In 2007, I became very discouraged. I was constantly altering my novel, and I was having a hard time creating scenes that worked. My characters didn't seem to want anything. Well, they had things that they wanted, but no particular "want" that could sustain a novel. I was having trouble creating a believable and compelling three act scenario. I had a pretty good plot going when Julian was a fratricidal maniac. I still had my work cut out for me when it came to making the story work, but at least there was a plot there. When I took out the fratricide, it became much harder to say what my story was about.
In short, I got cocky. I thought I could write a compelling novel in which nobody was murdered, but apparently, it's a lot harder than it sounds.
I decided that Julian's fratricidal days were over. He wasn't going to murder anyone. But maybe, instead of a murder, someone could just die. Maybe they were murdered by someone else. Maybe Julian was murdered and the whole book is about how he's a ghost but he doesn't realize it. Or maybe it's not murder but a terrible accident. And maybe this terrible accident gets Julian thinking about his life.
Anyway, this is how the character of Ryan was born.
I gave Ryan the last name Morales because Morales and the word "morals" have much in common. For some reason, that was significant to me.
I wrote multiple word documents, trying to find the perfect way to start my story. The word documents had titles like "Ryan Morales", "Ryan Morales 2," "Ryan Morales 3," and then, when I was getting particularly desperate, I even named one "Exciting Ryan Morales." This was because my story had to be exciting.
I really don't want to get into the specifics of what I wrote during that winter and spring of 2008. It's kind of embarassing. Suffice it to say that it was around this time that I decided that I was going to give up on the novel and just write a collection of interconnected short stories instead. I had a whole cast of possible characters to inhabit this fake setting of Red Harbor, Maine. I had Ryan Morales and Julian. They had their own individual stories. I had Julian's sister Leila. I had Ryan's sister Roseann/Rosanna. And I knew that, with Ryan's death at the center of my story, I could link a few more other people together.
In the summer 2008, I started off my final semester at Pine Manor College. This was the semester during which I would have to complete my creative thesis. I had been in the MFA program and Pine Manor for two years now, and I was more than ready to put this blasted creative thesis behind me. The mentor I ended up going with liked the idea of the interconnected short story collection, and this pleased me.
I ended up including six stories in my creative thesis (about fifty to seventy pages of which I wrote in one month). The stories were told from the points of view of Julian, his sister Leila, his girlfriend Roseann and his best friend Michelle. There's no real central plot that connects the stories. Ryan dies, but that's not really the point of the stories. They just all involve these interconnected characters. I don't know if it's any good or not. My mentor used these comments to describe it:
"You have good characters, well drawn."
"I really feel confident that this is going to be a strong and satisfying book. You are developing a number of multidimensional characters..."
"Like Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, you have a strong collection of interrelated stories here that are character driven rather than plot driven---even within the separate stories themselves. And I think you have just about arrived with it."
There are a few more stories that I'm working on right now to finish the collection. I hope to get some work done this weekend and say more in Monday's blog.
Friday, June 10, 2011
Thursday, June 9, 2011
Julian Through the Years: Part II
Here are excerpts from versions of my novel that I wrote around 2006:
The Tale of the Tiger
There was a dispute over who the apartment complex belonged to, who had the higher claim. The truth was, it was owned and maintained by two old geezers who hadn’t set foot on the property in twenty years. They rented the place out to their grandchildren---the oldest, Michael, got the top apartment, his cousin Jaclyn got the bottom and her younger brother Julian shared the middle floor with his best friend from high school.
Michael was twenty-six, liked to think himself mature, liked to think he’d moved beyond the childishness of adolescence. He’d graduated from college four years ago with an English major and the desire to be a published writer before he hit thirty. He wanted to make a difference in the world, he wanted people to read what he had to say and be better for it. The only thing he really needed was peace and quiet in the evenings so that he could spend that time at his computer.
His cousins had a different idea of what life was all about. They were the spawn of his permissive aunt and uncle, they’d been raised among wild children like themselves in a city where everything you could possibly want was right there in front of you---you just had to grab for it . Seize and attack. They grew up thinking that the only way to end a week was to throw a huge party, get drunk, nail down everything that moved. Julian would join his sister on the first floor, and he’d bring his roommate Nick, along with half the city or more. They’d turn up the music so that Michael couldn’t hear the shouting, grunting and crashing so much, but Busta Rhymes or whomever the hell they listened to still blared through the thin boards of his floor, interrupting his train of thought, making him momentarily think the characters in his book were sex-crazed gangsters in the ghetto. It would seep into his writing and would result in pages of wasted time. If he happened to be writing long-hand, it would be wasted trees.
Lucifer’s Oven had once been called Luigi’s Pizzeria. It had been owned back then by a tiny Italian who bore a comical resemblance to Stalin, and his doughy brother who looked more like Groucho Marx. After their deaths, the place had passed into the hands of a family of Pagans. The red and green booths were a little too Christmasy for their liking and so they‘d redecorated, using an orange and black motif instead. Rumor had it they slaughtered the animals out back and served them up on a pizza twenty minutes later. Hardly anyone in the town remembered the way the pizzeria once was, except for the regulars. Guys like Jimmy Viola, affectionately dubbed “Jimmy the C“ (C stood for “cripple”) as a way to differentiate him from another regular, also named Jimmy, who was not a cripple. Then there was “Crazy Steve” who wore the raccoon hat and always staked out the same booth from which he glared at anyone who happened to be within his line of view. When Michael walked into the place, Jimmy nodded at him. Funny how people could recognize you after so long.
Michael pressed his finger on the delete key and watched everything he’d written earlier that day disappear from the screen. He leaned back in his desk chair. He thought of Jocelin’s tiger bracelet, the one she‘d worn to the restaurant. A gift from Jude, she‘d said when she‘d caught him looking at it. Jude the Obscure. He realized what bugged him the most about it. He wondered what kind of guy gave his girlfriend something he’d clearly gotten out of a machine. He knew there must have been more to that story. A whole novel there.
At the top of the blank page Michael typed The Tale of the Tiger. The only problem with a title like that was the reader would be expecting an adventure, a romp through India, full of cultural misunderstandings and violent near-misses. Man’s confrontation with the beast. Michael had no idea what or who the tiger was. But its home would be his.
“You look like shit,” Jocelin said. “You got so wasted last night. Do you remember any of it?”
“A little. Kinda.” He remembered sitting up with her, watching some movie on Lifetime. It was about a woman who, when charged with the crime of killing her father, suddenly realizes that she had repressed memories of being molested by him. It was called Death of a Father; The Barbara Benchley Story. It was awful, but Jocelin’s beer was good, which made the movie almost beside the point. His sister had gotten so mad at the TV screen, as if it were an actual person. As if she were in some kind of political debate with it. It might have been the alcohol, but halfway through the show she’d started to throw things from the bed---stuff like pillows, shoes, the Bible. Fortunately they’d fallen safely to the floor before they could hit anything; her aim was shitty. The neighbors must have assumed they were a couple of pissed off rock stars, what with all the thuds and cursing. “Bullshit,” she’d say to the characters. “I hope they fry her, Jules. I really do.” Despite her antics, he’d felt himself relax in his sister’s company, more comfortable with her than he‘d been in a long time. He’d even laughed at her. And here he was, the morning after, paying for that short period of happiness, almost wishing he’d not remembered what it had been like.
“Well nothing happened,” she assured him. “You didn‘t do anything stupid, like streak across the motel parking lot.” She found this very amusing for some reason. He wiped at his nose with his arm and made a sniffling sound. “You crying?”
“No,” he snapped. “My nose is stuffed up.”
What Others Said
“These are two very effed-up people.”
“Julian’s feelings … contradict themselves so much---sometimes within the same sentence---that the only conclusion I could finally draw is that he’s schizophrenic and quite possibly insane.”
“Some good moments here, but you have not set it up so the dialogue makes sense.”
The Tale of the Tiger Revised
October 13, 2000
Julian had been running for as long as he could remember. It was a constant, single vision---the vision of him running--- racing through his mind, connecting one moment to the next.
He sprinted down crowded streets in the mornings, empty ones at night, along broken paths leading through thick trees, past tangled branches, his arms and legs covered in scrapes and scars. But that was nothing. Nothing at all compared to what made him run in the first place. Or what must have made him do it. Truth was, he had no clue.
He knew it drove his girlfriend and sister crazy. His sister said that one morning he’d wake up with a torn ligament, a bruised muscle, something that would stay with him forever. Lead to surgeries down the road. New body parts from cadavers.
But he couldn’t worry about something like that. He wasn’t so much afraid of what would befall him in the future. He was more afraid that his life was cyclic and that nothing new would ever happen to him again, that he would remain stuck in the same place he was now for the rest of his life. The future, to him, seemed to be the constant retelling of history, over and over, maybe at best a Martin Scorcese remake of what went on before.
There was no way in hell he was ever speaking to his sister again. The last time they’d spoken was at the Fourth of July party at their father’s house. She’d caught him flirting with the 50-something-year-old next-door neighbor. Actually, his neighbor had come on to him---it wasn’t his fault at all. Rosa had lived in the house across the street from them ever since they were little kids. She was older than their father and had three disgustingly perfect children, to hear her speak, who were now in college. But the moment he hit puberty, it was all “handsome” this and “good-looking” that, as if she couldn’t get enough of it with her own kids. At the cookout, Leila had called him a pervert. A pervert who was trying to take advantage of a poor Italian woman who spoke broken English and who desperately needed a lifelong American citizen like him to make a legal woman of her. It was stupid, really stupid. She’d been teasing him about Rosa since forever. But on this particular day, Rory was right there beside him. His girlfriend had raised her eyebrow at him when his sister had said what she did, and he snapped. The point was, he’d called her a nasty name, and now he couldn’t even look at her. Couldn’t talk to her either. And Rory still hated him for it. She’s your sister. How could you say that to your sister? Rory was an only child.
“I hate her,” Ellie said when he asked about her friend. Delilah. As in Samson and Delilah, Ellie told him. Julian had never heard that name used in real life before.
It had been Delilah’s idea to come here; Ellie would have much rather gone to a movie or something. “I suppose it’s my fault for always letting her get her way.”
“She sounds evil,” Julian said under his breath. He was still thinking of Jennie from second grade. Jennie who ate the hostess cupcakes his sister packed just for him. Jennie who would laugh every time her playground husband, for some unknown reason, called him Karen.
“No she’s not evil.” Ellie gave him the evil eye. She sighed. “Well, I suppose I sometimes act like she is, but we’re practically sisters.
“Well you’d have to have a brother, I guess, to understand. You know, she’s the older one. By only a month, but still, you’d think that month was the most important thing in her life. “
Julian knew. It was as if in that one short month, she not only took a fantastic ride down the birth canal, she was also elected president of the United States, saved a whole endangered species from extinction, prevented the destruction of the rainforest, found a cure for AIDS, ran for president again and was re-elected. That was Leila. That was Leila all over. Only replace one month with three years. The point was, his sister was barely past the pant-shitting stage when he was born and yet she had the nerve to get cocky with him. When he turned twenty-one, it would all change. It had to change. Really, once you turned twenty-one, what did it matter anymore who was three years older or younger? You never heard anyone say, “Oh, well I‘m twenty-six and you’re only twenty-three.” You hardly ever heard crap like that.
