The Adventures of Chase Harlin, Space Ranger!

Episode 23: Landing on Moon City

"I'm taking it in slowly this time, Skip."

Space Ranger Chase Harlin hunched over the controls of his space freighter, his long, lean jaw a slash of power against his chisled face; his hands clutching the controls with all the power of a steel cable. Skip Ripley, sidekick, yawned, wishing he had a cigarette.

"We're coming in to Moon City," Chase told his subordinate with all the authority and pomposity of a professor who's forgotten his lecture notes and is making do with hastily-scribbled Wikipedia printouts procured ten minutes before class. "I feel almost completely positive that the battle plans the Scriveners left behind will be found here."

"And if not, whoopee," Skip muttered.

"Of course, you can't trust those dashed Scriveners," Chase went on. "Ever since the Battle of Forma Terrain last year, they've been dying for a shot at getting those plans and unleashing Armageddon over the rest of us."

"I know, Ranger Chase," Skip assured him, looking at his watch and picturing several scenarios between him and Chase, all of which ended with the Ranger's head squashed under his boot, and with Skip laughing maniacally and smoking a cigarette.

"Why, for all we know, they'll colonize half the galaxy before they're done!" Chase clenched a fist defiantly and shook it in arrogant dismissal. Then, realizing he was shaking it at the wall, which was, so far as he could tell, immune to his scorn, he turned his attention back to the controls. "In just a little while, we'll sit down with High Council Spokesman Tar Tarnation. Then we'll get to the bottom of this."

"Right, Space Ranger," Skip offered on cue, wondering why in the hell Chase felt the need to continue narrating every single goddam thing that happened to them on their adventures. It made it not only boring and irritating, but also made even the simplest tasks take ten times longer. Just the other day, Chase had spent forty minutes explaining to Skip how they were going to use super-trans-power engines to cross the galaxy in a matter of hours. He'd even gone so far as to haul out several charts and graphs before Skip finally got him settled down, promising him they'd make a stop at the red light district on Planet Vulva before calling it a day.

"Of course, if the Terrakians get to the plans first, they'll most likely unleash war on the Scriveners and us," Chase continued, shifting in his seat and adjusting his equipment. "And wouldn't that be a fine kettle of space fish!"

Did people always talk like this? Skip wondered. In World War II, did Roosevelt turn to Truman and explain that the Nazis were a bunch of evil sons of bitches, which was why they were about to unleash ground troops in Normandy? Did Lincoln tell his Secretary of War in the War Room, "Now here's why we're going to go to war against the Confederacy...Ready? Because we want to reunite the Union." "Gee, Mr. Lincoln, that's really helpful background information!"

"Hold on, Skipper," Chase intoned, fiddling with several dials on the dashboard. "I'm going to start the landing cycle. If we don't go through the atmosphere with all diplomatic protocol--"

"They'll open fire," Skip supplied helpfully, hoping to avoid another expository lecture for the benefit of some nearby imaginary halfwit unfamiliar with the rules of space travel and elementary physics.

"If we don't, they'll open fire," Chase repeated irritably, shooting a look toward Skip that said, Who's the Ranger here? You, limpdick? No, me. That's right. "Ever since the Treaty of Putrefact, the locals here have been on edge. We'll have to keep a low profile, which means dying our hands and faces blue, wearing women's clothing..."

Skip sighed audibly and began thinking of big guns with huge barrels and unlimited ammunition. And using them to shut Chase's stupid hole permanently. It was almost like the guy was in a pulp story aimed at subliterate teenagers obsessed with sex, he thought to himself...

Suddenly, the atmosphere lit up with brilliant flares and searing thunder! A Klaxon warning began wailing. Red lights were flashing.

"Looks like something's wrong," Chase said solemnly, looking meaningfully at Skip, who bit his lip and fought to keep from leaping across the cockpit and throttling the stupid prick. Instead, he stabbed a few buttons on the console and brought up the visual.

Before them, a fleet of sleek, oddly-sexy-looking battleships were amassing in front of them, readying their weapons for attack.

"Egad!" Chase screamed, flailing his hands towards his face. "Terrakians!"

"What's the plan, Chase?" Skip asked wearily, already knowing.

"Evasive maneuvers!" the veteran adventurer thumped, tearing his shirt off. "I'll stay up here, explaining the military history between them and us out loud. You go get the makeup from below deck. My chest isn't going to glisten heroically on its own!"

Skip trudged off, contemplating suicide. He'd heard the Terrakians had vast dungeons of darkness and torture, and that they anally raped their prisoners. Well, as long as they had cigarettes...

Next Episode: The Dungeons of Terrakians (and some peace and quiet for Skip)!

A potential submission to NPR's Fiction Writing Contest

This is quite possibly the worst entry I've ever written. In fact, this was actually a writing assignment given to a bunch of sixteen year-olds. They had to begin wtih "No one really believed the story at first" and end with "Like all good things, it came to an end." I was going to showcase their work, but decided to showcase my own instead. No, really. No need to thank me.

"By This Rulebook, I Rule"

A tale of danger, discipline and derring-do, straight from the bowels of a public school! Maybe even the one...your kids go to!

No one really believed the story at first. Least of all Dean of Students Hank Thumpkins. It was just too strange: a guy? And another guy? In the hallway? Fighting?

“Nobody fights in this here school!” Thumpkins declared. “My discipline is too stern! They’re too afraid to fight in this here school!”

Hall monitor Jesse Hueber thought to himself of palm trees and beach cabanas: where he would soon be taking his vacation and where he wouldn’t have to listen to the big, sweating, bull-necked idiot in front of him. But that was several hours in the future, and for now, he had the dean to persuade. Maybe this time, he could be persuaded with the facts.

“I saw the fight,” he said patiently. “I broke it up.”

“Stress, m’boy,” Thumpkins said, swiveling back in his office chair and blowing cigar smoke all over the room. “Nerves. Happens to the best of us. I remember when I was fighting in the war--“

“Sir, I broke the fight up, and I brought the two boys in here to get a referral.” Hueber gestured behind him, where the boys sat sulking, bleeding from their ears and spitting teeth into Thumpkins’ secretary’s coffee mug.

