Oh, Title!

By Daniel Donatelli

A literary yawp; a hundred-thousand words; a compelling, sundry collection of stories and essays—Oh, Title! is a unique offering. At times a humorous memoir of the author-be-damned, at times a compilation of impressively eclectic fiction, this strange book is almost always one page away from turning into something else. You'll grip it tensely, then you'll put it down to laugh, then you'll tuck it under your arm while you look up a wonderful new word—but always you'll go to it with affection because clearly it was written with love. In reading the collection it quickly becomes apparent, between the lines, (and sometimes right on the lines,) that Daniel Donatelli loves readers—more than himself, even—and that every word of this book, from the invigorating heights of its descriptive bliss to the comical blue sewers of its sometimes deep scatology, was placed there with a simple hope: that those noble readers might find a thoughtful enjoyment in the sum.
The short stories (and to a large extent they are truly short indeed) are a sweet, alchemical mix of philosophy and fiction; the essays are engaging attempts at honesty and insight; the pastel parades are thought-provoking, entertaining little palette cleansers between the beastly rounds; and the final pieces—the two disturbingly funny teleplays and the giant poem of existential and linguistic gymnastics—display a refreshing (or maybe bewildering) creativity. The sum is greater than the parts, and the parts are greater than the sum, and all logic goes right out the window and onto the page.
Knock, knock. Who's there? Oh, Title!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Daniel Donatelli
• Release date: Jul 15, 2012
• ISBN: 9781937648091

Book preview

Part One

HE’D BEEN inventing for as long as he could remember, and he could remember nearly everything from his eternal lifetime.

In fact, where he was from, everyone lived forever.

So glorious was his immortal homeland that for all citizens but he—The Inventor—further creation was discouraged, even prohibited. With an immortal population, there resulted an eventual limit on what could exist before the accumulation amounted to a garish, cumbersome, endless hoard. And because any superfluous creations would only add clutter to and subtract beauty from the timeless harmony of the world they had all exhaustively refined, most of the immortals were able to distract themselves with other infinite tasks.

But, and this should serve to show just how masterfully talented he was, The Inventor was one of the very few immortals ever given permission by the ancient governing councils to continue creating. Whenever the creation of something new became necessary, The Inventor was called upon.

In fact, he was so talented that he had done something nobody else had ever even risked attempting. He had a home, and he had a lab, and that was all he was permitted to have, which was one more lab than any other immortal was ever given. But he also had another lab—an unauthorized, additional, hidden lab, deep underground: a personal sanctuary—that he had built himself, slowly and carefully, over the course of centuries.

When completed, the lab was a fountainhead of joy for The Inventor. He’d tunneled beneath the foundation of his home and then slowly emptied out a large chamber to house his equipment—a place where he could really let himself off of the proverbial leash. He loved inventing so much that he couldn’t stop himself, couldn’t ask for permission, either.

He knew about the delicate balance and about the councils that oversaw everything, and he respected it all, to a point, in public.

But his was an afflatus that resisted any containment—by councils or otherwise. Consequently, instead of making a petulant, emotional show of what he considered an injustice—the injustice being the bittersweet inventive permissions/restrictions given to him by the councils, cold as handcuffs—he quietly took matters into his own, free hands, and created a sanctuary governed by one.

Nobody else knew about it—it was too valuable a secret to share with anyone, even his closest friends. Despite the fact that a small part of him wanted to burst with the news of the awesome things he was creating down there, he knew he could not risk the additional indulgence. He hadn’t felt this good in what felt like forever—getting to invent things for the pleasure of inventing them, not just because they had been deemed necessary by a calculating council.

The Inventor’s basement lab was lit from the floor, ceiling, and walls. Each surface was a light fixture as well as a surface. In the middle of the basement was a large, smooth, box-looking piece of equipment that was his own brilliant invention: it was an invention that made inventing easier for him.

He invented using a coding system he’d created for the box. He could string the code together in his mind, transmit it into the box, and the box would translate the code into tangible reality. The machine worked silently, or almost silently—as the invented code was being made into a reality, the box issued a soft, mechanical hum.

