I've had a few spurts of effort at my dream of becoming a writer, with various levels of success. As the years pile on, I feel myself growing in experience, if not wisdom. And, of course, there've been false starts and setbacks. A string of failures and rejections left me disheartened enough to put my pen down for a time. I started again, only to have the birth of my first child slowed me down to a near stop. Now I'm in another "up" time, with a bigger storehouse of ideas from which to draw but an ever-shrinking pool of time and attention from which to draw them.
Today, for what's a stretch at the letter 'J', I'm sharing something from my growing junkyard, the scrapheap, the graveyard of fading dreams. These are stories I very much loved when I wrote them, but never found an audience. The following was a bit of an experiment for me. This came from the same period as the Drowned Hero story I shared earlier in this blog (has anyone guessed the character's obvious real-world inspiration? Or was it obvious only to me? But I digress...) What I find interesting about revisiting these tales is seeing the different directions I took while searching for my voice. I see some themes from these earlier efforts recurring, but I'd write them differently now. Still, I have some affection for these early fumblings; I hope you do as well.
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Linen and Leather
by Leonard C Suskin
The invitation to the party – the fateful party where I’d first meet The Girl in Leather - came with a slap on my back and a nickname nobody ever uses for me. “C’mon Big Bill. It’ll be fun. Besides, don’t you need material for your novel? Plenty of material here. And, of course, plenty of girls. College girls, professional girls from the office. Friends of those girls and of their friends. And hey, I have the extra bedroom for you; it’s totally cool with me and totally private if you happen to get lucky.”
use it sounded grown-up to my young ears. Two decades later it’s still working for me.
It didn’t take much for him to convince me. I love parties. I love lurking in a corner and watching the mating dance as people flaunt, present, approach, withdraw, pursue, and perhaps capture. I love checking out how the young girls are dressed – or not dressed. Most of all, I love the sense of possibility. Everyone there is a potential new life-long friend, a new story, a hook-up, the love of my life. Anyone can be anything. A party is like the first blank sheet in a new notebook. Like the brand new notebook I had in the inside pocket of the white linen jacket I was wearing over a black T-shirt and my second-best pair of jeans.
Across the room at the party I saw her – The Girl in the Leather Pants. The pants were the first thing I noticed, black leather worn shiny-smooth stretched more tightly across her curves than they could possibly have fit the cow in the first place. The second part I noticed, the part that had me reaching into my jacket pocket for the little notebook I always keep for such observations, were the three pendants hanging from her neck, nestled in the curve of her breasts; A crucifix, a star of David, and a pentacle. As I set my red plastic cup down on a table to free my hand, someone jostled my elbow, sloshing lukewarm beer across my jacket. She caught my gaze as I flinched from the clammy caress of sodden linen.
Jon Williams stirred the simmering, stinking pot of sodden pulp which had once been a quite serviceable but worn off-white linen jacket (perhaps it had even once been white. It’s so hard to tell for sure). His fingers were sweating in the heavy plastic gloves, his arms aching, and the stench turned his stomach.
“I’ll bet Aleister Crowley never went through things like this,” he muttered under his breath, “and if he did it wasn’t over a hotplate in a community college basement.”
“’scuse me, but what are you talking about?” Jon turned to see the big-boned older-looking (she must have been nearly forty) woman stirring a stainless-steel pot identical to his looking at him inquisitively. She was his neighbor on the chipped-granite tabletop here in basement classroom B21 for an adult-ed class in “The Joys of Papermaking”. He thought her name was Beth something or other.
“Oh, sorry, I was talking to myself. You see, there’s this girl. In school. Madison Lee. And, uh…”
Beth smiled. “So she’s a hotty and you want to impress her?”
Jon shook his head as he pushed harder with the big mixing fork. “No, it’s not like that at all. She’s smart and witty and, I just want to know her better.”
Mixing shredded linen into pulp takes a long time, so they talked while they stirred. He talked about Madison Lee of the razor sharp mind, Madison Lee of the caustic quick wit, Madison Lee of the raven tresses and ethnically confused name. If Jon had any reason to hope it was that Madison Lee ignored the other engineering students (eighty-seven percent male, thirteen percent female) as much as she ignored him. About how he knew they’d be happy together if he would just have an opening.