Was this what his life had become? Standing in a kitchen with a girl he didn’t even know, trying to look her in the eyes and seeing only a mountain of crap behind her; cans and newspapers haunting a home like old lovers and one night stands you only wish you could discard.
He pulled away. He said he was sorry. So sorry. He didn’t know when he’d gotten to the point where any little thing bothered him.
“Are you ok?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said. He left without further explanation, without looking back.
He left Ellie’s apartment around midnight. He didn’t know where the night had gone. He’d gotten his last image of Rory around seven o’clock. He couldn’t believe he’d spent the past five hours doing nothing. He had nothing to show for it. And there was the realization that hit him upon walking out the front door. It was tomorrow. Tomorrow had come as he was descending the stairs. I have to go home, he thought.
He thought again about how his life was like some indie movie. If he had the ability to cut whole chunks of crap out of his life, this moment of defeat - where he was trapped in his car, not able to go anywhere and absolutely dependent on his sister - would be the first scene to go, but had his life really been a movie, it would probably be one of the few scenes that had to stay. And then Blockbuster would get a hold of it and edit it some more, and just replay this scene over and over again. It depressed the hell out of him.
Nick was obsessed with Culture Club, not because he thought they were fine musicians, but because he was convinced that Julian was gay, and he wanted to be supportive of his friend.
When he noticed they were heading in the direction of Oz, he shook his head hard. Just the sight of it made him sick. He didn’t realize how much he hated that place until he saw it in the daylight. He said, “No. I’m not going there. Not tonight, OK?” Not ever.
His friend threw him a look. “What’s wrong with you? You love going there. Where do you wanna go then?”
“I don’t know.” His voice rose an octave. “I don’t care. Just anywhere else.”
“No shit. Was that where you were last night?”
“Keep your eyes on the road! Do you want to get us killed? Look, you almost hit that lady with the walker.”
“What lady?” Nick squinted. “The one on the sidewalk, Jules?”
“You were swerving.”
“Bull shit. You’re crazy.” They were silent for a moment. “Where we gonna go, then, if you don’t want to go to Oz. Is there a gay bar around here somewhere?”
“I’m not gay.”
“Sure. Sure you aren’t, Julia. Unlike you, I’d rather go somewhere packed full of women.”
“Aren’t you and Katie supposed to be getting serious? Mr. I Know How To Act With Women?”
“Sure, I know how to handle women. Like for instance, guess who I was talking to at the video store the other day. You’ll never guess.”
Julian rolled his eyes and turned his head to look out the window.
"Your sister," Nick said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was back? You should invite her to come out with us sometime. I still can’t believe she’s your sister. It’s like Oscar the grouch being related to…Catherine Zeta-Jones.”
“Catherine Zeta-Jones is a cow,” he said, insulted that anyone would compare his sister to her.
“Says the gay boy.”
Julian decided there really wasn’t any point in trying to correct him. That’s what Nick wanted. Besides, maybe he was right. Maybe Julian really was gay. Or maybe he wasn’t bent any particular way. Maybe he just fell in love with random people who showed him the slightest bit of attention.
Nick hesitated, his eyes slowly taking him in before turning away.
Julian pushed his plate away, only half his sandwich eaten. He couldn’t stuff anything more down his throat; he’d throw it all back up. “You done? I gotta get home.”
“Are you OK?” Nick asked.
“If I wanted bull shit psychoanalysis, I’d see a shrink. I wouldn’t hang with you.” He grabbed his wallet out of his pocket and took out enough money to take care of both of them.
“Aw, you’re gonna pay for me too? How chivalrous. Can I at least pay tip?”
“Let’s just go,” Julian said.
“That’s really interesting,” Rory said, and she meant it. She wasn’t saying it in the way most people would, as if they were pretending to care. Man, that Leila really had his girlfriend in a trance. Everyone seemed to think she was so mystical and mysterious, they all wanted to get to know her. If they knew the Leila he knew, they’d figure out pretty quick that she wasn’t so hot. The kind of person who makes great conversation over cocktails is the exact kind of person you’d never want to have any kind of real relationship with. There’s a reason they’re so damned fascinating; they’re completely self-absorbed and they don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves and all the cool little adventures in their own self-absorbed life.
She laughed. “Ever since he was a baby he’s been terrified of the zoo. I remember my mom and dad took him there once when he was about three and I was six, and the whole time he was shaking.”
He snorted. “She’s exaggerating,” he told Rory.
“Oh yeah? Elephant,” his sister said, as if that one word would send him into convulsions. “Giraffe.”
“I’m not afraid of elephants. “ He snorted. “You crazy?”
She blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Well you don’t like ‘em much.”
“And I was never scared of giraffes either. It’s just, have you ever taken a good look at one of those things? They’re butt ugly.”
“Oh, and I’m sure they think you’re real hot yourself.” She winked at Rory, scattering ash on his pant leg. “I’m sure the giraffes all get together and have a good laugh the moment they see you coming.”
“Makes me think of a ‘Yo Momma’ joke,” Rory said.
Leila’s smile was tight. “Oh yeah?”
Rory shrugged and brushed at something on her sleeve.
What Others Said
“This is very fine work. You are building a complex relationship between [Leila and Julian].”
“Some nice moments here. The way they act w/ each other is still a bit confusing to me --- nice one minute, awful the next. It might be easier if there were longer periods of niceness + meanness, or if I understood their mood swings, the reasons behind them. Rory slaps J’s face and the next scene he says he loves her. … What internal chemistry causes them, because most people do not behave this way.”
“I’m surprised [Leila would] hang around people so far below her intellectual level.”
“What did she taste like? A good opportunity for some sensory details.”
“I really liked the line describing Ellie’s hair as the color of peeled corn.”
“His attitude toward Elle also confused me. Most eighteen-year-olds would have tried to get down her pants even if there were dead bodies lying around, but he was put off by the hoarded items that reminded him of old lovers and one night stands that should be discarded. I did not understand what this meant, and this kind of observation did not seem like one an eighteen-year-old would make.”
The Tale of the Tiger
There was a dispute over who the apartment complex belonged to, who had the higher claim. The truth was, it was owned and maintained by two old geezers who hadn’t set foot on the property in twenty years. They rented the place out to their grandchildren---the oldest, Michael, got the top apartment, his cousin Jaclyn got the bottom and her younger brother Julian shared the middle floor with his best friend from high school.
Michael was twenty-six, liked to think himself mature, liked to think he’d moved beyond the childishness of adolescence. He’d graduated from college four years ago with an English major and the desire to be a published writer before he hit thirty. He wanted to make a difference in the world, he wanted people to read what he had to say and be better for it. The only thing he really needed was peace and quiet in the evenings so that he could spend that time at his computer.
His cousins had a different idea of what life was all about. They were the spawn of his permissive aunt and uncle, they’d been raised among wild children like themselves in a city where everything you could possibly want was right there in front of you---you just had to grab for it . Seize and attack. They grew up thinking that the only way to end a week was to throw a huge party, get drunk, nail down everything that moved. Julian would join his sister on the first floor, and he’d bring his roommate Nick, along with half the city or more. They’d turn up the music so that Michael couldn’t hear the shouting, grunting and crashing so much, but Busta Rhymes or whomever the hell they listened to still blared through the thin boards of his floor, interrupting his train of thought, making him momentarily think the characters in his book were sex-crazed gangsters in the ghetto. It would seep into his writing and would result in pages of wasted time. If he happened to be writing long-hand, it would be wasted trees.
Lucifer’s Oven had once been called Luigi’s Pizzeria. It had been owned back then by a tiny Italian who bore a comical resemblance to Stalin, and his doughy brother who looked more like Groucho Marx. After their deaths, the place had passed into the hands of a family of Pagans. The red and green booths were a little too Christmasy for their liking and so they‘d redecorated, using an orange and black motif instead. Rumor had it they slaughtered the animals out back and served them up on a pizza twenty minutes later. Hardly anyone in the town remembered the way the pizzeria once was, except for the regulars. Guys like Jimmy Viola, affectionately dubbed “Jimmy the C“ (C stood for “cripple”) as a way to differentiate him from another regular, also named Jimmy, who was not a cripple. Then there was “Crazy Steve” who wore the raccoon hat and always staked out the same booth from which he glared at anyone who happened to be within his line of view. When Michael walked into the place, Jimmy nodded at him. Funny how people could recognize you after so long.
Michael pressed his finger on the delete key and watched everything he’d written earlier that day disappear from the screen. He leaned back in his desk chair. He thought of Jocelin’s tiger bracelet, the one she‘d worn to the restaurant. A gift from Jude, she‘d said when she‘d caught him looking at it. Jude the Obscure. He realized what bugged him the most about it. He wondered what kind of guy gave his girlfriend something he’d clearly gotten out of a machine. He knew there must have been more to that story. A whole novel there.
At the top of the blank page Michael typed The Tale of the Tiger. The only problem with a title like that was the reader would be expecting an adventure, a romp through India, full of cultural misunderstandings and violent near-misses. Man’s confrontation with the beast. Michael had no idea what or who the tiger was. But its home would be his.
“You look like shit,” Jocelin said. “You got so wasted last night. Do you remember any of it?”
“A little. Kinda.” He remembered sitting up with her, watching some movie on Lifetime. It was about a woman who, when charged with the crime of killing her father, suddenly realizes that she had repressed memories of being molested by him. It was called Death of a Father; The Barbara Benchley Story. It was awful, but Jocelin’s beer was good, which made the movie almost beside the point. His sister had gotten so mad at the TV screen, as if it were an actual person. As if she were in some kind of political debate with it. It might have been the alcohol, but halfway through the show she’d started to throw things from the bed---stuff like pillows, shoes, the Bible. Fortunately they’d fallen safely to the floor before they could hit anything; her aim was shitty. The neighbors must have assumed they were a couple of pissed off rock stars, what with all the thuds and cursing. “Bullshit,” she’d say to the characters. “I hope they fry her, Jules. I really do.” Despite her antics, he’d felt himself relax in his sister’s company, more comfortable with her than he‘d been in a long time. He’d even laughed at her. And here he was, the morning after, paying for that short period of happiness, almost wishing he’d not remembered what it had been like.
“Well nothing happened,” she assured him. “You didn‘t do anything stupid, like streak across the motel parking lot.” She found this very amusing for some reason. He wiped at his nose with his arm and made a sniffling sound. “You crying?”
“No,” he snapped. “My nose is stuffed up.”
What Others Said
“These are two very effed-up people.”
“Julian’s feelings … contradict themselves so much---sometimes within the same sentence---that the only conclusion I could finally draw is that he’s schizophrenic and quite possibly insane.”
“Some good moments here, but you have not set it up so the dialogue makes sense.”
The Tale of the Tiger Revised
October 13, 2000
Julian had been running for as long as he could remember. It was a constant, single vision---the vision of him running--- racing through his mind, connecting one moment to the next.
