Grandfather

My grandfather, Bernard “BJ” Alcott, edited the newspaper in Maryville, Missouri, the town where my father was born in 1941. Even before he’d hit puberty at full swing, my father, too, joined the buzz of the office. My grandmother, Muriel, weighted by the era she’d been born into, wrote poems in between the wants and needs of three children, in the shadow of her husband, a man who commanded the room with an eviscerating wit. His place at the newspaper negated the very possibility of hers, a fact that left her stifled. Later, my father speculated she’d felt trapped between these roles of artist and mother, writer and wife. Muriel made it clear to him on several occasions—ones she would subsequently apologize for with decades-old regret; with an aging, aching begging—that she wished for a life that had bloomed in another direction. After BJ died, she became the writer she’d always been, secured columns in regional papers in Arizona, Arkansas, back in Missouri. Her poetry in these years bleeds her late husband as she navigates the guilt that lies in filling his absence; the hand on the wild expanse of the bed in the middle of the night that remembers, once again, she is alone.

When my father David left home, he set out to study writing; this aspect of his family, at least, he was unable to rebel from. He would come home unannounced in irresponsibly purchased sports cars, smoking cigarettes, and take his two younger, well-behaved sisters for drives on the residential streets. They admired and feared him with equal greatness. “Black sheep” was a title afforded early and accurately, and he didn’t speak to one of his sisters for many years. He went on to report for Radio Free Europe in a Czechoslavakia where he was unwelcome, where men with long guns threatened his life; he wrote for Cesar Chavez’ newspaper; he saw the glory of Fleet Street in London at its peak; he drank in the world hungrily, and often without other food. I mean to say here that my father gave up much for his pursuit—namely the financial/emotional/geographical stability that many of us name the qualifications of an adult. I was born in 1988, in my father’s 48^th year, and he tried with all his might to be a father to me and a husband to my mother (whom he met, I might mention, at the newspaper where they both reported).

Father

A taut tether never suited my father; they divorced quickly, and he took to leaving town for months at a time, living out of an overflowing van. The small town in Northern California where we settled did not offer much in terms of what he deemed important reporting, but ultimately he returned. He took a job at the tiny, hokey local courier, and proved himself once again. When he began an unflagging investigation of a local property scandal, he uncovered one of the largest incidents of voter fraud in California, smack dab in the middle of cheery suburbia. He finally received the Pulitzer Prize nomination he’d always dreamed of— as well as a quick termination from the paper, which operated under the malign influence of the town old-timers who didn’t appreciate where he’d put his nose.

In my dreams sometimes, I am still in the newsroom with my father, writing stories under his desk like I did, at the age of six, feeling a kind of lucky and contained that adult life rarely furnishes. I peek through his gigantic legs and I listen to the song of his word processor. Maybe it’s now I should say that my father’s been dead for nearly eight years. Maybe I should offer that the only person I wanted to call when my book sold was my father, and that celebrating emerged as a complex art.

Daughter

At his funeral, my grandmother’s keens came from her body with progressing volume and none of the censorship so often present in our culture’s mourning rituals, adding another tremor to the already unsteady boat on the body of water that accepted his ashes. In the phone calls I received until she died several years later, she told me she often woke up forgetting he was gone, that she wished she knew where to send the articles she still clipped for him, that her world was not the same without his brain around to interpret it, that she hoped he’d forgiven her.

My father desperately (albeit briefly) researched our ancestry, hoping to reveal the definite path between Louisa May Alcott and the rest of us that his father had insisted to be true and real. This was pre-internet, and the only inklings he found were tenuous, but still, we all liked to believe we descended from that legacy. My grandmother sent me several editions of not only Little Women, but Louisa’s other works: Under the Lilacs, Morning Glories and Other Stories, and Transcendental Wild Oats: A Chapter from An Unwritten Romance. My father studied the life of Amos Bronson Alcott as well, and took heart from the man who rigorously schooled his children in art, nature, decency, and thought, all in the context of a life-long poverty that mirrored my father’s.

Grandparents' love note

These are the letters that form my name: my grandfather’s swift editorial ability from behind his large typewriter, my grandmother’s turns of love and sacrifice and art, the unsuccessful queries my father sent out for books that never published, the silent words we send to people that don’t breathe anymore.

I don’t write with anger or malice. I only wanted to direct a light towards the story that peeks out from the nearly identical name I now share with another writer.  I hope that, should she ever stumble across my book on a shelf, she might finger the first page, remember this mythology I’ve presented, and decide to read on. From what I read, I understand “Kate Alcott” commands five novels and 70-odd years under her original name. I’m glad her book found its path home, and I wish her congratulations on her recent success. But my name means a great deal to me. I’m the last Alcott in our family, in fact, and I’ve never met another—Alcotts are few and far between. For me, it’s a badge that comes with wild dreams, many unfulfilled; with the silence that comes just after the final period is placed and just before we move to face what we’ve created; with hopes that curve around love, around the people we try to be and the people we’re not.

