Books Ruined My Life In which I blame everything but myself for the wrongs of the world.

I’ve covered this series before, so I’m going to make this a brief entry.  Every year a group of panels selects several of the best works of fiction, non-fiction, meta-fiction, short-fiction and illustrated fiction to present in an anthology.  Each year they top themselves… or maybe it’s the writers topping themselves.  The best stories re the ones that connect our individual experiences with the human experience as a whole, and while that can cover a variety of concerns and topics, death is usually the one that rises as the most poignant.

This year’s edition is no different, as death is approached in a variety of ways, but two stories in particular really work with the subject in amazing ways.  There are stories centering on strengthening what life we all have left, such as one centering on the post-9/11 treatment of Muslims, or another about a young Kenyan girl struggling through Chess to make her way out of poverty.  There are stories about moving towards death, embracing it or struggling to prevent it, in stories like “Pleiades” and “The Suicide Catcher.”  Then, there are stories that combine every aspect of these stories, and somehow still rise above them as original and significant.

The first, “Roger Ebert: The Essential Man,” by Chris Jones, is a bio piece that examines Ebert’s decade long, and running, battle with cancer.  As the story begins, we feel sorry for Ebert, a man being eaten piece by piece by his sickness, and battling it with everything he has while escaping into the world of the movies.  Readers would be wrong, however, to assume this is a depressing piece celebrating him before he passes… the story instead treats his death as inevitable, but glorious.  Ebert, a man who watched his friend and co-host, Gene Siskel, die of cancer years earlier, fights and struggles to keep going, not because he is afraid, but because he hasn’t said enough to feel complete.  Moving out of the movie reviews and into the review of his own life and struggles, Ebert has proven that any body will fail, but as long as the mind still works, something can be achieved.  Talking through a computer, now that his no longer has a lower jaw, and pondering what his last meal before the surgery that left him unable to eat was, Ebert thrives in the virtual world.  The story moves towards death, as Ebert admits that he is falling apart and feeling weary, but it doesn’t fear or dread the eventual.  Ebert stares at a picture of Siskel and repeatedly admits to missing him, and we get the feel of a man who wants to make the most out of any time he might lose, as well as the time many others lost.

The second story, “Weber’s Head,” by J. Robert Lennon, moves away from death, literally and figuratively.  The narrator, a man interested in his books and solitude more than personal interaction is thrust into a roommate deal with the titular Weber, a strange, artistic man who, despite his creepiness, is very much active and personal, struggling to make friends and please people.  The story is humorous, absurd and in the end entirely predictable, but it’s effective in its message, and we see a man entrenched in living-death being rescued from the edge by the death of someone very much in the living world.  It’s an old method, but works here because of how the story is told, and how death is expressed by the narrator.  Death isn’t nothingness and lonesome nights, it’s solitude and books about trains, people are all around, but those books just seem so much easier.

When discussing Ngugi wa Thiong’o with friends, we found ourselves focusing on how his book, Petal of Blood, explores the colonizer/colonized relationship, a common trait in novels and literature classified as post-colonial.  The novel takes a firm stance against the colonizer, and in fact the title of each section, taken from the closing lines of Yeats’ “Second Coming,” leaves no doubt as to the author’s stance.

But when approaching it as a new reader, or someone unfamiliar with the concepts of post-colonialism, how does the novel unfold its perspective?

Wa Thiong’o explores the separation of classes created by colonialism in interesting ways, and is the primary surface evidence of his message.  Focusing on the compradore class and the rising stratification of the native populace, Wa Thiong’o questions the very tenets of capitalism.  The compradors are natives of the area who rise to prominence in practicing the British colonial method of farming and business by holding other natives in a form of indentured servitude.  Much like our current upper class, or any ‘privileged” minorities coming from a struggling and oppressed cultural center, the Compradors are figures both hated and envied by those beneath them.  Much like one desiring to become a police officer or a soldier for the power, yet hating them for that same power and privileged they hold over you.  Therefore, everyone wants to be a comprador, but hates them for the feelings of treason and envy that they evoke in their countrymen.  It is really a cross-cultural sentiment, that we hate the ones with the power, but desire ourselves to be those same people.  Wa Thiongo is playing with the idea here in a more suggestive way, having those fellow countrymen with power not only hold rank above the others, but misuse and provide an example of what not to be to the reader.  The question is, with that same power, would you act in the same way… one only has to look at that social experiment with the students in the prison and guard roles to understand that power can corrupt in the most well minded or level people.  Human culture is based on roles and ranks, and those beneath others resent them and at the same time struggle to achieve that same level.

