Gum in the Gums

Too many writers write stories with the main character being a writer. They write “what they know.” It drove Ernest nuts. That and the way they went on to mimic each other. They were Hemingways or Joycean or tedious streaming consciousnesses or Kerouacian or derivatively creepy nutso-whackos who wrote like psycho Ellis or Burroughs. Or they wrote erotica-romance for horny widows and divorcees and mid-life-crisis post-feminists. Most of them couldn’t write for beans.

Ernest set out like Huck Finn, to write about anything but writing or writers. He invented a literary genre, a sort of non-autobiographical autobiographical fiction.

He had in mind something distinctive enough to fascinate the most cynical, the ones who found Vonnegut just plain boring and predictable. And because he was a writer, and to be consistent with the theme of his new genre, Ernest’s protagonist had to be a non-writer, perhaps a reader. Better yet, an illiterate. He could be blind too. Being a non-reading non-writer, the character could be called Ernest like himself, or even Ernest Hemingway because that would be the inverse of expectations — he could then be a Hemingway who never wrote a thing, couldn’t read, couldn’t see. Fuck! The irony! Never fought bulls, never went to Spain to fight for the Republic, never wrote for a Toronto newspaper, never boxed with Morley, never went to Paris, and never typed on an Underwood or drank himself silly. Never had a granddaughter that Woody Allen hired. No buddy-buddy stuff with Castro, no big fish nor old man, no urinating in the ocean three times or seeing the lions, never shooting himself in the head. No pretentious rubbish at all.

Next step: gender. Make Ernest Hemingway a woman, a blind woman. That works. Not young like Ernest the new-genre writer, but elderly. Near death even, a vegetarian illiterate with ambitions to fly hot-air balloons. No, no, that would remind some of the writer Ian McEwan and his story about the kid blown away in the balloon and the religious nut making those scary phone calls. He’d stick to the ground instead, or lower — make her a blind Olympic swimmer who, because she can’t read the directions to the pool, misses her much-anticipated opportunity to stand on the podium for her country. She could claim that she was being discriminated against on the basis of disability (being sightless) but also age and gender (trying to compete in the men’s swimming final). She would refuse to go the Paralympics route because it’s patronizing to old, blind, illiterate female non-writers.

The story is picking up brilliantly. Ernest is breaking out in an excited sweat, grabs a bottle of rare Scotch, ignoring the advice from all those how-to-write-a-novel books claiming most writers are not drunkards or drug addicts (except a few of the so-called best ones). He finds a slab of rolling papers, pulls up a sheet, salts it with some dried-out greenery that looks more like dandelion root than anything likely to be usefully hallucinogenic. He rocks the paper between his fingers like a miniature cradle, trying to find its equilibrium. He rolls the dope, narrowing the channel slowly, smoothly, until the lower edge is ready to be flipped under the top and then the upper edge pulled over the bottom. He licks the gluey edge and taps it down, pinched at one end and twisted, ready to use. Should he curl up a torn-off piece of matchbook cardboard into a filter? Yes or no, yes or no? He lights it and takes in a deep draught of unctuous smoke, chokes internally with delight, and exhales a steam bath’s worth of foggy soot. A couple more of those, and the writing really starts to swirl helplessly. What has he done?!

What on earth was he writing about anyway? Food? He’s famished. Hunger in the Third World, was it? Who the fuck is this female called Ernie and why is she staring at me? he thinks. He fumbles with the keyboard and taps out a stretch of silly alphanumerics: incoherence and odd combinations strung together in single letter-words and multi-lettered non-words.

But to his astonishment he starts to settle down eventually and picks up the thread of blind Hemingway’s story. She’s a feminist Olympian who has not come to terms with her disability. Have her smoke some weed, Ernest thinks. Get her banned from the sport. She can claim she has eye cancer and that it’s for medicinal purposes, so leave her be. It’s worth a try.

Ridiculous storyline. Move on, he thinks.

She leaves the Olympic village in disgrace, bumping along the sidewalk of . . . of . . . Name a city that could never have an Olympics . . . like Venice! Perfect. There isn’t a spot in Venice larger than a dime that’s not already inhabited or built on or flooded fifty times a year, so no way there’s an Olympic village there. But it is something beautiful, Ernest remembers. Shit, he’s been to Venice, so how can he send his anti-autobiographical character there? Break the rules! Rule number two in the writing instruction manual, next to “Show, don’t tell,” is “Break the rules!”

