fiction. sorta.

Fiction is not often shared on blogs. The format does not always lend itself easily to extensive characterization, and many people look to blogs to answer their questions quickly, rather than to be presented with more.


Photo by Charlie

What blogging does offer to the fiction writer is an opportunity to try out characters and plot lines on a willing audience. The people who read my fiction posts are not the largest section of my audience, but they are some of my most loyal supporters. I created the "fiction. sorta." category for those posts of mine that are purely fictional as well as ones that concern real people and real events, but have been changed in certain ways to allow for more freedom with the details of plot.

Some of my favorite posts from this category are listed below:

The full archives for "fiction. sorta." are listed below. Have fun looking around. And if anything bothers you, just remember--it's only fiction. Sorta.

Tanya: The Bold and the Uselessly Criminal, Part II

by anna on 11.28.2008

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You were still high from your recent criminal success and, having escaped without suspicion, you both hungered for another quest. Your next target, the TAE house, was also out for the summer, and located just next door to the Delta Kappas. Had you been real cat burglars, perhaps this would have deterred you, to hit two houses right next to each other in quick succession. But this was not Mayberry, it was still summer vacation, and the campus was still had a one-week turnover rate for conference-goers and corporate seminar attendees. The only other campus inhabitants were graduate students who, made easily identifiable by the ever-presence of their bicycle helmets, would rather die than be caught at the top of fraternity hill.

Besides, it would be vaguely poetic to hit the TAEs next, second-in-line as they were in the grand pecking order of mid-nineties Stanford fraternities. The Delta Kappa house might be the only place on campus you could catch a glimpse of the surfer dude/water-polo player straight out of Central Casting–that species of Southern Californian boy with whom you had grown up and for whom you had, in spite of yourself, developed an begrudgingly loyal affection. But for their own part, the TAEs attracted the New Englander version of him, a J. Crew-wearing, witty retort offering, summer home- and trust fund-boasting incarnation of the same snotty jerk, both familiar and strange wrapped into one. It was the house that would take Fred Savage, eventually, and though they were the same, though they were all the same, you were not yet acclimated to it. Your understanding of men in those days–nay, your understanding of people–and their relative value could be read with astounding accuracy from across a room, while intoxicated, at a crowded party. There, in the dark, you studied those differences with a highlighter and tape flags, tucking away your notes for later, never suspecting that the answer was to be discovered in the similarities . . . a milestone of another day.

It was fascinating, this brave new world with such people in it. You sometimes saw a magic to it, a hoodoo voodoo, and that night was no different, when you stumbled into the main room at TAE, after plenty of prepatory drinking precautions. There, you discovered what must have been a beacon divined just for the two of you, Tanya and Anna, and placed high above the dance floor that had been host to countless How Soon Is Now? moments in this and years past. Because there, framed by vaulted ceilings and in the middle large white wall, should have been the fraternity’s letters, TAE, in carved wood and spray-painted gold.

Except.

[click to continue…]

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Date Zero with GrecoMorgan, If Greco Were a Character in Novel, and I Was Much More Interesting Than I Really Am (Part II)

by anna on 11.25.2008

The following is the second part of a fictionalization of my first date with GrecoMorgan, of the Online Dating Chronicles fame, written way after the fact, but way before the Advent of Mr. Right-Click, and with only a very vague commitment to verisimilitude. Still, if you recognize some resemblance to real persons alive or dead, it is probably not coincidental. But we sha’n't speak of it.

. . . and this is disturbing, because although Jane was very annoyed with Frank for his behavior about canceling, on the phone and over the internet, she had already felt so close to him that she wanted to meet him with an eagerness that she could not explain. In that moment, when she first saw Frank and thought “GAY,” her heart sank. This possibility was over. She could not date a gay man, why in the hell was a gay man trying to date her? Was it true, then, her hypothesis that only people who are attracted to men (i.e. gay men and straight women) were attracted to her, that somehow she emitted something akin to testosterone, and so gay men went out with her when they were trying their best to pretend that they weren’t gay?

