The third novel I wrote (two novels prior to No Please Don’t) was narrated by a very loosely disguised (i.e. only in name) Fondajane I called Josephine Singer: a staggeringly gorgeous intersex sex-worker-slash-wunderkind of critical theory for whom a billionaire astronaut leaves his wife, and who, by the time she’s married to that astronaut, becomes world-renowned as an author, human rights activist, public intellectual, and sex symbol credited with all-but-single-handedly 1) bringing about the full legalization of prostitution in America, 2) bringing about the legalization of gay marriage in America, and 3) launching us into the post-gender epoch.
One big problem I had with the novel was that I never got Josephine to convincingly grapple with questions I imagined were central and unique—or nearly unique—to Fondajane: Was she truly a force behind social change, or merely an emblem of social change? Both a force and an emblem? One and then the other? If one and then the other, then which one first?
Instead of embodying these questions, or even addressing them directly, Josephine writes a lyric essay—included in the novel—about Harriet Beecher Stowe, who, according to Josephine, was always conflicted about 1) whether she (i.e. Beecher Stowe) really had, as per Abraham Lincoln’s famous quote, started the Civil War by publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and 2) whether starting the Civil War was something she wanted to think she’d done by publishing Uncle Tom’s Cabin. My idea was that the reader—in the course of thinking about how Josephine thought about Harriet Beecher Stowe—would realize how Josephine must have thought about herself (i.e. in terms of emblem vs. force, etc.), and thereby understand, on a deeper level than Josephine could communicate deliberately, what it must be like to be Josephine.
An even bigger problem I had with the novel was that it wasn’t—as I’m guessing you must have by now imagined—much fun to read. That’s why I never tried to publish it.
But as for why I told Lotta that I didn’t find Fondajane attractive, I suppose I thought it was the nice thing to say. One time, at Denny’s, I eavesdropped on some women in the booth beside mine, and three of them agreed that they didn’t like six-pack abs on men. Six-pack-less man that I am—on my hungriest mornings, if I really suck in, shadowy outlines of my upper couple “cans” momentarily show inside the arc of my rib cage—I was cheered. Because I assume that response was typically human, and because it would be hard to find two more physically dissimilar women than Fondajane and Lotta, and because Lotta seemed so nervous, and seemed so kind, I thought it would please her to “learn” that at least one man failed to find Fondajane attractive.
* * *
Why did Lotta Hogg think you’d been in institutions?
I never asked, and so it’s impossible to really say for sure, but since graduating high school, I hadn’t left the house much in daylight except to buy cigarettes or—a couple times a year—go to Sheridan Hospital. I did have brief and infrequent—as brief and infrequent as I could make them—conversations with my grandmother, and even less frequent conversations with Pang and my former editor at Darger, but with the exception of my father, there was no one I spoke to on an even remotely regular basis, let alone anyone in my and Lotta’s cohort. So given that she knew I’d been diagnosed with mental illness as a boy (everyone in town who knew of me knew), and given that I hadn’t, since graduating high school, spoken to anyone who she and I should have presumably had in common, it would make sense that if some person—or some people—in our town were to (somewhat understandably) assume I’d been institutionalized and then say so to Lotta, she wouldn’t have all too much trouble believing them.
* * *
Why was Lotta Hogg sorry about your life?
Again, I never asked and so couldn’t say for sure, but I imagine she said she was sorry about my life because she knew I’d been diagnosed with a psychotic disorder, and she was, as noted, under the illusion that I’d lived in institutions. Furthermore, she mentioned that I’d always been nice, even at my “peak” (presumably the twenty to thirty days following the murder of Feather’s swingset, during which I enjoyed a measure of popularity at school), indicating her belief that I was past my peak. Also maybe she remembered that I lost my mother young, which, to me at least, would have been the best reason for someone to be sorry about my life, though I can see how, given everything else, that probably wouldn’t have been what she was thinking of.
* N. Steiger, V. Klaus, H. Hyde, and R. Clydefellow, “The Strength of the Imprint,” Applied Behavioral Science 28 no. 2 (1993): 10–29.
ALL-ENCOMPASSING AND TYRANNICAL
I LEFT THE BANK parking lot, performing calculations. Supposing I were to smoke my maximum eighty Quills a day every day until my father’s return—six to six-and-a-half days away, depending on traffic—I would smoke between 480 and 520 Quills. I still had 150 (149 not including the one I’d just lit), which meant that, assuming bad traffic, I’d need to buy 370. Three hundred eighty, really, since they came in packs of twenty—so nineteen packs of Quills. With the cost of Quills at ten dollars a pack, I’d require $190 at most, then. I had a fin in my wallet, so, of the $500 Lotta had left me, I’d need only $185.
Lotta may have supposed I had a fin in my wallet, or even a ten, or a twenty. And because I’d told her I had enough smokes to last a normal person a week, she must have supposed I had at least a couple packs. But even supposing that she supposed I had nothing—no smokes, no dough—and that I needed, therefore, 520 Quills, i.e. twenty-six packs, that would mean I needed just $260, which would mean that her $500 would leave me a $240 surplus, i.e. her $500 would have been nearly twice what I could have possibly needed.
And I didn’t see how she could know, or even guess, how much I smoked. I had read about people who smoked as much as me (I had read about three of them—Keith Richards of the rock-and-roll band the Rolling Stones; Adam Levin, author of the novel The Instructions; and that guy who wrote the Easy Way to Stop Smoking book, Allen Carr), but I had never met anyone who smoked as much as me. Not that I’d met all that many people, but still. Of the people I had met, few of them smoked even a third as much as me, and so it seemed extremely unlikely that Lotta would suppose I smoked more than forty cigarettes a day, which would mean she’d left me, at minimum, nearly four times the money it was reasonable for her to imagine I’d need.
So there were no two ways about it: the loan wasn’t just generous, but conspicuously generous. What Lotta’s conspicuous generosity meant, however—that was hard to say. It could have been, to begin with, inadvertently conspicuous: she may have been too spidged to perform the kinds of calculations I was performing and, knowing that, had determined it was better to err on the side of giving me a little too much, but, intoxicated as she was, had vastly overestimated the amount I smoked, or the amount smokes cost, and ended up giving me a lot too much; or perhaps she was too high to even see how much she’d given me (e.g. maybe she thought, in her intoxicated state, that the twenty-five twenty-dollar bills she’d left me were twenty-five five- or ten-dollar bills, or five or ten twenty-dollar bills (having never used spidge, I had no real sense of how being spidged might affect one’s perceptions, or ability to count)). In either case, it would have been okay, I decided, for me to do as she so kindly wished: to purchase Quills with the money she’d lent me, then pay the money back when my father returned.