He sprinted down crowded streets in the mornings, empty ones at night, along broken paths leading through thick trees, past tangled branches, his arms and legs covered in scrapes and scars. But that was nothing. Nothing at all compared to what made him run in the first place. Or what must have made him do it. Truth was, he had no clue.
He knew it drove his girlfriend and sister crazy. His sister said that one morning he’d wake up with a torn ligament, a bruised muscle, something that would stay with him forever. Lead to surgeries down the road. New body parts from cadavers.
But he couldn’t worry about something like that. He wasn’t so much afraid of what would befall him in the future. He was more afraid that his life was cyclic and that nothing new would ever happen to him again, that he would remain stuck in the same place he was now for the rest of his life. The future, to him, seemed to be the constant retelling of history, over and over, maybe at best a Martin Scorcese remake of what went on before.
There was no way in hell he was ever speaking to his sister again. The last time they’d spoken was at the Fourth of July party at their father’s house. She’d caught him flirting with the 50-something-year-old next-door neighbor. Actually, his neighbor had come on to him---it wasn’t his fault at all. Rosa had lived in the house across the street from them ever since they were little kids. She was older than their father and had three disgustingly perfect children, to hear her speak, who were now in college. But the moment he hit puberty, it was all “handsome” this and “good-looking” that, as if she couldn’t get enough of it with her own kids. At the cookout, Leila had called him a pervert. A pervert who was trying to take advantage of a poor Italian woman who spoke broken English and who desperately needed a lifelong American citizen like him to make a legal woman of her. It was stupid, really stupid. She’d been teasing him about Rosa since forever. But on this particular day, Rory was right there beside him. His girlfriend had raised her eyebrow at him when his sister had said what she did, and he snapped. The point was, he’d called her a nasty name, and now he couldn’t even look at her. Couldn’t talk to her either. And Rory still hated him for it. She’s your sister. How could you say that to your sister? Rory was an only child.
“I hate her,” Ellie said when he asked about her friend. Delilah. As in Samson and Delilah, Ellie told him. Julian had never heard that name used in real life before.
It had been Delilah’s idea to come here; Ellie would have much rather gone to a movie or something. “I suppose it’s my fault for always letting her get her way.”
“She sounds evil,” Julian said under his breath. He was still thinking of Jennie from second grade. Jennie who ate the hostess cupcakes his sister packed just for him. Jennie who would laugh every time her playground husband, for some unknown reason, called him Karen.
“No she’s not evil.” Ellie gave him the evil eye. She sighed. “Well, I suppose I sometimes act like she is, but we’re practically sisters.
“Well you’d have to have a brother, I guess, to understand. You know, she’s the older one. By only a month, but still, you’d think that month was the most important thing in her life. “
Julian knew. It was as if in that one short month, she not only took a fantastic ride down the birth canal, she was also elected president of the United States, saved a whole endangered species from extinction, prevented the destruction of the rainforest, found a cure for AIDS, ran for president again and was re-elected. That was Leila. That was Leila all over. Only replace one month with three years. The point was, his sister was barely past the pant-shitting stage when he was born and yet she had the nerve to get cocky with him. When he turned twenty-one, it would all change. It had to change. Really, once you turned twenty-one, what did it matter anymore who was three years older or younger? You never heard anyone say, “Oh, well I‘m twenty-six and you’re only twenty-three.” You hardly ever heard crap like that.
Was this what his life had become? Standing in a kitchen with a girl he didn’t even know, trying to look her in the eyes and seeing only a mountain of crap behind her; cans and newspapers haunting a home like old lovers and one night stands you only wish you could discard.
He pulled away. He said he was sorry. So sorry. He didn’t know when he’d gotten to the point where any little thing bothered him.
“Are you ok?” she asked.
“Fine,” he said. He left without further explanation, without looking back.
He left Ellie’s apartment around midnight. He didn’t know where the night had gone. He’d gotten his last image of Rory around seven o’clock. He couldn’t believe he’d spent the past five hours doing nothing. He had nothing to show for it. And there was the realization that hit him upon walking out the front door. It was tomorrow. Tomorrow had come as he was descending the stairs. I have to go home, he thought.
He thought again about how his life was like some indie movie. If he had the ability to cut whole chunks of crap out of his life, this moment of defeat - where he was trapped in his car, not able to go anywhere and absolutely dependent on his sister - would be the first scene to go, but had his life really been a movie, it would probably be one of the few scenes that had to stay. And then Blockbuster would get a hold of it and edit it some more, and just replay this scene over and over again. It depressed the hell out of him.
Nick was obsessed with Culture Club, not because he thought they were fine musicians, but because he was convinced that Julian was gay, and he wanted to be supportive of his friend.
When he noticed they were heading in the direction of Oz, he shook his head hard. Just the sight of it made him sick. He didn’t realize how much he hated that place until he saw it in the daylight. He said, “No. I’m not going there. Not tonight, OK?” Not ever.
His friend threw him a look. “What’s wrong with you? You love going there. Where do you wanna go then?”
“I don’t know.” His voice rose an octave. “I don’t care. Just anywhere else.”
“No shit. Was that where you were last night?”
“Keep your eyes on the road! Do you want to get us killed? Look, you almost hit that lady with the walker.”
“What lady?” Nick squinted. “The one on the sidewalk, Jules?”
“You were swerving.”
“Bull shit. You’re crazy.” They were silent for a moment. “Where we gonna go, then, if you don’t want to go to Oz. Is there a gay bar around here somewhere?”
“I’m not gay.”
“Sure. Sure you aren’t, Julia. Unlike you, I’d rather go somewhere packed full of women.”
“Aren’t you and Katie supposed to be getting serious? Mr. I Know How To Act With Women?”
“Sure, I know how to handle women. Like for instance, guess who I was talking to at the video store the other day. You’ll never guess.”
Julian rolled his eyes and turned his head to look out the window.
"Your sister," Nick said. “Why didn’t you tell me she was back? You should invite her to come out with us sometime. I still can’t believe she’s your sister. It’s like Oscar the grouch being related to…Catherine Zeta-Jones.”
“Catherine Zeta-Jones is a cow,” he said, insulted that anyone would compare his sister to her.
“Says the gay boy.”
Julian decided there really wasn’t any point in trying to correct him. That’s what Nick wanted. Besides, maybe he was right. Maybe Julian really was gay. Or maybe he wasn’t bent any particular way. Maybe he just fell in love with random people who showed him the slightest bit of attention.
Nick hesitated, his eyes slowly taking him in before turning away.
Julian pushed his plate away, only half his sandwich eaten. He couldn’t stuff anything more down his throat; he’d throw it all back up. “You done? I gotta get home.”
“Are you OK?” Nick asked.
“If I wanted bull shit psychoanalysis, I’d see a shrink. I wouldn’t hang with you.” He grabbed his wallet out of his pocket and took out enough money to take care of both of them.
“Aw, you’re gonna pay for me too? How chivalrous. Can I at least pay tip?”
“Let’s just go,” Julian said.
“That’s really interesting,” Rory said, and she meant it. She wasn’t saying it in the way most people would, as if they were pretending to care. Man, that Leila really had his girlfriend in a trance. Everyone seemed to think she was so mystical and mysterious, they all wanted to get to know her. If they knew the Leila he knew, they’d figure out pretty quick that she wasn’t so hot. The kind of person who makes great conversation over cocktails is the exact kind of person you’d never want to have any kind of real relationship with. There’s a reason they’re so damned fascinating; they’re completely self-absorbed and they don’t give a damn about anyone but themselves and all the cool little adventures in their own self-absorbed life.
She laughed. “Ever since he was a baby he’s been terrified of the zoo. I remember my mom and dad took him there once when he was about three and I was six, and the whole time he was shaking.”
He snorted. “She’s exaggerating,” he told Rory.
“Oh yeah? Elephant,” his sister said, as if that one word would send him into convulsions. “Giraffe.”
“I’m not afraid of elephants. “ He snorted. “You crazy?”
She blew smoke out of the corner of her mouth. “Well you don’t like ‘em much.”
“And I was never scared of giraffes either. It’s just, have you ever taken a good look at one of those things? They’re butt ugly.”
“Oh, and I’m sure they think you’re real hot yourself.” She winked at Rory, scattering ash on his pant leg. “I’m sure the giraffes all get together and have a good laugh the moment they see you coming.”
“Makes me think of a ‘Yo Momma’ joke,” Rory said.
Leila’s smile was tight. “Oh yeah?”
Rory shrugged and brushed at something on her sleeve.
What Others Said
“This is very fine work. You are building a complex relationship between [Leila and Julian].”
“Some nice moments here. The way they act w/ each other is still a bit confusing to me --- nice one minute, awful the next. It might be easier if there were longer periods of niceness + meanness, or if I understood their mood swings, the reasons behind them. Rory slaps J’s face and the next scene he says he loves her. … What internal chemistry causes them, because most people do not behave this way.”
“I’m surprised [Leila would] hang around people so far below her intellectual level.”
“What did she taste like? A good opportunity for some sensory details.”
“I really liked the line describing Ellie’s hair as the color of peeled corn.”
“His attitude toward Elle also confused me. Most eighteen-year-olds would have tried to get down her pants even if there were dead bodies lying around, but he was put off by the hoarded items that reminded him of old lovers and one night stands that should be discarded. I did not understand what this meant, and this kind of observation did not seem like one an eighteen-year-old would make.”
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
Julian Through the Years
Here are some excerpts from my novel over the years. These are from 2002-2007. I may have made some minor grammar or phrasing edits since then, but they remain mostly intact. These are all from the versions where Julian kills his brother. In my second round of excerpts, which I will put up later this week, the brother is out of the picture.
Primal Rage
“Julian tried to recall the night of Christian’s death. The events of that evening were foggy in his memory. He seemed to remember a large expanse of red sky. Never before had the air felt so thick, and the image of being immersed in blood had come to him. Nowadays, everything was cloaked in red.
Julian felt as if he were being snapped back into the present. He was now surrounded by black. He soon realized that this was because he was amongst mourners in dark clothing. The ceremony ended. The mourners consoled each other and then slowly began to disperse. Julian followed his sister and his father to their car, which was also black.”
“I’m fine, Leila.”
“You look like shit.”
He leaned against the counter, still holding tightly to it as his sister came closer. “So do you,” he said, and she paused a couple of feet away. “Where’s your boyfriend, Jason? Did he ever arrive?”
“It’s Justin.”
“Jason’s better. He never seems to come just in time. Does he?”
She stared at him, then forced a smile. “That’s right.”
“Too bad. Punctuality is important.”
“When you left the living room, you looked like you were about to puke.”
“Spying on me?”
“No. It’s just that you’re always so conspicuous. I don’t want to imagine what it would be like if you weren’t around to cause such a big scene.”
He finally forced himself to meet her eyes. “What do you mean by that?”
“Look, I’m only twenty-one and my mother and brother are already dead. I’m just wondering who’s next.”
He studied her expression, which was blank. “Maybe you are,” he said.