This is an effective message and plays into many current arguments regarding our own society.  Who is in the right?  Are the people who worked their way into wealth or power just as wrong as those who took it by force or misuse it?  Both Kimeria and wa Riera represent the worst extremes of the type, but are they in the wrong, or are they just following the example set by the colonizers they once followed?

The novel parallels events occurring all over the world, and rightly so, as these same events have occurred frequently in the modern civilized world, and certainly during the period wa Thiong’o published the novel.   Within the pages common people, teachers and students and shopkeepers all come together to resist, not so much the changing world, but their mistreatment at the hands of those running the larger facets of business and government above them. 

Through this message, wa Thiong’o offers an explanation through many characters.  Perhaps most pertinent to our situation in America today, the laws and motives of protest and rebellion are explored through the protagonists and their people, who suffer at the hands and greed of their fellow countrymen.  While under the colonial system there was at least some reason for the upper class to aid and keep the working class happy, the new system and the compradors all feel a superiority for having worked up to their position.  This creates a system of complete abuse and intolerance towards the working and poor people of the country.  One person, a lawyer sees this, and in aiding them, becomes an ironic figure, representing the law, but not in the way the law would have itself represented.  He is a figure from the very system oppressing the people of Ilmorog, an insider to the “free” government and system of laws and rules, but he stands for the older ways.  In this Wa Thiongo seems to use the character to show us that all of this is by personal choice and greed, and even someone deeply embedded in a corrupt system can side with and work towards something better.

The stratified capitalist system is never an easy one to understand, and while it seems that the system is destined to fail, crushed under the greed that most men succumb to, wa  Thiong’o argues to the contrary.  Through restraint and accountability, the law and capitalist leaders can find a balance that allows for every man and woman to pursue a sucessful future.

This of course is not the only message or interpretation of Petals of Blood, after all the novel arouse from a period of unrest and troubles that Africa has yet to fully emerge from.  But this particular reading does allow for some correlation between the situation wa Thiong’o dealt with, and our current one.

My long hiatus is over, due in part to post Nanowrimo stress (I did complete the 50k words, and then some) and due mostly to a complete loss of my computer.  But have no fear, I am back up and running and reviews will begin anew this weekend.  I hope to take a more critical stance, though, maybe find more modern or pertinent focal points for a lot of the work.  We’ll let it evolve.

Z

                                                Sleep Sex

            I wonder what the sleep-sexers dream at night, tossing in their beds, and lucky if they are alone or at least the people who don’t have to sleep with them?

            Four months of nights with a sleep-sexer, this miniscule, underweight little sleep-sexer who doesn’t want it during the awake times, but come those dreams she can’t buck and roll enough, splaying her thighs and grabbing with those hands, reaching for my down-under but palming my face instead.  I’m only trying to sleep my drunk off, dick left to hang until after she’s passed out and I’m relaxed. 

            I think about how we met, laying there, about those first nights when it was exciting and this sleep-sexer, this slim piece of chicken bone, would take me to bed, and sleep sound after.  She’s a wake-sexer at that time, not like now.  She was slim, always wearing a sports bra because she had nothing to support, and doesn’t believe a woman has to shave anything.  I find this hot, this natural sex and sweat-bush smell that she gives off as the room heats up, like something you have top pay to see through a peephole, something shameful.  I think about Busy and Ziro, that mid-forties sex that sags like skin and probably smells something like this, but without the desire.

            I’m thinking about reading out loud at those campus coffee shops, reading something I’d taken the time to write, even if it sucks, and biting back responses to the boos and laughs, the people who come for a show.  They ridicule, but they don’t get to come home to a sleep-sexing sliver of a woman, where we don’t watch tv, but instead click on the record player and find some common ground.  Dean, my some-time best friend and every-time hero, calls her a hazard to life and libido.  “A sleep-sexer,” he says to me, flicking the long ash tip from his cigarette, “is every man’s dream.  ‘Til he needs a good night’s sleep or until she gets bored”.

            We’re sitting in the back, liking the atmosphere, the darkness and heavy smells from the grinders, but not interested in the sexless writings, the rhymes or the manuscripts all trying to be someone I can already find in a library.  There are a few, not including my own, which stand out as unusual as a sleep-sexer, and just as much fun-slash-distressing.  These are the on-edgers and the cut jugulars, the stories or poems that approach the edge and don’t push, leaving you to jump off.  As for my work, and the majority of the rest, we’re rubbish and fakers.