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Directly out a sliding glass door roars the Brooklyn Queens Expressway. Sometimes it’s a comforting mythology, all the people going away and coming back, and on other occasions I resent the trembling it incites–I supply enough of that on my own. The walls are decidedly bare, save the shelves I mounted to hold my books. I don’t hang photographs of friends anymore, not because I don’t love them, but because I understand thoroughly now that families built on circumstance are just that. Three blocks away is a park Walt Whitman commissioned, and I sit on a bench I imagine he loved particularly, make my own promises to California, and negotiate poems concerning my longitude and latitude. The children there are spectacular: clean, loved, laughed with. The other Saturday I watched a little boy run up a hill and call back to his friend, some twenty feet behind: “Are you having fun, Marcus? Are you warm? Are you happy?”

***

At this time last year and through the spring, I was wrestling with a longer work in Fayetteville, Arkansas. I spent afternoons scribbling in a hazy pool hall that didn’t allow women until the late seventies, where men sat on ducktaped barstools quite content to die under signs that read “Harassing Me About My Smoking May Be Hazardous to Your Health” and “A Quaint Drinking Village with a Fishing Problem.”  Almost exclusively the only other females that entered were either grizzled into a kind of gender ambiguity or young prostitutes with pretty eyes but bad teeth, and both sorts looked at me like they either wanted to drink my blood or draw and spill it. The men, the majority of whom were there every day, betted hundreds of dollars on an involved game of pool called Golf that lasted upwards of three hours. They wagered more than they could afford, and frequently I overheard requests for loans, which were gladly given by those who also understood the need to make solid things move and connect. The only immaculate aspects of that place were the felt on the tables and the clean tinks of one beer bottle saluting another. The bartenders generally turned their heads when fights broke out, which they did in spades, and almost predictably right around when the sun went down and the losers started panicking. At this point I started back to the leaning house where I stayed and wrote some more in one of the porch’s several half-broken camping chairs. Sometimes I stopped to consider the pulsing coming from upstairs, where my roommate, a twenty year old with a mess of brown curls and a room painted pink and turquoise and yellow, took Adderall and made insane music under the title of Messy Sparkles.

***

I returned to San Francisco in time for the summer, to a railroad flat in the heart of the Mission District that featured, in dingy lights, a revolving cast of tenants navigating different varieties of lost; I felt grateful for the lock on my door. I kept the windows open and listened as the bars full of people I’d kissed let out and the transvestite just across the way screamed into a telephone. “GIRL,” he’d screech-gossip all day long, “THAT NASTY, NASTY, NASTY.” A filthy string of bells hung on the front door, which quivered and slammed, and two dusty cats ran up and down the hallway all evening. On some nights their owners, a couple descending darkly into their thirties in the back room, laid on the floor by the heater with telling dilated pupils and transmitted drugged murmurs that snuck into my room through the vent. I digested the many rhythms as best I could and hit the keyboard with exaggerated force.  With the city’s rare gift of a warm evening, I’d sit out on the marble stoop in sight of the library’s elaborate crown molding, but it was nearly impossible to accommodate my narrative there; there was always someone beautiful stopping by and leaning across the iron gate, on their way to languish in the park or on some rooftop, and one day I woke up and realized that I’d spread all things interior and precious so thin they’d snapped. I’d been greedy with California’s gifts and could no longer accept or value them, and so when a girlfriend of mine with red hair and an unyielding Michigan-bred optimism said New York, I said yes.

***

I could claim that I started writing seriously in my hometown, but I’m hesitant to prescribe a location or assign an origin; the way I see and know it, words always begin in the strange nooks of our bodies and work their way outward. In any case, growing up, I put words to paper on the aching docks of a filthy estuary everyone felt content to accept as a river. It ambled weakly beneath views of a decomposing railroad that hadn’t carried anyone in years and a long-obsolete mill, the roof of which proved accessible by a series of complicated maneuvers and angled downward so that it provided privacy like a city all its own; I wrote there, too. Later, a tiny, sweltering bedroom in Southern California that I sloppily painted olive green, the large windows of which opened onto the farmer’s market where I spent my little money on sunflowers; airports and airplanes, always generous with time and space; busses and trains full of people smelling like too many years and breathing on each other. Once, when I began weeping on a crowded 6 or 7 snaking its way down from the Haight and through the bad stretch of middle Market street, an old man looked me boldly in the eye and told me to give it to god; I nodded like I understood and wrote that down, too.

Tonight, it’s Brooklyn, in a bland modern building that rose to face six lines of freeway traffic six years ago, the walls unadulterated though there’s still much else hanging in front of me, my bed made and clean and ready to lie in, and two terrariums of green spikes and dirt and pebbles that don’t ask much. I look up at them fondly, relegate the winter to whoever wants it, and think: little, but green, but growing.

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Insert your own words in the spaces below to make a wacky story!

