Melange Magazine

Fiction

Oh baby, that’s the way I hate it, yeah.

A trivial pursuit in the land of love, art, and apoplectic intercourse
By nathaniel g. moore

“I’ve always considered writing the most hateful kind of work. I suspect it’s a bit like fucking, which is only fun for amateurs. Old whores don’t do much giggling.”
HUNTER S. THOMPSON

When I was born I was wrapped in three different grocery store tabloid newspapers and weighed in at the meat counter. This was the way of things in Etobicoke, Ontario, an eastern suburb of Toronto, where the mortar was always squeezing out in between the bricks like too much mayonnaise. Clearly, I had no choice.

When the butcher slapped the price and expiration date on my papered carcass, the human experience had started for me.

I am a writer, stamp, and this is the first story in my life’s work that divulges this fact. I won’t go through the symptomology of the profession, nor dance around in the narrative slant. I usually tend to hide this grotesque fact in my work, by giving my characters real jobs—but not this time. Usually, it’s sexual-situational disaster comedy, a telethon for the unwell, or some epic sports murder mystery. Or, if I do identify the self, it’s non-fiction, a review, and perhaps, not unknowingly, in those slate-gray syllables I refer to myself as writer. But in fiction?

Never. So here it is: my name is Jack Notho, a brilliant and much sought after writer and in my very late twenties, completely uneducated, crude and hostile. One of my eyes leaks semen or cranberry juice. Hey, it’s fiction, and I’m sure if I tried hard enough, it could happen.

Some, who don’t know me personally and are happy about this fact, might go so far as to call me “insane” or, be so cruel as to call me “a jock”, which I don’t mind, but it doesn’t reflect my salary or intellect. Jack Notho thinks of hurting poets on a regular basis.

Oh and another thing, Jack started up. “Jack Notho is not desperate. Why? because that would imply ambition,” Jack boasted at the universal water cooler, “I know big things have and are going to keep happening to me, I’m not a parasite like most little hope-amputated poets who have looping wet dreams of open mic nights. I could go days without talking, and get criticized for it, yet spew out on average 100,000 words of fiction a year, yet am this boring shy person, withdrawn, who doesn’t talk?”

“I have no idea who he’s talking to.”

“This chick, said I never talked, fucking not true man, not true,” Jack chimed in.

“Impossible.”

“Desperate?

“No. What?”

“No, I’m looking for the big pay off, where, at a single sitting, I convert the unconverted, which at this rate is about 29,034,259 of the population of the country of my birth, the very large Canada. I’m not doing this for money, but I’m certainly not doing this for me. I’m doing this to change the way people think about the subjects I cover, because quite frankly, I don’t see enough variations in thought and interpretation, and it’s making me worry. I speak to many people and the blandness that pervades is equal parts rotten coffin and stale Gingerale, as if all we have left are our minds, and they have harnessed themselves to the safest harbors of meaning. I have always slipped down this back hill into this strange vacant lot, I have always found this netherworld of cerebral fascination, I go there for days on end… I’ve been like this since I can remember.

Eccentric? I guess when splattered against the tiles of a kitchen floor I’m eccentric. I’m seamless. I guess when compared to the barren faculty of creativity that is physical reality, I am eccentric, but that is when I’m juxtaposed against the inhuman, so there’s going to be a slight scale-tip.”

Jack explains to the world’s patrons. “Let’s pretend we’re all in a kitchen. There’s a table with apples on them. Someone says, Look, apples, and you see, Jack Notho would not want to start this way, and if someone began to say, look apples, I would probably leave.”

The apples are already there, they’re already apples, so fuck off. That’s Jack Notho for you.
No clarification is necessary.

Jack Notho could care less what happens to him. All he knows is that he’s good with language, can convey meaning and imagery like you wouldn’t believe, (or as a direct result of this skill, will believe) and he lives now, in an era of extreme personal irony that will tell more about the people he associates with than anything about him. Jesus, you can’t go anywhere without having a religious impulse. Book City down the street just did their inventory, and according to a warmly dressed madman who comes into the store that I work at, says the Bible was their most stolen book. Can you imagine that? Some sick frothing rapist in Toronto running around with a stolen bible, trying to coral two of every stripper into some sort of demented and near-euphoric tidal wave proof ark of sex, in his underground bachelor dungeon.

No, ambition was a fruitless and is a fruitless pursuit, because fate and timing is everything.
So is technology.

It all started one summer with wine and payphones and the faint reminiscence of Team Canada’s double-gendered gold medal win at the Olympics for hockey on ice.

