This Afternoon In Drama

Well, It's Come To This

It was inevitable.  My boyfriend Brent Bradshaw has just launched his blog after he encountered near desperation at his last stand-up show from people who wanted to know more about him: What are his dreams?  What gets him up in the morning?  What is the color of his soul?  On this blog you can watch some of his work from that vintage classic Last Call with Carson Daly, keep yourself updated on his show dates, and participate in assorted History/National Geographic Channel huge nerd contests, like the caption one that's kicking off this venture.  I think you can win, like, a lock of his hair.  Trust me, it's buoyant enough for your kids to play on.

Lauren Conrad, you've already invaded my industry.  Get your doe eyes off my boyfriend's lap.

Eulogy For My Dad

Given this afternoon at his funeral.  The interment is tomorrow morning.

"I feel like my dad was generally amused by me in life, and so I wouldn’t be doing my part if I didn’t also try to amuse him today.  We used to stand together at the back of the few funerals I’ve ever attended, and neither of us could understand the appeal of anything stuffy— once we even had to walk off together because either he or I had started to smile at the sheer lameness of another relative’s service.  I can’t remember who was at fault, and it might have been both.  But I strongly believe that my dad wouldn’t want anything too flowery or too humorless, so I wanted to speak to who he was as an actual person instead of an idea.  And because my dad was self-admittedly bored by my dense writing style, I thought I’d deliver the following as a business-like list, since I think corporate writing was his favorite of all.

So here are the things that I will miss most about my dad even though they had me continually exasperated:

1.  His obsessive-compulsive need to call me up to twenty times a day without leaving messages because he said he didn’t like to talk to machines.  I’d be working in the living room and hear the dial-tone buzzing on the tape every fifteen minutes, and then it was basically like he had left a message because no one else has a habit of doing this.

2.  My dad’s obsession with cars and his eagerness for me to do business with some Toyota dealer he really liked who lives nowhere near me.  When I sought my dad’s advice earlier this year on finding a truck that I only wanted in an electric blue, he began sending me link after link….to maroon cars.  I told him that I was definitely not interested in anything in maroon.  He argued that there was a great deal on a maroon truck in Tustin.  I said blue.   He emailed me with a picture of yet another maroon car, another good deal.  I told him that I thought all the maroon cars were such good deals because no one wanted them.  When I finally found my truck and brought it to show my dad, he smiled and told me it was a very nice blue.

3.  How he used to send me the most obvious possible websites every time I became involved with something.  Like when I got hired to teach at Loyola Marymount University, I received an email that read: www.lmu.edu.  With Chapman University, he immediately messaged me: www.chapman.edu.  Every time we made plans to go eat at a restaurant, he’d preemptively email me the menu.

4.  His love of bathroom humor.  This also combined with his love of Internet shopping, which I’ll mention next, but if he’d come across a toilet tank that doubled as an aquarium, then you could be guaranteed he’d be considering having it delivered to my home.  If my brother was seriously excited about a sports team, then my dad was probably browsing their memorabilia toilet covers.  If you went out to dinner with him and there was any sort of food that’s tough on the system, then you’d be guaranteed to hear detailed, graphic stories about some time that food went wrong for someone, told with great joy.  And if you ever happened to mention constipation in his presence, then he would likely regal you with stories about how as a child I used to willfully constipate myself and all the creative ways that he used to combat my quest.

5.  The aforementioned Internet shopping.  But it just wasn’t Internet shopping because it was swap meet shopping and catalog shopping and department store shopping too.  My dad really, really loved to buy gifts, which was ironic because he didn’t enjoy receiving them, and he definitely had a unique eye for selection.  Purple heels with pearls would show up on my doorstep.  A bike with a basket for my dog to ride in, despite her being so high strung that she will never, ever be able to handle sitting in a moving basket.  I believe my brother received a stool that appeared to be standing on a football player’s legs.  There was the watch with the ticking movie camera and scene slate minute hand.  The witch statue with the porcelain head and straw body.  The stuffed bumble bee that shook when you pulled a ring out of its something I don’t think I’m supposed to say in a church.  The French Bulldog sweatshirt that reads, “This is my happy face,” which I actually like.  Just many, many, many strange and perplexing gifts over the years that I can’t help but treasure because they have my dad all over them.  Hanukah always turned from eight nights into twenty, ten of which would be immensely confusing, like the glass gecko I have sitting in my bookcase because I’m not sure where that kind of thing goes.  But with my birthday coming up next week and Hanukah just months away, I know soon I’m going to miss his imprint on all those very Larry gifts.  I’m going to miss opening something, going, “Hmmmm,” and my dad, his face aglow, excitedly explaining why it made him think of me when he saw it.