            Basically, we like our sex during the awake-times, plain as every other.  If we approached that edge, the sleep-sex and jugular, we might find a meaning.

            There’s always Dos, and all those Dos-ers, their regular likes, the ones with fish faces and struggling gills, their red eyes gasping.

 The sleep-sexer is at Dos from happy-hour onwards, beating everyone else except the employees.  Those same employees you see at every minimum-wage bar, reusing the plastic cups and sneaking shots, except here they have names.  Alyssa waits tables, and it’s hard to look at her with the sleep-sexer by my side, I love the one I’m not with, but she only might know.  The sexer knows, because she’s seen my looks and watched me long after Alyssa’s footsteps, but when a woman needs a place to live, love isn’t such a big deal.

Busy and Zach work the bar tonight, the tv stuck to the cartoon channel, so the regulars can laugh, their eyes dancing along with the subtitles and planting dialogue even over the live music.  Dean is playing tonight, so I meet the sleep-sever at ten, and by then she’s just starting to smile, a third of the way to ruining my sleep and my shorts.  What makes Dos different from every other dive are the names, the people pouring out to the regulars and keeping them breathing, helping them pass out, because they’ve forgotten what sleep is without a drink or two.

Dean, who has another name but liked On the Road enough to steal the hero’s, knows everyone, and they know him back.  His days are words that they all focus on, smoothing through the chords and melodies, an easy wire for anyone to hook in to.  Dean tunes his guitar at the booth, the sleep-sexer resting her head against my shoulder.  “Wayne-o,” says Dean, sucking his teeth and clicking with every note test, “what’s up with you?”

“Same old, Dean,” I snap my fingers in time with a few notes that he plunks out.  I shrug the sleep-sexer off my shoulder, her tiny necks wobbles and slides down to the wall, depositing her head against the mural that spans the back thee walls, a landscape complete with big-dicked donkey that someone painted in two afternoons.

“I’m gonna marry Sissy,” he sets the guitar next to him in the booth.  “Gonna propose later tonight, wrote her a song.”

Dean is the king of flings, settling with one girl but always out with two more.  He sleeps with her, like I do with the sleep-sexer, but Dean rests well, always showing up with bags under his eyes, but not from a lack of.  Dean is a nightmare-sleeper, a bad-dreamer, and would have been a shaman if Christ hadn’t conquered those beliefs.  “Well,” says Dean, “a guess a man has to grow up and realize what’s important.  It’s the chemical-throwers and rope-tuggers who have it right, loving the simple things.  The gospel of John and Paul, but not from the bible.”

Dean, who calls everyone out with laughter, stands up and works his way to the stage.  “I’m telling you, Wayne-o.” he stops and says, “maybe there’s something you need to do, too.”

At that the sleep-sexer drifts off with her legs wide and wrapping the table pole.  She grinds it with both hips, and drools on my arm.  This is where my thinking happens, the real growth stuff where, like a tumor, thoughts invade and press causing all kinds of problems.  While sitting in a hosed-down booth and with Dean in the background, I think.  I feel as if I’m peeping again, the steady noise from around settles out and all I’m left with is a narrow stream of thoughts, words and images that struggle to fall into place.  What does the sleep-sexer think?

The midnight sleep-sexer is different from the early morning one, falling apart from the made-up building she is at first.  The dress is off at the shoulders, rippling as she dances, the same humping rhythm of every night.  Those hips, those sleep-grinding, always-wet, boney hips are saddled by drunken fish-men.  They ride those hips until last call, and then those hips ride me, their own sleeping, as I try to drift off my self.  Everyone at Dos knows the sleep-sexer, and many have had a good night’s sleep ruined by her, or at least a good pair of boxers.  They all went to the same school; that is they’re all in the same school now, with red-vinyl desks and last call as the final bell.

 AT night, before humping the sleep-sexer over my shoulder and back home, they all flock out for recess.  Four-square with the sexer and actual live music.  I think about this, taking notes as I watch, with the steady scratching of my pen like a small note backing the music.  I take notes for the sexer and for me, rubbing myself against her life like she rubs against my sleep.

The sleep-sexer usually comes with me to readings, the free ones where anyone can show up and scuff the stage.  A few even make dents, but I won’t.  My decision is final, and maybe I’ve been sleep-sexed for the last night.