She paused, thinking about that. Then she just laughed and walked away, leaving him to stare after her.
“Christian was a trouble-maker, ten times worse than Julian could ever hope to be. Yet, strangely enough, this made Christian the favorite one, in a twisted sort of way. He was not a source of pride, but rather, the one who got all Dad’s attention because he was so screwed up. Everyone seemed to love wasting their time trying to help Christian get his life back on track. Julian was normal, which meant that nobody gave a shit what he did or didn’t do.
Right then, Christian was at his worst. The ground was littered with beer bottles, and Julian found himself carefully edging around them, afraid of tripping over them or getting cut. Julian remembered the rest in fragments. Christian had been the first to take a swing at him, but it was only with his hands. Julian had tried reasoning with him at first. Slowly, his voice had begun to rise, along with his anger, until he was shouting along with his brother.
I’ll tell Dad you were drinking, Julian threatened.
Christian pulled one corner of his mouth up into a hideous grin. I’ll just tell him all your secrets then.”
“Julian looked down at his brother lying in the water. He had not been able to see very well because of the dying light, but he saw the red liquid leaking from Christian’s forehead. He had realized that he must have pushed him, but then he saw the broken beer bottle in his hand.”
“Leila looked on as the police dragged Julian out the front door, feeling sad, yet, also, feeling relief. Julian turned his head over his shoulder, shifting his eyes between their father and her. Their gazes locked for a second, his heart pulsing behind his own, and she wondered what he was thinking, and whether or not he somehow understood the look she gave him. She turned and hurried down the hall, the sound of her own heart growing louder in her ears, until it drowned out all noise.”
What Other People Said About This Story
About Julian: “Yipes---this guy is like Eddie Munster or something.”
A Small Leap
In the living room, Sebastian was watching a tribute to Keith Moon, from The Who, and drinking beer. Leila was curled up next to him, her eyes glued to the television set like a zombie.
The doorbell rang.
“Oh, that’s Cathy. She and I are going shopping,” Alexandra said. She quickly kissed her children good bye, and then, before Sebastian could turn around and look, she’d opened the front door, stepped outside, and then shut the door behind her.
“We’re all set. My husband thinks you’re one of my women friends,” she told her lover.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
“Wait!” She paused, finally beginning to regret her decision to go out. “Do you think it’s all right to leave Sebastian to mind the children when he’s so drunk? … And Jimmy can be a real terror when the grownups aren’t keeping an eye on him.”
What Other People Said
“I know it’s only a dream, but her lover comes and rings the doorbell? That’s pretty risky/reckless, isn’t it?”
Original Sin
Each prisoner had their own cell, but Julian found himself conversing with other men on his cell block, whether or not he actually wanted to, especially the man across from him, Steven. Julian figured him for a homo, but he had no proof of that.
Meanwhile, the homo across the way was looking over at him as though he were pitiable, as though he knew everything about him, as though he possessed the soul of Julian, trapped inside his thick little head. Maybe he’d had a day job as a psychiatrist, like Hannibal Lector, when he wasn’t murdering young boys by night. Julian began to wonder if Steven was many people---himself, some crazed killer, a sensitive psychologist/poet/philosopher all rolled into one. Hell, all artists were crazy.
It was just his luck that he would get stuck in a cell across from a guy like Steven, who couldn’t shut up for two seconds if his life depended on it. From what Julian had heard, Steven had been in prison before, and then had been released and was now likely going back again for murder. Most times Steven opened his mouth to speak, Julian would begin to drift off. What this guy didn’t get was just because he had a lot to say and just because he held a captive audience, literally, that didn’t mean people gave a shit about his opinions.
When Steven wasn’t discussing his favorite topic---himself, and how tough he was----he was asking Julian personal questions about his life. Julian didn’t want to talk about his life to a complete stranger, or to anyone, for that matter. “Hey Jules,” Steven would say every time he thought up something new to ask him.
“Don’t call me Jules, Steve?”
“Are you really David Kane’s son?” Steven demanded one morning, after Julian had been in jail for a week.
Julian didn’t want to talk about his father either.
“So what happened? How did a lawyer’s kid end up here?” Steven asked as Julian rolled over onto his side, toward the wall.
“My sister nailed me.” It was the first time he’d said it out loud. It had been sitting in him for just over seven days, like poison. It felt good to let it out, even to a man he absolutely despised. There was something about righteous anger. You just had to share it with others.
“Your own sister?”
“Yeah, my sister.” Leila. He felt like hawking up that name as if it were phlegm, spitting it out, like his father did all the time. It was one of those disgusting habits he’d sworn he’d never have, but now it just seemed the right thing to do.
“Sounds like a real bitch to me.”
“Don’t call her that.”
Julian had often thought it to himself, what an *effing* bitch his sister was, how he wished her insides would burn like acid, eating away at her until she rotted and died, sad and alone. He thought this twenty thousand times a day. He had a journal where he’d write pages full of insults aimed at that conniving bitch and he swore to himself that when she scrounged up the time to visit him he would read it out loud to her, that he would rip the pages out of his journal and take it to the visiting room with him. He would have, if he’d had an *effing* pocket in his pants to stuff them in. There were a lot of things he would have done if he’d had pockets. You had no idea how *effing* awesome pockets were until you lost them, he decided.
“He never did tell Leila to her face what he thought of her, mostly because the second he saw her, he’d start crying. He’d plead with her to give him an explanation to why she’d betrayed him, but she didn’t have one. “I’m sorry,” was all she’d say. And the visit would pass without him once calling her a whore. And he’d hate himself for being so weak.”
What Other People Said
“This guy has a lot of issues.”
In regards to my sentence “Julian didn’t want to talk about his father. And Steven must have understood.” : “Would an asshole understand?”
“Decide on the tone. If you want a made for TV melodrama write that. If you want Mickey Spillane tough guy 1930’s noir---write that.”
“I love your focus on Julian’s pockets. He is in a cell where all aspects of his way of living are non-private. I think that his emphasis on missing the ability to hide stuff in his pockets is hilarious. Perhaps later on, Steven can call Julian on this. Maybe his toilet is out in the open in his cell, and he is worried about his pockets.”
“I really liked the part about the pockets.”
“Enough people have died in this for it to be Hamlet.”
“We begin to sympathize w/ the protagonist already. Good start.”
A Short Leap*
Julian had begun smoking at eleven and drinking at twelve because his father really didn’t care what his kids did, as long as they left beer in the refrigerator for him. After a while, they’d built up a tolerance for it, and that’s when his brother needed a fake ID---back then he’d needed one anyway for the cigarettes. According to this pseudo license, Gabriel was really Brian Magee, 24-years old, and the kid behind the counter stared at them for what seemed a solid minute before getting that “To hell with it, I want to go home” look of cashiers and finished ringing them up. For all they knew, he probably wasn’t even supposed to be there that day but some lazy bastard had weasled out of work to go off to Vermont or some place like that and so guess who got screwed over? Julian made it a point to thank him as he and Gabe left. He always did anyway, but this guy, whose name was Ralph, assuming that wasn’t the designer name of his shirt and the Lauren part was covered up, looked like he was having the worst day of life----one in a long string of continually worse days in fact. When Julian tried to empathize with how he was feeling though he realized that Ralph could just as well be thinking about what a couple of underaged punks they were. So who really gave a damn about Ralph? Julian knew that anyone could justifiably believe Gabe was a bad influence on him, but the truth is that would be misplacing the blame because Julian would have done whatever the hell he wanted, with or without his brother.
“I’m just surprised my brother didn’t come out here with you. The two of you seem so tight.”
“We don’t do everything together,” Lucy defended.
“You are screwing him, though.”
“That’s none of your business.” He finally glanced her way, dropping his cigarette and grinding it into the floorboards of the porch with his shoe. She glared back at him. “Do you try to alienate all your brother’s girlfriends, Michael? Or do you just particularly despise me. I know you’ve never liked me.”
“I’m just doing you a favor. The only person Julian loves is himself.”
“You’re crazy, Michael.”
“Think whatever you want. Just don’t come crying to me and saying I didn’t warn you when he dumps you for his reflection.”
“Go to hell,” she said, heading back toward the front door. Michael took another cigarette out of his pocket as well as his father’s lighter. He was too cheap to buy one of his own. There was nothing wrong with that, though, he decided. Anyone could throw money around as if it were worthless paper. That was no test of character. He heard his sister’s voice as she stepped out onto the porch just as Lucy shoved past her to go back inside. “Less than three minutes,” Leila remarked. “A new record.”
* A Short Leap was a title inspired by a quote from The Reflecting Skin. In the movie, a character says something along the lines of, "It's a short leap between kissing and killing."
What Other People Said
"I'd still like to hear how Julian feels. Not ever having that component leaves the reader feeling like an impartial observer or unwelcome."
"Yipes! Leila is the devil!"
The Girl Next Door
Alexandra watched her two children from the kitchen window of the main house.
Behind her, David paced back and forth with a cup of Instant in his hand. He was muttering something to himself but she didn’t even try to decipher what it was he was saying.
“They got into some kind of fight,” she told him because he had been out earlier and had just gotten home to find the house silent--the kind of silence that follows a storm-- and his wife nervous. “Down there in the Old Port,” she said, “wherever it was they went. Michael and Julian. I don’t know what happened. Michael said there was a girl. Some girl they both knew from school. She graduated with Michael. They’re both in love with her, I guess.” She turned from the window to meet her husband’s eyes. “Has he come back yet? Michael? They came home together and then he left again. He was really upset.“ David stared back at her as if she were some moth alighted on the edge of the sink, as if he’d just noticed she was there but didn’t really care enough to swat at her. “None of this ever happened when Leila wasn’t around.” It didn’t exactly hit her like a ton of bricks, it wasn’t some cliché like that. It had been lurking in the back of her mind since the day her daughter was born, that the girl was dangerous. “It’s not like Julian to chase after women and get into trouble. I don’t want Leila getting him into that kind of club scene. I mean, that’s where they went tonight. I’m sure of it. They went to some club.”
Her husband shook his head. “Calm down, Ali.”
“I mean, with Michael, it’s too late. I can’t do anything about Michael. But Julian…” She turned her attention again to the back yard. It was empty now, though she could see the bathroom light was on in the guest house. It hadn’t been before. “What do you think is gonna happen to us?” she asked her husband.
He took a sip of coffee. “You worry too much.” And then he came up behind her, peering over her shoulder. “What’s your son doing over there?” She hated it when he called Julian her son. She knew why he did it. She’d always loved Julian best.
“I suppose you blame me for this?” Alexandra said after Michael had gone up to his room and her husband was the only one left at the table. “Everything I do is wrong, so go ahead. Tell me I somehow messed this day up as well. Tell me it’s my fault our daughter’s such an ungrateful bitch.”
