VINTAGE FAULKNER AND CIGARETTES



Barkley Brunson held a blue plastic folder over his head while he walked from Milwaukee to Damen, the rain coming down hard. Fat droplets thudded atop his shield against the elements, ran off edges and spilled inside openings, turned the papers inside to soup. The rain bent the edges of the folder and sent cold water down the back of his neck, which made him walk faster, as if he were chased.

Past the Bongo Room he went. It was a Friday, and pale-faced patrons with maroon umbrellas approached the delights of the brunch within-an extravagant grease bomb that Barkley knew he had to avoid. Through the window he caught sight of the Oreo and banana pancakes, buried under an arctic shelf of white frosting. Danger, he thought, gripping his potbelly. His socks were soaked. He should really get new shoes.

Two blocks more and finally, the sign for Myopic Books beckoned like a weathered hand. Barkley made his way to the entrance, navigating around the frothy water that spilled from the streets, bubbling over cars and curbs and snaking toward his feet. He swung open the door and shook off the rain. The door closed behind him and the city faded to a distant thrum. Dim lights and dust descended. Inside: labyrinthine pathways, creaky landings, and stale air, pleasant like a lived-in attic.

"Barkley? You made it."

"Huh? Oh, hey, Mr. Doring." Barkley looked behind the bookstore's cash register to find his graduate creative writing professor at DePaul-well, not quite a professor yet, but almost. The fifty-year-old PhD candidate had four piercings in his right ear, white hair, and a craggy face lined with smile and frown creases.

"You're late," Doring said.

"The bus. I mean, I had to transfer buses. Timed it wrong. Bus tracker-need to get an iPhone."

"You can't be late to these, Barkley. Understand? The summer classes put us all on a tighter schedule, and this is your rescheduled appointment. I'm doing you a favor, meeting you here."

"Right. I was also printing my story. Ink problems. I've got a new draft for you." Barkley waved the sopping blue folder in Doring's general direction.

"Is that readable?"

"I hope so. The rain-"

"Right, right. Well, I can't really read a new version of the story right now, can I?"

"It's only eight pages," Barkley said, wiping his forehead. "And I wanted to show you my new ending."

Doring scratched his chin, which was laced with dust-colored grizzle. "Let's just talk about the draft you gave me last week. Let me go grab my notes. Ginny, can you handle the register?"

A stumpy redhead approached the front, and Barkley immediately checked her off as too big-boned to seriously flirt with. Then he saw that she had a bit of a chest-in fact, the swell of it against her teal sweater was impossible not to notice. Her breasts were probably pale and freckled and even a little bottom heavy, but impressive. And her face was ... interesting. Unusual, even. He watched her at the register for a moment longer, feeling the familiar jelly-legged sensation that arrived whenever he breached the perimeter of an attractive female. He concentrated, used the old Zen strategy, tried to look at her without looking at her-peripheral ogling, that's what they called it. Her skin was a smooth white-he would have called it milky if the description hadn't seemed archaic, like something from those Jane Austen novels his mother used to love. At the register, she seemed reserved, hesitant, content to peruse crumpled receipts. She still hadn't noticed him. This, he thought, was an opportunity.

He'd heard a theory on positive thinking from his older brother, who provided unsolicited wisdom whenever applicable (which his brother believed was all the time). This particular nugget: if he, Barkley, simply replaced his typically insecure thoughts with confident thoughts-alpha male thoughts-he'd actually start to behave like one of them. Those countless conversations where every word came out twenty IQ points lower than his capability, each syllable feeling like a wooden child's block between his teeth? Gone! Out the window. Think confident thoughts, Charlie had coolly advised him, before canning a jump shot from the corner of the driveway.

And yet, out in the field, with a pretty girl lurking on the horizon (he'd decided that she was pretty now), it wasn't so easy. Sure, he could try to do it, even if for him it seemed absurd. Instead of being afraid of this cashier girl-Ginny-he should be thinking something macho, chest puffed out like a matador. Like, for example, that he'd be getting laid tonight. Yes. That was the tactic. He would be the classic, modern-day conqueror-all machismo, zero cuddling. Out by morning, leave without a note. Sure, there was a misogynistic aftertaste to that, but he had to do it, had to pretend he was someone else if he wanted any chance of success. So say it again: he, Barkley Brunson, brother of the legendary Charlie Brunson, son of the even bigger, more legendary stud Henry Brunson, was getting laid tonight. That was his character arc, his sacred trajectory.