She, the sleep-sexer, loves my stories, when they aren’t about her.  “What whores,” she says, talking about both guys and girls, the people she knows and I know, who make it into my work.  She calls them names, not their own, and even I don’t use the right ones.  “What backwards shit.  They have no idea they’re fictions.”  She sexes her way to the back of the room and is three drinks in before I read my first story, one of three for the night.  I sit beside her after number one is read, and a few people even boo me.  They are the non-sexers, and the ones who who will get normal-laid tonight.

These things are her couch and tv, places she comes for fun, for when the music is too similar and she needs a laugh.  The sleep-sexer sits next to me and is the loudest in the room, and even interrupts the goods work, like she’s interrupting a suicide and opts to point out how the person looks just as they expose the soul to the air.  The sleep-sexer ridicules even the jugular stories, and I know what I have to do. 

In other words, the sleep-sexer must go.  Time for a good night’s, for a peaceful one without the steady hammer of a pelvis and hands all over.  Like bow fishing, I lead my shot, and when the sleep-sexer is pushed back and laughing at some poor writer on stage with his or her veins throbbing against the cool air, I’ll snap the string and spear the catch.

“When are you up?” she punctuates with a shot.  “Whatcha gonna read?”

“Soon,” I answer, “and something about a good night’s with no bruises and moisture.”

What do those all-nighters think about in the morning when they get up?  Those all-nighters with their regular sex and their satisfactions, what is it they feel?  It’s me and the sleep-sexer next to some slim-jim guy and his rubber-string girl, their elastic movements up to the stage making the sexer laugh.  I think about Dean and soon-to-be Mrs. Dean, who will have her sleepful nights because for Dean sleep is up on stage with a guitar and words.

I think mostly of Mrs. Dean, maybe getting what she wants, secure with him but not having to deal with the waking sex and the sleep-tunes, how Dean fingers out notes like he’s playing along a fret in his dreams.  He’s sleep-player and so he just spends his nights actually playing.

The skeep-sexer watches me head up to the stage, and as I read the title, her face falls.

In other words, I call it “Sleep-sexer” and she’s not happy, calling herself a whore and fiction.  And me, once the story is hated and they’re all booing, I won’t go home to sleep-sex or waking sex, but to a good night’s and time to think.

                                    Generations

            The sunrise is slow over the Savannah River, and the rays climb over the bridge spanning Georgia and South Carolina like veins, crossing the concrete and steel.  Three generations of my family, the coming-up and the way-back all together on the clay banks, the water alone enough to keep the beer and cola chilled in the cooler.  My grandpa goes way back to when America won its wars, and he holds it well, with his wrinkles struggling not to slide down as he grips the net handle and lets his knuckles crack chords of arthritis.  His skin is the same tan as my grandma’s, but her hair is white while his has stayed salt-and-pepper.

            “Come here, Wayne, and help me with this fish,” he hefts a catfish from the net, his thumb bleeding as it hooks into the fish’s mouth and rustles it’s whiskers.

            I walk over and he lifts the fish to my face, the smell is like the mud, thick and heavy, as if it would pull you down and down until it closes over your head, suffocating you.  “Wow, grandpa, it has whiskers like a cat!”

            “They’re called barbells, hun,” he still calls me that, even with my twelfth birthday a few weeks past. 

            I hold my breath and reach up, my fingers expecting scales, but brushing against a smooth skin, slime-covered and writhing as the fish struggles to get a hold in the air.  It suffocates in his hands, the rippling colors of its skin growing still against my grandfather’s spotted skin, tugging at his looseness.

            “You’re getting to be a man now,” he explains, “and every man needs to know how to provide for hisself.  The world has gotten easier in some ways, and harder in others.”  He sighs as he lets the fish drip into a cooler, the long sliver of its body the first of the day to smear mud and slime against the white interior.  “I’ve fished damn near every river in Georgia, Carolina and Alabama, but it’s always the same; patience and curiosity, those well git you the catch.”

            My own father, rolling up his sleeves and pant legs, says, “That’s enough, Dad, no one does it that old way anymore.  We go right to the fish, or we bring them to us.”  He kneels in the water and shuffles, his arms feeling around the bottom.  “After all, God gave us fish finders for deep water, and our hands for the shallows.”

            My uncle wades in at my dad’s request, and places himself where my dad had just been wading.  Searching with his foot, my father prods at the clay and mud in the shallow until he finds a hole.  “Ready?” my uncle calls.

