Hardcore Writing

New Fiction

Photo by Yonghyun Lee on Unsplash

*Random new fiction. Seems to feel organic. Just having fun with it. Clearly there’s more here. Just want to see how people feel about it. I’m happy to finally write more fiction!

~

Amanda opened her eyes to the jagged sound of a siren cutting through the early morning air. She stared at her blank, smooth white wall. The sharp smell of red wine sliced through her senses. She instantly remembered last night: Andrew, her literary agent, the three glasses of red wine, the fancy restaurant up on 81^st and 2^nd, the long discussion about her novel in progress.

She sighed, spreading her arms out wide on the bed. She reached for her phone, her hand crawling like a spider. Out her window, to her right, she heard traffic ramming along 3^rd Avenue, someone starting a honking war, some asshole yelling into the void. Good ole New York City. Manhattan. Here just a year and she already felt like she was an indissoluble part of something bigger than herself. A writer. With an actual agent. Living in Manhattan. Finally.

Sighing again, she sat up. A small, sharp pain etched its way into her skull. Minor hangover. She looked at her faded green panties, a tiny hole developing, and gazed at herself now in the life-sized mirror across her room (which needed a desperate dusting). Her small, fist-sized breasts (still quite taut) with the brown nipples, her smooth, pale skin, her strawberry blond hair almost down to her shoulders, her green eyes. At 25 years old and barely over 110 pounds, people commented often that she looked like a contemporary Joan Didion crossed with Scarlett Johanson (but skinnier). However, she knew her friends (and strangers) were just being kind. She wasn’t that hot. Not even close.

Amanda stood up, yawning deeply. Another siren sliced through the morning. The neighbors above her stomped around like wild hyenas, the hardwood creaking violently, but she was used to this by now. City life. Her phone, she almost forgot, was now in her palm. The little computer—which was both a blessing and a goddamn curse—was cold. She liked holding the cold, effervescent machine in her palm in the mornings. What magic would the little thing hold for her today? Who knew. Something might explode on TikTok or Insta or Substack. But: Doubtful. Each morning she held onto that tiny glimmer of inner flame, that minor piece of hope. Something could happen. Her life could change.

Avoiding herself in the mirror—gross—she scrolled on the phone. It was 7:12am, she discovered. Saturday. Thank Christ no work. She didn’t want to think about agent slush piles or copyediting bad manuscripts. The whole reason she’d left North Carolina in the first place—other than wanting to move to NYC more than anything else in the world—was because she had a job lined up. Her maternal uncle—Uncle Charlie—had set up the job. He’d been in book publishing—Scholastic, doing books for schools—for over 30 years. (Now retired but still connected.) She asked him for a favor. He obliged. And so, every day, Monday through horrible Friday, she took the train down to Midtown and, at West 47^th and 8^th Avenue, she took the elevator up to the 35^th floor and did her meagre, boring job. She was grateful, even if she loathed it. It was money. It allowed her to pay the bills and survive. But, as with most writers, she didn’t want to have to work any job. Reality was a bitch.

She slid into her skinny jeans and Ugg boots—fuck it, it was Saturday—and threw on her red Columbia puff jacket, plus her purple beanie. For some reason whenever she wore that beanie she always thought of condoms, that is to say men. She’d dated two men since living here. A Paul and a Jake. With Paul she’d felt like a deranged older woman. They’d met up at The Hungarian Pastry Shop, the famous café where many a famous author had written (Ta-Nehisi Coates, for example) on Amsterdam and 111^th, across the street from the St. John of the Divine Church. Many a Columbia College student spent time there, of course—campus was right there on 116^th—eating endless cups of coffee, studying into the wee hours, doodling, chatting in small groups, smoking cigarettes outside, chomping on too many sugar-packed pastries laughing and being bored.

She’d gone in around 8pm one random night in April—just a few weeks after moving to the city—and she’d found a table in the front corner so she could people-watch pedestrians on the street outside the floor-to-ceiling window. She sat alone, of course, sipping Earl Grey tea with whole milk. (One of her favorites.) The place was crammed full of people, mostly young people and students. Majority women but many men, too. The constant buzzing noise of the espresso machine whirring was a background sonic chaos, and lines of people moved in and out of the clanging, bell-ringing glass door, each time letting in cool spring air. The smell of pastries and doughnuts and coffee wafted all around her. She loved this experience, alone, solitary in her existence. She didn’t need people. Or so she often thought. (She knew this wasn’t actually true.)