But Ginny still hadn't noticed him. She remained anchored at the register, solemnly reading a book by Tom-somebody-he couldn't see the rest of the name. He continued observing from a distance, and then Doring walked by and tapped him on the shoulder with his grading folder.

"Ready to review? This way, Barkley."

Doring opened a scarred black door and they entered his cluttered office, fortified with an abnormal number of fantasy magazines and orange highlighters. There was a square cedar desk in front of them.

"Sit," Doring said.

Barkley adjusted himself on the metal folding chair. He was twenty-three and without a full-time job; this class was either a step to something greater or yet another hopeless distraction. He put the blue folder on the desk, opened it up. The font of his new draft appeared to be bleeding mascara.

"Let's talk about the story you gave me last week, Barkley."

"Okay. What did you think?"

"Well, let's start with the beginning."

"Okay," Barkley said again. He felt apprehension, as he always did when hearing his work reviewed. But he was also mindful that Doring was no professor, at least not yet.

"The beginning works well."

Barkley nodded, waiting for the anvil to fall.

"It's about a twenty-something coming of age as a womanizer, right? And the catch, of course, is that it's all happening in the middle of a Chicago zombie apocalypse. This is a nice touch, Barkley. Really. You've got a knack for taking literary elements, or at least character-based ones, and using tried-and-true genre tropes as a backdrop. Now, finding the mundane within the fantastic isn't necessarily a new thing, but it's interesting enough, and you write with an exuberance that's hard to dislike. No one else in the class is doing it quite like that."

"Well, thanks," Barkley said. Was that a backhanded compliment?

Doring turned the page and moved his finger down a few paragraphs. "The main character-he's not confident in the beginning. That scene with the hairdresser shows that well. I like how he steals that Vavoom hair cream from the derelict salon to impress her. He's goofy that way. But lovable. And by the time they're on the run from the zombie horde, we actually care about the character."

"But," Barkley said, watching for the flicker in Doring's eyes. There was always an aggressive flicker-like the look from an assassin before plunging in a knife-that preceded an instructor's jump into rampant criticism. It convinced him, above all other evidence (like desert warfare or road rage), that human beings were essentially animals. Even in the ivory towers of intellectualism, even in those elevated attempts at literature and high art and reflection on life, all anyone wanted to do was kill each other. And the predatory flicker proved it. His brother knew about that, too, of course-but in a different way.

"Okay," Doring said. "Fine. Here's my 'but.' The problem really isn't the writing. You start with a lovable character who steals hair products to impress a salon worker, but then he has that near-fatal car accident, and when he wakes up, he's a new man. Just like that."

"That kind of thing happens, Mr. Doring. It's an awakening."

"Right. Right. Sure it does. But first of all, his evolution isn't earned. Secondly, his epiphany only influences his sexual magnetism and propensity for violence. It allows him to smooth talk the hairdresser, sleep with her, and then murder a roomful of zombies with a giant pistol. Anything of substance is left to the imagination."

Barkley leaned forward. "It was a .44 Magnum revolver. An ode to Dirty Harry. And he had to get it all out of his system, the sex especially. He was repressed!"

Doring uncapped an orange highlighter, held it aloft, then abruptly recapped it with a sharp snap. "The goofy character we love in the beginning is gone. He has a near-death experience that allows him to bed the aloof girl and become an apocalyptic action hero, but what could be charming or transcendent ends up being ... honestly, a little uncomfortable. I understand you want him to mature, but I think you have to be mindful of your audience. What are you trying to say, exactly? Does your new ending change any of that?"

"Well," Barkley said, looking from the stains on the ceiling to the smeared font of his new draft, "I don't think you're going to like the revised ending at all."

Doring offered a conciliatory smile. "You'll have another conference in August, Barkley. We'll see what you've got on tap then."

On the way out, Barkley stopped short of the door and rummaged through a stack of novels atop the window display. It was unbelievable. He just couldn't win. Doring hadn't even mentioned his spectacular use of figurative language in the .44 Magnum scene, when zombie heads were exploding like overripe Michigan pumpkins, their pulpy guts making abstract paintings on the white wall behind them. The white wall served as a metaphor for the blank slate the newly created badass had emerged from, and Doring hadn't even caught that particular angle.