He continued to chew slowly and picked up his glass of water. He didn’t respond. She knew he’d always loved his daughter more than his sons, loved her even after that stunt she’d pulled three years ago, sneaking out of the house in the dead of night, not even leaving a note to say where she was going, finally contacting Julian on his cell phone when she’d reached her destination. At first, David had been crushed by this betrayal, wouldn’t eat dinner with the family, wouldn’t do anything with them, just sulked. He was the only one of them who actually showed any joy at the knowledge of her return. And then that joy had dissolved into the contemplative silence of right now. Alexandra knew he was happy to have his daughter home, but she still waited for an accusation from him, never knowing what to expect when he was too quiet for too long.
“I don’t know why I even married you. I might as well have married a rock.”
He said as she got up, “It’s too bad you couldn’t have married someone more like Julian.” And then he was silent again. It was no use responding to that. It would be like talking to an empty room.
“What are you doing?” Alexandra asked, the sly jerk of her daughter’s foot not escaping her attention. “What are you hiding?”
“Nothing,” Leila said. “Oh my God, Ma, chill out.”
Alexandra stood up. “Come on, move over.” She bumped Leila off to the side with her shoulder and swung open the closet door. She didn’t know what she was expecting to find in there, but at first, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just her son’s clothing, much of it tossed on the floor in heaps. “What a mess,” she muttered. She bent down to pick up shirts and pants and even a century-old pizza crust. What was going on in that head of his; he knew they’d been having a rodent problem for years, no doubt thanks to this pig-sty he liked to call his bedroom. Her eye caught on a crumpled shopping bag underneath a sweater (a sweater for crying out loud, in the summertime), bright red plastic, looking as though it had been soaked in blood. She picked it up and opened it.
“Uh, Mom.” Leila’s voice behind her.
She turned to her daughter. “Is this yours?” She reached inside and pulled out an article of clothing, unfolding it so that she could see it was a black t-shirt, the words Gay Pimp printed in bold rainbow colors across the front. She tossed it at Leila. “Yeah, it’s yours.“ Her son and daughter about had a fit right then, their laughter grating on her nerves. “They sell this kind of thing out West?”
“No way, Ma. I got that at some airport shop on the way home. I thought our Julian would like it so I picked it up.”
“Our Julian, huh?” She looked from one child to another. “You bought that for your brother? He’d get shot wearing a thing like that into town. Give me that.” Alexandra tore the shirt out of her daughter’s hands and stuffed it back into the bag. “This is going underneath the kitchen sink. I needed a new rag. Thanks, honey.” She tucked the bag under her arm and picked the dirty laundry she’d gathered up off the floor. “I don’t want to see anymore gifts like that, Leila. I mean it.” She looked both her children hard in the eyes and then left the room. Leila closed the door behind her. She thought she heard her daughter say, “She’s so stupid.”
The dumb freshman who crossed in front of her car barely noticed us. He took his sweet time. He wasn’t really a freshman, actually. In fact, from his arrogant strut and the way he glided toward the senior lot, I was sure he wasn’t. My dad had a habit of accusing all bad drivers of being from Massachusetts, even if their license plates read Maine. Whenever getting ready to make an illegal turn, he’d say, “And now for the Massachusetts maneuver. Don’t ever try this yourself, Julian, till you know the rules enough to break them.” I didn’t know what his deal was, but then I had my habit of labeling all inconsiderate pedestrians around my school “freshmen” because I had such contempt for them, as a whole. I was finally getting out of this town and they seemed so far below me, as if they didn’t even belong to the same universe.
Everyone around town was talking about Julian Perry, and his dead girlfriend Aurora. The town hadn’t seen the death of someone so beloved, and under such bizarre circumstances, since Carrie Anderson’s 17-year-old son had shot himself twice in the chest while loading his father’s rifle in his parents’ bathroom. Luke Anderson’s “accident” had occurred five years before, and though there’d been fatal car crashes every now and then, before and since, those were to be expected, everyone agreed, and, as Julian’s own grandmother said, were “part of growing up and growing older”. Aurora Salve’s death was far too weird to be part of the everyday circle of life, and even Old Woman Perry had to admit it despite the fact that Old Woman Perry loved her youngest grandson and would never believe that he could ever be responsible for the death of another human being, let alone the death of his own pretty girlfriend. And if he wasn’t responsible, that meant she’d drowned in two inches of water on her own.
Which brought everyone to the fact that the beloved Aurora Salve had allegedly been shit-drunk that night, and the few who believed this made it their life goal to convert as many locals as possible to their way of thinking. These “chosen” few, who were enlightened enough to know the truth, already had a few theories going, none of them pleasant, and before long, rumors were being started that cocaine had also been involved, and that’s why the girl had a small trickle of caked blood running down her face when they found her.
“Aurora never drank anything stronger than Diet Pepsi,” some said, which was enough of a vice as it was in Cape Elizabeth where everyone drank Poland Springs water, and those who didn’t were from out of town and may as well have been driving around with a bottle of liquor in their back pocket.
“If it was really an accident, why did Julian run?” others demanded. Nobody knew why Julian had run, or why his sister had disappeared the same day. Leila had only just come back for a brief visit with her family after having spent two years out West with the cows and the married ranchers, no doubt, and it wasn’t hard to believe that she’d taken off again, this time bringing along her younger brother who was set to graduate in three weeks and who’d been, up until now, an upstanding student and citizen, on his way to Yale in the fall. Leila was wild, and many blamed her for her brother’s most recent behavior, particularly his mother, Sandra, who oddly enough, did go by Mrs. Perry, unlike most of her friends who’d only recently discovered the joys of the single life.
No matter what the truth ended being, right away it was evident that this wasn’t going to be some tragic incident that stopped up the roads for miles around Linwood & Son’s Funeral Home, and then was forgotten about a week later. To hear Katie Barnam speak, and of course she did, as much as possible, when she wasn’t separating aluminum from plastic at the bottle shed, this was the most horrible thing the town had ever seen, and would likely ever see, in the entirety of her life.
Nobody dared ask the Salves what they thought.
I didn’t want to hug her back, and yet my body betrayed me; I held her just as tightly as she held me, if not more fiercely, feeling that this was my final chance to hold her before she faded from my life for good. It was like a goodbye, though the kind of goodbye where the other person didn’t leave but just continued to stick around, defeating the purpose of saying goodbye to them in the first place. It was a Rolling Stones Farewell Tour kind of goodbye. Barbara Streisand’s last concert ever. The fat lady sings and the show keeps on going.
I shoved her away from me, still feeling her hands clinging to me, feeling dirty, as though I’d just been seduced.
Primal Rage
“Julian tried to recall the night of Christian’s death. The events of that evening were foggy in his memory. He seemed to remember a large expanse of red sky. Never before had the air felt so thick, and the image of being immersed in blood had come to him. Nowadays, everything was cloaked in red.
Julian felt as if he were being snapped back into the present. He was now surrounded by black. He soon realized that this was because he was amongst mourners in dark clothing. The ceremony ended. The mourners consoled each other and then slowly began to disperse. Julian followed his sister and his father to their car, which was also black.”
“I’m fine, Leila.”
“You look like shit.”
He leaned against the counter, still holding tightly to it as his sister came closer. “So do you,” he said, and she paused a couple of feet away. “Where’s your boyfriend, Jason? Did he ever arrive?”
“It’s Justin.”
“Jason’s better. He never seems to come just in time. Does he?”
She stared at him, then forced a smile. “That’s right.”
“Too bad. Punctuality is important.”
“When you left the living room, you looked like you were about to puke.”
“Spying on me?”
“No. It’s just that you’re always so conspicuous. I don’t want to imagine what it would be like if you weren’t around to cause such a big scene.”
He finally forced himself to meet her eyes. “What do you mean by that?”
“Look, I’m only twenty-one and my mother and brother are already dead. I’m just wondering who’s next.”
He studied her expression, which was blank. “Maybe you are,” he said.
She paused, thinking about that. Then she just laughed and walked away, leaving him to stare after her.
“Christian was a trouble-maker, ten times worse than Julian could ever hope to be. Yet, strangely enough, this made Christian the favorite one, in a twisted sort of way. He was not a source of pride, but rather, the one who got all Dad’s attention because he was so screwed up. Everyone seemed to love wasting their time trying to help Christian get his life back on track. Julian was normal, which meant that nobody gave a shit what he did or didn’t do.
Right then, Christian was at his worst. The ground was littered with beer bottles, and Julian found himself carefully edging around them, afraid of tripping over them or getting cut. Julian remembered the rest in fragments. Christian had been the first to take a swing at him, but it was only with his hands. Julian had tried reasoning with him at first. Slowly, his voice had begun to rise, along with his anger, until he was shouting along with his brother.
I’ll tell Dad you were drinking, Julian threatened.
Christian pulled one corner of his mouth up into a hideous grin. I’ll just tell him all your secrets then.”
“Julian looked down at his brother lying in the water. He had not been able to see very well because of the dying light, but he saw the red liquid leaking from Christian’s forehead. He had realized that he must have pushed him, but then he saw the broken beer bottle in his hand.”
“Leila looked on as the police dragged Julian out the front door, feeling sad, yet, also, feeling relief. Julian turned his head over his shoulder, shifting his eyes between their father and her. Their gazes locked for a second, his heart pulsing behind his own, and she wondered what he was thinking, and whether or not he somehow understood the look she gave him. She turned and hurried down the hall, the sound of her own heart growing louder in her ears, until it drowned out all noise.”
What Other People Said About This Story
About Julian: “Yipes---this guy is like Eddie Munster or something.”
A Small Leap
In the living room, Sebastian was watching a tribute to Keith Moon, from The Who, and drinking beer. Leila was curled up next to him, her eyes glued to the television set like a zombie.
The doorbell rang.
“Oh, that’s Cathy. She and I are going shopping,” Alexandra said. She quickly kissed her children good bye, and then, before Sebastian could turn around and look, she’d opened the front door, stepped outside, and then shut the door behind her.
“We’re all set. My husband thinks you’re one of my women friends,” she told her lover.”
“Great. Let’s go.”
“Wait!” She paused, finally beginning to regret her decision to go out. “Do you think it’s all right to leave Sebastian to mind the children when he’s so drunk? … And Jimmy can be a real terror when the grownups aren’t keeping an eye on him.”
What Other People Said
“I know it’s only a dream, but her lover comes and rings the doorbell? That’s pretty risky/reckless, isn’t it?”
Original Sin
Each prisoner had their own cell, but Julian found himself conversing with other men on his cell block, whether or not he actually wanted to, especially the man across from him, Steven. Julian figured him for a homo, but he had no proof of that.
Meanwhile, the homo across the way was looking over at him as though he were pitiable, as though he knew everything about him, as though he possessed the soul of Julian, trapped inside his thick little head. Maybe he’d had a day job as a psychiatrist, like Hannibal Lector, when he wasn’t murdering young boys by night. Julian began to wonder if Steven was many people---himself, some crazed killer, a sensitive psychologist/poet/philosopher all rolled into one. Hell, all artists were crazy.
It was just his luck that he would get stuck in a cell across from a guy like Steven, who couldn’t shut up for two seconds if his life depended on it. From what Julian had heard, Steven had been in prison before, and then had been released and was now likely going back again for murder. Most times Steven opened his mouth to speak, Julian would begin to drift off. What this guy didn’t get was just because he had a lot to say and just because he held a captive audience, literally, that didn’t mean people gave a shit about his opinions.
