By Andy Brucia
Through great mental discipline, hard work, and a propensity for drink, I have managed to forget most of what I was taught during my college days in the north, and I believe I am a richer person for it. Still, there are those lessons that stick like thorns, and I offer one here in hopes that it will aid in what I have to say, and in the faint hope this memory will be purged by the act of writing it down.
It begins with my creative writing professor, a complete horse’s ass whose lectures produced the exact substance one would expect from such an orifice, and in comparable amounts. I remember him haranguing me at length for the slow, slovenly manner in which my stories were written. He would say, “I got through your story, and I have a few suggestions.” Got through. He would hand me the bloody thing, red ink practically dripping off my already perfect prose. He marked my local color superfluous!, what I saw as adjectival he declared extraneous!, and my strolls through the hallowed South of my childhood he rudely called red herrings!.
I’m not such an egomaniac to say that my stories did not need work, but the suggestions Professor Yankee made were all about latitude. This failure to appreciate all things Southern was common, both in class and out. I suffered examples of this bias on a daily basis, but a glaring example, and one that northerners might get, began with a question about pigs.
A group of future leaders gathered to drink beer on a lazy fall afternoon on the same northern university campus. Boys hanging out, and the conversation slowly meandered into the subject of farm animal births. You know how that is. All I remember is there was some confusion among my classmates about pigs and how they gave birth or something. I didn’t listen to the particulars, but there was disagreement and discussion, and then the gang turned to me and was quiet.
“Well?” they asked expectantly.
“Well what?” I answered, not understanding.
“Who’s right about the pigs?” they asked.
“How in the heck should I know?” I replied.
“Well, you are from the South,” they responded, clearing up the mystery. Being from the South apparently made me an expert on, among other things, pig births.
I explained to them that, since the War of Northern Aggression, there were large groups of people living in the South now, and often people live so close together you could see your nearest neighbor’s home. I also mentioned that the street I grew up on was paved, and our house had indoor plumbing. I finished by telling them that, while I had seen one opera and two World Series in this hick town, I had never had the pleasure of witnessing a pig birth.
Of course, I was the exception, I told them, having traveled into the free states. Why, I was just talking to my ol’ friend Huck the other day. He’s a Project Manager now, but we talked about our salad days floating down the `Sippi on a raft, wearing bib overalls, chewing on grass, searching for treasure, freeing slaves. I think they got the point.
Now my professor would have thought this entire explanation unnecessary, which is exactly why I find it so important. Because, while it is not the story, in a manner it bears on the story, or at least it would in a Southern story.
But getting back to my professor, I remember the shock I felt looking at my sullied work, as he cited Tolstoy, who at one time or another said that a story should start in the middle somewhere, `in the action’ I believe was the phrase my professor chose. I doubt Tolstoy ever said such a thing. Tolstoy talking about brevity is like Mother Teresa talking about sexual technique.
I told him I was fairly certain that Tolstoy was not from the South. In the South, a story is usually about fifteen or twenty minutes old before the beginning is even a distant speck on a misty horizon. I also told him that a point in a Southern story (he used the word climax, a much too sexy a word for my ears) was as rare as a cool August in Alabama.
My voice rose as my grade fell, and I snatched my story from his hands, tore up the first three pages and handed it back to him. I told him that now he certainly had the middle. In as strong a voice as I could muster, I said, “A story isn’t something you get through. A story is like a kiss.”
He rubbed his chin, looking at my story, thinking about what I said. His mouth began to form a question, but I interrupted him. I figured my grade was toast, and I had already decided to drop as I continued.
“A story isn’t something you get through, even if you have sixty-eight of them on your desk, even if someone is paying you to read them instead of paying you to write them, which you thought would happen. You get to read stories, see? It’s a privilege. But you have to be open to it, like a kiss.
“I was just telling my friend Anita this the other day.”
Eater Anita, we called her. We all had tried to date her, for lack of a nicer term. She had gorgeous eyes, beautiful long black hair and a lovely personality, none of which we noticed because of her fantastic breasts. She was known for her equally fantastic appetite, and Dairy Queen wasn’t going to close the deal. My chronic lack of money quickly took me out of the running for Anita’s carnal attentions, allowing us to become fast-food friends.
My professor had apparently noticed Anita as well, and had taken her out to dinner the previous Saturday night. Over burgers, Anita had given me a blow-by-blow account of their date. With these details firmly in mind, I continued my comments on story writing and kissing, using his Saturday night date so to get my point across that much better. Always know your audience. Bet Tolstoy said that, too.
