Ants Dig Cold

There’s an entomological adjustment involved with moving to Miami. If you’re easily startled, you brace yourself when flicking the lights on, mentally prepared for the mahogany sheen of a cockroach the size of your thumb, sometimes frozen, sometimes running for its life.

Cockroaches run on two legs. Just so you know.

You might shake your coat or clothes out before you put them on, or snap your shoes sole to sole. Okay, maybe you did that up north for spiders, but did you rattle your front door before you left so cockroaches squeezed between the door and the jamb didn’t fly into your face?

Cockroaches can wriggle through a crack the thinness of a dime. Just, you know, FYI.

And Florida cockroaches fly.

If you don’t want an ant problem, you make sure your counters are spotless. You keep your pantry items – the cereal, sugar, flour, corn syrup, bread crumbs, etc, etc – packaged in gallon bags. Even that isn’t always enough.

My first job in Miami was in the kitchen at Bennigan’s. I’d transferred from the Syracuse Bennigan's, where I’d worn the same pair of work boots. When I went to put them on for my first shift in Miami, the boots swarmed with ants. Northern bugs were apparently too sluggish to find the bits of food ground into the treads.

I tried hosing the soles down when I left work for the day, but it didn’t help. The tiniest bits drew crowds. Eventually, I ended up putting my boots in plastic bags and hanging them up when I got home.

To heat my place during the recent cold snap, I closed all the windows and opened all the blinds. I turned on every light in the place. Ants gathered around my lights and died. This is something I’ve never had happen. I’ve fought trails of live ants, but coming home or waking up and finding their corpses in droves around heat sources is new and frustrating. It could be the bug spray. They’re attracted to the heat but they have to pass through lemon-scented death to reach it, so all I find are ant corpses. Or maybe the cold is already killing them when they come inside and the light bulbs just delay the inevitable. Whatever the reason, I got tired of wiping or sweeping them up three times a day.

When the cold snap ended, I went into full-on spotless mode. I basked in a home without little black dots drifted everywhere for a few hours, then went out for dinner. When I returned, there was a cockroach near the coffee table (toe up and struggling, thanks to Minime, who provided torture but couldn’t be bothered to finish the job) and a silverfish on the stove. Damn.

You’ve heard that man plans and God laughs? In the Treehouse, Aaron cleans and Mother Nature sends small, hairy, armored guests.

Character Descriptions

A few years back, I was having difficulty with a volleyball scene in Ming. I introduced a lot of characters in a short period of time, many of them players who would only be used in the two gym class scenes. My writing group had a tough time telling the girls apart, except for Michelle Vale:

“Michelle probably brushed six feet. She was all knees and elbows, a praying mantis with braces on her teeth and sad, down-turned eyes. The dark roots of her blonde hair broadcast that it wasn’t her natural color. She’d applied her makeup with a less practiced hand than her friends, looking like a young girl playing dress up. She must have money, Ming decided. Popular girls could do sports but sport girls without money rarely did popular, even if she was a star.”

It’s not surprising my cohorts got a handle on Michelle. She was the only new character in the scene who mattered to me, the only one I saw clearly.

Eventually, re-writes made volleyball back into basketball, as it was in the original draft (switching computers, I’d somehow lost one hundred pages; changing the sport made me feel slightly better about having to rewrite what was my favorite scene). Michelle Vale became Michelle Polaski. I also introduced Michelle at the same time as Ming’s three other antagonists, much earlier in the story. I started with broad strokes, adding details as the scene continued.

It just occurred to me- I could further help the reader distinguish the girls by clarifying Ming’s different emotional reactions to them. Sometimes, I wonder how many years of learning on my own I could skip by taking a writing course.

Anyway, since giving new characters immediate distinction was something I struggled with, I’ve often noticed how folks I’m reading manage the trick.

Jay McInerney offers this in Bright Lights, Big City:

“You suspect that his sexual orientation is largely theoretical. He’d take a hot piece of gossip over a warm piece of ass any day of the week.”

