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Ok, I thought I'd post the first two short stories I've ever written for some feedback. Obviously, since they're my first, they'll be crap, but I'd like to know specifically which elements to focus on improving (characterization, descriptions, etc). Anyway, enjoy, and thanks for any comments.
Charley learns to drive.
Charley was learning how to drive. He didn’t know why he was learning how to drive, or what where he was going to go once he had learned, but Giovanna had insisted. How can a man in New York, fucking New York, not know how to drive? “Easy, honey, we take the subways. We don’t have a shitload of tunnels going beneath this city, like so many rabbit holes for lost lovers and wandering souls, like worms tunnelling through our big rotten apple, without making something out of it for the normal people.” Normal people, he wondered as soon as answering. Who the fuck are normal people? Am I normal? I wish I were normal. As always, his musings came to the same conclusion.
NORMAL PEOPLE DON’T THINK
They don’t think; they just live. They breathe, eat, shit, sleep, fuck, and fight, and not necessarily in that order, without ever knowing why the hell they do it or how they’re even able to. “Baby, where the hell am I gonna drive? The streets are jammed with cabs and all the concrete looks the same everywhere.” “You’ll be able to take me out. You can take me from my parents whenever you want.”
Giovanna had the answer for everything, even though her answers always came from warped perceptions of reality. Her parents, for example, were either five-and-a-half feet underground or somewhere in Mexico with clogged nostrils. Charley didn’t know why the fuck she kept mentioning her parents. Maybe they still haunted her. He didn’t know. All he knew was that Giovanna deserved better than the cocaine addicts she lived with. Hm, maybe that was the connection. Cocaine? Or deserving better? It didn’t matter. He was learning to drive for her, because he wanted to be able to do things FOR her, not just TO her. She was an Italian beauty who didn’t speak a drop of the language, but who still writhed in pleasure (or was it pain? Charley didn’t know, but then, Charley kept himself from knowing a lot of things) when he recited Dante or Pascoli. Charley, he preferred his Shakespeare in the rare moments of both sobriety and lucidity, and for the rest he cried tears of love, admiration and jealousy for men like Bukowski and Orwell, men who despite great strength were still nothing more than an eloquent mirror for the reflections of society that they were smart enough to see. None of that meaningless romantic shit for Charley. Language for the sake of language gets boring very quickly. Words should mean something. They should be real, gritty, dirty. You should be able to taste the shit when you roll the words around in your mouth. And all the while, Charley wished he were real, gritty and dirty.
He wasn’t a solipsist, but he felt incomplete until he managed to project himself upon something and get a reflection of himself. Are we only as real as other people see us to be? Bullshit, he answered himself quickly, before abandoning a potentially dangerously stimulating line of thought. NORMAL PEOPLE DON’T THINK. That’s just for the freaks and the philosophers. The artists of the brain. He wondered how he could live in New York and still have to search so hard for someone to project himself onto. People walked around in circles all day like fucking chickens looking for their heads. Charley blamed everything from the TV to the President. Or maybe that wasn’t so much of a difference. The President might very well be the same thing as the TV. I’ve never seen him, how do I know?
But that was too much for Charley. Of course the President was real, what bullshit was this? Lucky Charley had never heard of Descartes. He’d have ran around the Bronx until nightfall asking people if they could see him until he’d have gotten knifed by some asshole who couldn’t even drive a car. Yeah, the car. That’ll help. Lemme get back into the car.
He got into the car. Now what? Placebo? Or the Killers? He was jealous of their angst. He wished he knew what pissed him off, what it was called, how to define it. Fuck Wilde, defining isn’t limiting. It’s enabling. Can’t talk about something without defining. But don’t fuck Wilde, he was probably joking when he said that anyway. What’s on the radio? Some kid whining about his parents. Fuck that, kid; you don’t know how good you’ve got it. Then he looked in the rear-view mirror and noticed a big-ass pimple on his nose. Right there on the fucking tip. Jesus, I haven’t had shit like that since I was 16. He turned on the news. Some crazy Muslim blew himself up in Baghdad. Some sick old fuck married a 12 year old. Tune in in an hour for our report on oil prices. Go down the rabbit hole with our new program. Close your eyes and let it all drift away.