And here he was, hanging his head again-Charlie Brown after another missed kick. Didn't anyone still root for the little guy? Yet on the other hand, there was the nagging suspicion that all of his recent misadventures, from the dubious science fiction streak to the sad sack loner routine-all of them-were simply an attempt to distract himself from what was really going on. Big-picture shit, starring the whole Brunson family. Barkley sighed and tried to shake free of the buzzing neurosis, that ever-present cloud of gnats that hovered, as if he were doused in vinegar. On the other side of the bookstore, Ginny was still at the register, bent over a book by ... there it was-Tom Robbins. He perked up, recalibrated, and chanced another glance at her face. Better than he had thought. Round but not fat. He took in her breasts again. From this distance-juggernauts. Swollen prisoners held captive in that straitjacket of a green sweater. His pants stirred. He raised his gaze and saw that she was staring at him. She smiled. He turned away.

Barkley yanked two paperback titles off the display without reading their names. He thumbed through them and cursed himself. Did she catch him ogling her? Probably not; otherwise, she wouldn't have smiled. Of course, she could have smiled because she liked being checked out, but that didn't sound right to him either. Ginny gave off the vibe of a shy, chaste, Puritan book maid. He looked back at her again. A long wave of dark red hair hung over her face. Reading again. At least she had a brain. And Tom Robbins-she liked absurdist literature. Good. He could do absurdist humor. Girls that liked books were easy game for him. True, his brother was the real master with girls, attracting almost biblical swarms of them in those years before his enlistment, but if the time was right, Barkley could hold his own as well. Sure he could. In fact, the real reason he hadn't had sex in eight months had more to do with-

"Need help with anything?"

It was Ginny. Shit-the guy was supposed to talk first. Barkley turned slowly, plotting out an intellectually pious sentence, something about the vintage, Parisian construct of the place. Yes, that sounded good, use the wordParisian, all girls liked Western Europeans.

But he was already talking-"Nope. Not needing any help, here ... miss. Just looking. Yes. Um, looking for ... looking for Faulkner, here."

"Oh great," she said. "That's in the fiction section. Through that little cubbyhole in the back."

"Right," he said. "The cubbyhole."

She smiled again and pointed to the back. "Faulkner will be right around the corner there."

"Tha-ank you," he said, drawing out his words. He walked stiffly toward the back. Faulkner? What was he thinking? He wondered if her eyes were on him. They probably were. He was a good-looking guy, minus the stomach. His hair got a lot of compliments, and that girl in his freshman Intro to Statistics class had told him once that his eyes looked "deep." Ginny was definitely watching him. He chanced a glance back and saw that her head was down, perusing the Tom Robbins novel. She had probably just looked down. For sure.

Inside the stooped cubbyhole was the beginning of the fiction section, and Barkley was faced with a second problem: he had mentioned Faulkner. Not only did he not read Faulkner, but he also knew only The Sound and the Fury, which he had quit at fifty pages. Which, if he picked it up now, would allow Ginny to tag him with the much feared "doesn't-read-Faulkner" bull's-eye. So he had to find a rarity, a Faulkner B-side, something to hint at his vast knowledge as a literature aficionado. He found the F section. An old hardcover of The Sound and the Fury? Check. What else?

As I Lay Dying? No. That had a certain familiar ring to it. Maybe he'd seen a movie version. He looked on. Here. What was this? Go Down, Moses? He pulled the book out. Seemed random enough. He hadn't heard of it. Go Down, Moses it was.

Barkley strode out of the cubbyhole, holding the Faulkner novel out like a vintage wine bottle. It would be suave to just unveil it at the counter in front of her. A conversation piece. Yes. She would love it-be impressed with him immediately. Pepper in some deft conversation and jokes (as well as Charlie's Jedi mind tricks), and he was probably getting laid tonight.

"What have you got there?" a man's voice called. Barkley looked up to see Mr. Doring standing behind the cash register. Damn.

"It's a Faulkner," Barkley said. "Something about Moses. He's just great, isn't he? Not Moses. Faulkner, I mean."

Doring nodded. "He is."

Barkley looked around the room. No Ginny. It figured, he thought. Bad luck was what he had-what his whole family had. But he didn't want to think about that.

"Did you want to buy that?"

Doring again. "No," Barkley said, and placed the book down on the counter. "Have a good day."

"I'll just reshelve that for you," his professor intoned behind him.

Barkley opened the door and saw that the rain was slowing. Vast sheets of drizzle waved across the streets in silver curtains, but the flooding of the sewers had subsided. He closed the door behind him, felt the stormy July wind on his cheeks. Tomorrow-that's when his luck would change.

"Did you get the Faulkner?"

Barkley jumped. It was Ginny. She was standing under the overhanging bay window from Myopic's second floor, taking a cigarette break, watching him without expression. He breathed in her scent-pineapple gum and book dust and nicotine.

"So that's where you went," Barkley said. "Smoke break?"