“So, what was that about Aleister Crowley? Did you find out that she’s a closet Golden Dawn initiate-wannabe and you’re gonna impress her with a mad-cool homemade book of occult secrets?” her lip curled into a half-smile. “Do you know any occult secrets?”
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“Taking notes on me? Are you some kind of stalker?”
I held up one hand, index-finger extended in a wait-one-minute gesture as I uncapped a ball-point pen with my teeth and, ruined jacket momentarily forgotten, wrote “comparative religion - occult secrets?” on a blank page in my notebook and then, with a glance from her tight leather pants to my sodden jacket added “linen and leather – light and dark, hard and soft women dressed hard man soft – sex”
I had more ideas, but that should be enough to jog my memory later. I was more interested in talking to her while she was still here; it would be likelier for inspiration to return than to have another visit from an angel in tight leather pants. The necklaces which had caught my eye were set in against an impressive backdrop of impressively uncovered cleavage, but I made every effort to look up at her eyes. Girls don’t like it when you stare at the cleavage, even when they do have it on display. Besides, it the eyes are the windows of the soul, and isn’t it more erotic to see a girl’s soul than her tits? Of course it isn’t.
“I’m always taking notes. I’m a writer.” I raised my mostly-empty cup to my lips, sucking down the foamy dregs of my beer as I awaited her response.
“mm.. that’s cool. But too bad.” She gave me a wicked smile with her lips and the corner of her eyes. “I’ve not had a stalker in forever. What kinda stuff do you write? Please don’t tell me it’s screenplays. Every loser and wannabe in the world thinks he’s writing a screenplay. You’re not, are you?”
I started to say “occult secrets”, but that might be too cute. I told her the truth about my current obsession – occult romances without vampires. I hate vampires.
The girl in the leather pants (who it turned out was called Liz) literally licked her lips. “Secret societies hiding amongst us, skyclad witches and intense brookding warlocks?” Her narrow tongue darted past sharp little teeth to lick wine-dark lips. “Intriguing. But I wonder if it would really be romantic.”
Liz tossed back the last of her drink – some kind of red wine that left a crescent-moon stain on her upper lip – then held up the drained plastic cup. “Well, I’m empty and should get back to my girlfriend anyway. Gotta make sure she doesn’t get too drunk and hook-up with the wrong guy.” She flashed that devil smile again. “At least not before I’m done with him. Good luck with the writing.”
“wait…” I tried to focus my brain trough the beer-induced fog. “wait. I need to show you the story when it’s finished.”
Liz raised an eyebrow. “Oh? Why me?” She gave him a flirty half-smile that told him she was exactly sure why her, but she didn’t seem to mind it.
“Because I’m starting it here. And I always like to share a story with someone who was there when I started it. It’s.. a tradition!” Well, that wasn’t quite a lie. After all, traditions had to start somewhere, right? An annual event was still annual, even the very first time it happened. Anyway, much to William’s delight, “a tradition” was enough reason to get a Liz’s email address beamed into my smart phone.
Now I just have to write something romantic and I’ll sweep her right off her feet and out of those leather pants.
Jon felt his ears heating up as blood rushed to them. He couldn’t believe he mentioned Crowley out loud – and that this woman knew what he was talking about!
“Uh, not quite. I’m an engineering student by day but by night, well… I’m kind of an initiate. An informal one.”
This was true. Jon had been obsessed with the occult ever since a really smart but reputedly druggy kid from his high school had shown up one day with a sharp knife hidden in his jacket, an upside-down pentagram around his neck, and wild-eyed stories about secret magical rituals. The druggie kid (whose name Jon couldn’t quite remember) had since moved on to different insanities, but the idea of magic had stuck with Jon, especially when he read of modern thinkers linking everything from quantum physics to Jung’s “collective unconscious” to the hermetic arts. “It’s not a contradiction” he concluded. “there’s real intellectual underpinning for this if one knows where to look for it.”
Beth smiled. “I never said there wasn’t. I still don’t know what it has to do with paper-making.”
