This Afternoon In Drama

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.

I Always Know What I'm Doing

As mentioned, my mom was opposed to me buying a truck.  At first her objection was that it was too masculine a vehicle, and then the protest morphed into the argument that I just did not need a vehicle with towing capability.  "What do you need to carry around?" she quizzed me.  "What are you possibly going to put back there?

"Wellllllllllllll," I said, "Someday I'm going to move again, and boy is that truck going to come in handy!  It's going to save me hundreds to be able to transport my own couch."

My mom sighed in disapproval and switched from questioning to lecturing me.  "You don't need a truck.  This is an unwise decision.  You never think.  You just do.  I don't know how you can live how you live.  You need to stop and consider this."

Little did she know that I had considered it in great depth.  I had done incredibly intensive research on the various blues that pick-up trucks come in, since I knew my truck better be some kind of bright, metallic blue or it might as well be a minivan.  

Also, I thought there were lots of things that I might want to tow.  I've long been interested in learning how to make chairs, and someday I might need to carry around lots of wood.  Now that we have goats on the property, I might need to drive them somewhere someday for some reason.  And I could definitely see myself wanting to put a bed in the bed.  I was open to allowing someone else to get behind the wheel and drive me around as I dozed.  Like a hay ride, except less poky.

So I went and purchased my truck.  My beautiful Speedway Blue truck:

And it took no time at all to prove my mom wrong!  Only a week after purchasing the vehicle, Brent and I were eating out at an Indian restaurant before going to see Year One, and it turned out that I could not finish my Chicken Biryani.  What to do, what to do.  I didn't want the dish to go to waste.  We didn't want to carry it into the theater-- they frown upon that sort of thing.  And we couldn't just leave the container of pungent rice and poultry in the car because then the floor mats would smell like Biryani forever.  I was about to be depressed.

Until Brent said, "Wait, you have a truck."

"I do," I agreed.  "I have a truck."

"So...just put the food in the bed."

Always suspicious, I asked, "You don't think anyone will steal it?"

We walked out of the restaurant, and I nestled the take-out container in the corner of the bed, figuring that questionable characters walking behind the truck would be the least likely to see it hiding there.  When we came out of the movie, it was still safe and sound.  I was delighted.  I'd never had such a good solution for fragrant leftovers before.  As we drove home, Brent started laughing uncontrollably.  "You can tell your mom she was wrong about the truck."  We looked out the back, to where the Biryani was riding comfortably in the fresh night air.  "You needed it to tow a single container of Indian food."

"I did," I nodded.  "I really did."

UPDATE 6/27/09:  Last night, we also needed it to tote half a leftover chicken sandwich:

Found Him

Waldo likes to dine at the place where I have regular breakfasts.  He's gotten a little doughy and feminine and experimental with his color schemes in his twilight years (helllllooooooo teen vampire Internet traffic), but he's still a great hider.  The horizontal lines on his shirt really blend into that brick.

The Road Looks Clearer Up Ahead

We just got news today that Gamma Knife worked and my dad's brain cancer is in partial remission, hopefully to be determined as complete remission soon.  The greatness of this is overwhelming.

My Mom's Already Yelling At Me For Buying A Truck, So Why Not One More Thing?

When my dad landed in the emergency room near the beginning of the year, Brent and I drove down there without packing overnight stuff because we were in a rush.  And then, when we finally went to go to sleep at my mom's house, I wanted to change into some nighttime underwear (you're not supposed to wear them while you sleep, okay, yes, I know), except I didn't have any on me.  I went upstairs to my childhood bedroom to fish around in my old dresser, wondering if I could hunt down some novelty Halloween boxers leftover in there from sixth grade, you never know, but to my deep surprise, I found a couple pairs of real underwear in the top drawer.  It turned out that while my mom's been throwing away my schoolwork and lesser drawings and personal notes over the years, she somehow couldn't bring herself to throw away two of the fake silk panties I used to wear right around my junior year.

So I put on the flowered pair of the underwear because I was feeling like a print, and pulling them up was a moment of real shock because they were SO BIG in the seat-- big enough that you could hold one of those contests where college kids have to cram as many of themselves as they can into a car, except instead you could use my high school underwear-- and I was SO PUZZLED by the fit because if anything, I'm kind of sure my butt was smaller in high school.  Because that was before the years of thrice weekly Kraft macaroni & cheese, which my parents used to ration, and before I spent the good majority of my day waking up, not moving, and then proceeding to write from my bed, and so I just couldn't make sense of what had happened to me...or alternately, what had happened to the underwear (look, I'm well aware the ass needs some toning work, but I've been VERY BUSY, and I'll get around to it maybe.)

