The Deviant

You lay coddled in her arms and she in yours. And when she tilted her chin back to expose her neck there it was, curled comfortable under her chin hanging a breeze-space below: a black hair. Half an inch long.

Imagine my disgust. To see that my woman, granted her left breast wasn't as good as her right, drooped a little and wasn't quite as perky as its sister, but that my woman should have an actual flaw - this was enough to make me think.

She had that hair under her chain. Like a gnat in the buttermilk. When I projected on my happiness with her in twenty years, the hair was a reminder that I could do better. This woman was not gorgeous. She was flawed. Added to her mental issues was this physical reminder. But if I could have taught myself to live with and love it, instead of being desiring and human... have you ever met an Enlightened person anyway? I've never been to Tibet, but I have a suspicion no one since Buddha has been perfectly happy and undesiring as an ascetic. Suppress and repress your unconscious (the wanting part of the self) to the point where you've convinced yourself that you're happy? Is that even possible?

I've tried not wanting, and it's just so...boring.

If variety is the spice of life won't we want to go through as many different kinds of happiness as possible? I wanted to go to Peru and Iran and taste all kinds of different flavored pussy. Just the possibility of being with other, more attractive women was enough to make me want to destroy relative happiness once I attained it. Or maybe I sought a reason to destroy it because I was scared I'd fuck it up eventually. Or maybe it was the hair I couldn't stand. Or the fact that she didn't seem to know about it (and Lord knows I couldn't tell her).

Because when we're young and there are so many possibilities to have what we haven't, to throw it all away on commitment is the ultimate.

Help: A Post Postmodern Dilemma

Bernini's "Apollo and Daphne"

Dear Gorgeous,

So far this has been my blog. I'm totally willing to publish anything you guys think is relevant. I mean, it is an internet warehouse after all, it's supposed to store a lot of different stuff.

Anyway I've been thinking about my book lately, the ol' Hot Love On The Wing. I've been trying to delve deep into the character of my female protagonist, Daphne. I've two main ways of approaching it:

1. Show Don't Tell: The way most good writing works. I show a scene where Daphne gets frustrated by the way menfolk don't take her seriously, even though she has good things to say, and you guys get an idea of what kind of woman she is.

2. Post Postmodernist: I point out to you that I can't truly know what Daphne is thinking, but based on the fact that I, the narrator and protagonist, have lived with and known Daphne for years, I have a good idea of what she might be thinking. While this can give you insight into the protagonist's psychology and his relationship with Daphne, it is a potential trap: I'm telling without showing.

Can you see my dilemma? If there are any ideas on how to solve this, or if any writers wanting to step up and suggest what I ought to do, please feel free.

All my love,
Daniel Adler

Color Theory, By Daniel Adler

    He looked like a turtle. Through the square framed glasses that rested on his chubby cheeks, he blinked slowly. His wide body and enormous back resembled a shell. And his favorite color was green, which made sense, according to my color theory.
   
Everyone has a favorite color. It happens back in pre-school, when everyone learns the the spectrum. Sure, maybe there are a couple of them that appeal to you now. But there's one you always really loved. Mine is red. Yours is probably blue. Buckley's was green - quirky, realistic, and intelligent.
   
When I went into his apartment and sheepishly greeted his mother, who looked if anything like a bird rather than a reptile, I was very queer. Parents made me uncomfortable as a child, especially fathers who came home in suits after selling bonds all day. Although they were welcoming and kind in the way parents of friends are when you are in their home, I couldn't help but compare them to the way my father came home in faded blue jeans and a toolbelt, and how much warmer and fluid my mother was than the avian woman with pearls.        

-Hot Love on the Wing, Daniel Adler

A Retrospection

Jimmy was the guy in charge. Whenever he alluded to the luck of the draw or the devil's cares, he smiled to reveal a gap where his front left incisor once had been. His skin was naturally orange. He had a broad nose and flat black hair.

He directed Gabriel to stack the wooden chairs on the tables in order to sweep the floors, then chop the brown-speckled vegetables that made him think about O' Donnell's pristine green peppers and long ridged carrots.

At 5:30, the food was ready, and the homeless people lined up. They were gray, black, brown, white, orange, yellow, etc. Their clothing hung limp and dirty on their hollowed bones. Scents of barreled whisky, vomit, urine, (feces?), and other bodily fluids clung to the air. Their bandaged dirty fingers caused you, unknowingly, to stare. Their hair hung scraggly by their crusty-downed cheeks. Gabriel thought disgustedly that there was no way to help them; they had done this to themselves.

After they finished their dinners, they had to stand in line if they wanted seconds, so that everyone would have their turn. Most got seconds; some got thirds. Those who left immediately after were probably drifters, floating wherever they could get a hot meal.

