing her own head. From the seminar room’s speaker system had chorused, raucously, that Olivia Newton-John hit song “Physical,” as covered by Richard Simmons and the Head’o’Hair Ultra Glee Club….

Volley glanced at his watch. After one o’clock already. They ought to get back to the hotel; they had to be downstairs in the seminar room by nine-thirty for April’s morning Scalpisthenics session.

“Yo, April,” he said, tapping her on the shoulder and breaking into Mister Teeth’s monologue of anguish about the first (Volley gathered) of his four failed marriages. “I’m gonna head back to the Hyatt, you wanna come or what?”

April twisted her head around just far enough so that she could glance back into Volley’s mournful eyes. “Nah. Think I’m going to stay and finish my wine first. But thanks for walking me over here though, Wally!” She turned back to Mister Teeth, patting his forearm and signaling the bartender for another Chardonnay.

That’s Volley, thought Volley. An ounce or two of Bass still lay in the bottom of his glass, in a little two-inch pool the defeated hue, it occurred to him now, of rusting metal. He poked at the scraps of his name tag, heaped them up in the puddle of condensation that ringed the base of his glass. The blue ink in which his name had been written leaked out of the little pile of wet-paper mush onto his fingertips; reflexively, before he caught himself, he wiped them on his t-shirt which was, alas, both new and white, imprinting upon it a pair of concentric pale-blue arches. Jesus Mother Mary. He downed the last of the ale, dropped a five on the bar, and left.

No (he would soon be telling the police), he didn’t know why he didn’t return to the hotel right away. What they think, anyhow — he go through that whole thing just for his peace of mind or something, for chrissake? It was just a nice night for a walk, what they want?

But in fact, well yeah, that was right: it was for something like peace of mind. He was restless, not really ready to hit the sack yet… and dogged, a little, by memories — memories triggered by The Drifters.

The last time he’d been in New Brunswick had been, what, like twenty years ago: the tail end of a disastrous first (and only) semester at Rutgers, when he’d quite literally partied till he puked and flunked every one of his four classes.

“A family record,” the old man had croaked with a characteristically disgusted curl of his lip, rolling his eyes and holding his hands over his ears as though to stem the eruption of lava. “The first kid to go to college, the first to flunk out. Way to go, champ. Watch out Ripley’s, here he comes.”

But what Volley now recalled most poignantly about that December was not his shame, but the girl he’d met a few weeks before.

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All You Knew Must Be Learned Again

April 10, 2020 by John Leave a Comment

[Video: high-definition trailer for the wordless 1992 film Baraka, a sequel of sorts to the better-known Koyaanisqatsi (and directed by that film’s photographer). According to Roger Ebert’s review of the restored DVD edition (2008), “‘Baraka’ is a Sufi word meaning ‘a blessing, or the breath, or the essence of life, from which the evolutionary process unfolds.’ In Islam generally, it is ‘a quality or force emanating originally from Allah but capable of transmission to objects or to human beings.’ In Judaism, it is a ceremonial blessing. In Swahili, it means ‘blessing.’ In French slang, it means ‘good luck.'”]

From whiskey river:

How is it that one day life is orderly and you are content, a little cynical perhaps, but on the whole just so, and then without warning you find the solid floor is a trapdoor and you are now in another place whose geography is uncertain and whose customs are strange?
Travellers at least have a choice. Those who set sail know that things will not be the same as at home. Explorers are prepared. But for us, who travel along the blood vessels, who come to the cities of the interior by chance, there is no preparation. We who were fluent find life is a foreign language. Somewhere between the swamp and the mountains. Somewhere between fear and sex. Somewhere between God and the Devil passion is and the way there is sudden and the way back is worse.

