The Fantastic Dinner Party of Scott Barman

"The Fantastic Dinner Party of Scott Barman"
a tender yet quaint pull of the eyes about the musician host Scott,
if it were hastily written by Ernest Hemingway.
by Jake Kilroy

It was warm and a breeze came, so the windows were left open and the sky looked like it would be the great death that many soldiers drink to. The lights glowed in the garden and in the distance Scott heard the cars go by but they were not the guests. The guests would come later, after he had taken down shots of cool liquor like a sniper lowering the count of enemy troops.

He put on his black shirt and navy jacket and adjusted the radio to bring music to the room. It would be a long night and he felt energy in his bones coming to him now, finally, after a long day of preparing the food.

The air smelled of summer, but this was not enough. He had always loved the smell of coffee, even as a boy, when he would play in his metal band. He no longer saw those friends, but this was life. This was the torrid sea forever pushing us into the horizon. He lit a large candle in a vase filled with coffee beans and it was good and sweet and honest.

There was loneliness in the house. It had been there, truly. But tonight was the end of that. The women would fill his home with mirth and conversation and his bed would be full and he would be happy. A man does not need much to endure, but a bed of women has hurt no musician in this life.

He arranged his instruments and was careful of his selection. The piano can break a woman's heart more quickly than a ruined marriage. The guitar can be as tactful as a gun and it carries the boom of a Lazarus Pit. His orchestra pieces made up a militia and he was its captain.

He was a man with means, which is a god to many. To the restless and willing, a god is a man with all the control he can imagine, and the truest music is the sound of mutilating and mangling the nerves. It is a beautiful sound to those with ears that can bare it. This was a country of gods. He knew that.

He brushed his teeth and listened to the bossa nova. When he was done, he called the girl.

"Hello?"

Her voice was soft.

"Hello."

"Is everything ready?"

"Everything is ready. I've poured the wine."

"We aren't the lovely type, you know," she said. He voice came excited and feline in its calm.

"You are who I want."

"All of us?"

"Yes."

"You are ambitious."

"I am a lot of things, but I am no coward."

"I'll have to consider the wine."

"You'll have some."

He put down the phone. That was enough. He would save his muscles for the lovemaking.

The smell of coffee and the taste of mint exhausted him with memories. He had thrown dinner parties before and the familiarity weakened him with beauty. The breath of warm lasagna coughed from the oven was not new. He was a man of family and of friends. There had been great laughs in his kitchen and sublime foreplay in his bedroom. There was the quality of an aristocrat to his tongue and the fury of a drunk to his blood. There would be no reason to not be welcomed in his home if one was of good faith in manners and an interest in dice.

The table blazed like a holiday. He watched the flames move in the breeze and he remembered the nights of his youth, when he was a college student studying music in the northern country. The sonatas he had written then as a young man in the city, the ones that had no place for the world but in the ear of a sleepy girl who had stayed the night, they came to him now.

He would go to the cafes that needed tending to and order sandwiches that were in desperate need of care and drink like a man with nothing to prove but honor and he would wait for the sun to go down to find hope or lust at a party near campus.

He had loved the darkness then as he did now. It was only after dinner he could resume his thoughts. The day would often prove useless and lost to the drought of time. He would bury himself in legal work or swim until the sun was no longer above him. At the pool he would watch the women, but they were often not what he was after. There would be a young white woman at the pool on stray afternoons, and it would stir his heart, but that was all.

In the kitchen now he sipped the wine and cut himself a pepper to enjoy with his glass before every appetite within his strange and serene body took him in the promised bellows of exceptional manhood. He would wait for the guests and he would give them everything he had in him, no matter how wild or sincere.

He took out the sheet of garlic bread and dropped it on the counter of scattered knives and forks. A crash of silver sounded from below the dish. The garlic bread was burned. The edges crumbled like ash. It spoke of gross poetry like a log in the hearth of the fireplace that his mother never let him use when she was out of town. This was not a surprise to him. He knew he would be a wealthy man that could set sail and live his life at sea eating fish and drinking port if only someone would pay him to burn garlic bread.