I’m going to miss the phone calls and the machine hang-ups.  Monday night someone called and didn’t want to leave a message and I turned to my boyfriend and said that my dad was still up to it.  I’ll miss him during my next car purchase, when he would have tried to coax me into a great deal on a used taupe Cadillac at Toyota of Anaheim.  I’ll miss him emailing me the link to my book when it pops up on Amazon, a book which has been dedicated to him.  I’ll miss him telling everyone about the gigantic metal yardstick he used to keep in our garage when I was going through a certain clenched phase.  I’ll miss all the things that he’d buy for me that I didn’t know I needed, and I’ll hold onto everything he ever gave me.  I’ll always take pride in the exasperating qualities he handed down to me, like how we both grow extremely tired after a minimal amount of company and hate making small talk, which is why I’ll honor him by bailing right after this ceremony, skipping the reception, and going home to nap.  First I’ll make some Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, which we always used to share a bowl of together because everyone else around us hated it, and then I’ll nap.

I thank my dad for being fantastic to me, for just being a fantastic guy in general.   I send him my love." 

In Short

Update Saturday, October 17th:  My dad died this morning at 11:00 a.m.

 

October 13th:  My dad is the best guy.  The brain cancer is back.  He has no more than weeks; it's probably more like days.  I'm going to go be with him.  This is up so I don't have to tell any of you that I know, even those of you who have always followed this blog because there was a time when my dad was making his signature cheesy comments on every single post, so you might have felt like you knew him a little too.  I don't want to have to repeat and repeat down the line.  I'm heartbroken, and I don't know when I'll be back.

 

What Have Jew Been Up To?

Posts have been slow to come lately because I've been very busy with assorted projects, but now I can officially tell you that one of the things I've been busy with is being a Very Important (lapsed) Jew.  Heeb Magazine has named me to their annual Heeb 100 list, which got revealed this morning, and I'm so happy they chose a picture of me with the property goats.  For most of the rest of the photo shoot I was hand-cobbling menorahs, so this was a real surprise.  (By the way, you should look at the photographers' site because they're really good and were completely open to doing this portraiture braless).

The magazine's also doing a traveling exhibition with 20 of the portraits, one of them mine, and it starts tomorrow night at the 92Y Tribeca.  I can't promise free bagels or free flowing Manischewitz, but you just might find yourself a nice doctor or lawyer while walking around!

The Family That Strips Together, Saves Together

I wouldn't say I'm a great or serious admirer of fine art.  I don't really know all that much about its history, I tend to like pieces based on subject matter and mood, and my boyfriend's pleading to visit the Getty Villa with him has fallen on deaf ears for months, and I'm sure with little to no effort I'll be able to make that years.  But every once and awhile I'll really respond to a work, and all of sudden I want to become a student of art!  I want to know who did it and where it came from and how it was created and if I can get a tiny reproduction of it to keep in the bathroom.

Ever since moving to the northeastern part of town, I have been driving past one such work and admiring it-- in fact, thinking regularly about the work, which is always a sign that a piece of art has real staying intellectual power.  This summer everyone's been talking about how District 9 majorly got them thinking afterward, but by the time I'd walked out of the theater, the film had already said all it was going to say.  However, this smaller local work has been churning around in my head since May of 2008, and a full summer later I still have a number of questions; and if ever you were driving in the car with me, then you'd be repeatedly asked them every time we went by on our way to eat breakfast at Coco's.  Like:

Why is the littlest one on the right the family member to go (literally) bare-ass naked?  I apologize for the poor quality of the photo, which was taken on my Blackberry, but hopefully you can still see that the artist sculpted some sort of vine-like plant growing from the mound on which this family stands.  The leaves of that plant, lush and plentiful, appear to cradle the buttocks of the first and leftmost child with gentle modesty, and seeing as how this piece rests atop a bank branch...

