For You, The Stars
Chapter Fifteen: Installment 2
Giselle and I got our writing group started, mostly with people she knew from her poetry class and another group she had been in, but also with a few of my writer friends, like Dave and his new girlfriend Mavis whom he had recently met in his graduate writing program at S.F. State. Mavis smoked a lot and seemed really hard on the surface. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. Her writing was also hard - diamond hard - polished to a fine gloss. I was really impressed by her attention to craft and her careful way with words. Many of her stories had religious themes. Dave had said that she was the only (other) really good writer in his class, and I believed it.
I knew Kim was an aspiring writer so I invited her to join the group too. Many of her stories had erotic themes or involved bodily functions. One of them involved getting bloodstains out of underwear. In the story her character washes the clothes in cold water. I asked why it wasn’t hot water and she and old the other women in the group told me that hot water would make the blood set in for good.
There was another woman in the group, Cindy, who seemed extremely young to me. She was probably just a year or two younger than I was but she spoke in that babytalk kind of voice. One time we were having the group at Giselle’s apartment, spread around her living room. There were not enough chairs so I was sitting on the floor. I noticed from across the room that I could see right up Cindy’s knee-length skirt. I was looking right at the gusset of her little cotton panties. I felt like a perv taking in this view but I wasn’t able to stop looking.
It was the same whenever I noticed a woman’s breasts. I couldn’t help but stare a little but I was mortified at the thought of being caught looking, so I would keep sneaking peaks with sidelong glances.
The one other woman in the group (besides Giselle’s crazy ex-lover who just came to the first session and then never returned) was Eliza Stone, who lived up the road from my Berkeley friends on Parnassus Way. Eliza was another happa. Her mother was Japanese and her father was British. She had grown up in Alaska and I always thought she looked a bit like an eskimo, although I realized that was just a matter of suggestion. Her face was round and soft and she had long glossy black hair and a querulous lilt to her voice. Her writing also betrayed hours of work and attention to craft.
I tended to rely upon random bursts of inspiration where I’d right like a maniac for ninety minutes or so. Then usually I’d drop the first page or two which tended to be throat-clearing crap and find a nugget of value, maybe only a few paragraphs but sometimes a few pages. String enough of these together and I’d have another of my semi-plotless abstracted short stories all about, say, a man who has trouble urinating in public bathrooms. When Mavis gave me a copy of The Mezzanine by Nicholson Baker I almost gave up writing on the spot.
There were other men in the group too, besides Dave and me. There was Prentiss Yee, who Giselle had met in her poetry class. He wrote poetry only but gave really helpful feedback on the prose that most of us were producing. He really made an effort to understand what I was trying to do even when I wasn’t sure myself, and more than once he helped me turn something that started out far to vague and arch into something moderately readable.
There was also another poet, Roman Lee, who was older than all of us, probably about forty. He’d been published in numerous obscure journals and wrote with a degree of confidence that was somewhat intimidating. He didn’t seem to care what kind of feedback we had to give him and I wasn’t really sure why he was in the group at all.
There were two key values to the group: the first was that we had no leader, no teacher. No one was getting paid to tell us how to write. We were a collective and we validated each other’s efforts just by caring to meet together once a week. We were diligent though: we were careful not to let it devolve into a kaffeeklatch or a meeting to talk about what you’ve been reading lately. The second value was that we did some actual writing every time we met. This was something Giselle and Prentiss had learned in their previous group. Someone would establish a theme, such as “write from a child’s point of view,” and then we’d all spend the next forty-five minutes tackling something. After that we could read what we’d written to the group, or not, or read something we’d been working on lately for feedback and critique.
It worked like a charm at first but it was discipline that was tricky to maintain, and as the group’s composition changed over time, we eventually gave up on that part of it, which was a shame, because it was unique and it forced us to do at least some writing if we hadn’t gotten anything new written lately.
Maura even came to the group once or twice at my invitation. After she found a place to stay in Berkeley that fall we finally reconnected. We didn’t resume sleeping together so I gathered that the mystery was exploded for her as well. I guess there were no hard feelings. We never talked about it and we certainly weren’t writing each other letters anymore now that we lived just across the bay from each other.
Things with Giselle fell apart but in a friendly way. We kept the writing group together. She decided to give up sex and relationships for a while. I think the ugly way her long-distance love affair broke up had an effect on her. I had probably underestimated her attachment to Jack Peters or Peter Jackson or whatever his name was. It actually was a pretty cool breakup. We just mutually agreed to let it drop. We stopped fucking and we stayed in touch. It was like the exact opposite of the horrible way things had ended with Simone, and it was less weird than the kind of zombie-like way things had ended with Cecilia.
I entered into a kind of desperate period of sowing my oats left and write. That’s when I slept with Chad’s ex. I also reconnected with Kim. She’d been keeping her distance from me at work since the time we’d had that drunken makeout session in Bettie’s kitchen, but one day after work instead of taking the bus to to BART now that Lucille was dead I asked her to give me a lift to her place. No explanation. She made us some dinner, just some vegetable soup, a one-pot meal on her stove.
We watched a little TV on the tiny couch in the nook next to her kitchen while sharing most of a bottle of bourbon, and then without saying a word we went into her bedroom and screwed to an old Hank Williams LP. I woke up in the middle of the night with a raging headache and an intense need to take a leak, when I got back to bed I woke her up and we fucked again. This wasn’t lovemaking. It was raw animal sex.
We did it again in the morning when we woke up. Later on our memories of that night differed. I always said we had had sex five times that night but Kim said I was overcounting it. I may have been basing it on the number of orgasms she had.
Kim was extremely thin and flat chested, but her body was incredibly sexy to me. She had paperwhite skin and she liked to wear old-fashioned lingerie, including garter belts and stockings, which was something I’d never seen on a real live woman before who wasn’t a stripper. I asked her once why she wore a bra at all when she didn’t need to and she seemed offended. I sort of figured out it had more to do with clothes and fashion and femininity than with support, but the lingerie had been a surprise because otherwise Kim dressed mostly punk or butch or both. She had a favorite pair of red plaid jeans and I had gotten so thin myself these days that I surprised myself by being able to fit them. I wore them around for awhile until the unbearable coolness got to be too much for me.
Given that I also had a crush on Eliza, the Alaskan girl who had dated two of my friends already from the Parnassus commune - in a way I guess she was on her own trajectory, cutting her own swath through a series of men she met - there were times when the writing group was weirdly charged for me. I’d look around the room and see Giselle and Kim and, at least once or twice Maura, all of whom I’d slept with, as well as Eliza who I wanted to sleep with and Cindy who was two young and babyish but who I had at least objectified that time I’d caught myself looking up her skirt.
I’m amazed I got any writing done at all that year and I’m not surprised I never finished most of what I started.