It was the truth and that is all that matters to some. It should matter to most but men are often too proud to take their blows like the prizefighters they boast to be in bars at last call. What should be nothing is everything to a liar. It is worse when the only person in the bar is the bartender. Not even the mirrors talk to the loudest scoundrel.

His friends would always talk about the garlic bread as if it had never been the grand curse that it came to be in his formidable years of cooking. It haunted him from his earliest days as a host. The wine, the women, the whipped cream had always been to his preference, but the garlic bread would laugh in the freezer and then cackle in the oven. A bare brutal beating would come from his compatriots, but they were at least true and loyal, and that is all a man can ask of his friends and lovers.

The door rattled with knocks now and he heard the squealing and giggling of his guests in the courtyard on the other side. He opened the cabinet beneath the sink and dropped the mangled sacrifice into its usual temple and closed it. There would be no garlic bread this evening. There would be wine and sex and lasagna but the garlic bread had played it's part in the death of a quiet chef's reputation. He wanted the women and there would be no fool left in the kitchen.

He brushed his blazer, moved a hand through his hair and surveyed his teeth in the mirror of his dining hall before he answered the door. He turned the knob and the night was tempered with glory.

"Hiiiiiiiiiiiiiii," he said.

A half dozen Asian women in black dresses stumbled into his house with fervor and eagerness. They passed Scott and removed their coats and kissed his cheek and showed the white teeth they couldn't hide in their red cheeks any longer. They had arrived in a cab and he closed the door. He would drive them home in the morning, after a swim in the nude with good sunlight and iced tea.

"Who wants wine?" he asked.

Each woman showed him the bottle of wine they brought with them. They still howled like their throats tickled with exotic feathers in each breath. They had the same notions as him and they might have been even more riddled with the dreams that we so often find pretty before sleep in a bed alone for one night too long. These women were the last thoughts he would have on his deathbed, he surely knew.

"Very good," Scott said. He pointed his finger in a quick jab and made an elegant sound. "Mmhmm. Very good indeed."

"a crowd of quiet lovers"

"a crowd of quiet lovers"
written after a hearty breakfast by jake kilroy.

unearthed with grit in the muscles,
pulled back like a victorian curtain,
there were heavens in each of us,
circuses in the chest,
dinner parties in the depths.
we were a mass of loners
spread across the world,
thinking, my god,
if only they knew.

9/50: Slaughterhouse-Five

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
4/5 stars
This is my 9th book in Rex & Jake's 50-Book Reading Challenge,
which Rex leads 12-9. Full list can be found here.

This book was wonderful, as expected, since, hey, it's Vonnegut.

It's funny, though, as this one was the first Vonnegut book many of my friends read. This was never assigned reading for me in high school, and, my goodness, if it had been, I might've turned out to be an entirely different person. It wouldn't have been because of the themes or even the nature of the narrative. I would've just really embraced Vonnegut at an earlier age. If I had read Vonnegut as a high school student, it might've changed my tactics on debating war, society, and sex. Maybe I would've been more sad and less angry about Iraq. Maybe I would've cut people some slack and not anticipated the world as black and white. Maybe I would've have been so baffled about teenage sexuality.

I read my first Vonnegut book in college, and he didn't click for me as the grandiose philosopher of morality and charm that he's come to be for me until I was a young professional.

To me, Slaughterhouse-Five didn't really figure out where the lagoon of my heart was to swim in, as previous books of his have struck me like lightning coursing through my nerves, as the world unveils itself to me. Don't get me wrong. This is a tremendous book, as it observes tragedy and humanity with the same gusto and beauty as he always has. I just think I maybe had it lurking around my life for so long with so many people talking about it that the revelations of it didn't conquer me the same way. It was, however, an absolutely wonderful take on time travel and the problematic, and sometimes rewarding, nature of indifference.

On the most basic level, Vonnegut understood this country and this world better and harder than anyone. The man was just one correct, rousing, glorious statement after another. He witnessed and wrote, and his casual remarks were spot-on and incredible beyond the stuffy libraries of academics and the wild petri dishes of drugs that belong to modern "philosophers."

