Stories for Gerard Hospice
I talked to my best friend Adam last night. We were roomies in our very first apartment back in '98. While I smoked pot and waited tables (which has continued, to this very day), Adam finished college with an art degree and now attends graduate school in D.C. But there's no jealousy or resentment there, just a profound sense of "what did I do with these past seven years?" I couldn't be more happy or excited for him.
Adam has always been my springboard, the guy I bounce ideas off of. He always seems to bring out the aspiring writer in me. He's an artist, too, naturally... a real artist, a painter, graphic designer, whatever. He deals in the abstract. He ran a piece at my previous landlord's gallery in downtown Chattanooga, AVA, or Association of Visual Artists, and sold it for quite a chunk of change. Two other friends of mine had some of their work displayed at the AVA gallery. Living right next door to the director didn't hurt; most of the people I ran with at that time were artists of some type, and a few were painters. Introducing them seemed to be a logical step.
Talking to Adam gets me in the mood to write. We both share the same interests in authors. I introduced him to Kerouac, he introduced me to Bukowski. Whitman, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, David Sedaris, et al. There's more but I won't drop names. While we had our apartment on Lee Highway, I spent a lot of nights writing poetry... not love poems or giddy rhymes, just broken verse. Phrases and words popped into my mind, and I wrote them down. Sometimes they made sense. Sometimes they were utter crap. But I attribute the surge of creativity to my surroundings at that time. I wrote a few more poems when I moved to Florida in late '98, but I stopped shortly thereafter. Florida crushed me, ground me into a pulp, and shred me to pieces. I felt the cold, wet shadow of death in Florida. But that's a whole other story, and I won't go there right now...
I decided to finally write a story. I don't want to call it a novel, because it's not that ambitious. I'm blessed/cursed with this strange memory... I don't know where I got it, or how it developed, but I can sit down, close my eyes, think back to my very first conscious memory and work my way forward from there. I don't remember dates, but I remember details... weird little details that nobody else would or could even recall. I break these memories into huge chunks, or segments, that are chronologically-ordered by outside events that occured at the same time: a movie, a song, a dance craze, a fashion trend, a school year, a summer vacation, a girlfriend.
I decided to go back to May of 1998, when I first lost my virginity at the age of 18, and retrace my steps to today. I'm going to write about my past girlfriends. No one, and I mean no one, will be left out. Like I said, I'm cursed with this elephant-like memory, and I can pick and choose up to six years of private history. It won't be a story about sleeping with chicks, though, don't get me wrong. As I said before, I tend to use ex-girlfriends as a way to recall other events that occured while I dated them. So it'll be a story about life, as I saw it then, and see it now. (How pretentious!) I don't know if this is an act of revenge, or catharsis, or if it's just an experiment in memory-recall, but I'm going to do it. And I'm going to send each chapter to Adam for criticism and editing. He's the only man I can trust, the only man who knows all of my dirty little secrets. There's nothing I can write and that he can read that'll shock him.
So now I have a project. One that doesn't involve zap guns, rocketships, and robots. Literature! A real story! It's been a long, long time...
P.S. Gerard Hospice is Adam's "alter ego" in my fiction. All of my friends have different names when I write about them. It's to avoid libel. ;-)
Adam has always been my springboard, the guy I bounce ideas off of. He always seems to bring out the aspiring writer in me. He's an artist, too, naturally... a real artist, a painter, graphic designer, whatever. He deals in the abstract. He ran a piece at my previous landlord's gallery in downtown Chattanooga, AVA, or Association of Visual Artists, and sold it for quite a chunk of change. Two other friends of mine had some of their work displayed at the AVA gallery. Living right next door to the director didn't hurt; most of the people I ran with at that time were artists of some type, and a few were painters. Introducing them seemed to be a logical step.
Talking to Adam gets me in the mood to write. We both share the same interests in authors. I introduced him to Kerouac, he introduced me to Bukowski. Whitman, H.G. Wells, Robert Louis Stevenson, David Sedaris, et al. There's more but I won't drop names. While we had our apartment on Lee Highway, I spent a lot of nights writing poetry... not love poems or giddy rhymes, just broken verse. Phrases and words popped into my mind, and I wrote them down. Sometimes they made sense. Sometimes they were utter crap. But I attribute the surge of creativity to my surroundings at that time. I wrote a few more poems when I moved to Florida in late '98, but I stopped shortly thereafter. Florida crushed me, ground me into a pulp, and shred me to pieces. I felt the cold, wet shadow of death in Florida. But that's a whole other story, and I won't go there right now...
I decided to finally write a story. I don't want to call it a novel, because it's not that ambitious. I'm blessed/cursed with this strange memory... I don't know where I got it, or how it developed, but I can sit down, close my eyes, think back to my very first conscious memory and work my way forward from there. I don't remember dates, but I remember details... weird little details that nobody else would or could even recall. I break these memories into huge chunks, or segments, that are chronologically-ordered by outside events that occured at the same time: a movie, a song, a dance craze, a fashion trend, a school year, a summer vacation, a girlfriend.
I decided to go back to May of 1998, when I first lost my virginity at the age of 18, and retrace my steps to today. I'm going to write about my past girlfriends. No one, and I mean no one, will be left out. Like I said, I'm cursed with this elephant-like memory, and I can pick and choose up to six years of private history. It won't be a story about sleeping with chicks, though, don't get me wrong. As I said before, I tend to use ex-girlfriends as a way to recall other events that occured while I dated them. So it'll be a story about life, as I saw it then, and see it now. (How pretentious!) I don't know if this is an act of revenge, or catharsis, or if it's just an experiment in memory-recall, but I'm going to do it. And I'm going to send each chapter to Adam for criticism and editing. He's the only man I can trust, the only man who knows all of my dirty little secrets. There's nothing I can write and that he can read that'll shock him.
So now I have a project. One that doesn't involve zap guns, rocketships, and robots. Literature! A real story! It's been a long, long time...
P.S. Gerard Hospice is Adam's "alter ego" in my fiction. All of my friends have different names when I write about them. It's to avoid libel. ;-)
posted by Billy at 1:10 PM
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