Honestly, the pictures don't even do the back of the underwear justice.

They come in burgundy too.

After I put on the flowered panties, I went downstairs to the den to show Brent and his features went slack and he said, "Whoa, those are some underwear," and I said, "I know!" and he asked, "Did they stretch out over time or something or did you actually walk around in those when you were sixteen?"  I tested the fabric and, while it's definitely cheap, it doesn't have much give at all, so the theory that somehow space-time had expanded the seat to these boggggggggling proportions seemed not very scientific.  Which then brought us to the conclusion that I guess I must have been walking around in REALLY BIG underwear while I was taking my SAT's and opening my locker, and this realization proceeded to blow my mind because you never are how you think you are, you know?  I never would have pegged my younger self as the kind of girl who was buying the largest possible size of Morgan Taylor Intimates for reasons I can't really get a hold of anymore, but the simple fact is that I was.  I was.  I was walking around in really, really, really big panties that are not at all big in the front, but gigantic in the back, and I must have been into it.  I swear, you wouldn't understand exactly how big these panties are unless you could get your hands on them in person.

I measured their inseam if you let the crotch hang naturally, and it's around five inches.  To give an idea of the sheer volume of the back portion of the underwear, I wanted to figure out some kind of equivalency, and I discovered that you can fit about half a full-sized bath towel with a relatively serious pile into the seat with zero problem.  Remember, this is not a stretchable fabric; it's a very firm polyester.

It's like instead of going to that woman at Nordstroms who measures your bra size, maybe my mom should have had someone supervise me when I tried on underwear instead because clearly I had some weird ideas about what underwear's supposed to do for you.  Back then, I must just not have known what I was doing, but I have to say that since finding the big panties in my dresser, I've brought them back up here and it so happens I've become sort of fond because when you're wearing them, it feels like you're walking underwater.  It's not bad.  I wouldn't put them under short skirts, though, because they'd give a petticoat effect.

Waiting for Godoats

I wouldn't consider myself a thoroughly manipulative person.  I mean, every once and awhile I'll make a perfectly calibrated sad face when Brent suggests we bake fish until he arrives upon the idea of going and buying me Chicken McNuggets, and it's been a really long time since I engineered that infighting amongst my sixth grade clique that led to my successful self-installation as its leader.  It's not like I go around thinking that my desires are so crucial that I'm in the right by bending others' wills to serve them.

But, look, I've wanted goats for a really long time.  When I moved onto this property and saw there was a patch of land in the back that would be perfect for a couple of them, I thought to myself, "Oh, wouldn't that be nice, wouldn't that be something."  But then, when my landlords started talking about getting a dairy cow for that patch, my will locked in tight-- GOATS-- and like the improbably sized black hole in the Star Trek movie, it began spinning and sucking, wanting to destroy anything in the vicinity that wasn't itself.

"Hey," I'd email my landlord, having just come back from the pet shop around the corner.  "There was this flier on the bulletin board saying that someone's giving away free goats!  Isn't that exciting?"  I reasoned that a free goat in the hand could spur action quicker than the cow in the bush that puts you out a few hundred bucks and is a pain in the ass to procure from that crazy stinky spot all the way up the 5 freeway.

Still, there was talk of the cow.  My landlord had started buying raw milk from a cow at a farm somewhere just outside Los Angeles, and she raved about the quality, sang the wonders of the skin that floats on top.  I was completely fine (and even happy!) with the prospect of a cow coming to live here, but felt we needed to keep our priorities-- our priorities being my strong preference-- straight.  Goats.  First.  Since a zero financial investment hadn't been coercive enough to bring those goats home, I began working on a more emotional tactic.  I preyed on possible feelings of underachievement, as my landlords often spoke about how much work there was to do around the property that they never had time to get to.

"Man, the yard sure does grow fast," I'd say when I took my dog out for her afternoon shit.  "You can barely see Christmas's little head sticking out above those weeds."  Christmas would help me out with the act, pretending to have difficulty finding her way out of the jungle.  Then, murmuring, I'd say, as if to myself, "Some goats would really take care of this overgrowth.  Yeah, [sigh] they sure would.  Some goats.  Cute motherfuckers would eat this all down."

