The Philosophy of the Bobby Pin

By Paul Gavin

This collection of sixteen short stories, told out of sequence and in varying tenses, has recurring characters woven throughout, creating an experience that reads more like a novel.

It begins and ends with the stories of Wade Chalmers, waiting for a flight at the airport in Sydney, debating about whether to board his plane or head to the outback to die in the desert.

As the other stories unfold, we gain insight into the cause of Wade’s emotional strife and how an accident on the night of his graduation sixteen years earlier has indirectly linked him to many of the other characters.

Among them, Bronwen Hughes, about to leave for a semester abroad in France, only to discover that her brother Traynor not only totaled her car the night before, but that he fled the scene of the accident, which cost the life of Wade’s high school sweetheart. Bronwen winds up on the run in Europe, even though she wasn’t in the car at the time of the accident.

Or there’s Camden, a friend of Traynor’s, in the car on the night of the accident, whose ongoing attempts at carrying on a normal life with the woman he loves are constantly thwarted by animal attacks, but he can’t tell whether they’re real or all in his head.

Brannen, also in the car with Traynor and Camden the night of the accident, years later drives across country to surprise his girlfriend during spring break from college, only to discover that she’s seeing someone else.

Alternate versions of Wade’s story play out. In one, he decides to go to the outback afterall, but along the way he meets a Sydney businesswoman. They hit it off right away and their instant, yet quirky romance could spell the end of his plan to die in the desert.

Attending a screenwriting group after college in Los Angeles, Traynor is faced with a critique of one of his screenplays, which humiliates him in front of the group. His attempt at getting back at his critic could spell disaster.

Millicent Erstad, a wayward college student, alone on campus during spring break is presented with a couple options for combating her loneliness, one of them being the offer of an affair with her Ethics teacher.

Another version of Wade’s story finds him on the plane back to Los Angeles, on which an encounter with another passenger could lead to admittance to the Mile High Club, but it turns out the other passenger isn’t a stranger after all.

Extreme and uncompromising, those stories and more create a unique, at times serious, other times darkly comedic, reading experience.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Gavin
• Release date: Jul 6, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476476667

Paul Gavin

Paul Gavin was born in Oregon and grew up in Southern California. He has a BFA in Film from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He currently lives California where he works as a Photojournalist and Screenwriter. Prior to The Philosophy of The Bobby Pin, Paul published a collection of poetry called Riots Never End. The Philosophy of The Bobby Pin is his first collection of short stories.

Book preview

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE BOBBY PIN

Paul Gavin

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Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2012 Paul Gavin

Cover photo by Martina Moreno

License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

Departures

Consciousness by Proxy

When We Were Future

Copenhagen Suite

The Philosophy of the Bobby Pin

Opinionated Assholes: A Love Story

Chapter 28

The Odium Transference

The Fourteenth Pillar

Alligators in the Sewers

The Safe House

The Liberation of Millicent Erstad

The Philosophy of the Bobby Pin II

Inconsiderate Pieces of Shit: A Love Story

A Season in Purgatory with Angels

Arrivals

About the Author

PREFACE

When I read a book, I’ll eagerly skip right to the story itself; writing off any Preface, Introduction, or Acknowledgments as incidental. I’m triggered by the death of J.D. Salinger to write one, though. His passing, I feel, necessitates that these short stories be accompanied by a disclaimer.

I unknowingly began writing The Philosophy of the Bobby Pin in 1998. I was taking a Creative Writing class at Pasadena City College in Southern California. As a result of not only that class, but writing that I was doing in my spare time, I emerged from that period of my life with a surplus of poems and short stories, all of which languished in rarely clicked-upon regions of my computer for a decade.

In 2008, growing increasingly frustrated with what seemed like the impossibility of breaking into the film industry through screenwriting, I decided self-publishing a novel might be the key to launching a writing career. Writing novels was a passion of mine that predated my interest in screenwriting, but I had let that goal fall by the wayside. In going back to the format of novel writing, I discovered that writing novels was more difficult than writing screenplays, in that screenplays are more of a blueprint for action, whereas a novel really has to have it all. Impatient with the process and eager to get something out there, I looked through what I had that was already done, and that’s when I came across the poems and short stories from that era of my life ten years earlier. I felt like the short stories would need some work, but that the poetry was pretty self-contained and complete and ready to go.

In November of 2008, I published most of that poetry in a book called Riots Never End, Book 1: Poems of Hate & Love ... But Mostly Hate.