“They look like good young Christians to me,” declared Thumpkins. “Good-hearted, too. What do you want to go starting trouble for around in this here school?”

“This one,” Hueber said, gesturing to the taller boy with brass knuckles and a split lip, “wanted to beat up this one,” here gesturing at the shorter, muscled boy with the black belt in jujitsu and prison tattoos, “for taking his lunch money. He said if he didn’t give it up, he’d beat him up.”

“Uh huh. And then what happened?”

“Then he beat him up.”

“Well if he did give up the money, why would he want to go ahead and beat him up? It just doesn’t add up, Jenkins.”

“My name is Hueber.”

“Whatever.” Thumpkins waved a hand. “Now me, when I’m prosecutin’ a case, I like to make sure I have all the facts at hand.”

“I have all the facts, sir,” Hueber said grimly. “I was there. I saw it.”

“Doesn’t mean you have all the facts, does it, Jenkins?”

“Sir—“

“What’s that boy’s blood type?” Thumpkins asked abruptly.

Hueber blinked again. “Sir?”

“His astrological sign? Heritage? Opinions about the future of the gold market?”

Hueber stared, his jaw working soundlessly.

“You don’t know? Then how can you say you have all the facts?”

“I don’t…I…sir, he’s bleeding on me!”

“Pure speculation, my boy. Why, that blood could have come from anywhere before it started oozing out his veins. Now ain’t that so? Say that’s so, boy.”

“Sir…”

“Won’t have any of this nonsense in this here school, Jenkins. Go wash that boy’s blood off your face. You’re a disgrace to your uniform.”

Hueber started sweating. “I don’t wear a uniform, sir.”

“And you never will, not with that attitude. Shape up or ship out, that’s my motto.” Thumpkins looked at his watch. “Well, now, I think you boys have learned a valuable lesson, haven’t you?”

“Sure have, sir,” said the tall boy, cracking his knuckles and staring malevolently at the other.

“I have indeed,” responded the squat boy, drawing a line across his throat and flipping a pair of nunchuks across his chest expertly.

“Good.” The dean beamed triumphantly. “Now, Jenkins, I suggest you go start your vacation. Beginning right about now, isn’t it? You’ll feel better after you get some time away.”

And Jenkins—er, Hueber, did. He had a great vacation. But like all good things, it came to an end.

NPR's Fiction Contest, Take 7--A Western

This month, some author I never heard of gave the marching orders: "You want to enter the contest? Get your little story published? Oh, how cute! Of course you can give it a shot! And maybe you'll win! And maybe I'll quit writing and go back to busing tables! Anyway, send your putrid attempt at creativity to NPR before the end of September. The rules: Your 600-word story has to begin with someone coming into town, and end with someone leaving town. Got it? Good. Don't screw it up."

To me, this seemed like the perfect opportunity for a Western. So...

----------------------------------------------------------

"He Came for a Drink...of Death!"
a pulp Western by professional pulp Western writer Tripton Duncan (Western writer of pulps)

“I’m looking for a killer.”

Christian encyclopedia salesman Skinny Muler spurted rancid beer out of his mouth and turned to gape at the tall, weather-beaten stranger who’d just sauntered into the Drunken Horse Saloon. His face was grizzled, his eyes a perpetual squint and his expression was that of a man who killed as easy as some men breathed. Good. Maybe he’d be in the market for a new set of encyclopedias.

“Mister,” he began, reaching for his satchel, “if it’s global warming you’re looking to disprove, I’ve got just the—"

"He was riding a horse," the stranger continued. "He's wearing a cowboy hat."



Larry Diddlesman, town barber and closet horse molester, sputtered a mouthful of whiskey onto his table. "Horse?" he stammered. "Hat? Why that sounds like Bellybutton Lint Leroy Baines!"



The stranger nodded. "That's him. Where is he?"



Pigtrough McWithers, one of Larry’s necrophilic drinking companions, sputtered the mouthful of turpentine he’d been drinking and bolted out the door. Larry shot a glance desperately to the side. "Bellybutton? Never heard of him."

"How come they call him Bellybutton Lint?" Skinny wondered. "Because he's got lint in his bellybutton?"

"No." The stranger rolled a homemade manure cigarette and lit it. "Because he's really tall. Now where is he?"



"I told you I ain't seen him," said Larry. Meanwhile, Johnson Nopenis at the other end of the saloon sputtered ranch dressing out of his mouth and ran out the door. 



"Then how did you know he was in town?" the stranger asked casually. "And how did you know he's going to the train station, to catch the 4:10 to Columbus?"

"I never said that," stammered Larry, sputtering whiskey and outhouse water. "Besides, he's going to El Paso!"

"Uh huh," the stranger drawled, plucking a piece of cowshit from his lip. "On the 4:10."

"He's getting on the 6:30!" spat Larry. He stood up, noticing an attractive foal mare outside (which sputtered its drinking water all over the porch in terror) and began running towards the door. "At the station by the post office. And I don’t even know him!"

“Go hump your horse,” the stranger said mildly. Outside, a terrified whinney erupted. Meanwhile, to the rest of the bar, the stranger announced, “If Baines comes back, tell him Bart Johnson’s in town, and he's coming to kill him for--"

"Say!" Skinny gaped, drool running down his chin. “Bart Johnson! Why you’re that poet from San Francisco!”

“What?” The stranger paused, then grabbed a drink of whiskey off the bar so he could sputter it out of his mouth. “Er, no. No, I’m the psycho killer from out Wichita Way, the one who shot—"

“You’re the one who wrote ‘Love is Like a Limp-Wristed Flower?’” Bartender Skunk Cassidy, busy cleaning up all the sputtered whiskey, beamed. “Why, that poem makes me sob like an Englishman!”

“I tell you, mister,” Skinny proclaimed, “your sonnets about how small testicles are a sign of a loyal heart are what gave me the guts to start beating my wife.”

“That ain’t me,” the stranger protested, careful to enunciate his bad grammar. “I, uh, I be Bart Johnson, meanest sonofabitch in the west.”

“The Bart Johnson who wrote an ode to President Garfield in otto rima?” Skunk wondered. “And the Bart Johnson who was caught having sexual relations with a maple tree? Say, did you know there’s one of those by the train station?”