(Jeanette Winterson [source])

…and:

The Ninth Elegy
(excerpt)
Why, if it’s possible to spend this span
of existence as laurel, a little darker than all
other greens, with little waves on every
leaf-edge (like the smile of a breeze), why, then,
must we be human and, shunning destiny,
long for it?…
Oh, not because happiness,
that over-hasty profit of loss impending, exists.
Not from curiosity, or to practice the heart,
that would also be in the laurel…
but because to be here is much, and the transient Here
seems to need and concern us strangely. Us, the most transient.
Everyone once, once only. Just once and no more.
And we also once, Never again. But this having been
once, although only once, to have been of the earth,
seems irrevocable.

(Rainer Maria Rilke [source])

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Holiday Traditions: “The Christmas Date”

December 26, 2012 by John Leave a Comment

[Scene from A Christmas Story. The Peking duck no longer smiles at the Old Man.]

In 1993, The then Missus-Eventually-To-Be and I went on our first one of these, and we’ve done so every December 23rd since. (Which, yes, made 2012 the twentieth time.)

That first year, we had a few things generally to celebrate, aside from the holiday itself. Eleven months before, on January 1, I’d moved sorta-kinda-ever-so-cautiously to this area, from the Richmond, VA neck of the woods, expressly to be closer to her. I didn’t move straight to this city, mind you, but to a town about forty minutes away — one with the small-town feel I was used to, and hoping to continue. I was jobless and all but flat broke then [*], so I took as a priority the getting of work… Yet, y’know, a common downside to small towns is that most of the work to be had must be had in nearby cities. So I eventually scored a series of part-time/temporary jobs down here, and by the fall was working enough that a date-date didn’t feel like an extravagance. Indeed, in October we’d abandoned all pretense at tentativeness and moved in together, to our first house: another thing to celebrate. And we had rich creative lives, as well, especially thanks to The METB‘s course of studies for a Masters degree in English (“creative writing emphasis,” as the University said).

So we splurged, that first year, on a meal at a splurge-worthy downtown restaurant called Chez Pierre. It was then a small, elegant, intimately lit, fireplaced and stone-walled nook of a place on the same block as the old Federal courthouse, and it was easy to love: the service was personable, the atmosphere relaxed — take as long as you want! — and the food spectacular. (When they had to relocate a few years later, to a giant sprawling brick pile in the area known as Midtown, we never did get used to the changes; Chez Pierre finally changed hands, and then, after what was widely felt to be a slow decline, finally went out of business last year.)

But — and this would become the enduring (and to me, endearing) little hook to the Christmas-date tradition — The METB did not know in advance that we’d be eating there. She knew only that we were dressing up (if not strictly, given our circumstances, upscale). And en route to dinner, I drove a circuitous route, expressly to keep her guessing…

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Book Review: The Night Circus, by Erin Morgenstern

September 15, 2012 by John 14 Comments

[Image: Big Top, a photograph (!) by user “*Trippy4U” at the deviantART site. More in the note at the foot of this (looooong) post.]

On the planet of Literature of the Fantastic (considered separately from its sister worlds, for horror and science fiction), you will find three major continents, inhabited (with a great deal of crossover) by generally three types of being.

You will find, for starters, the land of ancient and often supernatural beings: gods and lesser immortals of myth (dryads, cyclopes, and such); fairies, elves, pixies, and leprechauns; unicorns, dragons, and mermaids; any or all of the Four Horsemen (especially Death).

Across the ocean in one direction lies the land of latter-day heroics. (“Latter-day” refers to the time of this continent’s creation, although many of its denizens are centuries or even millennia of age.) Aside from humans, the most common inhabitants may be horses. Swords and other weapons are commonly brandished here, occasionally in the vicinity of immigrants and tourists from the first land, often in the direction of wild creatures invented specifically (because convenient) for the tale at hand: ents and orcs, sand worms, Frankenstein’s monster, the Jabberwock, blast-ended skrewts…

On the face of it, on the third continent we’d feel most at home. The populace here is all familiar to us, just from looking around at the (present or past) “real” world: donkeys and dogs and other domestic animals; lions and swans, friendly brontosauri; and, well, the people next door. But then we dig a little deeper and the “reality” drops away: the animals talk, not just among themselves but to us, they argue and scheme, some of them have jobs; and when we visit the people next door, we find them mixing potions in the kitchen, the surfaces of their bedroom furniture writhing with living ivy, their homes’ very walls sided not with vinyl or clapboard but with gingerbread and treacle.

