Rand and Ranting

I schlepped up the stairs of Keynes College the next day, passing the bar and lamenting the fact that I had to go to class and couldn’t just go to the bar for a couple of hours. I made it up to the seminar room, walked inside, and saw that I was one of the first ones in there. There was a girl across from me, attractive, short brown hair, and I recognized her from the doomed fiction reading last term and nodded.

A few minutes later, a couple other people trickled in—one guy who looked like he hadn’t slept last night, and the untucked shirttail and the stamps on his hands backed up that thought—right before Todd. Todd’s a guy about my height and build with James Joyce glasses and a skeptical face. He started off the conversation with a resounding, “So. You guys read Atlas Shrugged? Big piece of crap, huh?”

A deafening silence filled the room. The Brits weren’t used to this—and, frankly, I wasn’t expecting to have an American as a professor here. As far as I knew, the Americans on staff were in the Politics department. Anyway, the British professors were very British about their teaching method, as far as I could tell: Stoic, reserved, business as usual types who’d rather be doing anything else than working, and, frankly, didn’t care that much about what you were working on. To hear a professor come in with a statement that decried a work so fully instead of something like, “While this text is flawed, we must take into account that” etc etc, was—even to me, who’d had a screenwriting professor call Michael Bay “the biggest sack of cow dung ever to crawl out of the sewers,” this was jarring. But, that was probably because of the time that had lapsed between when I’d been in America and when I’d been in Politeness Land.

“So...” said the guy who looked like he’d just come from the club, “does that mean we don’t have to read the book if we haven’t started yet?”

“What?” asked Todd. “You—yeah, you still have to read the book. Well, I guess I wouldn’t know you hadn’t if you didn’t write about it for the final essay, but, you know, read the book.”

“Huh,” said the guy.

“I know a guy who read it for fun,” I said. This is how I added to conversations in literature courses, which also explained how I never made above an A minus in them. “He was a huge fan of Ayn Rand.” I punctuated it with a nod.

“Oh, hey, you’re American. Where you from?”

“Nashville and Ohio.”

“No shit? What part of Ohio?”

“Canton.”

“Cool, my people are from there.”

For a moment, I envisioned a group of literature professors and writers, as a tribe, coming from Akron—which was a quasi-industrial city most known for tires and their Triple A baseball team. It was an odd image, and, briefly, I wished that my brain would stop sending these things instead of something useful.

“So,” he said, “what’d you think?”

“I think it’s interesting that Rand has such a staunch hatred of government, yet took aid herself. But yeah. Big ole pile of crap. 500 pages of terrible dialogue, yadda yadda,” I waved my hand through the air, seeming to dismiss the whole thing from my high horse of literary knowledge. Of course, I hadn’t read the book at all, but I had read several articles online about how crap it was, and I’d learned from a professor my sophomore year that it was all about how well you could bullshit.

“I know, right?” Todd said. He made a retching sound. “And people take this stuff seriously. By the way, this will essentially be the tone of every discussion we have. Let’s go through the syllabus.”

We did. Every novel was met with a sardonic remark about the author’s hypocrisy, the fact that ranting didn’t make for good reading, and then, to close, a collective wish that people had better senses of humor. We left the classroom, and I called Giggles to see what he was up to.

The Rehearsal, the Descriptive Shortness of Which Will Be Disappointing to Those Who Were In Fiddler

It was dead dark on campus by the time rehearsal was scheduled to start. I walked by Templeman in my p-coat, a couple bottles of water and my libretto in my bag. Around me, undergrads stumbled around, drunk already though it was barely half-past five. Garbled Essex accents bounced off walls, high-pitched, scathing laughter cut through the air—and that was coming from a group of “lads.”

I sighed, thinking of the frat boys back in Knoxville and remembered that every country has their obnoxious idiots. Moving on.