Everyone waited. The stranger appeared to be doing some figuring.



“By the post office, right?” he asked Skunk, heading for the door.

Outside, the maple tree sputtered its whiskey.

When I Get Passionate (I Also Get Stupid)--Published: 2001, Park Lake, Inc.

George Edison walked into his swank Upper West Side apartment just after six p.m. He slung his jacket in a corner and turned on the television real loud. He made himself a bourbon and water, slamming ice cubes into the glass with maximum force and noise, and made sure to belch loudly several times before shouting, "Jessica! Where's my dinner?"

He heard nothing. Glancing about the apartment, he saw his wife's coat and floral-print purse lying on the sofa, next to a suit coat, pair of pants and silk underwear he didn't remember leaving there. Shrugging, he finished his drink and walked towards the bedroom.

The door was slightly ajar. He went to push it open, then paused.

"Is your husband home?" he heard a male voice asking. "I don't want him to catch us together, making love."

"No, lover," his wife's voice, unusually husky and labored, responded. "Don't worry. I locked the door hours ago, and he'll be at work until six."

"Then there's plenty of time for us to finish making love."

"Yes, lover. Plenty of time. For lovemaking."

George frowned again. Something seemed suspicious. He burst into the room and found his wife of six months in bed, the covers up to her shoulders. Next to her sat a balding, near-naked man with a thin mustache, in the midst of kicking his shoes and socks off.

“Jessica?” George intoned quizzically. “Didn’t you hear me come in?”

“Oh, hi honey!” she chirped, making shooing motions to the man next to her. “I was in the shower. Doing my hair. And making a plate of brownies. How was your day?”

“Jessica, I think…I think we need to talk.”

“All right, darling,” she said, making a warning gesture to the mustached man, who promptly dove into a closet two steps away from where George stood, shaking and scratching his head slowly. “But can we make this quick? The plumber is coming over to take a look at my pipes.” Jessica giggled obnoxiously at her witty double entendre, and then, remembering she was supposed to be playing it cool, tapered down to a series of annoying horselaughs.

“Jessica, I don’t know why, but I think…I think you’ve got something going on behind my back.”

“Goodness!” She looked as though he’d accused her of stealing the rags off a homeless orphan’s back, and George felt immediately guilty for making such a beautiful, faithful woman look so upset. “Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I mean, I work all day, and when I call you’re never here. I come home and you’re always in the shower, or in bed, or in bed with another man. I just don’t know what to believe any more.”

“It’s all in your head, darling.” Jessica, waiting for George to turn and look out the window, made seductive noises towards the man in the closet, who was hanging out the door, grinning widely and giving her the thumbs up. “You’ve been working too hard. You’re imagining things.”

“Am I?”

“Yes, dear, you are. Where did you get the idea I would ever be unfaithful to you?”

“I don’t know…” George shook his head moodily. “I wish I could believe you.”

“You can believe her, pal,” said the man in the closet. “She’s as faithful as I am to my wife.”

“Maybe…” George shook his head some more. “Maybe…”

“Maybe nothing. Oh pooh!” Jessica kicked her negligee under the bed and wrapped a robe around her as she got out of bed. “This is all so incredibly silly. Just look at the facts. I say I’m faithful to you. Benny says I’m faithful to you.”

“Benny? Who’s Benny?”

“Exactly!” she shrieked, hooking an arm around Bennie’s neck briefly to give him a long, lingering soul kiss. “Who is this Benny person you’re always going on about? You’re pulling it all out of thin air, dear! You need to relax.”

“Maybe you’re right,” George said, accepting a handkerchief from Benny so he could wipe his eyes, which were tearing up at the thought of the shame he’d just brought on the most wonderful woman in the world. He was beginning to feel ridiculous. “I’m sorry, darling. How could I be so insensitive?”

“It’s all right, darling,” Jessica cooed, patting him on the shoulder and leering seductively at Benny. “Why don’t you take a walk to clear your head? It might make you feel better.”

“Good idea, darling.” George went to go get his coat. “Will you start dinner while I’m out?”

“Um, probably not. Maybe you should eat out.”

“Another good idea. It’ll clear my head.”

“And dear? Make sure you’re not back until after nine? And knock first, so you don’t surprise me. Or Benny.”

“I will, dear.” George’s eyes were moist again, but this time with unbounded love for his radiant, slightly-perspiring bride. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, you know.”

“That’s nice, dear,” said Jessica, batting her lashes at Benny and shuttling him back into bed. “Now don’t make me put the chain on the door—nine p.m. Not a minute earlier. Larry the carpenter is coming over later to…”

“To check our your drawers?” Benny suggested?

George laughed out loud. That Benny. What a card…

An excerpt from my mystery-noir novel, So Young, So Tardy, So Dead: A Trip Duncan High School Mystery

The hallway outside Room 167 was dark and dank. The air was fetid. I lit a cigarette against the chill and slouched against the wall, pulling my slouch hat low over my face and balling my hands into fists. Two days’ worth of beard stubble rasped against my coat collar. My eyes were blue steel. My eyes bored holes into the mug in front of me. My eyes could beat the snot out of him if I so desired. And as it happened, I did so desire.

“You’re going to talk, punk,” I rasped. “We can make this easy, like a day at the beach, or we can make this hard, like breaking rocks with the heel of your palm. Your choice.”

“I just…I just need to go to the bathroom,” he said uneasily, producing a hall pass. I smirked, grabbed it from his hand and lit it on fire with my cigarette. Then I dropped my cigarette, so I had to use his hall pass to light my next one. Then I burned my hand on the hall pass. I cursed as I flapped my hand to put the fire out, hopping around in what I hoped was still a threatening, no-horse-manure-allowed manner. At first I was worried I might have lost some ground, but he still seemed suitably scared by my blue steel eyes and slouch hat, so I figured I wouldn’t have any trouble with him after all. Provided he started talking before I got tired of waiting and started using his head for a punching bag.

“I know you know what went down last night, when the dame got herself iced,” I rasped. “You know I know you know. So let’s cut the square dancing and get right to the second course. Empty your pockets and I won’t have to empty your skull.”

