So after a second submission to an online magazine, "A Night At Club Oz" remains unpublished. After four years of working on this story, I feel that, in some ways, it's as done as it will ever be. But there are always going to be things I want to tweak. I still am not one hundred percent satisfied with the ending. So it's for the best that it wasn't published. Publishing something you aren't totally satisfied with is like having sex with someone you don't care about (well, in my opinion, at least. There are probably going to be people thinking, You're crazy, sex with someone you don't really care about is still pretty awesome, and publishing complete shit is the only way to go). One day it's going to be right.
I just need to work on the ending a bit more. And come up with a better plot. I like the dialogue, though. I think I'll keep the dialogue.
Anyway, I decided to copyright the story last night, and here are the first two pages. I don't like the ending much, but I think the beginning is OK.
"You know what two things I hate the most?" I said. I was sitting at the kitchen table in my khaki shorts, drinking a diet coke as Leila carried a box of video equipment to the garage.
My sister frowned at me.
"Moving shit around," I said. "And arguing with old ladies about their fucking presidential rockers."
"I guess that makes this your unlucky day then," she said.
"It would seem that way,” I agreed and downed the rest of the coke.
“You done cleaning out your room?” she asked.
“Don’t worry.” I leaned back in my chair. “I’m all set.”
She continued on to the garage.
The truth was, I hadn’t even started the onerous task of cleaning out my room yet. For the past month, it had remained untouched. And we had to be out of the house in twenty days.
But I wasn’t going to worry about that right now. I still had twenty days.
Over the past two months, we’d been in and out of the house, loading up the truck with boxes and taking them over to the new place in Gorham. We’d settled into a pattern of behavior that was starting to feel like it might become a new sort of normal.
My grandmother would nag my father about how he was doing everything wrong ---from the way he priced the items that were being sold in the yard sale to the way he placed the boxes in the truck before driving them to the new place. If there was one thing my grandmother felt very strongly about, it was that big boxes should be placed in a truck first, followed by the smaller ones. My sister and I would stand back and watch, trying hard not to draw attention to ourselves. Occasionally, I’d feel a stab of pity and intervene on my father’s behalf.
“Aren’t you a sweetheart,” my grandmother told me one day as I finished wiping down the truck bed with a Red Sox t-shirt. Had to make sure it was dust-free. “You’re gonna make some girl very happy one day.”
“No problem,” I’d said, my eyes darting toward my father before I ducked out of sight.
“That boy’s queerer than a three dollar bill,” she’d muttered once she thought I was out of earshot.
Meanwhile, I was coming up with a list in my head of all the ways there were to take the bitch out.
I would post cryptic messages on Facebook, and throughout the day, my friends would check in, just to make sure that everyone was still alive and to ask if there were any dead bodies that needed to be moved. My uncle has a secluded farm out in rural Maine, this one stalker named Anna told me. Great for if you want to make a body disappear. Anna was my number one fan. She was always showing up as one of my top 6 friends no matter how many times you refreshed the page. We'd dated for a couple of weeks in high school, and she'd been obsessed with me ever since. I saw right through her clever ruse. I thanked her, but if I wanted to make someone disappear, I could make it happen on my own.
Every once in a while, my friend Holly would send me a text. Sounds like someone needs to get laid…
Leila would watch me as I responded to the messages. And when I’d slip out the front door later on in the evening, she’d ask me when I would be back.
I always managed to remain as vague as possible. And each time I came in at one or two in the morning, I’d find her waiting up for me in the kitchen.
“You didn’t miss anything,” she’d say, her voice restrained, as if there was more she wanted to say to me but never would. “Just Dad and Grammy arguing about the presidential rocker, as usual.”
When my grandmother had heard we were moving, she’d decided to help out as much as she could. What this meant was that she was over the house everyday, telling us what to do with our own stuff. She’d been arguing with my father about that rocker all summer. He wanted to sell it at the yard sale for fifteen dollars, and she said an antique like that should not be sold for anything less than seventy-five. I knew each side of the argument by heart. And I knew that my father was wasting his time because my grandmother would never back down. I didn’t want to think about it. Everything would work out in the end. Or maybe it wouldn't. But either way, it was out of my hands.
“Sorry I wasn’t there for that,” I’d say. And I would feel Leila’s eyes on me as I left the room.
