Fiscal, Fiscal

It is the afternoon following the morning when you said you would never write again. It is too painful. Every time you get started, you find something else to do instead. Today, you choose reading. And this is what you read: sometimes Dylan Thomas only managed to get one word on the page. One word! And that was enough for him to go to the bar and celebrate. An accomplishment to write the letters in the right order. To make a word. That is all it is to write.

And you think, well, OK. I can do that. If Dylan Thomas did that and then came up with “Do Not Go Gentle…” then I guess it maybe works. One word. How hard is one word? But then you’re thinking, which word? It has to be magical if it’s only going to be the one. You go through words that sound delicious or silly or mysterious: lush, wish, dust, dish and so on. So now the word itself becomes anxiety-producing.

Leave it to fate. That’s what you should do. You say, I will look at this section of the New York Times right here and just write the first word that comes into focus. And so the word is “fiscal.” Fiscal. Hmmm. That is a word you wouldn’t have picked on your own. Maybe it’s a sign. So you write “fiscal.” And then you think, well, that was easy.Let me riff on fiscal and see what comes of this. Because it feels pretty good to write down “fiscal." It has that soft beginning, the fissss like pouring a glass of 7-UP, a secret, the promise of something better on the horizon, but then, too, the word carries that ominous threat, doesn’t it? The rough kuh sound that follows so fast after the soda fizz. And so you write it a few times and what comes next seems inescapable: fist. But for some reason, it’s not just the fist. It’s the other f-word that goes with the fist. So you write it. And it feels even better to get that on the page. Wild and daring. You’re not afraid to write like this. You’ll be the new author that “writes like this.” They’ll say, she sets it down for us, all those things we think but we’re afraid to talk about.

Next thing you know, you’ve got an entire story devoted to these strange little words. You write it all in one sitting. It’s marvelous. This is what people talk about when they talk about the zone. About stories writing themselves. About characters taking over the story and saying, “No, I’m not going to the beach to make up with Astrid. I am going to the industrial park and I am sneaking behind the building to dig a grave in preparation for the murder I will commit, so do your thing. Get it down in words for me.” You never believed it when people said, “My characters told me where my story was going.” But now you are starting to see how that might be possible.

You finish the story. It is a breathless masterpiece. You cannot believe you whipped that out in, what, like an hour? The superpower. That’s what it is. You always knew it lurked in there. Your secret talent, latent and waiting until the time was right for you to wing it out there and throw it at everyone. “Shazam!” you say out loud, “Bet you didn’t know I could do this: fiscal fiscal fist fuck.” The feeling is incredible.

Time to submit this, friends. You open up your Submittable account. You ignore the pages of red denials: declined, complete, no thank you. You find the perfect journal. You usually don’t like to be the one paying for your writing, but this journal would be so worth it. It’s only $15. What is that – the cost of a t-shirt, a glass of wine? You go through more than that in one Starbucks trip. You send it. And then you wait.

The wait lasts for days. So many days, you almost forget about it, but not quite. You’re at a stoplight; you check your email. You’re talking to a client on the phone; you check your email. You wake up at 6; you check your email. You go to bed at midnight; you check your email.

You know what comes next. You get what has become, in your experience, the inevitable rejection letter. It says, “Thank you for submitting ‘Fiscal Fiscal Fist Fuck.’ Unfortunately, it is not for us. We wish you luck and so on. “

At first, you think, wait a minute. Is this a mistake? This was my thing. This isn’t supposed to get rejected. It’s my superpower. I’ve been waiting years for this. How could they not see the brilliance, the new ground being broken? And you cry yourself to sleep and whatever.

Then the next day, you’re taking stock of your horrible life and you’re like, fiscal fiscal fist fuck? That’s what I was waiting decades to write? What was I thinking? I suck. You feel as if you’ll never write again, but that presupposes that you ever actually wrote in the first place. You’re miserable.

And here is the thing you forget: the hour, which was really more than two hours, when you wrote that story. Your daughter laughed at her book as she sat in her favorite chair with her cat in her lap. Your son came home from day camp to tell you about a front flip he almost did, but didn’t, but tomorrow he will. And you sat at your table in the middle of your house, with a Dylan Thomas poem next to you, the New York Times next to that, and some coffee waiting in the kitchen. You sat there typing, typing, the tapping sounding out a rhythm, filling the quiet, happy house like a song.