When Steven wasn’t discussing his favorite topic---himself, and how tough he was----he was asking Julian personal questions about his life. Julian didn’t want to talk about his life to a complete stranger, or to anyone, for that matter. “Hey Jules,” Steven would say every time he thought up something new to ask him.
“Don’t call me Jules, Steve?”
“Are you really David Kane’s son?” Steven demanded one morning, after Julian had been in jail for a week.
Julian didn’t want to talk about his father either.
“So what happened? How did a lawyer’s kid end up here?” Steven asked as Julian rolled over onto his side, toward the wall.
“My sister nailed me.” It was the first time he’d said it out loud. It had been sitting in him for just over seven days, like poison. It felt good to let it out, even to a man he absolutely despised. There was something about righteous anger. You just had to share it with others.
“Your own sister?”
“Yeah, my sister.” Leila. He felt like hawking up that name as if it were phlegm, spitting it out, like his father did all the time. It was one of those disgusting habits he’d sworn he’d never have, but now it just seemed the right thing to do.
“Sounds like a real bitch to me.”
“Don’t call her that.”
Julian had often thought it to himself, what an *effing* bitch his sister was, how he wished her insides would burn like acid, eating away at her until she rotted and died, sad and alone. He thought this twenty thousand times a day. He had a journal where he’d write pages full of insults aimed at that conniving bitch and he swore to himself that when she scrounged up the time to visit him he would read it out loud to her, that he would rip the pages out of his journal and take it to the visiting room with him. He would have, if he’d had an *effing* pocket in his pants to stuff them in. There were a lot of things he would have done if he’d had pockets. You had no idea how *effing* awesome pockets were until you lost them, he decided.
“He never did tell Leila to her face what he thought of her, mostly because the second he saw her, he’d start crying. He’d plead with her to give him an explanation to why she’d betrayed him, but she didn’t have one. “I’m sorry,” was all she’d say. And the visit would pass without him once calling her a whore. And he’d hate himself for being so weak.”
What Other People Said
“This guy has a lot of issues.”
In regards to my sentence “Julian didn’t want to talk about his father. And Steven must have understood.” : “Would an asshole understand?”
“Decide on the tone. If you want a made for TV melodrama write that. If you want Mickey Spillane tough guy 1930’s noir---write that.”
“I love your focus on Julian’s pockets. He is in a cell where all aspects of his way of living are non-private. I think that his emphasis on missing the ability to hide stuff in his pockets is hilarious. Perhaps later on, Steven can call Julian on this. Maybe his toilet is out in the open in his cell, and he is worried about his pockets.”
“I really liked the part about the pockets.”
“Enough people have died in this for it to be Hamlet.”
“We begin to sympathize w/ the protagonist already. Good start.”
A Short Leap*
Julian had begun smoking at eleven and drinking at twelve because his father really didn’t care what his kids did, as long as they left beer in the refrigerator for him. After a while, they’d built up a tolerance for it, and that’s when his brother needed a fake ID---back then he’d needed one anyway for the cigarettes. According to this pseudo license, Gabriel was really Brian Magee, 24-years old, and the kid behind the counter stared at them for what seemed a solid minute before getting that “To hell with it, I want to go home” look of cashiers and finished ringing them up. For all they knew, he probably wasn’t even supposed to be there that day but some lazy bastard had weasled out of work to go off to Vermont or some place like that and so guess who got screwed over? Julian made it a point to thank him as he and Gabe left. He always did anyway, but this guy, whose name was Ralph, assuming that wasn’t the designer name of his shirt and the Lauren part was covered up, looked like he was having the worst day of life----one in a long string of continually worse days in fact. When Julian tried to empathize with how he was feeling though he realized that Ralph could just as well be thinking about what a couple of underaged punks they were. So who really gave a damn about Ralph? Julian knew that anyone could justifiably believe Gabe was a bad influence on him, but the truth is that would be misplacing the blame because Julian would have done whatever the hell he wanted, with or without his brother.
“I’m just surprised my brother didn’t come out here with you. The two of you seem so tight.”
“We don’t do everything together,” Lucy defended.
“You are screwing him, though.”
“That’s none of your business.” He finally glanced her way, dropping his cigarette and grinding it into the floorboards of the porch with his shoe. She glared back at him. “Do you try to alienate all your brother’s girlfriends, Michael? Or do you just particularly despise me. I know you’ve never liked me.”
“I’m just doing you a favor. The only person Julian loves is himself.”
“You’re crazy, Michael.”
“Think whatever you want. Just don’t come crying to me and saying I didn’t warn you when he dumps you for his reflection.”
“Go to hell,” she said, heading back toward the front door. Michael took another cigarette out of his pocket as well as his father’s lighter. He was too cheap to buy one of his own. There was nothing wrong with that, though, he decided. Anyone could throw money around as if it were worthless paper. That was no test of character. He heard his sister’s voice as she stepped out onto the porch just as Lucy shoved past her to go back inside. “Less than three minutes,” Leila remarked. “A new record.”
* A Short Leap was a title inspired by a quote from The Reflecting Skin. In the movie, a character says something along the lines of, "It's a short leap between kissing and killing."
What Other People Said
"I'd still like to hear how Julian feels. Not ever having that component leaves the reader feeling like an impartial observer or unwelcome."
"Yipes! Leila is the devil!"
The Girl Next Door
Alexandra watched her two children from the kitchen window of the main house.
Behind her, David paced back and forth with a cup of Instant in his hand. He was muttering something to himself but she didn’t even try to decipher what it was he was saying.
“They got into some kind of fight,” she told him because he had been out earlier and had just gotten home to find the house silent--the kind of silence that follows a storm-- and his wife nervous. “Down there in the Old Port,” she said, “wherever it was they went. Michael and Julian. I don’t know what happened. Michael said there was a girl. Some girl they both knew from school. She graduated with Michael. They’re both in love with her, I guess.” She turned from the window to meet her husband’s eyes. “Has he come back yet? Michael? They came home together and then he left again. He was really upset.“ David stared back at her as if she were some moth alighted on the edge of the sink, as if he’d just noticed she was there but didn’t really care enough to swat at her. “None of this ever happened when Leila wasn’t around.” It didn’t exactly hit her like a ton of bricks, it wasn’t some cliché like that. It had been lurking in the back of her mind since the day her daughter was born, that the girl was dangerous. “It’s not like Julian to chase after women and get into trouble. I don’t want Leila getting him into that kind of club scene. I mean, that’s where they went tonight. I’m sure of it. They went to some club.”
Her husband shook his head. “Calm down, Ali.”
“I mean, with Michael, it’s too late. I can’t do anything about Michael. But Julian…” She turned her attention again to the back yard. It was empty now, though she could see the bathroom light was on in the guest house. It hadn’t been before. “What do you think is gonna happen to us?” she asked her husband.
He took a sip of coffee. “You worry too much.” And then he came up behind her, peering over her shoulder. “What’s your son doing over there?” She hated it when he called Julian her son. She knew why he did it. She’d always loved Julian best.
“I suppose you blame me for this?” Alexandra said after Michael had gone up to his room and her husband was the only one left at the table. “Everything I do is wrong, so go ahead. Tell me I somehow messed this day up as well. Tell me it’s my fault our daughter’s such an ungrateful bitch.”
He continued to chew slowly and picked up his glass of water. He didn’t respond. She knew he’d always loved his daughter more than his sons, loved her even after that stunt she’d pulled three years ago, sneaking out of the house in the dead of night, not even leaving a note to say where she was going, finally contacting Julian on his cell phone when she’d reached her destination. At first, David had been crushed by this betrayal, wouldn’t eat dinner with the family, wouldn’t do anything with them, just sulked. He was the only one of them who actually showed any joy at the knowledge of her return. And then that joy had dissolved into the contemplative silence of right now. Alexandra knew he was happy to have his daughter home, but she still waited for an accusation from him, never knowing what to expect when he was too quiet for too long.
“I don’t know why I even married you. I might as well have married a rock.”
He said as she got up, “It’s too bad you couldn’t have married someone more like Julian.” And then he was silent again. It was no use responding to that. It would be like talking to an empty room.
“What are you doing?” Alexandra asked, the sly jerk of her daughter’s foot not escaping her attention. “What are you hiding?”
“Nothing,” Leila said. “Oh my God, Ma, chill out.”
Alexandra stood up. “Come on, move over.” She bumped Leila off to the side with her shoulder and swung open the closet door. She didn’t know what she was expecting to find in there, but at first, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just her son’s clothing, much of it tossed on the floor in heaps. “What a mess,” she muttered. She bent down to pick up shirts and pants and even a century-old pizza crust. What was going on in that head of his; he knew they’d been having a rodent problem for years, no doubt thanks to this pig-sty he liked to call his bedroom. Her eye caught on a crumpled shopping bag underneath a sweater (a sweater for crying out loud, in the summertime), bright red plastic, looking as though it had been soaked in blood. She picked it up and opened it.
“Uh, Mom.” Leila’s voice behind her.
She turned to her daughter. “Is this yours?” She reached inside and pulled out an article of clothing, unfolding it so that she could see it was a black t-shirt, the words Gay Pimp printed in bold rainbow colors across the front. She tossed it at Leila. “Yeah, it’s yours.“ Her son and daughter about had a fit right then, their laughter grating on her nerves. “They sell this kind of thing out West?”
“No way, Ma. I got that at some airport shop on the way home. I thought our Julian would like it so I picked it up.”
“Our Julian, huh?” She looked from one child to another. “You bought that for your brother? He’d get shot wearing a thing like that into town. Give me that.” Alexandra tore the shirt out of her daughter’s hands and stuffed it back into the bag. “This is going underneath the kitchen sink. I needed a new rag. Thanks, honey.” She tucked the bag under her arm and picked the dirty laundry she’d gathered up off the floor. “I don’t want to see anymore gifts like that, Leila. I mean it.” She looked both her children hard in the eyes and then left the room. Leila closed the door behind her. She thought she heard her daughter say, “She’s so stupid.”
The dumb freshman who crossed in front of her car barely noticed us. He took his sweet time. He wasn’t really a freshman, actually. In fact, from his arrogant strut and the way he glided toward the senior lot, I was sure he wasn’t. My dad had a habit of accusing all bad drivers of being from Massachusetts, even if their license plates read Maine. Whenever getting ready to make an illegal turn, he’d say, “And now for the Massachusetts maneuver. Don’t ever try this yourself, Julian, till you know the rules enough to break them.” I didn’t know what his deal was, but then I had my habit of labeling all inconsiderate pedestrians around my school “freshmen” because I had such contempt for them, as a whole. I was finally getting out of this town and they seemed so far below me, as if they didn’t even belong to the same universe.