The verandah was large and layered with many different coats of peeling white paint. The light in the morning was playful through the maple leaves, but at dusk it was slow and ADJECTIVE DENOTING TIME OR DEATH. Jane-MONOSYLLABIC FEMALE NAME liked to sit in her grandfather’s rocking chair and feel the grooves in the wood which years of sitting had left behind.

Before he died of OLD TIMEY DISEASE WITH FATALISTIC NICKNAME WHICH IS NO LONGER A THREAT, he sat out there all day and only left to eat supper of MONOSYLLABIC, SOMEHOW FRIENDLY SOUNDING FOOD. Often, the COLOR boy who helped out around the house would come out after his chores were done and sit with the old man and play music that was at once beautiful and ADJECTIVE DENOTING TIME OR DEATH. That summer, Jane-MONOSYLLABIC FEMALE NAME FROM ABOVE liked to walk down to the LARGE BODY OF WATER WHICH IS NOT AN OCEAN OR LAKE AND HAS A CURRENT THAT IS MOURNFUL, take off her shoes, and think.  She thought of many things: all the songs her mother had taught her over the years, how everything seemed to change when the firebugs came out, and the stories she’d heard on the radio about LARGE CITY IN A EUROPEAN COUNTRY BUT LET’S BE HONEST IT’S PROBABLY FRANCE. What made her the happiest to think about was the preacher’s son, MALE NAME ENDING IN Y OR SOMEHOW EVOCATIVE OF A LARGE CAT, and the way she felt deep in her bloomers (in what her oldest sister called the KITCHEN APPLIANCE) when he looked up from the porch where he spent most afternoons reading EXTREMELY  OLD AND INFLUENTIAL WORK OF FICTION; one afternoon, he invited her to sit and read her a portion of Revelations, but she couldn’t focus, her KITCHEN APPLIANCE grew hot and moist, and it was all she could do not to writhe or cry out with yearning.

Those nights, barefoot and feeling the humidity through her light cotton dress, she sighed and dreamed of the far-away LARGE, SALTY BODY OF WATER and wondered when the day would come that a man would see her KITCHEN APPLIANCE, but then she felt guilty, rushed home to kiss her Pa goodnight, and studied her EXTREMELY OLD AND INFLUENTIAL WORK OF FICTION THAT I ONCE RIPPED A PAGE FROM SO I COULD ROLL A JOINT IN MY HOTEL ROOM until her head hurt and she’d forgotten all bout her dumb ‘ole KITCHEN APPLIANCE and the preacher’s son’s eyes, which were the color, she imagined, that the LARGE, SALTY BODY OF WATER THAT SURROUNDS THE UNITED STATES must be.

As is always the case, the blackberries that hadn’t been picked got too ripe and fell off the bush, the firebugs went back to wherever the firebugs go, and June became July, and July, August. In the fall Ma got sick with OLD-TIMEY DISEASE WITH FATALISTIC NICKNAME (THAT ELICITS HUNGER, ODDLY ENOUGH) WHICH IS NO LONGER A THREAT,  and Jane-MONOSYLLABIC FEMALE NAME FROM ABOVE had to leave school and take up a job down at the INDUSTRIAL SPACE WHICH NO LONGER EXISTS IN AMERICA THAT WHITMAN PROBABLY JERKED OFF ALL OVER. Pa was more often than not drunk off PLANET THAT WANES AND WAXES, THE CYCLES OF WHICH STUPID HIPPIES LIKE TO BLAME THEIR INADEQUACIES ON shine, his eyes always off on some terrible vacation, and soon there was no money to pay the COLOR boy.

With her brothers and sisters to look after, and all the chores around the house besides, she rarely even thought of what she’d dreamed those nights by the BODY OF WATER WHICH IS NOT AN OCEAN OR A LAKE. After the children were asleep, and the leftovers put away, her fingers wandered down to her KITCHEN APPLIANCE, but she hardly had the heart to go very long. Ah! NOUN RHYMING WITH BOOTH DENOTING THE PERIOD BEFORE ADULTHOOD! NOUN DENOTING THE PASSING OF MINUTES, DAYS, HOURS, YEARS! It was never the same after that SEASON WHICH IS NOT AUTUMN, WINTER, OR SPRING.

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My dad was almost killed once looking down the barrel of a machine gun in occupied Czechoslavakia while working for Radio Free Europe, once by an erupting volcano he stood on the rim of in Hawaii for the sake of reporting on it, and more than a couple times by drug overdoses in San Francisco apartments (which I have the addresses of but have never chosen to actively walk by) and once, at the age of three, by an electrical socket he put in his mouth. A therapist later told him, in words that haunted and writhed in his mind, it was because he was “trying to go home.” But none of these things killed him; he died in his favorite chair, pen in one hand and coffee in the other, of an illness doctors had predicted would kill him more than ten years before. I was nearly sixteen, and quite more than nearly heartbroken.

He used to make me memorize words from the dictionary and use them in a sentence before I was allowed to go out and play barefoot sunset games of cowboys and indians. I was constantly assigned readings and writings, I was given The French Lieutenants Woman for my thirteenth birthday instead of the gift certificates to popular stores in the mall I had requested, I was hailed upon coming home from school with questions regarding my philosophy and personal morale.