...the work has long left me wondering about the intended commentary of this choice.  And seeing as how this family faces away from the viewer and its members are presumably totally naked from the front angle if you're going by the horizontal thrust of the other plant life on the mound, then could that vine be a comment on the impropriety of voyeur?  A suggestion that there is a purity in sheer presence and a perversion in observation?  "Something-something-something" about the Garden of Eden, except then it looks like Adam and Eve have already had sex at least two times and kids, so why are they still hanging around and banking nude?  I feel like, if I'm going off body language, that this is obviously a family looking proudly toward their future, and I hate to make quick assumptions, but I want to say that there are two parents of indeterminate sex (one slightly taller) and two offspring (one slightly nakeder), all of indeterminate hairdos or lack thereof...unless this is just a representation of a non-biologically related society in which the members are of significantly staggered heights.  Still then, if everybody's all bonded and loving, their arms extended around each other, and, for the sake of argument, the bank is the plant which nurtures these people or protects them or keeps them from falling backward into moral and financial bankruptcy or whatever, then that interpretation comes nowhere near to answering why the smallest, most vulnerable member on the right didn't get any plant underwear.  Why's his/her tushie out in the sun?

Because another thing is, the curvature of the vine is less than accidental.  It ascends somewhat organically toward the buttocks of the first childlike member, but in order to shade those of the guy who seems to be the dad, it suddenly takes a pretty sharp and artificial seeming curve.  Maybe you need to look at this from another angle:

The artist bent the head of the plant because that ass came sooner along the diagonal access than he was counting on.  I know there's some mathematical equation that proves this because I used to be nimble with it in high school, and if those leaves were plotted points on a graph, then I could more scientifically show you that once they reach the second person's buttocks, they travel off course in a way that really would have bothered me were I turning in a two-dimensional graphed representation of this piece as an x/y equation on a homework sheet.  I would have known that I'd come up with something wrong and this was going to mess with my grade.  The leaves drop further to almost completely cover the behind of the next tallest figure (mom, is that you?), and then the vine just stops cold.  No tendrils.  No seeds raining down to the ground to grow another plant and conveniently arcing across the littlest buttocks like a sash.  There's really, really nothing for that last kid, and you can see this best in the top picture, which was taken on on a bright day, but his is the ass that always catches the light and glints.  It's just out there for all passerbys to see, and while the whole family is apparently in very good shape and they have nothing to be ashamed of fitness-wise and their asses are unquestionably tight, it fascinates me that the artist evidently set out to provide some kind of coverage for his naked people and then he just stopped with the third grader.  That guy doesn't even get as much coverage as the fondant stripper who made an appearance dancing around a fondant pole on my dad's birthday cake this year...

...and whose skirt or blanket or curtain or whatever that is at least cups a little bit of under-ass.  Even she gets that much.  A bracelet too.

I've tried to get Brent's thoughts on what this all means, but mostly he just likes to make jokes about the temperature display above the naked family, which has been broken since I moved here and maybe before that.  It reads a constant, steamy 155 degrees Fahrenheit, so his analysis has generally been along the lines of, "Is it actually getting that hot out there?  Ahhhh, yes.  Look at that ass.  It certainly is."

Fire On The Mountain

I always hated the Grateful Dead song "Fire On The Mountain" because I'd long associated it with the "hippies" at my high school strumming on their guitars and drumming on self-made ceramic jugs atop the lunch tables near the soda machines while I was trying to eat my frozen yogurt cup and preliminarily tackle that night's math homework in peace.

Today I hate it because there really is a fire on the mountain above us, and I can't stop thinking about all the animals that must be running for their lives!  The animals.  It kills me.  The foothills are being evacuated and many people have farm animals up there, so a herd of baby goats, a brood of roosters (I looked up the list of what you call various animals when they come in groups, and apparently this is the one you want for these guys), a trio of dogs, and, temporarily, a horse have come down here to escape.

The baby goats are incredibly emotionally needy, which believe me, is a much, much cuter quality on a baby goat than it is on a person.

Dreams Can Come True. It Can Happen To You.

