The Ashcan Writers Club
Copyright 2012 by R.D. Byron-Smith
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I
Minneapolis, 2010.
When Norman’s heart skidded to a halt right in front of us, we were all munching Betty’s butterbrickle in the old recreation center next to the bocce ball courts, and discussing the misconjugation of adverbs. He suddenly slump-shouldered over in the hard-cushioned metal chair, and his head awkwardly bounced once on the shiny veneer tabletop. It made the sound of a gourd slipping from your hands at the farmer’s street market.
Within seconds in one off-putting efficient operation, Helen, our president and ever mindful of decorum, called paramedics on her Blackberry. They tried to revive Norman with a defibrillator but its battery was dead. By the time they installed a new battery in the electric-shock machine, they had to radio the coroner’s man.
His death was published in the retirement community's newsletter, which was unusual because its editor had always made it a point to avoid mention of death like the plague. I figured retired newspaper editor Norman wouldn’t have much minded the ink. Our group, six without Norman, couldn’t find the will (I almost said heart) to meet for four months afterward; and still, when we did, nobody would sit in Norman’s chair. Our seniors writing group finally met in early January, a chilly evening in which we all had un-trunked winter garments smelling sweet with moth balls and cedar.
Her eyes dull and her cheeks flushed (although I felt she had gotten over her anger at me for embarrassing her at an earlier meeting), President Helen immediately volunteered to read us her latest short story, and enunciated each word of the title like that television guy used to read the answers on Jeopardy, “The Day Norman Died.”
“Are you freaking kidding me, woman?” spit Edison, who always spoke, yelling like you were thirty feet from him, and who had the indiscriminate habit of bouncing all thoughts popping into his head out his mouth on a breath of strong curry.
I watched Jade’s lower jaw drop in open dismay, and she kind of shivered, as if feeling Norman’s presence.
Al, sitting next to Jade, and who had been Norman’s best friend around the retirement community, dug both of his wizened, copper-colored eyes into Helen’s perfectly rouged face.
“Of course it is a work of fiction,” Helen assured us, a whiff of arrogance in her voice, as if we were taking the title a little too seriously. For the rest of her reading we sat in rapt, brain-numbing silence -- even Edison, whose chair kept creaking as he shifted his large rear-end in it, as if trying to block gas. Her narrative of three thousand words portrayed Norman’s death in microscopic detail -- right down to the blood-redness of life evaporating from the chewed nails on his limp fingertips as paramedics fumbled in their latex gloves with the defibrillator’s “impotent” battery. She wrote that one paramedic’s frantic use of razor-sharp scissors to cut away Norman’s blue, v-neck sweater to get to his bare chest was but a metaphor for his life; that of a hack-journalist whose role it was to slice people into little pieces and drop them into the public dustbin. But, it was in her portrayal of our own reactions to the tragedy of Norman dying among us that Helen applied the highest counterfeit literary license. She had me frowning like a “medieval cathedral arch,” and later described me as “detached as an unholy monk” as Norman lay “inversely prostrate”; while she, Helen -- a character she lovingly called Helena (after Constantine’s mother) -- had heroically weaved her own purple and white rosary between Norman’s stubby fingers, after his passing; in effect, Helen had piously intertwined Norman with his Lord, like some female pope. And I can tell you that as Helen had written Jade (and let me quote it) never “panicked and had to be slapped by a paramedic into stuporous submission.”
It was all vicious claptrap, her story.
Yes, like some literary capo, Helen had blindfolded us backs to the garage wall and riddled us with adjectives. She even shot the corpse, having described Norman (by his real full name) as “an unctuous blowhard,” saying in more colorful language than here, that he was but “an attenuated artery waiting for plaque to harden.”
I thought of belting her good right there but knew, of course, that as a retired police detective, and several inches her senior, I’d have been booked and put away for it. Christ, my mug shot might have made Facebook.
Two others club members had brought pieces to read -- a character sketch and two poems. But in Helen’s mean-spirited wake none put his literary oar in the water. Even Betty’s delicious white-layer cake with rich butter, chocolate frosting stayed unsliced.
After she finished, Helen slowly gathered the pages of her story, which, as she had read a sheet she had laid it on the table in the exact spot where Norman’s head had bounced like that gourd. My body felt like one of these medical ultrasound machines that you can’t hear but you know there is plenty going on inside as I walked out of the cold room with the other members of the Ashcan Writers Club. We kind of vanished into the parking lot like deflated football fans after a forty-to-zero drubbing. Outside, the cold wind hit my unscarfed neck.
Al, wounded in Vietnam, hobbled with the aid of an eagle-handled mahogany cane, with me walking along side him. I was immediately curious to hear his reaction. “God, I hope she never gives my eulogy,” I said sharply, inviting him.
Under the pinkish overhead lights of the parking lot I saw his red-veined bulbous nose nod, grumpily. Al (called Leroy in Helen’s story) had been described as having gained the sum of his self-confidence in a defeated war, and, whose only redeeming quality to his long suffering wife was his disabled veteran’s check each month.