My intent was to eventually publish a second book that I would call Riots Never End, Book 2: Poems & Short Stories of Love & Hate ... But Mostly Love, and it would contain remaining poems and the short stories that I would rewrite without delay.

At that time, there were seven short stories. What started as rewrites turned into three years of throwing out some stories, writing entirely new ones, and being taken aback as the five stories that survived became sixteen and they evolved into their own thing—and I mean that in two ways—they were no longer short stories; they were one giant story told in fragments—and they took on a life of their own.

One such story, Chapter 28, was based on something I had written for that class. The original assignment was to write a stream-of-consciousness monologue. I think for a decade its title was even, Monologue. I retitled it Chapter 28, when the film, Chapter 27, came out in 2008; I guess in an effort to prevent that film from getting the last word on, The Catcher in the Rye.

Chapter 28 has since evolved into more than it was, but the basic idea is still there. Unfortunately, I feel I have to spoil what was meant to be a surprise ending, but the story culminates with a fictional account of a chance encounter with J.D. Salinger.

Now let’s back up to when I was in high school. I had always loved writing, but reading, especially assigned books in school always seemed an insurmountable task to me. For the duration of high school, I don’t think I read a single assigned book all the way through; at most I read pages here or there, skimmed; looked for key points, etc. What I did read during the first three years of high school, in my spare time were screenplays and screenwriting books—as in how to write them.

My senior year of high school, my uncle sent me a copy of The Catcher in the Rye as a Christmas gift. At the time I wasn’t living at home and had some downtime New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day and I believe I probably sat down to read Catcher, thinking it would be like every other fiction book I’d read up until that point, which was that I’d read a portion of the first page, get tired of it, not relate, and give up.

What happened instead was that I read it in the course of two days, pretty much just with a break to sleep, and had what I consider to have been one of the most tangible literary experiences of my life.

As anyone familiar with the book could imagine, reading that as an alienated and downcast 17-year-old during the holiday season, after never having been able to identify with a character in fictional literature prior to that, was quite profound.

Since then I’ve read all four of J.D. Salinger’s books available as of this writing and I can easily say that each book was a similar experience, and that my affinity for them increased with each one.

Now that I’ve established myself as someone who didn’t read a substantial amount of anything I was assigned in high school, I feel the need to add that for about five years beginning in 2003, I was working in the Los Angeles area and taking mass transit and found that books were the best way to pass the time on the train; so I took up reading. Like the screenwriting books I read in high school, the books I initially started out reading were self-help and how-to books. Around this same time, a friend of mine gave me a used copy of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley.

Brave New World was assigned to me by my English teacher, Mr. Webb, during my senior year of high school. This is pure conjecture on my part, but Mr. Webb never seemed too happy about how his life had evolved; at least that’s the way he came across in the classroom. I guess what I’m saying is, the default emotion was not happiness. But when he was talking about a book he liked, you could tell that book was something that did make him happy and the reason he was a teacher was because good literature was a passion for him. This passion was most apparent to me when he was teaching Brave New World.

It was autumn of my senior year; a matter of months before I would wind up reading Catcher. I read a few sentences from the first page of Brave New World. I remember thinking it was something I couldn’t relate to and that by asking us to read it, Mr. Webb was asking way too much.

A decade later, in 2003, while commuting to and from work, I read the tattered old paperback of Brave New World that my friend had given me. I remember distinctly one day, probably around seven in the morning, standing among hordes of people in the Red Line subway platform underneath Union Station in downtown Los Angeles and reading a paragraph deep into Brave New World, and being so moved by, and identifying so much with what was on the page that it seemed the volume of everything around me muted and everyone was moving in slow motion and I guess I began to see what Mr. Webb saw.

At some point when I was in the process of reading that book, I remember looking for the copyright date in the front of the book and thinking how amazing it was that a writer could write something in 1931 that someone in 2003 could read and relate with. In a way—thanks to the prevalence of anti-depressants—I think I felt like I was in the very time and place that he had imagined while writing that book. That was when it dawned on me, the intimate connection of the writer and the reader. I’d like to think that what Huxley was feeling as he wrote in 1931, I was sharing the same sentiment in 2003. I suppose that was when I fully realized what I was experiencing on New Year’s Day during my senior year of high school, while reading Catcher: the transmission of and the universality of emotions through words.

By that time in my life I’d alienated pretty much everyone I’d gone to high school with. I looked around on the Internet trying to find Mr. Webb. From what I could tell he was no longer teaching at my old high school and I couldn’t find any other traces of him. I wanted to apologize to him for not reading Brave New World in his class. Back then, he was probably painfully aware of the fact that I hadn’t read more than a couple sentences of the book and was making up answers on tests. I also wanted to tell him that I finally did read it and that it was now one of my favorite books.

