One of the Famous Writers I read when forced to do so for a class says never to work on more than one piece at a time. This is probably Smart.

He says to focus and finish, finish and focus. But rather than this (I know I will have to finish some of these one day), I usually have about four stories going on at once, all of which drag on (usually until I get bored). Yes, that is what is happening, and so I thought I'd put up another one of the stories I've been working on.

This one I think is about 1/2 to 1/3 done. It's a short story, unlike "Swallow." This is the one that I use to be sarcastic and biting about life when I need to do so. I hope to finish it soon and paste the rest up here for you consumers of my little crazy mind....

***Mugging Love
When Jose Luis—the only man Errol depended on for extreme villainy and petty theft—fell fast in love with the thirty-first woman he mugged, Errol felt everything slide away from him with the frenetic energy of a house caught on the downside of an undermined cliff. Later, a pissed-off and egregiously-victimized Errol would think about that moment, trying to decide which detail set the occurrence just on one side of inevitable, instead of simply the possible. Was it the t-shirt, a black rag with the Boy Scouts insignia on the left breast, that Errol had found in a free-bin and given to Jose Luis because it promoted irony, but was still too large for Errol’s slight frame? Perhaps that was the tiny detail that screwed up Errol’s life forever; never prone to homoerotic thought, Errol knew for certain that Jose Luis’s tattoo, subtly creeping out of the right sleeve, caught the black hue of that shirt and glimmered in a way that was considerably attractive, particularly to high-strung white girls in a crunch. Errol could never be sure, and possibilities like these left him wondering if perhaps the whole incident was his fault. And the result was, endless such details comprised the bulk of his thoughts for an extremely lengthy period of sulk.

From this later vantage point, the evening seemed to start off the right way. Errol had been knocking about the video arcades most of the day, and was starting to feel the profound weariness of having glued eyes to a screen that disappeared each second, only to be continuously replenished by slightly modified screens, transitions that were somehow dependent on one flick of the finger, one twist of the hand. Errol loved this light motion, although he would have had a hard time pinning this love of the arcade on any particular moment of achievement or catharsis. Perhaps it was simply the sensation that if, at any moment, a film director caught on the wrong side of this humming Bville metropolis, happened to wander into the arcade looking for directions, he might note Errol’s primed musculature, his inner focus and drive, and perhaps Errol’s high scores, and thus offer him a job, or at least a spot on a new game-show that featured beautiful gamers in their milieu.

Despite the recurring fantasy, Errol’s interest in the game was beginning to wane when Jose Luis walked by the arcade window toting what distinctively looked like a forty wrapped within a carefully squeezed brown paper bag.

“Now that,” Errol said, slapping the side of his machine, “Is what I was looking for.” This being said, he grabbed his seven remaining quarters from the edge of the game and ran out the door, taking only the time to slap a thirteen year old on the head as he passed him. “Fucker.”

Running to catch up with Jose Luis, Errol watched the gait of his friend: the low pants riding the knee-line, the black leather belt strapped loosely, allowing sufficient room for hitch, and the new rag-shirt draped casually over a pair of Simpsons boxers. Jose Luis was recognizable anywhere, not for the adherence to fashioned cliché, but for his specific guided aimlessness as he approached various sections of the sidewalk. While Bville, a small outback north of Seattle, tended to produce acned boys with wicked-bad pants, Jose Luis threw new light with his disingenuous propensity to step off the sidewalk into busy intersections and then look up startled as fingers flew around him. Errol, who was more like the spotted apple lying nonchalantly close to the local tree born down with fungi, was a great admirer of Jose Luis’s idiosyncratic luminescence, and he especially bowed down to all the words Luis used, words that seemed quite intelligent enough to scorch the ink off the local college students’ theses. This verbal genius was also compounded with more genuine punk macho than any of the other cabrónes within such a small and lost little town.

Errol practically swooned under the idea of becoming, or perhaps just growing into, some micro-version of such reality-escaping high, and he took every possible opportunity to follow Jose Luis, just as he was doing now, although he would rather have committed a diver’s seppuku by throwing himself down a steep bluff, than admit, via action or verbalization, the true extent of his platonic adoration. As he made the last sprint to finally catch up with Jose Luis, he leapt into the air and slammed Jose Luis’s back, almost knocking the forty out of Luis’s hands.

