Interlude: The Next Big Thing

You might have noticed that this isn’t a chapter.  Sorry!  Chapter 7 will be coming very soon.  But first I must break for this brief programming note: I am so honored to have been tagged by the brilliant Sophie Hardach as THE NEXT BIG THING!!! Sophie is the author of The Registrar’s Manual for Detecting Forced Marriages, which is about the hippest book about Kurdish refugees you will ever read.  It is really sad, funny, surprising, and cleverly structured. In fact, don’t even bother reading my answers to the questions below; just go buy her book right now.  Then go read it.

Finished?  It was awesome, right?

Okay, welcome back.  Now comes the part where we NEXT BIG THING types answer the following questions:

What is the working title for your book?

The Divine Sharpness in the Heart of God. I swear, it came to me in a dream.  Weirdest thing ever.

Where did the idea come from for your book?

The book is inspired by the four years I spent as an undergraduate English major and the six years I spent as an English Ph.D. student.  I loved studying English, but I often noticed discrepancies between the things English scholars said they believed and what they seemed to believe in practice.  That’s what this book is about, sort of.   That and the fear of death.   

What genre does your book fall under?

The last book I wrote didn’t have a clear enough genre, for marketing purposes: it was somewhere between literary fiction and “chick lit.” That’s why I’ve made sure my new novel falls squarely into the category of “metafictional academic satire porn.”  This time there will be no ambiguity!  

What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?

Self-serving literary scholar gets called out by savant undergrad.

Or for a multi-sentence version: Gavin Cheng-Johnson, soon-to-be English Ph.D., is searching for a job as an English professor while he finishes his dissertation on the experimental playwright Liam Stump.  He wants to devote minimal effort to teaching his undergraduate composition course, but his student Rona Gomez wants much more than that.  She hangs on every esoteric idea carelessly tossed around Gavin’s classroom.  Hoping to become Gavin’s protégée, she pursues a relationship that will lead both of them to places they never expected or wanted to go.

Which actors would you choose to play your characters in a movie rendition?

Oh, no, I don’t know any actors!  I hate movies and TV.  But I think Margaret Cho would be a good Gavin Cheng-Johnson.  And then maybe Aubrey Plaza could be Rona Gomez.  I’ve never seen her act or speak, but I just read an interview with her in Bust Magazine and she seemed pretty cool and also kind of crazy.  Jeremy Irons could play Liam Stump.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Don’t know.  Wish I did!

How long did it take you to write the first draft of your manuscript?

I’ve only been writing it for two months, but I am keeping a good pace.  I hope to be done with a draft by around June, though it’s hard to gauge these things sometimes.  The first draft of my last novel took three years, but it was about 500 pages long. I want this one to be much shorter.

What other books would you compare this story to within your genre?

Well, of course “compare” is a heavy and kind of scary word.  I was heavily influenced by the novels White Noise and End Zone by Don Delillo.  End Zone is the most brilliant novel, amazing, all about highly philosophical football players at a remote college in Texas during the cold war.  I was also inspired by Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, which is a novel about a poet and his editor, but it’s written as a preface and annotations to a lengthy poem.  Through the preface, poem, and annotations, we learn about the relationship between the editor and poet. 

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

All my friends with Ph.D.s who have moved to the ends of the earth to pursue their avocation.  I’m talking Ohio, South Carolina, upstate New York.  Who knows if anyone will ever see them again. I pour this novel out for you, my homies. 

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

It has a lot of texts-within-the-text.  These are mostly 1) excerpts from one of Liam Stump’s plays, 2) quotes from critical theorist Julia Kristeva, and 3) scenes from pornographic movies. 

Oh, and I'm writing it serially.  So if you'd like to read it, you can start here.

Phew, that was a lot of thinking about this novel!  I’m exhausted.  Luckily, now for the most fun part: tagging my victims…

I mean, introducing THE NEXT BIG THINGS: 

Michelle Gonzales, besides being my professional and literary life-partner, is the author of the memoir Pretty Bold for a Mexican Girl: Growing up Chicana in a Hick Town, a touching and brutally honest tribute to the small town she left behind. Her love of dystopian fiction borders on psychotic, and she's currently writing her own uniquely Californian/Chicana contribution to this genre. 

Anita Felicelli blew my mind by studying art, literature, and rhetoric at U.C. Berkeley before obtaining a law degree and becoming a published poet and novelist. I just finished her poetic and moving novel, Sparks off You, and can't wait to read her next one. 

