I just finished a story. Normally, I'd post it here, but I need to wait a bit before I do.

In the mean time, because I'm itchy to put something new up here now, I've decided to post the first chapter of my novel. As several of you know, I've been working on this damn novel thing for...way too long. One thing I've discovered about myself, is I seem to process things by putting them up here. I don't feel any urgency unless I know something could be on public display instead of squirreled away on my hard drive.

Today, I'm resurrecting my novel effort. It's not an April Fools joke either. Something about my mom's death put a spur to my ass. This shit is real. I've started speaking with my inspiration. And asking it "What the fuck? Why'd you leave me hanging on this shit?" And my inspiration said, "I got bored. You've got to take more risks, motherfucker."

That bitch is always right.

Anyway, this is the first chapter of my novel, which is currently titled "Not About Love." It might end up being all I post of it. Or it might be another narrative line on this not-so-linear site. We'll see.

****

Oatmeal Chocolate Chip Cookies

My dad shot himself in our front yard when I was eight. He did it in the plant bed surrounding the big maple tree. It was a cool Tuesday afternoon in November. According to Mrs. Anderson, who lived across the street, he sat there for a few moments looking up at the sky, then he took a handgun from his coat pocket and fired a bullet into the roof of his mouth.

The week before, he had raked up the fallen leaves, mulched them with his Toro lawnmower, and distributed some of them back into the same bed his body would lay slumped in a week later, the same bed which also contained the dying remains of the fall mums he'd planted in September, which he had planned on digging up and mulching and throwing in the compost.

Dad always said recycling was important.

I was at school that day. My mom was having a liquid lunch of gin martinis with Mrs. Pope, like she did every Tuesday.

He wrote in his note to me, a note my mom kept from me until I was in college, that he did it there in the front yard on that day so we—my mom and I—wouldn't be the ones to discover him with his head blown off. I guess he thought that would be the considerate thing to do. Sometimes concepts like "considerate" are all a matter of perspective.

In the note, he said he knew somebody would find him long before we got there. The garbage men, perhaps. Or a phone repair man. Or worst case, a neighbor. It turned out the worst case was how it happened. Mrs. Anderson, who was retired and recently widowed, had just gotten off the phone with her daughter and had made herself a little lunch of peanut butter and banana on wheat toast before settling into her high-backed chair next to the window, where she liked to sit and gaze at her bird feeder in the afternoon and read her magazines and work a crossword puzzle. She watched my dad, curiously at first, then with horror, as the inside of his head erupted onto the trunk of that maple.

She managed to dial 911. But she could barely hold the receiver in her trembling hand. After the operator's voice came on the line, she only let out a series of incoherent exclamations before falling to the floor of her kitchen, unconscious. The operator had heard the thud of her body and then the phone hitting her linoleum kitchen floor. He sent an ambulance to her address. To rescue her.

Mrs. Anderson had liked my dad. She was always impressed at how hard he worked on the lawn. And he would take the time to talk to her when she was filling her bird feeder. She used to give him a box of homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies each Christmas to share with us, which I loved.

The year my dad shot himself was the first Christmas I remember not having those cookies.

Much of what I know about my dad is based upon what other people knew, which is that he was smart and funny and a great professor and writer. And nobody could make any sense of the fact that he had killed himself. They blamed my mom mostly, or as I had heard Adam's mom refer to her once in what she thought was a private comment to his dad: that alcoholic bitch. I think everybody who knew my dad considered themselves to be one of his close friends. It's the way he made people feel. He had a knack for making them feel comfortable and important and good. That's what he would have called it—a knack.

I remember at the funeral this young guy, a student, came up to me and said, "Your dad was great. He really inspired me to learn." And this made me feel good, to have strangers tell me my dad was "great." It made him seem legendary. Famous. And, of course, he was. Famous. To a small community of students, writers, and academics who lived in our little college town. And I believed them when they said he was great. Because at eight years old, I thought he was pretty great myself.

I cried at my dad's funeral. I cried a lot. My mom never did. I remember being angry with her about that. We had a fight about it many years later when she was visiting me at college in DC.

"You're like this black hole!" I told her. "You feel nothing. You've probably never even felt any guilt about dad."

"Should I?"

"Yes," I said, exasperated. "Goddammit. Yes. Are you kidding me?"

I remember she was silent for a long time. We were tucked into a booth of some smokey rowhouse basement bar in Dupont Circle where I used to play on Saturday nights, before Dupont Circle became a bunch of fast food chains. She rattled the cubes in her gin and tonic. She lifted it to her lips and brought it back to her lap. One. Two. Three times.

"Dad made people happy," I said. "With his teaching. And his writing. You make people...fucking miserable. You make me fucking miserable. You..."

She interrupted me: "You know what happens when you try to make everybody happy, Nick?"

I stopped. Waited. She sucked on her cigarette and exhaled a white plume of smoke from her cold lungs.

"Somebody always gets hurt."

"Really? And I guess that was you? I suppose you were the one hurt?"

She didn't say anything.

I said, "The thing is, mom—you're never happy."

"Jesus!" She said loudly. I remember being terrified that she would cause a scene. My mom never had any qualms about making a spectacle of herself in public. I looked at the people around us but everybody was engaged in their own conversations and the music tended to mute everything anyway. "You think your Dad was happy?" She laughed. "That he went up to his study every night and planned for his classes and that he was....what?..." she spit the word at me: "content?"

My mom drew on her cigarette and blew the smoke through her lips, making this sardonic "ffff," which turned into "fffuck." She shook her head. "He was miserable. But he always pretended he wasn't. To everybody else. He never had any problem telling me all about it."

"Poor you."

"Yeah," she smiled sarcastically. "Poor me. And poor little Rebecca Greene. And whoever the fuck else."

"What?"

"Those students idolizing him. Spreading their legs."

"You're crazy. Dad...Dad?" The thought of my dad screwing around seemed entirely foreign to me. Mom, I could see. Mom, I'd always suspected, even. But dad?

"He didn't hide it from me, Nick. It's not something I wondered about. I didn't need to. Because he didn't hide anything. He didn't hide pretty little Rebecca. Or the others. Not from me, anyway. Just from everybody else."

I shook my head. "I don't believe you," I said.

"It was the seventies. Relationships were supposed to be open or... permissive or whatever the fuck."

"Christ," I said.

"Every generation thinks there's is the first one to have issues and weird crap to deal with," she said. "There's so much you don't know, son."

I didn't say anything.

She said, "Let's have another drink, shall we?"


At one point in my life, I remember having two parents. And a house. And a yard. And oatmeal chocolate chip cookies on Christmas morning. I played with matchbox cars and under tables at my parent's dinner parties. And I didn't have much to question. And I didn't think much about bad things.

Then I became the boy whose dad put a bullet through his brain under the big maple tree in our front yard. And whose mom, from that point on, brought a flask with her to my tennis matches and soccer games And life seemed to make less sense.

Now I'm the man I am now. And I think I'm a little like him. And I think I'm a little like her. But I don't feel much like myself. And I don't even remember what it was like to be that first boy again. And most of the time I wonder whether or not he even existed.

Category: NotAboutLove