There are a couple of buildings on campus that are, essentially, mazes. The rumor is that they were designed to be mirror images of each other, and each was designed by an architect who made his living designing prisons for the government. Further, goes the campus legend, the guy, after designing the two colleges, killed himself. I don’t know why, and the tale doesn’t say why. It kind of reminds me of the story about the guy who designed the cover for In The Court of The Crimson King killing himself after creating it. Anyway, the rehearsals were set to be in one of these buildings—Rutherford. I’d been in there to go to the karaoke parties, but then, that destination was clearly marked.

So, in the face of confusion brought on by a complete lack of understanding of the design of a building, I did what I normally did in these situations: I wandered. I knew the room was going to be in a courtyard, so I walked towards what I figured would be the middle of the place and hoped that I’d be correct.

Eventually, I came to a courtyard. In the middle was a large group of smokers. I imagine that, seen from above, this gathering would have resembled a big red target. I walked around the perimeter, looking into each classroom on the courtyard level to see if any of them contained actor types. When I reached the room that was directly to the left of the entrance, I saw a couple people sitting against the wall, smoking. They were chatting about rehearsals for another play.

“Fiddler?” I asked.

“Fuck you,” said the guy. He was lanky, pale, had glasses. This, I’d learn was Simon. “I’m not a kiddy fiddler you—oh, the play. Yeah, we’re here for that. You?”

I nodded.

“I’m not,” said the girl. I never actually learned her name, despite seeing her several times at karaoke and despite the fact that she knew mine and seemed to know a disturbing amount about me. “I just walked Simon over here.”

“Oh.” I said, nodding. “Okay.”

“I gotta go.” She left.

“So who’re you?”

“I’m The Narrator. I’m going to be playing Tevye.”

Simon gave me an appraising look. It hit me that he was one of the guys who tried out for Tevye. And, if memory served, he’d been the one who’d played the role as part of a traveling troupe of actors who performed in places from Germany to Russia. “So you are,” he said.

Silence.

“Well,” I offered. I looked at my watch. “I guess we should get in there?”

He nodded and we walked in the door.

People slowly trickled in, culminating with Laura’s retinue of Lucie and the Wookie named Kane. A visible shift occurred in her demeanor. She came in laughing at some joke and then turned into a cold, soulless human being, shouting at everyone to shut up and get ready to get down to the serious business of acting. I was scared shitless, but everyone else seemed to be used to this from working with her in one of the showcases in the fall.

This would be my motivation to perform throughout the time I spent in the cast: Pure, unadulterated fear of enraging someone shorter and lighter than me. Of course, that wasn’t exactly different than how I usually worked with other people. In other words, I’m scared of everyone.

Anyway, the rehearsal went on until about half past nine and involved a lot of me shouting at people when I wasn’t supposed to (my method was to base my interpretation of the character loosely on my father, who used to be quite mad), twitching at people who—clearly—hadn’t taken this as seriously as I had and not learned their lines, and sweating.

By the time the rehearsal ended and we’d made it through two scenes, it was half-past nine. I called Giannis as I walked out of Rutherford. Megadeth played over the phone until he answered and then: “Hello?”

“Hey man, it’s The Narrator.”

“Oh, hey man. How are you?”

“Fuckin tired. Drink?”

A long and exasperated sigh came from his end of the phone. “I cannot. I have work to do.”

“What? It’s the first day of the term.”

“Yes, I know, and I have three projects to work on, I must read four articles and write about them, and then rework some of my project from last term.” He sighed. “I hate it.”

“Man,” I said, “you should have gone into liberal arts. You know how much work I have to do?”

“How much?”

“Fuckin nothin, man. I have so much time, I’m the lead in an amateur production of Fiddler on the Fuckin Roof. I got like, two papers for the entire term and they’re both due in April.”

“I hate you.”

“Dude, that’s not the worst of it. Every assignment I have between now and then is optional.”

This time, Giannis hung up.

Okay, in Class for Real This Time

“Why do you want to do this? Why in the world would you come for a degree in writing?” the professor asked.

