The Lemonade Stand

Okay, normally I avoid politics because I don't like the divisive effect that the issue has, but a recent law pushed a button because of all the assumptions it made. Here's your warning sign. This is not safe for work, church, or any other circumstances where where it could get you into trouble, and it is graphic as hell. If you go past this point, I am not responsible for hurt feelings. We're all adults here.

A man and some of his friends open a lemonade stand on a street corner downtown. They sell cups of lemonade and soft drinks for fifty cents. They do a brisk business, until a certain law goes into effect.

That morning, a lady walks up. “Let me have one cup of lemonade.”

“Um, are you gay?”

“What?”

“Are you gay?”

She looks at him, shocked, as if he had just asked her if she was gay.

“Are you serious? No! I am not gay!”

“Okay, sorry. I can't serve you. Let me find someone who can. Rick, do you have a problem with straights?”

“Not as long as they're kinky.”

The first man turns back to the woman. “He wants to know if you're into BDSM. You know, spanking, dominance, stuff like that.”

The second man leans over to say, “Dom or sub, doesn't matter. I don't even care if you switch. I believe in equal opportunity.”

She screams, “I don't do any of that!”

The first man, the owner, holds up his hand. “Ma'am, I need you to lower your voice. I'm not going to ask any of my employees to serve someone if it would violate what they believe in. If you can't accept that, you can take your business elsewhere.”

“My boss wants a cup of lemonade, from this stand! Do you have any idea of the hell I'll catch if I come back without it?”

“No, but it sounds like he's using this errand to find out something that you'd be able to sue the hell out of him if he asked for himself. I'll bet he plans some way of getting you to tell him which one of us sells it to you.”

They start going down the line, asking all the employees if they're willing to sell the woman a cup of lemonade.

The woman who runs the register says, “I'll serve you if you're polyamorous, but only poly. I don't agree with swinging. Oh, and don't even ask me to serve you if you cheat, ever.”

The boy who stocks the water and ice says, “Ma'am, I'll be happy to serve you, just as long as you're celibate.”

The grumpy old man mixing the lemonade says, “Forget it. If you're the sort to leave the house without your husband, I don't even want to talk to you.”

A man down at the end smiles and yells out, “I'll serve anyone, as long as they practice bestiality!”

“Jesus, Clive, keep your voice down! Sorry, he went to school with my mom. Let's see who else we have.”

A woman who has been counting the cases of soft drinks waves them both over.

“So you're straight.”

“Yes.”

“Monogamous, not perverted, and not into animals.”

“Definitely not.”

“Married?”

“Yes.”

“I mean, this is your first marriage?”

“Yes.”

“Good. You said you don't cheat,either? By cheating I mean sex with anyone but your husband. I don't care what you call it.”

“No, I have never cheated.”

“You're not a furry, are you?”

When the other woman just looked at her with a blank expression, the employee said, “Never mind, never mind. You don't look like one, anyway. Let me see your neck.”

“My neck? What for?”

“Some people, mostly women, do something I think is absolutely abhorrent. They choke themselves. They think it helps get them off, but it's just sick.”

“My god, I've never even heard of that.”

“I'm sorry you had to. One cup of lemonade?”

“Yes! Finally!”

“Fifty cents please.”

“There's no tax?”

“We eat the tax. The way business has dropped off, we have to.”

The woman puts two quarters in the employee's hand, and just before she hands the cup over, the employee asks, “Wait, you don't masturbate, do you?”

When the woman just stands there in embarrassed silence, the employee shrieks, ”Oh my god, you touched me with your hand! Get out of my sight!”

Near tears, the woman starts to walk away. But the man on the end, grinning, draws another cup and runs up to her.

“Look, I know you don't like animals, but just say you do.”

“No!”

“What'll it hurt? You don't have to mean it, just say it. Then we'll both be happy. Hey, just tell your boss that some new kid served you, and he didn't ask a damn thing.”

The woman looked at the cup in the man's hand, and thought of the casual way her boss had asked her to pick it up on her way back from lunch.

“Okay, I like animals. I absolutely love them. I do them morning, noon, and night. Satisfied?”

“Here you go. Don't worry about paying, I'll take care of it.”

She walks away, but before she gets to the street she turns around and comes back.

“Let me ask you something. You really have sex with animals?”

The man chuckles.

“Lady, I ended up with cancer four years ago. They had to take both the family jewels, and I haven't gotten it up since. Messing with people like you is one of the few joys I still have.”

Laughing at other people's terror

My first marriage was a rocky one. We moved up to Dumas, a small town in the panhandle where my wife was born and where her parents lived. Being suddenly thrust into a town where I knew no one and where there were none of my usual interests put me in a bit of a spot. Everyone was friendly, but there weren't many people I could connect with.

At one point, the company I worked for changed their vacation schedule to synchronize it with the calender year instead of the fiscal year. Those of us with days left to take had to take them before the end of the period. I took four Fridays in a row off, and spent the extra time with my daughter.

