I wrote this story a couple years back, and have since modified it a number of times, mostly to fix little niggles that I didn’t like, but also some to make aesthetic alterations to the text, plot points, and some other miscellaneous items.
It’s about a struggling writer (of course) who longs for female companionship, for which he invents a creative solution. The strikeouts are there on purpose, in case you’re wondering.
I’ll be submitting this to this week’s Storyblogging Carnival. If you have a story you’d like in the Carnival, send Donald an email with your submission information. The following is a suggested format:
Name of your blog
URL of your blog
Title of the story
URL for the blog entry where the story is posted
A word count
A suggested rating for adult content (G, PG, PG-13, R)
A short blurb describing the story
Now, on to “Writer’s Block”.
Hiro tried. He really did. But nothing came out. He had hit an impasse, a roadblock on the creative highway. As his hand hovered over the page, he imagined himself outside his body. It was a trick he had learned from someone he had met in a coffee shop. He tried to divorce himself from his work, to divest himself of any relationship to it. Nope. He lost it. In actuality, that technique had never worked for him. He suspected it was bogus, even to the guy who had told him about it. Even Hiro knew that he could never be distinctly separated from his work. It was one of the Intrinsic Laws of Scripta Laborum, the Quality Tao of Zen and the Art of Story Writing. So there he was, unable to go forward in the plot, unwilling to burn backward. And this created problems. Not only for Hiro, but for Lili as well. Lili was…well, Lili was stuck because Hiro was stuck.

*****

Lili Fortune felt, ironically, unlike an heiress or a lucky person, but
Lili sighed and put her manuscript down on the desk beside her Brother typewriter coffee, put her small hand on her soft chin, and stared down at the rough, brick-orange, 70′s style shag that spread wall to wall in her little apartment. Sometimes she wished she hadn’t signed that contract. Writing the book was hard enough. Finding a publisher was nearly as tough. But a screenplay? She had never written a movie script in her life, and now she was struggling with every aspect of the craft. From adaptation of HER OWN BOOK (she reminded herself) to writing in industry standard format; it was one big disaster.
Brushing a small tuft of imaginary wayward hair behind her ear, she sighed again and picked up her manuscript. She had decided to use her original manuscript, instead of the published trade book that rested on her shelf, to write the script. She had discovered that she preferred the single-sheet to single-sheet of typewritten and unbound text to adapt, instead of the book. It gave her more room to scrawl notes into the margins, and instead of constantly flipping back and forth, never really seeing the completed work, she could get a more complete view by spreading all the pages out on the floor. It gave her a good perspective of her work as a whole, like God pondering Time and Creation from His seat in eternity.
Lili sat small and straight, with a

*****

Hiro shook his head, crossing out another line and muttering some unintelligible Korean. He was half-Korean, actually; his father had been a Korean soldier, his mother a Samoan washerwoman. They had met in Hawaii at a tour of the Pearl Harbor Memorial Museum. Nine months later Hiro emerged, looking as confused as his culturally and geographically inverted lineage. Two weeks after that, Hiro’s father was run over by a particularly aggressive rickshaw driver in Seoul; one of his ribs had been cracked, puncturing his left lung, and he had died there on the street waiting for an ambulance, wheezing and blubbering for air. Of course, neither Hiro nor his mother knew any of this – their one-night soldier boy hadn’t stuck around for very long. Which made Hiro’s mutterings all the more ironic. Even though he grew up with his mother, he had never learned her language. He only knew English and Korean, and only used English in public. Korean had so much more expression. It just made more sense to do all his thinking, cursing, and complaining in it.
Hiro still felt most of the confusions of his origins and legacy. Even his body seemed not to know what to make of him. His face was smooth and mostly hairless, compliments of his Oriental father. Blue-green eyes graced his slightly slanted sockets, and his face was pocked with Samoan crags that tended to isolate him at parties, which is why he didn’t go to many. He possessed smooth and small hands that hadn’t been useful for much work besides washing dishes or holding small objects, like pencils. So Hiro had decided to write.