Eventually he built hallways branching away from the laboratory, and he filled the hallways like a museum, or a trophy room, with displays of the things he had created over the millennia.

And this is how he lived for ages and ages more. He invented things, observed them, and decided if they were worth keeping or if they needed to be reworked. It filled the endless eons with dynamic beauty. He loved his new life, to every extent possible.

But then one day, as he was coding together what he considered the first step in his career’s masterwork, he coughed.

Never once in his life had he coughed before. He and the rest of those like him had never known even a moment of illness—had only known eternities of health and vitality.

He coughed again, worse than the first time.

Part Two

UNDERSTANDABLY WORRIED and confused, he sought the head of the council that governed all councils that governed the immortals. He requested and was granted an emergency meeting immediately.

He entered The Leader’s office, which was open to the day. The office was a small, circular grove in the forest at the foot of a mountain. The head of the councils had a great smile for The Inventor and welcomed him warmly.

Please sit wherever you like, and tell me what is on your mind, my old friend.

The Inventor sat on the thick hump of a root that had curled out of the ground. As he labored from standing to sitting, he could feel a wheeze in his chest.

I come with troubling news, sir. This morning, while working, I . . . coughed. I am sick. Please tell me it is one of The Jokester’s pranks.

The Leader’s smile collapsed and was replaced by a frown—a suddenly grave, ruminative aspect.

The Jokester is away.

The Inventor’s face, if possible, became even graver than The Leader’s.

Then I am . . . dying. But how? We are all immortal. I have done so much good.

You have not broken any of our rules?

I have broken some, yes. I was never told that my immortality would be revoked if I broke them. I was told they were simply for the betterment of all of us.

The Inventor coughed. The Leader was disturbed by the alien sound of it, but he recovered his thoughts and made a slight correction to The Inventor.

They are for the betterment of all things. This is unprecedented. Who knows about this?

Only you . . . and I.

Things here have changed before, but not like this. We do not always know all of the reasons for the changes, and there are enough theories around here to confound The Philosopher.

The Inventor waited as The Leader gave the matter the full weight of his aged, specialized wisdom.

The Leader shrugged weakly and then appeared to reach a mild certainty. "There must be a reason for it, Inventor. You must find the reason. There is always a reason."

The Inventor left with no more comfort than when he arrived. As he walked, he attempted to summon the unknown reason in his thoughts.

His coughing only grew worse. Between coughs, he could taste the mild fragrance of his world’s vibrant environment—a bittersweet kiss goodbye. He grew weaker with each step.

He had killed so many things in his ages of inventing; it had been necessary for the betterment of his creations. There were times when he had considered the idea of death, and he had picked at it to see if there were anything useful in its core. But, so far in his existence, he had not spent much time wondering about the full ramifications of his people’s deathlessness. Now, the end of his life was all he could think about, and even though he as yet couldn’t conceive of a way in which death had any value, the layers between himself and the problem were decaying rapidly. He was already feeling the intense heat of emotion—and the intense cold of reality—around the question of mortality. Now, he had the same disease within himself. What was the value? What was the reason? Why should he die?

He could barely make it to the basement below his house. He was sluggish and weak. He coughed in violent rasps that fell away in wet gargles, which he choked on, triggering more painful fits.

He knew sadness. He had not known sadness before. It was born within him now, and from out of the rotten pain of his new misery and confusion, the code popped into his head.

He’d been building the code for as long as he’d been inventing, which seemed to stretch back as far as he could remember—a powerfully long time. It was the interwoven code of everything he’d ever invented, and he’d been patching it together in his mind through all the many millennia.

He fell to the floor in the basement of his hidden laboratory.

To want to live, he thought. To live is not enough, but to want to live. To live and to want to live.

The code, complete, in his head—woven together so intricately and beautifully that he began crying over how much he loved and would miss all of this—would be his magnum opus, and it would exist here forever. It would be his immortality—it would be the only immortality left to him.

His chest rattled, and he coughed a mouthful of black fluid out of his lungs and into his hands. The rising stench was the stench of death. He knew.

Gasping for breath, he took his sputum-covered hands and held onto the sides of the box. Still on his knees, crying, he faced the input device. The code was there. He had checked and double-checked his memory. It was all there, but the box would not register it.

There was no soft hum.

He tried it again, painfully and painstakingly, but still nothing.

His world started swimming away from him. He felt death rising through his shuddering body.

He pulled his head back, and with the tattered, desperate remains of his dying, immortal energy, he smashed his head into the input device. Nothing. He smashed it again and again. Nothing.

With the last of what he was or would ever be as he existed from that moment on, he filled his head with the code and put everything that was within himself into the input device.

Then there was a big bang.

Table Of Contents

Fractal Traveling

ALL ROADS have brought me here, he thought to himself.

It’s not that all roads lead to Rome; it’s that all roads lead to all places where those roads go. Yes, they go to Rome, and they go home, and they go to me when I am on the road. He liked that idea, and he saw all those little cars and trucks and wagons within himself, going here and there as needed—each passenger listening to the tinny sounds coming from his radio, her phone, his murmuring inner monologue. The morning commute, the afternoon commute, the evening commute, the graveyard commute—the roads of his circulatory system thronging with pushy drivers, moving at great speeds and under pressure from all sides. It’s like that everywhere, on all scales, he thought, and he placed, in his mind, a marble on each side of each scale. High above his head, the first marble rolled off the top scale, and on each scale down the marbles rolled off, until they all thunked heavily on his throat.

He felt at his throat and felt beard, and beneath the beard was his voice—sensitive with illness, raspy with sound, but his.

There was more room on the bench where he sat—a long, thickly lacquered, wooden plane along the outside edge of a busy airport terminal—and a traveling family of four was looking to sit down to his left, each stepping over the bearded man’s bag while the bag’s owner pensively stared at his own thoughts, considering the precious transportation system within and outside of himself, counting scales and marbles and diving into the fractals of metaphysics. The family father was too distracted with leading his beloved brood to the waiting area to give much notice to the bearded man. The family mother noticed him with concern and wariness, and as she stepped over his luggage, she turned to look back at her two children, to (ludicrously) make sure that in the moment between when she last saw her children a moment ago, and this moment, where she was seeing the man, he had not somehow raped and murdered one or both of them.

They were there, safe, following her, and she scanned seemingly the rest of not only the airport but the whole city for any other spots that might accommodate the family. Unfortunately, there weren’t any.

Is anyone sitting here? the mother asked the man, attempting to gauge the stability of the stranger’s mind by reading into his eyes as he collected and gave his answer.

He gazed over at the rest of the empty bench, looked at the woman, and shrugged.

It’s a pretty simple question, beardo, said the elder sibling—a young girl just entering her tweenage phase, who looked like what her mother used to look like, but with her father’s wide-set brown eyes. She had a sneer of vast impatience on her face, as if shouldering her travel bags were a labor of Dickensian cruelty.

Anyone sittin’ here run to the bathroom or somethin’?

Forgive me, he said to the entire family, but I haven’t been paying attention. I don’t travel well.

Well, I can understand that, the father said. "I’ve never known anyone who travels well—even people who like traveling."

With that, and with the way that the father confidently sat his butt onto the bench and propped his ankle up on top of his ol’ knee, the ladies set their bags down and joined the two gentlemen already sitting.

Looking straight into the faces of the people seated on the bench, a traveler would see, from right to left: the family father, checking his watch, checking the board of flights, and checking his watch again; the family mother, angled so as to be able to see, at all times, both of her dear children and the unusual, bearded man; the elder daughter, seated so low on the bench that her head was held upright by the backrest/wall, listening to music on her headphones, eyes closed, seemingly to shut out the mortifying horror of her family; the younger daughter, not much more than three years old, mimicking her older sister’s lying-seated posture, her feet dangling in the air; then a large stack of the family’s travel bags, effectively working like a border fence; and then the bearded man, leaning on his right arm, which was leaning on the right armrest while he stared straight into the floor, pensive.

One of these things is not like the other.