Diane Rinella is such a brilliant baker, cake decorator, insane antique house restorer and Rocky Horror cast member that it only stands to reason that she is a brilliantly twisted writer as well.  She is currently working on a series of romance novels about a love so transgressive that it offends about half the people she summarizes the plot to.  Nice work! (I'm totally jealous.)

Chapter 6

Gavin was sitting on Sinder’s futon, watching a lady dressed like a nun use a giant wooden paddle to spank a lady dressed as a schoolgirl.

“I fucking love knee socks,” Sinder said.

He adjusted the laptop on his desk so that it faced a little more towards him, a little less towards Gavin.  It was perched on top of a giant book, six inches thick.  Gavin couldn’t see the title.

 “This makes…” Sinder slid his finger over the screen on his phone.  They documented their porn collection on a spreadsheet, kept online for easy access, though Gavin had never gotten it to work on his own phone.  “A hundred and sixty seven for BDSM—Light. Twenty-six for Christian Imagery. And, let’s see…three fifty two for everybody’s favorite category…” Wait for it, wait for it, oh the suspense. “Lesbian.”
 

Actually, it was Gavin’s least favorite category.  Okay, he hated it.  He would rather sit through a three-hour MLA panel on the Fifteenth Century printing press than watch two woman bring each other to orgasm. What could make a man feel more hopeless, more unnecessary?  There was nothing lonelier in the world. And yet look at Sinder—the guy couldn’t get enough of it.  He was grinning, his mouth a little open, a factory worker enthralled by the assembly-line robot who would make him redundant.

“That’s a lot of lesbians.” Gavin tried not to sound glum.  He wanted to keep Sinder’s spirits up before his exams, and anyway, it wasn’t exactly manly to admit that watching two women have sex kind of made you want to drink Drano.

“I know!  Seven hundred and four!” Sinder was bouncing lightly in his desk chair, his fingers gripping  hard on the armrests.  Gavin remembered reading somewhere that skinny people fidgeted more.  Gavin was on the chubby side, it was true—his last girlfriend had called him Buddha-esque a few weeks before they broke up—but at least he could freaking sit still. 

“Probably a few more,” he said. “I think some of them were threesomes.”

The nun took her robe off, and surprise, she had been hiding a giant pair of fake boobs under there the whole time. She pushed the schoolgirl onto the desk, spread her knees roughly apart, and said, “Young lady, you’ve been very, very bad.”

When she opened the desk drawer and pulled out the Jesus dildo, Gavin started to pick at a scab on his hand.  He had cut himself washing dishes a few days ago, and it was starting to itch. Oh, Sister Margaret, stop, said the schoolgirl, but you could tell she didn’t mean it.  It’s sooo big.  He caught his fingernail under the rough edge of the scab and tugged upward.  Slowly, carefully.  Oh Sister! Oh yes! No sudden movements.  Yes! Yes!  He dragged his fingernail hard towards the attached end of the scab.  It loosened and then skidded on a slick patch of fresh blood.  Fuck me, Sister, yes, fuck me!  He finger-painted crimson circles around his palm.

“What are you looking at?” Sinder paused the video. “You’re missing the best part.”

Gavin held up his bloody hand. “I cut myself.”

Sinder threw a box of band-aids at him.  It smacked against his palm and dropped onto the bed.

“Ouch.”

“You’ll thank me in a minute.”  Sinder angled the laptop screen back towards Gavin and pressed play.

There it was, close-up on the schoolgirl, her lips stretched around the base of her Lord on the cross, eyes peering longingly upwards through clumps of darkened eyelash, saliva dripping onto the little curls of the nun’s pubes—this must be have been made in Europe or something—that were poking past the harness straps.  Sinder was watching him watch, skinny brown hands clasped under his chin, excited for his reaction. 

Gavin widened his eyes like he was really watching, watching hard.  Then he made up his own movie in his head.  In it, a future version of himself was giving the keynote speech at the MLA convention. 

Your understanding of Stump’s less-studied works is so inspiring, the cute grad-student volunteer purred as she escorted him from the stage.  Do you want to go swimming?

I didn’t bring a bathing suit, Gavin said.

Me, neither.  She winked and slipped a pool key into his hand.  Meet me at eleven.

“Fine,” Sinder said, stopping the video.  “Doesn’t look like you’re into it.”  Gavin had already forgotten to pretend he was watching.  He was absentmindedly trying to stick a band-aid to his blood-smeared hand. 