Turning out of his parking lot, Charley struggled with the gears as he stared at the empty space where the twin towers used to be. And he couldn’t remember what it meant. And he struggled, and struggled, and tried to remember what he was fighting for, how he was fighting, and what it actually meant to fight, and he couldn’t, and birds flew through the air, and the radio chattered on, and he couldn’t remember. Or maybe he never knew in the first place. Maybe that was the trick. Maybe the car will help. Or maybe I need to go throw more of myself at Giovanna. Or maybe I can flush whatever’s blocking my memory with a sixpack.
Maybe.
Or maybe I just don’t think. I want to be normal, don’t I?
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Morning (working title)
It’s always hard to know when to start a story. Waking up, I guess, would be ideal. While not necessarily always chronologically classifiable as “morning”, it still serves as an accouchement of life. From the moment when I drag my carcass, still bloated from last night’s drowning, out from beneath the sweat-soaked covers and into the bathroom, that’s when life begins. At least, that’s when we like to think our life begins. As if yesterday’s bullshit could be erased by something as ephemeral as sleeping. All we do when we sleep is die a little, I guess that’s why waking up is such a chore.
“What, this crap again? Fuck, I thought I was finished with it.”
“Nope, sorry. Come on, gotta be alive again.”
“Fuck off.”
And so we hit the snooze.
Me, I don’t like the snooze. It’s too much of a tease. I hate being teased. I want to know what’s going on, what I’m getting and what I’m not getting. I figure if I want to be tortured by the immediate vicinity of a state of bliss, I’ll go to the park with my guitar and serenade the happy couples. Those goddamm stuck up sons of bitches. It’s impossible to look at them without imagining just how he’s going to fuck her over somehow. That guy looks like a moron, he probably beats her when she doesn’t blow him. And she can forget about getting tongued, too. That one over there looks like a subtler little jackoff. Pathetic wimp probably tortures her with his evil fucking mind to make up for his own tortured soul. Mind you, it’s a statistical impossibility that none of these guys are little shits. When almost every single person I come across each day tries to rape me in some way or another, it would be naïve to think that these guys are good partners.
So far so good. I’m not even clean yet and I’ve already thought myself into a depression. Let me hit the shower and see if I can get symbolism to work for me today. Bathrooms are full of symbolism. You see yourself in the mirror. You can try and wash away some of the filth in the shower. And you can throw your shit away in what sometimes feels like the only woman I have. Beautiful, smooth porcelain skin. Never complains, never leaves. She just sits there and takes all my shit. No one else takes my shit. I get fucked over for trying to give other people my shit. Shame, they could learn so much from it. Mine stinks a lot better than theirs does. People seem to think that because it’s all shit, it’s all the same. It’s important to remember that Plato never applied his abstract to the negatives. There is no “shit of shits” to set the standard for shittiness. Just a lot of different shit, each worth only what it is on its own. And my shit is worth a lot more than most people’s. After all, I’m always THINKING, always DIGESTING. I hate my porcelain woman. I want a woman who will make me taste my own shit before giving it to someone else.
So there you have it. Misandry and misogyny, one after the other, before I even have the chance to squeeze the pus from the little bumps in my face. I take advantage of this, though. It’s like I’m pushing out my intense anger and frustration, my misanthropy, my violence, my despair. All out, in a flow of fat, pus and blood, down the drain beneath the mirror that just stares at me, with a big red nose from all the squeezing and pinching. I ravaged my skin, and now I’m ready to join the human race. I have to leave all my reactions behind me. Most people are too stupid and self-absorbed to realize what I’m like no matter what I say to them, but some of them might figure out that I’m not normal. It wouldn’t take much, just a small, insignificant gesture that encompasses just enough of stupidity and ignorant malice to set me off and force me to break through my walls of social propriety into what I actually think.
“Did you hear about Isabella hooking up with the teacher?”
“Mhm”
“She’s such a slut, I can’t believe it. Can you?” This sorry excuse for a human being is circling her own drain and doesn’t even have the decency to do it alone. “I think you’re a jealous bitch who’s too disgusted with her own body to let anyone touch it, let alone give you a good fucking, so you try to make everyone else look and feel dirty about who they fuck. Well, fuck you and fuck off.”
It was shocking that a fellow human being would refuse to partake in the crucifixion and slandering of a third member of our species. Solidarity against our own. That’s teamwork and separatism working together beautifully, if you ask me. Such is the absurdity of our world. And I haven’t even had my lunch yet.
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I am not here, then, as the accused; I am here as the accuser of capitalism dripping with blood from head to foot.
Last edited by Cú Chulainn on Wed Sep 02, 2009 9:59 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Second one was good, keep writing!