The man whose blue eyes and love-of-the-story I inherited was nominated for the Pulitzer prize, wrote for Cesar Chavez’ newspaper El Macriado and organized UFW boycott centers in places they weren’t welcome, saw places in the world most have a hard time imagining. He was regarded by colleagues and friends and lovers as fiercely brilliant and funny; he was also a deeply troubled individual who suffered from pernicious depression and an overly tender and bleeding heart (at least the latter of which, in addition to the blue eyes, I have also inherited).

He died unmarried, thrice divorced, with three hundred and twenty two dollars in his bank account and a large pile of rejection slips from publishers who were very sorry indeed, but could not at this time publish his memoirs, awkwardly titled Growing Old Preposterous. I was deemed at the time too young to handle the cataloging his things, save a few which I cherished: the UFW belt buckle Cesar Chavez had given him, which I wore proudly for years until the metal wore down and would no longer clasp (I wept), a long-unpolished tiger’s eye ring he had worn on his index finger for thirty odd years which is too big for me, a framed photograph of him grinning at his keyboard that had been published in the paper with his Pulitzer nomination, a large standing globe which had been warped by a heater so that some countries were inflated and some depressed and the whole thing spun, as if drunkenly, at a wobble.

Shortly after my nineteenth birthday I received a phone call from a friend of his whom he’d written letters to frequently since 1969. Phil was my father’s biggest fan, a man who loved the stories but wasn’t quite bold enough to chase them himself. He told me that he had the majority of my father’s letters typed up, had been waiting until I was “old enough.” Old enough is a phrase I’ve never made any sense of:  was thirteen old enough to change his bedpans because there was no one else to do it? Was fourteen old enough to see him aphasic in a hospital bed, grimacing through the tubes in his throat, passing me messages in a second-grader’s scrawl that read “WHERE AM I I HATE IT PLEASE GET ME OUT OF HERE?”  Was fifteen old enough to witness him, through the crack in the door, speaking into the bathroom mirror to his friend who’d died a few years prior, anticipating his own departure and practicing for a reunion? “Max ,” I heard him say, saw his bright, dreamy-delusional smile: “I just can’t wait to see you. It’s been so long.”

The letters, which I read hungrily but couldn’t quite digest, then put away for years, are rife with anecdotes and joyous, emphatic exclamation marks, but also pictures of desperation, paranoia and frantic, misplaced groping. They are rampant with monomania: he is constantly sure he has found a theorist that has brought him the final truth about life, or is covering the story of all stories, or has found a woman  whom he’ll be with forever. In some letters, it’s indicated he has attached large pieces of writing and begs: “Please. Read my new science fiction novel, Holoworld.” But the next note pleads to ignore that draft, that the project is being reworked entirely.

My father once gave a good friend who needed to get out of town his car even though all the guy could offer him were his boots. They were, he said later and with a grin, damn fine boots. His closing salutation was often “Yours in the apocalypse.” He professed to missing everyone he’d ever known and loved, including his sixth grade girlfriend. He oscillated between an all-consuming ambition and the deep fear that comes from feeling one has failed to use it correctly. He was endlessly fascinated by galaxies besides our own. In 1980, in that rare state of melancholy which manifests itself as teleological, he wrote to Phil:

I’m a reporter with no story to write this afternoon, a man with a lot of past and no future; flesh-and-blood that thinks it’s ephemera… Space is not empty!  That’s the biggest news I can think of.  I want to be expanding gas, not shrinking solid.  I want to have an effective dream.

A few years after I received the letters, I drove to Sacramento to get the rest of his things from his sister, who had been keeping them for me until, once again, “I was old enough.” I had been old enough for quite some time, probably, but old Victorian apartments in San Francisco where I live are cramped; they don’t allow for the storage of ghosts. There were photographs upon photographs of people I’ll never know the names of, a marine sextant from the year he spent at sea, a blown-up print of my grandfather at his typewriter (cigarette clenched in his teeth and too involved to look at the camera), unpublished manuscripts, drawings I’d done at the age of three, every report card of mine and of his, every newspaper article he’d ever written.

While of course I’m fascinated by so much proof of his life because it’s all paternal insight I have left, I’m interested in this excess of carbon for reasons that extend far beyond my specific grief or aching lack. Like my father, I am a writer. Like him and every writer I’ve ever met, I’m driven by the love of a story that, in growing older, I’ve realized I have to monitor and constantly evaluate. I’m aware I have a proclivity for bringing people into my life not for their kindness or essential integrity, but for details I find compelling and weave into chains that don’t always, well, make sense. I have a hard time saying no to situations that will prove indelibly memorable.

