Unclogging Love Part II
David LaBounty

            Me, I hate fishing (another myth about plumbers down the drain). I’m also from the school of writers that likes to let the reader get to know a little bit about them before they begin. I figure, if you know who you’re dealing with up front, you’ll be more than willing to follow me wherever I go.

            Not that I’ve ever taken anyone too far. My first story, “Unclogging Love,” was rejected by Story. Well, that’s not entirely true. My first story, “Unclogging Love,” was accepted by Penthouse. That’s when I figured I maybe had a flair for this sort of thing – writing, that is. (Actually, it was my first revision of “Unclogging Love” that was rejected by Story. They said it wasn’t realistic. Maybe I should have made my penis only eight inches long.)

            Of course, publishing my prose really isn’t the point of writing for me. The only reason I picked up a pencil in the first place was to find a wife. You see, if I don’t marry before I turn thirty-five, I’ll lose ten million dollars.

            No. I’m kidding. Who wants to read a story about some spoiled brat, who’s on the verge of losing his fortune, marries for money, but by the end of the tale has actually fallen in love with the chick?  How ABC Movie of the Week can you get? 

            I would like to get married though. You know, settle down with a sturdy woman, have a couple of rugrats. The problem is finding the right one. For the most part, the word plumber repels women like garlic repels vampires. The only kind of women that word attracts are tight-ass blue jean and black Metallica concert shirt wearing skanks.    

No offense to skanks, I mean, I’ve met a lot of nice skanks in my time. It’s just that I get tired of talking to women big on hair and small on brains. Their idea of stimulating conversation is arguing over who was the better lead singer, David Lee Roth or Sammy Hagar, when everybody knows Gary Cherone’s got a voice like an angel.

To make matters worse, skanks are everywhere. They’re at the bars, the Mall, the grocery store. There are even skanks at church. Of course, they’re all reformed, and sleeping with the preacher. I tell you what, there is nothing scarier than a reformed church-going skank.

            So you can see my dilemma. Where can I go to find a nice, mature, sensitive woman that can cook in the kitchen as well as the bedroom, if you know what I mean?

            That’s right. The community college. I figure, why not enroll in one of those furthering education classes full of housewives and recently divorced women looking for something to fulfill their lives. I may still be a plumber, but I'll be a plumber trying to better myself. That should count for something.

            After a quick scan of the course catalog, I realized I had two choices: sculpting and writing. I could have signed up for the quilting class, but the ladies there are a little out of my age range. Nothing against senior lovin’, mind you – experience does count for something in my book. It’s just that ninety-nine percent of the ladies in that class have been in a monogamous relation ship since the end of the Great War and are not there looking for a stitch in time, if you know what I mean.

            At first, sculpting sounded sweet. You’ve got to be one hell of an unfeeling bastard to never have gotten a hard on during the sculpting scene in Ghost. Unfortunately, the class cost too much money. First you have to pay the eighty-dollar materials fee, then you’ve got oven fees and showing fees and then more material fees. Too much of an investment, if you ask me. I already own a pencil, so I signed up for Creative Writing Workshop.

            It’s not like this is unprecedented. Have you noticed lately how many short stories out there are about writers having sex?  In my high school, the geekiest of geeks were the bookworms – pimply pussed people who wore thick glasses and seemed to sleep on their heads. But, if you read nothing but Zoetrope and the Atlantic Monthly you’d think everyone wants to lay the English professor or the writer in residence, as if they’ll be inseminated with some mystical grammar secrets or something like that. Who believes that crap?

            Take Paul, for instance, my writing instructor. Paul’s a nice enough guy. Got his MFA from some school in Idaho or Iowa – some place out West. Paul’s had a couple of short stories published, and he keeps telling us about the status of his novel (“I finished three pages today,” or “I really think I had a break through with chapter seven last night”), though he’s never brought in anything for us to read.

            Anyway, Paul’s not exactly what you’d call a babe magnet. Have you seen the movie Jerry Maguire?   Okay, you know that little kid with the glasses?  Well, imagine him twenty-five years older and a foot taller. That’s Paul. Sure he’s cute. But teddy bear cute not Tom Cruise cute. Women may want to snuggle with a teddy bear, but they want to fuck a Tom Cruise, if you know what I mean.

            Studentwise, I’m not the only guy in the class. There’s Jack; a seventy-something retired naval officer who writes stories about subs that will never sell because he replaces huge chunks of text with ellipses. (“Can’t have sensitive information falling into the wrong hands. Might jeopardize national security.”)   Never mind the fact that underwater warfare has advanced way beyond the Civil War subs this guy rode in. Okay, that was harsh. Jack is a good guy. He’s always got something nice to say about everyone else’s stories, no matter how crappy they really are. (“But, Janice you hardly had any typos on this page.”)  Jack looks like my grandfather.