Written by: Jeanne Jones
Photograph by: Florian Klauer

The Smith-Corona

 

 Jake Thayer paced back and forth, taking in the breadth of his studio apartment in just a few short strides. Every fourth step or so, he would do an about-face, take a swig of Pabst, and throw a derisive glare at the typewriter that sat on the desk.

The typewriter stared back. Silent. Smug. Mocking.

And as evidenced by the growing jumble of beer cans heaped on the counter and the shallow groove being worn into the shoddy wooden floors, the typewriter had been mute a lot recently.

But that wasn’t always the case.

The typewriter was a 1954 Smith-Corona Travel Deluxe. With its pristine hard-shelled case and unique cursive script, it could probably fetch a pretty penny at any of the antique stores downtown. But no matter how destitute, Jake would never consider selling it. Its value went far beyond money. It was both a link to his past and his ticket to the future.

A gift from his doting grandmother, it was a relic from her own younger days. Always a restless youth, she wasn’t content to stay in the south Chicago neighborhood of her Irish forbearers. So she spent her youth criss-crossing this great expanse we call a country, devouring every new city, every new experience, the typewriter her sole companion until that day that her wanderlust was finally satiated with a chance meeting in the least likely of all places.

His grandmother would regale him with that story, the story of how she met his granddad, every Sunday, during their weekly ritual of banter and pancakes. And every week he listened with rapt attention. So much so that by the time he was ten, he would finish it with her, holding her hand as they looked at the photo on the wall of the man they both loved and missed so much.

“…and it didn’t matter that I was a big city girl. I took one look at that shy, young farmhand, standing there in the cold on that forlorn train platform in the middle of absolute nowhere, and I knew that my traveling days were done.”

It was those moments, sitting at her little farmhouse table, listening as she spun magic with nothing but words, that became the seed of Jake wanting to become a writer. And as any good farmer would, his grandmother fed that seed. She fertilized it with tales of all of the places she had been, describing how each place had its own personality, its own cadence, its own smells, and she nourished it with the works of the writers she loved, giving special attention to local-born Willa Cather and Weldon Kees, just to prove to him that even those from small town Nebraska could blossom into great writers.

She presented him with the typewriter after graduation, along with a check for three thousand dollars. Tears blurred his vision as he lifted the sleek, hard cover, making it hard to read the piece of paper tucked into the roller. On it was just three typed words.

Go. Live. Write.

And write he did.

Oh, how that old Smith-Corona used to sing! His stipend was long gone by the time he hit New York City, used up on long rambling train rides and nights of jubilation, but that didn’t matter. He spent his days doing whatever menial tasks it took to pay the bills and those hours of drudgery became perfect fodder, giving his brain plenty of time to ferment. By the time he got home the words would be bubbling up and ready to pour forth, frothy and delicious and intoxicating. His fingers, like a chorus line of tiny madcap dancers, would kick and stomp across the keys, filling his little hovel with a cacophonous din of rat-a-tat-tats and clickety-clacks.

Times were good. The economy, and a certain White House intern with an affinity for blue dresses, were humming along. In the city, Jake fell in with a bohemian crowd of artists and writers, like-minded spirits who didn’t mind his shy Midwestern ways and who seemed to love his vagabond prose. Together they laughed and loved and fucked and cried. It didn’t matter that they lived in the shadow of the ghetto, or that no one bought their paintings or published their words. It didn’t matter if they were black or white, gay or straight, penniless or just playing poor. Like the generations that came before them, the only thing that really mattered was that they were young and alive.

But that was then.

Now, with the smoke still rising from the rubble at ground zero and a specter of dread hanging in the air, it wasn’t so easy. Most of his friends were gone, scattered in the winds to the safety of the well-known bastions of the weird--Austin, Asheville, Portland--seeking somewhere easier on both the wallet and the soul.

But Jake was steadfast in his resolve. Just as his grandmother knew that long ago day that her travels were over, Jake too, knew where he belonged. He knew that on these streets he was home, that there was nowhere else in the world for him to be. He knew that city would soon rebound and regain its pulse, its rhythm. That it would rise up with a tenacious resilience and proclaim once again “FUCK YOU WORLD. THIS IS NEW YORK CITY.”

And when it did, he and the Smith-Corona would be there, and he would once again have something to say.

Written by: Ben Cook

Photograph by: Jen Smith