Some things I wrote from the age of 21 to 27.

I wrote this story called “Sunshine” about a guy who picks up a hitchhiker and they move in together. They drink too much and she becomes a prostitute and he waits for her on the street corner. She doesn’t like to be alone but he finally leaves her to get a job because he doesn’t want her to be a prostitute anymore and when he comes back she gone. Then he goes looking for her and finds her with a bunch of biker types and they beat him up.

I wrote this screenplay about Seymoor, a leading man who wanted to get out of a movie, but they wouldn’t let him, so he drove to Chicago where they didn’t make many films. In the process his fancy car became a ’79 Impala. Once there he befriended Sammy, a gas station attendant who took him home. When Sammy’s wife sees Seymoor she says, So you’re the tall dark stranger and I’m supposed to fall in love with you. They have sex in the next scene. At one point he’s playing chess with Sammy and Sammy says, “This isn’t a movie” to which Seymoor responds, “Are you kidding? Of course it’s a movie.” Eventually he goes back to Hollywood, because he belongs there.

When my girlfriend was traveling in Europe I sent her letters, at least ten pages long written by hand, mailed poste restant to whichever town she was heading to next. They weren’t really letters so much as diary entries. She rarely wrote back; she wasn’t much of a writer. But when she returned we got engaged, or something like that.

I wrote this other screenplay about a genius who wrote beautiful poetry and prose effortlessly. He was a junkie. There was also a waiter who wanted to write but couldn’t. The waiter was beautiful but his poetry was horrible. There was the waiter’s girlfriend who owned an art dealership and recognized the waiter’s lack of talent. There was the woman who despised art and set out to destroy the junkie. She was kind of an even dominatrix type. At one point she says, “Fuck art, let’s dance.” Eventually the dominatrix hooks up with the art dealer. Then the junkie tells a woman to destroy his notebooks. She obliges him but has mixed feelings so she burns only half of them. There’s a scene where a man in a wheelchair escapes from the local jail.

When I broke up with my fiance I wrote a series of short stories called “Anatomy of a Breakup.” In the first one, three months after the breakup, the boy moves in with a transexual prostitute who he services in exchange for drugs. In the second one, six months after the breakup, the girl comes to visit the boy in a small fictional town in Utah where he’s living in a trailer. They go for a hike and see a bear. The third story is five years after the breakup. The girl is about to get married to someone who doesn’t love her. He’s not curious about the pictures she keeps of her ex-boyfriend. The ex-boyfriend is now a bartender in a dive bar in Oakland. He bartends during the day and goes to the other side of the bar in the evening and sleeps above the bar at night. At the end of the story the girl gets married and the boy breaks all the bar windows during a storm. In the fourth story it’s twenty-five years later and the woman is dying and the man hasn’t turned out as badly as he could’ve, but he’s lonely. He goes to visit and he’s telling her a story in the hospital and doesn’t notice that she dies in the middle of the story. In the fifth story the man is having a dream and the two are together again but then he wakes up in a hotel room, staring from the window into an echo chamber.

I sent my ex-fiance all the stories. She responded with emails from her new boyfriend’s email account.

I wrote a long short story based on the three months or so I spent in a mental hospital when the state first took custody of me. It became the first chapter of my novel, A Life Without Consequences.

I wrote a lot of poems. Every year I would go to the printer and take all the poems and stories I’d written and bind them in a spiral notebook. I still have the box of those notebooks. A lot of the poems are about gambling, temp work, financial hardship, my ex fiance, and the world not giving me the things I felt entitled to. I never wrote about writing.

I wrote a screenplay about the time my friend J. and I hitchhiked to California. I was fourteen and he was fifteen and J. was molested by a trucker, but he didn’t tell me about that for a long time. We were arrested in Las Vegas and sent home, separately on Trailways busses.

Answering phones for Kaplan Test Prep. in San Francisco I wrote a fifteen hundred word story about the last summer I spent with my fiance, living in Chicago. We were beautiful, and poor, and beautifully poor, and filled with all the perfect misunderstandings of that age group. Two people in their early twenties who don’t know how to have a relationship, trying to figure out what that means. In the end, I think she had a better idea of what she wanted than I did. She wanted what her parents had. I wanted what her parents had too, but I didn’t really know what that was.

Around that time I wrote a story about a man living on top of a bar who waits at home every night for his ex to call him. He lives in the midwest and she lives in California and every night she goes home with another man and calls him while she’s having sex. One day she meets someone nice and doesn’t call him. He responds by robbing a house. She calls the next day while having sex with the nice guy and promises she’ll never not call him again. The name of the story is “Long Distance.”

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Rumpus original art by Rob Kimmel.

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