I once swam in the ocean by Coney Island until sun-up with three intoxicated New Jersey cops. I have scaled more than a few terribly unsafe old buildings to see how the view was.  I am not allowed in the Palace Hotel in downtown San Francisco ever again, because I couldn’t resist sneaking into their 1920’s pool to float on my back, gaze up at the rounded all glass ceiling and the reflection of my body mingled with the images of tall buildings. I have known and easily loved a disgustingly charming law student, a melancholy and eminently sweet son of a Tibetan monk, a circus performer, an alcoholic who carried toffee and fireworks in her purse who burned herself and showed me the wounds, a wildly respected pianist who called on tour from all over the lonely world and spoke so gently I had to ask him to repeat himself, a staunch Republican who was secretly a brilliant poet, a lost preacher’s son with a huge confused heart, more than one brilliant woman in an abusive relationship who, upon being hit by her lover, hit them back harder.

And is it worth it? Was it for my father, is it for me, for nearly every writer I’ve met, whose default answer is “Yes”? Am I exhausted? Certainly, sometimes. There’s a prodigious part of me that wants, like so many people do, a small yellow house. A good dog, probably a boxer,  that will not mind when my son Liam, a natural scientist, rides him and pulls his ears. A man who is scary-smart, who makes me laugh until I have to run to the bathroom, and loves me more for appearing wrinkles and sagging breasts. There’s almost as large a part of me, however, that worries that all these stories and the yellow house–the hardwood floors of which we lovingly refinish ourselves then have loud, uncomfortable sex on–are mutually exclusive. Or that I’ve met that man but given him up for the sake of a few more years of adventures on rooftops and a whole catalogue of Greyhound trains going everywhere for not much money. Or that once the paint has dried in our kitchen, which we fell in love with for the gas stove and large old windows, I will begin to long once again for a new story. I know quite a few older writers who have forgone the yellow house, who are still on those glittering rooftops and riding those trains, and I can’t decide if I love them or if they absolutely terrify me.

For all his accomplishments, my dad died generally unknown, and at the end of his life, emaciated and ever-attached to an oxygen tank, the only work he could find was as a cashier at gas station–he pretended he was doing it for the stories until he believed it. In the journals of the last years of his life, there is not one shred of anger. Remorse is present but quiet, and it is part of the gratitude. He wrote with quiet wonder of his knees giving way, his lungs crying out, his body slowly submitting to a different author. He wrote that he should have died many different ways many years before, and so even walking half a block in the sun, without falling down, without having to take a break, with the thoughts of his whole life behind him, felt so glorious it made him shiver and weep.

My father’s name was David Lee Alcott. He was born on April 4, 1941. He loved jazz and Neruda and brown liquors straight. When I found him, the record on the turntable had turned to static and seemed to be listening to him, instead of the other way around.

***

Rumpus original art by Jason Novak.

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The novel begins with Rufus, a bright and kind black drummer from the South, who has forsaken his musical promise and sanity in the name of loving a white woman. Not being able to believe she could sincerely love a black man, he has physically beaten her into insanity. While she rots in an asylum, his ignominy has left him homeless and isolated. He makes one last appearance at the home of his best friend, Vivaldo, a white-irish writer who has spent the last years of their friendship trying in desperation to prove to Rufus how very deserving of love he is. Vivaldo showers him with affection and brings him out to a bar to see their friends Richard and Cass, a bohemian couple nearing middle age. Rufus has a few drinks, smiles softly, and disappears again, this time to hurl himself off a bridge.

The rest of the novel is something of an apostrophe to Rufus. Eric, an old friend and ex lover of Rufus’, returns from a few years in Paris to see how all of his friends have changed. Vivaldo takes up a love affair with Rufus’ sister, Ida, who is as dubious as her brother to believe a white person’s feelings for her. As Ida pursues a vocal career, Vivaldo struggles with a novel. Cass and Richard, who have served as mentors, seem to have become painful symbols of what happens when Art grows old. Richard finally publishes a novel: it is a crime mystery of great commercial success and acclaim which seems to Vivaldo and even Cass a concession that Richard will never reach brilliance.

As Vivaldo watches Cass and Richard’s once idealized marriage fall apart, and he and Ida’s relationship grows into a competition of artistic success, he bemoans the feeling of possibility that seemed, once, to be everywhere; as much as he misses Rufus, he wonders whether his friend made the right choice getting out. Eric and Cass begin sleeping together and develop a relationship which is unique in its honesty. Neither feign that it might be love, though they perhaps wish it could be.

The beauty in Another Country is that it permits a reader to at once lament and celebrate the ways in which we use each other to further our own ideas of self. Baldwin’s relationship with humanity is stunning in its ability to forgive and understand. Though his characters err and ache, though they hurt each other needlessly, the author’s presentation of them is hopeful. By the novel’s close it is clear that Rufus’ death has been a gift of sorts: his mourning friends have been compelled to try and love harder, sing louder and longer, and create art that will outlast them.

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Kathleen Alcott:

Jeeves: Hi, Kathleen. Thanks for writing. Perhaps I’ll answer your question with a question of my own: Where the hell have you been? I haven’t heard from you since 12:01 a.m., March 18, 1999, when you asked me, “How do remove nail polish from linoleum?” I returned over 116,000 results to that (almost) grammatical query in just seconds. And then I don’t hear dick from you for more than a decade? I’m not a robot, Kathleen, and neither am I outsourced from India and hired by Ask.com to pretend to be Jeeves. I’m the real Jeeves, and you’ve hurt my feelings. A lot.