So Jon explained. He explained how to him, being an intellectual mage, the grimoire or book of rituals was to be his most important tool. And how each part of it had to be personally connected to him and, hopefully, to the concepts and emotions that had lead him here.
“Last week I made a circuit of about a dozen used bookstores to see if I could find some love poetry to pulp or even newspapers from the date of her birth of mine. Luckilly, her birthday is on her facebook page so it was easy to check. You ever go to those places? They all feel cramped and old and they smell like mildew. Anyway, to make a long story short I got lost, had to change a flat tire, got lost again, and still couldn’t find any paper worth using. I eventually ended up at a second-hand clothing store where I found this great old linen suit. There was what looked like a beer stain on it, so I can imagine that the guy wearing it met a wonderful girl and was so caught up in her that he didn’t even notice that he spilled beer on his jacket and probably ruined it. So it’s the perfect material for a grimoire of love spells.” He pointed at the wooden frames he’d stretched metal screens across to mould the sheets of paper. “The frames for my deckle screens are from old slates I found in antique stores for the spirit of learning. Head and heart together. The whole thing should be perfect.”
Beth thought it was a wonderfully quixotic little project (Jon was so tickled that a woman at the papermaking class using the word “quixotic”!), and slipped Jon a calling card with her name, address, and email address in calligraphy so elaborately drawn that it seemed a waste to use it just it just to communicate. He told Beth that he found it lovely.
“I love the art of writing,” she said. “Aren’t the lines of pen on paper so much more personal, so much more sensuous than whatever you type on a computer?” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “You haven’t asked what my project is.”
Jon knew it wouldn’t be as interesting as a grimoire, but he asked anyway.
“Someday I’m going to finish writing my cycle of Lovecraftian erotic horror-poems and hand-print and bind them in a 16ht-century style illuminated manuscript. Each copy will be something special and unique, maybe to give a special person as a special gift.”
Jon didn’t ruin the mood by telling her what a stupid project it was to spend so much time on something that only one person would get to read. He busied himself screening his paper and setting it to dry.
and spent the next week staring at the slightly ragged sheets while he scribbled notes for his love rituals in the kind of marble composition notebook you buy for ninety-nine cents at a drug store. Everything seemed too obvious, too [[profane]], or both; dancing naked under the moonlight, saying a prayer over photos of her, anointing them with tears or blood or semen, it just felt trite. Internet searches gave invocations of angels, nature spirits, or Egyptian deities, none of which resonated with him. In a kind of desperation he called Beth. She was, after all, the only human being who knew about this project.
She sounded surprisingly glad to hear from him, that she’d stumbled across something that reminded her of his project. Jon was so stunned by her enthusiasm that he agreed to meet her for coffee before even admitting that he was stuck on the idea of how to write his love ritual.
My emails to Liz all bounced back, “unknown address”. Damn my beer-addled fingers for mistyping them into my damn phone! I thought it was “Lizzie472” at some webmail site, but could my seven really be a one? Or the four a nine? I tried all the combinations, but none of them worked. It’s too bad, because I was halfway through a killer esoteric, intellectual piece that would hopefully wind up being sexy as all hell too. I even wrote the thing wearing the linen jacket (with the beer stain that still wouldn’t come out) imagining her wearing it and nothing else after a long night of lovemaking.
I probably could have done a better job chatting her up at the party, but once she sees this… well, I know it’d be perfect for her. If only I’d gotten that damn email address right.
Jon screened his paper, set it to dry, and spent the next week staring at the slightly ragged sheets while he scribbled notes for his love rituals in the kind of marble composition notebook you buy for ninety-nine cents at a drug store. Everything seemed too obvious, too profane, or both; dancing naked under the moonlight, saying a prayer over photos of her, anointing them with tears or blood or semen or some combination of the three; it all just felt trite. Internet searches gave invocations of angels, nature spirits, or Egyptian deities, none of which he could imagine visiting him here in the big city. In a kind of desperation he called Beth. She was, after all, the only human being who knew about this project.
She sounded surprisingly glad to hear from him, that she’d stumbled across something that reminded her of his project. Jon was so stunned by her enthusiasm that he agreed to meet her for coffee before even admitting that he was stuck on the idea of how to write his love ritual.