He blinked. “What?”

“Spill it, punk. What happened to the broad?”

“Who?”

“The broad, the dame, the femme fatale, the vixen who can make the earth move. Stop playing dumb, punk, or I’ll make sure you never think straight again after I pound your head into last night’s leftovers.”

He blinked some more. “I…uh, I don’t know to whom you’re referring.”

I lit a cigarette. “I think you do. And in a minute, I’m going to lose my temper. Only when I’m angry, my minutes seem a lot more like seconds.”

“So…you’ve already lost your temper? I’m confused.”

I smirked and lit a cigarette. “Keep talking dumb, punk. It’s better than a Bach concert.”

“You know…you, uh, already have a couple of cigarettes going.”

I looked down at myself. Sure enough, the punk was right. One in the lower lip, one in the left hand, one tucked behind my ear. No wonder my hair was on fire. I sucked deep on the cigarette in my mouth and coughed wildly, smacking my hair and putting the fire out. Sooner or later, I’d have to start smoking these things for real.

Never mind. He’d never notice. It was time to break out the big guns. I grabbed him by the shirt and thumped him against the lockers behind him.
“Start squealing, little piggy, or you’re never going to the market again.”

“Hey!” he yelped. “I have a hall pass!”

“Nuts to your hall pass, maggot. Tell me about the girl or your eyes will be playing tennis with your tonsils!”

“I don’t know what you mean!” The punk started sobbing hysterically. “You keep mixing your metaphors, your pronoun referents are ambiguous, and you use dime store clichés with which I’m not familiar! For God’s sake, talk to me like I’m a product of the 21st century!”

My eyes narrowed. So: he was an AP English student. I’d have to change my tactics.

“All right, dummy,” I rasped, lighting a cigarette (and then remembering my other one, and swearing, and hiding it behind my back). “Your main idea is what happened to that young woman Nancy Caskin. Now for your evidence, you’re going to tell me where you were last night.”

“And…and my link?” He looked up, starting to appear hopeful.

“It’s going to link where you were to where she was.”

“Okay.” He breathed more calmly. “Okay.”

Now it was only a matter of time. And a graphic organizer…

Next week: Opening STACS of Death!

From NPR's Contest Story Site: Three-Minute Fiction is back, and it's time for Round Five!

Our contest has a simple premise: Listeners send in original short stories that can be read in three minutes or less. We're looking for original work no longer than 600 words.

Each round, our judges throw out a challenge. This time, your story must begin with the line, "Some people swore that the house was haunted." It must end with, "Nothing was ever the same again after that."

Those lines were written by the judge for this round, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Cunningham....because he's a huge fan of ghost stories.

“Those Deadbeat Dead”

A short story

Some people swore the house was haunted. Most just swore.

It wasn’t so much the two-story brownstone’s foreboding façade, or its squeaky hinges or vampire, cannibal rats. It wasn’t even that it was built on top of an ancient Native American sacrificial site, and it wasn’t the regular parade of headless apparitions that got people boiling mad.

No, the deal-breaker for everyone, and what got Neighborhood Watch Patrolmen Rory and Buck knocking on doors up and down the block to raise awareness, was whether or not the ghosts were legal.

“Because we’re not just taking this country back for America,” Rory would tell people up and down Pleasant Street. “We’re taking it back from the undocumented undead too.”

Buck honestly didn’t give a shit whether the house had one ghost or two hundred, or whether the ghosts had all just taken the night shift at the local Wal Mart. He was only following Rory because he really wanted to get into Rory’s sister’s pants, and the afternoon before, he and Rory’s sister, a fox of an activist named Jessica, had gotten plastered on a cheap bottle of wine, during the course of which he’d been granted immediate access to her boobs while she’d speculated about what might be in the house, “people all dead and on welfare? That would leave this nation vulnerable!” Yet now, at three in the afternoon, with a pounding headache and a dry mouth, he was wondering if maybe he hadn’t overestimated the allure his investigations would have in Jessica’s mind when he returned to her later that afternoon.

Rory, however, was a man on a mission, unlikely to back down.

“It’s the principle of the thing,” he told Buck for the twentieth time. “The Constitution doesn’t say anything about whether or not the occupants have to be alive.”

“Activist judges, man,” said Buck, wishing Rory would shut up so he could go back to daydreaming about his pleasant afternoon with Jessica.

“Just wait until some activist judge manages to tack a bunch of bloodsucking, brain-eating, chain rattling Mexicans into the Fourteenth Amendment. Then what? They’re in our schools, our factories, our abandoned asylums...”

“Exactly,” said Buck. “Illegal. Also breasts.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Buck said. He ignored his friend’s stare and squinted up at the house. They were in front of it, and he could faintly hear the sound of the walls moaning and bleeding.

“Let me handle this,” Rory said, pushing past him and rapping against the dark mahogany in front of him. “Damned illegals. Probably socialist ghosts, too.”

Buck scowled, and thought of breasts some more.

The two waited a minute. Eventually, a transparent, cadaverous white man appeared with a blood-smeared mouth and sharp fangs, dressed in black, sporting a cape. “Visitors,” he intoned in a smooth, Eastern European accent. “Welcome to my home. I bid you enter! Mwa-hah-hah!”

“Good evening, sir,” Rory began in his best official voice. “My name is Rory Calhoun, and this is my friend Buck Mulligan. We’re canvassing the neighborhood, and we’re wondering if we could inquire as to the residency status of this house, specifically pertaining to number of people, both alive and dead, currently living in this fine establishment.”

“What?” The apparition, startled, drew back from the door. “Uh, sorry, no habla espanol. I, er, love Americanos. Go local sports team!” The door slammed in their faces.

Rory beamed triumphantly at Buck. “What did I tell you? That guy’s never seen the inside of INS, I tell you.”

“Oh yeah?” Buck retorted. “Well I’m seeing the inside of your sister tonight.”

Nothing was ever the same again after that.

Finis

Passages from my self-published romance novels, available for immediate purchase

Purchase the following titles wherever fine paperbacks are sold.

The Mysteries of Love
Published: 1997, Harcoyrt/Brase, Inc.