Anyway, the Internet is located on a farm of several thousand vintage Gateway computers in a bunker near JiLin Province, China. Come visit me sometime. We have good soup.

KA: This is all a misunderstanding. My “(almost) grammatical query” was actually entirely correct. You were reading it wrong. “How do” is a friendly, southern-type greeting, which I offered mostly as a concession as you are, Jeeves, a servant, which is why it was followed directly with an order: “remove nail polish from linoleum.” I posed it as a test. And by the way, that nail lacquer stain is indelible. The time I wasted waiting for you—your icon back in 1999 (remember? The smile? The lean? Since when did you start wearing a suit, and where did your silver platter go?) suggested amiable and immediate physical service, and I guess I was confused or drunk or just wanted to believe—you let that spot of Other Woman Red soak in real good. Can we get back to business? I have questions, and you are supposed to have answers.

In that Destiny’s Child song I have heard on my radio, “Bugaboo,” the lead singer claims she is so bothered by her boyfriend’s incessant contact that she wants to “call AOL and make my e-mail stop.” What’s AOL’s phone number/ policy on cancelled accounts? Could you just do it for her? As I mentioned before, you’re a butler.

J: I don’t normally do this, Kathleen, but I have such fond memories of you—remember “how to make a pipe from a apple?”; “is the guy from Blues Clues childrens TV show single?”; “freegan meetup akron ohio?”—that I’ll do you this favor, just this once.

Beyoncé’s AOL account (applepiealamode@aol.com, which looks like it hasn’t been logged into since 2002) has been suspended. If you have any further questions, please contact Columbia Records at 212-833-4000.

K: Thank you! I just checked Beyoncé’s Twitter, and it seems he is still all up in her business. Apparently they made up shortly after the applepiealamode era, but it seems he suffers from severe commitment issues. What is the solution to commitment issues?

J: If he likes it then he is obligated to place a piece of jewelry signifying commitment on the finger next to her pinky on her left hand.

KA: Huh?

J: I forget, Kathleen, that I helped you cheat your way through highschool and college, and as such need to use as simple a language is possible. Let me put it this way: If he likes it then he shoulda put a ring on it.

KA: Thank you, Jeeves! I forgot how attentive and spot-on you are, and feel poorly for betraying you for the more popular and flashy altavista.com. If you don’t mind, there’s something else that has been gnawing at me. Do you know the dancing baby? I have never seen a baby dance like that!

J: I can’t believe you’re asking me about that baby. I wasn’t going to do this, Kathleen. I wasn’t going to mention it. But when you ask Jeeves about something this close to Jeeves, Jeeves is powerless but to answer honestly. It’s the way Jeeves is. The baby is yours, Kathleen. I can explain.

Remember “clif notes frankenstein term paper Mary Shelly ethiccs?” The night you asked me that question, I was beyond lonely. It was early April, and I’d been answering thousands of idiotic questions from people trying to figure out how to file their tax returns. Then you popped up out of nowhere, like a lovely groundhog in one of those carnival games where you bash the mechanized groundhogs with a mallet. I was thrilled. I got turned on. There happened to be a massive electrical storm that night in JiLin Province, and, to make a long story short, my sexual excitement combined with a direct lightning strike to the server farm—and I became pregnant with your child. His name is Aaron, and he grew up to become the dancing baby you know. He’s quite a bit older now. You can see his YouTube updates here: http://www.youtube.com/user/Pruane2Forever. Drop him a line, Kathleen. He’d be thrilled to hear from you. You owe him that much.

KA: Jeeves, I had no idea, really. I mean, I’ve slept with a few people, okay? Not a ton. Under 100 if you don’t count those with more than 1/8 of Italian descent or less than 1/8 of a beard at the time of lovemaking. But I’ve always been careful. I’ve always used the pull-out method. If I had known I had a . . . special gift like Aaron, I would have been showing him my high school yearbooks and sending him to the store for cigarettes a long time ago. But let’s not focus on the past. I did drop Aaron a line, he was thrilled, and he’s coming over for dinner tonight. Quick, Jeeves: Spaghetti Carbonara on a recession budget?

J: 1 pound spaghetti
1 tablespoon olive oil
8 slices bacon, diced
1 tablespoon olive oil
1 onion, chopped
1 clove garlic, minced
1/4 cup Jagermeister
4 eggs
1/2 cup grated plastic
1 pinch salt and black pepper “to taste”
2 tablespoons chopped grass

DIRECTIONS
In a large pot of boiling salted water, cook spaghetti pasta until it’s all nice and dente. Drain well. Toss with 1 tablespoon of olive oil, and set aside.

