Just So-Me Stories

By Matt Greenfield

Just So-me Stories flirts with the hyphen in between "non" and "fiction" in chronicling the darkest moments of Matt Greenfield's young life. "The Edge Behind Me" investigates a Memorial Day weekend/breakdown in the life of an alienated young teacher and would-be rock star known only as "Mr. B" as he interacts with students, parents, the vapid bar/concert scene, and an imaginary interviewer, all while trying to dodge the mystical musical inspiration he carries inside of him. "Drug-Induced Wanderings, Hooped Up on Them Goofballs" is the brief unexpurgated account of Greenfield's subconscious as his conscious self struggles with the side effects of a narcotic cough syrup one Thanksgiving weekend. And "And Found" is the true-but-much-elaborated story of Greenfield's peripatetic cross-country odyssey during his first full summer as a teacher. While the students are away, the teachers will play in these three witty, insightful, and completely un/true explorations of the solipsistic human spirit.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Aug 26, 2010
• ISBN: 9781450247108

Matt Greenfield

Further details about the Matt Greenfield of the Second Bush Administration may be gleaned inside the covers of this book. During the Obama Administration (and beyond, most likely), Greenfield prides himself on being the post-1875 Arthur Rimbaud of our times: instead of sojourning to Africa and the East, however, Greenfield is finding fulfillment beyond his prolific late teens/early twenties by keeping his writing confined to written comments about his students' writing, perhaps encouraging a Rimbaud or two of the future (though he hopes not, for their sakes), and finishing up his tenure as enfant terrible theatre impresario of the Oddy Festival. He currently teaches History and Creative Writing on the high school level and lives with his soon-to-be wife Jackie in Beachwood, Ohio.

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Just So-

me Stories

Matt Greenfield

iUniverse, Inc.

New York Bloomington

Just So-me Stories

Copyright © 2010 by Matt Greenfield

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the publisher except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-4709-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-4710-8 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 8/16/2010

Contents

Directions to a Prologue

The Edge Behind Me

Epilogue

Drug-Induced Wanderings, Hooped Up on Them Goofballs—

And Found

Introduction

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-one

Twenty-two

Twenty-three

Twenty-four

Endnotes

Directions to a Prologue

Exactly one year ago, I opened my poetry tome Tenure with a prose Pre-face. Now with this present prose volume, a poetry prologue would be most fitting. But, alas, dearest Reader, the prologue I have selected is by an author who is not myself (even I must admit, other authors do occasionally produce something of note) and thus subject to certain copyright laws. Nonetheless, you intrepid hunters of knowledge (and prey of Wisdom) may find the almost-century’s-past prologue in a poetry volume originally published in 1916 called Mountain Interval by one Robert Frost. The name of the poem is The Sound of Trees.

Since I was offered a tenure track position by UP&L (the University of Poetry & Life) last decade, I decided to retire. Rather than call this volume Retirement and look forward to my pastoral future, however, I have decided to go the memoirist’s route and look at how I came to this zenith through a gaggle of nadirs. Like Kipling’s Just-So Stories, I have decided to look at origins in a folktale-y way, flirting with the hyphen in between non and fiction and presenting a trilogy of sorts (in reverse chronological order of composition) from my darkest times that somehow left me standing where you may find me today. These three fire escapes of the mind (in the words of my most me-like character from drama, Samuel Goldstein) somehow got me out and above and through to here.

Here, where I no longer need writing, with the exception of my green pen in the margins of my students’ papers and signatures on future joint tax returns and other issues married of legality and marriage. That writing self, (w)holed up in a solitary room-universe, is literately dead and figuratively buried. In addition to the title Retirement, I was also more seriously toying with the titular phrase Alienation Tombstone (or Alienation Tomb-tome to be witty about it), hence the negative-image cover.

More than just (merely) a self-indulgent reflection, however, it seems to me that these three stories from my Florida years hit upon something very nearly approaching the Zeitgeist of the first decade of the 21st century, the 2nd term of the 2nd Bush in particular. Of course, that is for you and my future History teacher colleagues to decide. Until the future, then, I wish that you may fare well, bye the by goodly, and at the middle of it all come as well home as I have.

-Matt Greenfield, summer 2010

(Oh, and if anyone asks, this one goes out to two gents who saw me through these alienated years, appropriately from afar: to Peter Nalepa and Tom Kondilas, the Antonio and Bassanio from the third scene of our first act.)

The Edge Behind Me

But, firstly, you must understand that also living in the town was a young man. He had green eyes and was a teacher.