Sleep has gotten more sound for me this year.  There were only two incidents of sleep-rage, once when I repeatedly air punched in the direction of my adored dog, missing her by a foot but breaking my heart into a million pieces when Brent told me about it the next morning.  Speaking of Brent, he asked that I stop sleeping with the green Komachi knife next to my pillow for his sake.  I told him, "You have two kidneys."  I do have to say that now, when I watch the Dateline episodes on people who accidentally kill loved ones while claiming to still be asleep, I'm much more willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  I'm also much more suspicious when Brent encourages me to drink Gatorade.

I've written about my Tylenol PM and Benadryl eras of fitful sleep, but back before I even had problems with insomnia, there were two hallucinatory, drug-free nighttime episodes that became indelibly marked in my mind.  One occurred when I was three or four.  A group of vampires visited my bedroom around midnight and stayed at my tea party table until dawn.  I want to say it sucked, but then I run into problems with punning.  The second occurred the year I was a visiting student at Berkeley.  While ostensibly awake and lying in bed in the dark, I saw a small, hairy, naked man run across the length of my studio, then squat in the corner next to my rabbit cage.  I saw him.  He was very clear.  According to my own tested perception, I was completely awake.  I got out of bed and stared at the man.  Then I turned on the light, and he disappeared.

The image of this little ape man stayed with me because I'd been so alert and because I'd gotten such a good look at him-- I've had many vivid nightmares over my lifetime, but none of them have ever crossed over into complete wakefulness.  None of them have ever been so sure.  I was still so bothered by having seen the man almost ten years later that I wrote a short story about a girl who's visited by the guy in her apartment.  From it:

"The light coming through the verticals illuminated the outline of a man crouching at the foot of my bed.  I knew he was a man because of the shape of his body and head.  But then, after my eyes adjusted, I only knew he was "male."  I saw all the hair against the light.  I could see the tips.  He was covered in it like a bear.

He was facing away from me, and I could see the place on his body where his legs split into his ass.  That's how I knew he was naked..."

The other day Brent was, as he is wont to do, nerding out and reading science articles online, and from across the room he said, "Holy shit, this article about sleep paralysis perfectly describes what happened to me when I was a teenager.  One time I woke up to see this guy crouching next to my bed where my nightstand used to be, so I freaked out and knew I had to destroy him.  And I was screaming, so my parents came in and turned on the light, and I was holding pieces of my nightstand, which I'd torn apart with my bare hands.  But here's the really weird thing," he said, carrying his laptop over to me.  "There's an old painting accompanying the article, and the guy in it is THE SAME GUY THAT WAS STANDING IN THE PLACE OF MY NIGHTSTAND."

He put down his computer in front of me, and I looked.  And then I yelled, "Hoooooly shit!  THAT'S THE SAME GUY WHO WAS SQUATTING IN THE CORNER OF MY STUDIO NEXT TO THE RABBIT CAGE."

We stared at the guy in the painting, so familiar to both of us, and then we began to wonder about how if the same guy was painted by an artist centuries ago, then maybe he's familiar to millions and millions of people.  And if this is the case, then would that mean that either he is something programmed into our brains, a collective image triggered by a deceptive cusp between unconsciousness or consciousness, or that he's some kind of age-old phenomena, that he's the foundation of the bogeyman, the Sandman, someone ridiculous who you're not supposed to believe in past childhood and who becomes the basis for a fantastical Nic Cage conspiracy film?  The depiction of him in the painting above is so uncanny for both me and Brent that it seems wasteful to write it off as coincidence, so I'm actually using the blog to find out if anybody else is like, "Heyyyyyyy, I know that guy too!"  On a side note, I never saw the horse.

Per Brent's request, I did put away the Komachi, which I think was a good move considering that both both Brent and Christmas are hairy and I wouldn't ever want to confuse them with the sleep guy in the middle of the night.  But neither of us ever saw him again, so maybe he only comes to you once in your life, and then you just think about the sighting for the rest of it.

