When first creating this forum I intended flogging my ebooks Reveries and Cool Brass. That, and resume some kind of writing discipline by telling stories. Nearly two decades have passed since I last graced a newsroom, and 10 years from any article bearing my real byline.
Writing is easy. Self-promotion is craven. Funny thing is while I’m reticent about myself and my product, I could be P.T. Barnum’s spiritual heir if it came to hawking some loser starving for celebrity or another kind of dog food.
The job I held back in January 2011 didn’t require adhering to any strictures. Other than getting shot at, what else instills greater purpose than meeting deadline? Even a self-imposed one.
Hungry for eyeballs, I cast wide nets. Shamelessly buttonholing strangers through the web and mail, I hoped they’d sample then find continued interest in whatever the weeks offered. Enough so they’d do one thing.
Tip their friends. Or depending how they regarded them, tell their enemies. Word of mouth. Best advertising in the world.
Now decidedly domestic audiences peruse this blog, my initial posts drew decent response from Russians. Well, they wrote me in Cyrillic. Or better, in broken English.
My curious part wanted to ask the obvious. But then my mantra, “Eyeballs! Eyeballs! Eyeballs!” kicked in. Essentially, who cares who’s reading!? Just as long as they are!
Plainly as an undergraduate I never sat down in and slept through a stats class.
By the way to readers of this blog between Kaliningrad and Vladivostok, “Spasibo.”
It’s just coincidence, but near the end of winter I struck up a correspondence with Lilia. I presumed she lived in Brooklyn. Particularly Brighton Beach. There, former Soviet immigrants have boisterously created an enclave of Russians striving for the American-ski Dream. Wrong direction. I was off by the Atlantic and Europe.
After suitable sniffing around, a photo exchange, my pen pal revealed her St. Petersburg address. Russia. Not Florida. Okay, so no swarmy chats over Martinis at Maison Premiere anytime soon. I guess she had the cheesecake pictures snapped on a Black Sea beach. Background scenery with minarets should’ve given it away.
The Lilia pictured is a slender, buxom blonde grinning below pellucid blue eyes. She stated her age at 28, though on the Internet …
Here’s the chance part: the model upon whom I based the figure “Ricky” in Stretched Bliss, one of four short stories comprising Reveries, reappeared a few weeks later. If you’ve read the story, you know how protagonists Paz Duarte and Caleb Abercrombie regard him.
Almost as a repeated joke, the real Ricky, a decade my junior, towed his usual blonde. For him truly any woman will do. She usually does, but he prefers blondes. The short-term kind.
He migrated to Texas several years ago. Mainly for alleged economic opportunities the Lone Star State had over the Northeast and his own native Mid West. That big-haired blondes swamped the place was simply serendipitous.
The straw hair bounty so great, or Ricky so weak, he took his eye off the money ball. In no time babes aplenty had him focusing on them rather than business. He forfeited his stake after several misdirected years.
I should wanted to have commiserated but Ricky hadn’t earned it.
The woman Ricky squired when we met again in Quarropas was … adequate. She was a starter slam piece. Another doll on his fun shelf. Before he’d finished introducing us I’d already forgotten her name. Grant him this — he’d only follow my lead after dumping her.
Nonetheless she was attractive in a closing time though no need to kick her out of bed way. Ricky, something of a rough-hewn charmer, won’t make any woman perform the walk of shame.
She came across as pleasant in daylight. By their unease I saw basic bliss sufficed between them. Their togetherness crept up on 14:59.
So our catching up was choppy. And remedial.
Perhaps I’ve read too much into my Russian correspondent. Better, maybe she’s stamped me with a firm impression. That afternoon I compared some woman I’ve never met with a transitory Ricky woman. Presumptuous, no?
Yet having known him since the late 1990s, Ricky’s women fill bim templates. He taps familiar, not new. Exploring, being surprised, expanding, all interfere with his deriving comfort from the same sort of niches.
Blonde. Compliant. Shallow.
Lilia is blonde. The other two qualities don’t fit.
Her half of our correspondence is pointed. Especially her questions. Lilia knows what she wants. Declarative sentences stake positions. Lilia writes effusively and passionately. The tone, if one can truly discern sounds from written phrases, insinuates when it isn’t ingratiating. Maison Premier might not have served as the appropriate platform. The languid possibilities in that part of Brooklyn sure suit me fine. Thus far she’s come across as intense on the way to fervid.
If we ever advance beyond the visa thing (Russians and Americans require them for entries into the other’s country), maybe I should prepare for shot glasses slammed or smashed after their contents have been gulped, and declarations or protestations issued in maudlin or strident tones.
Yes. Some of the above paragraph is exaggeration. But it comes from impeccable antecedents.
Late in 2010 when my impending former employers showed no sign of avoiding implosion, I economized. Besides curtailing amusements, I also reduced obligations. One of those was a storage unit. Within it a personal trove. Mostly books and furniture retained for the someday expected move into a pleasure dome.
Sentimental I’m not. About the only trait I shared with my father. Wariness braced his friendliness; reserve forms the skeleton of my own. Another reason to see how Lilia and I would’ve contended in person. The tempered and the tempestuous. Might make for a good show.
Sensing squeezed discretionary income darkening my future, I chucked furniture and culled literature. Among the works sacrificed were volumes by Isaak Babel and Anna Akhmatova, writer and poetess, respectively. All those two had in common was heritage.
Babel rode with and recorded Red Cavalry exploits during Russia’s immediate post-revolutionary epoch. His are the cool observations of a committed believer. Talk about unsentimental. One wonders whether and how he rectified his beliefs when Stalin’s purges claimed him, a Bolshevik after Lenin, not Trotsky.
Akhmatova conjured poetry so powerful it even stirred me. And I have no taste for that art. Here’s how persuasive I found Akhmatova: younger, much younger, long before today’s distinguished gray younger, I occasionally weaved a few of her lines into the patter I hoped got me over with women. No. You wouldn’t be surprised at the effectiveness of sincerely uttered lines inserted among swyving. On smart, empathetic chicks. With bims, it’s just a waste of breath.
Reading Lilia, I heard Akhmatova.
That’s one thing Ricky will never hear. I must concede given his steep numerical advantage in fleeting hookups, no doubt he’s heard plenty. Mostly repetition. But anything as moving as dispatches from an illumed soul? No.
http://www.amazon.com/Cool-Brass-ebook/dp/B0067DD5K6/
http://www.amazon.com/Reveries-ebook/dp/B004H8G1KO/
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