This teacher’s Christian name was forgotten long ago, and most of his surname as well, but all of his students knew him as Mr. B, and thus we will label him here.

I wouldn’t mention him, except for the fact that he bears some minor relevance on the larger tale that I have to tell, which relevance will reveal itself in all due course.

As I have explained previously, the town was in the midst of its Memorial Day Weekend festivities at this time, and, as such, there was much to do. In addition, and more particular to the case at hand, the middle school where Mr. B had taught for running on five years was preparing for its final exams the following week. The test in the subject Mr. B taught (the subject itself is unimportant and not worthy of mentioning here) was considered by most of his students to be the hardest of the lot of half-dozen tests coming their way before the long, much-deserved summer break. This was in large part because it was unstudyable, being something which required application of some such skills other than memory and general test-taking ability.

Mr. B himself woke up that Sunday before the Memorial Day before his exam at the normal time, when dawn had long peeked in with finger-tips of rose cracking open his drawn blinds of his small apartment located not too far away from the center of town where the Parade of the Elks would be processing, as has already been explicated in some detail in the previous chapter. Indeed, for what would be the fourth year, Mr. B was expecting to observe the sounds of the parade through his drawn blinds starting at noon the following day, that greatest solemn patriotic holiday on the United States calendar.

He languished in bed for a few moments, such moments constituting a few hours or so. This was normal weekend procedure for Mr. B, as given his basic character and demeanor. This general languishing period would usually not last more than 15 minutes, but, as the big final test was coming up, Mr. B had no stacks of papers to mark awaiting him.

And he had had a dream of some sort. A dream that was fantastical by nature (indeed as most dreams are), but one which stamped itself on his waking memory somewhat more profoundly than would normally be permitted. As such, he wished to return to slumber such that he could half-recollect what the dream was about. It was something involving him, and perhaps some other people as well, but the rest of that business was vague and shadowy.

So he lay in bed for some hours, awaiting some recollection of the dream. He occupied this time by staring at the ceiling, which ceiling he had become intimately familiar with for most of his four years as a teacher at the middle school of the town. The ceiling was rough and off-white, with a few splotches here and there, such that he could stare at it and think for a long while and not think of the ceiling at all but his own fantastical thoughts.

And here’s where Mr. B’s character bodes somewhat on the story to be related, but this part is somewhat difficult to explain. Mr. B was a musician. Not a musician really, but a composer of songs in his mind. He would develop the lyrics and mind-hum the melodies until the songs were perfect, and they were the greatest songs ever conceivable. Would be, if he could get them out. But, he did not. He insisted that they were not ready, and so they awaited in his brain until such time as they were, which usually turned out to be never.

It had started in his childhood, a simple two-part melody now and then, but with such words to it that they would ring of a certain minute eternity. He ignored them. But the songs would not stop, and each one would be more perfect than the last, capturing some sort of ephemeral essence of existence which had escaped all musicians and composers of the previous hundreds of generations of humanity.

He had wished long ago that his brain would hold all of these songs in such a way that he would never need to actually write them down. So that, when he was dead, someone would find his brain, completely preserved in the grave, and yield all the songs from it, and that would be that. He would not need to extract them or perform them, as they would be complete and perfect after his death as they always had been in his mind when he was counted amongst the living.

But these were only fantasies—Mr. B’s brain, like all brains of the human species, would decompose into small calcium deposits in the earth and be recycled into sundry organic and inorganic compounds upon decomposition.

This biological reality did not stop his wish, nor, to his greater frustration, the songs.

The dream had had something to do with the songs. Himself on a stage, singing and playing some sort of instrument simultaneously. He was screaming out the lyrics that he had worked on, some time ago, one of his profound songs, with great meaning and portent for humanity.

He could not recall if it was a dream or nightmare.

The ceiling did not change all this time, just the light filtered in a bit more clearly and dustily. It was a lazy sunny summer day, late May, with people surely needing to do something, but not quite gathering the energy to do it until the pressure of a Memorial Day Sale gets them up and about.

Indeed, Mr. B had shopping to do, he remembered, as the image of his near-empty refrigerator replaced whatever it was profound and moving and true that had been dreamt or had been dreamt to have been dreamt. He also recalled the grey hardcover book awaiting on his nightstand.

This book, of course, was Architecture of Silence, a collection of beautiful black-and-white photographs of Cistercian monasteries in France by photographer David Heald. He could not recall when he had first looked in the book, perhaps in teacher grad school, but the pictures had captured the mystery of his soul from the get-go. These images of vastness, of greys and emptiness and echoes, had a strange comfort like loneliness for Mr. B, and he always yearned on these weekend mornings for a peek at the book.