*****

Lili had thick, brown hair, dyed ultra-blonde, that she kept cut short, like a man’s. Round eyes that reflected light like pools of water hovered over her round upturned nose and small Judy Garland mouth. When she spoke, she sounded like Liza Minnelli.
She had become an overnight sensation when her first novel, Blood’s Orchid, got published. It had hit the stands at Number 2 on the New York Times’ Bestseller List, remaining there for a couple of days before finally rising to Number 1 for good. That was a year ago. Then, three months after publication, Blood’s Orchid was optioned, and she had negotiated to write the screenplay and all revisions.
What a meteoric rise! And it was all due to…
What was it all about, anyway? What was it about Blood’s Orchid that had critics creaming their pants with ecstatic acclaim? She couldn’t see it. Even her editor had made an offhand remark telling her that it was highly unusual for a book of its…caliber…to be gaining such attention so quickly. Oh well. She would try to be more thankful. After all, she had the deal of a lifetime, and she was determined to make this opportunity work…

*****

Hiro needed a drink. No. He needed to concentrate more. Get some inspiration. He looked around his dirty apartment. Hell. It wasn’t even an apartment. It was a friggin’ Rent-A-Box. No wonder he couldn’t write. His desk was the most prized thing there, but considering his other “valuables”, it was small consolation. A dirty and torn up lime-green sofa graced the middle of the room, facing the twelve inch black and white television he had bought at a flea market in the Castro District. It was a simple structure, with a cold concrete floor, covered only occasionally with faux Oriental throw rugs, corrugated walls that looked like rusted hell, and a ceiling of claustrophobic pipes and wires that had been neglected to be covered over by the owner of the building complex -
“Slum is more like it,” thought Hiro. The room wasn’t getting any nicer with age, and Hiro’s less-than-hygienic presence did not alleviate the smell that daily emanated from old and unwashed underwear, discarded cigar butts, feline micturition upon the sagging couch, long-forgotten rags stuffed into small corner mouse holes, and greasy tea bags sitting too long on top of the one cupboard in his kitchen. Hiro didn’t mind the smell anymore. Of course, it always bothered the ladies, which is why he never brought them home…Oh, who was he kidding? He hadn’t even met any ladies lately.
“Am I a writer?” Hiro asked himself. That question had plagued him since he had started. He had begun to think that the word he used to describe his profession didn’t fit him very well. He perceived an underlying problem that riveted his feet to the ground and his hands to his side, preventing him from really getting into his work. Either he lacked the will to become closer to the story, or he lacked the talent. Whichever it was, it had become a dragon of proportions equaling his relatively unsure beginnings, and he didn’t see much of a way around it.

*****

Lili glanced down at her reflection in the silted remains of her coffee, first scrunching up her jaw into a scowl, then wiggling her nose, and finally squeezing her eyes shut. Gulp. Down the hatch. The lukewarm bitterness crept down her throat, leaving small grains lodged in her throat. What a night.
She had abandoned her work at the desk and stretched out on the shag, wishing she had a man. Oh, that was dangerous work. She reminded herself that wishing she had a man was not the same thing as wishing she had another man. And it wasn’t as if Claude was a complete no-show. After all, he was pretty sweet, giving her those roses and taking her to dinner. But then that awful revelation. She felt sorry for him, but repulsed at the same time. And ever since then, her excuses to avoid seeing him had grown progressively hollow, and she thought he might be getting suspicious and she was starting to feel badly about pushing him away.
So he had a little problem. It wasn’t as if their relationship was based on it. Well, come to think of it…that aspect of their relationship seemed to be much clearer now. She had never asked, and he had never pushed it. After he had dropped the bomb, she didn’t feel cheated, just repulsed. She couldn’t help it. It was her first experience with a man with no lead in his pencil.

