Unused Stock Character by Arthur McMaster

Friday, February 12, 2010

See anything out your front window? Probably not; people look at the wrong times, like just after the crazed escaped cons break in across the street. Or you were at the fridge, looking for the seedless grapes. Now picture your quintessential struggling fiction writer – me – looking out there too. Concentrating like a lunatic – searching for an idea that might morph into a good story. Trawling for one detail, raking through the raw oyster bed that yields the proverbial pearl. Oh, never mind. Maybe I could borrow an idea from someone else. Yeah, that’s it.

Meanwhile, while you sit there, in the rain, waiting for your two-dollar ride, open to nearly anything, you think you’d like to be transported not downtown to work but to some breathless night club of pre-war Paris – right? – a spot where you might happen upon garrulous, outrageous company and totally gratuitous sex. Maybe some celebrity will appear on the bench next to you, finding you somehow interesting. Anything to distract you while you wait for your smelly bus to pull up, the driver of that bus, when he opens the door, boasting a permanent scowl above his deadened-brown eyes. The kind of deadened-brown eyes that got too much smoke in them as he walked around for years with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his cruel mouth, the tar from that fag suppressing his hunger for yet more Milk Duds, which his now missing mother used to put into his lunch, until she stopped, all while that young man unconsciously channeled the late Richard Widmark, the same Richard Widmark who always talked with a lit cigarette in his mouth, his bad-boy hair flapping around on his ample forehead like he was caught in some gale force wind. Why the bus driver’s mother is missing is another story.

Well, what I didn’t need then, I figured, as I sat down at my obscenely cluttered writing desk to sketch out my next much ballyhooed short story – the kind of short story that when it’s published in some small journal they pay me maybe four cents a line, barely enough to keep my dog Rosemary and me in Johnny Walker Black – what I didn’t need then was a call from my old MFA pal, Nick, who needed a favor. Could I work one of his stock characters into my new story? This would be someone he didn’t use in his last piece, he said, but felt an obligation to get into circulation again. Or to try.

Could I help him out?

Yes; there may have actually been an ellipsis in that penultimate ejaculation of his, to use a term Charles Dickens was oddly fond of. “Or to try.” he said. “Could I?” I’d have to think about it, I said, but he sensed that I was drawn to that literary device, as he spoke; much like a poet listens for a tell-tale caesura. I listened to determine if he was using a real ellipsis, one that works its way naturally into banal, conversation like ours, or one he had inserted needlessly. Naturally suspicious, I figured the latter. But then I would, wouldn’t I? That’s exactly what real short fiction competitors do. They listen. The good ones…

Well, I pondered this conundrum for several moments; my cup of instant coffee getting cold, so cold a small Polar Bear could have attempted to swim across it, looking for Russia, or for his mother on the other side, had the cup been – well – much, much bigger – that stained Buffalo Bob cup sitting there, on my obscenely cluttered desk. Anyway, the conversation, as near as I can reconstitute it now, went like this:

“Hey Arthur, I need some help, amigo.” Now, Nick only called me amigo when he wanted to demonstrate a heightened sense of camaraderie. We had not been all that generous to each other in our final fiction workshop – honest, maybe, but not kind. Never kind! Fiction writers hate that show of supercilious sentimentality. Almost as much as poets despise over-baked alliteration. Still, here he was, asking for help, as if we were not, in some real sense, “dog-eat-dog” competitors. Warrior dogs. Warrior short fiction dogs, in a race for the affection of sage and learnéd readers. Well, that got me thinking.

I mean this “race for readers” idea is not unlike a real foot race, sharply up-hill both ways, – maybe a 15 K – so that when you line up several rows back from the front, where all the annoyingly super-confident assholes assemble, and you begin to anticipate the bark of the starting gun, you notice that one shoe is half untied and there’s no way you can bend over and retie it tight because the runners are packed in so close around you, you can’t move; but now you could almost smell the Red Bull on the breath of the runners in front of you, even though the wind is blowing from the other way. And you don’t even want your bending-over-butt touching that person behind you, anyway, because it’s not a hot chick. That’s how tight this race is. That’s how competitive. Tight, sweaty fiction warriors. That’s the pressure I mean to convey, and trust I have.

“Well, Nick,” I said, ignoring the amigo gambit. “What did you have in mind?”

“I hate to ask but I have this one amazing stock character,” he said. “Everyone loves her, honest, and I need to give her some action.”

“Really?” I said. “Some action?”

“Yeah,” said Nick, which was half his non de plume. His real Christian name was Darwin. No shit; Darwin Applenord. I mean, really; give me a break. That’s why he went for Nick Stiletto, I guess. Anyway, he went on, “I didn’t get her into my last piece, a dealie about Brazilian zombies working at a Midwestern Kroger grocery store, mostly in produce, and I thought maybe you could use her. Hey, I’d appreciate it.”

Sweet Jesus, I didn’t dare ask how Brazilian zombies would get even get to the Midwest, or would want to. Like did they hitch-hike? To Wisconsin? I mean what’s to do there? But it was his story. I also didn’t ask why he’d ignored her, figuring she was probably pretty messed up, somehow; or he would have worked her in. Right?

“OK, what’s her name; what’s her game?” the lapsed poet in me tried? As soon as I had asked I wished I could have pulled it back. Now I had shown the guy some interest, empathy even. Not good among cross-genre short-fiction warrior dog writers.

“She’s a world-class athlete, Arthur” he told me. “A runner, mostly. She does other cool stuff, too. Short-haired brunette. Name is Bambi.”

“Cool stuff? No way, pal,” I told him. “The small lit mag publishing race is tough enough, full enough of would be runners. Front runners, in fact. Warriors. I don’t need that kind of complication. Unless.,” I paused, and here I did use an ellipsis.

“Unless what?” Nick Stiletto came right back, like one of those small, red rubber balls on a string, the kind you see on a little hand pallet with a tethered ball, like they used to have when Scott Fitzgerald was writing stories about people meeting casually on some ritzy beach – Nick now sensing a weakness.

“OK, if she’s hot,” I said, “I’d think about it. Is she hot, Nick?” ‘Cause if she was, I knew, I could maybe put her in to my new story that was just coming into my head – a story about a road race where this guy has to retie his shoe. Right? And everybody is really jammed up together. Red Bull at every aspect. Maybe put her right behind my tall, handsome protagonist. A writer. Sure. Why not? Put her in little, red silk pants. Yeah. I could use her. No doubt figure out how to work in some totally gratuitous sex. After the race. Not during. That would be crazy.

Well, I dumped my cold coffee, checking first for bears, and got up to pour some fresh, spilling a little on my obscenely cluttered desk, thinking right – the race is on! There’s the oyster, but I have to write it before Nick asks for his stock character back. Bambi is mine now. Mine. She and the cool writer runner are together – off on another award-winning road race. But hey; that is exactly what a tough, honest, warrior-based MFA fiction workshop can lead to. Judicious use of other people’s abandoned ideas, amigo. Oh look, here’s your bus.

–

Arthur McMaster writes poems, short fiction, flash fiction, and stage-plays. He grades papers when he must, or when he runs out of ketchup. He just finished a one-act comedy that juxtaposes a Neanderthal couple with a “modern American he and she.” He has pieces in Wisconsin Review, Subtropics, and forthcoming in Emrys Journal and Poetry East.

Share and Enjoy: