A Writer's License - Part I

Dad was a sport. An engineer who had no patience for artistic pursuits. That was Mom. Dead now a dozen years, her Smith-Corona battened down in the dusty sea of carpet under her desk. Back in their bedroom down the hall, far away from mine.

He drove me downtown and stopped in front of the building. “Need any money?” He leaned forward on the steering wheel, arms poised to take another stroke, ready to row his two-plus-two-equals-four boat straight and true and right out of this foreign, loose-with-the-facts neighborhood, its commas pole-dancing a dozen or so along the granite curbs, trailing a little too much leg, Bourgeois caps on road signs paraded lower case behind them like peasants ignorant of the boiling fervor for a blogged-out revolution, choosing not to raise Helvetica in these Times of New Romans, the perfect spelling would make that dark queen, Mr. Felder, my sissy sixth grade English teacher, squeal happy brandishing his red-pen claw for another brief moment. And they were… oh, so brief, like recess on the first warm spring day.

“Nah, I have fifty bucks.”

“Here, take this.” He handed me an envelope, limp over his finger mimicking a skinny, dead fish. “It’s not much, but it’ll tide you over.”

“Thanks.” I took it quickly but didn’t want to look at him, afraid he’d see that I, too, knew this might be a long ordeal. “I’ll probably be out by lunch, first time and all.” I tried to be chipper. I lied. Isn’t good writing telling good lies? I might never be out.

“Go on. You’ll be late.” His eyes drifted across the street again and up at the tired, three-story building, a few bricks from being condemned as unfit for fairness. “Look. If you don't pass..."

It’d be a tough sentence to finish. I did all right in math, thanks to his hours of after-dinner tutoring, devouring enough quadratic equations to lose an appetite anyone would have for my mother’s delightfully dialectic desserts topped with a good helping of humor and sprinkled with whimsy. Despite corralling my mind inside complex equations, my heart leapt the prickly fence lines of fouled up math to graze on scribbled green poetry in the wide-open margins of my calculus textbook. My math work was healthier at the time. That was before I learned from the typing teacher, Mrs. Synder, to finger-fuck a keyboard, its keys squirming under a constant orgy of creative thought, before I started marching those black fleas fearlessly across innocent skins of virginal cellulous, latched on to some wild-hair idea born of spit and sparkle, before I went days without a bath to better up a story and worsen affairs of the heart and flesh through unrepentant neglect and philandering with such lovely phrases all a flame in their leopard-print syllables and low-cut constructs, sipping languid vowels, seducing my mind’s heart with coos of consonants. Before I was up to the challenge and could come away with the illusive treasure of the finest woman in any room, Writing’s home phone number.

I had yet to call up the courage to collect a license. And that was up to the verbal voyeurs up in that building, far away from the quick and kind smiles of friends and family, but now just across the street hidden from me like some lecherous ghouls of grammar and good story lurking in the shadows of the greats that came before.

“I’ll put on supper.” Dad smiled faintly and glanced again at the building.

“See ya soon.” I hesitated. He was still eyeing the dirty windows and broken pediment. Just below its pathetic concrete crown, a few chiseled letters protruded from a grimy limestone plaque: Bureau of Artistic Pursuits – Writers Licensing Division.

I grabbed my stack of dog-eared manuscripts, snatched my shoebox from the floorboard and shoved open the car door. The west end of the block already darkened with rain, everything cocooned in a shimmering skin of dreary, thick dampness, generous with gloom. Trees drooped, people slogged, spirits burdened, bubbles burst. Even mischief took its leave, sense of humor long gone.

To the east, perky publishers with pocketed rays of sunshine bosoming against the sleazy silk of sincerity freshened the cavern of brownstone hovels of hokey homogenized literature for the bovine masses as if God himself was the shoeshine of this sacrilegious creation. Shop signs advertised the hopeful: “Holister, McBrikles and Ivory: A manuscript today, a million $$$ tomorrow.” I felt even assholes were welcome, but only if they were great, heroic and wholesome. I wouldn’t qualify. Tom Clancy preached, Nora Roberts led the street-corner choir and hack writers, their cheap suit seams bursting with shat-out sequels, passed the hat soliciting for the short hours left of lives wasted in the hogwash of horrifically ordinary writing. I felt breakfast slithering up my throat. I had to look away.

On the street in front of me, a tall kid skateboarded by with a fist full of sputtering pens and a beat up paperback swaying three inches from his pimpled nose, a saddle-rest for his four-foot thick glasses permitting him to peer into a world gilded by the gifted. The mailman, too, had his curved hook in a rare book, dozens more jostling in his delivery bag, vying with one another for the next caress of human hand and critical eye. On the stoop behind me, kids sat on soured-soft basketballs, lunchboxes littered on the sides with Salinger and Whitman quotations, and like a song for my amused eye, an upside-down pink plastic trashcan with fairies afloat seemly falling a flitter for their final resting place in Hades (as it fucking should be). The kids played Scrabble with swords of scholarly self-righteousness, so sharp Webster sat up and took note for his next edition, arguing whether words could be nounified for points. [Of course, they can, but only if exemplified so elegantly in sweet sentences that make angels swoon and howling dogs go silent.] Preschoolers with sticks chased wind-blown, week-old newspapers down the sidewalk and once snagging a piece, and although they couldn’t yet read, raced one another their tracing fingers to find the longest word on the page. Mothers, each with an eye in her own book full of luscious language, their free eye on their children, called for them to come back, practicing their adverbs: “Edgar Allen, get your lil’ black behind back here most expeditiously.”