*****

Hiro feverishly pounded his head against the wooden table that served as his workstation, clenching his teeth together in mock anger and willing the table to knock an idea, anything, into his bald head. An old typewriter, no ribbon, sat unused on the corner of the table, serving as a file folder, trash holder, and secret mocker of Hiro’s efforts to transcend the dreary room and enter that place that all authors seem to fall into eventually, if they’re good enough. That place represented the golden apple for Hiro, the unattainable fruit that, once gained, would open up and reveal the Ultimate Secret. That secret was entrenched in the words that Hiro could not write. Being four times removed from greatness did not make him glow.
Wait. Think. Hiro, watching in his head, in love with a woman he had imagined at a curious little Art Deco bar he had discovered on Haight Street? He tried to remember, to create the scene.
It was the Persian Aub Zam Zam, owned by a rude waiter (the rudest waiter in San Francisco) named Sam Wu. This little man never kept regular hours, and when he opened up those locked doors, and you were lucky enough to get in, he told you where to sit, what you could order (sometimes he only serves martinis), and when you had to leave. And it was here that Hiro had fallen in love.
The woman was at the bar, twisting her butt around to match the sway of the nameless trip-hop tune that resounded over the loudspeakers. Hiro got up from his little triangle table and wrung his way through a small throng of dancers to the edge of the bar. Oh God, he was so short compared to her! There, at the bar, with Mr. Wu staring him down, Hiro did the bravest thing in his life to date.
“I’ve been watching you dance,” he shouted appreciatively. He leaned in a fraction closer to judge her reaction. Strangely, she wasn’t repulsed.
“I needed a good time,” she shouted back. “I’ve not been out in a while.”
She did look good to Hiro, but that wasn’t saying much. She glanced down at him curiously.
“What’s your name?” she said.
“Hiro. What’s yours?”
A guy Hiro had failed to see earlier came up behind the woman and laid his hand on her shoulder. She twisted her head over to see him, and smiled. The man said something to the woman that Hiro couldn’t quite catch, and then she turned back to the bar.
“I gotta go. Nice talkin’ with you,” she yelled.
“Yeah. Maybe again,” he said, not bothering to raise his voice.
He watched them walk out, appreciating the fine sway of her posterior. Damn.
Yes. That was the inspiration he needed. It was there he had decided to give the unknown woman a name.
“To Fortune,” Hiro told himself. “She will be my fortune. And my future.”

*****

Claude Denoumot had troubles, that’s sure. They had started a couple of days after he and Lili had visited that damned Art Deco bar. She had insisted on going, even though she knew he wasn’t into dancing. And it had turned into a flop. The mad waiter had ushered them in and seated them at the bar. Claude had gotten up to take a piss, and as he was coming back, Wu had pulled his arm and asked him and his “Rady Friend” to leave the establishment. He protested, but Wu stood, implacable and inscrutable. Then there was the little encounter with his boss. Yeah, he had been seen trying to stroke it in the men’s bathroom. Trying. Oh, Lord, was he trying. But nothing. And the uproar!
Turns out attempting to abuse a member of the clergy was not appropriate or appreciated at the office. Not that it was worth it. And it didn’t matter that the only guy who had seen him was the egg-sucker from Copy who was trying to make as fast a grab at all the steps on the ladder as he could before someone noticed he wasn’t worth what they paid him. And it didn’t seem to matter that his damn prick had just stopped working. At first he didn’t mind, and cut back on his work (he thought the stress was getting to it), but after a couple of days of this, he was beginning to be scared.
And then the final straw. He felt he had to tell her before they got too serious. The subject would eventually rise, and he didn’t want to be compromised by flaccid arguments and limp excuses. He would roll it out beforehand, and try and fix the problem from the flank. So he bought her three roses and took her out to dinner, hoping to soften the blow. He had a feeling she was the kind of woman who measured her men, in part, by the equipment they carried, and only the greatest amount of personality would compensate. He hoped.
She looked beautiful in her dark-red evening dress. A bad sign. That color meant she wanted him – bad. And he had been so polite, so demurring, not forcing her or anything. He waited until they had both taken their fill of salad before finally falling into the speech he had prepared.
“You know, I can’t think of a more special time than this,” he said, smiling. She nodded and took a small sip of wine. He had splurged on that too. Thirty dollars for one bottle! He hoped it was strong enough.
“This is just what I’ve needed, Claude,” said Lili. “I swear, I haven’t had a moment’s peace since the book.”
Claude smiled faintly and fingered his cloth napkin.
“I’m…I’m glad you’ve…” Claude began.
“What?” asked Lili. Her eyes opened wider. “I’m sorry, did you say something?”
“I was trying to say, I’m glad you’re happy,” Claude said. She looked confused. Had he blurted something wrong? Oh no! What to do?
“I…I mean…well, we’ve been getting closer, right?” he stammered.
“Claude, maybe I should…” Lili hurriedly picked up her purse.
“No! No, Lili, I’m sorry! I don’t know what’s been wrong with me the last few…” said Claude.
Lili paused. She looked at him with wide eyes that fluttered back and forth, searching frantically for something in his face.
“Claude, what’s going on?”
“I brought you here tonight to tell you something,” he said.
“Are you all right?” she asked. “Do you need a doctor?”
“No!”
Damn it! What the hell was happening to him?
I have…man issues. No. My penis doesn’t fucking work. Too anatomical. I have problems with my manhood. Oh, too blunt, and not quite the impression he wanted to give.
“Did I ever tell you I’m disabled?” Claude blurted out finally.
Lili sat quietly for a moment. Then she started laughing, first softly, then harder and harder until she was holding her mouth into her napkin to muffle the sound.
“This isn’t very easy, you know,” he said quietly. She didn’t hear him.
“Is that what you’ve been trying to tell me?” she asked.
“Yes! That’s exactly what I’ve been trying to tell you!”
Lili laughed again. Claude’s eyes remained sober, his mouth a solid line across his broad face.
“Well,” he said, laughing nervously. “Exactly isn’t exactly right.”