"I find myself attracted to you," he said, approaching her slowly and loosening his tie.

She blushed, knowing full well that he only loosened his tie when he found himself attracted to women. She also knew that, when attracted, he tended to make a move.

"I find myself also wanting to make a move on you," he added, removing his glasses and regarding her intently. She squirmed and blushed some more under his intent regarding, and realized that, within moments, what with the tie-loosening, glasses-removing and intent regarding, that there would soon be romance between the two of them...

Love in the Dot-Com Bubble
Published: 1999, Crown-Dundee, Inc.

Jameson leaned back in his office chair and laced his fingers together. "All right, Miss Templeton, in your duty of secretary, I'll be needing you to take appointments for me. Is that a problem?"

"No, Mr. Jameson," Miss Templeton said, clenching a pen between her teeth and making obscene gestures with it. "I think we understand each other quite well."

"I do too, Miss Templeton. In fact, I'll go even further: I want to sandwich in some lovemaking with you between my ten o'clock meeting and my teleconference with Beijing at eleven."

Miss Templeton examined Mr. Jameson's appointment book carefully. "I think we have just enough time, sir. I can push the teleconference ahead, if you think that's going to be necessary for us to finish lovemaking in time."

"I like your confidence, Miss Templeton. Put the teleconference at five after eleven."

"Yes sir, Mr. Jameson."

"And now, if you've done your job and scheduled the time, I will make sweet love to you."

"Yes, sir, Mr. Jameson. You will."

When I Get Passionate (I Also Get Stupid)
Published: 2001, Park Lake, Inc.

George Edison walked into his swank Upper West Side apartment just after six p.m. He slung his jacket in a corner and turned on the television real loud. He made himself a bourbon and water, slamming ice cubes into the glass with maximum force and noise, and made sure to belch loudly several times before shouting, "Jessica! Where's my dinner?"

He heard nothing. Glancing about the apartment, he saw his wife's coat and purse lying on the sofa, next to a pair of man's shoes, a suit coat, pair of pants and silk underwear he didn't remember leaving there. Shrugging, he finished his drink and walked towards the bedroom.

The door was slightly ajar. He went to push it open, then paused.

"Is your husband home?" he heard a male voice asking. "I don't want him to catch us together, making love."

"No, lover," his wife's voice responded. "Don't worry. I locked the door hours ago, and he'll be at work until six."

"Then there's plenty of time for us to finish making love."

"Yes, lover. Plenty of time. For lovemaking."

George frowned again. Something seemed suspicious...

TV Pilot Script: The D.C. Guys

A co-worker and I whipped this up last spring in a desperate attempt to cash in on the addled tastes of whoever picks shows for television and escape our humdrum jobs, not to mention avoid work. So...yeah. We avoided work, all right. For about ten minutes.

VOICEOVER: In 2009, a couple of disgruntled, possibly-loaded-on-the-job high school teachers packed up and went to Washington, D.C. Their mission: to expose any elements remaining of the evils of the Bush administration, and to get a cushy job in Legislative Affairs. Whatever the hell that is.

Today, they're living on the fringe in the nation's capital, watching, investigating, and racking up debt. They're currently wanted by a government that refuses to acknowledge their existence, and their savings are almost gone. If you have a problem, and no one else can help, and if you can find them...maybe you should hire...the D.C. Guys.

OPENING MONTAGE: Magnum PI ripoff music. Scenic shots of D.C. The Capitol Building. The White House. The Lincoln Memorial. A homeless guy pissing in a dumpster.

CHARACTERS:GREGG STUDLYBUFF, tall, ripped, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and two days' worth of beard. And sunglasses! Mirrored, aviator sunglasses. He leaps out the door of his Potomac-bank trailer wearing his mirrored, aviator sunglasses and spends an exciting minute and a half parallel parking his Dodge.

ADAM ACHIN', medium build, conservatively dressed, smoking a cigarette and staring arrogantly out the window of his swank, three-bedroom apartment. Behind him, a trio of Senegalese men implore him to come back to bed. Adam resolutely ignores them.

Gregg finally gets his car parallel parked. He steps out. Through the reflection of his bitchin' aviator mirrored sunglasses, we see the Capitol Building. Gregg smirks confidently, pulls out a cell phone and calls Achin'.

CUT TO: ACHIN'S SWANK APARTMENT. Achin answers the phone.

ACHIN: "Yeah."

SENEGALESE MAN/BOY #2 (from the bed): "Revenu au lit, le grand homme. Les heures sont peu."

ACHIN: "Quiet, lover. Daddy's working."

GREGG: "Achin'. I'm at the Capitol."

ACHIN: "And?"

GREGG: "Uh, they still won't let me in. The restraining order paperwork went through."

ACHIN': "Damn."

GREGG: "Yeah. So, what do you want for lunch?"

PREVIEW NEXT WEEK'S EPISODE: Club sandwich special! And a quick trip to the doctor's office for penicillin.

ROLL CREDITS

Having the Sex Talk with Your Kids

A How-to Guide

Have you had the talk with your kids yet? Dr. Digger Blue (PhD, University of Phoenix Online) explains why it's more important than ever to start a conversation about sex with your kids.

From The Oprah Winfrey Show, "How to Talk to Your Kids About Sex with a complete stranger and Oprah Winfrey."



When your child asks where babies come from, do you break a sweat and blame it on the stork? When your kid wants to know what a rim job is, do you immediately turn them to a back copy of “Car and Driver”? Dr. Blue, a trained family therapist certified through hours of watching “Full House” and "Family Matters" in his teens, says not to bring it up yourself is a big mistake.

“This is the information age we live in,” he said. “Your kids are two clicks away from finding out all about the Kama Sutra. If you don’t act first, you’re at a large disadvantage, and God knows, if you’re an average parent these days, you’ve got just about all the disadvantages you can stand: laziness, average intelligence, bad eating habits, kleptomania and that nagging gambling problem you haven’t had the moxy to tell the wife about.”

