Tag / prose

by Alexander Sorondo

Summary of 2015

Probably the most unsettling part of this informal retrospective of 2015, as you jot it on a notepad at Starbucks, is that you find yourself writing these exhaustively detailed notes about a departmental merge that took place at work in the middle of the year — this ostensibly temporary job that you’ve now inhabited for two years. It isn’t even interesting. Why are you writing so much about it?

So OK, here’s one last realization for 2015: it’s time to quit your job.

#

You go on a date with somebody you met on Tinder. Drink three whiskeys while she eats a salad (extra croutons) and recounts for you a controversy that unfolded on The Bachelor and why, on moral grounds, she refuses to watch it as even just a guilty pleasure anymore.

Later that week you delete Tinder.

#

On New Year’s Eve you’re at a bar as one of only seven customers. Everybody gets free champagne at midnight. You climb on the bar and then fall off, shattering a flute, and the sad-looking man three stools down smiles when you hit the floor and says, “Please do that again.”

#

As the year starts out you’re finishing up a book you’ve been working on for several years and you’re involved, in a complicated way, with a spindly brunette who quotes Macbeth when she’s drunk and fans her face with big saucerlike hands whenever she gets excited. The two of you drink a lot together, and fight, but it’s a good time.

Then you finish your book, and the girl moves to another city, and your drinking slows down and you quit the worse of your two jobs and go back to the gym. Life seems to reset.

#

After revising the book twice you start sending it out to agents; excerpting little sections that might pass for short stories and sending those bits out to magazines.

Twenty agents say no.

One says maybe. She asks for more pages, so you send her some more pages, and then two weeks later she says no.

You hold out hope for the excerpts, at least. The stories. But the magazines say no, too. They say, like the agents before them, to not take this rejection personally. “Please don’t,” etc. Because, they say, there’re a million factors and the majority of stories they turn away are rejected for reasons having nothing to do with the quality of the writing. So really. Don’t feel bad.

One of these rejections begins, “Dear Aaron.”

#

You do get discouraged, though. How could you not?

One day over lunch your dad prompts you to explain why you’re so discouraged. And so you go on. Talk about the poor quality of the prose and the overall shoddiness of this thing you’ve written and “the fiction market” this, “the fiction market” that, fears about something you read online and so on, so on.

He listens. Tells you to lighten up. Points at your drink: “And you shouldn’t get into the habit of drinking a beer with lunch.”

#

For a couple weeks you can hear your own heartbeat whenever you get too idle. You start feeling it in your ears — which are constantly hot. After going to the Miami International Book Fair on its opening morning, and actually seeing the reverberation of your heartbeat in the flesh of your stomach, you freak out. Go to Urgent Care. Then Urgent Care sends you to the hospital. Electrodes are glued to you, and you panic. Blood is drawn, and you faint. An x-ray is taken and various tests are run and when finally you see a doctor she scans the results and shrugs and says you should probably just calm down.

An hour later, over Thai food, your dad nods. “Really, though,” he says, “you gotta lighten up.”

#

You become active on Twitter. In the wake of your book’s completion, rich with rejection, you start a new project on (and find solace in) YouTube. After a month of work on this project you feel good, busy, but find that even just reading a few lines of your book can sour your mood for a whole day.

Start writing other things. One of those things gets published, and you dedicate it to the spindly Shakespearean with the wide hands.  You start work on a new book.

#

At an Italian restaurant in the Gables you’re sharing a booth with a girl who doesn’t live here and she sighs a lot, looks around, and when finally she gets her menu she flips it open and tells you in a near-whisper, without looking up, “Since I know you’re not gonna kiss me I’m gonna go ahead and get something with garlic.”

#

Next year there’s a new Cormac McCarthy book coming out, which is exciting, and you should have a new job and should be well into the next book and you suspect, in optimistic moments, that you’ll’ve gotten a better angle on the agent thing. On publishing. Either way: you should probably lighten up.

Here’s to the best.

Cheers.

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by Alexander Sorondo

Summary of August, 2015

Last call and the bar tender’s telling you about this older married couple who keep coming by on weeknights and chatting her up, inviting her out, boasting of their money and of the luxuries they’ll bestow, of their yacht and two sports cars and lavish meals each night.

