I will insert a banner ad for One Eyed Bastard Frog once I get around to learning how to steal the code for that. In the meantime, you can enjoy music from the band that Janet Maslin, of the Gray Lady Times says is “like ending world hunger, only more satisfying”, and about whom Brigitte Bardot said, “I gave my youth to men, but I will give my late moyen age and my senescence crapuleuse to One Eyed Bastard Frog”. You can listen to and download their latest album here. You can sample earlier releases here, here and here.
Now – the usual garbage.
The difficult part about fiction is that the fiction writer needs to make things up. That is not necessary if you life-write about mobile home parks (I defy Martin Amis to say that turning into a cockroach is stranger than being chased by a three-hundred-pound man wearing only a diaper, a park owner skin diving in a septic lagoon or, well, any day in the life of JB), but it is needed in many other contexts.
I recently took a short on-line fiction-writing class with One Story, an organization that sponsors readings, education and a literary magazine. It consisted of five separate exercises, each taught by a different teacher. Some exercises were more challenging than others, but all were rewarding. One teacher had us write about place. Another had us use tarot cards to generate scenes re the past, present and future of a character we made up. Another, taught by a teacher named Lisa Ko, had us write a scene in which the stakes for the main character are high. The exercise proceeded as follows:
- Step One: Who is the Character? Name five things about the character. Where are they, when is the scene taking place, and what is at stake? Write a short (e.g. 300 word) scene with him, her or them. Include external action (physical movement, dialog) and interior action (feeling, thinking).
- Step Two: Go Deeper. Read your scene. If one of the following questions is not apparent, re-write it to clarify. How does the character feel at the beginning of the scene? How does the reader know this? What does the character want to happen? How do we know this? What is stopping them from getting what they want? How does the character feel at the end of the scene, and how does the reader know that? What decision does the character make, and how do they change as a result?
- Step Three: Introduce Conflict Introduce a source of external conflict into the scene (a ticking clock, a deadline, an opposing character, a physical interaction, a weather event, e.g.)
- Step Four: Deepening Revise. Ask yourself, Are the stakes clear? Can you clarify them? Are they high enough? Too high? Can you strengthen them with outside sources of conflict? Can you maintain the tempo in later scenes?
Since making shit up is not something I am very good at, I was initially at a loss as to how to proceed. Then I remembered that a fiction writer usually takes pieces from her life and re-arranges them in a mosaic. The tiles come from life, but the pattern is made up (although the pattern is also not made out of whole cloth. The pattern may come from real life, too, as may be the frame, the grout, and the little green man who actually assembles the pieces, installs it at the base of your swimming pool and whispers things about the CIA beaming thoughts into your head in your ear). So I decided to write about Joe Gurry, the grifter with whom I am having trouble in the park in central New York. Except, in this case, the narrative voice would be Joe Gurry’s voice, and the blocking character would be the park owner, a nasty little prick named Sam Korda who lives down state, wears black performance tee shirts that he buys at Walmart, Riggs jeans, Montrail trail running shoes (when he can find them, now that Montrail has been purchased by Columbia), suffers from male pattern baldness and rhinoelephantitis, drives a beat-up black 2016 Prius and uses pretentious sesquipedalian words in what should be every-day discourse. The idea was to show what a scumbag Joe is by presenting him as an unreliable narrator, while not sugar-coating the situation he was born into.
Here is my effort:
Joe liked late morning the most. Hangovers subsided with the first cigarette. He didn’t crack the first beer until noon, and the hard liquor started shortly before dinner. The hours between wake-up and lunch were unburdened. When it was warm, he would sink his butt into a lawn chair on his front-door porch, put his feet on the railing, look out at the Tufanos’ home in the lot next door, and fill a coffee cup with cigarette butts. He needed to fix the skirting and call the insurance company to take down the handicapped ramp they had put up when Margot first got sick. He should also mow the lawn and fix the tractor.
Today was glorious. Dry, clear sky, September. Cool enough so you could drink a beer without sweating. And who comes along, climbs the steps and stands on his porch, carrying a shoulder bag, a clipboard and a box full of papers, but Korda, the owner of the mobile home park?
“Mr. Gurry. Your lease.”
Korda handed him a manilla envelope. As Joe leaned forward to grab it, he felt his chin double and his gut spill over his belt, he heard a crack!, and then he felt the front two legs of his lawn chair sink six inches below the decking. He would have to fix the rotten porch boards. Shit.
Korda lived down-state and showed up each month or so for a couple of hours in his black Prius. He rarely spoke with tenants except to dun them, never smiled, never cracked a joke, never allowed payment plans. Dee Dee and JB did the dirty work; all Korda did was count his money. He had rausted Joe’s daughter, Perdita, a year and a half ago. Joe still remembered the sound of the judge’s gavel, and the piles of stuff they had packed into Perdita’s car when she left. He thought that she was living in Syracuse now, but he had not heard from her in over a year.
Joe had wanted to speak with Korda for some time. The rent-to-own was up at the end of next year, but he had sold the home to a lady named Katherine last month. She had paid him fifteen grand up-front, and had agreed to pay another seventeen when she got the keys. He blew a lung-full of smoke and stubbed out his cigarette. He hesitated a bit when he spoke:
“Sam. How much is left on the home?”
Korda looked past him, blankly.
“You haven’t paid rent in six months.”
“How much to buy it? I have some money now.”
“You’re into me for five grand. You have violated the terms of the option. You are never going to buy it.”