A book arrived about cow-keeping.  The landlords announced that they'd checked with city ordinance to find out if they had enough acreage to legally keep a cow.  They did.

I found out that a nearby neighbor was keeping two goats in his front yard, and they were beautiful ambassadors for the species.  I emailed my landlord, giving her the address, "Oh my god, you need to go look at these goats!  You're going to fall in love!"  She did and came back gushing about the two, saying that they were "so cute" that she had to take a picture because they looked like they were just hanging out, talking to one another.  "So cute!" I agreed.  "So cute, right?"

The cow talk began to die down.  And was replaced by talk of chickies.

I found another goat living a few blocks up from us at a children's day school.  He was old and his bleating was just about the saddest thing you could ever hear, and I thought he might be perfect for igniting a certain generalized sympathy for goats.  "You should go see this goat as soon as you get home," I texted my landlord while she was across the country in New York.  I'd talk the old man up for awhile before I'd take the dog on a walk to go visit him.  "He's such a sweet, sad guy, he'll just about take your heart."  Inwardly, I wondered if we could take him home-- there was no way those kindergartners knew how to treat a goat right.  Then he died, proving me correct.

My landlords began to debate how best to build a chicken coop.

I'd hunted down some illustrations I'd done of goats (well, to be precise, one was a pirate goat) in high school that my mom had been keeping in her laundry room, leading to their slight water damage, and I brought them here to the mansion.  Maybe I had to get those goat reminders matted and framed and then hang them in the downstairs entryway that I share with the staircase to the basement.  Maybe my landlords had to pass goats every day for that desire to really sink in, had to undergo regular visual persuasion like that in A Clockwork Orange, except less violent.   I had just recently noted a big frame sale going on at Aaron Brothers to Brent, when--

I received an email from my landlord on May 12th that the property was getting two goats.  Lily and her daughter, Rosie, our beautiful Nubian goat princesses, arrived this morning.

Victory.  Now I can turn my energies elsewhere.

Homeward Bound

I've been busy because I've been down in Irvine while my mom has surgery.  Between the two of my parents, I've been to the hospital so much that when I walk in the door and the volunteer tries to direct me to my destination, I'm like, oh honey, go find someone who can make you useful; that's what keeps us all alive, feeling useful.  Inevitably I'll get in the elevator with a guy who asks me why I'm there, and I'll him I'm having quints.

In the meantime I've moved into my mom's house, which disorients me when I wake in the middle of the night and can't understand when or why I redid my bedroom in an all-encompassing nautical strip with floral accents.  It takes me a few seconds to say, holy shit, I'm in the den of my formative years.  It would be no better were I sleeping in my childhood bedroom, which my mom unfortunately took from "underwater wonderland" almost the second I stepped out of the house, only to turn it into into "surrender to sage."  Happily, though, even though she thought she got rid of it, I tracked down my favorite troll from my trip to Norway.  Norway in Epcott, of course.  My Dances With Whales poster was not so fortunate, maybe because it doesn't have the inherent luck of the troll.

While living here, I'm doing things that would make my mom crazy were she watching me because in times like this, even if we don't all have our health, we still have ourselves.  So there's really nothing left but to be true to those selves, which is why when my mom recuperates and finally gets to see the following picture, I'm going to celebrate the fact that she's calling me to yell about it.

See you back here soonish.  In other internet activity, my former student Jane has put up an interview she did with me at Coco's.  I learned all over again that I use more "like"s than the Jonas Brother day player who's been pretending to be John Mayer's girlfriend.  Oh well, there's nothing left to do but go drown my compounded sorrows in liters of Sprite.  Let it be.

Dancing With The Chairs

I always liked Cloris Leachman as an actress, but I didn't become really interested in her as a person until she came on Jimmy Kimmel's show after being ousted from Dancing With The Stars.  She walked on the stage in her sherbet ombre dancing dress and banana colored evening gloves, already laughing the second she sat down.  Before Jimmy could attempt to start interviewing her, she began analyzing the logistics of how she should sit because her feet couldn't touch the ground unless she struck an awkward pose.  She turned around in her seat, her back to Jimmy, and suggested that she just put her feet up on the next chair.  He was already smitten.  She then got on her knees on her chair, bent over, and put her elbows on his desk, her face in his face.  Still unsatisfied, she lifted up the chair's cushion and sat down in the frame.  Her feet dragged on the floor.  Jimmy had moved past smitten into true love.  She slid down to the floor.  Jimmy said that he thought he should just come around to the front of the desk and sit with her.  She leaned against his shoulder and did her interview from the carpet, correcting Jimmy's grammar throughout.