In his new book, “Let’s Talk About Sex, Not Baseball: A Modern Parent’s Guide to Raising Screwed-Up Children,” you get a few tips on how to prepare your child for the inevitable Next Sexual Revolution:

Make them listen to you. Don’t take no for an answer. Have your daughter put away the Barbi dolls; have your son ditch the baseball glove. Or vice versa. No time like the present: dive right into the subject. What’s your kid doing right now, for example? Playing with his friends? Mom, nothing will bring you closer to that kid right now than sticking your head out the window and yelling, “Hey Jimmy, we need to talk about genital hygiene.” Go ahead. Try it.

Euphemisms can work. Not so much for the kid: they’ve heard it all on the playground. But you might need to take baby steps in this direction, which is absolutely fine as long as you get the phrases straight and consistent. Appendix III of my book has a lexicon you can feel free to adapt for any purpose whatsoever. Just make sure to keep the noun-forms and verb-forms parallel with each other; I can’t tell you how embarrassing it is to say “Uff her from the bow-wow, son, but remember that the hoo-hah won’t go through without a little slick-juice” without including a proper direct object.

Dramatizations and demonstrations can work! Who cares what Freud thought? Or the AMA, or APA, or any of those Philistine tongue-cluckers! Why, with just a few action figures and the proper sound effects--Free excerpt ends here

Want more? Up yours: buy it here and bring me some moola!

Hubris Lit Mag Introduction, 2008-2009

The real adviser is too drop-dead lazy to write a real one, so this one was ghost-written by yours truly. Enjoy.

Putting together a literary magazine is hard work. Not as hard, I'm sure, as cooking up fourteen couplets on watching your acne explode in the mirror ("Pus n' Boots" by Mike Tugner, freshman--page 45), or visually depicting the world through a lens of distorted images, poorly-chosen color patterns and scrawls of the word "fuck" across a slashed canvas ("Fuck," by Dave Erickson, junior--page 2). But it's pretty hard.

The process through which the Hubris emerges is rigorous and unyielding. A high school literary magazine is a harsh mistress, and I have to take its demands seriously. Before I do anything remotely constructive, I usually take last year's issue out of the files. I page through its contents, reliving its glories and triumphs. I stroke its cover. I inhale the crisp scent of cheap ink and pulp-saturated paper. I take it out with me, to restaurants, topless bars and NRA rallies. I really make an effort to get to know it. And then, after the concerned phone calls and interventions are all over with, I'm ready to Advise.

Advise Literarily, as the case may be.

It all starts for real early August, when, in the midst of my summer break, I begin interrupting my midday, beer- and nacho-induced naps and start to remember that I do indeed have a job that needs doing. By mid-August, I'm getting up at noon and idly thumbing through back copies of Swank and Adam's Quarterly: A Magazine for Gentlemen, in a desperate search for inspiration or, barring that, something to rip off. When school starts, I start plugging the magazine, especially to my freshman classes, young and impressionable as they are. I cook up a series of promotional posters, designed to spark interest and self-confidence.

From September to November, I watch the work roll in. Usually it's submitted anonymously, to my mailbox, with attached codicils bearing instructions for truly appreciating the sweat and blood poured into these pieces. Like, "Teacher: My painting was done after a two-week breakup with my boyfriend, and I would really appreciate it if you'd remember he’s an asshole, please." Or, "Dear adviser: I couldn't come up with a rhyme for 'festering sore' that accurately depicted my feelings about my study hall teacher. Can you suggest anything?" It's communiqués like these that reassure me about the direction the Arts are taking as we Twitter and Facebook our way into the 21st century.

After all of this, truthfully, I don't really do a whole lot. I choose fonts. I decide on the order of the pages. I spend a few days agonizing over where on the page the page numbers should go, and in what font I should supply them. I meet with Lake Park's legal team to make sure we're not vulnerable in the face of any lawsuits over questionable content and poor font choices. I text my colleagues for feedback, and sometimes, I even get it:

ME: I don't really understand the allusion to Ramses in this one poem.
COLLEAGUE: That's just Suzi's style. She's a deep young thinker who's feeling her way towards a higher artistic consciousness.
ME: What are you getting that from?
COLLEAGUE: Dead Poets' Society. It's on TNT right now.
ME: Wicked.

And sometime in May, the presses roll, and the class of 2009 has plenty of lining for their birdcages and litterboxes.

Oh, sometimes there's quite a few ripples upon publication. Debates over symbolism, Dadaism and postmodernism. Occasionally, harsh words, fistfights and the occasional gang rumble do take place. But that's the price you pay for speaking your mind, and I’ve tried to remember that throughout my tenure.

COLLEAGUE: Don't take it so hard. You're doing fine. You're a deep thinker who's...
ME: You were going to say something about an artistic consciousness, weren't you?
COLLEAGUE:...Gotta go.

That said, I can say without a doubt that this year's edition is the best collection of this school's writing and artwork produced and submitted between the months of August and December, 2008, and published the following spring, that you're likely to see in your lifetime. Hopefully, President Obama's stimulus package includes a few bucks for us, so we can finally start our Dead Writers' Centerfolds collection. (First up: Virginia Woolf! Aroooo!) But all of that is looking towards the future, and right now, I'm supposed to be ruminating about the past year.

So, without any further ruminations, here is this year's copy of our pathetic school's excuse for a literary magazine (font: American Typewriter), and you are more than welcome to the wretched thing. I'll see you all in August. Save me a copy of Swank, will you?

Mr. What's-his-Name
Adviser

I've been screwing around on Facebook so much with the notes function, I think I've brainwashed myself. Rather than plan out lengthy pieces, with varying degrees of success, I find myself firing off 500-word billet doux on any number of subjects: potty-training my dogs, childhood memories, etc. As a result, I've got a mental drawerful of pieces I need/want/sorta might like to write, but for motivational issues:

1) "Banned spellbooks": My librarian orders a copy of Lovecraft's Necronomicon, and gets brought before the board on charges.
2) "My own personal red list" or "They call me Madame Defarge": people I want to get revenge on when I hunt them down. First on the list, that guy in the Annex bar in 2001 who wouldn't shut up during the football game. Also, anyone who bought real estate from 2002 to 2006.
3) "Little Jimmy." Little Jimmy is a student in my Historiography class who, I just found out, has enough credits to graduate already, and thus has no real incentive to pay attention, shut up, open a book or otherwise be a human being when around me. I'd like to write him up as a case study on asshole-ness.
4) "Debates I'd like to have": Me vs. Bill O'Reilly, 2005--"So, where are those WMDs, numbnuts?" Me vs. Rush Limbaugh, 2008: "Oooh, I'm so scared of you...good thing I'm not a plate of cheeseburgers and pain medication right now, or I'd be toast." Me vs. Renee Descartes, 1637: "Listen, bub, if you only go by empirical evidence, how the hell can you ever hope to promote government or social reform? Go back to playing with your dolls or something."
5) "Children's books I'd like to write": My Daddy Drinks Because I Can't Do Long Division.Followed by my best seller Mommy's Been in the car for Twelve Days and Daddy's Taking Me to Disneyland!