Those were good days. I would sleep in (my insomnia was worse back then), write for a few hours or drive down and explore Amarillo, then pick Maddy up from the babysitters a couple of hours early. My wife was in a work-study program at the time, so we had the rest of the day to ourselves. These were Maddy-Daddy days.

We would go to the park, stop by the library to return books and check out new ones, play games, and read together. We had fun. Being the skilled chef that I am, when it was time for dinner I would boil water to make macaroni and cheese, and open a can of corn or some other vegetable that we both enjoyed. Before bed, we would watch some TV together.

Around that time, MTV came up with a new reality show called 'Fear.' They would gather a group of young, enthusiastic kids and drop them in an abandoned prison, hospital, or some other place that would make a good setting for a B-list horror movie. I've never had a taste for reality shows, because the concept has the same flaws that you'll find in true crime books and movies 'Based on a true story.' Reality doesn't make a good story, not unless you chop out a lot of the relevant facts.

But Fear, and all the similar shows that followed it gave me something I could use: an illustrated guide on how people scare themselves. I don't think that any of those kids found real ghosts, and I'm highly suspicious that it's become common practice to have some member of the production crew hidden at the location to slam doors, move objects, and open windows when no one else is looking. But the show, and the current shows, often managed to get the mood and tone down near-perfect. The kids were the stars, and deservedly so. They made up their own reasons why the spirits are either trying to communicate with them or telling them to get out. They nervously crept down into basements with rats, leaking pipes, and broken windows, wondering where those squeaking, dripping, and whispering sounds were coming from. Clutching each other in the dark, with one light right on each person's face (so the camera could get a good shot) and one focused light that only let them see a few feet ahead, they never let their night vision build up. Take away the scary back-story, or just let them perform all their tasks during the day, and the series would have been like every other reality show. Just overacting drama.

You haven't gotten the impression I didn't love watching it, though, have you? Or that I don't take advantage of the fact that SyFy has episodes of a similar series up on their website? Sorry, but when it comes to scaring people, I'll get out the Dots and the popcorn. My daughter got her share of giggles and smiles out of it, too.

Wow, thinking about that makes me want to write.

Back in the saddle

With all the other stuff on the burners, it's been a while since I sent anything out into the cold, cruel, world. Unfortunately, the world has not yet beaten its path to my door to throw money at me. Bummer. Guess I still have to pitch my stuff like everyone else.

So this week I've sent an old short story set in the Great Dustbowl to Burnt Offerings Books, and less than a minute ago I shot an angry little piece off to The Dark, a magazine that publishes dark fantasy. Both stories are ones that hit you in the heart, as well as all the nerves that run down your spine. Being in love doesn't stop you from needing to put food on the table, and anger can do a lot if you just focus. Fame and fortune can't be far behind, right?

Snicker.

Our new dog is slowly coming to grips with the fact that the cats are not going to ever be the sort to enjoy big, sloppy licks in their faces. The cats are absolutely refusing to accept the possibility that this big, funny-looking stranger with a cold nose is going to be around for the duration. Diamond keeps trying to give her new pact mates a friendly sniff, but one hiss and she runs away whimpering. Try to imagine a puppy with the awkwardness of a teenager who is terrified of two cats a quarter of her size, but who jumps between a stranger and my wife, barking and growling, when that stranger appears unannounced. Fortunately, the 'stranger' was a friend who had just changed clothes and her hair.

Still pounding on In The Dark, and still working on what I want my website to look like.

Still writing, now with a dog sleeping at my feet.

Another old gem

Recently I got another of those urges to to revisit one of the old movies that stuck in my head when I was younger. These are the films that I watched either lying in my bed with the lights off some night during the summer or the weekend when I could stay up as late as I wanted, or sitting on my mom's bed on a Saturday morning taking advantage of her larger TV while she was at work. During those years I probably watched hundreds of movies, ranging from the high-quality, professionally made ones to the films where you could see the actors standing there, waiting for their opponent to throw a punch or kick so they could scream 'Ugh!” with Shakespearean passion.

In that odd mix, a certain group has always had its own special place. They're not only horror movies, but they have a certain flavor and style that comes from being made in England by Hammer and other companies that knew what they were doing. This is where I got a lot of the images and situations that eventually gelled into the protoplasm that I pull my ideas from. This is the stuff that nightmares are made from.

'The blood on Satan's Claw,' from what I've read, came from trying to follow up on the success of 'Witchfinder General.' It takes place in an isolated country village, where an innocent/naive farmer plows up an inhuman set of bones. From there, the whole village is affected by something that we never get a good look at, and in ways that are more subtle than you will see in most other movies, past or present.

Not having seen it in many years, when I sat to down and watched it last week, it was all the details that made it stand out. Aside from good acting, there are subtleties that make it feel bigger and richer than its contemporaries. The evil corrupts the young people in the village, and they seem to take to their new lives with wicked enthusiasm, with passion that everyone else lacks. The local reverend loses control of the children in his Bible class, and ends up reviled and accused of murder. The only adults we see as part of the unrest are the truly old, part of an age that this bright, shining country worked hard to bury, and is working harder to forget. There are references to England splitting from Catholicism and creating their own church, as well as to generation gaps and the slow struggle out of the dark ages. We get the sense of larger events that overshadow the villagers and their problems. If they die, and darkness takes them and everything they know, it's doubtful anyone in the outside world would even notice.