Okay, so now you know about Paul and Jack. The rest of the characters in my passion play are women. Median age: Thirty-seven. Marriage status: Fifty percent divorced, the other fifty percent will be in one to two years. Statistically, I’d say I had a good chance of finding ‘the one’ – or two or three or four, if you know what I mean.

Other than being female, the women can be lumped into one of two categories: those that are undersexed, and those that are sexually frustrated. Now, I know what you're thinking, “What’s the difference?”

            Undersexed women haven’t had sex in ages. They write stories that border on hard core porn. One woman in the class, I’ll call her Fran because, well, that’s her name, had a scene in one of her stories involving a naked woman and a Doberman, and she was writing about a broker who lost all his money when the market crashed.

            Sexually frustrated women, on the other hand, are your romance writers. They’ve had sex recently, maybe even frequently, but it’s never the sex they’ve always envisioned having. These women write in metaphors (throbbing beast = penis) and can, at times, be very sensual. Many a class, I’ve had to wait until the room has cleared before escorting my chubby home.

            There is one woman, though, that’s worth describing in greater detail. Her name is Laurie. She’s thirty-five, divorced, has two dogs, and no kids. She looks a lot like Gwyneth Paltrow only with red hair and breasts and she isn’t as skinny and doesn’t have that silly British accent. She’s from somewhere down South and likes to write mysteries. She’s a college girl – graduated with a degree in counseling – so right away you’d think we had nothing in common. I never went to college. I spent three years in juvy and another two in the Big House. That’s where I got my real education.

            No. I’m kidding again. (Hint: Nobody who’s ever been to prison says, ‘Big House.’)  I bet when you picked this up and saw the word plumber you thought this would be a story about some maniac killer or uneducated working class stiff, and, even though the thought of it disgusted you, you kept on reading so you could broaden your social circle so to speak, and converse about those less fortunate at your next cocktail party as if you actually met them. Sorry to disappoint. I graduated from high school – barely. I tried junior college for a year – boring. Finally, I ended up going to work for my father.

            I do read a lot – and not just Penthouse letters. Playboy has some good articles. Oh yeah, I’ve also read all of Dickens stuff (loved Bleak House), some Austen (wake me when she’s done), a pinch of Pynchon, a bit of Bellows, and a line or two of Irving. I’ve also read a lot of short stories (thanks again Playboy), you know, to figure out the formula for writing them.

            What I’m trying to say is, Laurie is not out of my league intellectually or sexually, if you know what I mean.

            Okay, I’ve given you all the background information you need to have a pleasant reading experience. Are you ready?  I’m going to start the story now. It picks up in the middle of the action, just like it’s supposed to. Here we go . . .

            “So, Teresa," (this is Paul speaking, by the way) "if I heard you correctly, you believe Laurie’s story is a post-feminist critique of society’s patriarchal bonds imposed on the housewife.”

            “Exactly.”

            “What do you have to say about that, Laurie?”

            “I don’t know about all that. I mean, I guess Detective Simpson could be considered patriarchal, but it’s a story about finding his gay lover’s murderer.”

            “It sucked.”

            Oh, I forgot to mention Jenny. Jenny is a bitch. She’s a forty-seven-year-old, mother-of-three bitch. She looks a lot like Lenny Kravitz, only with breasts. I mean huge mounds of ever-expanding flesh that you can see no matter where you’re standing, like say Jersey.

            Jenny has this wonderful ability to make everyone feel like crap about their writing. Once, she made a lady cry for using a metaphor that was so obviously stolen from Kate Chopin. Obvious to Jenny, of course.

            Jenny was an English major in college who got pregnant at a frat party and had to quit school to raise the kid. Yeah, she married the guy, but she dumped his ass after she caught him in bed with the neighbor’s teenaged daughter. Oh, and she’s only had two orgasms in her life – Jenny, not the teenage whore – and one of them was mechanically induced. How do I know all this? We read about it in her first story, “My Husband was a Lyin’ Sack of Shit.”

            Okay, so that’s Jenny. Sorry about the interruption. Let’s get back to the story.

            “Are you gay?”  (Jenny’s still talking.)

            “No.” (Laurie.)

            “Do you know what it’s like to be gay?”

            “No.”

            So far, I’m relieved by Laurie’s responses. Now that Jenny’s mentioned it, Laurie does seem to write a lot of stories with gay characters in them. They are all men, though.