            “Yeah,” my dad braces as his brother shifts his weight and plunges a leg into the water, his hip sinking past the surface.  My dad yelps, shoves his hand under, and snatches out a smaller catfish, its tail thrashing at his upper arm.  The fish gnaws on his palm, but my dad drags it through the water to the land, and then tosses it into the cooler.

            On the gentle slope between grass and red clay, my grandfather casts three rods, one after another, into the deepest part of the river, right in the middle.  My father finds his way up to the bank, sitting next to his dad, and watching the lines tense with the slight wind.  A sliver arch of fishing line tightens, but goes slack.  They both hold their chins low, the flesh doubling up as they focus on the ripples, and together they could be time-lapse photos, both beaten by different fights, my grandpa by war ad my own father by years of electronic work.  He has some of the same scars as his father; hot metal makes similar marks, no matter what sent it flying.

            “That’s not how it’s done, boy.” My grandpa says to one of us.  “Impatience might catch a few things, but the real rewards come in time.”

            Back up the hill my aunts and uncles all laugh, drink and celebrate.  In the damp of the morning they squeltch in their dew-heavy shoes and inhale the heavy rolls of mosquito-coil smoke, the insects still swarming despite the cooling weather.  Up on the hill they drag tables and chairs, wooden and heirlooms, things used for a hundred cook-outs and burned with cigarettes and charcoal, set up long like the Last Supper.  Some lights a grill, its bursting belch audible by the water, and my uncle calls for a fish.  “Bring em up!  I’m gonna clean em and bread em.”  He claps his spatula against the grill lid.

            I drag the cooler up the hill, scooting up backwards on my ass and clenching the plastic between my knees.  He takes it from me as I settle against a rock at the top, the sweet potato bread and fries already steaming on the grill’s attached griddle.  I watch them set the plates and napkins, clamping a table cloth at the corners and stacking Tupperware like beams, a skyscraper of food, condiments, and utensils.  The smell of grandma’s dutch over cornbread is overpowering, so strong I can almost see it cook through each wiff, the smell rising with the bread.  Corn husks and cheese wrappers float with the wind, and slow, but with a measured pace, the ingredients all combine.  “What about desert?” my mom asks.

            “Uncle August brought pie; they’re in the green cooler.”

            “Wayne!”  My grandpa calls up to me, “Wayne, we got one on the line!”

            I scuttle down the rocky hill, sliding through the clay and landing on my butt behind my grandfather, who helps me up and hands me the bowing rod.  “Reel it in!” He hoots, “Git that boy on the line!”  The hook sets, and I feel it.  It’s a change in the fish and how it runs, no longer light tugs, but desperate yanks and pulls as it rolls and boils the shallow river water.  The pumpkin-colored water erupts into a red muck as the catfish rips at the bottom, trying to break free, trying to rip the hook out of its own mouth.  “Reel it, hun!  He’s getting sore!”

            The chilled water splashes me as the fish nears the shore, its tail turning up plants and pebbles as its strength fails.  A half-circle grows around me as my family watches me fight the fish.  They yelp and cheer, offering tips on landing the thing, and someone crouches near the water with the net ready.  Finally, after a few minutes that pass so slow I expect it to be night when I look up, I hold my fish between my sore arms, my hands cleans except for a thin layer of mucus.  It’s smaller than either of the ones caught before, and its limp body doesn’t shine with the slime rainbow of my grandpa’s, but this fish is mine.

            My mom stands with the camera and snaps a quick photo, the click of the shutter blending in with the drip-drip from the dead fish as its skin sheds water onto the rocks.  My hands grips around the fish’s head, his whiskers poking through my fingers, limp.  My uncle takes it from me, and heads up the hill with everyone else, the excitement gone and the hunger built.

            My grandpa claps my shoulder, but my dad takes me aside.  “Son, that was fun right?”

            “Yeah!” I nod.  “I wanna do it again.”

            My dad smiles, “How bout something better?”

            “Like what?”  I walk over to the water and kneel by it.  My dad stands over me, his loose jacket taps the back of my head, the zipper taken with the wind.  He is short but lean. Like my grandpa, and his legs bow out slightly, letting me crawl under them like they were a bridge, risen for me to pass.  He puts his hand on my shoulder and tosses a soda can into an open cooler.  Nudging me further into the water, he warns me of the cold and says, “It’s time to get a little wet, son.  That’s the best way to fish; you just jump in and grab what you.  No sense waiting for things to come to you.”