Many of the Grimm “fairy” tales — which feature no fairies — fall into the latter category, and so do Aesop’s fables. Also here you’ll find whole shelves full of one-off, sui generis works with (nearly or in fact) no counterpart elsewhere.

And on one of those shelves, you’ll find Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus.

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Getting It Out of My System (2)

September 21, 2008 by John 5 Comments

(Part 1 of this N-part series was here.)

Let’s see, where were we… Oh. Right. I’d just posted excerpts from the Prologue to Crossed Wires, my 1992 mystery, and Chapter 1 from its never-published sequel, Trapdoor. And I said that the differences between those two excerpts sprang from “something” that happened in the roughly one year that elapsed between their two writings — something whose principal result was to relax me.

This isn’t the story of how I came to write Crossed Wires. (A lot of that crosses over into autobiography — not relevant right now.) No, it’s the story of what happened after I wrote it.

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Getting It Out of My System (1)

September 18, 2008 by John 7 Comments

[In a post a few days ago, I started to nose around my “issues” with writing mysteries, thrillers, and the like. This is the perfect time do something I really don’t like to do, much — to lay out the story behind one of my formative experiences as a writer: the publication, in 1992, of my first book. In a couple days, in part 2, I’ll cover how it got to print. In this part, I’ll try to purge myself of some second thoughts about the book itself. And maybe, in the process, I’ll get the damned monkey off my back.]

Crossed Wires didn’t get many really good reviews, a fact which stunned and wounded its author. On the other hand, I learned that even when reviewers found some honest-to-God fatal flaw, they were nearly always generous enough to close their reviews on an “up” note.

I’ve got a folder of Crossed Wires reviews sitting on the desk here, right by my hand. But I’m not (for now) going to quote specifics. Instead, I’m going to talk in generalities — categories of things which bothered reviewers. The complaints were of three kinds (not all equally easy to dismiss):

Complaints about the heroine, Finley’s, depiction as a hearing-impaired person. Surprisingly, these complaints came primarily from individual readers and online communities who were themselves hearing-impaired. The problem was never, He shouldn’t be writing about this stuff. Instead, it was Oh, this isn’t what it’s really like to have a problem hearing… That would never happen with a hearing aid. And so on. While it sort of bugged me, this criticism was the easiest of the three types to ignore — because, of course, Finley’s experiences with deafness and hearing aids had been my own.
Complaints about the lack of mystery to this “mystery”: how easily the reader knew in advance who the killer was, how slow on the uptake were the “good guys” (especially Finley). I’ve got no excuses in this department. (On the other hand, as you’ll see in part 2, I had some professional help in mucking up the storytelling.) Unfortunately, the mystery at the heart of any mystery novel, the suspense in any thriller, is its reason for being; even if I’d eliminated complaints of type 1 (above) and type 2 (below), this one alone would have killed the book’s chances for success. And rightly so.
Complaints about the writing style. While these didn’t come from the majority of reviewers, they probably stung the most. Somewhere here on RAMH recently, or maybe it was a comment on a blog somewhere, I mentioned that I think of myself more as a writer than as a storyteller. Every family member (of course), every friend, every teacher and school newspaper/magazine advisor I’d had through college, every editor with whom I’d ever corresponded on story proposals and so on… they all agreed: “John can write.” That someone — professionals at that, who by definition must appreciate good writing — that they didn’t join the chorus, well, it just flabbergasted me.

It’s this third sort of critique which I want to talk about here. And I’m not going to argue the point, either. I’m going to agree with it.

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