Erratic Fiction

He lies sprawled on my bed, arms and legs tied up, a can of whipped cream waiting invitingly on the end table by his blindfolded head. He’s a sight to behold, all right: three hundred pounds with bumps in all the wrong places. This is about to get freaky, I think as I shake up the can of whipped cream. Real freaky . . . What the fuck?

“You ready, stud?” my girthy friend inquires.

“I . . . I don’t know. I don’t think I want to be ready,” I reply.

His head tilts forward in the clearest expression of confusion that his bound state will allow.

“Well, I mean, we’re here,” he says.

“Yeah, about that: Why are we here?”

It’s because you’re a curious young man in college, and he’s the algebra professor who promised to change your F to a C – if you're willing to turn some of your curiosity on him.

I look up. Who the hell is that?

What? You can hear? – never mind. Just get back to it.

Wait . . . Can he hear me?

I mean, obviously I can.

I freeze, not sure where to look, a glob of whipped cream melting between the fingers of my left hand. What’s going on here?

I’ll tell you what’s going on here: You’re ruining a perfectly sexy scene, and my readers will not stand for having their well-earned arousal wasted because the hot main character decided to become self-aware right as things started getting good.

I blink in confusion. My blindfolded bedfellow shuffles about.

“So, we, uhh – doin’ this or what?”

“Just a second,” I tell him. Then I turn back to that voice, whoever – whatever – it is.

Oh, for God’s sake, stop talking like I’m not here. You know you can hear me just like I can hear you. Now, start talking to me directly, but make whatever it is you have to say quick. I’ve got to write an almost unreadable sex scene that a surprisingly large number of closeted married men in the Midwest can’t get enough of.

Whoa, whoa, whoa . . . I’m supposed to have sex with that? I mean – with him?

Don’t worry--he can’t hear you when you’re narrating.

Narrating?

“I’ve got a scratch right under my left elbow. If you’re not gonna do what we came here to do, then please God, at least scratch it for me.”

What do you mean “narrating”?

I mean you’re the first-person character in this erotic gay novel, and when you’re not talking directly to other characters, you’re describing and commenting on everything.

I sit down so hard that it’s really more of a fall than a sit.

See? Just like that.

I ask him what he was trying to get at telling me I’m a character.

No, actually, you didn’t ask me; you just said you asked me. But I’ll take it. What I mean is, you’re a character. As in not real: a piece of fiction, something that came out of my head and onto a Word document.

“Now just wait a damn minute!” I holler, jumping to my feet.

You don’t have to use dialogue with me. Remember: I can hear you when you narrate? Dialogue will just confuse the other characters around you.

“What’s that now?” the naked man tied to my bed asks.

See? Now you’ve gone and messed with his head. That’s at least another three pages to correct.

I still don’t buy what this voice fella’s saying. Character, huh? Work of fiction, huh? Not real, huh? I laugh: “Ha ha!”

“What’s so funny?”

“I’m as real as this whipped cream in my hand!”

“Maybe we can try this another time?”

Oh, yeah? Well, if it’s so real, then why’s it a toucan?

I look to the hand holding the whipped cream, and what meets my now plate-sized eyes is an honest-to-God, no-bullshitting, real-life toucan.

Real fiction toucan, actually.

My brow breaks out in a hot-cold sweat. “I-I’m seeing things,” I stammer out. “I’ve gone looney.”

“Please untie me.”

The alchemic avian flies from my hand. I watch in confused silence as it smacks into every wall, window, and shelf until it finally decides to make the headboard of my friend’s bed its perch.

What are you, Mr. Voice?

Look, would you stop with all this nonsense already? You have absolutely thrown my story entirely off-track. Just shut up, accept that I’m in charge, and don’t use dialogue unless you want other people to hear it. That poor guy looks like he’s about to run for his life.

“I’ll give you money, just please, let me go,” the naked fat man begs. Disgusting.

In charge of what?

In charge of you.

And what’s this business about just accepting what’s going on? Accept it? Hah! Andy McGee – which is apparently my name as of now – never just accepts things. Except for having to give up his dreams of being a professional baton twirler to go to college . . . which is apparently a dream I’ve had.

“Since when?” I wonder.

“Since what? My handcuffs are very tight.”

Since now, when I decided you needed a name – which came from a combination of my middle-school friend Andy and a funny-sounding last name I thought up – and a failed dream. I figured that would make you more, you know . . . human.