I am damned erudite. I'm an erudite bastard. I'm like an erudite sandwich with a side of loquacity.

And on the horizon, a beast slouching towards Bethlehem to be born: A novelist

Oh crap. It's almost November.

Oh crap. That means NaNoWriMo.

Oh crap. That means I'm going to be dumb enough to enter the contest for a third year in a row.

I. Am. An. Idiot.

It all started with Tso. All stupid things do. He told me, "So quit grousing about your job and go back to grad school. What's the worst that could happen? You flunk out? Which you probably will."

So I did. And I met Wiggo. Who, four years afterwards, while we were both struggling secondary educators, told me about NaNoWriMo: a novel-writing contest where quality is eschewed in favor of quantity, and a loyal legion of "writers" churn out crap copy and clutter the blogosphere and wannabe-publishing industry with their deadline-enforced literary efforts.

"I can't get into that!" I whined at the time. "I've got papers to grade! Plus, I'm starting a unit tomorrow, and I really should take a look at the book. Who is this Joyce guy anyway?"

"If you're that behind, then this won't matter," he said breezily. "In fact, it'll help. Joyce wrote in stream-of-consciousness. You can write that too. You'll have an inside look at the writer's mind. You'll be a star, a stellar nova, a Cultured and Distinguished Man of Letters. The students will revere you. You'll widen their horizons."

"Yeah," I said distantly, trying to watch House of Payne out of the corner of my eye.

"And you can get a t-shirt. Cheap."

I was immediately in.

This was \ two years ago. I took last year off. I had to. It was that traumatic.

So now I've got to start all over again.

Damn you, Tso. You suck.

In all honesty, writing a novel without clear direction seems to me as dangerous as driving a car with your eyes closed. Last time, I got far enough into my piece to realize that November ending was the best thing in the world for me. Without a forced conclusion to the charade of my "creativity," I'd never be able to end the damned thing. Mine involved a couple of brothers: one an alcoholic high school teacher (they say write what you know), and one a defrocked priest, both home over an extended weekend to deal with a family situation. I never figured out what that situation was. I never figured out why the priest was defrocked. I did manage to recount, in excrutiating detail, what the teacher liked to drink (Jim Beam on the rocks), and what the priest was wearing (jeans and a t-shirt), and what they both did the first few hours of Friday afternoon (teacher drank at a bar and ignored cell phone calls from a putative girlfriend; the priest went to the father's house and learned that he'd bought a new car).

Ulysses, it ain't.

And yet, to be candid, I had fun messing around with it. It became a kind of halfassed game: How far can I sink into this putrid collection of free-association and agonizingly-direct characterization, before I either get so sick of the whole thing as to vomit, or run out of time, or both? Not very far, as it turned out. But once you make the decision to write it and enjoy writing it, as opposed to writing to win a Pulitzer some day, the whole experience becomes, if not rewarding, certainly more comforting. Like riding on a second-rate roller coaster. Cheap thrills, no discernible payback, but you can wear a t-shirt bragging about your endeavor and people will at least raise an eyebrow in approval.

Screw it. I'm in. Hear that, Wiggo? Get your pencils sharpened, bitch. We goin' to have a cage match.

Confessions of an (un)aspiring novelist; Cholera in a time of (love?)

All week long, all I could think about was spring break, and now that I'm here, unlike other years where it's felt like charging headfirst into your favorite bar, surrounded by friends and dollar-a-pint prices, this time it's more like getting into a hot bath after a day working out in cold weather. Muscles relax. Blood pressure decreases. I wound up canceling my plans (yes, I'm the only person alive who has to call in sick for a party), watched TV for an hour (of all things, Scrubs episodes I already have on DVD), read for two hours and was asleep at nine a.m. Up this morning at 4:30, finished the book, made coffee and stared out the window impatiently, waiting for the newspaper. My old man, I do take after.

I do have a checklist, of sorts, for the next eight days. Projects and papers to grade, lesson plans to prepare, etc. But there are a few books to read as well. In a fit of ill-advised ambition, I offered my sophomores extra credit to read and review James Loewen's Lies My Teacher Told Me over break, then realized I'd have to read it myself. No matter. I'm a fan of revisionist history. Every time Rush Limbaugh or Anne Coulter sounds off about "liberals who want America to fail," I have to wince and shrug embarrasingly. No, I want to tell them, it's not about wanting your country to fail. It's about wanting the people who "run" your country to fail. When a president goes to war because God told him to, when an administration congratulates itself on a "reasonable proposal" by offering members up for testimony without oath, and when think-tanks doing precious little thinking give shitty advice on Capitol Hill, I find myself waiting for the fifth act, when hubris is punished and, if the righteous don't prevail, at least they get to say, "I told you so." I've been able to say such words to several people lately, but have gotten no joy out of it. Maybe when and if Patrick Fitzgerald goes after President Bush, I'll be able to crow a little.

But I digress. Before I can tackle Loewen and how my history textbooks got it all wrong, I had to finish Jane Smiley's Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Novel. I stumbled across the book in a Salon.com article reviewing books about how to read, and I picked it up more or less on a whim. I've read two Smiley novels, and neither made much of an impression on me. However, I've come to realize this had less to do with her writing style than it did with my attention span--I read both of them in grad school, on off-hours not spent studying or grading undergraduate themes, and just seeing her name and recognizing her cadence brings back some of those memories. Smiley's meditation on the novel and the novelist is a tad circular since she constantly brings up the same novels as examples, and she is fond of pointing out that (maybe) novelists are good at their craft because of their inability to engage successfully within their own social circle. But I could listen to her go on about the particulars of novels for twice as long as she does in the book. I like how she points out that most, if not all novels are destined for some level of failure, whether through the passage of history or the disparity of today's multimedia audience, and I respect how she willingly offers herself up for sacrifice by walking us through the composition and editing of her novel Good Faith (which I have not read).