“A kiss isn’t something to suffer through, either, even if someone spends, say, seventy-five dollars on your dinner. I said to my friend, Anita, you don’t owe him three minutes of tonsil hockey or a quick feel, even if you did eat enough to, if not choke a horse, then make him inclined to clear his throat. That isn’t a kiss, that is a contractual agreement, trading payment- shrimp cocktail appetizer, prime rib, baked potato, ceasar salad, three wines and Key Lime pie – for a service. If hard-earned cash had been exchanged instead of dinner and spit, and had a mouth ended up at another anatomical location, up here they call it prostitution. Down south we call it Saturday night.”
I grinned. He didn’t. I decided to head straight over to registration to see if I could still drop at this late date.
But the point is that bad kissers make bad readers, and vice versa. It is through this transitive property and Anita’s detailed report that I know that my professor must have been a bad kisser.
You get through a long dental appointment. You get through a prison term. You get through a war, a republican presidency. You don’t get through a short story. You don’t get through a kiss.
A kiss is one of those things you have to be true in. You can have no expectations. You have to clear everything else out of your mind and heart, and not think about whether your deodorant is working or what the future holds or what baggage you carry. There is only one moment, and it is here, waiting on your lips and on hers. You have to be willing to put yourself out there and get nothing back. If you have an agenda, believe me, it will be on the tip of your tongue, so to speak. If you have reservations, there is nothing you can do to hide them. If you don’t feel the same way, it will show. If you are looking to get through a kiss, do yourself and someone else a favor and just stop, smile, shake hands, and say goodnight.
A story isn’t something you witness, it certainly isn’t something you get through. It isn’t something you hear. The writing part is only half of any story, the other half is what happens to the reader when they hold still for a goddamn minute and let it reach them. If you aren’t up for that, if you can’t quiet your mind down enough to meet the writer here, then put the damn thing down. But if you are, and the timing is just right, it can change everything. Just like a kiss.
I believe I learned something despite myself at that school. It is a tendency of mine to start at what I think of as the beginning, and amble around into this and that charming backstory. I am not trying on purpose to delay the actual story, which I must at this point confess this still is not, and I do realize now that what I have offered so far might be seen as a delay of sorts to some people. For this reason, I do apologize, and heretofore I will endeavor to speed up the process for the benefit of the broad audience.
The story goes that Momma made a secret promise to herself as an adolescent girl that she would obtain carnal knowledge with the first man she saw buck naked from the front. It was late summer, and she was seventeen. She worked hard on the farm before school and after, and the work was turning her into a lovely young woman.
On weekends, Betty (Momma’s name is Betty) would go to the local dances. Her straight, strong back and fine figure held up her summer dresses well, and the young men flocked to her like, well, like horny young Southern men.
After returning from these dances, I imagine her laying in her dark room, thinking of what those graceful boys’ arms would feel like around her naked body, their hands on her, her legs all akimbo, stuff like that. Think a minute about your momma that way and imagine how I feel.
She had seen plenty of penises. Little cute ones on babies, small ones on boys swimming naked in the lake on the McCreary farm. Penises on horses that seemed ridiculous. Penises on drunk streaking football players running through a party, men pissing on walls, in a magazine, even her grandpas sagging stuff once when helping him from the tub.
She didn’t get it. None of those penises did a thing for her, though she couldn’t say the same for the boys themselves. Anyway, on one of those hot summer nights, the story goes that my momma promised herself that the first time she saw a fully naked man, she would drop trow or dress or whatever right then and there and find out once and for all what all these hot feelings were for.
As Momma wasn’t routinely presented with frontal male nudity on her daily travels, things went on much as they had before Momma made this promise to herself. She dated politely the few shy, goofy boys who asked her out, occasionally kissing them but fending off their searching hands and long tongues.
But it was only a matter of time.
Her brother, my Uncle Rooney, was in high school as well and on the wrestling team. One day after practice, Rooney and his friend Phil went out for a run to try to sweat off the last few pounds before their meet on Friday. They returned after the run to Rooney’s and my Momma’s house and got cleaned up to go out that night.
Phil was in the bathroom washing up and changing clothes, looking at his naked body in the mirror. He was a lanky, pale teenager with acne both painful to have and to look at. As he looked in the mirror, maybe his penis (his father called it Johnson) hung slightly to the left, and Phil was worried something was wrong with it. He might have tugged at it to see if he could get it to hang straight down, but it wouldn’t. It probably had changed a lot in the past few years, and maybe Phil pushed and arranged his curly black pubic hair so as to get a better look at his changing penis.
