FOR HE’S A JOLLY GOOD FELLOW

a bit of fiction and some news

This story originally appeared in The Sparrow’s Trombone but then the guy running that website unfortunately passed away and it went dormant. I have resurrected it to be a part of my ongoing WIP. More on that below. This is from the point of view of Noah Turbot who the novel is about…

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The unspoken rule in my eighth grade class, around the cafeteria table and the other furtive areas where kids’ policy held sway, was that if you could pull off a good enough mimicry of a gay man, that meant you weren’t gay. Were not. It had to make people laugh. It only need be five or six seconds long. The way I interpreted it, it needed to be a substantial enough departure from your true self so that people could measure the distance between you and “gay.” It couldn't just be an imitation of a girl. There needed to be a somehow inherent knowledge that this was a gay dude you were doing. And it's not exactly like they were sitting in a circle in the cafeteria trading impersonations. It’s just that one guy, Tim Geintz for example, would do it off the cuff and it would crack everyone up so bad that his stock would kind of rise, and you’d look at him and just know, “He can't be gay, look how he made such fun of gays.” Tim Geintz would do what I would call the well-known voice that might be considered entry level if we’d had more access to info at the time. Matt Welter in gym class had a knack for doing a moderately insightful impression of a guy so exasperated that everything was cause for emotional catastrophe, that he somehow made clear wasn’t himself. Others just archly commented on clothes: “I love your ________.” (Could be shoes or pants or backpack or hairstyle.) All this made me very nervous. About would I be able to do a good impression when my time came. What if I tried and it fell flat, wasn’t believable enough and they jumped to conclusions? So I undertook to do the best impersonation they’d ever seen in their lives. I got busy doing my research. I studied TV and movie characters. In on-screen interactions, gay men seemed to melt with a luxuriant knowledge of everything that went unsaid. I studied Charles Nelson Reilly and Richard Simmons and that guy from the control tower in Airplane! who pops into the frame every so often and says something outrageous. I was going for caricature since I would only have a small window of time to get my point across. Somewhere in that process, I got the picture that gay men were often smart, cultured, sensitive, and kind. Since I was already all of those things, I felt that I had an edge on the competition that nobody could deny. Anyway, there were all kinds of louche, sophisticated, under-the-radar characters to draw from in the media. But I sensed I needed to go deeper. For the truth of the big role, I needed to rely on my own imagination. That’s where my rendition would really get traction. The Brandoesque grace notes, how he played with the girl's gloves in On The Waterfront to signify depth, verisimilitude. I picked the day after much introspection and practice. Time was running out to strike a blow. I could feel people wondering. We were going on a field trip to the Everson Art Museum in Syracuse NY. I noticed no one talked to me on the bus ride, but that was fine as I was going over his part. As we went inside, we gathered into informal clutches of students and I tried to maximize my audience by waiting for the right time. Something just comes over you and you know it’s go time. 

I can’t remember all the finer details. I think I said something about how a male nude in a neo-classical painting hadn’t been short of coupons at the meat counter, leading into something about me needing to watch my girlish figure. There was a musical interlude to my impression, I think: a few lyrics to a racy song I came up with on the spot, impromptu improvisation. The whole affair went on for way longer than five seconds. I wanted to set a theatrical benchmark. I wanted to push it. I slayed. I had them all laughing at me. I tried to look in their eyes for an absence of judgment, nothing that would tell me they suspected me. I had carved out a little zone of safety for myself, an island of security. That was all anyone could ask for. I got invited to parties. I finally had a shy girlfriend (a little later than everybody else, they were all having sex at 14 or 15). I went to college, got married, had a kid, got a job. But even though nobody said otherwise, inwardly I felt nagged by the whole thing at the museum. At a deep dream-level in rooms only accessible through a set of subconsciousness keys, I was dissatisfied with that version. I can’t see clearly, but I can sense that there were aspects of the imitation back then that were kind of rough and wouldn’t meet my present rigorous standards. If I had a time machine, I would race back in time over decades and do it again. A big if, but it opens on large personal vistas that are otherwise hidden. Until the thing with Tony Larry, a robot kid in my head practiced the impression, relentlessly, and I suspected the robot kid with a couple decades more data would be able to pull off such a higher quality and higher fidelity mimicry.

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News:

I have read a short review of The Tattletales written by Gabriel Hart that won’t appear until later in his print-only publication Beyond the Last Estate. I obviously won’t share it here but it was quite buoying to read.

A piece of fiction (also from my new novel) will be published in Farewell Transmission / Across the Wire on 1/30. Look for that. I’m highly anticipating that.

I’ve been on the air twice, interviewed once at Sabrina Small’s podcast Self-Exposure and once on local radio WIOX FM in the Catskills. When I’m able to I will give links to listening to those conversations. Self-Exposure will be on Apple Podcasts and the local radio one will be a SoundCloud file. The interviews were fun and I hope I gave some good perspectives and ideas.

I have blasted this out all over but I’ve been invited to do some duties as an editor for Pig Roast Publishing out of Providence, RI. Jeff Schneider, PRP founder and publisher, has been in talks with me to take on this role which I’m very excited about. I’ve enjoyed the limited editing experience I’ve had working on a book with Sabrina Small.

Also partially on that note, the concept I had had of publishing books as “Prism Thread Books” is being put on hold. Perhaps indefinitely. I just realized that I lack the abilities currently to put out other people’s books and do it justice. I might still publish my own things this way. We’ll see. I’m more in the mode of trying to find a publisher for this thing I’m working on. Which is not done but is growing better and better as I work on it. I’ve described it on twitter as “less a crafted work of fiction as much as it is an artifact of decisions made on the fly in an autobiographically fictive space.” Does that mean it’s autofiction? I don’t know exactly. I’ve never felt the degree of comfort with that word to know if what I’m doing fits that category. Blood Trip was crime fiction but aspects of it derived from personal emotions and fictionalized situations.

And I’m reading books and gearing myself up for editing other people. I’m going back to work in a week. There’s a lot going on. It’s 2024 and time to figure out what’s happening, where to put energy. I’ll try to be more frequent with the newsletters as it’s been a long while since I wrote last.