Everyone around town was talking about Julian Perry, and his dead girlfriend Aurora. The town hadn’t seen the death of someone so beloved, and under such bizarre circumstances, since Carrie Anderson’s 17-year-old son had shot himself twice in the chest while loading his father’s rifle in his parents’ bathroom. Luke Anderson’s “accident” had occurred five years before, and though there’d been fatal car crashes every now and then, before and since, those were to be expected, everyone agreed, and, as Julian’s own grandmother said, were “part of growing up and growing older”. Aurora Salve’s death was far too weird to be part of the everyday circle of life, and even Old Woman Perry had to admit it despite the fact that Old Woman Perry loved her youngest grandson and would never believe that he could ever be responsible for the death of another human being, let alone the death of his own pretty girlfriend. And if he wasn’t responsible, that meant she’d drowned in two inches of water on her own.
Which brought everyone to the fact that the beloved Aurora Salve had allegedly been shit-drunk that night, and the few who believed this made it their life goal to convert as many locals as possible to their way of thinking. These “chosen” few, who were enlightened enough to know the truth, already had a few theories going, none of them pleasant, and before long, rumors were being started that cocaine had also been involved, and that’s why the girl had a small trickle of caked blood running down her face when they found her.
“Aurora never drank anything stronger than Diet Pepsi,” some said, which was enough of a vice as it was in Cape Elizabeth where everyone drank Poland Springs water, and those who didn’t were from out of town and may as well have been driving around with a bottle of liquor in their back pocket.
“If it was really an accident, why did Julian run?” others demanded. Nobody knew why Julian had run, or why his sister had disappeared the same day. Leila had only just come back for a brief visit with her family after having spent two years out West with the cows and the married ranchers, no doubt, and it wasn’t hard to believe that she’d taken off again, this time bringing along her younger brother who was set to graduate in three weeks and who’d been, up until now, an upstanding student and citizen, on his way to Yale in the fall. Leila was wild, and many blamed her for her brother’s most recent behavior, particularly his mother, Sandra, who oddly enough, did go by Mrs. Perry, unlike most of her friends who’d only recently discovered the joys of the single life.
No matter what the truth ended being, right away it was evident that this wasn’t going to be some tragic incident that stopped up the roads for miles around Linwood & Son’s Funeral Home, and then was forgotten about a week later. To hear Katie Barnam speak, and of course she did, as much as possible, when she wasn’t separating aluminum from plastic at the bottle shed, this was the most horrible thing the town had ever seen, and would likely ever see, in the entirety of her life.
Nobody dared ask the Salves what they thought.
I didn’t want to hug her back, and yet my body betrayed me; I held her just as tightly as she held me, if not more fiercely, feeling that this was my final chance to hold her before she faded from my life for good. It was like a goodbye, though the kind of goodbye where the other person didn’t leave but just continued to stick around, defeating the purpose of saying goodbye to them in the first place. It was a Rolling Stones Farewell Tour kind of goodbye. Barbara Streisand’s last concert ever. The fat lady sings and the show keeps on going.
I shoved her away from me, still feeling her hands clinging to me, feeling dirty, as though I’d just been seduced.
Monday, June 6, 2011
How I First Came To Know Julian
I would like to begin this week’s blog entries by giving a little bit of information about Julian’s background. This is how I came to “know” Julian.
The year was 2002. It was sometime in the Spring. My father and I were having a conversation over pizza. We were talking about Tricksters because I was taking a class on the subject at the local university. A trickster is a shape-shifter essentially. There’s more to a “Trickster” than that, but that's all I really remember about that course. That was money well spent. Anyway, my dad made the comment, “Commodus from Gladiator is a trickster.” Looking back, I can’t really remember how he came to that conclusion, but I think his point was that Commodus was a complex human being. He was evil because he killed his father and Maximus’ family. He lusted after his sister, which made him kinda gross. But he was a pitiful creature really. All he wanted was someone to love him. He had depth, I guess you could say. And this is in large part due to Joaquin’s brilliant acting.
Shortly after having this conversation with my father, I started to write a story. I called it “Primal Rage.” In this story, a 17 year old boy killed his brother. He had a weird relationship with his sister that was only really hinted at. And in the end, his sister betrayed him by turning him into the police. Yes, it was all very Gladiatoresque, only without the gladiators and with a completely different plotline. I actually pictured Joaquin Phoenix in my head the whole time I was writing about this boy named “Vincent”. His brother’s name was Anthony. His sister’s name was Ann. His father’s name was Adam.
I brought the story into my Creative Writing class to have it workshopped. My professor said, “It’s kind of like a David Lynch film.” This was clearly another way of saying that the structure was confusing as hell. And that’s true. It started with the brother’s funeral, there was a flashback to Vincent running for help, then it’s back to the funeral again, then it’s a flashback to shortly before Anthony’s death, and then it’s a flash forward to the present. You get the picture.
I then took the story to the Stonecoast Writer’s Conference in Freeport, Maine in the summer of 2002. It was workshopped again. One woman said something along the lines of how she didn’t want me to take this the wrong way but she disliked all of the characters. The workshop leader said something along the lines of, “Wouldn’t it be nice if Joe (he was Joe now) had some pigeons that he nurtured and cared for? And his sister could say, ‘Hey Joe, what’s with your fixation on these pigeons?” And the workshoppers talked about the scene where Julian got up from the table where he’d been sitting with his sister, washed his hands and then left the room. A woman in the class said, “Maybe he has OCD.” I made sure to point out that, in fact, he did have OCD. So I was pleased to see that that I did a good job getting that across. Then they started talking about what Joe’s deal was. What was this big secret that Anthony was babbling about just before Joe killed him. The same woman who mentioned the OCD also picked up on some incestuous undertones between Joe and his sister. Like me, she had read V.C. Andrews as a child.
So that brings us to V.C. Andrews. Around the time that I was beginning my novel, I was obsessed with a character in V.C. Andrews’ book Petals on the Wind.
For those who don’t know, Petals on the Wind is the sequel to Flowers in the Attic----V.C.A’s infamous story of greed, betrayal, murder and incest. The basic premise is that four children are locked in an attic room by their mother in order to keep their existence a secret. The reason their grandfather can't know of their existence is because he never approved of their mother's marriage to her half-uncle.
In the sequel, there was a danseur named Julian Marquet. He was this mysterious, dark-haired young man in his 20's who loved the protagonist until the day he died, even as he beat her and took advantage of every pretty young thing who came his way. The protagonist, Cathy, never really cared for him, even after she married him. But she had this nagging feeling that he was the dark-haired prince who always waited for her in the shadows when she danced in the attic as a kid.
I never really liked Julian Marquet the first time I read the books. He reminded me of Billy Zane’s character in Titanic. At the time, I preferred Cathy’s brother Chris. With his blond hair, I imagined him looking a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio. So of course Julian as Cal was a nuisance to be endured.
But when I read through the series at the age of 19 (Julian's age when he was first introduced), I realized that Julian Marquet was kind of sympathetic in a way. He was a classic wife-beater, but I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. His parents never loved him. They forced him into ballet when he was too young to have a say. There was this sincerity to him at times that was touching. He had a fascination with used cars. He liked to fix them up, but he dreamed of getting one brand new. His ultimate dream was to make it big in the dance world and get a car for every day of the week. He refers to Cathy as “brand new” because he likes to pretend that she’s a virgin, even though he must have known that she wasn’t. I came to the conclusion that he knew she was damaged goods, just like him, and that's what drew him to her in reality. I'm not saying that I would have married the guy in real life, but as a fictional character, he was intriguing.
I also liked how his whole family was described in vampire terms. They were Russians with black hair and pale skin and lips that might well have been made of “congealed blood.” At one point, a character remarks that it’s almost as if Julian is afraid of the sun, what with his lack of any kind of tan.
The one thing that V.C. Andrews hammered home again and again was that Julian grew up unloved, so in that sense, he did lack the sunlight necessary to thrive, as surely as Cathy and her siblings did when they were locked in the attic room. His father never encouraged him. His father, Georges, didn't seem to talk much anyway. The only times his father would talk to him is when he saw fit to criticize him. I always sensed that there was more to Julian’s story than what was written on the page, but suffice it to say, Julian was Commodus. All he wanted was his father’s love. So both Commodus and Julian became the model of the character I was trying to write.
The funny thing is that, when I first saw a picture of Joaquin Phoenix when I was about 15 years old, I took one look at him and Liv Tyler together, and I thought to myself, “That’s Julian!” Little did I know that I would be proven right time and again when, years later, I watched movie after movie where Phoenix played the misunderstood bad guy with the troubled history. If a movie had been made of Petals on the Wind in the 1990’s, Joaquin Phoenix could have easily played Julian (Rosencoff) Marquet.
I want to add that sometime around 2002, I had a dream where Cathy went to visit Julian's chain-smoking half-sister (Julian didn't even have a sister, smoker or not, though Georges did seem to come across as a bit of a whore, so maybe he did). In my dream, Julian's sister revealed all of Julian's secrets. I don't remember what they were.
So this is how my character made the transition from Joe to Julian. At first, I was too embarrassed to change his name. It would have been easy enough to leave him as Joe. Nobody hears the name Joe and thinks, “Gee, where did you come up with a name like that for your character?” But when you name a character Julian, it’s going to attract attention. And the one thing I tried to avoid for most of my life as a writer is too much attention. I used to rip up my rough drafts as a kid before throwing them out for fear that my parents would read them and laugh. I'm sure they would be saddened to know I felt that way.
There have been some alterations to Julian's character over the years. For example, he no longer has a brother to kill. I decided that Julian was a strong enough character that he didn't need a sensationalistic plotline to justify his reason for being.
The year was 2002. It was sometime in the Spring. My father and I were having a conversation over pizza. We were talking about Tricksters because I was taking a class on the subject at the local university. A trickster is a shape-shifter essentially. There’s more to a “Trickster” than that, but that's all I really remember about that course. That was money well spent. Anyway, my dad made the comment, “Commodus from Gladiator is a trickster.” Looking back, I can’t really remember how he came to that conclusion, but I think his point was that Commodus was a complex human being. He was evil because he killed his father and Maximus’ family. He lusted after his sister, which made him kinda gross. But he was a pitiful creature really. All he wanted was someone to love him. He had depth, I guess you could say. And this is in large part due to Joaquin’s brilliant acting.
Shortly after having this conversation with my father, I started to write a story. I called it “Primal Rage.” In this story, a 17 year old boy killed his brother. He had a weird relationship with his sister that was only really hinted at. And in the end, his sister betrayed him by turning him into the police. Yes, it was all very Gladiatoresque, only without the gladiators and with a completely different plotline. I actually pictured Joaquin Phoenix in my head the whole time I was writing about this boy named “Vincent”. His brother’s name was Anthony. His sister’s name was Ann. His father’s name was Adam.
I brought the story into my Creative Writing class to have it workshopped. My professor said, “It’s kind of like a David Lynch film.” This was clearly another way of saying that the structure was confusing as hell. And that’s true. It started with the brother’s funeral, there was a flashback to Vincent running for help, then it’s back to the funeral again, then it’s a flashback to shortly before Anthony’s death, and then it’s a flash forward to the present. You get the picture.