And just like that, Korda walked off toward the Tufanos, carrying his clipboard and his box of leases. Joe felt an ice-pick in his stomach. He had already spent the fifteen thousand that Katherine had given him. He would need to explain to her that problems with the title would need to be worked out before they could finalize their transaction. If she wasn’t patient, she would ask him to return the down-payment. His lawyer had told him that anything over ten thousand was grand larceny. It didn’t look like Korda was going to give him a break here. He pulled the second-to-last cigarette out of his pack, looked up toward the sun coming over the roof of his home, and noticed a panel of siding that had come loose and was gapping down. He would need to fix that, too.
Part of the course was feedback. Here are two comments posted re the above:
- Nice start, John. I like your main character. In very short order it feels like I know him and the stakes are certainly big. I think the dialogue would help with some beats and tags. Physical descriptions too might help with identifying the several characters introduced here. But I see this being a larger piece and that this will be addressed later as we get to know the other characters.
- I read this as the beginning of a novel that I would like to go on reading. You set the atmosphere with some great detail about the rotten porch boards and round off the piece with another repair reference, making me feel that this narrator has a strategy for managing his deeper preoccupations and I am curious to find out about them. I too like your main protagonist the dialogue is believably direct but you might help it with more contracted speech.
But, here’s the thing – if these two classmates ‘liked’ Joe Gurry, I failed. Joe Gurry is not a likeable guy. I will go further – he is a scum-sucking parasite who in a better world would be exiled to the Gulag or rendered for tallow. He steals school lunches. He sold his terminally-ill wife’s pain meds in the park. He started a Go Fund Me campaign to help with his wife’s funeral costs when she was still alive. He refused to let his wife see her son on her deathbed. He sold a home that I own to an unsuspecting old lady and pocketed fifteen thousand of her dollars in exchange for blue sky. He tells his lawyer that we cannot negotiate because he has COVID – but he is out and about, goes to the store, has visitors, picks up his mail, interacts with people in town, and pays his attorney $400 an hour to harass me. My goal was not to make people like him. It was to get them to see that they were viewing the world through the eyes of a scumbag.
Shortly after those posts went up, the news about Joe Gurry in real life got worse. Like COVID or a bad case of athlete’s foot, I think it will continue to do so until it gets better.
In 2016, Gurry leased his home with a European-style option to buy it that matured at the end of 2021.[1] The option was contingent on Gurry’s making sixty-four consecutive monthly rent payments on time and otherwise complying with his lease. He was desultory about rent payment for several years. In 2019, he assaulted the park manager, Dee Dee, and the park maintenance guy, JB. He stopped making rent payments when the eviction moratorium went into effect in March 2020. He entered into a contract to sell the home to an unsuspecting old lady named Jenny in July 2020. Jenny paid him $15,000 when she signed the contract, and agreed to pay him an additional $17,000 at closing. When she asked him when she would get title to the home, he told her, “I need to straighten that out”. Then, he started calling me to ask “how much more was left to pay on the home”. I was unaware of his arrangement with Jenny when this happened. I reminded him that he had a lease with an option rather than a mortgage, so there was no outstanding principal amount that he could pay off. I also told him that he would never buy the home, because he had violated the terms of his option.
Remember – I owned the home that he sold. He had lost the right to exercise his option when he stopped making lease payments in March and when he assaulted the park manager and maintenance guy. Even if he had not violated the terms of the option, it was European-style, not American-style, and hence could not be exercised until 12/31/2021. He did not tell me that he had contracted to sell an asset that I own when he contracted to sell it. Jenny got bupkis in exchange for her $15,000.
Once I found out about his attempt to sell my asset, we both lawyered up. Our attorneys went back and forth. Mine suggested that we might be able to close amicably. I told him that that would be fine with me, so long as Gurry makes me whole and moves out of the park immediately. Gurry’s lawyer got slippery a few times. He claimed that I had already been paid, or that I had committed a tort by interfering with Gurry’s (unenforceable, illegal) contract with Jenny. Things dragged on and seemed to get lost in the shuffle of emails and one-on-one calls between parties not directly involved. I lost patience, so I suggested an all-hands call. To prepare for that, I drafted a bullet-point list and a spreadsheet stating chronology, facts, closing mechanics and method for making me whole and purging the park of this particular pest. I asked my attorney to call his and set up a Zoom meeting or a call Friday afternoon. Then, on Thursday, my attorney called me:
“John. I had forgotten what Gurry’s attorney is like.”
“I am not impressed by what I have seen so far.”
“He is a scumbag.”
“I’ve been telling you that for muntz.”
“We can’t expect him to negotiate in good faith. We need to squeeze.”
“Let’s bang heads Monday.”
So – alternative remedies it is. We will begin the garnishment process for an outstanding $3,000 judgment that we obtained over the summer and which we had put on hold in the understanding that we would do this the easy way. We will sue for the rest of the $10,000 and counting in back rent that he owes. Jenny and I will contact the police and press criminal fraud charges. Like Mr. Gurry, it will be ugly, wasteful, lugubrious and of no redeeming social value. Attorney’s fees will eat up most of any amounts recovered. When it is over, nobody will say that they “like” Mr. Gurry. Not even his cell mate, the guys he showers with, the commissary worker, or the solicitous young men who will ask him to join their games of hide-and-seek on the yard.
[1] A European-style option is an option that can be exercised only on a specific date. An American-style option can be exercised any time up to or on a specific date. A “Bermudan” option can be exercised on two or more specified dates. Somewhat confusingly, both European and American-style options are traded on American equity exchanges (I believe that index options are European-style but ETF options are American-style, even if they reference the same underlying such as, e.g., options on the SPX and options on the SPY). Although American-style options can be exercised prior to maturity, they rarely are exercised prior to maturity, because a holder of an American-style option can cash out option value better by selling an in-the-money option, rather than by exercising it. I do not think that there are any option exchanges in Bermuda. Successful option traders go to Bermuda to die, because of the tax benefits.