"Yeah. It's one of those college habits. All the hot guys used to play guitar and smoke in front of the dorms, and of course the girls would follow. And here I am, in front of a bookstore years later, still smoking."

"I can play guitar for you," Barkley lied.

"Ha."

He struggled to find another avenue of conversation. The rain trickled and popped around their perimeter of shelter.

"Well," she said. "How do you know my uncle? You're his student, right?"

"Who, Mr. Doring? You guys are related? No shit. Yeah, he's my writing teacher. It's a master's class."

"A bit of a hard-ass, he tells me."

"Well, he doesn't like my writing, that's for sure."

Ginny nodded and blew out smoke. "Growing up, he never liked the pictures I drew. We used to workshop my Big Bird sketches."

"You're kidding, right?"

"Yes."

Barkley reminded himself not to look at her battle cruiser-size chest. "So," he said.

"So," she echoed. She took another drag.

"What's your uncle really like? Is he like the cool hipster uncle or something? Some kind of old-school Chicago beatnik? Does he drink a lot of PBR?"

"Well, not really. He touches me sometimes. Down there."

Barkley coughed. "Sorry? What? He touches you?"

"You know, down there." She looked at him and brushed away what could have been a tear. "In my no-no spot."

"Your no-no spot? You're joking, right?"

She stared at him, unblinking.

"You know what, Ginny? I, uh, actually think I have to go. The bus. Taking the bus out of here. Or maybe the Blue Line."

Ginny laughed and punched him in the ribs. "Totally fucking with you."

"Jesus. You serious?"

"That's right." She took another drag. "Your professor does not fondle his niece. Are you relieved?"

"Wow," Barkley said. He sighed and scratched his head. "You had me going there." Chaste Ginny, Barkley thought. Looks like you don't exist.

"Now you're clamming up," she said.

"No. Actually, that was pretty convincing. I was sold."

"I'm glad. I tried to be an actress once. In high school. Got all the best roles. I played Pippi Longstocking in tenth grade. Didn't even need a wig."

"And now?"

"Well, some bad stuff happened senior year, during Fiddler on the Roof."

Barkley stared at her lips. "And?"

"My drama teacher, he was a guy. He kind of, you know."

"What?"

"He touched me. Down there."

"Shut up," Barkley said. "You can't play the abuse card twice."

Ginny cackled. "Come to think of it, know what you can't do?" she said. "From henceforth, you can't ogle girls when they're helplessly trapped behind a cash register. Am I right? You just can't do it."

"Ah," Barkley said. "Crap."

"Thought you got away with it, huh?"

"I think I should go," Barkley said.

"Just relax, kid. I'm joking around."

A beige SUV sped down Milwaukee, sending a wave of rainwater over the curb and onto his sneakers. Cold dampness soaked his socks, they both looked down, and Barkley saw how ratty his gray old tennis shoes really looked, and how they must look to Ginny. The formerly blue toes worn down and colorless, the heel practically detached. Damn it, he thought. This had actually felt like a semisuccessful conversation, no bullshit, and now his stupid shoes-

"So, this whole uncle-teacher thing makes us not really strangers," Ginny said.

"Right," Barkley said. "I hear you." He felt a vague sense of urgency but watched the rain instead.

Her green eyes bored into him. "Damn, son. That was your opening. I just gave you the biggest opening ever."

"Opening," Barkley echoed.

"Look," she said. "I've got a concert tonight. You should come and bring friends."

"Concert?"

"I'm in a band."

"Really? A band? What do you play?"

"What do you think I play?"

Barkley thought of her behind the register, then onstage. "The drums? You play the drums?"

She wrinkled her nose. "Drums? Why do you say that? You think I'm too top-heavy to stand up? Bastard."

He laughed, despite himself. "That's it. No, I don't know. Bass guitar, maybe?"

"Let me tell you something. Fuck bass guitar. Everyone thinks the chick has to play bass guitar and wear moody eye makeup. I'm lead electric, bitch!" And she threw her head back and howled.

"Well," Barkley said, "I'll go to the concert. But we haven't even been introduced."

"You need me to get my uncle out here and hold your hand? I'm Ginny."

"Barkley." They shook hands.

Ginny raised an eyebrow. "Well, if you can make it to the concert, do so. It's at the Empty Bottle."

"I will!" Barkley said, feeling like he'd just swallowed a balloon. "I'll see you there, Ginny. And-"

"Gotta go," she said, flicking down her cigarette and slipping back inside the bookstore.



Copyright © 2015 by Erik Fassnacht