I then took the story to the Stonecoast Writer’s Conference in Freeport, Maine in the summer of 2002. It was workshopped again. One woman said something along the lines of how she didn’t want me to take this the wrong way but she disliked all of the characters. The workshop leader said something along the lines of, “Wouldn’t it be nice if Joe (he was Joe now) had some pigeons that he nurtured and cared for? And his sister could say, ‘Hey Joe, what’s with your fixation on these pigeons?” And the workshoppers talked about the scene where Julian got up from the table where he’d been sitting with his sister, washed his hands and then left the room. A woman in the class said, “Maybe he has OCD.” I made sure to point out that, in fact, he did have OCD. So I was pleased to see that that I did a good job getting that across. Then they started talking about what Joe’s deal was. What was this big secret that Anthony was babbling about just before Joe killed him. The same woman who mentioned the OCD also picked up on some incestuous undertones between Joe and his sister. Like me, she had read V.C. Andrews as a child.
So that brings us to V.C. Andrews. Around the time that I was beginning my novel, I was obsessed with a character in V.C. Andrews’ book Petals on the Wind.
For those who don’t know, Petals on the Wind is the sequel to Flowers in the Attic----V.C.A’s infamous story of greed, betrayal, murder and incest. The basic premise is that four children are locked in an attic room by their mother in order to keep their existence a secret. The reason their grandfather can't know of their existence is because he never approved of their mother's marriage to her half-uncle.
In the sequel, there was a danseur named Julian Marquet. He was this mysterious, dark-haired young man in his 20's who loved the protagonist until the day he died, even as he beat her and took advantage of every pretty young thing who came his way. The protagonist, Cathy, never really cared for him, even after she married him. But she had this nagging feeling that he was the dark-haired prince who always waited for her in the shadows when she danced in the attic as a kid.
I never really liked Julian Marquet the first time I read the books. He reminded me of Billy Zane’s character in Titanic. At the time, I preferred Cathy’s brother Chris. With his blond hair, I imagined him looking a bit like Leonardo DiCaprio. So of course Julian as Cal was a nuisance to be endured.
But when I read through the series at the age of 19 (Julian's age when he was first introduced), I realized that Julian Marquet was kind of sympathetic in a way. He was a classic wife-beater, but I couldn’t help but feel bad for him. His parents never loved him. They forced him into ballet when he was too young to have a say. There was this sincerity to him at times that was touching. He had a fascination with used cars. He liked to fix them up, but he dreamed of getting one brand new. His ultimate dream was to make it big in the dance world and get a car for every day of the week. He refers to Cathy as “brand new” because he likes to pretend that she’s a virgin, even though he must have known that she wasn’t. I came to the conclusion that he knew she was damaged goods, just like him, and that's what drew him to her in reality. I'm not saying that I would have married the guy in real life, but as a fictional character, he was intriguing.
I also liked how his whole family was described in vampire terms. They were Russians with black hair and pale skin and lips that might well have been made of “congealed blood.” At one point, a character remarks that it’s almost as if Julian is afraid of the sun, what with his lack of any kind of tan.
The one thing that V.C. Andrews hammered home again and again was that Julian grew up unloved, so in that sense, he did lack the sunlight necessary to thrive, as surely as Cathy and her siblings did when they were locked in the attic room. His father never encouraged him. His father, Georges, didn't seem to talk much anyway. The only times his father would talk to him is when he saw fit to criticize him. I always sensed that there was more to Julian’s story than what was written on the page, but suffice it to say, Julian was Commodus. All he wanted was his father’s love. So both Commodus and Julian became the model of the character I was trying to write.
The funny thing is that, when I first saw a picture of Joaquin Phoenix when I was about 15 years old, I took one look at him and Liv Tyler together, and I thought to myself, “That’s Julian!” Little did I know that I would be proven right time and again when, years later, I watched movie after movie where Phoenix played the misunderstood bad guy with the troubled history. If a movie had been made of Petals on the Wind in the 1990’s, Joaquin Phoenix could have easily played Julian (Rosencoff) Marquet.
I want to add that sometime around 2002, I had a dream where Cathy went to visit Julian's chain-smoking half-sister (Julian didn't even have a sister, smoker or not, though Georges did seem to come across as a bit of a whore, so maybe he did). In my dream, Julian's sister revealed all of Julian's secrets. I don't remember what they were.
So this is how my character made the transition from Joe to Julian. At first, I was too embarrassed to change his name. It would have been easy enough to leave him as Joe. Nobody hears the name Joe and thinks, “Gee, where did you come up with a name like that for your character?” But when you name a character Julian, it’s going to attract attention. And the one thing I tried to avoid for most of my life as a writer is too much attention. I used to rip up my rough drafts as a kid before throwing them out for fear that my parents would read them and laugh. I'm sure they would be saddened to know I felt that way.
There have been some alterations to Julian's character over the years. For example, he no longer has a brother to kill. I decided that Julian was a strong enough character that he didn't need a sensationalistic plotline to justify his reason for being.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
For Julian
It has now been nine years since I first started writing about Julian. I've seen him through several changes---some of them more major than others. When I started my novel, he was a Cain-like young man who had killed his brother. His last name, in fact, was Cain. I wasn’t very subtle at age 19. I gave Julian the last name Cain. His father was named Adam (after the first man), and then I changed his name to David (after King David). The father had a brother named Simon (after Simon LeBon). And then I named the father Keith (after Keith Moon). There was a psychiatrist named Dr. Strode (Halloween reference), and then her name changed to Dr. Sybil Woodward (Sybil reference). After a while, I learned that characters don’t necessarily need to be named for other people. And they don't necessarily need biblical names! It's true that I now have a male character in my stories who has a twin sister named Diana Hunter. But I didn’t even intend for the Artemis/Apollo connection. Maybe I did a little. But at least some of it was subconscious. Over time, I have gotten better at learning how to internalize ideas so that the metaphors come more naturally.
Things have changed a lot in the past nine years. Julian doesn't even have a brother anymore. He’s gone from being a man whore to being virtually asexual. Writing about an asexual and making it interesting is definitely hard since books and movies rely on sex for not only entertainment value but also for their emotional core. It’s certainly a big step for a writer like me. When I first started this story, it was full of murder, sex and mayhem. A reader of mine said, in October 2008, “As for Julian, you'll have to decide what kind of character he is in such situations. Either he finally gives in and has sex, as most normal boys would, or you decide that he is a much more idiosyncratic character who is too self absorbed and confused to give in to the carnal in a moment of mental weakness.” I decided that I liked the idea of my character being idiosyncratic. After all, the year I started writing about Julian, I had gone from loving John and Joan Cusack (this was before John Cusack sold out) to obsessing over Joaquin Phoenix.
And really, what other reason is there to write, or read or watch a movie if not for the unexpected moments and the idiosyncratic characters?
I used to write constantly. I didn't even care that it was all nonsense. But ever since I've gone through writer's conferences and an MFA program where I got my Masters in Creative Writing, it's kind of begun to feel like a chore at times to write. And I think I'm scared too. So long as I never go near the computer, or never pick up the pen, I don't have to deal with the fact that I might have nothing decent to say. It's hard to make that effort, though once I start writing, there are times when the words almost come on their own. And I can just as easily get excited about a new paragraph as I can about five new pages. The truth is, it's not hard for five pages to be reduced to a paragraph in the span of one editing session anyway. Sometimes all anything is is one well written paragraph that has been extended beyond reason.
As for Julian, I find myself coming back to him, even on the rare occasions when I try to write about someone else. I may call the character Tyler or Devon, but it's still Julian that I'm writing about. I was in a writer's workshop once where another writer said to me that it sounded like I had a crush on Julian. And maybe that was true. After all, in my stories, my female characters were all prettier versions of myself, and the men were their male counterparts. It got to the point where Julian was just too beautiful for me to even imagine. I knew he had so much potential, and my limited imagination was stifling him. When I started out, he had some safe, boring name. It took some guts, but I finally changed his name to Julian because I wanted to make sure he had the right moniker. I am definitely partial to guys named Julian. In fact, I loved the horrendous Bullock movie Premonition solely because her husband was played by Julian McMahon.
I started this blog because, the truth is, I am married to my writing, even when there are times when I don't even want to look at it. I want to use this blog as a way to reaffirm my vows to writing on a regular basis. When I was younger, I used to keep a journal that I would write in daily. Some days I would just write a bunch of quotes from my favorite movies. Some days I would just draw a picture or interpret a dream I had had. My goal with this blog is to write whatever comes to mind, so long as I write something. Anything to keep the communication open.
Things have changed a lot in the past nine years. Julian doesn't even have a brother anymore. He’s gone from being a man whore to being virtually asexual. Writing about an asexual and making it interesting is definitely hard since books and movies rely on sex for not only entertainment value but also for their emotional core. It’s certainly a big step for a writer like me. When I first started this story, it was full of murder, sex and mayhem. A reader of mine said, in October 2008, “As for Julian, you'll have to decide what kind of character he is in such situations. Either he finally gives in and has sex, as most normal boys would, or you decide that he is a much more idiosyncratic character who is too self absorbed and confused to give in to the carnal in a moment of mental weakness.” I decided that I liked the idea of my character being idiosyncratic. After all, the year I started writing about Julian, I had gone from loving John and Joan Cusack (this was before John Cusack sold out) to obsessing over Joaquin Phoenix.
And really, what other reason is there to write, or read or watch a movie if not for the unexpected moments and the idiosyncratic characters?
I used to write constantly. I didn't even care that it was all nonsense. But ever since I've gone through writer's conferences and an MFA program where I got my Masters in Creative Writing, it's kind of begun to feel like a chore at times to write. And I think I'm scared too. So long as I never go near the computer, or never pick up the pen, I don't have to deal with the fact that I might have nothing decent to say. It's hard to make that effort, though once I start writing, there are times when the words almost come on their own. And I can just as easily get excited about a new paragraph as I can about five new pages. The truth is, it's not hard for five pages to be reduced to a paragraph in the span of one editing session anyway. Sometimes all anything is is one well written paragraph that has been extended beyond reason.
As for Julian, I find myself coming back to him, even on the rare occasions when I try to write about someone else. I may call the character Tyler or Devon, but it's still Julian that I'm writing about. I was in a writer's workshop once where another writer said to me that it sounded like I had a crush on Julian. And maybe that was true. After all, in my stories, my female characters were all prettier versions of myself, and the men were their male counterparts. It got to the point where Julian was just too beautiful for me to even imagine. I knew he had so much potential, and my limited imagination was stifling him. When I started out, he had some safe, boring name. It took some guts, but I finally changed his name to Julian because I wanted to make sure he had the right moniker. I am definitely partial to guys named Julian. In fact, I loved the horrendous Bullock movie Premonition solely because her husband was played by Julian McMahon.
I started this blog because, the truth is, I am married to my writing, even when there are times when I don't even want to look at it. I want to use this blog as a way to reaffirm my vows to writing on a regular basis. When I was younger, I used to keep a journal that I would write in daily. Some days I would just write a bunch of quotes from my favorite movies. Some days I would just draw a picture or interpret a dream I had had. My goal with this blog is to write whatever comes to mind, so long as I write something. Anything to keep the communication open.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)