Jane looked at him pointedly, as he almost walked past her, and he pointed and smiled, hugging her in greeting. Immediately she started wondering why he had hugged her, what that meant, did it mean he was attracted, or was he just friendly, she did not know men who hugged. What was this behavior?

“Hey, have you been here long?” he asked.
“No, just a couple of minutes,” she lied, putting her cell phone away.
“Sorry, I was on the phone,” he said, leading her into La Poubelle.
“The trashcan,” Jane translated, “how appropriate.”

How dare he talk on the phone when I’m waiting for him. Who is this guy? They sat at the bar, and since it was too late for dinner, and since Jane knew that Frank knew she had already eaten, she decided to not take his lack of a dinner offer personally. They sat down and Frank looked at a menu, the bartender asked them what they would like, and Jane ordered the usual Diet Coke, bracing for the Moment—the Moment being that in which the man figures out that she is not drinking, and starts to wonder about it, ultimately culminating in an uncomfortable question and the revelation of the dealbreaker to end all dealbreakers, Jane was an alcoholic—recovering, yes, but it was worse to have to admit this than to be a practicing alcoholic, she sometimes thought, although only in this context. If she were still drinking, she could order a glass of wine, and white knuckle it through the date so that she didn’t order another, successfully hiding her neurosis until it was too late for the guy.

But Frank didn’t seem to notice, he was too busy asking about the wines they had.

“I’m sort of a wine snob,” said Frank.
“Ah,” said Jane, thinking, Wine? what kind of a man chooses wine and not beer? A gay man, that’s who.
“So, you sounded pretty pissed at me on the phone.”
“Oh?”
“Yeah, I’m actually kind of surprised you’re even here.”
“I’m not pissed, I’m just—”
“Frustrated?”
“Yeah.”
“Where did you eat dinner?”
“Oh, it was crappy.”
“Where were you?”
“Los Feliz.”
“Where did you go? The Vermont?”
“Oh, no, we went to—have you ever heard of Mimi’s Café, it’s this crappy place, kinda like Denny’s—”
“Oh yeah, I know Mimi’s Café. We put together a deal for them.”

She liked the way it sounded, putting a deal together. She never had been with a man who spoke this way. The men in her past, such as they were, had nothing to do with business, there were a couple lawyers, but for the most part it was academics and more academics, there was something interesting about being able to talk to them about her work, but as her work became less and less interesting, so they became less and less valuable to her.

The letdown of Frank’s physical presence could not be ignored. No, Frank Christakis was not gay, but he had struggled and lost with appropriate fashion choices, and the trace of a cold he had been battling gave his voice a nasal quality to it that night, making him seem that much more anal retentive. The conflicting elements of his dress confirmed his heterosexuality—his jeans were somewhat dirty, she could tell even with the blazer that he wore that he had a fat, womanish butt, two things that a gay man would never allow—but she could already see in him the shadow self of an old balding Greek-American patriarch, despite his clear efforts to outrun his ethnicity.

Besides, she could tell immediately that he was in the midst of The Crisis, that five-year span in a young urban professional man’s life in which he waits for someone or something to send an unmistakable sign, assuring him that he Had Arrived, finally, at what he had worked so hard for, that this was It, this was as good as it gets, it was time to Settle Down and Start a Family because he’s Not Getting Any Younger. Jane made a point of avoiding men in the midst of The Crisis, which effectively eliminated most successful men from ages 28 through 33, and breaking this rule for Frank seemed absurd, not to mention risky.

[click to continue…]

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Andy, You’re a Star . . . in Nobody’s Eyes, But Mine

by anna on 11.21.2008

Andy was a Sophomore transfer student from the Wharton School of Finance at Penn. Not the Wharton School of Business, because that is a graduate program, of course, though to this day Donald Trump seems to confuse the two when speaking of his daughter’s accomplishments. Or perhaps he just hopes that not enough people know the difference, and will assume that Ivanka has an MBA already, which she kind of does, if you think about it, since what better Masters in Business Administration program could there be than growing up with The Donald in the next bedroom?