Across the street eased against the curb, a few limousines languished in their sullen fumes, their chauffeurs huddled together eyeing me hopefully and yet with faint distain. Agents inside, no doubt, ready to command a new willing slave, sipping the Champaign of another’s success: “Bow down and lick the drivel of dead hope off my Italian shoe made from Andalusian leather.” [That’s in Spain, you self-sanctified asshole.] Whores, I’ve heard, who know every trick in the sadist’s book but their pens can’t make magic and produce a rabbit of originality.

I overheard the old men on the bench next to me reminisce about their favorite sentences. One pulled out a lump of leather from his pocket and with trembling hand, shared a yellowed clip with the other. “Frank, you know I can’t see nothin’ no more. Let me just touch it.”

I was in the right place. Exactly the right place. All too familiar with my painful happiness, I smiled. Dad drove off, orphaning me at the curb.

“Psst, hey! Over here.” A voice in a tailored dark suit and long topcoat.

“What?” I hadn’t taken a step since I left the car, drinking in and now drunk from the sights around me.

“Wanna get a license real quick? Got plenty. Look like the real thing. You can say you’re published. Just pay me five G’s ‘n’ you’re good to go?”

“Really? It’s that easy?”

“Yep, don’t have to waste all the postage, no gnashing of teeth over the query letters, no lengthy editing process. Quick, easy, done. Whatda say?”

“I don’t have that much money.”

“Well, kid… how much do you have?”

“Fifty dollars… and bus fare.”

“Get out of here! Scram! Why are you wasting my time?”

“Sorry, you approached me. I’m interested in the real thing, actually. A writer’s license.”

“You’re no writer, kid. You gotta pass that damn test first. Good luck, sucker.” The man turned, his overcoat flaring from his legs and disappeared in an alley.

I headed across the street, sure of step but working hard to catch up with my feet.

On the stoop at the entrance, sat a young girl in a flowery cotton dress and wearing a woolen cap on a warm summer’s day. “I tell fortunes,” she said frankly. “But you don’t want one, do you? That’s only slightly different from not having one.” She shuffled the cards, stirring a breeze laced with gardenia.

“Not looking for one, either.”

“Not many like you come this way. Most want a fortune…and fame. They pay dearly. I’ll do the one you don’t want for free.”

“I’ll pass… sorry to disappoint.”

“Makes no difference to me. Fate ‘ll treat you just the same. Thought I’d just save you some trouble.” She tossed the cards into her purse and sat down. “Go see the old man just inside the door.” She thumbed over her shoulder and looked up. “No matter what’s ahead, don’t look back or you’re out. The SOB’s watch every pen stroke. They don’t care what you write. They care whether you mean it.”

“How old are you?”

“Thirteen… and six hundred. Funny, Will Shakespeare asked the same question straight outta the box, too. I still have a crush on him.”

“So do I, girlfriend.” I patted her on her thin arm and took a few steps up the stairs to the door.

“Wait.” She shot up and danced the stairs towards me. She motioned for me to stoop down to her face. She kissed my cheek, her soft lips bruising against my stubble.

“For luck,” she said, squeezing my elbow. “It’s the only friend you got now.” Her blue eyes bloomed violets and larkspur. “What’s your name?” she sung.

“Why?”

“Why not?” Her fickle best friend, Chance, called with a thin voice from somewhere down the street.

“Fair enough. Doubt you’ll hear it again. Jack, Jack McCoy.”

“I’ll remember you, Jack McCoy.” She winked and skipped off. “Chance, Chance. Let’s go down to the gas station ‘n’ get someone to spend a buck and buy a million dollar lotto ticket.”

Guess that’s the most a writer can hope for. To be remembered. A million bucks is left to some goon who goofed off a buck on the lotto and made me wait another few minutes behind him in line to drop a twenty on gas while he scratched off his bad luck exposing the prize most pray for and few deserve. Go figure. Dad, drop the quadratic equations. Logic left the building.

Inside, an elderly gentleman in a crumpled, dusty tuxedo hunched over stood the best he could in a foyer the size of a tight elevator. “Been here before?”

“No, sir.”

“Well, suppose you read up on the process ‘n’ all.”

“Yea, brought everything with me.” I lifted the stack of manuscripts slightly and nodded to the shoebox.

“Yes, sir. I see that. Won’t be needin’ that paper much. It’s what comes after that counts.”

“I’m proud of most of this.”

“Won’t be after this experience. Wanna leave those with me? Might be a bit easier for you.”

“I guess.” I handed him the foot-tall stack and felt instantly lighter.