Individuals, families, lovers, and teams clattered by with their big bags. Male and female voices sounded informational soundings to the hustling travelers—Cleveland to Minneapolis, Flight Three Eighty Four, is now leaving from Gate Sixty One, repeat Gate Six One; Marcia Brendowicz, please pick up the white courtesy telephone; We at Hopkins International Airport hope you are having a great day today—and the bearded man barely heard any of it. He was back in his head.

Two philosophers sat under an ailanthus, near a gurgling brook, with the late-afternoon sun golden on their faces as they watched two children toss pebbles into the water.

One of those children will die within the year, the philosopher Cheng said. And what purpose will he have served?

Cheng’s friend, Qei, a notoriously negative man, did not answer but instead himself picked up a pebble and tossed it into the brook. The pebble disappeared beneath the running surface.

Then Cheng understood, and neither said anything else for the remainder of their visit.

The bearded man could feel that sun on his face. It worked its way within him. He heard jostling sounds, soft—rhythmic and arrhythmic.

His eyes focused again on the floor; then he turned and saw the three-year-old’s face looking at him—her little cheeks buoyant as hot-air balloons—just over the stack of bags. She was breathing a heeshy laugh at the change in the man’s face from thought to perception to his recognition of herself.

Tessa, baby, leave the man alone, the mother said, trying to sound like she was trying not to inconvenience the stranger, rather than what the father heard, which was his wife helicoptering again. Really worked for Kelly, he thought, and he looked over at Kelly, still lying back, still eyes-closed, still embarrassed as hell.

Three-year-old Tessa ignored her mother and kept looking at the funny man. He looked at her, began scratching his face, and with a sleight-of-hand motion, he appeared to pull a tiny metal toy airplane out of his beard. Tessa again heeshy laughed—this time at the barest look of faux-surprise on his face when he saw the airplane in his hand.

He held it out to her, but she didn’t move to take it. She was still feeling shy, but she was emboldened by the bags between them, which she kept bumping her chest and belly into lightly with an uncoordinated consistency that was somewhere between rhythm and nonrhythm.

I understand, he said to her, but so low that only she could have heard him, and he winked at her. She liked the wink and responded by trying to wink back, but she just closed both eyes—elaborately blinked—when she did it. The bearded man almost floated into the air from his amusement at that. The amusement filled him, but the only evidence on the outside was a little upturned corner of his mouth.

He held out the toy, but she still didn’t take it, so he slipped it back into his beard.

C’mon, Tessa, the mother said, picking up the little one. Let’s go find the potty.

Tessa watched the bearded man as she was being carried away. He sat forward and put his elbows on his knees, face in his hands, and stared at the carpet.

Two philosophers sat on a craggy precipice high up a mountain. Below them was a great grassland valley dotted with trees and shrubs, with animals all around. The animals had gathered near a small watering hole—the hole too small for the great numbers of dehydrated animals there—and the animals waited patiently their turn, even as the two philosophers watched the level of the water go down inch by inch.

They continued watching then as a large, predatory cat chased down a sturdy-legged grazing animal on the periphery. The field of dehydrated grazers fled in all directions but the direction of the attacking cat.

Qei said to Cheng, Can you believe the price of gas these days?

The bearded man began to see the floor again, his bag, his feet. His cheeks, above the beard-line, were red from the pressure of his hands.

I said can you believe the price of gas these days? the father said. "It’s actually cheaper for me to fly the family out to Lauderdale this year."

The bearded man looked at the father. He saw in the father’s face, and heard in the father’s voice, that this man had something else on his mind that he wished to talk about, but couldn’t. The elder daughter opened her eyes briefly, looked at her father, looked at the bearded man, and shook her head in embarrassment and disapproval before closing her eyes again.

The price—the moral price? the bearded man asked.

For some reason, this really charmed the father. Ha! Well, I guess you’re right. He said to himself, The moral price— Then he continued, No, I was just talking about how frickin’ expensive it is—money expensive—these days. Can’t trust any of these markets, I guess.

I think, the bearded man said, that it would have been better if you and I had met under different circumstances, if you don’t mind my saying it.

