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Solitary

Posted on October 31, 2007
Filed Under The Stories |

He was hunched over, even when he was standing up straight with his arms raised over his head. Not that he was needed very often to raise his hands over his head. It’s not like he lived in an old Western town or something where leather-skinned men with warts and crooked eyes popped up in front of him and demanded that he stick his hands up because this was a robbery. But if he had been in a situation where it was required that he stand straight up and raise his hands as high as they would go, he would still be hunched over.

His spine had curved from the hours he spent at a computer each day trying to bang out the requisite number of words that allowed him to call himself a writer. He was not proud of the fact that he often simply sat at his desk because he needed to call himself something. ‘Writer’ was probably (and he was the first to acknowledge the limited extent of the probability) just a step or two above ‘complete fuck-up’ or ‘good-for-nothing loser’ but he was able to look himself in the eye on the odd occasion that he came up against a mirror or some other reflective surface and feel less ashamed about not justifying his place in the world.

They were not friends, life and he, and it treated him badly every chance it got. Whenever he told a woman he was a writer she walked away without a backwards glance. He knew that this was more uniquely his lot than that of others like him. He was fairly confident that in the case of other men, the women asked what kind of writing was involved and they might even sidle up to him and press the outside of one thigh against his hip if they learnt he was a screenwriter. Just as long as the ‘he’ in question was any man other than himself that is. He suspected that women were on the look out for any excuse not to be talking to him and finding out what he did for a living (if he could call it that) was enough reason for them to begin the short hike to the next available man in whatever restaurant, bar or church they were in.

He assuaged his hurt feelings by reminding himself that a writer cannot truly document the human condition in a short story, novella or literary epic if he has a life worth living. If he were the type of gregarious individual who could be the life of the party with his fly wide open and his inadequate penis hanging out for everyone to see and snicker at, he would not need to resort to doing work to earn a worthy definition. ‘Life of the party’ was the best definition a guy could ask for. He also had a good idea of what the best definition was that a girl could ask for but he was afraid to say it out loud because he was certain the women would flock to attain that state without once thanking him for having shown them the way.

So he hung out on the periphery of great romances and so-ugly-you-cannot-look-away fights in the hope of someday being able to understand humankind enough to be able to fake being part of it. Until then he wrote short stories, essays and novellas under an impressive collection of false names (because he worried that the very attachment of his name to a piece of writing would instantaneously make it undesirable for publication). Burdened by the knowledge that a working writer could not afford to befriend anyone, lest he give up on a rich vein of character-enhancing material just because the neurotic spayer of cats was suddenly his ‘friend,’ he lived a life of quiet loneliness.

In a passage he kept taped to the wall in front of his desk he had written: A writer’s lot is a solitary one. Not just in the pursuit of his literary endeavours but also in the living of his life. Intimacy can only be purchased in the bosom of a clean, well-fed hooker and sexual release can only be self-imposed or administered by a professional. Small intervals between sexual gratification will lead to diminished creativity and should only be indulged in as a way of challenging the writer to go beyond the safe confines of his comfort zone. At all other times you are alone.

They were the words he looked at each morning as he sat at his writing desk and each evening when he left work to drink alone in a bar or afford himself his monthly visit to the whorehouse not too far from his home.

Everything else was fodder for his creativity.

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