“I’m into it.  Totally into it.” He looked up at his roommate. What was that face you were supposed to make to show you were heartily enjoying lesbian porn? 

“Don’t patronize me.”  Sinder clicked the laptop shut.  Now Gavin could see the title of the book below it: The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy.  Guess that explained why it was so thick; a philosopher couldn’t tell you what a word like “epistemology” meant without a seventy-page treatise.

“You can’t focus.  It’s that Ashley in your class, right?”

Gavin had forgotten that Sinder knew about her.  He flopped backwards, banging his head against the dense futon mattress. Sinder liked his bed uncomfortable; Keeps me from oversleeping, he always said.

“She’s ruining porn for you.  I’ve heard that’s what happens when you have a real woman.” Sinder wheeled his chair closer to the futon, so he could lean over Gavin like a psychiatrist.  “Did you ask her out yet?”

 “No way, brah.” He didn’t actually talk like a frat boy except to Sinder, who could recognize the irony.  “Don’t you know anything about women?”

“No. Thanks for the reminder.”   

 “Listen.” Gavin rose to sitting.  Just one minute lying on the rock-hard futon was already making his back hurt.  “You can’t just go asking your student out during the second week of the semester.  You’ve gotta finesse it.  She needs to feel comfortable with you, to learn how much she really respects and admires you, before you make any moves.”

Something sticky touched Gavin’s hand—not that kind of sticky, more like jam or honey, but still, eww— and he jumped up from the bed.  It had to be a sign, clear as if it had been sent from on high by the chair of Sinder’s exam committee, that Gavin had been in Sinder’s room long enough.  

Wait, no—the stickiness was just Gavin’s blood.  He could see the red smudge he had left on the sky-blue comforter.  Anyway, it was still time to go.

“I get it,” Sinder said. “Choose your moment to attack.” The giant dictionary was on his lap now. He was probably trying to memorizing the entire thing.  Gavin had heard that philosophy exams were crazy hard, worse than English exams, though not quite as bad as history, which was the worst.  

“Exactly.”  Gavin stood in the doorway, one foot in Sinder’s room, one in the hall. He didn't bother mentioning the other reason that he couldn't ask Kayla out just yet.  Braden was a step ahead of him, it was true, in the flirting department.  But that was all the more reason for Gavin to hang back, play it cool, position himself as the alternative, the man to Braden's boy.  When the time came for Gavin to flirt, he would flirt circles around Braden.

“See, I never do that," Sinder said. "I usually tell them they’re hot the first time I meet them, or, like, ask to touch their hair or something.”

 Gavin shook his head. “Gives them too much power. You have to show them you’re not interested.”  He recognized the cockiness in his own voice as something he had heard in a movie or a commercial or something.  It kind of freaked him out not to sound like himself.  He wondered if Sinder could tell.

“How’d you get so smart?” Sinder asked.

“Only time confers wisdom, my son.”  Gavin frowned and stroked his imaginary beard.  His voice now was a kung-fu movie, but at least it was on purpose. “When you have reached the venerable age of twenty-nine, then you, too, will have mastered the enigmatic ways of those creatures known as women.” 

"Four years."  Sinder sighed.  "It will difficult to wait, master, but I will be patient." 

<Chapter 5
Chapter 7>

Chapter 5

Act I, Scene II

Lights come up on Thomas McGrew III and IV, in their same positions on the slide.  Thomas McGrew III is winding his wristwatch.  Thomas McGrew IV is staring upwards toward stage right.  He stands, assumes a sprinter’s pose, and runs with giant leaping strides up the slide.  For a moment, he is suspended in a higher position.  Then he loses footing and slips back down to where he started.

TMGIII (still winding his watch): You won’t get anywhere like that.

Ignoring him, Thomas McGrew IV tries once again to run up the slide. This time he does not get quite as high before he slides back down again.  Defeated, he sits, panting, for one minute, until he is ready to speak.

TMGIV (out of breath): You’ve tried it?

TMGIII: I’ve tried everything.  Nothing helps.

A minute of silence. Thomas McGrew III continues to wind his watch.

TMGIV: So you’ve given up?

TMGIII: I’ve become resigned.

TMGIV: Isn’t that the same thing?

TMGIII: Maybe.  But it’s not so bad once you accept it.

A minute of silence. Thomas McGrew IV watches Thomas McGrew III wind the watch.  Then he looks past Thomas McGrew III, down the slide towards stage left.

TMGIV: What’s down there anyway?

TMGIII (looking downwards towards stage left): Down there?