To view the world with such humor, humility, and wonder, alongside pointing out the destruction and the horridness is unreal, almost unholy. Vonnegut, in this book and others, presents a voice that would've given God advice and told jokes to the Devil. It's just fascinating to know they teach this book in school. What a way to educate youth.

The Long Night of Jackie Jones

"The Long Night of Jackie Jones"
a borderline obnoxious five-chapter story about the photographer Jackie, if it were (quickly and lazily) written by Charles Bukowski.
by Jake Kilroy

Chapter I: Hot Night
I got home late from the newsroom. It was dark but pretty. The sky was still there, so I hadn't died on the way home. There was music on somewhere. My studio was still and hot, but what else do Americans expect from their bedrooms in the summertime? People want to come home to a disaster or flowers, and they never learn it's nothing but a room. There are a hundred rooms on the block. Why would any of them be different from the others?

"All these weddings and no assistant," I cursed with salty gums. I had hoped my work would've done itself in hours ago.

Chapter II: Sure Enough, Here
The clock was a sloppy mess, hands everywhere. Or maybe it was the heat. Maybe Dali was right about clocks. Maybe Einstein was right about time. Maybe I was right about nothing. At least here was cold beer in the fridge. It would be a long night, but that's the only kind I've ever had.

"All these weddings and no assistant," I mumbled again, waiting for the air to come on. The air was staler than the bread I begged for when I was a rotten youth.

I set my bag down and considered my computer. Lurking in it were brides and grooms and the terrible aches of the future. How had so many deadlines come knocking at my door to let themselves in? Why was I always at the Orange Circle taking photographs of sunlight?

Ah. So I'd have something to hold onto when the darkness and wine came later.

Chapter III: Sacrilege of the Photographer by the Writer
Hours later, I had a headache and my pajamas on. There were photos everywhere with memories nowhere to be found. They let me drink at these weddings, and they shouldn't. I'd be a mess if there weren't other messes. I can blend into a crowd. It's not that hard. All you do is stand tall and micmic the others. This is why sheep get eaten by wolves. They try to show off.

Individuality will get you killed. Conformity will get you married. The irony will get you grinning. But, ideally, in the back of your mind, you also see yourself smiling in front of a firing squad.

Joe Purdy came from the small radio I keep by the window. His answers made sense, but I had no questions I could ask this late after so much work with words. I nearly drowned in the wine bottle that watched over me like a concerned friend. These were troubling times, but I was in no mood to be anything else than drunk and glorious at photo editing.

So many lovers, so many meadows, so many holding hands with daylight glimmering until nausea sets in later, often around midnight. Then I will go to bed, convinced that I am the reason these people even love each other. The artist with the loaded gun, bullets flying out (months later, after I've touched up the colors), here now in the foxhole of her room, waiting out another summer of engagements, weddings, and babys being goddamned babies, drooling on themselves, like I will one day when I have finally given up the camera for good.

Chapter IV: When You Finally Give into Everything You Want and Your Body is Silent
When the slurs finally came to my mouth, the empty room felt like another person. It sheltered me and kept me company. I wasn't lonely, though every strong-hearted person says that, whether they mean it or not. I can be mean or not. Whatever suits the mood suits me. There's nothing to do about the world if it doesn't feel like it.

Around 2, I called Celeste. She didn't answer. It was just as well. I had seen New Girl GIFs online, and my only intention was to giggle with her for 45 minutes, or until one of us lost breath and fell asleep. These were the nights, and we welcomed them.

The sun was still gone, and I was still awake, but we would both be changing soon. What lousy creatures night owls are, with their broken eyes and their busted hearing. So I called a man. His name was in my phone as "Robert, M.D." I didn't remember him. I remembered what I had that night. But you can't make a house call to eight vodka tonics and a handful of vicodin.

Robert answered without any tone of drink or drug. He was asleep.

"Hello?" came the groggy voice.