When we went and saw Cloris talk at the neighborhood library this week, she did some more of these furniture gymnastics.  Worried that the people in the back rows wouldn't be able to see her in a normal chair, she began dragging a large, round table from the side so she could climb onto that.  Climb onto that backwards, slapping her ass and cracking herself up.  Concerned, the library event organizer came over with one of those high rolling chairs that goes up and down, and Cloris then climbed onto that instead, holding onto the back of the chair while kneeling.  And then she began to spin herself round and round until finally, her son stopped her for the interview.

I've long been bothered by the idea of people being treated as if they're funny or cute simply because they've gotten so old that society cycles back to the beginning for reference and infantilizes them again.  The woman introducing Cloris at the library spoke to her as if she were a five-year-old ("and we hear you've just come from the dennnnnnnntist!"), but the reason that Cloris's humor is not cute-funny is because it is, for one thing, very calculated.  She knows what she looks like climbing onto a chair and she knows it works every time-- not only did she do the bit on Jimmy, but she did it to Tom Bergeron, in the library, and I'm sure frequently at the Christmas dinner table as well.  This isn't the surprised humor of the kid who happens upon something funny and keeps repeating it to make adults laugh, and it isn't the patronized humor of the senior who still displays some form of spunk that gets everyone going about how hilarious it is that she's doing something besides gumming carrots.  What differentiates Cloris's humor is that when Cloris climbs on a chair and spins herself around in a circle while spanking herself, there is nobody in that room who is more amused than she is, and that's what makes you laugh.  She gives a fuck that she entertains you, but she doesn't give a fuck if you're not entertained by the same things she is.

So, at the library, Cloris spun around in the chair (the photo at left comes courtesy of Timothy Rutt).  She took notice of a seventyish woman in pigtails and Mary Janes who kept piping in with comments, badly wanting Cloris's attention, and so Cloris read the poem the woman gave her aloud.  And made fun of it.  "Does anybody understand a word of this?" she asked and burst out in a honking round of laughter.  Still, the woman loved her because you can't not.  First she tried to give Cloris the floppy denim hat she was wearing-- "I bought it at a thrift store" she said by way of encouragement-- and Cloris, after asking if the woman had washed the hat, pressed it firmly back onto the woman's head with a there, there tap..  When the woman then tried to give Cloris her cardigan, Cloris said, "Oh, I don't want that," and secured it tighter on the woman, and the refusal was somehow both funny and kind while cutting too.

She talked about having just worked with Quentin Tarantino on Inglourious Basterds, and she asked the audience, "His face is like...who's that artist?" and seconds later answered herself, "Picasso.  He's like a Picasso.  He's looking at you straight, but still it's like everything's on sideways."  And then cracked herself up.

She got into politics a little, discussing how worried she became when Bill Clinton became very fat, prompting her to call the White House and talk to his secretary for forty-five minutes about his health.  She asked if anyone in the room liked Nancy Reagan, and then, without waiting for a response, started laughing wholeheartedly and said, "I hate her!  She's the biggest pill!"  Laughing some more, she said joyfully, "And she looks terrible!"

She talked about the line of chiffon tunics she launched, and which she models in the latest Us Weekly.  She instructed us on the many ways you can tie them up or down, depending on your mood.

In the middle of the talk, she got on her cell's speaker phone to her ex-husband, George Englund, and when he asked where she was, she laughed hard and told him in delighted bewilderment, "I'm in Altadena, George!" as if she were calling from Antarctica.  I haven't finished her book yet, so I can't tell you why they divorced, but he seemed just as endlessly entertained by her as he should be, and he also seemed smart not to have let her out of his life when I can't imagine a person who wouldn't kill to welcome her into theirs.

When it came time to sign books, we waited and went up to Cloris, and I asked, "Will you make it out to Andrea and Brent?"  Without hesitation, she began drawing arrows down the middle of the title page, explaining, "This way you'll know where to split it if you break up."  And then she cracked herself and us up.  I don't doubt that she hasn't done this routine in some other couple's book before, and I don't doubt that it amused her just as much the first time she came up with it as it did when she was drawing in our copy.  "No, no, I'm sure it will work out," she said as she handed it over, and the delivery of that line had us all laughing again, because it was another perfect joke.