Simon Smith was a short, portly poet with glasses. By his own admission, he usually didn’t dabble in prose, “but I’ll try.” When the three of us in the course met in one of the seminar rooms in Woolf, it was dusk at around four. It was myself, a guy named Ritchie who happened to be in one of The Writer’s seminars, and Simon in this room. Sitting, chilling out. Initially, when I saw that there were only three people in the class, I thought, “Well, this is strange.”

I was used to literature courses with about eighteen depressed scholars, one skip away from diving into a whiskey bottle due to their time spent reading the works of people who truly hated humanity. Being in a room with two other people, one of whom seemed to be simply mildly cynical and the other who seemed to wish he were writing highbrow crime novels, this was strange. I wondered if every writing seminar were like this.

“I mean,” continued Simon, “it’s not like there’s any money in this. I made more money working as a librarian than I did writing poetry.”

“Well,” I thought, “that’s because you write poetry. Try writing lawyer thrillers. You’ll make a mint.” I didn’t say that, though.

I cleared my throat. “I’m doing this to spite a friend.”

“Okay,” Simon said. He gave me a look—one that would turn out to be a common look—that said I was slightly unhinged and didn’t have the firmest grasp on life.

“He’s a dick,” I continued, though Simon obviously didn’t want me to. “Real pretentious type; thinks he’s the shit, right? King Shit of Fuck Mountain, one might say.”

Ritchie snickered.

“Huuuuge fan of the Russians—writers that is, don’t know about politics—and thinks every piece of genre is total crap.”

“And so you’re spiting him... how?”

“I’m going to write a long-short story, have you mark it, and then show him that genre doesn’t necessarily fail.”

Simon nodded. “Richard?”

“I don’t know. I like to write. I hated my job. This seemed like a good idea.”

“Okay,” Simon said. He leaned back and looked between the two of us. “Narrator, what books have you recently read?”

“Welp, one of the required texts for my other course—”

“Which is?”

“Er,” I pulled out my notebook. “It’s called ‘Utter Mishegaas’ with Todd McEween. It’s in the Ranting in Literature M.A. I’m reading Atlas Shrugged. If I get through it without gouging out my own eyes—”

“Like Oedipus, I like the imagery.”

“I was thinking Sam Neill from Event Horizon, but yeah. Oedipus will work. If I get through it without doing that, then I guess I’ve completed just as much as I can hope to as a human being.”

“How dark.”

“Meh. Life is objectively meaningless, and I feel it’s best to keep your expectations as low as humanly possible to avoid disappointment.”

“How Zen.”

“Nah,” I said. “My guitar teacher taught me that when I was fifteen.”

“Richard?” asked Simon. I could see the wariness growing already. “How about you?”

Richard listed some British novelists of whom I’d never heard, and I zoned out for a bit. Went to my happy place, which, today, was sadly based in Sholazar Basin in Northrend. It’s best if I skip over the contents of the happy place, as to describe it in detail would be incredibly depressing.

“Well,” Simon said, “here’s a thought. How about we eschew this meeting in a large seminar room, since there’s only three of us in the module, and have one-on-one meetings?”

“Oh, at a pub?”

“What? No. In my office.”

“Oh,” I said, deflated. And here I thought writers were all rampaging alcoholics. “Yeah, sure.”

“Great,” he said with a smile. “Well, how about we break with some thoughts about what we’re each going to do as a final project—I say ‘we’ because, hell, why not do one myself—and then meet next week. Narrator, you at eleven, and Richard, you at one?”

“Works for me,” I said.

We left the room. Ritchie and Simon were talking about what Ritchie was thinking about doing—a continuation of something he’d been working on for that Rose woman, who, I was certain, The Writer was trying desperately to impress. I figured there wasn’t much point in me thinking about what to do, as I could easily just choose one of my mad daydreams and write that. Or, barring that, if I couldn’t think of anything, just use my blog, which was original writing and I would be damned if anyone said otherwise.

