Somewhere Over the Sun

Epstein had decided long ago that he was to become a great writer.

To do this, he knew he would have to patience. Expertise did not spring into shape, it eroded. It was hiding somewhere inside you and was slowly revealed. Time had to do its thing. Little particles had to wear away the layers. But instead of wind and dust and rain, Epstein’s genius would be eroded into shape by these three things:

•  Other people’s stories
•  An everyday dedication to his craft     
•  Living his life

Those were bullets and not numbers because all three were equally crucial, balls that had to be juggled. They had the same weight, the same shape, and Epstein would have to learn how to balance all three, giving them each an equal opportunity to chip away at his inexperience and uncover however many masterpieces were waiting within him.

This might some day be a short story or something more, but for now I wanted to share it. Because I like it. Yeah.

The first orange to be taken onto a plane will not know what is happening. It will be split into 2, then 4, then 6, then 8 wedges and will believe that it is simply about to be eaten, like most oranges in the past have been and most oranges in the future will be. Wedges 1 and 2 are eaten by the pilot before takeoff, so the orange simply says goodbye to those two parts of itself and wonders what the loud whirring is.

Then the plane begins to climb and almost immediately the orange knows that it is reaching new heights for an orange. It quickly gets up higher than the tallest orange tree, and not long after, it is higher up than the oranges which get eaten in very tall buildings, higher even than the oranges that get carried up elevators in the Empire State Building by businessmen who need a snack after lunch.

Wedge 3 will roll off the pilot’s lap during the ascent into the sky, rolling all the way to the back of the plane, where it will remain until landing, thus becoming the only orange wedge to ever make it up to the highest point an orange has ever been and lived to tell the tale.

Wedges 4 thru 8, meanwhile, are not entirely sure whether to be thrilled or terrified. They understand the historic implications of just how high up they are, and the view of the clouds and the ground and everything in between the two is quite stunning, but they do not know how their bodies will react in such an environment. Especially since the pilot has gone and exposed their pulpy insides to the air. Wedge 6 can’t contain its fear and bursts into tears, one of which finds its way into the pilot’s eye and momentarily causes a chaos in which the rest of the wedges and both humans on board become entirely terrified and not at all thrilled. But the pilot recovers and then eats Wedge 6 as punishment.

Wedges 4, 5, 7 and 8 lament their friend’s passing, but are happy it is not them, and that they are allowed to slowly become less terrified and more thrilled, like how they get sweeter and less acidic as they ripen. Almost all oranges prefer to be sweeter, but they’re thankful for the bits of acidity that make them a bit more complex, and sophisticated. Unlike bananas, which are just that one stupid flavor throughout their long, stupid bodies.

At a cruising altitude of 25,000 feet, the pilot offers the co-pilot a wedge, and thank God the co-pilot refuses, because what’s left of the orange is really starting to enjoy being at the highest point an orange has ever been. It makes the orange feel legendary, like this is something that it will be able to tell its grandkids about. Wedge 7 interjects that oranges don’t exactly have grandkids, just seeds the bloom more oranges on a new tree, and that, even if you could call those children, it’s highly unlikely that their seeds will make it to fertile land from all the way up here. The other wedges, upset at Wedge 7’s negativity, shove him into the pilot’s mouth. This awakens the pilot’s appetite, and he eats Wedges 5 and 8.

This leaves Wedges 4 and 3 (still all the way in the back of the plane, on the ground, never to be eaten and without a good vantage point of what it looks like being up so high, but at least still alive) as the only parts of an orange still up that high. Chewed up oranges don’t count. The plane begins its descent, and though they aren’t quite as high up anymore, they’re still higher up than any orange has ever been, so the wedges are happy.

 Then the co-pilot changes his mind and says that on second thought, he would love an orange wedge. Not only that, he does a sloppy job of eating the orange, as if he’s never actually had an orange before and only accepted because he is afraid that the pilot might think he’s a strange person for never having eaten an orange. So, Wedge 4’s death is sloppy and painful, and it makes Wedge 3 cringe at the sight, even from way in the back of the plane.

After the plane lands, someone finds Wedge 3 and tosses him into a garbage bin, and then someone comes and dumps the garbage bin into a truck, which is taken to a landfill at the edge of town. Wedge 3 is forced to sit next to a banana peel for the entire ride to the landfill, but once there he finds a few more orange wedges to rot away with. He tells them about being part of the first orange to be taken onto a plane. They listen interestedly, although most of them don’t believe the story, because who’s heard of anything higher up than a tree. 

“And after that, I quit writing for a couple years.”

The poet says this immediately after he tells me that his dog got into his room and ate 250 pages’ worth of his poetry. I have always been the kind of person that assumes honesty in people, so I do not think he is lying, or even joking. I believe his dog ate his poetry. He says something beautiful about how it was a part of his soul, but it takes me too long to find a pen, and I forget before I can write it down. 