            Dad pushes me on, the water rising up to my knees, and then to my waist.  He puts an arm around me; the waves from my wriggling make ripples along his knees.  We stand quiet, listening as the fish move about our ankles, small minnows flee from the larger fish that chase with their mouths open, and visible streaks stream from their gills.  The world has edges as we stand there, and it’s easy to grab a hold and turn things over and over, making some sense of them.  The water, not clear but translucent, never stops or settles, but flows on and on.

            I look left and then right, down from the Augusta bridges, to the where the canal turns rocky and meets the river, and things jump from the water, and skip with the light, struggling to climb the fading sunbeams as the morning approaches noon.  Dad says catfish are strong, “they keep growing and growing as long as they live, like a family, stretching with the generations.”  He points to a small one, swimming between rocks and dodging the current.  They retreat from our steps, all taking the same paths as the ones before them.

            “Ok, son,” he starts; “now it’s time to catch a fish.”

            I reach into the water, grabbing at the slick and elusive bottom, handfuls of muck coming between my fingers.  I hear him explain something, but all I focus on are the little fish flickering between my knuckles.  They flee the closing cage of my hands, and all I come up with are weeds.

            My dad thrusts his foot into a hole under the surface, and then points, “The hole opens up right here.  Just reach in and grab whatever you can.”  He watches as I hesitate, and eases me on, “Nothing will hurt you, it’s too small for a turtle, and a snake would have bitten me already.  At most it’ll hurt when its teeth scrape you and draws a little blood.”

            I duck beneath the water reach my arms into the hole, and my finger tips scratch something stiff that moves as I poke it.  My fingernail scrapes the surface of the fish and I feel something build up under my nail.  It pulses away, snatching itself deeper into the hole.  It’s forced back by my dad’s foot, and into my hand.

            “I’ve got it!”  I cry, pulling my face above the surface.  My dad shouts for me to pull it up, and get a grip, but my fingers slips across its mouth.

            Under the water the light cuts through the surface and streaks red with my blood, like the red from a stoplight broken up by rain.  My dad thrashes in the water, or maybe the fish does.  Leaves fall from the dogwoods along the shore, and small fish snap at them, expecting bugs.  Somewhere on shore my grandpa yells my name, but I’m still reaching into the hole, streaks and spots blurring the mud-water even more.  I pray, reach, and manage to get the fish out of its hole.  It struggles against my bloody fingertips; the whiskers along its head seem to grasp at the edges of its burrow as I drag it out. I look into its flat, black eyes, open my fingers, and let it slip away.  I surface with a breath, watching as it traces the same path as the other fish, dodging between the rocks and disappearing downriver.

With November as the national novel month, many people I know are approaching their work with hesitancy, unsure of how to make some impact or creative stride, and really be innovative or interesting.  With that in mind, I present one book in a world of others, that approaches a simple story in a complex and interesting way.

Jonathan Safran Foer’s first novel, Everything is Illuminated, has received mixed reviews since its release in 2002.  While critical and media reviewers have approached the work with varied opinions, from declaring it an interesting and unique addition to the literary arena, to calling it an over-blown work of magical-realism… but from what I’ve seen, everyone who’s picked it up has enjoyed it.  Popular with many bibliophiles, the book, notable for its narration and stylistic choices, continues to see print today, and was even adapted for film in 2005 (a successful adaptation in my opinion).

Everything is Illuminated focuses on two characters.  The first is a fictionalized version of Safran Foer himself, who is seeking the European village of Trachimbrod, where his Jewish grandfather escaped a massacre.  The second narration, woven into the stylistic and literary story of Trachimbrod, is told by Alex Perchov, Foer’s translator in Europe who, along with his Grandfather and dog, guide the writer on his search.  Alex’s pieces surround the fantastic tale of Trachimbrod, and are explained with a series of letters and correspondences with Foer.  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of Alex’s narrative, and perhaps the book, is the strange dialect of English he speaks with.  Having learned English from pop-culture, Alex speaks in a very broken style, described as having learned English from a thesaurus without hearing it properly spoken.  I present a quote, “Many girls want to be carnal with me in many good arrangements… because I am a very premium person to be with.”

This, maybe, is one of the things that turns some readers off the novel.  Alex’s manner of speaking can be difficult to decipher at times, and his bluntness and innocence regarding political correctness can offend some readers.  But these tools both serve to effectively illustrate Alex as a character, and to define the world he grew up in.  As a result of a restrictive upbringing and an interest in the taboo “American culture” Alex has a more optimistic view of the changing world, but still views it with the stereotypes of his parents and grandparents.  Unsure, at first, of his Jewish client, the naive Alex presents his enthusiasm for America, but lets his prejudices get in the way.  He declares early on that he admire Michael Jackson, as well as other African American entertainers, but expresses confusion and even resentment when Foer informs him that Sammy Davis Jr., who Alex loves, is Jewish.