As I left the building and was hit by a heavy burst of wind, I received a text message from The Traveller. We would be meeting at The Sub-Pope’s Flock on Saturday to have another story session. Anyone who did not attend would be counted as bowing out of the competition. It was now Wednesday, which gave me two days to remember who’d told a story last, and to think of one myself.

But, more pressing than that was the reheasal tonight. It was the first non-singing scene (the bit where Tevye leaves off singing “If I Were A Rich Man” and gets mobbed by people with bad news) through the scene where Perchik goes all “guh” for Hodel for the first time.[1]

---

[1] Side note: If you don’t know what I’m talking about, that’s for the best. It’s been about a year since I started rehearsing for the musical, and I’m still having nightmares about being on-stage and forgetting lines mid-song, and then being lynched by Laura. I wake up in a cold sweat and curse my iPod whenever it plays songs from that musical.

The Return to Classes

 As I said, the previous week was incredibly dull, and spent with little more than streams of Muppet movies on Megavideo, and Menzopeptol, my troll shaman on World of WarCraft. After I emerged from the dark of my room on a Tuesday morning, hacking up some phlegm and cursing the world for not raining coffee, I walked to the kitchen to get the last of the Dunkin Donuts grinds and saw the following hand-written note from the cleaning staff:

Dear D3

Your flat is disgusting.

Please clean it.

John tried to, but found himself throwing up from inhaling the fumes from the black mushroom things on the counter and then his eyes started bleeding which we attribute to the—estimated—three pounds of gutted fish on your table.

I sighed and ripped down the note. I didn’t want to confront the Chinese girls, because they were really nice, and weren’t doing anything on purpose. (I’d seen pictures of a Wal-Mart in China online and... well, cultural differences. Dead pigs, I assume to be used for pork, were piled in a giant tub with a huge price marker on it. Semi-cooked ducks hung from a non-refrigerated display. There was another tub full of what looked like different cuts of beef all lumped together. Madness. The horror. The horror.) So I stood in front of the kitchen door, thinking of a way to shrug off the responsibility of cleaning up someone’s mess.

I could tell Chacko, but Chacko, apparently, hadn’t cleaned his room since he’d moved in, so he wasn’t exactly the paragon of cleanliness. The other option was Giannis. Giannis was a military man (by default) and, swear to God, his room could have been used as a model room for guided tours of Woolf College. Everything was neatly placed in its own slot, there was a constant pleasant smell, his desk was neat, and, unlike my room, there weren’t empty liquor bottles strewn across the floor and dirty wine glasses on every shelf.

I dashed into the kitchen—holding my breath—and turned on the coffee maker. Then I headed over to Giannis’s door and knocked. The sound of Iron Maiden briefly dipped in volume and he shouted, “Yes?”

“’s Aaron,” I said. “You busy?”

“No, man, hold on.” Iron Maiden stopped entirely and there was a brief shuffling. Giannis opened the door and I saw Stasia sitting on his bed.

“Yo, Stasia, what’s up?”

She shrugged. “I had to leave. The Writer was complaining that I was shouting, so I threw an apple at him and left.”

“Sounds fair,” I said. “Frankly, I’m surprised you haven’t killed him yet.”

She laughed and shrugged.

“So,” said Giannis.

“Yeah. Right. Kay. Look,” I held out the piece of paper.

Giannis read it. “Yes, I too passed out in the kitchen. The... what are they? The things in the bowl?”

“Mushrooms?”

He snapped his fingers. “Yes. The mushrooms, they stink.” He formed a gun with his fingers and mock blew his brains out.

“Wait,” I said, “you passed out in the kitchen?”

He nodded. “Two hours.”

Chacko’s door opened and, like an Indian Kramer, he slid into the hallway. “Did someone say my name?”

“No.”

“Oh. What’s up?”

“This,” I said.