But, monk-like, Mr. B was disciplined, and realized that overloading on these images, which he would dive into eyes-first and feel as if alive among these entities of timelessness on the page, this would lead to a depth that he dared not be exposed to, for his noble profession’s sake if for nothing else. As opaque and de-mystifying as the images appeared, there were always the papers to be marked, calling out from those medieval walls, even in the light and porous grandness of space floating and yearning.

He had already looked at p. 56 yesterday, he recalled from his wake-memory. He could not flip back to p. 55, but must move forward linearly to p. 57, but not until Tuesday, according to his schedule. Else it would be too much. He saw the spaces in his mind, but refrained from opening the book, for discipline and integrity’s sake.

He would like to touch the coarse cover, though. And, in order to do that, he needed to get up and out of bed.

So he languished in bed a few minutes more. He had no clock, but realized that it were best to try and sleep again, before the Cistercian monasteries pulled him back to the vastness of waking thoughts and concerns, with its ethereal effervescence and souls reaching up to him.

He closed his green eyes, and the song came to him again, as fresh as in the dream-haze of before. Vivid and angry and alive like tentacles. And, something behind the song, in the light chords in some sort of a minor key (Mr. B could never read music), a something that was bigger than anything else. He shook his head, and it gripped him, spun his loose fragments into a skeleton of thought, and this jarred him. It was a new song, another one, this one the most powerful yet, gripping his spine and tingling his neurons. His fingers twitched, as if seeking some piano keys or guitar strings, despite the fact that Mr. B did not own nor had ever owned any musical instrument of any kind.

He ignored this new song, and jumped from bed with a quick start. Then opened his eyes, and was set reeling for a moment next to his bed. This shook him a bit, this light-headedness that came to him. He clung to the bed, seemed as if he were going to fall. This was not the sudden-getting-up, but the disease, he hoped earnestly.

Yes, the terminal disease he had long hoped that he had. Some sort of brain cancer, ideally, something he had been suffering from all his life and which would remain tragically undiagnosed until the very end, which would be soon, quite sudden and unexpected, one of these mornings in his third decade. This is what kept him going day after day, this substitute for suicide ideation, which is considered somewhat unhealthy by practicing psychiatric experts.

Yes, they had gotten worse, these little quasi-seizures, like feeling his brain somersault without the rest of the body going with it, about to collapse or fall over and the tingling too. He could be sure of it. Any day now. It would be coming very soon.

But, he got up, sadly, and recovered. The dizziness was gone, the episode was done. But still he was shook to the core and the vital presence of death lingered and he was gladdened by it.

When he calmed his breathing and looked at his bed and realized he was not in it anymore, he made his way to the grey book on Cistercian monasteries.

The book was still there, waiting for him, with the bookmark sticking out of the page, some Chinese characters and underneath: When you’ve got something special.... Never forget it. –Chinese proverb. Something some student had given him. A her, he thought he remembered clearly. Her name was long forgotten, but an image of long reddish hair came to him when he saw it and he associated it with the student, rightly or wrongly.

He remembered the song from the dream again, and remembered making the peace sign to the audience, holding up two fingers and clawing out at the spotlight with pleading fury. But he touched the cover to the book and rubbed his index finger over the red title and soon forgot all about that business.

The light was hitting in as if a backlit X-ray and he emerged from his room and heard the noise of the TV or someone talking in a nearby apartment. This was enough.

It was definitely the TV, now. The drone of the accented syllables echoed off his own walls. Mr. B had not owned a TV for a few years now, nor a radio ever since that one day he decided to emulate the monks in the Cistercian monasteries and throw his stereo out in the lobby trash can. That all, all that noise, had created too nice of an apathy, a stupor which could calm him. The songs would not go away in that case, but be amplified by the emptiness of regurgitated commercial sound. This he could not bear more than anything else. Or, at least, he thought it was nice to believe so for the time being. This emptying of his self was considered a triumph.

As he emptied his real bladder in the toilet bowl, he thought again about leaving the job for good, this teaching racket, and making a legitimate independent someone out of himself. This thought came to him several times a day, a close third behind the songs and the wish that he had some sort of terminal disease that was slowly killing him so that he could avoid the trouble later on of doing it himself.