TMGIV (closes his eyes, scared to look any longer): Yes.  There.

TMGIII:  I wondered when you were going to ask.

A minute of silence. Thomas McGrew IV’s eyes remain closed.

TMGIV: What is it?

TMGIII: Down there.  (looks downwards toward stage left again).  Down there is the end.

A minute of silence. Thomas McGrew IV sits with his eyes closed.  Thomas McGrew III watches him.

TMGIII: Son?

TMGIV: That is much worse than what I imagined.

* * *

“So.  How did it go?”

Gavin was sitting on a tasteful leather sofa in the ginormous office of his dissertation advisor, Jeremy Frick, who sat across from him on an upholstered armchair.  They were drinking fizzy water out of brandy snifters.  Frick looked thin and tired, which is how he always looked: tired and profound in a way that made women try to have sex with him.

“Good, I think,” said Gavin.  “Okay.”

Over the winter break, he had flown to Boston for the annual Modern Language Association convention.  There, he had interviewed for two jobs: one in Irish Studies at Santa Clarita College outside of Los Angeles, the other in Nineteenth and Twentieth Century Literature at West Kansas Agricultural University.   In accordance with MLA tradition, interviews were held in hotel rooms: three faculty members in rumpled business attire perched on the edge of a queen-sized bed, while Gavin, in his fresh new suit (purchased on sale from House of Coats) occupied the lone chair.

“How was Santa Clarita?  That’s the one you’re hoping for, right?”

Hope was a funny word for it.  Gavin had always hated Los Angeles, but when you compared it to Kansas—well, at least LA was an actual place. This year’s job listings looked like they had been chosen using pushpins and a blindfold. These suck, Frick had said when Gavin showed him back in August.

“It went pretty well,” Gavin said. “They seemed interested in my work on Stump.”

                                                                                              

“Sure they’re interested. It’s Ivy League argumentation.”  Frick swished the water around his glass, sniffed it, and took a thoughtful sip.  “If the job market wasn’t so fucked, they’d never be seeing someone like you.”

There was a framed photo on the wall, from the year Frick gave the keynote speech at MLA.  He stood smiling at the podium—a real smile, not his normal wry smirk—shaking hands with Grover Maloney, who had introduced him.  The photo usually made Gavin jealous and kind of angry.  But today he felt something different: a thrill of excitement that shot from his chest down to his groin like a new crush.  Ivy League argumentation, he said to himself.  For a moment, he felt almost nauseous with hope.

Gavin loved when Frick talked like that, like Gavin was the hottest shit to ever hit mid-century Irish Modernism.  That’s how his comments sounded in the margins of Gavin’s dissertation drafts: Yes. Yes. More like this. You’re killing it.  Gavin’s two other advisors were more prosaic: Confusing. Clarify your use of “abject” here.  EXPLAIN!  These professors, perhaps not coincidentally, were also much less fun than Frick at a dinner party.

“The Kansas interview went okay, too.”

“You don’t want to move to Kansas,” Frick said, which was true, but none of this was about what Gavin wanted, exactly.  It was about strategy and sacrifice.  If Kansas was where he could get a job, well, he would just have to fucking man up and move to fucking Kansas.  It was just a place, and there was no point being scared of a place.

“Santa Clarita is a decent starter job,” Frick said.  “Three years there, get your book published, move up.”

Frick’s phone was vibrating on the coffee table.  He picked it up, squinted at it, tapped the screen with an agitated finger.  Then he reached into his pocket, pulled out one of those long pill sorters with the hours of the day marked on it, and tossed two small and one medium pills into his mouth.  

“And your paper?” he slurred, his mouth full, before he took a gulp of his fizzy water.

That was another MLA tradition: everyone applying for a job had to present a paper.  If you presented, your school would pay for your trip; otherwise you had to cover it yourself.  This led to an unfortunate one-to-one ratio of people giving papers and people listening to papers.  Gavin had read his paper, “Abjecting Silence: Disruptive Pauses in Liam Stump’s Time Slide,” to an extremely drowsy audience of three people.  There were supposed to be four presenters on his panel, which would have been embarrassing, but luckily two of them hadn’t shown up.

“It was okay.  Small turnout though.”

“Were any of them familiar with Time Slide?”

“I don’t think so.  All of their questions were for the other guy.  His paper was about The Divine Sharpness.”

“MLA is a load of crap,” Frick said.  “A means to an end.  Put it out of your mind and get ready for flybacks.”