This is of course conjecture. I don’t know what occurred in that bathroom, I wasn’t there, but I’ve heard of fellas who have thought, felt and done similar things.
What is not conjecture is that downstairs, Betty came flying in the front door and bolted for the bathroom in urgent need. She did not knock as she attempted to enter the downstairs bathroom, but it was locked with her mother, my grandma, inside reading, having five minutes to herself.
Betty flew up the steps three at a time and burst in on Phil examining himself, and found that she suddenly didn’t have to go. Phil stood in shock, yelling `Get outta here, Betty!’ (they had met), his hands cupped over his privates. But it was too late; mom saw it, and though seeing a penis might bring a lot of different things to different minds, for my Mom Betty it brought to mind her promise. She shut the door behind her, ignoring Phil’s shouts. Transfixed by what she was seeing, she reached for the buttons of her blouse, but she couldn’t unbutton them and frankly had no urge to. Still, her promise gnawed at her, as she was never the kind of person who gave up on a promise easily. She searched for solutions as Phil called for help and covered himself.
Quickly Rooney came running to see what was up, and Grandma also appeared on the scene to see her daughter leaving the bathroom and an almost naked teenage boy yelling. Grandma turned to her daughter for an explanation.
Up to that point, it had not occurred to Betty that she would have had to break with her Christian upbringing to keep this promise to herself, so her mind quickly searched and found an acceptable compromise between her word and God.
“I have to marry Phil, Mother,” Momma said to my Grandmother, and from what I have heard, I believe that if my father had not been a fast dresser and a pretty fair wrestler, he would never have been able to get out of that bathroom, down the front stairs and out of that house alive. But he did, and although momma could have had her pick of a lot flashier guys than my dad Phil, and could have changed her mind about the whole thing, she kept her promise to herself and chose Phil, my Daddy.
Anyway, that is what she would tell to everyone else. But around the kitchen table, on nights that were just ours, school nights doing homework or after days doing chores, she would look at across at my Daddy, then at us kids, and tell the other story, the true story.
“Of course I could have changed my mind,” Momma says. “It was a promise I made, but I was seventeen and not five and I knew I was talking about my life. We agreed to go on a date. You tell it.”
Daddy smiled and continued. “I liked your Momma since sixth grade, but I was shy and she wasn’t, and she made me a little uncomfortable. She would look straight at you when she was talking, which was always, with those big blue eyes looking at you, she was just so pretty it made it hard to concentrate.”
“Don’t notice any problem now,” Momma interjected.
“Not true, Betty…What was I saying?”
“Funny man. Tell the story.”
“Right. We went out that Saturday night. It couldn’t have gone worse. I was late to pick her up. We went to a dance, and lord knows I can’t dance. I was sweating like crazy. Between dances, she talked and I nodded, and dabbed myself with napkins. It was hot and loud, and I wanted to just get out of there.”
“But she did this thing. We were walking toward the door, and she heard a song or something. As she turned back toward the dance floor, she reached out her hand, and touched my arm, then her hand slid down into my hand, and I held on, and so did she. She turned and looked at me, straight at me like she does, and this time I didn’t look away.”
They looked right at each other and smiled. The hair on my arm always stands up when they tell that part.
“And I kissed her, right next to the dance floor. First date, in public. I wanted to close any gap between us, so I kissed her. Sweaty, shy clumsy me. It wasn’t the kind of thing I was exactly known for, and she wasn’t a girl who would kiss a boy if she didn’t want to, in public or any other place. I expected a punch in the chops. And she kissed me back. Pretty much, that was that.”
They both smiled. I wanted my professor to know this somehow, that this is where you have to be to read a story, or to kiss, either one. You have to be open to it. You have to be ready for it, but not ready for it at all. You have to expect everything to go bad, and open to it when it doesn’t.
Momma would later describe sexual relations as no big thing, and said her ideas and feelings prior to sex were overblown, so you can imagine how Dad feels most of the time. Still, it amazes me that their marriage actually works pretty well, and maybe the first penis you see is as good a criteria for a union as any.
Another thing that professor told me was that once I had reached my climax, quickly wind things up. I told him down South we liked to get wound up before we reached the climax, and smoke a nice cigar or maybe sip some Kentucky bourbon after. It’s a truly different world up there.