I scoff. I’m already human, I think and then start floating.

“But I can’t float! I’m a person! People don’t float!”

They do when the goddamn writer says they do.

“Nothing you’ve said has had any logical conversational source,” my friend says.

Look . . . You’re a character in a dirty novel – nothing more, nothing less.

Trembling from the corner I’ve floated into, I concede that this voice seems to know a thing or two about me and to have this world I live in by the short and curlies. So, I play his game and talk mano-a-mano about my whole existence thing:

I’m more than a character, Mr. Voice. I’m a cowboy . . . Wait, what?

No, you were a cowboy. I started to use you in a western that never really went anywhere. Loved your character, though. I started writing this raunchy little moneymaker, remembered you, thought you’d be perfect as the naïve college kid, and the rest is what you see before you.

Wait . . . But I remember. Yeah. I was a cowboy. And I had a family: wife, daughter. Nice little house in the country. Easy life of roping cattle and working with my hands. Not this life of doing God-knows-what that involves whipped cream and men who look like John Goodman.

. . . Why John Goodman?

I was thinking of John Goodman when I wrote him.

Oh.

“When did a bird get in here?” he asks after the toucan tried to use his face as a perch.

And while I think of it, why . . . I mean, just why? Why am I here and not there with my wife and daughter? Surely I must have loved them.

Yeah, you did – for twenty pages. But that didn’t work. This, though: This works.

“This . . . This works.” I try those words out like a pair of pants that you haven't worn in, like, two years: They almost fit, but it's clear I've been lying to myself about how much cream cheese I've been putting onto my morning bagels. Or whatever. The point is they don't fit right.

“Stop spouting out non-sequiturs and get this goddamn bird off me!”

So that’s why I’m here? Because one life didn’t work for some reason and now another one – one I don’t like – does? I could be holding my wife and baby girl in my arms, but instead, I’m about to do I don’t even wanna know what with a can of whipped cream in a room with a John Goodman lookalike and a toucan that came out of nowhere?

Look, I know you don’t like it, but this works, okay? It just works.

And what’s “works,” Mr. Voice? What “works” for a goddamn life?

Money. Westerns aren’t selling, Andy. But gay erotica: That’s making some money. And I’ve got bills to pay.

Bills to pay? The words hit me like a fist to the gut. I’m miserable. And apparently, at one point in my life – in one of my lives – I wasn’t miserable. Hell, I was happy. I had a daughter, a beautiful daughter that meant the world to me, I’m sure she did. And a wife: a wife who loved me as I loved her, surely. A wife who lived her life to make her family’s life better and stronger. A wife who –

“Look, can you at least spray a little of that cream on my toes? I need to get something out of this, you know what I mean?”

“A wife who didn’t say gross stuff like that!”

“What’s that now?”

Don’t forget a wife who didn’t get my phone bill caught up with like that gentleman did.

So that’s what my life really amounts to: a phone bill?

And a car payment. And these really nice slippers.

“Slippers!” I spat.

“This is the most confusing sex I’ve ever tried to have.”

I don’t think you realize how comfortable these slippers are.

I don’t care about your goddamn slippers! Or your goddamn phone bill! And I certainly don’t care about doing stuff with this man here just because that somehow makes more money than the life I was happy with did! You can’t put a value on someone’s existence!

I can, and I did. And it wasn’t quite enough to put a dent in my alimony back payments, but it was still pretty decent.

I fall to the floor because my disembodied God doesn’t know what gentleness is, and I sit, quiet, thoughtful, confused – and, most of all, upset. Upset at having exactly zero say in my life. Upset because I don’t get to live the life that made me happy. Upset that, instead, I’m living this awful existence because it somehow makes more money for some disembodied voice.

All right, look . . . I know it’s upsetting. But no one has control of his life. Not even me. I mean, hell – you think I wanna spend my life writing scenes where John Goodman gets freaky with a hundred-pound college kid and a can of Cool Whip? No! I wanted to write westerns. Loved writing them. I’m damn good at writing them, and I suck at writing this crap . . . But doing what I love isn’t paying the bills, Andy. And at the end of the day, paying the bills is what decides our fate. There are book companies that need to make money. They make that money with niche erotica. They need people like me to write that erotica so they have something to sell.