That was the next step.  If the interviewers liked you, they invited you to visit their campus, where you would give a talk and have a second round of interviews.  He wasn’t looking forward to Kansas, but LA would be okay. Maybe his parents would come down from Northern California for a day.  He hadn’t seen them in almost a year.   

“How soon do you think I’ll be hearing?” 

“In a few weeks,” said Frick. “Definitely before the end of February.  The most important thing now is to—”

The door flew open and a woman in tight black jeans and red heels dropped a full armload of library books onto the floor.  “There!” she said, kicking them into the office so she could close the door.  Then she saw Gavin.

“Excuse me!” she said, grinning like he was someone exciting.  She left the books—there were at least ten of them—in a messy pile on the floor and sat down  next to him on the couch. “I didn’t know you were in here.”

“How’s it going, Kat?” he asked, but he didn’t smile or anything.  Hopefully she would take the hint and leave.  She was a former classmate of his—Katherine Curtis, Renaissance drama—but she had dropped out a few years ago, right after she started sleeping with Frick.   At the time, she had said she was leaving to pursue her dreams of becoming a stage actress in New York, but surprise, that didn’t happen. Frick never talked about her, but based on rumors around the English department, Gavin was about ninety percent sure they lived together.

“Is this like a do-not-interrupt kind of meeting?” She raised the painted arches of her eyebrows.  She was painted all over: pale powdered skin, shiny mahogany hair, deep burgundy lips and fingernails.

  

“What would you do if I said yes?” Frick asked.

“Listen at the door.”

“It’s nothing too interesting,” Gavin said.  “Just my career.”

She pointed at the pile of books. “That’s everything on the list, except the Rhudry and the Williamson,” she said to Frick.  “They were both out but I put holds on them.”

“Oh, no, the Williamson?” Frick walked over to the pile and scowled at it.  “That’s the one I need first.  It’s okay, it’s okay.”  He bent at the waist and picked the books up two-at-a-time, stacking them neatly next to other neat stacks of things on his desk.

“Sorry, babe.  I’m sure they’ll get it back for you soon.”  Emphasis on the babe. She shot Gavin a look that said, Can you believe the nerve of this guy? And also, He might be directing your dissertation, but I’m the one he fucks.  She stuck her arm elbow-deep into her embroidered purse and pulled out a prescription bottle, which she placed on the coffee table between Frick’s phone and the Winter/Spring issue of New Irish Modernism Studies.

“Adderall,” she said to Gavin.  “Need any? It’d help your writing.”

He shook his head.  He was just doing some final revisions, and anyway he didn’t need pharmaceutical speed to get his work done.  He was very organized and wrote on a strict schedule, from nine to two every weekday morning.  

“Where’d you get that?”

“Well, it’s complicated,” Kat said. “You have to walk up to an undergraduate and ask them.  Have you ever taken it?  It makes Jeremy concentrate for hours.  He’s working on his new book.”

Frick was still at his desk, frowning into one of the library books.  “Kat,” he said, without looking up.  “Gavin doesn’t need to know my life story.”

In fact, Gavin did know Frick’s life story.  Everyone in the department knew it, even if Frick never talked about it.  Ten years ago, fresh out of Yale, he had written the book on Funeral of Giants, Romulus Keaner’s famously unreadable experimental novel.  And while that book had marked Frick as superstar genius of the year, it had also almost killed him.  The first heart attack was seven years ago, when Frick was only thirty-three. 

He hadn’t written a book since, so he was stuck at New Buffalo University.  It was a decent English department, in the top fifty and known for its Irish studies, but for a former rock star like Frick, it was like dropping off the edge of the world. At MLA, every time Gavin told someone his dissertation chair was Jeremy Frick, the response was identical: Oh, he’s still around?  Funeral of Giants, right? What ever happened to him?  

“No one likes being on the job market,” Frick said, coming back to sit on his armchair.  Gavin studied his face for new signs of stress, the book, the adderall.  It was hard to tell; Frick always looked so exhausted, his eyes sad and ringed with sickly violet.  “The process sucks, but you learn to let it wash off you and stay focused on your writing.”

He poured another round of bubbly water, adding a snifter for Kat, and raised his glass.

“What’s that line from The Divine Sharpness? ‘Blood is messy, but it’s our life.’ Is that right?”

“Yeah, that’s it.” Gavin clinked his glass against Frick’s, and then, grudgingly, against Kat’s. “It’s our life.” 

<Chapter 4
Chapter 6>