When you first met him, Andy still oozed that frenetic energy that he attributed to his PTSD from living in Philadelphia. And since you had never been to Philadelphia, you figured this was as reasonable of an explanation as any other. Every afternoon, he would pace back and forth on the brand new industrial carpet of your freshman dorm room, offering observations about the differences between living in Shallow Alto and Philadelphia, talking about Kurt Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions (which he thought of as some kind of Bible), or relating whatever had happened that morning in his macroeconomics lecture. This was back when Andy went to class, when you both did, and when the extent of your adventures consisted of his tales from the Philly days, where he had procured for himself a switchblade, and where he had met a man who could help him, should he ever need to have someone killed. When Andy brought out his switchblade, you found it peculiar that a 20-year-old from Scottsdale would risk bringing a weapon through airport security at SFO, when you might have been attending school in the safest place in the entire world, provided you weren’t afraid of quadratic equations and all-male a capella groups.

But Andy was different, and over the course of those months, he paced his way into your life, in spite of any objections you might have initially had. Andy smoked Camel Lights, and he did so ostentatiously, out on the sun porch at the end of your hall in Kimball, for everyone entering and leaving the dorm to see. And though you had been smoking more or less regularly since returning from Paris the summer after your Junior year in high school, you never joined him out there. Yours was a very quiet, if not reliably odorless rebellion. It was a war you raged against yourself during early mornings by the beach before going to school or, now that you were in college, over by the Slavic Studies department, where you never saw anyone go, though you assumed they must go, since why have a Slavic Studies department building if nobody ever majored in it?

Andy knew you smoked because you reeked of smoke. It was a tough habit to hide, and other people were confused and annoyed by your efforts to hid the stench. Once, Denise Kahn asked, loudly, in the middle of a French seminar, “Is your perfume like, uh, JUST REALLY STRONG, or something?” And you, humiliated, nodded, even though you had only sprayed the perfume to make it seem less stinky. There was a dirtiness about smoking, and it embarrassed you at the same time as it sucked you in. That was why you did it, and that was why you hid it. You smoked, because you hoped for an early death, and you needed to cling to something, as the song said. These were the days when you went around telling people of your plans to kill yourself once you hit thirty, because you hated life, and why hate life AND be old at the same time?

“Why won’t you come out to the sunporch and have a cigarette with me?” Andy asked you, for the eighty thousandth time. It was an adjustment, smoking had been something you hid the entire time you had done it. Was it something that could or should be shared? You had objected to Andy’s invitations for so long, knowing that he had some kind of a crush on you, and really not wanting to pursue that story arc any further than need be, since he was most definitely not your type and though he made you laugh, you didn’t want him to have any expectations.

But Andy had a way of inserting himself into your life in such a way that after a while you started to wonder what had held his place before he had gotten there. He introduced you to things like putting relish in egg salad, and tabasco sauce on pizza, and smoking because you felt like it, and because that’s what people did. That’s what adult smokers did.

So when you had that first Marlboro Light on the sunporch–because that was what you were smoking back then, before you realized that all Marlboro Lights do is give you a sore throat–when you had that first public cigarette, it probably didn’t seem like a big deal to anybody else. It probably didn’t seem like an earth shattering experience to people walking by, and if they noticed, it would only have been to say, “Huh. I didn’t know she smoked.” But for you, it might have been a little something else. It might have been the first step on a path that was windy, messy, dirty, riddled with stones. And tough, but maybe for the first time ever, the path that was uniquely yours.

And that’s why when Tad, your childhood friend who had attended all of the same schools with you–almost miraculously, really–since Kindergarten, continuing on now, through college, when Tad came over and you told him you wanted to have a cigarette on the sunporch, Andy wasn’t there but he was in a sense. And when Tad said, “You know, the changes I see are interesting. Really. But the smoking, is a little much.”

And you smiled and said, “Tad, I’ve been smoking for 3 years. Where have you been?”