Dennis Lehane's short story “Running Out of Dog” features a Vietnam vet whose only outlet for his demons is shooting strays. Lehane immediately presents the character’s emotional identity:

“Blue was the kind of guy you never knew if he was quiet because he didn’t have anything to say or, because what he had to say was so horrible, he knew enough not to send it out into the atmosphere.”

Mystic River was one of my favorite reads of 2009, a modern tragedy with pathos to rival Shakespeare’s best. Mystic River offered some of the best character introductions I’ve read.

“It was a strong face, never pretty probably, but always striking. She was not unused to being stared at, Sean guessed, but was probably oblivious as to why she was worth the trouble. She reminded Sean a bit of Jimmy’s mother but without the air of resignation and defeat, and she reminded Sean of his own mother in her complete and effortless self-possession, reminded him of Jimmy, actually, in that way, as well. He could see Annabeth Marcus as being a fun woman, but never a frivolous one.”

Not quick sketches but mental Polaroids. You understand where she’s coming from immediately; everything after these snapshots is gravy.

Unfortunately, these paragraphs didn’t blend as seamlessly as the rest of the story. Because Lehane has the luxury of page time with his main characters, they’re allowed to unfold like petals in the morning sun. He needed to present secondary characters quickly so they can make their contribution to the story. I noticed every time.

I’d like to point out, this is criticism so gentle it qualifies as a subjective opinion. More of an observation, really.

Also, it could just be a side effect of writing. One of the things I hated most about majoring in musical theater was being unable to enjoy movies without picking them apart. After I stopped being involved with acting and theater, it took years to dissolve that critical eye and let a story sweep me away.

In the mighty Ben Fountain’s short story “Near-Extinct Birds of the Central Cordillera” (one of ten gems collected in Brief Encounters with Che Guevara), he offers this:

“Hernan [was] a slight mestizo youth with catlike looks and a manner as blank and flaky as cooled ashes.”

The language fits right in with his descriptions of the “gelatinous drizzle” of the rainy Colombian jungle. In less than two dozen words, Fountain introduces a new character, gives that character a sense of place, and shows us how untrusting the protagonist is of him. Functional, simple, and poetic, a masterstroke of character description.

Thinking about how I stack up in all of this gives me a headache.

It would be much easier to use the method Christopher Moore employs in the upcoming Bite Me: A Love Story to describe his vampire-fighting detective duo, Cavuto and Rivera. Moore already described them in 1995’s Bloodsucking Fiends: A Love Story and 2007’s You Suck: A Love Story. He probably assumed readers were already familiar with the cops, so why not squeeze in another joke?

Moore writes “Cavuto, if he’d been a flavor of ice cream, would have been Gay Linebacker Crunch.”

Meanwhile, “Rivera’s flavor was Low-Fat Spanish Cynic in an Armani Cone.”

It might not have the poetry of “blank and flaky as cooled ashes” but it gets you to the same place. I don’t think we, as readers and writers, should dismiss this as a joke. I’m sure the first time movies featured people in France speaking French-inflected English among themselves it was a bit jarring, but now we just suspend our disbelief when the lights go dark. We accept that there are no foreign languages, just English with different accents. We accept when friends espouse exposition at the main characters instead of just chatting. We accept black best friends without depth and people too good-looking for their lot in life and men dating women half their age.

Using ice cream flavors as characterizations would save pages of reading and tons of ink.

“If Walter Mitty had been an ice cream flavor, he would have been Diffident Nut.”

“If Dr. Jekyll had been an ice cream flavor, he would have been Obsessive Guilt and Violent Desire Swirl.”

“If Sancho Panza had been an ice cream flavor, he would have been Sweet Loyal Chunk.”

If nothing else, it would make my job easier.

Coldest Winter Ever

I lived in Syracuse until I was twenty-five. It’s the lake effect snow that gets you, storms which come off the Great Lakes dropping fat flakes at a rate too quick for windshield wipers and snow plows. Those storms are the reason we have pictures of shoveling through several feet of snow dated in May, but that doesn’t necessarily mean April was anything more than slush that year. I can count the number of times it snowed on Halloween on one hand. It’s impressive to claim snow eight months out of the year, but those were banner years. Only January through March was it guaranteed to stick.