I never did find him. Years later, I would find out from an old high school friend I reconnected with through social networking, that Mr. Webb had passed away.

I felt intense guilt about every book I was assigned in high school but hadn’t read and set off reading as many of them as I could remember being assigned.

That initial experience of reading Catcher has always stuck with me. In the creative writing class in 1998, when I wrote the monologue that the short story Chapter 28 in this book was based on, it was a time when J.D. Salinger was conjured up very little in popular culture, but I was unceasingly fascinated by his self-imposed exile and what I wrote for that assignment was a stream-of-consciousness narrative of what I thought it would be like to meet him, and presented the question of, if I did meet him by chance, would I know it? And ultimately, I guess the point of what I turned in to that class was the tragedy of meeting your hero and not knowing it.

I suppose that by writing this Preface, I’m making known to myself what was otherwise not known, which is the theme of my short stories: an exploration of chance encounters and what we choose to do with them, nurture or destroy them; pay attention to or ignore them; and what impact it can have on our lives and the lives of others.

Along with that aforementioned chance encounter with J.D. Salinger there are other references to him and his books, not only in Chapter 28, but also in some of the other short stories. Because of the prevalence of Salinger and his books within my short stories, he has been on my mind a lot. I suppose he’s been on my mind ever since that New Year’s Day during my senior year of high school, but in the three years I’ve spent finessing these short stories, I’d say that my thoughts of him have only escalated. I had planned to publish the short stories in May of 2009, but kept rewriting and modifying them in circles, over and over again, and it wasn’t until near the end of that summer that it started to occur to me that I might actually have something here; if I ever were to finish it. At the same time it made me think about Salinger’s age. I knew he was getting up there and had to be 90 at the time. I’d spent most of my time since summer of 2009 fearing his death.

In fearing his death and telling myself that most people aren’t lucky enough to make it to their nineties, I was working up scenarios in my head, like that in his perfection of solitude, maybe he had requested that when he were to die that his death would not be made public and that his unpublished writings would go unpublished and maybe he had already passed on and the public wasn’t privy to it. I suppose I had built it up in my mind that his seclusion would never end. I think not knowing was easier. What we knew was that he was sequestered somewhere and probably writing and enjoying it and the thought that he was just out there somewhere doing what he loved for himself and no one else was one I didn’t mind.

Sunday, January 24, 2010, I arrived at a point that I thought I’d never reach: The Philosophy of the Bobby Pin was done. It would need some proofreading, and editing, but I finally felt for the first time there was nothing more to add to it, and nothing major to change.

Four days later, Thursday, January 28, 2010, I began the day to news that I was hoping I would never read, which was that J.D. Salinger had passed away the day before at the age of 91. This was a definite game-changer, at least in my mind. The following 24 hours, the Internet was abuzz with people trying to out-J.D.-Salinger-fan each other in sentence fragments on social networking sites, while news articles begged the question of What’s in the safe?

As I write this I’m not so sure what the future holds for J.D. Salinger’s writings, but my hope, and perhaps the whole point of this Preface is that The Philosophy of the Bobby Pin will be read from the mindset of a period piece set in a time when J.D. Salinger was alive and in seclusion and was an enigma aside from his pre-1965 publications.

If this book of short stories were to be viewed in any vein with relation to Salinger or his works, my preference would be that it be viewed as a love letter to the author of the first fiction book I read fully and enjoyed—nothing else.

Articles have since come out about what his life in seclusion was like, what he wore, what stores he shopped at, and what kind of car he drove. If I wanted to, I could go back into Chapter 28 right now and change things to match those descriptions, but I’m keeping it as is, and as it was when all those details were a mystery.

There’s a well-defined timeline in my mind of when each of the stories take place. When each one takes place is more apparent in some than in others. In some it’s blatantly mentioned. In others there might be a brief pop culture reference that suggests when it takes place. And in some, it’s not mentioned at all.

Chronologically speaking When We Were Future takes place the earliest, in June of 1993. Condescending Pieces of Shit: A Love Story takes place the latest; it’s the only one that I don’t have a specific time period in mind for, but I consider it to be Present Day. Most importantly, but probably least obvious, Chapter 28, while originating from something I wrote in 1998—to fit the chronology of the overall piece—I consider it to take place in spring of 2005; when J.D. Salinger was alive and I presume well and writing in seclusion.

When the other stories take place, I’ll leave up to the powers of your own perception.

