The Hive
The official blog of science fiction / horror author Terence West.
William Gibson Blog
Famed author of Neuromancer and Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay.
The Word Foundry
Joe Clifford Faust's "blog of a working writer: tracking writing projects, musings on the
creative process, occasional side trips into music, media, politics, religion, etc."
A Writer's Diary
By Cynthia Harrison, who has the good sense to quote Virginia Woolf: "The truth is that writing
is the profound pleasure and being read the superficial."
The American Sentimentalist
"Never has any people endured its own tragedy with so little sense of the tragic." Essays by Mark W. Anderson.
Screenwriting By Blog
David C. Daniel writes a screenplay online. "I've decided to publish the process as a way to push myself through it.
From concept to completion, it'll be here."
SeanAlonzo.com
Official site of occult fiction author Sean-Alonzo, exploring symbolism, alternative
history, philosophy, secret societies and other areas of the esoteric tradition.
Crafty Screenwriting
Maunderings of Alex Epstein, tv scribe, about life, politics, and the tv show I'm co-creating.
Stealing Heaven From The Lips Of God
Writer & Artist, Dee Rimbaud reflects upon politics, religion, art, poetry, the meaning of life,
the nature of God and why toast always lands butter side down on carpets.
Robert Peake
Heart and Mind, Fully Engage ... a poet's website.
Sidestepping Real
By Ren Powell, poet, children’s writer, essayist and editor.
(Posts archived here are from 01/10/03 - 10/31/06)
Wednesday, June 18, 2003 The Serial Monogamist [from a memoir in progress, which began on 4/13/03]
Along with too much booze came too many women. They fit into one of two categories: one-night stands and those with whom I attempted a relationship, most of which lasted anywhere from a few weeks to a few months, only a couple lasting as long as a year or more. The one-night stands were few and far between. Mostly I was a serial monogamist, moving from one steady girlfriend to another.
Most of these women I met in bars, which meant that more often than not they, too, had a drinking problem. Sometimes, in periodic frustrations with the bar scene, I met a woman by replying to a personal ad in the paper, and on one memorable occasion I even put in an ad myself. But mostly they were women who came to bars with some regularity, barflies like myself.
Very few of these women treated me as badly as I treated them. At best, the affair ended of its own inertia when not even sex, which was what brought us together in the first place and often was good and sometimes all we had in common, could keep us interested in one another. When the breakup was worse, it would be noisy and loud, full of drunken accusations, and when it was worst these histrionics would take place in a public bar.
The pattern was always the same. You bought a woman a drink, or she bought you a drink. You moved to a table for two or maybe just to adjacent barstools. You talked. You hit it off. One or the other suggested going to another bar, usually to one where you weren’t well known. You drank and talked some more. One or the other suggested going home together. Your place or mine? If there was booze in the apartment, you drank some more. You made love. You fell asleep, or passed out, together.
The next morning was always the key, the moment that defined whether this would be a one-night stand or an attempted relationship. Did I wake up with the feeling, My God, how did this happen? Or with the feeling, How did I get so lucky? If you felt the latter, if you made love again, if you had breakfast together, then the signs were good that a relationship would be attempted. You’d do this again. If you still were interested in one another a week later, you would do something besides go to a bar together. Maybe you’d go to a play or a movie or to dinner. Maybe you’d take a trip together out of town. Eros might find Fidelia standing by its side. Agape was usually nowhere to be found, but you can’t have everything in this world.
The women got bored with this routine before I did. Usually they wanted more than what we had together. Relationship gurus call this the “intimacy issue” but I don’t think it had much to do with intimacy at all. I think it had to do with the fact that, as a writer, I spent a lot of energy and focus within the world of my imagination, a world that was private. When a woman realized she was not a participant in this process, she felt left out, as indeed she was.
But this has little to do with intimacy. When someone speaking Chinese has a communication problem with someone speaking Arabic, it’s not a problem of intimacy, it’s a language barrier. Within the world of my imagination I was being intimate indeed, and in time, after the creative process was completed, the special arrangement of language we call a play or a story would become public, as intimate a communication as my art and craft permitted me to make. I might even hang out considerable dirty laundry in public, as I am doing here. Who gets more intimate than a writer?
This very discussion between a man and a woman occurs in my play Sad Laughter, which is based on the life of Moliere (excerpts appear in both The Best Stage Scenes of 1996 and The Best Men’s Stage Monologues of 1996). Here is the great playwright in an exchange with his young wife:
ARMANDE: I can only try and make sense out of your actions, Jean. You never talk to me. I never know what you want. One day you say I should leave the stage, the next you offer me a great part. I don't think I really know you at all.
MOLIERE: Everybody knows me — I reveal myself to the world!
ARMANDE: Only on stage.
MOLIERE: All it takes is the price of a ticket to know me.
ARMANDE: I'm talking about my husband, not the playwright and actor. We play roles on stage, not ourselves.
MOLIERE: I don't always distinguish the difference.
Later Moliere tries to explain the relationship between his work and his life:
I often play the cuckold on stage, don't I? So maybe I'm just practicing. That's what we live for, isn't it? Perfecting our parts? Fine-tuning our roles? I know I haven't given you much attention lately. I mean, you're right, our life is a rehearsal. My life is a dress rehearsal for a play. Even now, as I hear myself talking, I wonder where I'll be putting this, in what future scene in what future play I'll be standing before someone like you, perhaps before you yourself, the actress, and I'll be the actor, and we'll be talking — in some play, some day — much as we are talking here now. Because that's what my life seems to be, a dress rehearsal for a play. Which, strictly speaking, doesn't really make my life much of a life at all, does it?