"Hi, is this Robert?" I chirped.

"Who is this?"

"Are you a doctor?"

"What?"

"Are you a doctor?" I repeated, slower this time. This brute was a drag.

"I'm a maitre d'. Who the fuck is this?"

"So you're not a doctor," I moaned in distress, this time making sure to roll my Rs like the bad girls from high school had taught me.

"Who. The Fuck. Is this?" he growled like a monstrous beast from Hell.

"Your worst fucking nightmare."

I hung up. If he wasn't going to give me the time of a day, I didn't see any point in giving him the time of night.

I wondered what Kristen was doing.

Chapter V: The Devil's Play Things
I tried to do the math to figure out if Kristen was just going to bed or just getting up, but the numbers might as well have been sworn enemies. I can count cigarettes, and I know what radio stations play the right songs, so I stopped. It was enough math.

I went back to the computer. I had enough of weddings. There was more to life. There was more to the world. The problem wasn't the system. The problem was me. I had made a living taking pictures of happiness, and they weren't me. I was happy, and I've been happy. But happiness to me is free booze and a dance floor. I don't need a whole goddamned society telling me otherwise.

Still, I suppose there is always something left, even at night. The fears and the anxieties come out of the darkness swinging at you. The problem is that it requires a choice. Step back, swing back, or die. I decided to find a man, to find sex. I was bored, and I was hungry, and it was more work for me to make a sandwich at this hour.

I took down the last of the last bottle, unable to read labels anymore until rest. So I went to the window. I wasn't a beggar, but I wondered. Where were the machines of sex? Where were the men, soldiering on as nobodies in their great lifelong campaign of nothing? Where was the entertainment for a young woman hellbent on everything? They were supposed to be ready and willing and eager to ruin.

So here I was, a woman, empty and coarse, relentlessly pursuing a dream, any dream.

And then the young man dropped off the morning paper. His eyes lured up to my window like a catfish with his mouth caught on the grime of the hook. I grinned, starved for attention and sweat. He, on the other hand, gulped so loud it should've woken the neighborhood. He set down his bike, and I walked to the door to unlock it. There is never a need in this world to be impolite. Always be a good host. It will be repaid in the afterlife.

"heartbreakers"

"heartbreakers"
after a quick, small, late-night talk by jake kilroy.

we carried the heartbreak with us.
we had enough honor to not drag it,
and we had enough sense to not name it.
but it was with us, tucked away in our chests,
sweating inside our shirts in the summertime,
as we ran our mouths broken in every venue
and smoked everything with promise to kill us.
it was forever a death squadron season here,
in our youth.

there was no tragedy in the heartbreak.
it had hardened our nerves,
but only to love harder.

we were ruffians accordingly,
posed and well-mannered,
though destroyers entirely.
we salted our wounded tongues
every evening under the moonlight.

so our dance shoes never saw daylight,
and our flowers only grew after sunset.
the world was open and free and available.
all we had to do was show up for the taking.

"trials"

"trials"
written with a beta song and a thought blasting by jake kilroy.

when our bodies collapsed and the roof caught its breath,
we gulped the fresh sunlight that hurt our torn-apart mouths,
hearing the sounds of words, laying in wait to pounce on our tongue,
caravanning up through our throats, leaving all the red wine behind,
strangling our stomachs, so that every inch of us felt out of place.

we listened to our hearts pound like our chests were snares;
punched, knocked, blasted, and destroyed with warmth.
a punk band of ditch diggers using welfare checks as picks,
with everything going toward romance, we were well spent,
down to the last dime; but this time, we were spry and loud,
now maniac skins fleeing the spirit core to each other, finally.

godspeed us to ourselves, we chanted over and over,
peeling clothes off like fruit skins, casual and healthy,
deliriously in love with nearly everything in the room.
but your music wasn't enough, and this light wasn't either.
nothing would cure the starvation, probably ever.
but we tried. with every magic trick and lie we had,
we put everything we knew into a second chance.