The father’s affable smile disappeared. Why’s that? What are you some kind of flit?

The bearded man enjoyed the question, even smiled introspectively, and responded. It seems as though you have something you wish to talk about, but you can’t, because your daughter’s headphones might be on mute right now, and you don’t want her to hear whatever’s really on your mind.

What? Kelly— the father said. She did not respond. Kelly, you can take the headphones off; I know you’re not listening to them; I can hear it when you are.

Busted, the tweenager pulled off her headphones.

"Well what’s on your mind then, Dad?"

The man was wrong, Kelly; there’s nothing on my mind.

The bearded man said, There’s always something on our minds—

"There’s nothing unusual on my mind, okay?"

What’s your name, fella? Kelly asked the bearded man.

My name . . . that’s a good question, said the bearded man, giving the question more weight than the girl anticipated.

No, it’s not! It’s just a stupid name. What’s your stupid name?

It’s really none of our business, honey, the father said.

"He’s the one who’s telling you what’s on your mind, Dad. I just want to know who he thinks he is, is all."

I think . . . I am here, the bearded man said, and I am also in my thoughts sometimes.

What the heck does that mean? You’re weird.

With that observation, Kelly closed herself off from the conversation. She put on her headphones, and soon both the father and the bearded man could hear the muffled noise of loud pop music.

It’s something about your wife, the bearded man said. Anxiety—

Okay, we’re back! the Tessa-carrying wife announced happily, relieved to see her husband and eldest daughter still alive and safe. She settled back down onto the bench, and her eyebrows briefly furrowed in curiosity as it finally registered in her mind that it appeared as though her husband had been talking to the bearded weirdo while she was walking back just now.

Tessa was beaming and drooling with a big yellow sucker in her mouth. She reached with both hands towards Kelly, to be held by her.

Mom, this guy is weird, Kelly said taking off her headphones again and accepting Tessa from the mother.

Kelly, honey—don’t say that about people. It’s un-ladylike.

In the bearded man’s head, the philosopher Cheng said, in a particularly effeminate voice, "I can’t help it if he’s weird!"

The bearded man saw the floor again, felt the family’s eyes on him. He said, Don’t worry about it, ma’am; I already knew.

A woman’s voice, pleasant, over the intercom, announced, Flight Two Twenty One, Cleveland to Anchorage, is now boarding.

The bearded man stood and picked up his bag.

"What’s in Alaska?" Kelly asked, one last attempt at a barb against the creep before he left, and also showing off she knew where Anchorage was—nobody’s fool.

Tessa scrambled across Kelly’s lap and stood and bumped her belly against the bags again, heeshy laughing at the now-standing bearded man.

Another good question, miss, the bearded man said to Kelly. That’s something else I’m trying to figure out.

As distracted by his thoughts as ever, he picked up his bag and entered a gap in the river of gate-bound travelers, and he worked his way perpendicularly across the river until he melded into it and was gone from the family’s view.

After the unusual man disappeared into the crowd, three-year-old Tessa continued bumping her chest and belly into the family’s stacked bags, but she wasn’t heeshy laughing anymore. Instead, her eyes were fixed on something where the bearded man had been sitting.

A small toy airplane.

Table Of Contents

The Poops

THE WEEKEND before I left for college was the first time I ever smoked weed. Because of how seriously I took baseball in my youth, and because of the then-depths of my profound Catholic-moral guilt, I just never had any interest in puffing the magic dragon.

But then high school ended, and I had one last summer of baseball—one last summer of trying to get a scholarship, to continue my athletic successes in college. But I didn’t get shit.

Baseball used to be my life. Everyone knew exactly where they could find me nine months out of the year: practicing, running, hitting with friends . . . whatever. It was the heartbeat of my adolescence.

Now picture this: I played for the best summer-league team in Cleveland. The best of the best northeast Ohio had to offer. We were cocky, talented, locally successful, and better than you or anyone else (at least from Ohio). Every season ended with a State Tournament in Youngstown OH—the most depressing place in America this side of anywhere else I’ve ever been—and the tournament after my senior year was particularly special, not only because we’d made it further than any other team I’d ever played for, but also because I knew it was the final season of my baseball career. And after a childhood of playing tournament baseball, it was particularly special for me to be pitching in the state-championship semifinal game.

