The Post Where I Use Shame To My Advantage

So in the (extensive) list of things that I've started and not finished, creative writing sits plunk in the top five. I did take a writing class several years ago, which forced me to write a short story a week. (Not an easy proposition, take my word for it.) I continued to write for a while after the class ended, but then I just let it go. This, I know, is just shocking behavior for such a self-confessed slug, but it also meant that I have a couple of unfinished stories lying around. One in particular has been taunting me from the depths of my 1 Gig Lexar Jump Drive. "Finish me," it whispers. "I'm a reeealy good story. People want to read me." I take it out every so often and add a paragraph or two--after which the story gets even more grumpy about being unfinished--but haven't been able to finish the dang thing. So here's the deal. I can't trust the quiet come-ons of my short story about its desireability. ** I need some outside guidance and I also need the possibility of public shame for not finishing it. This is where you, my blog reading public come in. Help me help myself!

** I know that stories don't talk. I may be slightly (or more than slightly) off-kilter, but I'm not--at least that I know of now--crazy. Just pretty much a smart-ass who thinks she's amusing.

Without further ado, here is my partial story titled "THE BRIDGE"

Some days you wake up and wonder whose life you're living. When this happens, you roll around in the crumpled sheets and fret about your lack of job, your perceived ill health, The Significant Other threatening (again) to throw you out of the house. This life couldn't possibly be yours. There must be some mistake, some cosmic mix-up that will soon be corrected and then the six-figure salaried job, gorgeous lover and daily routine without acid reflux or migraine headaches will begin. The thought of someone rectifying this obvious injustice conjures the sound of angels singing a joyful chorus. Then The Significant Other throws an elbow in your general direction and barks out an order to quit your flailing and moaning. No doubt about it, this is definitely your life.

It's any given morning and you and The Significant Other go about your morning dressing and bathroom routine, which is as intricately choreographed as a fourth and long Hail Mary play. As the two of you wordlessly trade positions at the sink or wipe down the condensation from the mirror while the other is in the shower, you notice that you’ve become a little bit like the plastic players on a foosball table--unable to advance, only able to go back and forth and spin.

As the climax of the morning’s event, you both end up at the kitchen counter. You fixing some heavily blackened toast and The Significant Other slurping up Captain Crunch directly from the bowl. The Significant Other usually takes this opportunity to point out, for at least the hundredth time, that you don't have a job and that you'd better get your lazy ass out to make the rounds, network, glad hand and generally debase yourself to whatever hiring director has a few crumbs to dispense today. This reminds you of something one of your college friends once said about job hunting really just being prostitution in a suit. And while the process does make you feel tawdry and sordid, mostly it's taught you that you're a shitty salesperson. You couldn't sell a life preserver to a drowning man. Somehow, this thought makes you feel worse.

You are most likely wearing your best navy blue interview suit--the one with the subtle pinstripes. The Significant Other is surreptitiously making sure the suit is cleaned and pressed, as if you were incapable of being anything other than a cave dwelling Neanderthal. You wonder if just as a joke, some morning you should emerge from the closet dragging a large wooden club and grunting unintelligibly. You decide that The Significant Other would neither get the joke nor see the humor in it. The Significant Other is a proponent of the pinstripe (who says that it conveys a subliminal feeling of power and competence) but not a big fan of comedy.

You assure and reassure The Significant Other that you have places to go, appointments to make and a full day's agenda to keep you busy. Inside, you're cataloging the places that are open at 7:30 in the morning and don't cost anything. It's a very short list.

The final step to the ritual is the kiss; the kiss that is devoid of any warmth or meaning, but the absence of which would mean that this dying relationship is truly deceased and not just limping along. You both are so conflict averse that it will take one of you finding someone else to finally break it off. At this point, you're fairly certain that The Significant Other can't be too far away from this possibility. Who are you kidding? The only qualification to be considered better than you is having a job.

You do have a routine of sorts for leaving the house. You’ve made sure the night before that the trunk of your car is packed with a change of clothes and some snacks for the afternoon. You make quite a show of confirming that the Italian leather briefcase that The Significant Other gave you last Christmas is brimming full of resumes and lists of your current references. While The Significant Other is ostensibly finishing up the last of the morning chores, you back out of the driveway (waving frantically like a pageant contestant) and point the car toward the city’s center. Once you’ve driven to the end of the street, the day’s first decision presents itself. Should you go right, toward the river and the city parks, or should you go left, toward the business district?

Some days you do make a token effort in the job search. You’ve long ago used up any goodwill that you had with your employed friends, so networking is no longer an option. But there are times when you’ve carefully circled ads in the help wanted section, so you dutifully make the rounds of the sleek, glass-sided skyscrapers with resume in hand. You feel like a sort of modern day tinker—pushing your wares around in a decrepit wagon and begging for someone, anyone, to sample something.