Jake Kilroy's Ten Rules for Writing

Jake Kilroy's Ten Rules for Writing
by Jake Kilroy

1. Read everything from western novellas to cereal boxes.

2. Let people know you write in your free time, so you appear deep and attractive, but don't boast enough to where they ask to read your stuff.

3. Don't date a writer that's better than you.

4. Briefly hate the entire activity of writing from time to time.

5. Have one moment in your life that you can definitely cite writing as something that saved you.

6. Impress someone you're attracted to with the written word every so often.

7. Write in different places and settings.

8. Be practically turned on by the sheer thought of publication.

9. Acknowledge that you're better than your peers, but not as good as the greats.

10. Steal.

R.I.P. Elmore Leonard: Dutch's Lesson

Elmore Leonard, once called "the Dickens of Detroit," passed away today. He was 87 years old and indefinitely rad as hell. Born in New Orleans and raised in Detroit, Leonard aimed to be like Hemingway if he had a sense of humor. He penned some of my favorite crime novels (Get Shorty, Out Of Sight, The Hot Kid) and my favorite pulpy western stories (3:10 To Yuma, Saint With A Six-Gun, Man With The Iron Arm), and they all contained honest, jivey lowlife dialogue. It was pitch-perfect realistic, but it was silly and violent at the same time. It was so spot on that prisoners used to write him fan letters.

He was one of the first real writers I started reading as a kid, and his take on wild characters intertwining in some big crazy deal influenced me and what I wanted to do when it came to telling stories.

Anyway, out of respect to "Dutch," here's Elmore Leonard's essay about his 10 rules of writing...

"WRITERS ON WRITING; Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points and Especially Hooptedoodle"

by Elmore Leonard

Published: July 16, 2001, New York Times

These are rules I've picked up along the way to help me remain invisible when I'm writing a book, to help me show rather than tell what's taking place in the story. If you have a facility for language and imagery and the sound of your voice pleases you, invisibility is not what you are after, and you can skip the rules. Still, you might look them over.

1. Never open a book with weather.
If it's only to create atmosphere, and not a character's reaction to the weather, you don't want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead looking for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways to describe ice and snow than an Eskimo, you can do all the weather reporting you want.

2. Avoid prologues.
They can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in nonfiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck's ''Sweet Thursday,'' but it's O.K. because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: ''I like a lot of talk in a book and I don't like to have nobody tell me what the guy that's talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy's thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That's nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don't have to read it. I don't want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.''

3. Never use a verb other than ''said'' to carry dialogue.
The line of dialogue belongs to the character; the verb is the writer sticking his nose in. But said is far less intrusive than grumbled, gasped, cautioned, lied. I once noticed Mary McCarthy ending a line of dialogue with ''she asseverated,'' and had to stop reading to get the dictionary.

4. Never use an adverb to modify the verb ''said"....
...he admonished gravely. To use an adverb this way (or almost any way) is a mortal sin. The writer is now exposing himself in earnest, using a word that distracts and can interrupt the rhythm of the exchange. I have a character in one of my books tell how she used to write historical romances ''full of rape and adverbs.''

5. Keep your exclamation points under control.
You are allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose. If you have the knack of playing with exclaimers the way Tom Wolfe does, you can throw them in by the handful.

6. Never use the words ''suddenly'' or ''all hell broke loose.''
This rule doesn't require an explanation. I have noticed that writers who use ''suddenly'' tend to exercise less control in the application of exclamation points.

7. Use regional dialect, patois, sparingly.
Once you start spelling words in dialogue phonetically and loading the page with apostrophes, you won't be able to stop. Notice the way Annie Proulx captures the flavor of Wyoming voices in her book of short stories ''Close Range.''

8. Avoid detailed descriptions of characters.
Which Steinbeck covered. In Ernest Hemingway's ''Hills Like White Elephants'' what do the ''American and the girl with him'' look like? ''She had taken off her hat and put it on the table.'' That's the only reference to a physical description in the story, and yet we see the couple and know them by their tones of voice, with not one adverb in sight.