I'd Like To Move On To Fall Now

I've religiously watched The Bachelor/Bachelorette canon since the first season when I squinted at the TV and asked about Alex Michel, "Him?  Really?"  I continue to stick with the series even as it follows its identical rainbow of moments over and over again-- the talk of journeys, the drunken pool dive at that first cocktail party, the ongoing, willful delusion of contestants that it's the bachelor or bachelorette who arranges that picnic date atop the glacier and not the producers-- and I'm repeatedly asked by people who religiously watch all the other reality shows, "Why?"  

I've tried to explain that I sit in continual fascination of what people experience as falling in love.  In return I often get the argument that these people who go on these shows are not an accurate cross-section of the population, but I don't think that's fair at all.  I just think they're disappointing to viewers, including myself, who hope that our falling in love is more interesting and varied than what goes down amidst the handing out of the roses.  Probably those of us who roll our eyes at the journey talk have a different, yet similarly static set of romantic tics.  We may want to puke at latest bachelorette Jillian's dolphin squeal and incredible fondness for doing the jump-and-legs-around-waist-wrap, but at the same time, I recognize my own hair-behind-ear-tuck and melancholic blinking at the ceiling.  I have my own really stupid moves that feel profound and lovable in front of eyes that I want to perceive them that way.

I'd been reading a number of cast interviews for the film (500) Days Of Summer in which leads Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt spoke excitedly about how they'd made a romantic comedy that depicted the truths about falling in love neglected by, say, a Katherine Heigl blockbuster.  They talked about how they felt they'd made something very honest out of a genre historically dripping with bullshit.  Reviewers also talked about honesty.  Before Brent and I went to see the movie last night, I read an article on Entertainment Weekly's website that argued even if you were to take away the non-linear twist of the film, then the force of its recognition held fast, the feeling persisted that you were finally encountering a relationship on film that captured, as never before, something about being young and falling in love.  Or maybe just being young, into music, and falling in love.

I can't remember the last time I loathed the first act of a movie more.  I mean, there's no doubt it's happened on a more heinous level, and this isn't a bad review of the movie, but I think what I was responding so negatively to was not only the general tweeness of a film set to Zooey Deschanel's big blue eyes, but also the suggestion I'd already received through its promotion that this was a film that really peered at love and had something more down-to-earth to say about it.  I feel like I have to make a disclosure here that at one time I was half acquainted with the director because he was my ex-boyfriend's friend and colleague, and at the director's birthday party his very nice extended family tried to feed me my first intestine-cased sausage ever, the sausage being a favorite family recipe, but still I couldn't get a bite down.  And I felt a little bad about that at the time, same as I now feel a little bad saying that I couldn't get down the first thirty minutes of what was undoubtedly the passion project of someone who was once very hospitable to me.  

That out of the way, I'm thinking the beginning of the film had me so unhappy because it was a Katherine Heigl blockbuster if Katherine Heigl were as quirky in her romantic comedies as she seems to be in real life.  The supporting buddy actors surrounding Joseph Gordon-Levitt were the guys that surround Gerard Butler except weirder looking, indie faces that had been cast as, to use Brent's description, secret jocks.  So I guess the sum of what I was left feeling was that this movie was a romantic comedy gone hipster-- which is as viable a direction for that genre to go in as any-- but just because there was dialogue about a band I have on my iTunes instead of a dialogue set to a band that my mom would ask, "Who's that?  I like this!"  if she were to hear them on the radio, didn't make the endeavor any more emotionally honest, and I squirmed to have it presented as such.

As the movie got first ridiculously happier and then sadder, I liked it better.  I liked when it gave itself over to emotional manipulation, particularly during a split-screen scene that showed the difference between romantic expectation and actuality, because instead of trying to depict an actuality of a romance, it dealt with the imagined scope of romance in the romantic's head.   Then the film was about a character and not a way of life that was somehow supposed to cut quicker to the quick than Heigl's movie set at a Sacramento news station...by being set at a Los Angeles loft-based greeting card company (!) with a staff of full-time writers (!) worked by an assistant who has the time and money to achieve her desired aesthetic effect via custom wallpaper in an apartment so very charmingly accessorized and lived in, despite her having moved into it just a couple months before.  I'm not saying I take issue with movies being movies, with the whole enterprise being a fast, churning wheel of fantastical construction, same as those Bachelorette dates atop glaciers.  I'm not saying it's a good idea to ever go to a movie looking for something real, and I'm not even going to put that word in quotes.  It's that last night I felt so much worse about a movie that thinks it isn't using the same raw materials to do its meeting cute when the spokes have been wrapped in Zooey Deschanel's ponytail ribbons and Pixies karaoke.