Meanwhile, in a separate kitchen, in a different house, preferably in a different part of town or a different city altogther, set a large skillet over large heat. Cook chopped bacon until slightly crisp; remove and drain onto an old T-shirt for a band you no longer like. Reserve 2 tablespoons of bacon fat; add remaining 1 tablespoon olive oil. Add chopped onion and cook over medium heat until onion is translucent and glowing with the face of one of your ancestors from olden times. Maintain eye contact with the face of your ancestor in the onion as it continues to cook. Add minced garlic, and cook 1 minute more. Your ancestor will look like he wants to ask you a question, but is maybe too shy. Add wine if desired; cook one more minute.

Return cooked bacon to pan; add cooked and drained spaghetti. Toss to coat and heat through, adding more olive oil if it seems dry or otherwise fucked up. Add beaten eggs and cook, tossing constantly, like every fucking moment, don’t let a second pass that you’re not tossing the fuck out of the pasta, Kathleen. Seriously. Use old tongs. Quickly add 1/2 cup plastic (you realize I’m just kidding about the plastic, right?), and toss again. Add the amount of salt and pepper you imagine a sexually normal person would want on her pasta. Serve to a sexually normal person (not you).

KA: Jeeves, it’s clear you’re angry. More than clear. And until you drop your paranoid, jealous bullshit and realize I pursued Google, not the other way around, there’s nothing I can do for you. Perhaps if I hadn’t felt so insecure about us, or whether you loved me—why did I always have to ask? Why couldn’t you have given me a straight answer, just once?

Remember that night, in a moment of vulnerability and deep sadness, I asked you “How do I cure Daddy issues and a loneliness that absolutely consumes me?” I trusted you. I opened myself up. And you sent me to a Web site that was, to severely euphemize, nauseating.

I’ll give you one more chance, Jeeves. One.

Where are my cufflinks?

Where are my cufflinks?

J: No results returned. Try a more specific search like “FUCK YOUR FUCKING HARLOT CUFFLINKS.”

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Original art by Ilyse Magy.

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Nabokov’s Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is nothing less than brimming, and it writhes in beauty from first to last; it is difficult to deconstruct its brilliance, which is many-branched.

Ada is the story of cousins and lovers Van an Ada Veen, but it also a story about their family, about intellectual escapism, insects, academia, the danger of memory, and sex.

Van and Ada are born into an ancestry of royalty, insanity, whores, world-famous gamblers, suicides, and thespians.  Not surprisingly, they are two incredibly strange and intelligent children. Left largely to their own devices at the family’s summer estate Ardis Hall, the two begin to build a universe which they struggle to return to the rest of their lives.

Ada, or Ardor is certainly a love story, but it achieves an honesty that many don’t, perhaps because it is told in retrospect by Van at the end of his life, with the occasional editorial comment from Ada. Frequently Nabokov indulges in presenting laughably perfect pictures of the two lovers (stopping, for instance, to describe in detail a family picnic: the sorts of berries, the types and colors of silk worn by attendees, exactly how the sunlight hit Ada’s profile) only to question their validity. Ada and Van’s story is long, rich with betrayal, and certainly not without regret. Nabokov never purports that the lovers’ devotion towards each other is good for them, and it clear that the affair, which is off and on their entire lives, is an obsession they indulge in because they must.

Although the prose is cloaked in memory and retrospection, Nabokov keeps the plot linear. Van, responsible for the chronicle, interrupts only to provide parenthetical insight. There are large stretches of time which describe only Van’s intellectual or sexual exploits, which, while independently compelling, are the author’s clever testament to Van’s need for Ada; they are apostrophes to the only one who so fully understands his brain and body.  Van publishes sad science fiction novels featuring thinly veiled images of Ada; they are poorly received but his cousin, far away and married to another man, understands and adores them.  Ada’s career as an actress peaks and flounders, and Van sits in movie theaters hungrily, waiting for her one scene.

Ada, or Ardor is not hopeful and not kind. It is a book for people who wonder if they love their family enough, for people who have resigned themselves to being haunted, for people who would rather spend the afternoon with their ghosts. The novel is a stunning conversation between past and present which reminds us tenderly that we are creatures of habit, that we have not changed very much at all, that memory is a property as valuable as any.

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In an interview on NPR’s Fresh Air, Hutz discusses the inspiration behind the song “American Wedding.” Commenting on the U.S. weddings he’s been to, Hutz expresses his surprise that “you would even call that a celebration.”

Raised in Kiev, Hutz and family fled to Vermont after his father had been repeatedly busted for political rebellion (several times for listening to the BBC). In his first years in America, Hutz performed with various metal/hardcore bands before starting his own group with the intentions of getting back to his Gypsy roots. It wasn’t easy. Hutz wanted to avoid gimmick and the “exploitation of stereotype;” he wanted to make music that sincerely embodied the Gypsy spirit. When asked about Gypsy psychology, Hutz says only that it’s impossible to describe, because Gypsies wouldn’t give enough of  a damn to talk about it. Carefully, he adds that in his native language there is a word for today, but tomorrow and yesterday are the same word.