She’d brought a book with her—Ottessa Moshfegh’s Lapvona—but she didn’t even open it. She just sat there, sipping and observing. What would her parents have thought about this, back in North Carolina? She pictured their house in Chapel Hill, where she’d grown up, right off Interstate 40, just a little southwest of Durham. The hiking as a kid, all the little lakes, drives to Mount Pleasant along the Pamlico Sound, going east to the ocean, or else heading west with her folks to Greensboro along I-40 or else Highway 421, the “back way” as they called it. Just the three of them. Mom, a fairly well known author of travel guides (where she got the creative gene) and Dad, a civil engineer who built bridges, dams and all manner of other necessary things, often all over the country, taking him away from her and her mom sometimes for months.

Her parents wouldn’t understand New York, even her mom, despite being a writer. I mean, her mom wasn’t really a writer, at least not in the sense that Amanda understood writing; that is to say, literary writing. Novels. Short stories. Fiction generally. Or even literary memoir. Secretly she smiled inside when people said (claimed) she looked vaguely like a young Joan Didion, because she cherished Didion’s elegant, finely-tuned prose. Especially her nonfiction from the 1960s. The White Album had changed her life; ditto Slouching Towards Bethlehem. A woman of her mother’s generation. A hot “it” writer of her era driving a Stingray around Pacific Coast Highway and dealing with the beautiful, brilliant, if less successful brute (probably verbally, maybe even physically abusive) that was John Gregory Dunne. Didion-Dunne, people called them.

But Amanda Peache (pronounced peeshe, she always had to tell people) didn’t write like Didion. No fucking way. Amanda’s prose was much more like, say, Moshfegh’s, yet with a poetic, glamourous, blue-collar edge like Mary Karr: Hard, tight, mean-spirited sentences. (Mary Karr, another brilliant female author, of literary memoir, who was involved with a semi-psychopathic, verbally and physically abusive male writer: David Foster Wallace, the most overrated author of all time.) Amanda’s literary style was more of a Hemingway reach, mixed, perhaps, with Karr. She knew Didion had cut her literary teeth—as far as practice of the craft—retyping Hemingway sentences, but her mature work did not smack at all of the misogynist 20^th century literary giant.

“Hey,” a male voice suddenly rang out, swording across her attention, jagging her out of her reverie like a drunk plowing into her walking down the street alone at 5am; her private inner life collided with the corporeal world in real time.

Slightly irritated, and still getting her bearings, she looked up and saw a tall, dark-haired man. Young, early twenties probably, clean-shaven, wearing well-fitted brand-new blue jeans, a black T-shirt that had a photo of Elliott Smith on it, white high-top Chuck Taylors, and fierce hazel eyes. He smelled of cologne, but only a feint whiff, nothing terrible. He must have been close to 6’0. She sat up, alert now.

“Hi,” she said, self-consciously.

The guy cleared his throat. His skin was a few shades darker than hers. He was white, but could almost have been seen as Mediterranean, perhaps. He was skinny, with an almost inverted, concave chest. Instantly she imagined running her hands along his naked chest. She pictured him in her bed. This nearly made her laugh. Boy-toy

He swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing awkwardly, and his face took a rush of redness to it. Oh, Jesus. What was this?

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just. I. Well. Thing is…” He cut himself off, laughing uncomfortably. “I guess what I mean is…”

Now she did laugh, not loudly and not at him, but subtly, with a gentle, relaxed calm. She’d been through this a million times, guys coming up to her, trying to talk to her, awkward, insecure, unsure how to act, what to say. Usually she was annoyed, sometimes amused. Right now, for reasons she couldn’t quite fathom, she was charmed. Men tried so hard. Poor guys. They were so desperate, so needy, so wounded, so desirous of female energy and attention. And they had to compete. That hadn’t changed in 50,000 years. Some things never change.

“I just wanted to say…” he finally managed to blurt out, “that, um, I just, well, I think you’re, like, really, like beautiful…”

She cupped her hand over her mouth, slightly giggling. Internally she yelled at herself, Don’t be a cunt!! Be nice. Don’t be cruel.

“What’s your name?” she said.