On all seasons of the Bachelor/Bachelorette, the situations are the biggest constructs ever (last season you had Jillian and her date rolling around on vintage cars at the Peterson Automotive Museum for an "impromptu"-- and there the quotes are needed-- photo sesh), but for me these have been far more probing looks into the act of falling in love.  Critics say that what goes on on those shows isn't falling in love, and they may be right if you're going to gage the experience by the relationship it generally leaves behind.  But I'm less concerned with the sustainability of the relationship or, more to the point, the foundation of the affection, because even if that love is based upon thirty other people vying for the person you think you want, and then that longing evaporates once you get the chance to notice that the others are gone (the helicopter rides too), the fantasy of what you thought was happening to you is no less relevant.  That Days works so hard in its set-up to roll its eyes at one fantasy while substituting another that's, really, no less eye-roll worthy, made its portrayal of falling in love into an as irrelevant a statement on romance itself as I've seen on any screen lately.

Again With the Ozark Shadows

I'm back from my-- to borrow a favorite term from the The Bachelor/ Bachelorette dynasty-- journey, although mine didn't happen to be emotional, except for the fact that the audiobook of Jon Krakauer's Into The Wild destroyed me for days.  It was more a literal trip.  In a car.  To Arkansas.  And because this was my first time to the South, since I guess you're not allowed to count Austin, people kept warning me about how "they do things different down there."  So I was expecting some real American exoticism, some cheese thrown on top of dishes that I'd never imagined could go with cheese, but it turns out that things really aren't so unlike how they are out West.

For instance, when cops in Arkansas arrest you, they handcuff you just like anywhere else!  I know this because only fifteen minutes into the state, my boyfriend was pulled over for a burnt-out headlight and then promptly arrested for an old speeding ticket he'd forgotten to pay.  We were about another fifteen minutes away from his parents' house, where I'd be meeting them for the first time, but now that Brent was otherwise occupied (being carted off to jail) and could no longer supply me with directions, I instead met his folks at a local supermarket called Harp's, since I had no clue where I actually was.  To be fair, we don't have Harp's grocery stores out here.  That was different.

And maybe you've imagined that kids drive covered wagons down South, but they don't: they drive golf carts just like any old fifty-year-old golf pro around these parts.  In fact, Brent's twin nieces have logged so many hours in their vehicle that they're able to zip you around the property at top speed while holding an intense conversation and unbroken eye contact with passengers.  They'll drive you straight over to their treehouse without ever looking at it, so that you're surprised when they successfully anticipate the need to brake just inches from the door of their custom jail, now apparently being used for detaining, according to them, "teenage boys."  It's too bad Brent's in his thirties, or he could have taken a much more convenient trip to their lock-up instead of the town poky.

 

I'd heard that Southerners really, really like to eat, so when Brent's family took me to the Golden Corral, I was like, "Look, guys, I've been to Souplantation.  I'm no stranger to multiple entree choices."  So maybe the Corral had not multiples, but exponentials, and required a hundred square feet to accommodate the desserts alone.  So maybe, for a minute, I felt a little overwhelmed.  I got over it quickly.  Pizza is pizza, right?  And a fried cupcake, which I've never seen before in my life, is a fried cupcake, no matter what nook of the country you're in.

You know, I think the only member of the trip who was bewildered by the South was Christmas.  When we stopped halfway to Arkansas at an Albuquerque hotel that had an in-house TV channel dedicated to Native flute music, she had some difficulty comprehending the appeal of Southwestern decor.  "I just don't get this rug," she said.  

She also had a bit of trouble getting along with Arkansas local Ringo the teacup Yorkie and, like the cosmopolitan snob she can sometimes be, spent the first hour of their acquaintance rejecting his Southern friendliness by perching on the edge of a bathtub and turning her face toward the wall whenever he asked her if she wanted to go shoot guns in the backyard or have a piece of his famous possum pie.