Manager pulls her away for a moment. Some problem with the register. While she’s over there trying to fix it the manager comes back to where you’re sitting and, after a quick and heavy pour, hands you an egregious amount of whisky and with arms folded he leans back against the liquor display. Tells you with a smirk and a hard stare to “Go on, drink it all, one gulp. Come on. Something to put on your blog.”

A girl who’s stood you up three times before gets in touch to say she’s back from out of town. She asks if you’d like to go for a drink on Saturday and, since you’ve never passed a stove you didn’t touch, plans are made.

To your surprise and delight, she shows up. The two of you meet at a bookstore and then cross the street for a drink, small talk along the way, and meanwhile, like a match dropped into oil, your anxiety ignites to something apocalyptic and vast so that, once seated, you pull down two beers in quick succession to quell it.

Conversation at that point is going pretty well, fluent as it was when the two of you first went out six months earlier. So it appears that the booze has worked, which is great, except that it’s kind of a double-edged success in that, having been soothed by the second beer, you feel emboldened to have a third. Elixir of good conversation. Have a fourth! What could go wrong?

It isn’t until you stand up for the check and the room starts doing Inception things that you realize how drunk you are. Sit back down and, keeper of necessary information, tell this to your date. “I’m a lot drunker than I thought I was.”

“Yeah,” she says, “you had seven.” Her tone is kinda dry and maybe it isn’t so judgmental as you’re thinking but you go ahead and project things on it.

Two days later you and the date exchange pleasantries through text, pledge a mutual interest to get together again later in the week, but old habits resume, the girl goes dark, and you go on to sit thinking and talking and cringing about your fuckup at various bars over the next few days, friends lending their ears. Sleep is sparse and guilt abundant and meanwhile the Earth persists undaunted in its orbit and your dog each night is here with this look to his eyes like, “Hey. Come on.”

Your brother stops over between appointments. Sits at the kitchen counter playing with shrinkwrap and doesn’t make eye contact when he says, “Hey so have you ever tried using online dating?”

This is his way of saying that he knows you’re using online dating.

You have finished the second draft of your book and now get to be that 20-something with a part time job and an unpublished book. Laying up at night and contemplating your credit score in the same bed where you once sat contemplating your first pube.

Your dog in the middle of the night starts roaming the bed. Rising and stepping and then laying and groaning. Repeating the cycle. It’s 2 a.m.

You take him outside, thinking he’s gotta pee. There on the grass with his tail pulled tight between his legs under so much moonlight, the sky strangely purple, you see his hindquarters pitch to the right and then the rest of him goes over. He’s never collapsed before.

Get down in the grass and try bribing him to his feet with promises of every sort of enticement he knows a word for. He blinks, squinting.

Pull on your jeans and shoes and head toward the all-night animal hospital a few blocks away. All through the drive you’re talking to your dog in a perky voice as if to sooth him in his final moments but really probably just so you can feel like you’re doing something, anything, that you’re not quite so helpless while this dog you’ve had for half your life dies in your lap.

Peel into the parking lot at the strip mall where the animal hospital is, throw open the car door, unsnap your seatbelt — and this fucking dog jumps out of the car like it’s his birthday. Frolics among the pavement and grass. Latenight piss fiend, raising a leg to everything.

Take him to the vet and the vet says he’s fine. Probably arthritic. It’s 2:30 in the morning.

So you head back home and take this fucking asshole dog back to bed with you and there in the dark you squeeze him to your chest until dawn and are grateful that certain things can at least be postponed if not avoided.

Your mom, not making eye contact, digs around for something in the top shelves of her closet and calls back to you, “Hey so have you ever tried using online dating?”

This is her way of saying everyone in the family knows you’re using online dating.

Two envelopes in the mailbox amid the catalogs and flyers. Both addressed to you.

Open the first. A collection agency wants $63 for a parking ticket you got almost six months ago and have neglected to pay.

You don’t have $63. Fold the bill, put it in your back pocket.

Open the second letter: A different collection agency wants $63 for a parking ticket dated from the same week as the first one.

Take the dog back inside and keep typing.

“Oh my God.”

“What?”

“You have those fucking glow-in-the-dark stars on your ceiling.”

Something you’ve been telling just about everybody this month is of a guy on reddit who, after several years in prison, still can’t shake the habit, when he sits on a toilet, of taking one leg completely out of his pants. Why? If somebody attacks you in the bathroom, and you’ve got your pants accordioned down at your ankles, you’re bound. Can’t run.

That even in prison you’ve got people worried about their constraints.