The thing about tournament ball is that usually both teams’ aces face off in the semifinals because there’s no point in saving your best starter for a championship game you might not even make it to. And in fact I wrote about a similar situation in my novel Jibba And Jibba, but I needed to enhance the drama of the situation, so I had young Jibba, who was his team’s ace, pitch in the finals.

My defense is that JAJ is a sloppily written work of fiction, and this particular story is not (fictional, that is).

In front of dozens of scouts, my friends, my family, and a smattering of players from teams left behind who’d come to the game to give me a hard time (I’d been responsible for the defeat of a number of top teams in that, the greatest tournament I ever played in), I took the mound, and the game began.

Two hours later, the game ended. We won 3–0. I pitched a complete-game shutout, had a home run, two doubles (one of which short-hopped the left fielder like he was playing shortstop) and after my last swing of the game, as I came to a standing stop at second base, my longtime coach shouted over to me, What are you gonna do next, drive the bus back to Cleveland?

(Like I said I’ve written most of this story in JAJ, but it’s worth repeating for what follows, as a juxtaposition—to show where I started compared to where I find myself at the end of this story.)

That was the game I finally hit one of the main goals of my life: I threw a ball ninety miles per hour.

I know that doesn’t seem like much when you consider the speeds tossed around in the professional leagues, but 90 mph for a 5’8" white dude is pretty fucking sweet.

After the game ended, all four of the semifinal teams, their friends, families, and the scouts were treated to a fireworks display given by the organizers of the tournament. The whole show was underscored by a crackling-speakers song that seemed to be directed directly at me—My Way, as performed by Frank Sinatra.

I’ve always taken a certain pride in being my own person and in doing things my own way. Everything from my awkward sartorial choices to my unusual, grunting pitching delivery was a personal signature, was done my way—with an oxymoron-busting volitional intransigence that goes back as far as I can remember, the individualist to a fault.

It’s not often you’re actually aware of the fact that you’re experiencing one of the truly memorable and important moments of your life—usually you’re too busy living within the moment to think about it. A lot of the time you’re ignorant of the moment’s importance until six months later (or five years , or . . . ) when it hits you just how special and important and profound that moment in time was. How much it mattered. How much it represented to the person you were at that period, during that part of your life.

After the game, I was sitting on a picnic table with teammates I’d been playing baseball with since I was six years old, and as I looked up and down the line of faces gazing up at those radiant, colorful explosions, which cast shadow-splashes of light across their dirt-streaked aspects and within their lacrimal, reflective eyes, I realized, in that rarest of moments, that I had achieved everything I’d ever wanted to achieve with baseball. There was nothing baseball had left to offer me, because a few weeks earlier I had been named to Ohio’s all-state baseball team (2nd team), which meant I had achieved my other main goal, of getting my picture put up on my high school’s athletic wall of fame, which had been my dream for the previous decade. I had reached the pinnacle of my youth, and I knew it was time to move on and become a goddam adult.

Which was especially true when you consider that this was at the height of the steroid era (A.D. 2000), and there was no way a professional team was ever going to draft some short, right-handed, balding white dude who couldn’t even get a better offer than a half-scholarship to a miserable D-III school.

The following afternoon we lost the state-championship game to a team of Mexican immigrants—all of whom were the size of NFL tight ends, who were flown in by some rich asshole—and the following week our team bowed out of the Midwest Regional Championship Series in Cincinnati.

I cried long and hard after that final loss in the regionals.

Thundering shudders. In front of everyone. A massively pathetic display.

But I knew it was the last game I’d ever play.

My Way had been my swan song.

Because I was so good at baseball all my life, I was friends with the popular kids. Well, at least until my late junior/early senior year, when I realized that I never had any fun when I was hanging out with them besides on the baseball field, and none of them appeared to want to be my friend outside the field anyway. Getting drunk and into fights