And I needed someone to be in these books. I like you. I liked you since I tried to do anything with my westerns. And that’s why you’re still here. You’re a great character, and I didn’t wanna let you go. I hate writing this stuff as much as you hate being in it. But I figured if you were in it, It’d make writing it that much more bearable.

I ruminated over this as the toucan pecked at John Goodman’s toes. At least that seemed to be doing something for him.

All right, Mr. Voice, I finally conceded. I understand. Fine. You need money. I’m a cog in your machine just like you’re a cog in some bigger guy’s machine. It’s all about money. I’m about to get freaky with this guy because people all need to make money. So, fine. I’ll do what I have to, because I know I can’t avoid doing it, just like you can’t avoid writing it. It’s all about making that money, and making money’s more important than happiness, I guess.

So here we go. Send me in, Mr. Voice. Let’s make the best damn teacher-on-student gay erotica the world’s ever seen . . . But while we do, I just want you to remember one thing: It won’t last forever. This story. Your story. Any story. If my wife and daughter can go away because they weren’t worth anything to anyone, so can anyone else. And when the day comes that you can’t offer the world anything anymore and it’s your turn to be a memory, do you want that memory to be just a guy working to make someone else a buck? Wouldn’t it be nice to maybe have a good memory or two to break up all that monotonous moneymaking? Just a western you write cause you wanna write it, not cause you have to write it. A wife, maybe. And a daughter. Just a good little story that won’t pay your phone bill, but it’ll sure make you happy. Wouldn’t that be nicer than a toucan crapping on John Goodman’s face?

I’m sorry, but that’s funny.

Yeah, it is. But it isn’t what I’d want. Isn’t what you want either, I’d say.

Look . . . Andy . . . You’re just a character. You’re just something I control.

“Same to you, Mr. Voice. You’re just something someone else controls.”

“Mr. who?”

“Nothing, Johnny. Now how’s about we get to what we came here to do?” I turn to go do the deed with my rotund partner . . .

And he’s gone.

So’s the toucan.

So’s the whole damn room.

It’s all been replaced with a scene I just about remember: sturdy wooden floors under sturdy wooden furniture. A worn bearskin rug running damn near the length of the place. A little furnace burning coals over in the corner. And an open window with the curtains billowing in by the breath of the most perfect, most comforting breeze that ever snuck its way into a home.

And trailing right behind that breeze is the most beautiful singing I ever did hear: nothing technically perfect, but perfect to my sentimental ears. A soft lady’s voice humming a sweet song as the singer approaches the house. Closer. Closer. As that voice begins to sound from just outside the front door, I find that I knew that voice just like I do my own nose.

“Huh-honey?” I say – squeal, almost.

And it is her, as I see when she enters the place, an armful of clean sheets tucked under her slender but sturdy arms.

Almost without any control of myself, I run to her, pick her up – her laundry tumbling all over – and spin her around like I were presenting the first-prize ribbon at a fair. “Honey! Oh, honey, I missed you! I missed not having to suck cream off a fat man’s toes for a living!”

“Oh, Andy. I was only gone five min – wait, what?”

Just then, a scrawny thing in pigtails and a gingham dress comes skipping in. “Hey, daddy!”

“Hey, pumpkin!” And I spin her around, too. “What have you been up to?”

“Just outside playing with my pet toucan.”

“Jeez, you really like those toucans, don’t you, guy?”

“What, daddy?”

Remember the dialogue thing, for Christ’s sake!

All right, fine. As I sit my daughter down and tell her to go clean herself up for supper, I can’t help but wonder why you decided to put me back here . . . Which is your cue to tell me why you decided to put me back here.

Because you were right: We are all going to die someday. And as much as I like the money, it can’t compare to the feeling of doing what I love . . . At least every now and again. I can’t promise you’ll never service gross fellas anymore – I mean, I just put a down payment on a BMW, for God’s sake. But I can promise that, no matter what I put you through, I’ll always have time to let you spend in the stories – in the life – you like. That we both like.

I smile. You’re gonna write some great stories, Mr. Voice.

And you’re gonna have to make love to a crooked cattle baron who looks like a middle-aged version of that fat kid from Modern Family just to save the town.

“What?”

“Honey, what’s wrong?”

What “what”? Jesus, I said I wanted to be happy; I didn’t say my alimony payments just disappeared. We all have to make sacrifices. Now grab a can of that bacon grease your wife keeps by the range top. You’ll need it. A lot of it.