Therefore, he’ll keep her in Venice. Perfect for the blind. This one bumps along like a rabbit in a warren, in the narrow alleyways that are in some spots only five or six feet wide, speckled with tourists in high season, but not so bad, not so smelly in off-season. At every fifth Japanese bridge over a canal artery, there’d be an Albanian begging with a cup, pretending to be blind. One of them comes up to Hemingway and bumps her, grabs her ass and manhandles her old flesh, threatens to kill her if she doesn’t hand over her valuables. The bastard speaks Albanian at first, which is about as common a language as playboys in a nunnery, but then switches to Italian, realizing where he is, and what better luck he might have if he were to demand things in the old lady’s own language. Hemingway doesn’t know Italian either, but gives her assailant the flat-hand-under-the-chin salute, never having known what it really means, but it suggests aggression and must be rude.

She then reaches into her purse as if to reluctantly hand over her money or diamonds or credit cards, but instead yanks out . . . a Derringer! This is the one she just happened to slip through airport security because she looked so old and helpless and blind. She now pulls the trigger, and down drops the Albanian beggar, no longer an obstacle, no longer much of a beggar. Flat-out dead.

Ernie is fast running out of steam for this character and rolls another joint, this time with one hand, just to see if he can still do it. It was cool, he remembers, to be so ambidextrous at sixteen, rolling a joint with one hand, the other arm around your chick (the man, his car, his woman!), she swooning in equal amounts of (old-style) ecstasy and love. They’d kiss with full fleshy lips and roll tongues around in each other’s mouths, swooping up and around the teeth, dislodging loose foodstuffs or running into Wrigley’s gum remnants at the base of the gums. (Gum in the gums. Wow. He writes that down in his notebook for a future story title.) Then they’d touch tongue-tip to tongue-tip and gradually encircle each other’s bodies, finding every fleshy crevice, cleft and cranny until it got a little ridiculous and then they’d just do it. Well, smoke a joint and then do it in a tizzy.

But he’s back with his character now, still in Venice, slayer of the Albanian refugee beggar thief. She, Ernest the Hemingway, saunters further into the maze of the Bog City, can’t see a thing but feels the sides of buildings, smells the bad food and vomit courtesy of tourist revelry, and it’s piling up in the gutters that lead to the sewers and canals — oh, the stench, the stench! — and on out to the blue Mediterranean where the cruise ships sit and wait.

She finds herself in . . .

Now, this is important! He must place himself in her skin, behind her eyelids and opaque eyeballs and eternal darkness. What must it be like? He shuts his eyes and smells the weed, he hears the sound of cars outside buzzing by, and a fly whizzing past inside in the opposite direction. She must itch like me, or itch differently. Does she not bleed like me? Do they hear and smell with more gravitas, as compensation like it is said, or is that bullshit? Did anyone ever do the experiment? How could you set it up . . . ?

Ernest is sliding into a phase of deep stuff. He wonders if understanding this worthy detail should be explored, the research part . . . to enhance the story. Or will this set him off in a technical direction and interrupt the flow. Think of your dear reader, skip it, move on, he decides out of pure laziness.

But Hemingway has by now really and truly run out of steam. Ernest could care less and could not care less about what’s next. She’s a character now, not a person he has come to know and care about, and why is that? It happened after the killing scene and the smells in the alleyway and the blindness that took him down the hole where he lost her.

He scrolls back and sees that when he began to feel as her, he lost her. He abandoned her, like an orphan in the dingy streets of Venice, a foreigner, a murderer, soon to be tracked by the polizia and brought before a judge, made guilty, strung up Mafioso fashion, thumb-screwed maybe, water-tortured like a Chinese. And then humiliated, plunged into a blood feud with the family of the Albanian beggar. He’d have them boat across the Adriatic for the court’s judgment and they’d see her brought out, manacled and sentenced to twenty years less a day in some grungy prison. The Albanian family members would take a run at her and her police protection, and kill them all with pitchforks and sickles. And they’d gouge out her eyes. An unnecessary joke for an old blind lady.

To close off the story, there’d be a maelstrom of families of cops and Albanians chattering in rhythms sounding like Stalinistas, fanatics, old ladies wearing black, Muslim fashion, or Italian widow wear, and amounting to the same thing. The whole event would get filmed on one of those TV stations owned by President Brutaloni, the one who owns all the media and still gets elected despite the unbelievable corruption that everyone knows about. So then the story veers off into political commentary on Italian ways, a segue of sorts.

Segue . . . a great word, never heard it twenty years ago and now it’s everywhere. He’d scratch that word, therefore, and Ernest does, a concession to the wrong-headedness of using clichéd in-vogue words. A literary no-no.

Ernest moves on, again, seeking a way to tie up loose ends. Or, should she do it the truly authorial way and leave an end or two untied, a hint of confusion. Artier, more sophisticated, complex, obscure (she thinks twice about using the word “obscure” more than once in the same story, but . . . again, again, that anti-anti thing, and she just leaves it there).