Beth looked different in the coffee shop. Her hair was loose around her shoulders and her face seemed a bit more made up. When she handed Jon a flat book-shaped package wrapped in brown butcher paper he noticed that her fingernails were very short and cut square. Her hands were probably a bit rough. They got drinks – a latte for him and some absurdly oversweetened coffee and cream and caramel and sugar concoction for her. Jon opened it and was delighted to see an irregularly shaped scrap of leather which appeared to have been riveted to a six by eight sheet of stiff cardboard. “For the cover of your grimoire” she explained. Because Papermaking for Beginners didn’t cover leather binding, but a proper grimoire just had to have at least some leather in the cover.
Jon ran his fingers along the faded shadow of an old crease in the letter. It felt a bit like palm-reading. He wondered what stories it could tell. “Thank you. I have to admit, I was a little lost on how to write the love ritual. Maybe this’ll inspire me.”
Beth smiled. “Could be. It was a great jacket before I wore it out. And…” she glanced quickly around the room and leaned a bit closer before continuing, “I remember wearing it for at least one early spring date with an old boyfriend. And well…. He was eager enough to tear a perfectly good linen skirt nearly in half. Why can’t you men take a little effort with fastenings?”
Jon took a big gulp of coffee before answering. It went right past the back of his throat and set him off on a choking fit, spraying saliva and coffee all over the table. He blotted with his napkin and looked up. “uh… I’d take the time for a zipper.”
“I’m sure you would. Sorry if I embarrassed you. I just thought you should know… well, on that particular night I ended up going home in the leather coat and nothing else. If that doesn’t inspire you, I’m not sure what will.”
The conversation taled off as Jon imagined the scrap as a jacket, and pictured Madison Lee standing naked except for the rough leather on her soft, clear skin.
Sometimes fate succeeds where planning, foresight, and the ability to type a damn email address correctly fail. Which is just a fancy way of saying that I ran into Liz again at Slanderous Ink, the kind of low-class dive bar Bobby and his friends liked to hang out at.
The bar met the very highest of Bobby’s non-standards. Sawdust on the floor, wooden picnic tables that looked as if they’d fall apart if one stared at them too hard and, best of all, some unidentified draft beer served in plastic cups. Plastic cups! A treacherous, creaky wooden staircase lead to what I hoped was a cleaner downstairs room in which one could spend the liquid courage gathered at the bar getting a new tattoo. Glossy close-ups of garishly-inked body parts decorated the wall behind the bar. I found Bobby at the bar with a plastic cup of beer. I gestured at our surroundings. “I feel like I fell ten years back in time to a frat-house kegger where I don’t know anyone.”
Bobby slapped me on my back hard enough to rattle my teeth. “As if you’d ever been to a Kegger, Big Bill.”
We drank for a bit when I spotted Liz, tossing back a shot of what I assumed to be tequila. She was wearing jeans this time, but they showed off her ass every bit as well as those leather pants. I excused myself from Bobby to approach her, amazed that at this serendipitous real-life meeting that would have felt clumsy and contrived in a piece of fiction. I re-introduced myself as William, from the party.
“Who’s party? Oh, I remember… you were the artist, right?”
William smiled. She did remember! “Writer, actually.”
“Yeah, you didn’t look like one.” Her eyes flicked up and down, taking in his khaki pants, navy golf-shirt, and battered shoes. “Still don’t.”
“It’s not a look. It’s… it’s my passion.” That seemed like the right answer. “I’ve got this great modern-occult-romance piece I’m working on that I’d love to let you read. Remember? The one I was talking about at the party?”
Jon bought some leather conditioner to clean his new leather cover. He drilled neat little holes along the edges of his cover and the pages, found some red silk thread and painstakingly sewed the cover on with a Coptic stitch. The row of red knots looked daring, occult, and even a bit sexy next to the rustic leather cover. He cleaned his papermaking screens and discarded the ones that were too stained to clean. In other words, he did everything but actually write the ritual.
