Boychik Lit: Stories and Essay

By Gerald Everett Jones

From the acclaimed author of 2020 Independent Press Awards Distinguished Favorites Clifford's Spiral and Preacher Finds a Corpse. This short book has six stories and one essay. The essay "Boychik Lit" is the think piece, offering Gerald Everett Jones's thoughts on the genre which he named. "Chemistry" expands on the self-evident premise that you can't tell teenagers anything. The narrator of "Not Quite After Lisette is a forty-something high-tech executive whose wife is divorcing him. "Johnny Halo and Rock, the Tyro Shock Jock" is the first of three episodes from the Rollo Hemphill series of comic novels. In this installment, he falls upward into a job as a shock-jock deejay. "In the Valley of the Happy People" is from the second book, Rubber Babes, and "Spin Cycle" is a chapter from the third book, Farnsworth's Revenge: Rollo's End. "In the Gallery of American Art" is actually a story about a woman who wakes up on her birthday thinking her life is perfect. And of course it's not. It is excerpted from his novel Bonfire of the Vanderbilts.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LaPuerta Books and Media
• Release date: Sep 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9780985622701

Book preview

Introduction

boychik: boy, young man. (English boy + Yiddish diminutive suffix -tshik)

– wikipedia.org

In Yiddish, boychik is a term of both endearment and sarcasm, referring to a young man who has more chutzpah than brains, which pretty much describes the foolish daring of all young men who are too much in a hurry to do anything but grow up. I coined the term boychik lit to describe a variation on the genre of male-centered humorous fiction.

This short book has six stories and one essay. The essay Boychik Lit is the think piece. I placed it in an afterward to relieve you of the mild guilt you might otherwise feel should you decide to over it. Perhaps after you've read some of the stories, you'll be more curious about what I mean.

Not all of the stories are humorous, and one even has a female main character. At the risk of slipping into a perilous thematic region despite my insistence I would avoid it here, underlying boychik lit are issues of contemporary sexual politics. I thought, then, that including an emotional female-centered story written by a professed practitioner of the male-centered kind would be interesting, if only for the sake of contrast and to highlight how much a man can get it wrong.

And as for sticking or not sticking to other self-imposed rules, the notion of a boy in these pages is not so much a matter of chronological age as a state of mind and (lack of) maturity. If you nevertheless don't find the boychik's thread in these stories, suffice it to say that the unifying theme is at least that the instigator of boychik lit wrote all of them.

The stories appear in no particular order with respect to the phases of a man's life, except the three about Rollo Hemphill follow that character sequentially in time.

Chemistry expands on the self-evident premise that you can't tell teenagers anything. The autobiographical main character gets a major life lesson when a crusty adult makes him look ridiculous.

Not Quite After Lisette is not about Rollo. At least, I hope his saga never goes there. The narrator is a forty-something high-tech executive whose wife is divorcing him. On the occasion of her birthday, he makes a phone call to his son, who has been sent away to boarding school, presumably to get him out of the line of fire.

Johnny Halo and Rock, the Tyro Shock Jock is the first of three episodes from a series of comic novels. This one is an excerpt from My Inflatable Friend: The Confessions of Rollo Hemphill. I first started thinking about boychik lit when I was writing this book. Aspiring jock Rollo is in his late teens.

In the Valley of the Happy People is from the second book in the series, Rubber Babes: Further Misadventures of Rollo Hemphill. Rollo is in his twenties, embarking on married life with the girl of his dreams.

Spin Cycle is a chapter from the third book, Farnsworth's Revenge: Rollo's End. This installment marks not so much the demise of Rollo as the presumed object of old Hugo Farnsworth's retribution.

In the Gallery of American Art is the one about a woman, Grace Atwood, who wakes up on her birthday thinking her life is perfect. And of course it's not. It is excerpted from the novel Bonfire of the Vanderbilts, a work in progress.

Boychik Lit offers my thoughts on the genre, relating more directly to the Rollo stories than to the rest of this collection. But the other stories do, I think, give some context to what it's like to be a man in a world where chick-lit novels outsell the boychik books by hundreds to one.

Chapter One

Chemistry

You can't tell teenagers anything. That's because we think we will live forever. By the time we realize that's not true, we're older, in which case we're not teenagers anymore. Or we're dead, and we can't know anything, or at least we're not in a state of being that qualifies as being a teenager any longer. In any case, quod erat demonstrandum – as my geometry teacher used to say – you can't tell teenagers anything.

I don't know how I got on the subject of geometry when I intended to talk about chemistry. Chemistry was my best subject in high school, and I don't mean the hormonal kind, although I worked pretty hard at that, too. No, I'm talking real chemical bonds, the molecular kind, not the body-locking, fluid-swapping kind, although that aspect came into play eventually.

Her name was Elizabeth Bressler – with a last name to match those nicely rounded, perfectly developed breasts of hers – but I'll touch on those, I mean, come back to her, later, and the chemistry we shared.

It all started because, in the chemistry department, I was ahead of my time, literally. I had transferred into the Baltimore school system from suburban Chicago, only to find that the beer-swilling crab crunchers of my new home were on a totally different academic program from the beer-swilling sausage stuffers I'd left behind. In my four-year high school back on the verge of the Windy City, high school ran four years – freshman, sophomore, junior, senior – and so did the science curriculum – biology, chemistry, physics, and Advance Placement science, or AP. AP was a college-level course in one of the other three sciences so you could get a head start becoming a big man on campus. But in the Baltimore system, junior high ran three rather than two years, leaving only three for high school – sophomore, junior, senior. And so the science courses ran in parallel – biology, chemistry, physics – with no AP even possible. So when I transferred as a sophomore who had already completed freshman biology, I was a year ahead, at least in science. They put me in chemistry class, as I expected, but with a roomful of juniors. So I'd skipped a grade without doing anything, like it must be to fall through a wormhole in space and end up on the other side of the galaxy without having to waste any of your precious proton-drive fuel.

My new lab partners were a couple of seniors (the killer couple, I called them, and her knockers were not bad either) who complained almost immediately to the teacher, a dyspeptic Scotsman named Mr. Maxwell, that I was not of their caliber. I hadn't been taught to wash out beakers properly (according to his rules). And what was worse, I didn't respond to direction (namely, theirs) – which actually further reinforces my contention that you can't tell teenagers anything.

So cranky Maxwell called me into his office and informed