-Ironically,
Daniel Adler

The Strabismics Pt. 1

This is the first installation of a chapter in my forthcoming book, Hot Love on the Wing. To my younger readers, proceed with caution, it is rated M for Mature.

It was Easter weekend and he hadn't seen Buckley for a few weeks.  Their friendship had plateaued due to Buckley being set on making new friends at school and spending most of his time there, although he missed Gabriel.
They manhugged, with their arms x'ed around each other's shoulders and an arched gap between their pelvises. It was Friday afternoon and the evening sunshine darkened so when they sat down there was an odd play of sunshine across Buckley's bed and onto his face; it looked like a nasty birthmark. Gabriel hadn't been smoking weed and didn't miss it, but social smoking was a delight. Buckley packed a bowl eagerly and he said this was the last, melancholically, but that he knew a guy from Stony Brook who had a friend who lived in Bushwick.

“Bushwick? Isn't that in Brooklyn?”

“Ya man, it's off the L train. Supposed to be real fire.”

Although most druggies won't admit it, the adventure of picking up the drugs is half the pleasure of consumption. Since Gabriel had never been to Bushwick he decided it would be fun to go.

As he felt his thoughts and worries begin to evaporate, Buckley took out a piece of aluminium foil with a black letter on it and an empty pen. He lit the black letter with a lighter and hovered the pen over it as he sucked in the fumes. 

“What the fuck are you doing, man?”

Buckley nodded profusely as he finished inhaling the last of the smoke. “Dude, I'm trying to quit Oxycodon, so I smoke this opiate resin.”

Gabriel looked at him like he was five feet underwater. “What? So you're smoking heroin?” He tried to be amiable, unjudging about Buckley's habit. This is my friend, he is a good guy. Maybe it isn't the way it looks. But it looks like he's smoking crack. All those times we smoked weed under the bridge and now...

“Dude, it's not heroin. It's much safer than heroin because you couldn't possibly smoke enough of this to die.”

“You might as well smoke heroin. You look like a crack fiend.”

“Trust me man. It's much safer.”

“I just don't want you getting caught up in these drugs man. Mary is one thing, but this resin shit is weird.”

“Try it and see for yourself that it's not that weird.”

For a second, Gabriel debated whether he should try, but his gut warned him. “Nah, I'm okay.”
    Buckley finished his drug and his phone vibrated. It was a text message from his man in Bushwick. "He said go to the Morgan stop and he'll meet us there."


Lunch Time in Post Postmodernism

Gabriel enjoyed lunchtime the most. For thirty minutes every six hour shift, he was allowed a meal, usually a hero, or a sub - a sandwich, for those who don’t understand late 20th century regional dialects that have probably died out by the time you’re reading this. Interesting how certain accents are becoming less and less prominent today. The American Southern accent is becoming increasingly infused with that California lilt that ends sentences in a slightly interrogative tone. If you watch the old Hollywood movies with Katharine Hepburn, you can see the pronounced rigidity of her New England accent “William, my dear, I absolutely love you.” Try it yourself with your jaw unmoving, admire Cary Grant's perfect Mid-Atlantic accent, the one they taught in acting school. By the time you future generations read this, there will probably be an American accent that has taken the place of regional dialects, or who knows, those regional twangs may become more prominent due to the regionalization of our huge country.…anyway, where was I, yes, the hero.
  

 It was toasted so that the bread sometimes burned and cut the roof of your mouth if you weren’t careful. And of course Gabriel added all the trimmings - mayo, mustard, pepper salt, oil vinegar, lettuce tomatoes, pickles, red onions, jalapenos and bell peppers, provolone.  If his shift were five and a half, he would stay on extra to get lunch, which did not bother O’Donell in the slightest; he enjoyed watching the lad eat. It reminded him of his own youth and  the nostalgia he felt took the place of the son he had never had. Gabriel ate ravenously, scarfing the sandwiches as if they were his last. O'Donnell pretended to chop, but actually watched tv and glanced at his employee to make sure he was enjoying his idea of fine food. Gabriel usually worked weekend afternoons, which was enough to give him money and the nighttime to play when he wanted.
  

-Hot Love on the Wing,
Daniel Adler


Stella's Birth

Another passage from Hot Love on the Wing, describing Stella's birth:

In the humid July heat of 1956, Tessie's hormone swollen face flushed pink with pain. She called my eldest aunt, who kept the other five children at bay and led my grandmother down the five flights of their Morningside Heights apartment building. A 12 year old has trouble hailing a cab while balancing a belabored Irishwoman. Amid the traffic and the busted-pouring fire hydrants, a mustachioed Italian man driving a Wonder bread truck – a bread that my mother and her siblings longed for while growing up instead of the 3 for $1 wheat bread loaves from the A&P that Leo bought and which they despised as a sign of their inability to assimilate – slowed to a stop and worriedly said, “Ya mutha? She gonna have a baby?”  Maureen led her wobbling mother into the truck and she and the mustachioed man zoomed away to an uptown hospital that no longer exists.