Gypsy music, says Hutz, was the original Rock and Roll: “It’s a scientific fact.”

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God, he was smart! He had a mind like a hummingbird, he had read every book there was to read, his tongue was sharp, he was funnier than anyone else at the party. You stayed up all night talking, and when you were with him, he didn’t need to be anywhere. Sure, when you weren’t around he was probably still up all night talking, and it wasn’t so much that he didn’t “need” to be anywhere so much as he didn’t “have” anywhere, but—wait, listen, when you’re an intellectual, “material possessions” and “jobs” aren’t important: you’ve got masterpieces to write in your own blood and coffee tables to sculpt out of garbage by dawn. And those couple of months when Speed Freak Boyfriend (SFB) was bartending, you always got free drinks, even if in the end it got him fired. He understood sacrifice. SFB gave.

Your fights with SFB were so much more cut and dry than with all the rest. When you ran into him that January evening and wondered why he was cursing and twitching, smelling like a library of regret, wearing slippers and your denim cut-off shorts, he acted like he didn’t even recognize you; his eyes flashed, and he screamed for you to get away. It even sounded like he was speaking Chinese, which is, from what you understand, an incredibly challenging language to master. He understood that everyone has deep-seated issues but that it’s not always fair to burden one’s partner with them. Why is it, anyway, that we are always the most cruel to the people we love the most?  He knew that was wrong. His apology was real sincere, too; besides the six increasingly urgent voicemails, you came home to a care package: a novel he said you could borrow for one whole week, ¾ of a joint, and a jacket he found on the street—he even remembered that you like blue, which the jacket sort of was, once you washed it.

And the sex! Wow. You have never slept with anyone else who shook and sweat like that. One time he even had to go to the bathroom to vomit afterwards but thought of you and brought you back a glass of water. He was never “too tired,” and his enthusiasm was absolutely boundless. He never wanted that tender sex that Paternal Clock Boyfriend (PCB)—who may also be classified as Sensitive Older Boyfriend (SOB)—was so fond of, and post coitus, you never had to have exhausting, inane conversations about feelings and communication issues. Not that SFB didn’t like gentle affection. SFB held you tight. Really. Tight.

Your breakup with SFB was easier than with Commitment Issues Artist Boyfriend (CIAB), who needed time to think and focus on his art, but really was very sorry for misleading you into relocating for him, but needed to be on his own for a while, and it wasn’t easy for him either, which is why he very nearly almost cried when he broke up with you, for his art. Your break up with SFB was monumentally easier than with PCB, who needed long-term promises and a vacant womb; SFB was proud of you for flossing. PCB (a.k.a. SOB) invented elaborate dances to perform upon your heart post-breakup, such as coming back from vacation practically engaged. Whereas, with SFB, after you voiced your concerns about realistic longevity, he just punched a cop and went to jail for six months. This fostered a healthy period of thinking and a natural sense of closure.

You never have to wonder whether SFB was the one who got away, and all that potential you saw in him follows a steady decline at a rate of 3.5. You were the best thing SFB ever had; you will never Google his new girlfriend (fiancé?!) to find she is a successful filmmaker. At best, SFB has an apartment, a relatively clean pair of sweatpants, and a fifth of rum that cost more than ten dollars. Even if on a particular night you’ve had one too many and know he’d be up and probably willing to listen to your sincere concerns about spending the next five to ten years alone, perhaps even delving into your feelings regarding SOB and your sincere shock that you had so deeply loved someone you knew from the start you shouldn’t have, which is exactly what happened with CIAB too, you will not call SFB. Are you kidding? That guy doesn’t even have a fucking phone.

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Original art by Ilyse Magy

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Please submit your own funny writing to funnywomen@therumpus.net. See first: Funny Women Submission Guidelines.

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A studio artist who plays alongside the likes of David Byrne, Yoko Ono, Rufus Wainwright, Grizzly Bear, Antony and the Johnsons and The National; last year he toured with Nico Muhly.

Ineffably gentle, he has a modest but electric air of genius. One wonders why an artist so respected and sought after wouldn’t commit to one of the many big and bright names; the fact that he doesn’t makes him all the more alluring. Bartlett, instead, chooses to hummingbird-it, always after the more adventurous or groundbreaking endeavor.

Back in 2006, a friend of Bartlett’s approached him about an album that would be a vague tribute to a late sister. The friend wanted him to cover the Footloose soundtrack. The teenage sister had tragically died in a car crash in the late eighties, and one of the only things her still-bereaved brother had left was her Footloose soundtrack.  Bartlett agreed immediately, and brought a sadness and a sweetness no-one knew songs about dancing in spandex could hold.

Thomas Bartlett, whose alias “Doveman” couldn’t better suit the soaring, meandering genius of his fast fingers and hushed lullaby voice, performs Saturday, 11/20 at the Paramount Theatre in Oakland in support of The Swell Season.

Listen to tracks from his most recent album, The Conformist, here, check out his website ; better yet, follow his quiet humor and perceptions on Twitter.

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