What’s cold in a place like that, when you’re not impoverished? Staying out too long for snow forts and snow men, shivering your wet clothes off in front of the radiator, stripping down to long underwear and running upstairs as fast as you could for fresh socks, sweatpants, and sweaters, leaning over a hot chocolate or a Campbell’s tomato soup that mom had waiting for you. Yes, your toes were numb, ditto nose and fingers, but it was in the service of fun. It made getting warm that much more comforting.

Waiting at school bus stops, dancing from foot to foot, hands stuffed in pockets, head ducked turtle-like in collars, it wasn’t the puffy flakes you worried about, it was the wind. Wind chill could make ten degrees feel like twenty below. But the busses were coming, Cheese Boxes heated with religious fervor. Your toes might not be dry by the time you reached school, but your hat and gloves would be off, your jacket zippered down, hairline dappled with sweat. We were too old to take a change of footwear without looking like dorks. If you were rich, you wore Timberlands. If you were not, you wore knock-offs. Either way, you waited until second period for your toes to dry.

College classes could get nasty. For the transplants, walking around Syracuse University – the Hill – revealed the crucial difference between Manhattan Smart and Survival Wear. For the natives, Onondaga Community College’s lack of foliage and low industrial buildings offered no protection from the raging winds.

Yet coldest I’ve been in my life was during this past cold-front, in sunny Miami.

The way few homes up north have air conditioning to keep cool during the couple months they may actually need it, few down here have heat. To keep warm at night, I had my usual sheets and blankets, plus a couple of fleece throws which Algonquin Books had sent as a promotion with paperback copies of A Reliable Wife, along with three pairs of socks, a toque, three t-shirts - two short and one long – pajama bottoms, and underwear. I hate sleeping in underwear. If I wear underwear to bed, you know it’s cold.

All this would have been fine. Nostalgic, even. Except the buying office at Books & Books doesn’t have heat. The Westin Colonnade across the street blocks our sun. Books & Books rents three of these offices, one for buying, one for marketing and events, and one for accounting. The architects who own the building occupy a fourth space, and the fifth is currently unoccupied. The architects worked from home a lot that week.

Why are we paying rent, exactly? They could have at least offered us space heaters. Instead Mark and I hunched at our desks, fingers white, noses dripping, toes numb, cracking jokes about Scrooge and coal and Bob Cratchit.

If you northerners think we’re weak, step outside and have a seat in the shade next November or December, whenever it gets down to the thirties in your neck of the woods. Sit there for eight hours. Believe it or not, typing doesn’t get the blood flowing like you’d think it would.

I walked instead of biking. The wind on your face in spring or fall? Delightful. This week it burned.

I was in a car a few times with the heat blasting, and the children’s section at Books & Books was toasty warm. Other than that, I froze my ass off the entire week. I used to say I preferred cold to the heat. It’s not so bad up north, I’d say. You can always add more layers, but what are you supposed to do down here? You can only get so naked. That’s logical.

But when you’re getting dressed in front of an open oven in a vain attempt to feel your feet, logic doesn’t keep you warm.

I Carry a Big Stick

Harry, seventy plus years old, gay and garrulous, wants to know if I’m okay. I’m “even more silent than usual,” he tells me with his impish smile. He’s a sweet, good-natured guy, but the connotation is that there’s something off about me because I don’t talk much.

Am I that quiet? In work mode, I guess so. I thought I left the silent, shy version of myself behind years ago but it comes out when I’m buckled down on a deadline. Which, at Books & Books, is most of the time.

Still, I don’t see the point of yakking for yakking’s sake, except to make others more comfortable. It’s a skill I’ve developed somewhat over the years but nothing that comes naturally. That’s part of the reason I enjoy groups of people; there are others to share the burden of filling dead air.

I told Harry I felt great. In less of a rush (or with quicker wit), I could have used humor to prove to Harry how great I was.