As for Salinger’s seclusion, it raises the question, at least for me, Are we the phonies that Holden railed against? Reading some of the things people have posted in mourning on the Internet, I’d be inclined to say, Yes. But I suppose the reasons for his seclusion are fit for the speculation that myths and legends are made of.

Something that I’ve encountered a lot over the years and is probably the reason I decided to self-publish is, I would write screenplays—the initial writing process would be so cathartic and nearly euphoric, solely in terms of expression and vision—then I would hand them over to either people I was writing for, or to classes I had in film school, or to people in writing groups I belonged to. They would never like the writing for what it was. They would see it not as a manifestation of a creative vision, but instead as something that had entered the world and was flawed until they had thrust upon it their own values and ideas of what it should or should not be. Everything I wrote seemed to get manipulated and contorted by multiple people until the original creative vision was blurred to such an extent that it no longer resembled my idea. As a result I’d ultimately abandon each individual project and move on to something new, only to go through the whole cycle again. To me, that alone is enough to drive a person into a life of solitude. To have a story, a life, or a world, play itself out to perfection in your head, and have people who hardly know you, tell you the world inside your head should be different is a painful process. So, I like to think of Salinger in his self-imposed exile, creating life, stories, and worlds in his head and enjoying them for what they were.

I have an unproduced screenplay—many actually—but one in particular has a couple lines of dialogue, which I was hoping to lift for this group of short stories and use somewhere in Arrivals, but I never could get it to work. One character explains to another how all his heroes are dead. This for me, right now, as I write this, has never been more true. In response, the other character says that if all your heroes are dead, it’s time to be your own.

Paul Gavin

January, 2010

THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE BOBBY PIN

DEPARTURES

Why can’t you just accept things as they are rather than insisting everything fit your preconceived notions of how they should be? the young girl a couple seats to my right—whom I didn’t know—asked her mother. I guess I had caught the end of a disagreement and missed the context. I thought it was strange. She seemed too young to be saying something like that, but I didn’t know for sure. The fact that she had said it told me that maybe my perception of her was wrong. Maybe she wasn’t too young to be saying something like that.

As she asked her mother that, she was listening to music on a tiny, pink iPod Shuffle with white earbuds in the entrances to her ear canals. She had pulled the right earbud out of her ear by the fragile white cord just long enough to expel that question, but put it back in without awaiting a response. Perhaps that action was prompted by familiarity with her mother and knowing the reaction it would garner from her, because she received none.

Since I hadn’t paid attention to anything that had come before it, I didn’t know what she was talking about. It could’ve been the sleep depravation or just not knowing, but it sent me into a tailspin of thought. It made me think of things that people hang so much importance on. Things of the ego. Superficial things. It made me wonder how many wars had been hard-fought and how many people had been injured or killed because something or someone didn’t fit someone else’s preconceived ideals of the way they should be. I wondered why it’s so difficult for people to be accepting of—other people.

I had about ninety minutes until my flight. I didn’t have music to listen to like that girl did. I remembered a time when I used to listen to music on a constant basis like that. I never listened to music anymore. It depressed me. It didn’t matter what kind. Just any music depressed me, so I just never listened to it. Instead I read.

I had a book with me, but I was too tired to read it. It was Finnegans Wake by James Joyce, which I’d brought with me from the States. I couldn’t bring myself to concentrate on it. Maybe my neurotransmitters were transmitting in excess, but I suddenly tied my ownership of a copy of Finnegans Wake to what that girl a couple seats to my right had said.

I worked in a bookstore on School Street in Boston. I was seeing less and less of Alexia—not through any choice of my own. It initially started as her saying she needed to focus on school, but after a while I began to wonder if school was an excuse. It got to be where, from time to time, when I didn’t expect it, she’d wander into the shop and browse books that she’d never have enough time to read and then come up to the counter and look at me, the same way she’d look at those books. It just felt like there was something invisible keeping us apart. I don’t know if it was invisible, maybe she knew what it was, but I didn’t.

Anyway, I think it may’ve even been the last time I ever saw her. She was looking around the place like she was memorizing it; like she knew she was never going to step foot in there again. She looked at me the same way; like she was memorizing me, ‘cause she knew she’d never see me again.

It was a Sunday afternoon, three years ago, and by chance I happened to have had a misshelved copy of Finnegans Wake next to me on the counter because prior to her walking in, I was planning to go reshelve it.

She didn’t even say, Hi.

She just looked at the book and blurted out, "Finnegans Wake, huh?"

I said, Yeah.