What's probably the most alluring part of the book, though, is the last two-thirds, where she offers encouragement to would-be novelists by reminding them to write to please themselves rather than get rich and famous, and where she offers her own two cents on one hundred novels she read over a two- or three-year period. I've only glanced at a few of her reviews, and I plan on only skimming the rest, but I have to admit, I'm a sucker for reading about reading. Nick Hornby does it in The Polysyllabic Spree and Housekeeping vs. the Dirt; Jonathan Franzen bemoans both his own and the public's lapses in novel-reading in How to Be Alone, and while I have yet to finish it, Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading is no less intriguing for its social commentary about why we read and why we read what we read than it is for its insights into the psychology and even sexuality of reading (did you know your eyes are skipping all over this page even as you follow the words? or is that because you found some porn somewhere and are getting distracted? come on, share the wealth, asshole).

Gulity confession: I used to want to be a novelist. Sometimes, in spare moments, I still do. I've started maybe a dozen novels in my lifetime. Some fought for existence heroically, uttering strangled last words melodramatically on a death bed. Some came into existence, chuckled contemptuously at the lot that had been cast at them, and died without a murmur. The example that sticks in my head most vividly: in the summer of 1998, while working for a mosquito management company, I spent days trudging through forest preserves and suburban back yards spraying larvae and thinking up third-rate horror stories. One tried to become a book about a vampire who tries to give up blood drinking by switching to substitutes, only to have his possessive witch of a mother trick him into backsliding with a girl he's trying to start an affair with. I was smoking fairly heavily at the time and unsure of the teaching credentials that I was shopping around the state, and figured, way way in the back of my mind, that this could be a means to avoid the drudgery of work, of an alarm clock and a briefcase filled with essays on Why My Parents Don't Understand Me. What's always precluded me from pursuing a career in writing has been twofold: I find myself questioning why I want to do it in the first place, and I wrestle with the guilt that comes with struggling valiantly over something so middling while working in a profession that, by necessity, demands creativity, innovation and dedication. Elmore Leonard wrote some of his first work by hiding it in a desk drawer while at his office job. Geoffrey Chaucer was a civil servant his entire life; The Canterbury Tales were more of a hobby. Were I to do likewise, my students would be watching a lot more movies, and I wouldn't be able to sleep at night. Every time I sat down to write something halfway decent, Jack Roeser would leap up in my head, chuckling over how well-paid I was and how many kids would never learn to write coherently because of a middle-of-the-road drama about an alcoholic ex-priest visiting his home town.

Then along comes Smiley with words of encouragement, arguing that a finished first draft of a bad novel is in itself a success, that only through looking at the trees at first can one eventually see a forest. "Just write," she seems to be telling me. "The worst that can happen is you won't finish it, and that's already happened, what, a dozen times?"

Well, don't sit by the phone, Reading Public. "Write a novel" is on my list of Things to Do Before I Die, and I'll most likely get to it before long, but I'm still in the process of deconditioning my must-publish attitude towards the whole thing. I'm also having way too much fun reading novels, not to mention histories, biographies, essay collections and, yes, even the occasional student essay.

Among the pile: Maugham's The Painted Veil. I picked up a copy at Target on an impulse (and before anyone gives me any static about that, let me just point out that there hasn't been an independent bookseller in my neck of the woods in years, and that I regularly frequent the Chicago bookstores, not to mention independent sellers on line) and read it over the space of a week. I like Maugham. I don't know why, but I do. Of Human Bondage is a book I'd love to teach, although I have no idea how I'd go about doing it. Maugham has symbols, foreshadowing, style and substance, but it's all just so there. Things just happen. I think it was Jane Smiley herself who wrote the foreword to the Bantam edition, in which she points out that the progression seems more an afterthought, as if it's an excuse to watch the protagonist struggle with his passions, his lack of money and his ostracism. My cup of tea. The interior conflict has always been something that, when executed well, I can eat for breakfast.

The Painted Veil is different, though. Kitty Fane is caught in an affair with a big-talking diplomat, and in a fit of passive agressive punishment, her husband Walter, a doctor, takes her with him to treat cholera victims in an epidemic sweeping through rural Japan. Kitty is superficial, but changes when exposed to true suffering, true love, and the example of the Catholic church as it treats cholera patients, and she learns to see her husband through her new eyes. The ending could have been melodramatic, but Maugham does a better job wrapping up Kitty's journey of self-awareness than he does Philip's in Of Human Bondgage--she's lost too much and made too many mistakes to have a happy ending, but she can at least step in a new direction, and it's from there that I derived the most enjoyment.

Unfortunately, the one factoid that kept running through my head while reading was Maugham's homosexuality. Critics, I believe, keep returning to that as an explanation for his treatment of women: they're either complete and utter bitches, like Mildred Rogers, or confused yet immoral roundheels, like Kitty (and is it any accident that she's named after a slang term for either a prostitute or a vagina? I doubt it). So I was preconditioned to be skeptical of her portrayal, and I think I bought into it. Leafing through the pages once again, I still can't see deep pathos on her part, just a matter-of-fact account of her second thoughts and self-ruminations, almost as if she's going through the motions of having a soul.

But then, pathos in fiction has never been my strong suit. Like Eleanor of Acquitaine, I am not moved to tears, but I should at least be able to recognize when I should be so moved. It's something to work on, I guess. How else could I write my own deathbed scene, many years from now? "As the life left his eyes and his head slumped on the pillow, she felt as if she were floating over him, untethered, free yet precariously so, like a balloon drifting into the atmosphere, at risk of popping because of the inverted atmosphere." Sure, that will do the job just fine. God, I could have gotten a paper graded in the time it took to write that. Damn you, Roeser, you win this round.