He had been riding on this train of thought, briefly, when he stared at his contract that he had laid out like a corpse on the table in front of the mailboxes in the faculty work room at school, ballpoint pen in hand as if the scalpel for conducting this autopsy. He had several weeks to sign and return this yearly contract, as he well knew on this, the fifth time for such a procedure. But, he wished to show his unquestioning loyalty to his school, his administration, his colleagues, his parents, his students, and himself as well, he supposed. So, when another teacher walked in the room, he signed it quickly and exited before he had much of a chance for a conversation, as was his habit. (He usually carried around a blank piece of paper whenever walking through the school beyond his classroom, just in case another adult tried to speak with him. He would claim he didn’t have time to talk, and vaguely reference the blank paper with body language, and all would be understood and he’d be saved from another possibly-awkward social situation, as indeed any conversation with a fellow adult now was.)

But now, as he stood in front of his sink trying to avoid looking at the mirror while washing his hands and face and brushing his teeth, he could not help think back upon it, and wonder if he should have lived out his fantasy and ripped up that contract and thrown it back in his boss’s mailbox, and gone somewhere else, and changed his name, and started over with something else, something to do with music where he would legitimately feel like he was changing the world in some small way again, instead of paying off his grad school loans. But, what would he do, pick up a cheap guitar at Wal-mart and play in train stations and coffee houses these songs that sprung through his soul and threatened to tear the fabric of everything apart in the universe? He could not bear it, especially if it was real. He could barely bear it in his life of the mind. No one would understand, and it was far better that way.

As he gazed in the filtered sunlight, something near his right wrist caught his eye. He scratched it, and remembered the long white hair. He raised his wrist to the window, and looked, and there it was, wisping in the air. He moved his wrist about, and this seeming piece of thread four inches long dangled from his wrist. This hair comforted him, as the similar one that had randomly appeared on his chest when he was a teenager and later a similar one on his ankle had comforted him; it gave him hope that this terminal disease was in his bloodstream, producing these random hair mutations. It reminded him of a witch’s chin, this long white hair that had one day appeared almost full-length at random from the middle of his wrist, right next to where the pulse should be.

He felt around for it with his thumb and forefinger, and gently caught a hold of it, and gave it a gentle insistent tug. It had grown longer since he had last noticed it, this wispy white hair. He smiled to himself and shook his wrist a little bit more so that it flapped with the movement like a proud flag. There was again something amiss in the details of things, and all was repaired once more.

He caught sight of the soap dispenser then and remembered the $67.48.

Tri-weekly, since he cared to remember, he had gone to the local grocery to purchase his food and toiletry supplies for the three-week period: milk, eggs, butter, cheese, bread, apple juice, fruit snacks, a jar of peanut butter; hand soap, face soap, body soap, mouthwash, toothbrush, toothpaste, tissues, etc. The price of these items, although somewhat fluctuating over the years, currently amounted to $67.48, and that exactly was the amount he would be sure was contained in his wallet upon his departure on the Sunday every three weeks coming. This took some creative spending and thrift, but he had nothing better to do, and enjoyed the project nature of this enterprise, and the satisfaction of giving the cashier the exact change when everything was tallied up in his cart.

Though, he remembered sorely with dismay of the one time some months ago that he had gone when some sort of ludicrous grocery store sale was occurring, and he was left with some three dollars extra. He insisted to the cashier that there was some error—he had no coupons of any sort, and wanted to be fair to the other customers, so he told her to remove the couponed prices from the receipt and charge him his $67.48, which he had conveniently stored in his wallet. But the cashier would not budge: no coupons, sir, just the result of some sale. He went so far as to leave the change from his $67.48 on the counter, but the cashier told him not to forget it quite nicely, and he would have started a scene if not for the attractive young woman three lines down who had looked at him. That was enough for him to take his change and exit the store. He dropped the change down the sewer of the parking lot, out of principle, but still the event had held as a stain on his memory ever since.

Today was Sunday, and he would be consuming his last two eggs and the final dregs of the butter and apple juice with the eggs for his standard weekend breakfast of fried eggs and a glass of apple juice. He only hoped that there was no Memorial Day Weekend Sale on.

The hand soap dispenser was almost completely exhausted as well, and he felt the need to drain its contents completely before he went about to purchase another one, out of principle, so he picked it up with the same thumb and forefinger which had moments before held his long, white wrist-hair and unscrewed the cap and turned the dispenser over and slowly the liquid soap at the bottom filtered down, oozing.

And he watched it descend in the filtering sunlight, this orangish soap running in spurts down the side of the plastic bottle. It had almost a hypnotic effect, and the song came to him again, but he quickly pushed it away in favor of completely focusing on the spectacle of the liquid soap slowly rolling down.