This particular day, though, you’ve not given a real thought to landing another job. Waking up with nagging doubts about your life seems to sap all the confidence out of your body even before your feet hit the floor for the first time that day.

You turn the wheel of the car to the right and press the accelerator with particular gusto and decide that you'll stop by your favorite greasy spoon to get a Styrofoam cup full of coffee nearly as thick as mud. You'll banter with the owner, a beefy linebacker type, and ask him for the thousandth time if you can have a job slinging hash. He'll tell you that you're completely overqualified and that he knows you'd bolt the first chance you got. He has no idea that slinging hash just might be your dream job, but you also know that The Significant Other, your parents and the rest of society as a whole would consider it demeaning. For some reason their opinions mean something to you.

You make the rounds at the greasy spoon and it all happens exactly the way you pictured it earlier this morning. The owner slides the morning's paper across the counter to you along with your cup of joe. He always insists that you take it. On the house, he says. He knows how long you've been out of work and that you spend most of your days hiding out. You can't decide if you want to bring The Significant Other here to meet him. It might be just like the Irresistible Force meeting the Immovable Object. Or, then again, you might just want to keep your two worlds separate.

You take the paper and your coffee and have a seat in one of the booths to follow your ritual for reading the morning's paper. This means skipping the front page and immediately pulling out the Metro section. What's happening in the sleepy little town where you live is more important to you than reports of disasters from some far-away land. This is one of the guiding principals of your life—worry about your immediate surroundings first.

The Significant Other doesn’t subscribe to this theory and will spend hours collecting signatures for a petition to ban land mines in Afghanistan, but won’t help the elderly lady next door unload the groceries from her car. You can’t really blame The Significant Other. Someone has to worry about the big, global issues. But no one should misunderstand, you do worry about the decimated rainforests and global warming and endangered spotted owls, it’s just that those things are so much less tangible than what tax measure the city council is going to pass next week.

It’s hit or miss with Metro. Today, the front of the section is completely covered with an article about “THE BRIDGE.” Well, you might be a little guilty of exaggeration. It’s never printed all in caps surrounded by quotation marks, but that’s the way everyone says the words. “THE BRIDGE” is your town’s only claim to fame and it’s been a source of pride for over a century. It was the first suspension bridge built in the United States and has been in continuous use since 1870. As a child, you were a little hazy on the whole concept of what a suspension bridge really was. It was the biggest disappointment of your second grade year when the view from the window of the yellow school bus was of an ordinary bridge, made of metal and brick and very much connected to the two banks of the muddy river below. All the way from school you had been almost delirious thinking that you were going to see a levitating bridge and wondered how people and cars went across if it wasn’t attached to anything.

You’ve come a long way since then and have made yourself something of an expert on “THE BRIDGE.” You might just be the only one who knows the full name of the engineer who designed and built it and who also knows the story of how it was named. A man pulled an entire family from a burning building and then went back in to save the family pet. It was the rescue of the dog that finally did him in. He survived the incident, but died several days later of burns he sustained while pulling the frightened dog out from under the kitchen table. The town was so taken by his heroics that they put his name on the largest and as of yet unfinished structure. His name was Robert Jebadiah Constantino, but who really wants to say, Let’s go down to the Robert Jebadiah Constantino Memorial Bridge? About twenty years ago, the idea surfaced as if from nowhere, to simply call it Bob.

You’re sitting in the booth at the greasy spoon and begin to think about naming a bridge Bob. The irreverent idea to give a landmark a three letter, one syllable name did give you a thrill when you were a teenager, but you have to admit that the nickname doesn’t do much for you now. It seems a shame to reduce the sacrifice of one heroic man to little more than a joke. But 1869 was a very long time ago and you suspect that people forget what the word memorial in a name really means.

Why, you think, are the journalistic geniuses at the local gazette running an article about “THE BRIDGE” today of all days? More than anyone except the sweet, arthritic old ladies at the local historical society, you know that it isn’t the anniversary of anything connected with the structure. You begin to read and note that the article is both exhilarating and horrifying. It does a fabulous job of laying out the history of the bridge and brings to life poor, doomed Mr. Constantino’s actions, but a quarter-page into the story, you realize that only a fresh tragedy or tragedies could be the reason for such in-depth coverage.

The next paragraph hits you like a slap in the face. Two people in the last week have used “THE BRIDGE” as a springboard to the ultimate solution to all their problems. The reporter has a particularly poetic way of assembling a sentence and in your mind’s eye you are standing with the first man, alone, on the railing of “THE BRIDGE” looking at the water below—how it seems like a flowing green carpet, wondering how something that benign looking could actually kill someone. You can feel the gritty bricks underneath your hand but the sensation seems more like a dream than reality and what seems most real to you at this moment is your despair. The misery feels like a living scarf, wrapping itself around and around your neck until you know that falling free into the slow-moving green water would be a relief from its choking pain.