            “Look, it’s just a mystery – a who-done-it. That’s all.”

            “Maybe it’s a metaphor.”

            That was Cindy. Quiet, tiny, Cindy who writes horror stories that keep me up at night. Not that that’s any great feat, mind you. I’m scared of my own shadow. I avoid King and Koontz. I don’t watch scary movies. I can barely stand to look at Elvira. If it wasn’t for that plunging neck line . . .

            “Interesting, Cindy. Go on. A metaphor for what?”

            “Well, if you ask me, I think Detective Simpson is struggling with his own sexuality. Frankie’s death symbolized the death of his own homophobia and only by finding his lover’s killer can he embrace his true gay self.”

            “Comment, Laurie?”

            “I guess. Maybe.”

            “It still sucks.”

            “Yes, well, thank you, Jenny. Okay, class, that’s it for tonight. Read Morris’s story for next time, and be ready to discuss.”

            That’s me, by the way.

            As I was walking out of class, Paul called me over to his desk and asked me about rat poisoning.

            “Sure, I’ve used it before. Why?  Got a rat problem?”

            Paul tossed a hateful look towards the door just as Francis was leaving. “Yeah, you could say that.”

            Francis just sold her story about a kitten that visited her from Heaven. Very sappy, but I’m sure the readers of Cat Fancy will eat it up.

            “You’re going to kill Francis just because she got published?” I asked in horror.

            Paul stood and methodically collected his papers. “Yes. Yes I am.”

            Of course that’s not what he said. I just threw that in for a little tension. Paul keeps telling us readers love that stuff. Truthfully, there’s really no tension there. I mean, how many stories have you already read where the underachieving English instructor offs his brilliant student?  Or what about the story where the brilliant professor tells one of his less than creative students that they’ll never be a writer and that they should start thinking about a career in banking, or worse yet, plumbing?  But the student never gives up, because writing isn’t about being published, it’s about feeding the soul. Maybe there’s the inevitable twist on that last story where the student perseveres and one of her pieces is published by the end of the story. Good God.

            Anyway, the real reason Paul called me over after class was because he wanted to get a drink and talk to me about my story, you know, prepare me before the rest of the class had a chance to rip into it and make me cry.

            Why does every story about writers end up in a bar?  Like if writers aren’t constantly drinking, they’ll never reach those Hemingway Heights. Come on. Sure the guy was an okay writer, but he blew his brains out in Iowa or Idaho – some place out West. What kind of idiot does that?   Of course, this last paragraph was just filler so I didn’t have to give you the boring details of two guys walking down the street to the local bar. Although Paul says readers like to feel they are in the story. You know, they want sights and sounds and smells. Maybe I’ll do that next time.

            “Screwdriver.”

            Paul’s choice of drink surprised me. I though Scotch was the official drink of writers. Maybe his beverage is a metaphor for the perilous relationship between the working class farmer and his attempts to bring in his crops (orange juice) under the watchful eye of the bank creditor (vodka).

Maybe he’s just a wuss.

            “I’ll have a Pabst.” All plumbers drink Pabst. God’s honest truth. The Union has a contract with them.

            “Why do you want to be a writer, Morris?”

            “To get laid.”

            Paul grinned. “You wouldn’t be the first to say that.”

            I smiled back and turned my attention to the basketball game playing on the television above the bartender’s head. The bar was dark, not in a seedy way, but as if run by a father who followed you from room to room making sure you turned off the lights so you wouldn’t waste electricity. There were your mandatory neon signs in the windows, a dartboard next to the bathrooms. No pool tables. A small wooden floor in the opposite corner stood as the stage for local bands that played on Friday and Saturday nights when ladies didn’t have to pay a cover charge. The floor was clean, not a peanut shell to be found, and it smelled like alcohol, not beer, but the good stuff. How was that?  Feel like you’re there with us?  Good.  

            “It’s a myth, you know,” he said when the drinks arrived.

            “What?”

            “That writers have sex like rock stars. It’s not like groupies hang out in bookstores after signings hoping to get in the writer’s pants.”

            “I don’t know. I bet Grisham’s got more than he can handle. And that wide open plains guy . . .”

            “McCarthy?”

            “Yeah, him. Women like scraggly, emotional guys with bad punctuation.”

            Paul laughed a little too loud. Not a regular drinker, I surmised.

            “Well, let’s see,” he said beginning a mental calculation. “Four years undergrad English, three and a half years MFA. I slept with a total of . . . let me see . . . one woman. So, yeah. I guess writers do get their fair share.”