*****

Hiro wanted to see her again. This was not unusual. Hiro always wanted to see lots of women again. The difficulty was, they had never reciprocated that desire. This was an inherent problem for Hiro. He was small, of mixed blood, and not particularly attractive to members of either sex; three strikes meant Hiro-no-get-laid.
Over the years, he had grown increasingly apathetic in his attempts to meet women, and by the time he turned thirty, he had become a sexual couch potato, too lazy, unmotivated, and well-fed with an ample diet of trashy porno rentals, girly magazines, and hand lotion to pursue anyone of interest. Which is why his attempt at the bar was such a daring and unusual thing. Hiro recognized this, and wondered if he was turning over a new leaf or if he was just overly desperate. Either way, he decided to play it out, see what happened. Anyway, it gave him something to think about, and more importantly, to write about.

*****

Claude couldn’t do anything these days. So the date with Lili had gone badly, oh so badly, contrary to every effort he had put forth to prevent it. He hadn’t been fired yet, but he suspected it would happen within the week. And to top it off, the active ladder-climber had brought a sexual harassment suit against him, claiming Claude’s act in the men’s room had permanently scarred his young, tender eyes.
“You can’t tell me that weasel never masturbates,” thought Claude. He just saw an opportunity to screw someone using a suit that was sure to pass muster in court. Ironically, Claude thought, he was just as flaccid in his attitude toward fighting the suit as he was when he first gave litigious cause to the corporate prick. He couldn’t say he was receiving any less pleasure (or any more, for that matter!) for it, which made Claude dubious of his future involvement in either relationships or business. He had a thought then that they were the same, that to bed a woman was just as perilous as working for a corporation. At this time, for Claude, his sexual reality for both seemed to be about the same thing.
Claude had a sort of passive acceptance of the ways in which his life had spiraled down the crapper. Maybe that’s just my nature, he thought to himself, turning into the development center where he worked. Maybe I’m too weak for this world. Trees flew past him like details, and he absently worked the controls for the windshield wipers as it began to drizzle slightly. He had the vague idea that the world was no longer his own, that it was slowly being preempted by a force outside himself, independent and self-serving, intent on altering every plan he had for himself and directing him into an unfamiliar path.

*****

Hiro didn’t care that Lili was the hottest writer on the market. Indeed, this characteristic seemed almost to be a consequence of his attraction for her, rather than a progenitor for it. It didn’t surprise him that he hadn’t heard of her until he had started writing. Sure, critics knew her, and she was the darling of Oprah book club aficionados, publishing houses, and one minor movie studio. But it wasn’t until Hiro joined the league of extraordinary people who called themselves “writers” that Lili Fortune had pinged on his radar.
Hiro had first discovered Lili during his initial days of note-taking and research for his book. After he began actual writing, his thoughts frequently dwelled upon Lili and her rise in public favor. It couldn’t be said that he was in love with her, at least not then. He mostly just admired her. The fact that they lived in the same town probably had something to do with it.
Yet there had been a growing need for Hiro to connect, not just physically, but spiritually, emotionally, and intellectually. The physical stuff he had staved off so far, but his other needs daily clamored for his attention, and it had seriously begun to affect his ability to write.
These were Hiro’s thoughts as he struggled to load the typewriter with paper. Yes, he had decided to hit his work from a new angle. He found a shop that sold old ribbons, bought two of them, and returned to his home determined to break the spell of silence that pervaded his paper and thoughts.