It’s all material – which is not necessarily a good thing. But it’s the way life is for a writer. Or at least for this one.
My writing, even more than my drinking, was the mistress against whom many women felt secondary and unable to compete. There were exceptions to this – Carol and Linda come immediately to mind, both of whom found ways to participate in my work (and in the next chapter you’ll meet “Zeena,” a participant as Muse) – but most women found that I did not have enough emotional energy left over from writing to give them what they needed. Who can blame them for leaving?
If the pattern of the relationship was similar, the women were not. In all ways they were different, and when I think of them now it’s as the individuals they were. Two, in particular, stand out in my memory, not because these short relationships were special but because the women were such remarkable and individual characters. They were, in fact, characters a writer might create.
The first I’ll call the Director. I met her on a sunny afternoon at a beer garden. I was ordering beer by the small pitcher, as I usually did, and drinking one after the other as I revised a play I was writing. This was during my residency period at the New Rose Theatre.
In time, a woman took the table next to me, also sitting alone, and she too began to work on something. We may have exchanged a smile but physically she was not the tall lithe type of woman I’m readily attracted to, so I entertained no thoughts of seduction and went back to work. It was she who made the first move.
Without asking, she joined me. She had noticed I was working on a script. She was a theater director and actress. I put aside my work, and we started chatting about theater. She was new in town and hoping to make connections, how serendipitous to run into me. She had a great personality, we hit it off, one thing led to another, and I ended up going home with her.
The next morning I dismissed the experience as a one-night stand. A few days later I received something in the mail from her. It was a report card. She had graded my lovemaking performance in a variety of categories. I was not too pleased with my final grade, a B-minus, until I realized that this was about the grade I would have given her, too. We just hadn’t clicked in bed, which was fine. At the bottom of my report card, like a teacher’s note, she suggested a relationship as friends and theater artists, keeping sex out of it – but did I have any friends I might fix her up with?
How the hell can you not like a woman like that? She was ballsy, eccentric, unique – and she ended up being a talented theater artist as well. A few years later we worked on a grant project together, and she directed a script I wrote.
Still later I met a guy in a bar who had recently experienced the strangest one-night stand of his life. The woman had sent him a report card on his lovemaking, giving him a final grade of B+. The Director was up to her old tricks. I reminded the guy that his grade could have been worse and bought him a drink.
The other woman I remember so well is someone who responded to my personal ad. By and large, running the ad proved to be a confusing, immobilizing experience because I received over 100 replies – and every one of the women who wrote sounded like someone worth meeting. How was I supposed to choose between them? I also found it depressing that so many neat-sounding ladies were as unable as I was to find a partner of the opposite sex. Of course, in my ad I failed to mention that I spent four or five hours a day, on the average, in a barroom.
I probably wouldn’t have responded to any of the women at all had not one response caught my interest by the extreme measures it would take to meet its writer. This woman was a doctor, and she only could be reached by phone at home between the hours of four and five in the morning on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
I’m a morning man. The thought of having an actual conversation with a woman before nine in the morning was very titillating. I called the woman as soon as I could, and we made a date to have lunch later in the week.
We agreed to meet at a downtown restaurant near the waterfront. I went early and sat at the bar, lubricating my nerves while wanting to call the whole thing off. I tried to imagine dating a doctor and couldn’t.
She was late, which actually was a relief. I entertained the fantasy that she was standing me up. Then, just as I was about to give up on her, a red sports car swerved to a stop on the sidewalk in front of the door into the bar. A tall dark lanky woman, just my type, rushed through the door and grabbed a man who was sitting on the stool nearest to her. “Are you Charles?” she asked. The man was a born comic. He replied, “No, but I wish I was.”
I identified myself, and the Doctor, grabbing my arm, pulled me outside. The sports car’s engine was idling. She introduced herself and asked if a picnic lunch would work.
She had prepared a wonderful gourmet feast, which we ate in Washington Park overlooking the city. It was about as romantic a first date, a blind date at that, as you can have. We seemed to hit it off and before she had to rush back to the hospital, we made a second date.
I was very optimistic about this relationship for several weeks. She had an incredible apartment on an upper floor in a downtown highrise. She loved theater. She was even familiar with my work. Maybe going out with a doctor, with a woman rolling in dough, wouldn’t be so bad after all.
But then came the rest of the story. She said she liked me. She liked me so much that she wanted to give me a complete makeover. She wanted to buy me expensive clothes, getting me out of my usual jeans and work shirt. She wanted to set me up in her apartment. She wanted to buy me a car. She wanted me to escort her to all the fine fancy events of the city. I had to look the part, of course. She wanted me to be her boy-toy.
I think I actually considered the offer for a few minutes. In those days, I always gave free rent the time of day. But I already had free rent, and all I had to do for it was to collect the rent of others and keep honest books. What I liked least about the offer, of course, was the makeover. Today your jeans, tomorrow your soul.
The funny thing is, the Doctor wasn’t used to being turned down. She wasn’t used to being rejected. She couldn’t believe that I, a starving writer, wouldn’t let her take care of me. Who the hell did I think I was, pseudo-bohemian slob that I was, not to let her buy me a thousand dollar wardrobe? Didn’t I know that clothes make the man? How do you expect to become a famous playwright if you dress like that? And so forth and so on.
It wasn’t a friendly separation. A few years later, when I ran into her at a play, looking a tad ridiculous in her furs at this particular dungeon of a theater, she refused to acknowledge my presence. I was happy to notice that the boy-toy accompanying her looked miserable as hell.
6/18/2003 07:03:00 AM |
0 comments
_The Writing Life