“Up those stairs, son.” He pointed up to the wooden stairs, oak threads sculpted from wear, exposing rusty nail heads yet unforgiving of their grip. Tall white plaster walls, muddied by the damp, dirty hands of the hopeful narrowed the stairs.

He dropped my stack on top of a four-foot high column of others in the corner. I pointed to the brightly colored lavender sheaves buried halfway down the pile.

“Yeah, ‘bout the only thin’ pretty ‘bout her work. She’s still up there. If you wouldn’t mind, don’t mention I said anythin’.”

“The secret’s safe.”

“No, it ain’t. She put it out on the Internet. Probably sorry she did by now. She’s getting’ a good grillin’ up there is my guess.”

“Hear you met Will Shakespeare.”

“Yep, got his photo and autograph in a frame up there on the wall just past Chaucer’s.”

“And Hemmingway?”

“Yea, him, too. Gave me a Cuban cigar, he did.”

“Meet my mother? She got an apprentice’s license back in ‘59 but didn’t go for the full deal.”

“She’s waitin’ at the top, son.”

“My mother!”

He motioned for me to climb the stairs.

I saw a figure at the top. Up I went. I glanced at the photos along the way, skipping a step at a time, cranking my muscles past all those cocksuckers we h studied and wrote laboriously dull papers on. I kept focused on the figure at the top. When I got there, heaving air, a gray typewriter case stood alone, its chrome latch gleaming in the dull light. A note card propped against it: “Good luck and God speed. Love, Mom.”


“Did you see a short woman standing here.” I pointed. “Round, infectious laugh,” I asked the woman behind what looked like a receptionist’s desk.

“No, sir. Lots of folks see something like her there. You here for a license?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Above her desk, a sign in Roman letters: “INSPIRATION. You can go see the other stations, but you best stop here first.”

“Mind if I spend the day here?” I pointed to the sign.

“Some do…and never move on. That’s why those boys down there at EXPERIENCE get to take long lunches.” She frowned. “Wish I could take a long lunch. If I did, this whole place would come to a grinding halt.”

“I might have something for you.” I flipped open the shoebox and fished for the clump of wax paper tied with thin bow.

“Here.” I handed her the package

“What is it?”

“Homemade fudge. Mine. With coconut, nutmeg, walnuts, and raisins.”

Her eyes lit up. She took a bite. Her tongue traced her lower lip, collaring a few crumbs convicted at last to time on her pallet lonely for a delectable treat. On her desk, from a page of her open dictionary, a writer’s most useful creative tool, under “death by pleasure”, shone her likeness.

“You trying to bribe a government official?” she cooed.

“No, ma’am. Sometimes fate, longing and pleasure get on the same elevator to top floor of heaven. They wind up huggin’ one another like old friends, only they just met.”

“I see you met my daughter.”

“Who?”

“LUCKY. Downstairs, with the cards.”

“Oh, yeah. Cute girl. I can see where she gets her looks.”

“Certainly not from her daddy.”

“Who’d that be?”

“HASTE. Lazy bastard. Had the looks of Zeus. As if hurry makes it good. She’d be better off without his genes.”

“How’s that?”

“Folk think luck just happens, snap their fingers and here it is. Most don’t know it’s made, much like with this here fudge. Put the right ingredients together, especially the elbow grease, and wah la!” She handed me an index card. “Sign here.”

I did as she said…as always and whenever she called.

She pulled out an inkpad, dabbed her rubber stamp and pounded a pair of big red lips on the card.

“Here. Take it to the next desk. And thanks for the fudge. I never get the credit.”

I nodded. “You know that’s not true. You know it won’t be true of me.”

She blushed. “You can go to any of those desks.” She pointed out into the mammoth open room. “Those at SKILL are SOB’s. They don’t like show offs, rule-breakers. Just get it done, watch the commas, verb tense, point of view, rookie stuff. EXPERIENCE got all day for a good story but keep it short and skip over the details. It’ll drive them crazy enough, wanting more, to get you passed on. STORYTELLING, if you make it that far, you’re off the map and on your own.”

“Why you telling me all this?”

“You won’t be back here again, whether you pass or not.” She seemed sure, like she knew a fortuneteller.

“Nah, guess not.” She was right. No reason, really. It’d just be…over.

“You’re outta nutmeg, aren’t you?”

I smiled. You can’t get me here. Not this early. And not with INSPIRATION. I could have this girl nearly anytime I want. “Yep. But cinnamon works, too.”

“See, I told you. You won’t be back,” she pouted.

She was right. I loved (and lost and loved) her type. A fish with a well-oiled bicycle. A two-pound Mountain trout with a robins egg blue Schwinn bike, a white wicker basket out front stuffed with freshly picked artichokes and raspberries. Yea, I know. Inspiration’s like that. Artichokes and raspberries don’t grow together in the same region.

“Keep an eye on this typewriter, won’t you?”

“Sure thing, honey. Be an honor, your moms ‘n’ all. Good luck and thanks for the fudge.”

“Most welcome. Think I’ll try my hand over at EXPERIENCE, first. I feel… lucky.”

(continued)