All that in ninety-seven minutes, made back in nineteen seventy one. They didn't have CGI, or digital watches, or Pac Man. Star Wars had not yet come out, and Elvis was still alive. They just had film, actors, and a script.

That's writing.

The world's biggest marshmallow

So yesterday, my wife and I brought home a new addition to the household. She's named Diamond, is a boxer/retriever mix, and in the first hour she had established herself in the pecking order somewhere below our long-haired cat. A single paw-swipe at her nose sent her running away and hiding behind my wife, who was trying to be supportive while laughing so hard she had to sit down.

The book is coming along, slowly, but it's getting where I need it to be. I'm also looking at new markets where I can submit some of the stories I have sitting around on my hard drive. Also, I'll probably go through Roja at least one more time before I consider it ready to use as agent-bait. It's nice to have a plan of what to do. Now the only thing left is to follow through.

Some small part of my brain is also going back to The Red Man Burning. I haven't worked on it in a while, not since I missed getting In The Dark done on time (which still annoys the hell out of me). I'm having to go back to all those weird, awkward moments from when I was a kid. That's a time when you have to find your own way in a world where you have almost no say in what goes on in your own life, the people who have power of life and death over you have a set of priorities that they created long before you ever showed up, and everything from doorknobs to grocery shelves are designed for people who are six inches to a foot taller than you. Childhood has been romantisized in our culture into some magical, beautiful period in our lives when the world is fresh and beautiful and there's no lesson so hard that we can't get through it. I'm sure someone, somewhere, grew up in a place like that, but the more people I meet, the more I think that childhood is when spirits are broken and psychopaths learn just how well they're going to fit in. We all go through that period, and then we selectively scrub our memories of it until we're left with something we can tell ourselves and other people.

That's what I need to capture.

In the middle of writing this, Diamond started whining, which we've figured might be her signal for 'Could I step outside for a moment? I have some business to attend to.' I was only planning on taking her out into the backyard, but right now it's cool and misty out, with something that's not quite fog thickening up to the point where anything farther than a block away is hidden in soft gray clouds. I grabbed her leash and we both took a tour of the neighborhood while her toe nails clicked on the sidewalk, and every other sound was muted by the mist. Beautiful.

To end this on a cheery note, if I can get this to work right, I'll be posting a picture of our new dog right here. She's a big, furry lump of woof, and she's dozing in front of my desk while I'm writing this.

Still writing.

Getting better, and getting back to work

Well, after laying in bed for three weeks or so, it actually felt good to get out and hit my day job Thursday and Friday. Exhausting, but good. Coming home Friday I felt like I had worked forty hours straight, and was ready for another three weeks of recuperation.

It's slow getting back into 'In the Dark.' There are parts where I can see what it needs, but the words are coming out in a gradual trickle. I reread scenes that I've considered part of the foundation, and now I'm not as sure of them as I used to be. Worse, some parts do nothing, absolutely nothing. They don't grab me, advance the story, or even flow. What they feel like is damp paper that's been lying out in the rain because they fell out of a folder while I was thinking about something else. Yet you know what? I wouldn't trade one bit of it for pages of the same thing pressed in gold leaf, because they're mine, and because even if I end up plowing all of it up and starting over, it'll be the soil that the book grows from.

My wife and I were able to get out of the house over the weekend, despite a sudden drop in temperature and some rain. She hauled me out to go see 'I, Frankenstein,' which is not an intellectual movie, but was a heck of a lot of fun. I had read some reviews of it that were less than kind about the fact that the flick seems to recycle the plot from 'Underworld,' and it also sort of recycles Bill Nighy in a role similar to the one he played in that movie. But you know what? It was still a good watch. Sometimes it's nice to just let the higher parts of your brain relax and enjoy, as a friend of mine puts it, some “kicks and 'splodes.”

Still writing.

Night of the (maybe) living dead writer

Okay, this was not how I had planned to start off the new year. Getting sick as a dog and being able to just lay in bed, sweating and shivering, was not high on my list of fun things to do. It still isn't.

This crud has wiped me out so much, I've even fallen behind on reading, let alone putting any of my own words down. 'In the Dark' still needs to be finished, and yet the only thing I feel like doing half the time is crawling back in bed. Through all this my incredible wife has patiently nursed me, making sure I ate enough to keep from wasting away and drank enough water to keep from crumbling to dust. Seriously, if it weren't for her I would be in some really bad shape.

Prime Books has the release date for Handsome Devil as February eleventh. If I keep checking it, some part of my head tells me I'll freeze the passage of time and be forever locked into that infinitely smaller moment just before it comes out. Don't look at me like that. If you're expecting logic, how the heck did you find my blog?

Let me get better, and then we'll see some real lunacy. At some distant point before I contracted this bug, my wife and I got to talking about a genesis for the vampire myth, one that tells a whole new creation story.

Let me get better enough to write.