He took the paper from my hand and read it. He nodded, crumpled it, and threw it in his room. “You guys want to go see a film? I heard tha—”

“Class in an hour,” I said. “Rehearsals later. What’re you going to do about the kitchen?”

“Nothing,” Chacko said.

“What?”

“It’s not that bad.”

“Chacko, Giannis passed out!”

Giannis nodded.

“Oh.”

“I can talk to the girls,” Giannis said. “I have bleach. I will just dump it on the floor if nothing else.”

“So,” said Chacko. “A film?”

“Fuck off with ya.”

“Fuck you,” responded Chacko.

“Fuck you!” I countered.

“Fuck yoooou!” Chacko said, shaking his fist.

Stasia gathered her things in one swoop and said, “I hate this flat,” and left.

We shrugged.

An E-Mail

So, I just received an e-mail from a friend of mine. Everything below, until after the signature, is from the body of the e-mail.

Narrator,

You need to get on with it. I know what you’re planning, because you talked to me about the days after your trip to France. Don’t do it, man. Don’t write about World of Warcraft, man. Seriously, that’ll be the most boring shit ever. No one, and I mean no one, has any desire to hear about you dual-wielding mutton in Lich King heroics. That makes you a troll (and yes, I know you play a troll), and trolls are the worst things ever.

Just, please, get on with the blog. It’s gone on for over a year now, and you’re still not through December.

Also: I know, you wanted to talk about Christmas. You’re a Jew and you spent it watching Scrooged and The Muppet Christmas Carol. There. Summed up in one sentence. Booyah.

-I’m out

So, yeah, I guess there’s something to that. There’s not much point in detailing how I went into a virtual hermitage for a couple of weeks before classes started back up, and you’re probably not all that interested in hearing about how I spent about three six-hour stretches grinding reputation for a bunch of goblins, so I might as well skip on to the next interesting bit, which took place about two and a half weeks after I returned from France.

Empire Strikes Back was ten kinds of awesome to see on the big screen, though. Hadn’t seen it since they came out with the special editions in the 90s.

 

An Interruption

Outside, a new wave of wintery vengeance rained down upon us mere mortals, and we wept. 

           The old world, gone now—long disappeared behind the veil of white that covered the surface of our planet now—was but a memory. We knew not whether anything lived out there, in the frozen expanses. Perhaps some primitive species had managed to eke out a way of life by tunneling under the permafrost. Humanity would not get that far, I felt. Once our reserves of heating oil and fuel were depleted, it would be a few months—a couple years at most—before we were lost.

Well, that’s what popped into my head as I stood at The Traveler’s window on the top floor of his block. A pretty steady wall of snow flew through the air. Windows around Woolf, which, it turned out, weren’t properly built, vibrated and slammed open and shut with the wind—even if they were supposedly latched shut. On the inside of every door, there was a note by the property management, which read:

“Residents, please take care around the property as there will be strong winds WE will not be in the office until Thursday, as to remain here in this icy hell would be suicide Thank you –UPP”

It was a bit of a hyperbolic reaction, but they didn’t lie: The Pavilion was empty. The help desk was shuttered shut and mail bags piled up in front of the employee entrance door. Critter tracks littered the courtyard and the only people who moved around were dressed like sherpas.

In The Traveler’s kitchen, there wasn’t much hint of that aside from the occasional burst of cold air when the windows briefly popped free of their latches. The air in there was filled with spice and the sinus-melting scent of Diablo peppers. The Thes, we took it for granted (turned out that we were all there, except for The Writer, who was still sulking) that we would be in pain from smelling everything in the pot, and were thus able to withstand it. The two Brits in the flat—a tall, tall guy named Ross, who I think I’ve mentioned before, and a shorter guy in Psychology—weren’t faring as well. They’d tear up from the spices and have to wander out of the kitchen occasionally. Giannis and Chacko came over—Giannis was crying, but stayed around because we were blaring Jethro Tull, and Chacko laughed at everyone, saying, “My grandmother could make spicier food than this. Naturally, everyone hated him.