By the time we were on our way back to California, stopping in a Kansas Holiday Inn, she was all smiles again.  

But still, I think Ringo won a little spot in her heart, as I saw her trigger paw twitching later that night in her sleep, a smile of sweet remembrance on her face.

 

Oh, and I did some shooting too, but that's business as usual, pretty much.  Prettttttttty much.

The Speed Of The Business I'm In Makes Me So Mental

I'm still waiting to announce the new book deal and the new film deal because various people have taken various vacations in the middle of drawing up various contracts, and yet other various people are fighting over various back-end points.  In the meantime, The Coachella Review has launched online, and it is the new literary journal of UC Riverside's Palm Desert MFA program, where I am likely teaching young adult fiction at come January.  My short story "Dear Penthouse Forum" is up, but if you're looking for a tale of surprised and anonymous public bathroom sex/ a plumber's lucky day/ a couple who unexpectedly open their marriage during a snowy weekend in a mountain cabin/ a woman who loses her parking garage ticket and doesn't have the cash for the full amount, leading to the decision to pay the attendant in a different fashion/ the mousy, be-bunned girl at work who turns out to be anything but, you might be disappointed.  Besides that, who knows what you're into?

DEAR PENTHOUSE FORUM,

by Andrea Seigel

Bardo’s fist came down twice on my left cheek, near the lower border of the eye, as he said, through closed teeth, “You motherfucker.” It was then I decided that I would go fuck his mother.

We were in the park, which was covered with snow, making it hard to tell when my vision was whiting out and when I was simply seeing all there was to see.  After Bardo tired his hitting arm on my face, he rested on what must have been a whitened bench, because he appeared as if he were levitating.

“You motherfucker,” he said, heaving.  “Keep my girlfriend’s hands off you.”

Fucking Bardo’s mother was realistic for two reasons.  The first belonged to me: I was wanted by women.  This was why Bardo was beating me for the third time in December.  He kept finding his girlfriend, Annalese, pressing herself to me with her hands underneath my sweater.  He especially lost his mind this time when she said, “They got cold.”  She’d held her palms flat on me like she was feeling a pregnant stomach.  Which brings me to my theory on why women want me.  I am the closest thing to a lesbian experience they can have without having a lesbian experience.  My hair is long and hangs over my eyes.  I wear my jeans low on my hips like a girl.  My voice is soft.  My upper lip is sweetly bowed.  I am not a fighter.

It was easy to pack my face because all I had to do was roll onto my side.  A misguided bird sang above me on a branch that I could barely distinguish from the sky.  “I don’t have the power to stop anyone from doing anything they really want to do,” I said, only because I saw a shape, not white, moving in our direction, and I knew Bardo would not be able to kill me in time.

After the man threatened to call the police, Bardo succumbed and walked off in the direction of our school.  Over his shoulder he yelled, “I’m not giving up on the quest for that power, motherfucker!” which made the man hold out his cell phone like a taser.

If I was going to keep Annalese’s hands off of me, as Bardo had asked, that would mean cuffing her wrists with my fingers and holding her arms above her head.  This was not my style.

The one time I’d seen Bardo’s mother, she was walking through CVS with Bardo and her face was nearly kaleidoscopic from bruising.  It was a timeline, similar to mine in its current state.  Red meant now.  Purple meant a couple days ago.  Brownish-yellow meant she could hardly feel it any more.  As they went up the non-prescriptive medication aisle she cried, not like something bad had just happened to her, but like crying was how she lived.  With the back of her hand, she rubbed the tears hanging from her jaw as if they were itches.  I didn’t plan on showing up to her house with the blood.  I’d clean it off first.  But the burst vessels and swelling were key.  They’d make me look like her, or, at the very least, like a sensitive memory she had of herself.  This was the second reason that fucking her was realistic.

The man wanted to know if I was all right, and I asked him, “Isn’t this what guys do?”

“You didn’t look like you were fighting back.”

I formed a snowball and pressed it to the place where Bardo’s ring had cut my cheek.  When I pulled the ball away, I could see the blood sinking like flavored syrup into Italian ice.  ”I was,” I said.  “You just can’t see my moves.”

The man opened his wallet and gave me the card of his Tae Kwon Do instructor...

You can read the rest here.