She shook her head and said, That book’s impossible to read. That was coming from a Harvard freshman, mind you.

We had a genial, yet superficial conversation and she left and I never saw her again. I shelved Finnegans Wake and forgot about it for a while, but as time passed and it became more apparent that Alexia was no longer speaking to me, that brief portion of our final conversation kept echoing through my head and then one day, I bought it with my employee discount and decided to read it; almost just to spite her.

I guess that brings us back to what the girl a couple seats away in the waiting area of the gate at the airport had said about not insisting everything fit into your preconceived notions of the way they should be. It was like Alexia had her own ideals of how a book should be and since Finnegans Wake didn’t match those ideals, she’d written it off as impossible to read. Not me. I swore I was going to read the whole thing. Just not while waiting there in the airport. I couldn’t concentrate.

The view out the windows of the airport terminal didn’t have much to offer, either. Some grey clouds in the July winter sky, a Jetway; a couple airplanes; the Sydney skyline in the distance, nearly too small to make out.

Out of boredom I pulled my passport out of the left hip pocket of my slacks and flipped through it. Inside the front cover was my picture—taken early one morning in the Mail Boxes Etc. store in the Canyon Crest Towne Center in Riverside, when I was nineteen—with my name, WADE RAMSEY CHALMERS, next to it and the address of my P.O. Box there, which I no longer had.

Riverside was where I lived from fourth grade until I was twenty-four. It’s roughly sixty miles east of Los Angeles. It’s a great place to raise a family and grow citrus fruit.

I nostalgically looked at stamps in my passport from previous trips and the stamp I had just received on my way through customs to get through the security checkpoint in Sydney’s Kingsford Smith International Airport. It said I had DEPARTED Australia.

I glanced over to the counter at the gate where a couple of the airline personnel were milling about—a smug-looking man with a dark pompadour and an attractive woman with straight sandy blonde hair—both possibly in their mid to late thirties. I wondered if the scanners they were going to run our tickets through—as we went to board the plane—would keep a record of who had passed through and who hadn’t. Ideally it would’ve been nice if they didn’t. I could’ve walked right then and no one would’ve been the wiser until my layover in Los Angeles.

I’d promised my younger sister Tiffany we’d have dinner at the Encounter restaurant at LAX. Was it possible no one would know I’d bailed on my flight back to the States until I didn’t show up for dinner with Tiffany?

It was a thirteen-hour flight. That was plenty of time to disappear.

I wanted to take a train out into the outback. Wander into the desert and get lost. Commit suicide by the elements.

Even if they did have a record of who boarded and who didn’t by scanning the tickets on our way into the Jetway, I could disappear well beyond downtown Sydney by the time anyone realized. And what’s the worst that would happen? The flight would be delayed while they pulled my checked baggage out of the luggage compartment of the plane. A small black suitcase filled with dirty laundry would get torn apart by bomb-sniffing dogs. That was all the time I needed to disappear.

The woman with the sandy blonde hair announced pre-boarding for minors, seniors, first and business classes. As those snobs rushed the counter with their tickets, I watched closely as the personnel behind the counter would take each passenger’s ticket and run it under a scanner; a laser beam of red light skimming over a barcode, resulting in a beep. I knew then that it must keep track of who boarded and who hadn’t.

My indecisiveness sent my mind reeling. Even if they were keeping track, that was no reason to not disappear. I could get away with it. The only problem would be if I got caught, but even that wouldn’t be a big deal; knowing the justice system, probably a fine comparable to a down payment on a car. With the amount of money I was shoveling into student loan payments, it was like I was getting fined every month as it was. One more fine wouldn’t make any difference.

Watching the people funnel into the gate was only confirming my desire to disappear. Nobody cared about anyone else; only about getting their wait over with sooner than the next person. Then there was the empty and emotionless exchange with the personnel scanning the tickets.

Dying in the desert was a better option than what was beyond that gate. Dinner at the Encounter with Tiffany would be the highlight. I’d fly back to Boston and resume my rotten existence, working in a bookstore, living in a dilapidated apartment, trying to figure out why Alexia Paloma was no longer speaking to me; why Prudence Morgenstern had to go out the way she did. I decided to just do it. To go. To walk. Go out to the desert and die. As I was about to stand up I heard the mother of the girl a couple seats away, turn to her and say, I’m gonna use the restroom before we get on the plane. She stood up and turned around to face her daughter. D’you need to go? she asked.

I hesitated; remained in my seat. It would’ve been awkward if I stood up right after her.

The girl simply shook her head.

The mother put her hands on