“Why do you want to kill us all?” asked Giannis. He was sitting at  the long table against the wall, red in the face, tears welling up in his eyes, and wiping his forehead with some paper towels.

The Traveler responded by shouting, “Pain is weakness leaving the body!”

“That,” said The Stalker, “is my personal motto.”

An uncomfortable silence filled the room.

Soon, we ate and--

In The Dolphin

After the worst half hour walk I’d ever had, we’d made it into town. Usually, the city was always at least somewhat busy. During the days, it was locals and tourists from England and around Europe, at night it was drunken students—mostly undergrads—roaming around shouting. If you weren’t careful while roaming, you’d probably wind up trodding in vomit and empty kebab containers.

Today, though, it looked like The Rapture had occurred. The streets were empty and, aside from light streaming through shutters, there were no signs that people were alive. We walked across the bridge spanning the stream they called the River Stour and turned a corner onto Pound Lane. About half a block later, we crossed the drive exiting from one of the parks and saw a display that, normally, contained an advertisement for something called a pantomime[1]. Today, though, it had something that stopped us in our tracks—for the better.

In the glass case, listed under Canterbury Council Events, was a full-sized retro poster of The Empire Strikes Back, with a date, three days in the future, listed. The cold in front of us was wiped out of our collective mind—and I do mean collective. Right then, we were not three separate people, two of whom despised one another; no, we were one person, one combined Fanboy. “We must attend that showing,” said The Writer.

“Didn’t think you’d need to say that,” said The Drunkard.

“Where is that place? The Auxiliary Marlowe? What the hell?”

“It’s...” said The Writer. He scratched his head. “I don’t know. Isn’t the Marlowe being torn down?”

“Yeah. It’s basically a hole in the ground right now.”

“Lads,” said The Drunkard, “never fear. We will find that place. It is our Dagobah, and this shall be our journey into the ways of the Force.”

This pleased us greatly, and we walked the next half block to The Dolphin, and walked inside.

The interior was low-lit, as always. There weren’t many people inside; indeed, the only person in the front room was a pensioner--who never seemed to leave the pub--with her orange juice, sandwich, and crossword puzzle on the table, and her walker next to her. The girl behind the counter was the redhead I vaguely remembered seeing from somewhere, but could never place. Murmurs came from somewhere in the back, so I figured we weren’t the only people in the place.

We shook ourselves off at the door like three dogs—prompting a disproving grunt from the pensioner—and walked up to the bar. We ordered some pints and meandered to the back, the thing that would double as a back porch. We took one of the tables, took off our coats, and plopped down in silence. Outside, wind blew. I saw a few birds in the sky fighting off wind in their flights to some other country, some place where they could exist in the sun and the warmth and not have to deal with so many fucking rainy, windy days.

I grunted.

The Drunkard grunted and drank half his bitter in one go.

“So,” I said after tapping the tabletop a few times. “Writer. What have you been up to?”

The Writer adjusted his glasses. “I’ve been working with my tutor, whom you may remember from the reading in which you made a complete ass out of yourself, in one-on-one sessions on my latest work. A short story, in the parlance of the proletariat, in which both of you, no doubt, find yourselves. It explores the deep, cutting divide found within each individual of even middling mental faculties, and explores how those individuals compe—”

“What’s the plot?” asked The Drunkard.

“Yes, you would ask about something so base as the plot, wouldn’t you? Can’t quite wrap your gourd around the concepts therein without having a full explanation of the material happenings therein. No, I’m not surprised, just disappointed.”

I looked at The Drunkard and, while his face was calm and not shaking, his knuckles around the pint glass were white, and you could see the glass vibrating against the table.