*****

Lili too was growing uncomfortable. The silence seemed to pervade every pore and surface, until even emptiness seemed corporeal with a quiet tension. No movement existed, no molecular action and reaction; all was, for the first time and truly, quiet on the Western Front. Her existence hinged upon the spinning of the world; her livelihood resided in the implied promise – that it would not cease, that it would provide and destroy, create and deprive, unending, infinite and forever action that dressed and undressed her existence like a cabaret dancer. She had always waited for her cue, and until this time, it had always been there, on time and in place. At least, so it seemed.
She tried to be frightened, but nothing like that came to her mind. Instead, there was only the lingering feeling of waiting for something, waiting for nothing, waiting for something to happen to nothing. Her mind could not couple itself to the basic framework of her present existence, because it was not constructed to understand. Her mind paralleled the strongest and weakest in her world, and thus she, nor anyone else, had any conception of the state of things. The world, her world, had ceased, but it had not gone away. Though nothing solid remained and no action was conceived or executed, no one noticed.
What Lili and everyone else did not know was the laughably simple explanation behind these occasional lapses in the machinery behind their world. Of course, every world has a back door that leads to the levers and springs and engines and pistons and pipes and steam. Just who resides in those maintenance rooms of the world…well, it didn’t, and couldn’t have, mattered to those living and breathing within the bound walls of their inclusive reality.
Then, as if it had never happened, everything started up again. And like rotting flowers, no one remembered.
Lili looked down at the note that had suddenly appeared in her hand. Without effort she slit it open, and read its invitation. Intriguing.

*****

Claude began to think he was crazy. He felt twisted around, lost in time and space, unable to think or reason. He wanted to hear German Big Band music as his own personal soundtrack…where did that come from? Now twirling around, his arms in the air, trenchcoat swaying with the movement of his body on the street, he wondered why he felt so delighted and changed into a new man. Oh! Violins! Soft muted trumpet, Waaaah! Waaaah! Waaaah! And the gentle piano gliding down into a soft, silent perfume of sound…
This was crazy! He was assaulted by the sounds of old cinemascopes, the clicking and clacking of shutters and projector wheels. He was inside an old house; shutters jaunted crazily and old leaves billowed inside the doorframe. A low beat. His heart. The wind in the sky and the geese flying south. There was just him now, standing next to the graffiti-covered brick wall and the decrepit dumpster, drinking a bottle of malt and wondering from whence these whiskers and foul breath had originated. Inside his breast pocket of this tattered and torn overcoat he found a stale cigar, partially smoked.
He was a caterpillar in his cage, gilded with soot and soil. Ever changing, ever revising and being revised, the man became the truth and the essence, every poem and experience, every emotion and longing, secret and public, freeing itself and becoming a new creation as each new page found the words in which to cover itself.
Claude didn’t know what had happened. There was a loud noise, a bang inside his head, and he was back. He rounded a corner. Up ahead, a dapper little bald man, dressed in smart black leather, sat on a bench, writing. How could he sit there in the drizzle and write? A woman was just crossing the street…wait a minute…it was Lili Fortune! And she was going to Baldy! That stupid, lying bitch!
Claude Denoumot forgot that he was driving and saw the curb too late. He bounced hard up and over, his car’s bumper landing just shy of a postal box. Inside, Claude, shaken and stirred, looked over the steering wheel to the outside world. To his left and about fifty yards away Lili sauntered up to the well-dressed Oriental man.

*****

Hiro glanced up from his writing and saw her crossing the street. Down the street, a black, non-descript car seemed to gain a life of its own as it screamed recklessly into the curb, nearly piling into a post office box. Hiro laughed. He knew the driver was not hurt. Nor was he lost; indeed, for the first time in his life, the driver was where he needed to be, where he was meant to be. It was all there, like he had imagined.
Remembering, Hiro returned his gaze to the woman. He watched her approach the bench where he sat. She was just like he had written. The wind swirled her brown overcoat around her smooth legs, and she put her hand to her head, to ward off the blast to her carefully sculpted hair. He definitely liked what he saw.
“Lili,” he wrote. “Lili Fortune, right?” She glided up to him as he finished scratching his pencil against the paper.
He stood up quickly, dropping the notebook, pages open-faced and scattering in the strong breeze. The pencil bounced and clattered onto the concrete below.
“Hi. Yes, that’s right…this note…” She held a piece of crumpled paper in her hand. “How did you know?” she said. The paper dropped and swirled away in the wind, and Lili gathered her coat closer to her thin body. Hiro held out his hand and laughed. “Because my name is Hiro,” he said, extending his hand.