“Shit, Errol, fuck-you man.” Jose Luis did not even need to look up to know that it was Errol utilizing the masculine teenager’s form of hugging. Sliding off the sidewalk, he handed over the paper bag and shook his head. Errol noticed right away that Luis’s eyes were rimmed red, and wondered whether they might be able to make an evening out of it. Something stirred harder, the winter hours slipping feline into alignment, cold and echoing, some good shiznit going down.

Before the unfortunate incident that Errol was to later endlessly analyze, Jose Luis and Errol had been enjoying themselves quite a bit, frolicking in nightly anarchy, garage music, tattoos, and philosophies that Jose Luis understood, but that Errol thrived under, and Errol had developed a taste for it, perhaps an urge to backfill mines that could not be filled unless they were doing—not that the doing lead anywhere, but that staying still was cause for panic, as if Bville could, if it chose, eat the world, and Errol needed to keep hitting new spots, finding new folks to mess with, to not be swallowed too. Errol took a drag from the paper bag, churning the piss-thin beer as far into gut as possible.

From here, the night seemed to stay on track, although Errol would sometimes tweak one action or another to see if he could just re-adjust history enough to make things a little bit better, for himself of course.

Jose Luis and Errol finished their beer, and although it was a pleasant size for two teenage boys both under the ideal height of six-foot, it was not quite enough fill their expectations of sufficiently drunken debauchery. After the forty, their actions turned into a game of hunt-the-alcohol as they ended up pacing the downtown area, stopping at two gas stations where they tried to bribe several unfortunately-idealistic customers to break the exceedingly unreasonable alcohol laws and buy them several more beers. The fact that these folks all turned Errol and Jose Luis down, even under a potential ten-dollar influx into their wallets, showed that even the most suited of Pacific Northwesterners (as indeed, three or four were) truly had no solid sense of supply-demand ethics. Jose Luis and Errol started to get frustrated.
Truth be told, each of them had their different reasons for wanting to get shnockered beyond belief. A good shnockering was really the height of ambition for most boys their age—an almost-universal characteristic that doesn’t truly change until boys hit their mid-twenties and find different forms of ambition to keep them busy until they realize that their passionately adhered-to ambition was really formed under a tight denial of their inevitable demise, and thus revert back to their teenage goal of achieving a good shnockering, only this time with different deterrents to finding alcohol (such as a “good” job, a “good” wife, or maintaining “good” health). But despite this, Errol just wanted to get drunk because it seemed like a good change, a means of driving off the ennui, and something great fun to do with his platonically-adored friend Jose Luis.

Jose Luis, however—and it must be admitted that Errol truly had no idea about what was going on in his beloved’s head—was at the moment undergoing an admirable existential crisis. A few astute observations on Jose Luis:

You might be inclined to notice his name and wonder if he is Mexican, if his family was a poor immigrant one, and whether he was suffering under the burden of a society that eats immigrants for scapegoating fodder. Although the latter was certainly true, the former two were not. Jose Luis was partially Colombian and his family—indeed his grandfather—had escaped Columbia right before the major perception became that Columbians were nothing but drug-traffickers or thugs. In fact, this grandfather was a bookbinder in Columbia, and had simply run out of work, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez had not yet become popular and things were a little economically tough in his homeland. So, he moved to the land of opportunities, married a poor German woman, fathered a half-European daughter who then insisted on naming her one-fourth Latin son after a book-binding grandfather who had died when she was quite young.

As a result, Jose Luis had the name, and he also had most of the skin—he was slightly darker than most of his classmates, and also had dark eyes and hair. This, coupled with a sneaky Pacific-Northwest subliminal, but ferociously denied, dislike of anyone who could potentially not speak in an unaccented English (although British and Australian were cute), meant that Jose Luis had grown up under a pressure to meet Standard. Grade-A Latin boy standard. The Granola and Redneck of the county joined forces in Jose Luis’s Ferndale school system, and simply expected him to dance.