“Very well,” he said, “I shall endeavor to lay out the plot. It follows a young man, similar in age to ourselves, who finds himself in a different country than the one of his birth. In this country, he must combat the forces of mediocrity as he struggles to maintain his artistic worth in the face of—”

“This isn’t fiction,” said The Drunkard. “This is your life.”

The Writer gave off a little, smug laugh and I wanted to punch him.

“No,” said The Writer, “it’s fiction. None of it happened, thus, it exists in a plane of existence that is not this one. If you could wrap your mind ar—”

The Drunkard slammed his fists onto the table in front of him. “Shut up, you blathering jackass. What you’re doing isn’t anything that requires more imagination than that which is needed to change names. Your ‘conflict’ in the story, from what I can tell, is one step above whinging in a damned Livejournal entry about how no one understands you and you are a lonely artist, living on the fringes of a reality television-obsessed world.”

“I—”

“Shut up, you fucking hack,” he said, dropping his voice low and jamming a finger an inch away from The Writer’s face. “Narrator, back me up on this.”

“Well,” I said, “I agree that it’s pretty unimaginative to write about nothing other than your life, viewed in the lens of, well, semi-fiction; but to shit on it with the gusto you’re doing is—”

“Absolutely necessary if fiction wants to survive another ten years,” said The Drunkard.

The Writer scoffed. “Please. Alarmist rabble rousing.”

“If there were a rabble to be roused, I’d agree with you. Fiction’s going through its death throes, man. If it weren’t for Stephen King and Terry Pratchett, the only people reading would be tweens and academics. And yet you continue to ream them at every opportunity.”

“They’re hacks who refuse to acknowledge the struggle of the daily grind—the horror that is the modern society built upon repressed emotion, feeling, intellect, and thought in favor of rote reactions to TV and pop music drilled into the mind by nothing more than repetition at an early age.”

“And you’re a specific, despicable breed of hack that refuses to acknowledge the value of looking at the world from the view of fantasy or science fiction; in other words, that the genres you decry are just as valid and able to provide social commentary as your beloved fucking Tolstoy.”

“Ha! Like what? Fantasy and sci-fi are nothing more than Dungeons and Dragons and Star Wars.”

“My ass, you shit-brained piece of dog turd. Dune, Lord of the Fucking Rings.”

“I’ll give you Dune, just barely.”

“You’re a schmuck!” The Drunkard stood up, finished the rest of his beer in one pull, and stalked off to the bar, shouting, “Whiskey!”

“Congratulations,” I said, “you’ve broken him.”

“He was near breaking anyway. I cannot believe that the man is so staunchly in the camp of genre fiction.”

“Tolstoy’s pretty fuckin terrible, man. And really, the real world’s depressing enough if you read the news. Why would you want to read about it in your spare time with a book in front of you?”

“For information about the world around us! The human perspective!”

I dismissed this with a wave of my hand. “I know that argument, and it’s bullshit.”

The Drunkard arrived at the table with a couple of . “What’s he talking about?”

“Realism as a way to show the human interest piece of any modern event. I was about to point out that that’s what good journalism is supposed to do.”

“Eeeeeeh,” said The Drunkard. “Yes and no. It sells, but, you know, facts are important.”

“At any rate,” I said, “you can’t expect that argument to hold up when most of the news pieces are human interest bits that relate to a larger story, Writer. Look at an extended article in the New York Times magazine, for example. Most of those things are about how individuals deal with things like housing bubbles bursting, recessions, student loans, and any number of other crises that pop up from time to time. You can’t make the claim that it lies solely with literary fiction to deal with these problems.”

“No,” he said, “but the most intelligent amongst us go to literary fiction for insights one would not otherwise encounter in the base pages of the broadside.”

I sighed and The Drunkard gritted his teeth.

The redhead (Sarah, as I’d later finally remember) passed by from the kitchen. “Ma’am,” I said.

“Yeah?”

“Could please slap him?”

“Sure.”

She reached out and slapped The Writer in the face before walking back to the bar.