9. Don't go into great detail describing places and things.
Unless you're Margaret Atwood and can paint scenes with language or write landscapes in the style of Jim Harrison. But even if you're good at it, you don't want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.

And finally:

10. Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip.
A rule that came to mind in 1983. Think of what you skip reading a novel: thick paragraphs of prose you can see have too many words in them. What the writer is doing, he's writing, perpetrating hooptedoodle, perhaps taking another shot at the weather, or has gone into the character's head, and the reader either knows what the guy's thinking or doesn't care. I'll bet you don't skip dialogue.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing. (Joseph Conrad said something about words getting in the way of what you want to say.)

If I write in scenes and always from the point of view of a particular character -- the one whose view best brings the scene to life -- I'm able to concentrate on the voices of the characters telling you who they are and how they feel about what they see and what's going on, and I'm nowhere in sight.

What Steinbeck did in ''Sweet Thursday'' was title his chapters as an indication, though obscure, of what they cover. ''Whom the Gods Love They Drive Nuts'' is one, ''Lousy Wednesday'' another. The third chapter is titled ''Hooptedoodle 1'' and the 38th chapter ''Hooptedoodle 2'' as warnings to the reader, as if Steinbeck is saying: ''Here's where you'll see me taking flights of fancy with my writing, and it won't get in the way of the story. Skip them if you want.''

''Sweet Thursday'' came out in 1954, when I was just beginning to be published, and I've never forgotten that prologue.

Did I read the hooptedoodle chapters? Every word.

"doughnut shop"

"doughnut shop"
written after a raspberry chocolate doughnut by jake kilroy.

i was in line at a doughnut shop this morning
when i smelled your perfume and lost my four other senses,
even though you were states away and years behind me.

it was the aroma on the purple shirt you left the first night,
and maybe that's why i thought of irises, pansies, and asters,
there, memorizing my own breaths,
empty-eyed on the day's special,
counting the seconds until i had to speak.

the years blew through me then, stormy and determined,
as moment after moment crowded into the tavern of my head,
waiting for the band to play, waiting to hear our song now.
the past, scattered about in a crowd setting, cheered drunkenly,
with some rapping their knuckles on the glass of my eyes,
making sure i was paying attention to the brawl to come.

the cold night in Dublin, the near death in Morocco,
the weeks in Spain, the home in Austin, Texas;
they were mapped out in the back, near my neck,
coaxing gibberish out of their stale gums,
to paint a new picture, one that's been touched up
and revitalized as a museum piece out of a barroom.

hope is a matter of personal welfare,
and we sign checks we can't always cash,
wondering what happened to our heart
in the time it's taken to drain the vault a hundred times
and refill it a hundred times more, day in and day out.

where was i for years?
and where was i after that?

everything was wasted, and everything was lost.
everything was reclaimed, and everything was given back.
so nothing was wasted, and nothing was lost.

love is bathtub gin, stirred and stored in the very depths of us,
homemade by hand with directions we write down as they come.
some have barrels, some have pints, but all of us have something.
we must never forget that there are always new recipes upon us,
forever with new lunatics to cook up the wild and the beautiful.

"outerworld"

"outerworld"
written after too long by jake kilroy.

in the crack of the evening, i slipped into the unreality,
a daydream that bends and bounces and thrashes and laughs.
i heard horns and clashes but felt every kind of breeze and wind,
while all colors cackled, struck, broke, and washed over me.

there, in the right pitch of the outerworld, i felt you like a church,
a home made of light, a place without gravity.

i was weightless and sublime with the heaviest heart around,
swilling post-rock anthems in my bloodstream until sickness came,
when i finally let go of my eyes and saw like i had been asleep for years.
you were this, you were that, you were there.
what more could i want but a few more words?
what does any spirit really hope for?

i floated into the breaths of the earth,
the deep, sinking gasps for air,
and they glowed a new color, yes,
all while i dragged my limbs behind me
and went free into the unknown,
spinning.

after what felt like eons, my head returned,
emptied of hate, full of everything else,
and i was what you had always made.
this was me, and i was yours,
and it was complete.