New Adventures in Writing...

A Dog Named Bear - Epiphany - Rabbit Killers

But back to my book. Though I'm still pretty damned stumped, I'm prompted by the intriguing way in which Candy's book makes use of intertextual irony as a means of drawing the reader into the plot, and the plot is nothing more than the absence of an ending. This guy, this writer can't come up with an ending. But who cares, because that's the whole crux of the book. If he could come up with an ending, there'd be no book. Similarly, in my case, I can't come up with a beginning or middle let alone an end for my book, which means it has that much more potential for becoming something clever enough to engage readers in a real and palpable way.

However, I have guilty thoughts, using Candy's premise as a means of furthering my own literary endeavor. Not that I'd steal her whole story. I feel that I could somehow enlarge on what she's already done.

Anyway, so I finally tracked down my ex, Rita. I found myself starting to question Rita's existence, thanks to that fruity kid, Candy. As a result I started wondering if maybe I'd fabricated the whole long, lugubrious relationship with this half bread. But no, I found her, barefoot and humming some awful radio hit and making guacamole in her kitchen.

"How'd you find me?" she squawked when she first saw me standing in the doorway.

"You changed your phone number."

She blinked and then stuck her tongue out and slammed the door.

She forgot to lock it, so I opened the door and came inside. Instantly I found myself engulfed in that strange and exotic odor specific to Rita alone. All girls have it, all humans have it. A unique odor that somehow encapsulates that person's entire past, present and future in one instantaneous effervescent odor, at once both tangible and intangible, explaining all and yet relinquishing nothing.

I breathed in and frowned. The smell of her hair mixed with cooking oil suddenly brought back a troublesome memory from my own past.

So, after I'd used the crowbar on my uncle and stolen his car, I drove straight to my sister's place out on the plains of the Mojave. She run's this sort of junk racket with her husband, a pock marked Apache with cataracts named Constantine. They keep about a dozen junked cars and a host of other equally inoperable farm machinery along with a menagerie of birds, stray dogs and various mules and goats, fenced in with rickety cedar timbers, turning gray under the tortuous desert winds. I think they even have a pet deer, but I'm not certain. I helped build that fence actually. Anyway, first thing I do when I get there is ask my sister which war it was that dad got killed in.

She of course gave her usual answer, that it must've been one of them Indian wars since all those damned Injuns got nothing better to do than drink whiskey and make trouble. I told her the west had been won like a hundred years ago and dad couldn't have been killed by an Indian.

"Yeah, well I'm being killed by an Indian, and real slow." She glanced up at Constantine on the porch, wisps of jet black curling out from under a dogged John Deere cap. She scowled. "What are you doing here? Oh," she brightened. "I've got something for you."

I followed her inside.

Their place has always reminded me of a petting zoo mixed with a thrift store, with a little bit of gun shop thrown in.

"Look at this," she pulled out a couple of pistols hung on a small leather belt. The guns were cap guns. Toys. Silvery aluminum with fake ivory handles. "Found these at the old house last month. Thought you might like 'em. They were yours when you were little. Well, littler than you are now anyway."

"Huh," I took the weapons. The old house she referred to is the rickety bungalow where I was born in east Los Angeles. My mother sold it years earlier but my sister still liked to visit the place, sneaking in at night to rifle through the basement and the shed. A couple of half-wit hippies had bought the place and strung it up with all kinds of plant life and buddhist prayer flags.