It’s these techniques that Foer, the author, uses to lend his book an interesting face.  He builds his characters through their faults, both Alex’s conflicting ideals, and Foer’s (the character) habit of collecting his history and focusing on the fantastic and ideal side of history.  What could have been another interpretation of Jewish struggles in Europe instead becomes a story of growth and understanding between the descendants of both sides of the struggle.

So that’s my roundabout advice to any writers working this month.  If you have time, read the book, if not, read a summary and keep this review in mind.  You don’t have to tell a new story, you just have to find some new way, all your own, to tell it.  The sad truth is that Jewish people where persecuted and abused in the past, but instead of just presenting those facts, Foer instead lends significance to the struggle.  We get a view into history (though not really accurate), but more importantly we see into the growth of humanity and spirit, as the grandchildren of two opposing cultures come together in friendship.

                                                Lasting

            I’m with Alyssa a lot lately, but I’m not the only one.  There’s one guy who shadows her like her brother, he isn’t, but we let him hang around because he works at the bar and he likes her, so we get free shots and beers.  I don’t know if she fucks anyone else, but relationships can be like that, with one person giving more and the other taking; it just takes more on one side or the other to balance things sometimes.  I walk over to her house, certain that she isn’t alone today.

            I’m in love with her, and even though she says it’s reciprocated, she’s really in love with her ex, a man so far away that they barely talk once a month.  He stops by once or twice a week to fuck her, though.  I see him walking by my window some nights.

            I knock on her door, but Busy answers, her hair tied back and rubber gloves dripping above her wrists.  She lets me in, and warns me no tot slip.  “Careful,” she tosses a sponge, hidden by the yellow of her gloves, “I just scrubbed the kitchen.”

            “Has Lyssa got you working for her now?”  I drop to the sofa.

            Busy smiles, “Ziro kicked me out again, so Alyssa’s letting me stay.  I figure the least I can do is clean a little in payment.”

            “Is she in?”  I kick my shoes off and motion towards her bedroom.

            Busy nods and snatches a rag from the counter.  “But she’s entertaining right now.”  She sprays it down with a blue liquid and leans against the wall.  She sees the look on my face and interjects, “Not that kind of entertaining.”

            “Good,” I stand, “I thought maybe Mick was here.”
            Busy laughs, “Naw, he only pops up at night, and it’s never that quite when he’s here.”  She lines up the dishes like in a shooting gallery, stacking them up flat in straight lines, plates, bowls, saucers and cups.  She stacks them in the cabinets, but Alyssa knocks them back by morning, putting a little food onto one and then changing her mind and using another.

            “Why do that?” Walking over to the kitchen, I pull down a cup and fill it with water, “She’s so messy, nothing you do will last more than a day.”

            “What does?” she asks, “What lasts any amount of time anymore?”

            “You and Ziro,” I answer, “you’ve been together for 20 years.  Jesus, you were together when I was an infant.”

            She laughs, “And he kicks me out twice a month.  Our love doesn’t last, and neither does our anger.”

            The last three nights she’s let me sleep in her bed, our backs to one another, and she flinches whenever we touch.  The apartment is hers, but there’s a steady stream of men and women staying over, pretty much like everyone I know, communal living and loving.  Alyssa doesn’t make noise when we have sex, and it’s not just me, she’s always quiet except with Mick.  When Mick comes over, she makes noises like a wounded rabbit, chitters and yowls, noises of dying in a trap.  She’s alive for him, but for the rest of us, she’s just a part of the bed, soft and moving underneath, waves in motion with our rhythm. 

            Except for that one guy, he never says anything when she comes out of the room with me or someone else in tow, our heads hung and her naked except for an oversized shirt, peeled from whoever captures her each night.  He only offers her a drink and waits for her to be alone, or at least sit near him, and then he talks in smiles.  He smiles as a question and an answer, but at night he never goes into her room and never comes out.  I stand next to him now, as he emerges from her restroom.  He opens her door, and I see Alyssa inside with Harry and Smokes.  I follow the guy in, and she looks up.

            “Wayne,” she starts, and then smiles.  “Oh, hey Filb, when did you get here?”

            Filb smiles back and takes a seat on her bed, right next to her.

