Writing stories is not a recent obsession for me. It began in my early teens with a story about the end of the world. Planet Earth gets sucked into a black hole. Balls and holes. The scientist who announces Earth’s fate to his colleagues does so while standing beside a pool table holding a cue stick. This was so obviously a story by a teen-aged boy sublimating his sexual urges. It was me using my pen to masturbate. Amazing Stories sent me a form rejection with a tick mark beside one of the cardinal rules of sci-fi storytelling: an idea alone does not a story make. Discouraged, I abandoned sci-fi stories for a time and moved on to more adult themes. I wrote a story about a married man who picked up a woman at a bar. As they drove to the local motel, a fog rolled in, forcing them to stop. Bored of waiting for the fog to lift, they succumbed to the inevitable. Blouse unbuttoned, pants around ankles, car seat tilted back as far as it would go. Mid-coitus, they felt a rumbling and realized too late that they had stopped on a level rail crossing. Smush! I called my story “The Well-Trained Husband.”
I gave the story to my mom for her opinion. I’m not sure what I expected from her. My mom’s literary education was typical of native Ontarians who grew up in farm communities: a handful of canonical texts run through the blender of a healthy Calvinism. It produced a philosophy of art that could be summarized like this: the purpose of art is to improve the character; if it doesn’t do that, then it’s crap. Until grade 8, my mom attended a one-room school house on the 5th concession south of London. For all that time, she had only one teacher, a woman named Katie McCorquodale, a good Presbyterian like my mom. I had the privilege of meeting a much older Mrs. McCorquodale at various community functions. Doubtless, she was a woman of unassailable character, but she was no artist, that’s for goddamned sure. After my mom read my story, she looked me in the eye and said, “It’s not terribly moral, is it?”
Getting a form rejection slip from Amazing Stories is one thing; getting a steely gaze from your mom is a rejection of a different order. Although I was too young to have discovered therapy, I did a good job of talking myself through the crisis. I started by asking myself why my mom couldn’t see the camp, the over-the-top silliness of a train bearing down on lovers in a fog-bound car. Why were our sensibilities so different? Part of it may have to do with personality. Part of it may also have to do with the obvious fact that after they were married, my parents moved from the corner of nowhere and cornfield to an apartment that fronted the busiest street in the country. Of course I would grow up seeing the world differently; I was a city boy. Until me, no one in either of my parent’s families had ever been born and raised in a city. I was a dreadful experiment, like the monster in Frankenstein.
For my next story, I wrote about a husband and wife who rented a house with a long narrow staircase to the bedroom and bath. The husband had been in an accident and was confined to a wheelchair. The couple hoped one day to save enough for a proper escalator, but in the meantime, the husband hoisted himself up and down the stairs step by step, grunt by grunt. Although, technically, he still had the use of his manly bits, since the accident, he’d never been able to get an erection. The wife loved her husband dearly but was sexually frustrated and longed for more than he could give her. So they came to an agreement, a temporary measure until the husband solved his problem. Once a week, while the husband was at work, the wife would remain at home and entertain the services of a gigolo. My story opens on the morning of a weekly visit from the gigolo. The husband feigns illness and says he has to stay home. The wife suspects that the husband is lying. She is angry, but relents; he can stay home while the gigolo visits, but must promise to stay downstairs. Story promises are made to be broken, and while the wife and her lover-for-hire scream their orgasms like butterflies down to the sitting room, the husband begins his arduous grunting journey up the stairs. At the top, he hoists himself into his wheelchair and waits for the couple to finish. Confrontation between husband and gigolo. Husband produces gun. Gigolo laughs. Husband fires. Misses. Kills wife. Recoil sends wheelchair down the stairs. Bump, bump, bump to the bottom where the chair flips over. Husband breaks neck and dies. Gigolo stuffs giant manly bits back into pants and traipses downstairs. Spooked by husband’s leering dead eyes, gigolo covers them with comics page from newspaper.
The end.
I never showed this story to my mom. I showed it to my friend’s mom instead. She seemed more liberal in her view of the arts. Once a week, she took her son to drawing classes. Once a week, my friend and his mom would sit together and draw female nudes. When I heard about this, I wanted to trade places with my friend. I wanted to be the one who sat holding a pencil and staring at naked women. Besides, my friend was gay so the experience was wasted on him. Then again, maybe it was for the best that I didn’t go to the drawing classes. As a horny teenager, it was reasonably certain that the minute the model’s clothes came off, I’d get a massive erection. In an art studio, I wouldn’t know what to do with an erection. I’ve only ever had one sure-fire method for dealing with an unwanted erection.
I write.
I write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write and write.