Also Known As by Tom Fillion
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Flint was easy to pick out in the beige, fluorescent lighting of the Language Arts building. Besides being the tallest person in the hallway, jacked up a few more inches by motorcycle boots, he was dressed in blue jeans, and a long-sleeved, striped shirt. He pushed back his hair with his free hand and held his motorcycle helmet in the other. It looked like he had just fallen out of the sack with Ellie Windows or one of the aardvarks he was always fucking, including the provost’s secretary, Mary Samuelson.
“I saw the Diane Arbus exhibit you recommended,” I said.
“So what did you think?” Flint asked.
“The photographs were a long suicide note in black and white.”
“That’s an interesting way to put it. Coverdale, you are a poet,” Flint said.
My name is Billy, but he was always calling me Coverdale, after the poet-narrator of The Blithedale Romance, a book by Hawthorne he had given me.
He looked away. He went to The Void he was always talking and writing about in his novel entitled The Void.
“What?”
“Nothing. It’s nothing.”
“You sure?”
Then I knew without his saying it – which made sense if he was only a creation, an apparition of my mind – which I sometimes suspected.
“You? You tried to commit suicide?”
He had been a forestry student, more interested in the raw materials of literature, wood pulp turned to paper, before he took up literature.
“It was at a Holiday Inn in Lake City. I was with the only girl in Lake City I could find, and she hated me. I was just another tree in the forest. I tried to prove my love by cutting my wrists on a wine bottle. Boone’s Farm.”
“That shit? What’d she do?”
“Our relationship was first and foremost based on IOUs. Psychological and emotional IOUs. Also tequila and weed.”
“Called room service for a martini and left me to die.”
He walked toward the stairs.
“I’m in love thanks to you,” I said.
Flint turned and looked at me like one of the ex-communicants from life in the Diane Arbus exhibit.
“I met this chick at the exhibit. We’re going out Saturday night. I owe you.”
Our relationship was first and foremost based on IOUs. Psychological and emotional IOUs. Also tequila and weed.
“You’ve got to be the only guy who ever picked up a chick at a Diane Arbus exhibit. You mind if I put that in The Void? Victor the anti-hero goes to a Diane Arbus exhibit. I’m not sure how I can work it in, him being a plumber and all, but that’s the work of a novelist – to work out those details so there are no leaks.”
“No problem. I’m flattered. I owe you double.”
We walked down two flights of stairs to the oak-covered lawn in front of the Language Arts building. Students sitting cross-legged dotted the landscape. A few students buzzed by on ten-speed bicycles, the gears shimmering like diamonds in the reflected sunlight. Flint went for the shady area under a huge oak.
He stretched out lengthwise with his knee in the air and one elbow jabbing the raw earth. Another student walking by recognized him. Flint tried to ignore the guy, but from his position on the ground, he couldn’t.
“How’s The Void going?”
Flint’s eyes darted from side to side. He stroked his beard several times.
“Fantastic. Should be done with it in a couple months. I’ll be sending it out to publishers, and the publisher that gives me the best deal gets my business,” Flint replied.
“Good luck,” the student said continuing to the Language Arts Building.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“I was trying to dazzle some princess in the snack bar and that guy was sitting next to me,” Flint explained. “I was laying all this shit on her about The Void and how it was going to be on the forefront of modern literature. I told her about Victor. I even told her my pen name: Daytona Smith.”
“Why do you need a pen name when your real name is Flint Dupree?”
He put on his sunglasses with mirrored lenses.
“Anybody who tries to look into my eyes only sees himself, not Flint Dupree,” he said, once his sunglasses were in place.
“Does that mean you don’t exist, or that nobody can really know you?”
The other alternative was and, as I later came to believe minus the tequila and weed, he didn’t exist, but was everything I wanted to be, and that existed, that was real and took the shape of Flint Dupree aka Daytona Smith. He was a rich, rugged, handsome, blonde, blue-eyed, biker novelist. His mother owned half of Maryland. Athena Nike sprang from the head of her father, Zeus. Flint Dupree sprang from the head of Billy Spinnaker aka Miles Coverdale.
Flint raised his right arm in the air and shook his wrist to adjust the fishing-line bracelet beaded with tiny lead weights.
“Where’s your motorcycle parked?”
He motioned to a parking lot in the distance. I had had a fascination with motorcycles ever since puberty erupted.
“Look at that princess,” Flint said.
“I tried to imagine an aardvark having sex. They lie on their back when they are being defensive.”
A statuesque blonde with a purple ribbon in her hair sauntered from the Language Arts auditorium. I had seen her before.
“You can’t even get near a bitch like that.”
He could, but I couldn’t. I was an aardvark with everything misshapen, a body that was a collage of discarded, non-evolutionary parts, out of place, and nocturnal.
“Feel my heart. It’s palpitating. I’m not hungover. I haven’t done any speed. I have no control over it. It’s spooling like a fishing rod. It’s frightening a woman has that much autonomous power,” Flint said.
“I’m going to ask her out,” I said “You can put this in The Void too, to add some tension to the plot. Or comic relief.”
“Okay. Let’s get to the denouement then. I’ve got to be somewhere in just a while,” Flint said.
Billy Spinnaker approached the gorgeous blonde who sat on a bench outside the Language Arts auditorium. It was if she had been waiting a lifetime for this moment, for him to appear. She adjusted the purple halo that crowned her head.
“I was wondering if you’d like to go see the Diane Arbus exhibit with me this afternoon?” Billy asked.
He looked back over his shoulder for his friend, Daytona Smith.
Daytona was gone. A pair of mirrored sunglasses reflected silver from the ground.
“I’ve already got a date for the exhibit with a tall, handsome plumber who rides a motorcycle,” the blonde replied.
After the bitch turned me down, laughed at me for being such an apparent loser with no finesse, Flint and I walked to the parking lot. He fastened The History of Ideas, Volume II with a bungee cord on the back of the 750 Honda with extended handlebars and a chopped seat. He climbed onto it, raised himself high on the rubber-covered rungs, then descended on the starter. He grimaced.
“Hemorrhoids, from sitting for two hours in the History of Ideas class. Sitting and reading, Gravity’s Rainbow. Sitting and writing The Void. They’re like a ball and chain I carry around. I’ve gotta split though,” he said. “I have a date with this chick who claims to be an artist. She keeps coming over to fuck me. I don’t encourage her either,” Flint said with a rare hint of guilt. “She’s insecure, ambivalent, and obscure. A complete aardvark. I feel sorry for her, but to tell you the truth, I enjoy banging her.”
I tried to imagine an aardvark having sex. They lie on their back when they are being defensive.
“Later,” Flint said.
I watched him speed away. He was everything I wanted to be: a biker novelist, except for maybe the hemorrhoids. When Flint’s novel, The Void comes out to critical acclaim, which I’m sure it will, the plot and the theme will be as old as the Bible, man against nature, his own or otherwise, and the aardvark in it, the one that bumps into all the trees – before they get turned into wood pulp for literature – because it can’t see the forest. And the aardvark is Billy Spinnaker, also known as Miles Coverdale, also known as me.
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Tom Fillion is a graduate of the University of South Florida. He teaches mathematics and coaches golf and tennis at a Tampa public high school. His short stories have appeared in many online publications. For a complete list please visit Dream Mechanic.
© 2010, Metazen. All rights reserved.
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