            I sit on the floor, down by the a.c., with my legs spread apart.  Harry hands me a bottle, and I open it.  Tossing the cap into a bucket across the room, I look at Alyssa.  She’s short and slim, maybe weighing less than when we first met, she can’t be over 100 pounds.  Her hair color changes weekly and I have no idea neither what color she was born with, or what her teeth look like without braces.  In her apartment she wears mostly panties with those stolen sex shirts covering her to the legs, and those are her best feature.  She has pony legs, built for groping, and that’s where men’s’ hands stray to first.

            “Why are you here, Wayne?”  She looks up from her sketch pad, the skritching of the paper and pencil is the only noise besides the hum of the air.  She continues to scribble, her nose slanting towards me, “I didn’t call you.”

            “I know, but I wanted to come over, we need to talk.”

            Harry laughs and grabs Smokes by the arm, dragging him out the living room, “Good call, Wayne-o; looks like that’s our exit cue.”

            Alyssa throws down her pad and pencil, “Fuck.  Look what you did, I wanted them here.”  She reaches over and slams the door while sitting on the bed, “And I don’t remember inviting you.”

             “I’ll stick around,” Filb says, the first words I’ve ever heard out of him outside of the bar.  Even Alyssa looks shocked, turning her head to look at him.

            “Yeah, there’s that,” she snaps.

            “It’s payday,” I pull the little bank envelope from my jacket, “It won’t last, but I figured we could go somewhere new tonight.”

            Alyssa smiles, suddenly moving to the floor next to me, and crosses her legs over mine.  She takes the beer from my hand and licks the rim of the bottle, “that’s a great idea, Dos is getting a little played out.”

            “But,” Filb starts.

            She cuts him off, “We don’t need free beer tonight, babe.”  She coos at him, “we’re just going somewhere different tonight; I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

            Filb gets up, wordless, and leaves.  He closes each door with a careful quiet, and his footsteps, usually audible from the street-side window, never sound out.  Alyssa laughs and kisses my neck.  Standing, she pulls me over to her bed.  “I love you,” she says, and that’s the last noise she makes until we leave for the bar.

            The day ends like every other in Georgia, with the purple of night and red of dusk bleeding against each other, merging in a visible battle that the day always loses.  The cars along the road use their high-beams, even though this is a city, and we flinch with every pass.  The lights search the bar patio, but whatever they seek is never found, because they come over and over.  Alyssa never squints when the lights wash her.

            I down four shots, and I’m sitting, even as I circle the bar, and make my way back out to Alyssa, I feel that familiar relaxation of reclining.  She hands me a beer, and I hand her the last of my paycheck. 

            “How do you like this bar?”  I ask.

            She shrugs and blows a cloud of smoke that joins the haze hovering above the patio, thick like the London fog that stalked Dickens’ novels;  a sticky layer that builds and builds before sinking down to our level.  No one but me coughs as the smoke thickens; the rest of the bar breathes the demon air, their lungs used to the heat.  Alyssa is the most comfortable, licking her lips every few puffs, and tasting the air like a reptile.

            “You about done?” I ask, “I wanna get back to your house.”

            “Not yet,” she says, and ducks inside.  I wait for half an hour, but she doesn’t emerge from the porch.  She instead bursts from the front, my money still in her pocket, and merges with Mick, who is walking along side the road, passing the bar.  I hear her squeal, and he doesn’t even look up.  They just walk side by side, her arms against him, and his at his side, hands hidden in his pockets.

            “Where’s Alyssa?” Busy steps out onto the porch, two beers in her hands, “She said you guys where broke, so I got her a beer.”

            I point to the shrinking couple, one small and living minute to minute, and the other just slightly bigger and living somewhere none of us could imagine. Some place where sex is the only shuttle to this world, the only point where people can connect.  Like two animals, they’ll trap themselves and yowl for help, screaming in fear and fury at the helplessness they feel every day.  “Alyssa and Mick,” I say to Busy, “feel no love for each other, but she likes saying it and he never notices.”

            Busy shrugs and hands me the extra beer, “Ziro never says it to me.”

            “Are you going home tonight?”

            She nods, “He just called me and apologized.”

            “But,” I look down the road, where Alyssa is no longer visible, “he didn’t say ‘I love you?’”

            “He never does,” she replys.

            And he never needs to.  Sometimes the things we say most are what we mean the least.  I’ll wake up tomorrow, alone, walk to Alyssa’s house, and she’ll tell me she loves me.  But when we fuck she doesn’t even make any noise.