He swallowed again, clearly full of anxiety. But the hard part was finished.

“Paul,” he said. “Paul Anderson.”

“Amanda Peache.”

“Peach?”

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes. “Peache, as in P-E-E-SHHH.”

“Oh. Got it. Cool.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

“Really?” he said, clearly shocked. He’d probably tried this move a billion times and this was the first time it’d actually worked.

She laughed. “Sure.”

He sat, quickly gazing across the room, probably at his table, his former table, maybe at his buddies who were now no doubt in an equal amount of shock. Men were so predictable. Like clockwork. Driven by biology, need and fear.

“So, what do you do?” he asked, his hands gesturing and moving around like wild snakes. He didn’t know what to do with his hands.

“Well, I work at Scholastic in Midtown doing copyediting and other annoying stuff. But my calling is writing. I’m working on a novel. That’s why I moved here.”

A massive smile glowed upon his face. “I’m a writer too! I mean. Well, like, I’m a poet, I guess. And I’m a sophomore at Columbia. Studying English Lit and Creative Writing.”

“Jesus. How old are you?”

He blushed crimson, red peeking his tanned cheeks. “How old do you think I am?”

Amanda gazed at his face again for a moment, hearing the loud moronic whirring of the espresso machine in the background. Someone coughed. A rush of cars drove along Amsterdam outside. She realized as if for the first time that music was playing quietly in the background; it was Bob Dylan’s Like a Rolling Stone. She loved that song. It brought her back momentarily to North Carolina.

“I dunno,” she said. “Twenty-three?”

It was his turn to laugh now. “Nineteen.”

“Nineteen??!”

He shrugged, a little embarrassed.

“I’ve got six years on you, kid. You like older women, huh?”

“Not until now.” He grinned stupidly, and yet she liked it. She liked him.

They sat there talking for several hours. He’d come to Columbia last year from Austin, Texas. Almost no one in New York was from New York. All the dreamers who were pulled, magnetically, to the mecca of book publishing, the hard iron core of the literary universe, the Paris of America. Didion—born in Sacramento—had come to New York to write for Vogue after winning that writing contest. Everyone ended up in New York eventually. It was like the semi-loving, semi-abusive boyfriend you just couldn’t quit. (Jake.)

He’d been a poet all his life, he said. His dad had died in a car crash driving alone late one night, half drunk, on I-20 a little west of Abilene, Texas. Mom was a restaurant manager in Austin. His parents had had him and his sister when they were just teens. He grew up working class. No one in his family before him had gone to college. But he was smart. He read voraciously. He penned poems. He devoured Yeats, Byron, Whitman. He did well in high school. And, due to his father’s dramatic death, he had a good story for a college essay. He applied to five schools and got into four of them. Columbia was one, with a full scholarship. He jumped at the opportunity. And here he was.

She told Paul all about her childhood in Chapel Hill, her parents, her love for writing which her author mother had always fostered since the beginning, her father’s warmth and goodness but absence and total disinterest in anything creative or intellectual, her days hiking and swimming in local lakes, drives along I-40. Moving to Manhattan at 24. Her rote job. Getting an agent. Working on her novel. She’d never been to Austin; he’d never even been to North Carolina.

Her novel, she told him, was currently titled Black Gods. No, she assured him, it didn’t have anything to do with race or identity. The reference was to her own inner gods, her own inner demons or, to be more precise, the inner demons of Stephanie Field, the novel’s protagonist. The basic plot was this: Field was a 22-year-old woman living in North Carolina (Greensboro) who ends up totally isolated and alone after her parents are unexpectedly killed in a plane crash. She has no other family. With a small inheritance, she tries to find her way in life, wanting to be a novelist but knowing she needs to work and make money somehow to survive. Drifting from motel to motel for a while, around various random cities in North Carolina, she soon meets a shitty guy (drug-dealer) who beats her up and gets her hooked on heroin.

Eventually, through drive, grit and determination, she escapes the drug habit, flees the asshole, and makes it to New York (Brooklyn) where she finds work as a hospital tech and writes at night. Finally, she writes the Great American Novel. She becomes famous. The end.

“Sounds pretty hardcore,” Paul said, his hazel eyes sparkling, thin mouth grinning again.

She smiled. “Yeah. I guess you could call my writing hardcore.”