These Irish born children had no idea at the time, but when Tessa was birthing them with a midwife in a cabin in Mayo, there were no drugs to induce the process. The only thing utilized was a nice warm stout to ease the flow of breast milk after the stress and pain of parturition. When my narrowback mother (so called because she never had to experience the pear shaped disfiguration of working the potato fields) was born as the first in the United States, they gave her mother scopolamine. This drug in high doses causes extreme euphoria, much like an opiate. In a transdermal patch the average dosage is .4 mg and can often cause memory impairments. It is no surprise that it was used to ease the pain of my grandmother when her fourth child was brought into this world.
   

When they whirled Tessie into the obstetrician's office, she felt precipitously like there was a dramatic difference with this one; oh yes, a definite firestarter, a real hellacious one. Without going in to the unsavory details of childbirthing, I will say only that my mother immediately began a route on which she would stay for the rest of her life – one of howling and rubicund fury mediated only by her feminine capacity to love and shelter.     

Two months later, my mother was in her pram enjoying the late summer sun just outside of Van Cortland Park in the Bronx (funny how THE Bronx is the only borough with an article in front of it; in a way that makes it less particular, as if there could be another one somewhere). Suddenly, a Wonder bread truck slowed to a stop, and a mustachioed man yelled, “Ey, so wuzzita boy or girl?”

-Daniel Adler

Stella, the Mother Cat

A tad of a chapter from Hot Love on the Wing:

 Stella’s routine was such that by eight or nine o clock she had those wide red Sauvignon splotches across her cheeks that showed, similar to the rareness of a steak, that she was not ready to be tried. At that point, the children avoided her having learned from years of verbal abuse. If they did have to ask a question, they were greeted with a strabismic glance and the kind of bobble headed shake that meant she was thinking of how to respond, and that it was not going to be a real answer, but an attempt at witty repartee – if she were in a good mood. In joviality she assumed any conversation was an attempt to test her, and her inability to cogitate resulted in one of her favorite aggressive lines. If she were stressed or broken down, the kids ran away, because like playing with broken glass, sooner or later you're bound to bleed, and you should really just avoid it altogether, or if you’re responsible, clean it up instead.


On more than one occasion Gabriel came home from Buckley's and, hungry for a snack, searched the refrigerator for food. The only noises she ever made were from the cracking of her joints as she walked and the light jingle of her gold bracelets, which she never took off. They consisted of  1. Tiffany bracelet with a quarter sized golden heart that she had received when she graduated nursing school, 2. a charm bracelet, (again, she was a fervent believer in superstition) 3. a thin gold bangle, 4. a twenty four karat chain, and 5. a white gold elliptical link bracelet.

All of this jewelry together gilded about four inches of her wrist. It made the sound of a bell on a cat's collar, jangling with every movement, and my mother was the mother cat. They say that if you can take care of a cat,  you can take care of a woman - they're so different from dogs, the way they sense negative energy and back away. They also say that cats have to feel comfortable with space, and that's why when they do, they go around rubbing their cheeks on everything, which is where their pheromones are, so that it kind of becomes their property through their scent. Yes, to live with a cat can teach you a lot, and if you don't like cats, it's probably because you've never lived with one (or you're allergic, and for people with allergies, I'm sorry).


Continental Lovegames in Post Postmodernism

Daniel Adler serenading his  true love.

Americans are afraid to fall in love, because they’re afraid of being made vulnerable. In South America, they know how to play the game, so they play it, and they play it well. There’s a girl with beautiful blue eyes sitting at a bar, and an Argentine man approaches her. “Hey, why don’t you get your nails done? There’s a chip on your fingernail.” This infuriates the girl, and she in turn wants him. In Europe, a Spanish man approaches a beautiful blue eyed girl. He says, “I’m going to make you fall in love with me," and tells her about his positive attributes, complimenting her on her gorgeous jawline and earlobes. In California, a surfer dude approaches the blue eyed girl, “What gorgeous blue eyes you have.” Of course she knows this, but he has to tell her this to establish ties, to make him a legitimate competitor.

Europeans love the game, almost wanting to lose, savoring each play as if it could be their last, South Americans want to win at all costs, but Americans, we are simply afraid to play. Capitalism has engrained the mindset that if you aren’t good at something, if you stand to lose, there’s no point in risking it – and so the battle for who goes first can often take weeks, and once the first move is made: a triumphant battlecry! Hahaha! You made the first move! And weeks more of sparring and balancing the power scale before the next is made.

Oh capitalism, how we deplore you, and need you at once, for you are our saving grace. But in another 50 years, when the American aristocracy is further entrenched, and socialism begins to rear its ugly head, then what? Then will we take more risks in love, be more willing to sacrifice and lose?

Daniel Adler, Hot Love on the Wing