            That was pathetic. In just the six weeks I’d been going to this guy’s class, I’d had sex with two classmates. Okay, one of them was Jenny, and no, she didn’t add me to her non-mechanical orgasm list. The other was Alice, a German woman who was a little too butch for my liking. She stopped coming to class after we did it. I wonder why. Anyway, give me two more weeks and I’ll have bagged Laurie. That still makes my writing class to sex ratio much better than Paul’s. Not that I thought this was the right time to point that out to him.

            “You’d think I’d at least be able to sleep with a student,” Paul added. “What is it about me?  I’m an okay-looking guy, right?”

            “You look like you’re twelve.”

            Paul nodded and starred into his drink.

            “So you write for sex too?”

            He shook his head. “No. I don’t want to get a real job. I thought by this point in my life I’d have tenure at a small university, teaching two classes a semester, and writing if I wanted to. Nothing too stressful.”

            “What happened?”

            “Look around. Everyone in this bar thinks they are a writer.”

            There were four of us, including the bartender and the waitress, but I got his point.

            “So?”

            Paul waved my “So” away, swallowed the last of his drink, and wiped away the smear of pulp from his top lip. “Never mind. Look, I gotta go. We should do this again sometime.”

            “Okay, “ I said slowly.

            Paul tossed a couple of wrinkled dollar bills on the table, grabbed his weathered, leather satchel, and weaved his way through the tables to freedom.

            I swigged the last of my beer, added to his ante, and retraced his path out the door and into the night. I stood there for a moment, soaking up the stars and the silence. I saw my reflection in a puddle in the gutter and wondered if I never found the words, would I be better off than a man who had them but didn’t want them?

The End

            No. I’m kidding.  But seriously, how many stories have you read that ended like that? You know, where you finish reading and the first word out of your mouth is, “Huh?” and you’ve got this look on your face like someone just told you the Emperor's sardines were watering the highway. But before you add, “Well, that sucked,” you go back and reread the last paragraph thinking  you must have missed something, some underlying truth otherwise this story never would have been published. Maybe you even go back and read the entire story again, hoping you aren’t as stupid as you’re afraid you’ll be found out to be if someone ever brings it up while discussing the state of the American short story over tea and crumpets. But no matter how many times you reread it, it still doesn’t make sense, and you finally concede that it must be truly great literature. Well, fear not, faithful traveler.  I will not let you go without some sort of closure, without some insight into the purpose of my prose. My tale does not end there. I have a denouement, a wrap-up of sorts.

            Paul never showed up for class again. No, it’s not what you’re thinking, he didn’t kill himself or realize the futility of his art and go start a commune in Arizona. After he left the bar, he got a call from Random House. His book, which happened to be a young adult novel about a space alien living in the body of a ten-year-old witch, or something like that, won the Delacorte First Novel award. Maybe that’s why he never talked about it in class. Maybe he was afraid we’d make fun of him for writing children’s stories. It’s not like that’s real writing. Real or not, Paul’s book spent seven months on the New York Times Best Seller’s list. It went on to win the Newbery Award and Dreamworks paid a pretty penny for the movie rights. He’ll never have to work again.

            Turns out Laurie was gay. She got married last month to a cute little dyke from California. It was a beautiful wedding. I was upset she didn’t ask me to be her best man, but relieved to know I wasn’t the reason she came out of the closet, if you know what I mean.

            Jack was in the class for the same reason I was. By the end of the term, he had slept with five women. And although I didn’t believe him when he told me he was Jenny’s orgasm number three, her story, “Senior Lovin’,” proved otherwise.

            Jenny got a job writing greetings cards for a small company here in town. She started her own line of break-up cards. Maybe you’ve seen one. ‘Roses are red, violets are blue. Get out of my bed or I’ll cut your dick off.’  They sell surprisingly well.

            Me?  That’s nice of you to ask. That story of mine Paul wanted to talk about but we never had a chance to, I sold it to Atlantic Monthly. I went on to sell three more stories (two of them to magazines other than Penthouse), which was enough to convince the Dean of the Community College to hire me as the Creative Writing workshop instructor. I still make my money snaking toys out of the crapper, but for two nights a week, every Tuesday and Thursday, from September to May, and sometimes during the summer, I sit in a classroom full of middle-aged women and listen to their longings. I’m still searching for the “one,” but my batting average in the love cage is respectable, if you know what I mean. I’m sure it’s still better than Paul’s. I mean, how many children’s writers brag about getting laid?  Okay, maybe that Rowling chick, but that’s it.

The End (Seriously this time.)

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