The answer came to him while he was honing the antique straight razor that served as his air-dagger. He drew the blade back and forth against the leather strop, tested the edge, then a few more passes before flipping the stop over to wipe the edge clean on the fine linen side. What if the whole point of making the book wasn’t to have a grimoire, but to marry the two components, the soft and the hard, the leather and the linen? Maybe he was already within the ritual and the only thing he need to was to complete it. But what to put within the pages? Maybe a story about why the leather and linen belonged together in the first place. He sat at his desk with the newly bound tome, a gull-feather he’d found on the beach, and a jar of ink. He sliced the end of the feather with his razor/magic knife, dipped it into the ink, and began to write.
It didn’t. Jon bought some leather conditioner to clean his new leather cover. He drilled neat little holes along the edges of his cover and the pages, found some red silk thread and painstakingly sewed the cover on with a Coptic stitch. The row of red knots looked daring, occult, and even a bit sexy next to the rustic leather cover. He cleaned his papermaking screens and discarded the metal screens on the ones that were too stained to clean. In other words, he did everything but actually write the ritual.
The answer came to him while he was honing the antique straight razor that doubled as his air-dagger. He drew the blade back and forth against the leather strop, tested the edge, then a few more passes before flipping the stop over to wipe the edge clean on the fine linen side. What if the whole point of making the book wasn’t to have a grimoire, but to marry the two components, the soft and the hard, the leather and the linen? Maybe he was already within the ritual and the only thing he need to was to complete it. But what to put within the pages? Maybe a story about why the leather and linen belonged together in the first place. He sat at his desk with the newly bound tome, a gull-feather he’d found on the beach, and a jar of ink. He sliced the end of the feather with his razor/magic knife, dipped it into the ink, and began to write.
show it to you as soon as I figure out how to get the two people together.”
She shrugged, muttered something vague, and bought herself another shot of tequila. The next day William realized that a smoother man would have bought her the next drink.
The third and final time he saw her she was literally waiting for a bus from New York to Philadelphia. She was there with another man and pretended not to recognize him.
At least he hoped she was pretending.
A week later he finally sold the jacket to a thrift store. He only got five bucks for it, but the real return was not having to think about the damn party every time he saw the Guinness stain. He did have a half a story out of the episode, but he probably would have to change the title.
He poured himself a cup of coffee, powered up his computer, and tried to figure out where these two people were headed.
Jonathan set aside his quill and blotted the paper. This didn’t seem right at all. The point of the story was to draw him to Madison Lee through sympathetic magic, not to spin a yarn of unrequited love that went nowhere in particular. This was feeling like more of an anti-love story. What’s worse, it was boring.
The next day in class Madison didn’t even seem to notice him when he smiled and waved hello on his way in. He was sure she usually did. The magic must be working to push her farther away! He called Beth again. She’d been such a terrific help through the process so far, Jon was sure she’d be able to come up with some kind of an answer.
She seemed interested. “Oh, a story? Could you email it to me when you get a chance? I’d love to read one of your stories.”
“That’s not the point, Beth. The point is that I can’t get the story to turn out the way I want it to. It’s like I keep writing myself into a corner in which the characters who are supposed to fall in love all end up hating eachother.”
“well… maybe it’s just working on the wrong person.”
Jon sat down as the blood rushes from his head. He somehow had an idea of where this was heading. “What do you mean?”
“well Jon… that jacket I gave you had really belonged to an ex. That’s why I cut it up. He’d left me for another girl. Maybe some kind of re-direction of affection is built into this. As I said… I’d really like to read your story. Could I come over sometime and see it?”
Without another word Jonathan hung up the phone. The next day he drove to a park to build a bonfire, and sat by himself for a long time watching scraps of linen and leather being consumed by flame.
Today's adventure involved System Builder - Crestron's simple configuration tool. Our instructor emphasized how powerful System Builder can be in the hands of someone with knowledge of how it works and a bit of creativity in use of global variables, conditionals, and other tools. Each student was assigned a neat little workstation with a Middle Atlantic console rack loaded with two processors (a Pro2 and MC3), a digital graphics engine, a lightbulb, and various dimmer switches, button consoles, and touch-panels. This let us experiment with simple tasks, such as linking a pair of RF dimmer switches, building touchpanel interfaces and an executable "X-Panel" to run on a PC or tablet.