The poet works at the small resort of cabins that I am staying at. We talk as we look out at the lake. I am drinking a beer, and he his holding the check, and across the empty lot of grass, three lizards walk up a red wall. I think about how the poet once stopped writing for two years. He is thirteen years old.

He mentions wanting to escape at 18, go live with no parental burdens. He tells me he once wrote a story about a town with no adults. I ask him if he’s read Lord of the Flies, he asks me if I’ve read Tolstoy. The town he lives in is overrun on long weekends by hundreds of underage drinkers with a lot of money. I tell him the idea for my book came in the middle of the night, he tells me that’s what his last poem was about, waking up in the middle of the night to write. 

Our conversation ends abruptly, but I tell him to keep writing, already knowing that   I will write about him.

The following is an excerpt from my manuscript for The Moustache. I was writing this for some guys in L.A and their agent decided to pass so the project is now dead. I thought I may as well share a little bit with some of you. Enjoy.

Chapter 1

When the alarm clock woke Harvey Bellfield at 6:24 a.m every weekday morning, he would immediately pull himself out of bed, stumble toward the bathroom, turn the shower knobs more or less to the ideal water temperature, and strip naked, all before he was fully capable of understanding who he was or what he was doing. Routine preceded consciousness.

Harvey often shampooed twice during those morning showers, not out of an overzealous devotion to hygiene, but simply because he’d forgotten that he had already shampooed once and thus, enough. What usually brought Harvey fully into the waking world was the always too long and too cold moment between shutting off the water and wrapping himself in a towel. Once his upper body was dry, Harvey would tie the towel around his waist and step out of the shower, taking one perfect stride onto the bathmat in front of the faux-granite bathroom counter.

His first thoughts of the day occurred almost invariably during this one perfect stride and they usually consisted, in no particular order of frequency, of one or several of the following: his wife, Emma, and of how much she loved him now, or how much she had loved him a few years ago; a short highlight reel of himself as a high school athlete, in degrees of exaggeration varying from slight to hyperbolic; drafts of articles he wished to write about the previous night’s NFL or NBA games and happenings, almost all of which, in theory, were insightful, moving, accurate, and deserving of high praise from everyone in the sports journalism community; Amy, the coffee shop girl with the deep-set eyes, and sensual, tip-inducing lips, her velveteen laugh, the faint smell of cigarettes that lingered on her fingers when she handed Harvey his drink or his change; details about his life that he would consider to be blessings (forced into Harvey’s head by the self-help book he had been rereading for seven months, which encouraged him to think these thoughts); details about his life that Harvey would want changed, altered, bettered.

 As these thoughts continued, sometimes crossing from one category into another, sometimes leaving the threshold of aforementioned categories and thinking whatever the hell they felt like thinking, Harvey opened his medicine cabinet and removed his shaving cream and his razor.  He applied the shaving cream, which was always foam, not gel, first to his left palm, which curled upward like a beggar’s. Then he brought both hands together, and smacked the big, wasteful heap on to his face, trying to cover up every pinprick hair that had sprouted since the previous day’s shave.

Once the shaving cream was fully applied and the razor began its slow, measured charge across Harvey’s face, one single sentence grabbed hold of Harvey’s thoughts: Take that, Dad.

Harvey’s father had never taught Harvey about shaving technique, had never told him what to do, and, more importantly, what not to do. This parental neglect had cost Harvey’s late-teenage face many painful nicks and embarrassing, blood-freckled strips of gauze. Maybe it was silly, but Harvey saw that avoidance of fatherly duties as the first great failure of the man he had once admired, and he was certain that every great failure that his father had been guilty of (alcoholism, incarceration, abandonment), had stemmed directly from the initial oversight of not teaching his son the proper way to shave. Well, perhaps Harvey couldn’t be certain of it being the root of all problems, but he was certain that it could not be excluded from his dad’s long list of offenses. Now, every time Harvey saw the trail of perfectly smooth skin his razor left behind, he thought: Take that, Dad.

Sometimes, Harvey considered showing off his shaving skills to spite his father. He thought about fancy, well-groomed, goatees, he thought about pencil-thin chin-strap beards. He fantasized about just letting his hair run wild across his face, about going grizzly so that his father would see what could have happened had Harvey not been self-reliant enough to teach himself how to shave. But, that would have been a little more passive-aggressive than Harvey fancied himself capable of, and it would have been unbecoming. Plus, he hadn’t seen his father in six years, so it was somewhat unlikely that the subversive act would get across. So Harvey shaved it all off, every morning, never ceding to his fantasies of insubordinate facial hair.

Entirely, not fully. That was the word he had been searching for, and finally it had come during a middle-of-the-night piss. He flushed and went back to his room, turning on the computer that he kept by his bed. Entirely, not fully, he kept saying, lest the midnight weariness erase the perfect word choice. He hoped the glow of the screen would not keep him from falling back asleep, but there were more important matters at hand.