You willfully pull yourself out of your inner view. It has been a long while since you’ve let your fertile imagination run away from you like that. But then again, you’ve always been sensitive, even as a child. The family cat once captured a mouse and you caught him in the act of pinning the poor little rodent to the ground. You could see its tiny heart pounding at the base of its little throat and you started forward to keep the cat from killing it, but your father stopped you with a simple explanation. There are predators and there is prey and nothing you can do will ever change that, he calmly explained. Saving one mouse isn’t going to change the cat.

You’ve spent the last twenty years trying to reconcile how you feel about that one statement with what you know about the ways of the world.

Your mother always described you as a dreamy child and the other mothers would nod along, as if this description was tattooed across your forehead. This one will probably think up the cure for cancer someday, she’d say with pride. If your father was present during these discussions, he’d shake his head with resignation and say that the only thing you might think up was a way to pull your head out of your own ass.

There are days when you believe your mother is the only one who really understands you, but while her belief in your greatness keeps you in the game, it is also your Achilles heel. Your father’s disenchantment with you dimmed long ago. He barely bats an eyelash when you come around for the zillionth time asking for money. This is the behavior he expects, but your mother is another story all together. Each time you talk with her on the phone and you have to admit (again) that you haven’t found a job, you can hear her almost imperceptible sigh as if it were a gunshot—the bullet speeding straight toward your heart.

The next section of the newspaper article is even worse than you could have imagined. The second person to commit suicide was a woman and the writer coolly reports that at least fifteen people watched her plunge to her death. There is a quote from a young man who was playing Frisbee. I saw her climb onto the railing, he said, but me and my friends thought that maybe she was just part of a photo shoot. You get the feeling that what he witnessed was not so much horrifying to him as it was voyeuristic.

You imagine that the girl climbed onto that railing on a cool but sunny early spring day as a sort of an experiment, a test to see how many of the happy automatons cavorting around the park would notice her. Was she the mostly invisible girl she believed herself to be or was she really gloriously conspicuous? Only one way to find out. She hoisted one leg onto the railing and pulled herself onto the flat concrete surface. She rested there for a moment to collect her thoughts and steel her nerves and then in one swift motion stood, balanced as a gymnast. It wasn’t the girl or her position on the edge that caught the attention of the people that saw her before she jumped. It was the crimson coat she was wearing, the bottom billowing and undulating in the wind like a superhero’s cape. You stop to look at the accompanying picture of the victim, stare at her eyes mostly obscured by lank brown hair and know before you read the next sentence that there was no way that coat belonged to her. And sure enough, you’re right. Her mother couldn’t understand why her daughter had taken her best coat—the one she wore only on special occasions and spent most of its days under plastic in the hall closet. She knew that coat was my pride and joy, the dry-eyed mother told the reporter. Why couldn’t she have taken her own ratty old leather bomber?

You finish the piece, the rest a recitation of a few dry statistics and a listing for the local suicide hotline. You’re sick at heart and your stomach seems to be rejecting the coffee you’ve drunk by making it burble uncomfortably in your belly. The thing you didn’t see in the appalling article was an idea of how to keep anyone else from using “THE BRIDGE” to do the same thing. Isn’t this what happens? Someone has enough gumption to actually kill themselves and this success causes others to contemplate taking their own lives. In your experience, it takes a leader to make most people follow.

So what’s your next step? You’ve got that antsy feeling you used to get when you were in college. It always hit when you knew you had finals and term papers and a million things you really needed to be doing, but your roommate or some friend would call needing a battery jumped, a tire changed or their lost dog found. The Significant Other wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that right now the proper thing to do would be to get yourself out of the vinyl covered booth and over to the nearest high rise building to beg someone for a job.

The owner looks at you with a concerned expression as you exit the diner. You normally spend the majority of the morning pouring over the morning paper and bantering with the waitresses. You give a distracted wave and head to the car and then, almost magically, you find yourself at the sitting in the parking lot of the park that includes “THE BRIDGE” and realize that you must have driven here in a daze, as if your car was the equivalent of the hero’s horse in the old westerns. The weathered Mazda just knows the place you most need to go and delivers you with no conscious input on your part.

You step out of the car and wander to the edge of the manicured lawn that is still covered in early morning dew. The Significant Other’s voice comes to you unbidden while you hesitate with one foot still on the concrete and the other poised above the sodden meadow. Do you know how much money those shoes cost? You’ll ruin them for sure and don’t come crying to me for money to replace them. Normally, a thought like this would pull you back in line, but it’s as if The Significant Other’s harangue is nothing more than the buzzing of a fly. A nuisance. Irrelevant. You can almost hear the crescendo of orchestral instruments as the sole of your shoe makes contact with the grass.


Does this story deserve to be finished? trashed?