So when Jack Notho goes to the jugular vein for this particular piece, he was sitting at Christie Pitts with some luscious Euro-cougar-in-training, around June 2002. She was not freckled, but clever, and was scented in sweat and something illusory. It was this illusory mist that Jack could not deny.

In the simplest terms, thought Jack Notho, this lady was some fluorescent landmine in faded denim, a wine bottle wielding mad kisser sexpot, with envelopes brimming with the magazine she helped edit with her nonchalant elitist crew who had obviously spent a great deal of money slapping together another meaningless issue.

“Sexpot” said Jack Notho, typing and sneezing mid-sentence “is not a word according to my computer, so I will refer to this character henceforth as seaport.”

Seaport was drinking and smoking on the picnic table, as was Jack, and discussing the rest of the contents of her envelopes. “So, thanks for editing my stories,” Jack said. Seaport replied, “Jack, I can’t stand to read about this tragic romantic stories, these women who…” And that’s when Jack Notho stopped her, “Don’t worry, it’s painless, I just tell it like it is, really it’s not meant to get pity.”

As Satan would have it, or to get scientific, the irony bloomed in Jack Notho’s life like sweet fangs spitting from every orifice of his pristine teen model type frame, then things got funny between him and seaport.

Yes, dear hangers-on, not four months later, ol’ seaport would cast herself in the traditional Jack Notho sadness icon brand patron at the tail end of a short list of art related, field related, industry related romantic tragedies, smile in the back row, holding a grenade, like we were shooting a commemorative cover of failed lust, and this was the cover story, or it was for a commemorative plaque I could iron onto my underwear.

“This isn’t a smear campaign against the human experience,” Jack assured those walking their dogs. “I just wake up and these things happen, one minute I’m in the bushes naked at 2 a.m. with someone, the next it’s me alone, facing the answering machine as it haplessly massages my auditory likeness with Khan-like precision.”

“I’m sorry to hear that,” said a public specimen.

“About a week ago”, Jack told another stranger, “I saw the first woman I kissed walk into the bookstore where I work and she was peddling a child in some sort of transportation vehicle, I think a carriage, but it seemed to hover. Anyway it was awkward, I wasn’t sure why, I hadn’t seen here in ten years. The physical state is something I think no artists can avoid, but the real ones try, like Kafka; he was just like fuck this, the body, that’s stupid. Cognition is the real genesis of human trait; it is what separates us from the plastic straw.”

So seaport, the latest icon in the theory of romantic degeneration in the life of Jack Notho even went so far if you can imagine, um, went so far in the bravado campaign of her affection relocation program by offering to edit the stories Jack was in the middle of writing about on the subject of, well, their imperial entanglement.

Their naked lies.

The discrepancies pilled up like a plate of unborn cavities; if she was in town, Jack wouldn’t know about it, “but then she’d show up at my work, peck me on the cheek and disappear on a bus,”

She would say, “I’m leaving on a bus now.”

“What kind of weird world was I forced to pay rent in?” Jack thought as he typed.

This one I suspect. I mean, that is the answer.

“The world I star in I suppose, acts like a guaranteed muse; it’s a guaranteed dictatorship, the emotional dictatorship that I awake under each morning, giant and menacing.”

Jack smiled on his way into the grocery store, kicking the slush from his copper boots. He began to speak to the strangers because he knew they would understand his speech.

“I am only relating the human experience, which for my part is much more human than theirs, I mean, what are they, these people I know, what are they really doing without Jack Notho as the focal point? Enjoying things from a passive vantage point, right? There is a human trying to talk to me, I will cook instead, I will read a book. I will masturbate.”

The clerks wriggled their noses in unison and also in apathy.

“I’m out here, fighting the war against turning into a retail beetle one morning, handing eight customers the same book and eating day-old garbage from the alley bins during my lunch break. I’m fighting this war with intent and love, a purity not seen since well, ever really.” Jack explained on his way up the side of some crates.

The patrons in the store began to shiver with anticipation; they knew audience participation was eminent. They all stopped their groping and watched as Jack Notho stood on the mountainous peak of a crate of pie sized bagels, and exclaimed to the fallen cloud of humans: “The fact that I can get so much done, dominate as much as I do, and work a full-time job makes me special, like the special Olympics of writers. So please call the number on your screen, it could save your life, you could be cast in a similar likeness, or you could, as one past icon put it, just go and brush your teeth. Who gave but this option?”

The patrons clapped, there was strength in everyone, everyone seemed smarter and happier, admiration forms were filled out and roles were cast in plastic, wood and signed in crude oil. The world was a better place.