“I like people to see me as the strong, silent type.”

“When you don’t talk much, you’re at less of a risk of saying stupid things.”

“God only gave me forty-seven million words in this lifetime, and I’m trying to use them judiciously.”

One thing I’ve noticed. In crowds where I don’t speak much, when I do open my mouth, people listen. On the rare occasion that I actually have something decent to say, this works in my favor. When I’ve been the victim of my own logorrhea, I’ve wanted the ground to open at my feet so I could disappear with nothing but an inward groan and a sheepish wave goodbye.

That’s why dialog is so much fun. You have weeks to put the perfect phrase in your character’s mouth, whether you want her to be dazzling in her erudition or cringe-worthy in her ignorance.

Truthfully, I wouldn’t mind being mute.

My Girl is Home (at Last)

I want to smooch her fury face.

Minime’s fuzzy little presence makes the Treehouse home.

I feel about my living quarters the way I feel about my job.  Unless I’m signing a book deal, never again do I want to sit across from a stranger, presenting some limited version of my best self, trying to convince her / him that I’m worth his / her investment.   Likewise, why bother moving unless it’s for something really great?

Up north they call it a FROG room, for Front Room Above Garage, but “Treehouse” fits.  Except for the tile floors and bathroom walls, it’s all wood.  It’s shaded everywhere by a variety of Coral Gables’ foliage.  The name also gives my dwelling a little je ne sais quoi.

I’ve hidden all sorts of fun things in the Treehouse for myself.  There’s a Hopper print, a signed Palahniuk poster, my 2nd-place cook-off ribbon, and a Bright Eyes concert poster taped inside various cabinetry.  A framed Tank Girl picture hanging in my walk-in closet.  A typewriter by the door is my mezuzah. There are tiny stone turtles and large dream catchers in the windows.  As a little bit of cheer to ease the transition into living alone, the name works.  I’ve only realized now that the name has allowed me to avoid saying “home.”

I used to have artwork from Cake CDs in the archway between the kitchen and the living room, but I took them all down this week. They stopped looking cheery and started looking like clutter. I must be more acclimated to my own space.

I also realize why I waited three months to bring Minime here; she is tied into my past with Andi.  Of course she is, you vacuous, imbecilic moron, I hear you saying (I’m just kidding; we rarely think thoughts as hateful of others as we think of ourselves), what’s your next keen insight? Teenagers are hormonal? Chocolate is yummy?

When I was packing up to move, some of the things I left behind surprised Andi.

“Are you trying to eliminate any trace of me?” she asked, only half-joking.  As if I could.  If I stripped naked, tossed all my possessions, and moved to a new city, my tattoos would follow me.  I don’t have “Andi and Aaron Forever and Ever” tattooed on my heart or anything, but we used to go to Zopie’s Caffeine Fix together.  Does that reminder of Zopie's count as a reminder of Andi?  What about the time we were tripping our balls off, making fun of the Tank Girl tattoo on my thigh, which barely looks like Tank Girl’s tattoo?

This is my problem with Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; “Go through your house and take away anything which reminds you of her.”  It’s a neat idea for a story.  Charlie Kaufman looks at mementos of past relationships and thinks, what if one could use these objects to map the human brain and eliminate memories?  There is no collection of objects which can contain a person, and no way to remove all traces of a person from your life without removing yourself.  The way every song speaks to you when you’re falling in love, it works in reverse when you’re falling out.  Even if I had those tattoos removed, our sixteen years together would remain in me.

Is Minime a stronger connection to the past than my CDs, DVDs, clothes, dishes, shoes, and sheets because she’s alive?  Is it harder to make new memories around a fuzzy, pink-nosed baby than an object?  If Minime hadn’t scratched a little girl's eyelid badly enough to warrant a trip to urgent care, how much longer would I have dragged my heels?

Both my delay in bringing her here and the motivations behind that delay are obvious in retrospect. Most likely, they were obvious to an outside observer.

It makes me worry about what other obvious things I’m missing.