The Writer looked shocked—but that might have just been because he was being abused by a woman who wasn’t Greek.

“I think that about sums up the mood of most of the people here,” I said. “Now,” I said, “I’ve got a question that’ll keep us away from talking more about your writing ideas—and thus keep us from having someone slap you again: You schtupping Rose?”

“I say!” said The Writer. If he’d had possessed a monocle, it would have popped off of his face in consternation. “Scandalous!” Right the fuck off. With a cartoonish pop.

“Who’s Rose?” asked The Drunkard.

“His tutor,” I said.

“Hot?”

“Eh,” I said. “In the cold heated, ice-queen way that the English manage. Got a kind of dom feel about her.”

“Makes sense,” said The Drunkard. He pointed a finger at The Writer. “You’ve got a bit of the submissive about you. Kind of like one of the editors at the paper back at CRU who went off to New York for a few days. Never came back. Turned out he was accidentally killed in an S&M dungeon.” He suddenly grew serious. “Please, Writer, promise me you’ll be safe.”

“Fuck you,” The Writer said.

“I’m just looking out for you. Why, if you weren’t around to provide the hilarity of being the best straight man ever, I don’t know if I could bear it.” The Drunkard’s phone buzzed and his ringtone, Kinky Friedman’s “They Ain’t Makin Jews Like Jesus Anymore,” went off.

A couple of the other pubgoers looked over with a look that, if properly analyzed, would have betrayed a confusion of how to feel. The ringtone was only the—relatively—sedate chorus, and did not include the verse made up entirely of racial slurs, but it was fairly obvious that Sarah at the bar, the pensioner—who was mumbling something that just sounded like “what?” over and over again—and the artsy couple a few tables over did not know how to take something that made light of ethnicity. This was England, where they took guilt to levels of which a good Jewish mother could only dream. Talking about ethnicity was reserved for stand-up comedy and the BNP, and to have someone broadcast their ribald song at such volumes (meaning: audible), well, inconceivable.

The Drunkard answered it, nodded, and said, “Sure.” He hung up.

“Who was that?” I asked. The Writer was fuming and glaring out the door, trying to avoid looking at The Drunkard—something that was hard on his part, since The Drunkard was sitting directly opposite him.

“The Traveler.”

“He back in town?”

“Yep. Wants to make jambalaya for Christmas tomorrow; he got a hold of a few bottles of kosher wine, and said he’s going to make it the most Jewish Christmas ever.”

“By serving a dish including both shellfish and pork?”

The Drunkard shrugged. “I’m not complaining, man. I’ll eat the shit out of some jambalaya.”

“Taken literally, that would be disgusting. You gonna go Writer?”

The Writer grunted.

“D’aw,” said The Drunkard. “Did I get to you? Burn the ego of The Writer, did I?” He reached over and slapped The Writer lightly on the cheek. “Drink your beer, little Writer, and one day you’ll learn not to take yourself so seriously.”

And with that, The Writer stood up and left the pub.

“Well,” said The Drunkard, “I don’t think he’ll be going to Empire with us.”

I nodded.

---

[1] There aren’t many things I despise about England. Overall, I look back at my year living there as a student/unemployed person and have nothing but warm, fuzzy feelings everywhere around me. However, there were some things that really cheesed me off about the place. The predilection for overdrinking (rationalized by a few friends as “well they said we were going to binge drink anyway”) among the youth is one of them, right up there with fucking Essex. But the one that really takes the cake is the pantomime.

A pantomime, see, is a deliberately awful play. Seeing a deliberately bad movie is one thing, because you’re virtually encouraged to heckle the movie as you sit in your living room. But you can’t do that during a pantomime because it’s a time-honored (or honoured) tradition. It’s bollocks. Sitting through one, in my opinion, is worse than a wisdom tooth extraction without pain killers. If you ever hear a Brit talk about how superior British humor is to American, bring up a pantomime and see their faces melt like a villain in Indiana Jones.