Hyperthetically

I still don't know if I'm allowed to talk about the deal that was agreed upon Friday, but really, my managers only instructed me not to go make big purchases until the check arrives.  I held off on the fro-yo machine.  Didn't even browse any local goat herds.  But I'm pretty excited about it and have the secret keeping power of a kindergartner, so let's just hypothetically present a situation.

Let's say:

That I had recently written a book for some random publishing company, and that I had pushed through the writing of it while my dad was in the hospital for his brain cancer because I was on a tight deadline.  That I'd gotten it in on time, but that the company sat on the book for awhile because my editor had been laid off during its writing.  That I'd been enormously happy with the book and thought it was one of the better things I'd ever written-- that it had maybe my favorite narrator yet.  That when a higher-up got around to checking out the book to assign it to a new editor, she read the first twenty pages and called my agent to say, "Wha?"  That she eventually read the whole thing and was, from what I understand, flabbergasted that one of her editors had ever bought it.  That she essentially, from what I understand, told my agent she didn't want to publish it and was waving it away like, "Here, here," in the way I would be were you to try to pass me a bowl of guacamole.

Okay, let's say:

That I took that news with a mix of exhaustion and amusement, since on one hand, I'm so bone tired of turning something in and getting a "Wha?"  On the other hand, I was the littlest bit tickled to have had a book given back by a major publisher, which seemed some kind of accomplishment.

And let's say:

That after the book became homeless, my managers were like, "Should we go ahead and send this out to film people anyway to see if there's interest?"  Lately things have been so shitstormy that I've been feeling pretty freewheeling, so I told them, slurring like a drunk, "Yeahhhhhh, sure, let's do zat."  I didn't expect that there was going to be much response, but my managers were wonderful about giving it the old college try.  And lo, what harkenedeth?  Within a couple days, people were calling.  People that I never would have thought would be calling, much less calling with such enthusiasm.  And by the following week, more people were calling, not only because they wanted to talk about making the film, but because they wanted to say that they loved the book.  The book that I love too.  The book that the book woman couldn't imagine people wanting to read.

This all culminated in a deal making Friday, and even though this is a hypothetical situation, I still don't know that I'm allowed to throw out some pretend names yet.  Let's just say, for fun, that it sold to the company of a certain guy, that company having a name that might share something with an Oprah property, a guy who may or may have not been involved with a certain spirit busting project.  Let's say he bought it for a studio that is the pinnacle of studios.  Let's say that another guy, a guy who has French Bulldogs too (maybe what excites me most about this coming together, that we can socialize the dogs) and who shares a last name with one of the suspects from Clue, is producing.  Let's say that I'm enormously thrilled with the outcome and think this movie is going to come out fantastically.  And let's say maybe the woman who didn't see the promise in the book was wrong.

Hold tight, Christmas, more luxury is coming your way when the check arrives.

P.F. Says...

Last Thursday we went to P.F Changs, and after Tiny Dessert (don't tell me you don't know about the Tiny Dessert, P.F.'s newest menu addition, a shot glass stuffed with cake.  At first you spend a little time talking about how they got in there like you did ships in bottles when you were young, but then you figure out that they're really just violently shoved in)...

...then the fortune cookies came.  And I opened mine, and it said:

And I asked, is that this Thursday, as in today?  Or is that next Thursday, as in what has now become today.  We all decided that it was the Thursday following the opening of the cookie because I'd been given so little warning about keeping my eyes open.  And since I'd already had my Tiny Dessert, what other opportunity could have come that night?  Brent told me to put the fortune in my pocket.

So it was this Thursday, today.  And for the most part, it went by quietly.  I had a tiny reward this morning when my dog went back to pooping normally after a mild bout of constipation.  I ran faster than the fatter girl next to me at the gym.  I watched Natalie come closer to telling Jessica that the baby she thinks is hers actually isn't (Jessica switched her dead baby with a live one while one of her alter personalities was running her normal consciousness) on One Life To Live.  I discussed a little String Theory on a walk through the neighborhood.   Everything was business as usual, until it wasn't.  Until the opportunity showed up, and suddenly, I had the most rewarding, vindicating news that I've had since I don't even know when.  

I can't talk about it yet.