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Date Zero with GrecoMorgan, If Greco Were a Character in Novel, and I Was Much More Interesting Than I Really Am (Part One)

by anna on 11.19.2008

The following is a fictionalization of my first date with GrecoMorgan, of the Online Dating Chronicles fame, written way after the fact, but way before the Advent of Mr. Right-Click, and with only a very vague commitment to verisimilitude. Still, if you recognize some resemblance to real persons alive or dead, it is probably not coincidental. But we sha’n't speak of it.

At 30, Jane Fairfax was a spectacular disappointment to men and women alike. This was not her fault. It was just that the disparity between her ethereal appearance and her Mephistophelean personality troubled people. She was not As Advertised. Oh sure, people like to say you cannot judge a book by its cover, but even these very people tend to make a practice of doing just that. Let’s face it, there is a certain comfort in the practice of judging books by their covers, and the faith that the contents match the binding is a hard thing to let go. And the fact that her content was usually at war with her cover was a problem that had followed Jane wherever she went.

But Frank Christakis totally got Jane. It was his single recommendation.

Unlike most people, Frank knew immediately that there was nothing sweet about Jane, and if you had asked him why, he would not have been able to answer. But he knew it and he craved it, and he thought of her in the same way that one thinks of two Jack ‘n’ the Box tacos (only 99 cents!) at 2:00 a.m. after a night of drinking.

Which is to say, just enough.

For this was the sort of woman that had only entered the realm of possibility for Frank since his foray into investment banking post-Berkeley, post two years in the boiler rooms of JP Morgan, back in Manhattan, where people actually knew what investment banking was, and six foot models flanked the arms of tiny swarthy sweat hogs for the price of a Fendi purse. That was a world that Frank could get behind, he had thought, when he first picked up a copy of Liar’s Poker at age 16, hot off the press, the book that would become the blueprint for his life’s work, when it all seemed so glamorous back in Claremont, when he was fenced in by the walls of his decidedly Greek middle class home, under the tutelage of his intellectual, but overly traditional parents. That was the kind of life he could get behind.

There was much ado about nothing in the planning of the first date between Frank and Jane. Frank’s pursuit of Jane was lackluster from the start, he Could Not Commit® even to email her regularly, after initially responding to her ad, Frank had disappeared for weeks at a time, always resurfacing once she had officially given up on him, with a half-offer of a date of the variety that would have been deemed ‘gay’ by Jane’s friends because it was so noncommittal. Move on, date others, said the Chorus, and she knew they were right. Frank’s behavior had been decidedly gay, but she had some kind of resilient interest in him, and it frightened her, it encouraged her to overlook things

It was highly unlikely that Frank Christakis was in fact homosexual, his admittedly faggy approach to dating aside. But by the year 2000, it had become decidedly difficult to accurately predict the sexual orientation of a man in the under 40 age group within the city limits of Los Angeles, since everyone was on a diet, everyone went to salons, even many men were getting manicures and working out with personal trainers; but, at the very least, Frank was metrosexual in the interest he took in Jane, and Jane was disappointed in herself for agreeing to meet him after the barrage of stupid attempts and last-minute cancellations he had felt comfortable subjecting her to.

At long last, Jane had agreed to meet him at the last second at a bistro in Hollywood, where she was pointed in telling him that she would not be changing from her work clothes, as if this meant something to him, and so Jane showed up there, three minutes early, wearing a black v-neck sweater, a Banana Republic flounce skirt, mary janes, and the every present L’Artisan Tubereuse perfume. She looked OK. She didn’t feel gorgeous, but then, Frank was nothing to write home about. Naturally, Frank wasn’t there yet, so Jane did what any insecure person left waiting alone in Hollywood would do, and got on her cell phone, leaving messages haphazardly for friends of hers throughout the country. After checking her voicemail, and her watch, and beginning the descent into real annoyance with Frank, there he was, walking towards her, a man much darker, much swarthier than she had imagined. And that thought–the thought that goes through a woman’s head when she sees a man, that classifies him irrevocably, but that she will then spend at least three dates trying to battle–that thought, on this night and at this time, was “GAY.”

[To be continued . . .]

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