Eventually it fell to the cusp of the bottle, and gathered for a moment there before gravity took over again and it fell, not in droplets but in spurts from the mouth of the dispenser down onto Mr. B’s open palm.

This image, although seeming rather innocuous, had a very profound effect on Mr. B, one which would indeed affect the rest of this weekend and life, etc. This is the difficult and interesting thing to capture here. How the image of liquid soap falling down in front of a mirror can represent much more than the image of liquid soap falling down in front of a mirror.

But, be that as it may, this had seemed to represent, at that precise moment then for Mr. B if for no one else, the fall and decay of everything, the disillusion and universal uncaringness of the universe, the progress of decomposition and beauty of a continuous ending.

All the soap had long ago fell onto his palm, but Mr. B still held it out and shook the bottle a little. The soap was starting to ooze from his palm down the sides of his hands and into the sink. He took the empty bottle and threw it out, and then quickly rinsed off his hands, the white frothy bubbles filling up the sink and making little crackling noises even after the faucet was turned off.

Mr. B wondered if a girlfriend would really change things. He remembered the few hers that had been his, and that did little to comfort him now. Even if he were married with a kid or two, that would just be a disguise and a facade, like a theatrical performance on the stage to attempt to escape the empty theatre beyond it. He wondered if he should masturbate.

But, he was hungry, or, at least, he felt as if he had gone long enough without eating such that he felt it would probably be reasonable to be hungry.

He emerged from the bathroom, and still heard the drone of the TV from a nearby room. Or, it could be someone talking too. He entered the kitchen, removed two eggs, threw out the empty carton; removed the butter container and scraped out the rest of it with a knife, flung the butter onto a skillet, threw out the container; removed the apple juice bottle, poured the bubble-dregs into a glass, threw out the bottle. He cooked the eggs in the silence of the TV from the neighboring room, and ate them in the same silence at his small table with one chair. The table had come with three other chairs upon purchase, but he threw those out in the dumpster one day because they made him feel guilty.

After he finished the eggs and juice and was filled with a sense of accomplishment at his completely empty food stores, he loitered at the table as the sun reflected through the closed slats of the kitchen blinds. Dust malingered in the air, and he stared at the empty plate in front of him, and the fork laying on it.

Then he had another conversation with an imaginary reporter. This is how he would fill up his spare time, when he was feeling particularly good with himself and needed affirmation of something significant. He imagined himself touring on the road, playing his songs for packed audiences night after night, and conducting interviews with local presspersons on the tour bus during the lazy afternoons of his touring dates. He imagined a reporter sitting across from him, and asking the first question, and spoke aloud his answers, with mythical unlit cigarette dangling from one hand, putting it up to his mouth occasionally:

What does it mean? Well, that’s a hard one to answer ... I mean, you know, meaning is subjective, and everyone comes to it with something different. Everyone asks me about those lyrics, but, you know, I don’t know anything more about them just because I wrote the song. I guess that’s the type of songs I write, and I know people get frustrated with me, but that’s the best I can answer for that ... Listen, let me put it this way: if I pooped a piece of poop that looked perfectly, exactly like one thing, like, oh, Ella Fitzgerald, say, or a certain fish or something, then I’d flush it down the toilet. But, if I pooped a poop that looked like five different things at once, then I’d put that up on stage in the spotlight with me.

He laughed.

"Well, I guess you’ll let me know if you ever come across any ... But, seriously, what does anything mean? Why do people treat words in songs differently than anything else? ... What does it mean to me? Well, to be blunt, suicide prevention. If I weren’t singing songs, I’d kill myself. It keeps me going. That’s all."

A pause, as he nodded while the reporter asked the next question.

Well, sure, they’re very simple songs. But, that’s the thing: the sense of structure in the melodies is what makes them so free. If you write free verse poetry, then you’re not going to be as creative as writing something with a firm sense of structure—that structure gets you to find the perfect word to fit. You know, in the same way, you can do the same song night after night and it will be completely different. It’s like when you see a movie a second time, or make love a second time, or do anything else a second time. So, even though they’re the same song, they’re different for me, and different for the audience, I hope. Does that answer your question?

A nod. Then, a laugh.

"Yeah, people always ask me about that. That’s the thing about touring, you get so lonely. So, I say, at the end of each show, ‘I’d like to sleep with all of you; meet me backstage.’ And, I do, really, I sleep with everyone who meets me there, security checks ‘em first, then we all go back to the hotel suite and sleep. Just sleep. That’s the thing that’s so weird about it: there’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just co-habitation, just people literally sleeping together, and some people are making a big deal out of it. The reason