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The Guy That Roller-Skates on Stage
Then, after the Rockettes, a guy came out in a tuxedo and roller skates on, and started skating under a bunch of little tables, and telling jokes while he did it. He was a very good skater and all, but I couldn’t enjoy it much because I kept picturing him practicing to be a guy that roller-skates on the stage.
—J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye
These are the rules. Stepfathers in stories ruin stepdaughters with their dirty desires. Women empowered by sex are dark and cool and in love in a take-it-or-leave-it way. Homeless people contain within their rags and stench a shining, bright truth. Battered women can produce guns at a moment’s notice.
Here’s what I remember. Reality cannot change, so the world remains blameless, and thus we must accommodate it. The cost of rebellion is destruction; those who cannot pay that price should not be rebels. Our illusions must always fail in the world. The world’s mysteries can only be assimilated, never bent to our own needs. And so on.
Here are some things for you to say. There’s no story. It begins with summary. No one changes. I don’t see the point, the reason, the why of it all. At the end, there’s only “So what?” It’s self-indulgent. I wanted to care, really, but you never made me. It’s not you—it’s me. I hate these kind of writings. What’s worse is thinking someone could like it.
The stepfather crept into her room and touched her in that ugly awful tender way. She grew up to have sex in bar stalls and give blowjobs in parking lots and she is free of the bonds of love. If you try to get close to her, she spits cum in your face and how do you like that? Only the homeless can hang with her. She shares chicken and rice with them on the church steps and they reveal a truth that sounds like a secret spy message: “Pretense is the new love.” This guy smacked her against the metal radiator in the bus stop rest room and her finger transformed into a gun and she shot him through the chest. The bullet bounced off metal and thus entered the heart twice.
The writer can be anyone in a story, a guy whose penis has been severed in a wartime accident, a manic teenager with the unique ability to find phoniness in all its varied forms, a woman beyond love yet falling for it over and over. Life isn’t like that. There’s the illusion of choice, of course, but it’s fixed like Fate and inherited like disease and eye color.
Most people identify with Holden, holdin’ onto childhood and Eden and illusions masquerading as truths. I am that guy on roller skates, practicing my entire life for this moment and this moment only. It’s corny. All show. For phony applause. I don’t want it to be otherwise.
The world is locked in place and never varies its path. If I could give myself instead of a story, I would. Once, a story wrote itself without me and expressed the desire locked within its world. It went like this:
Fix me.
Return to Volume 2.5
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