The dance was something like a salsa, combined with handkerchief-wrapped gang warfare.

The Granola were entranced and supportive. They would ask Jose Luis if he was bilingual (he was not), and then cluck their tongues in sadness over the lost cultural inheritance. The girls would both secretly want him to take them out, pay for all their meals, open doors for them, whisper delicates about their twinkling blue eyes, then spin them silly in dances of one-two-three, and also be scared that he was going to pressure them hard like a Latin man. Because he was handsome, no denying that. And so their actions, the actions of the granola, would be to overtly support him, while secretly convincing themselves that their support meant that they were him. This little imaginative denial gave them a brief window of opportunity to shirk their boring, moderately evil, certainly non-artistic, white, related to “the Man,” hegemonic heritage, in favor of something that let them off of the historic-responsibility charts. Pretending to be a real live “minority” could be so relieving sometimes.

The rednecks, on the other hand, had a slightly more honest approach to friendship, if not more admirable. For their parts, they would simply steer away from Jose Luis—avert their eyes, their friendship, their dialogues just to the corner of the room that Jose Luis was not in. For the most part, Pacific-Northwest rednecks would tuck their hats further down upon their head, look the other direction, and mutter very inaudibly under their breath about “speaking English or getting out” and “soccer, a pussy version of football.” They weren’t interested, didn’t act interested, and felt no pressure to appease a half-century’s worth of using Jose Luis’s direct relatives as cheap migrant labor to fill their capitalistic pockets, in part because they couldn’t even imagine themselves a part of some smoothly-oiled capitalistic machine. Their responsibility, as they felt it, was to make their life work as best as possible, and they didn’t have time to feel bad about anything but cheating on their spouses or drinking too much.

All of this, whether resulting in hospitality or not, had a crisp sort of irony for Jose Luis, particularly at this time of his life—seventeen and simply waiting for school to be done with—due to the little fact that he grew up in what was decidedly an upper-middle class household. He had no brothers or sisters, his family was no longer Catholic, and his father was a seventh- or eighth- generation American business-owner, who had a rather prosperous lumberyard that catered more to Seattleites than to the local residents. Jose Luis grew up in a house with five bedrooms, a once-a-week maid (Latin to show patronage), and two educated parents. His room had a large-screen television, a computer, the latest video games, and also some windsurfing paraphernalia, and the garage held Jose Luis’s unused Mazda Miata, which got admirable gas mileage that meant the hundred-dollar allowance Jose Luis was given to keep it in gas was no problem.

But all of this was in direct contrast to the dance. The dance he was asked to do. And for quite some time now, Jose Luis, with the enlisted assistance of Errol, had been stealing and thieving, drinking and fighting, and in general living up to what seemed to be the forced expectations of everyone around him. This wasn’t because Jose Luis was an easily manipulated boy, but rather because he was profoundly exhausted.

Actually, the transition had happened two years ago when a teacher Jose Luis had a crush on lived up to the title, and crushed him bad. To keep it short, there is inevitably a time in a boy’s life when they fall in love with a pretty teacher. They have to do it, or they will never ever develop the appropriate respect for women. This rite of passage allows the boy to acknowledge women’s extreme potential for brilliance (even if what they are admiring are some legs), while meeting some high expectations of student/lover behavior themselves. This particular crush, however, ended up with a bitchy former-sorority girl, who was desperately pleading with her god to get her out of the Ferndale school district, to accuse Jose Luis of cheating, kick him out of her class, fail him, and call his parents and tell them that they had raised a morally reprehensible boy, just because a granola had cheated off of Jose Luis’s paper and Jose Luis had also brought an apple to his crush. The former-sorority girl teacher convinced herself that the apple was a mortal insult to her, a slimy smile after an intellectual rape, and thus slapped poor Jose Luis harder than even a cheat might have deserved. And of course, this slick-haired Mexican boy was the cheat, a thought that wasn’t even challenged in this slightly stupid teacher’s head.

As a result, the very intelligent Jose Luis got pissed off. And decided that it was time to re-align this County’s ethical and financial status quo.