The Androgynous Zone and Other Stories

By J.V. Granucci

The Androgynous Zone by J.V. Granucci (1936-2014) is a collection of short stories that promises to entertain and inspire, covering the wide spectrum of human morality, psychology and sexuality.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Mar 17, 2017
• ISBN: 9781365830600

Book preview

The Androgenous Zone

and Other Stories

by J.V. Granucci

James Bishop Publishing

Palm Springs

This book contains works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental, except where noted.

© 2017 The Estate of Joan Virginia Rivard Granucci.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

ISBN: 978-1-365-83060-0

First published 2017

Cover image © 2017 Mary Cuda

The Androgenous Zone

and Other Stories

Jesus said to them, ‘When you make the two into one, and when you make the inner like the outer and the outer like the inner, and the upper like the lower, and when you make the male and the female into one, so that the male will not be male nor will the female be female..., then you will enter the Kingdom of God.’

The Gospel of Thomas

Introduction

Quite likely you’ve never heard of J.V.Granucci. (Joan Virginia Rivard Granucci, 1936 - 2014). She grew up in a small farming community in Illinois, lived briefly in Chicago as a young adult, and on a whim moved to Northern California in the mid 60’s, where she lived mostly in the Bay Area and earned a degree in Creative Writing from San Francisco State. Although she lived in California the rest of her life, Joan remained always the country girl from Illinois, where she was at one with both the natural world and the mystery that she gleaned from her roots in Catholicism.

When the muse struck her, Joan wrote stories that were the outlet for her passionate love affair with words, and reflected the bold life she lived. The stories also gave her a voice for her vision of the wide spectrum of human morality, psychology and sexuality. Joan was a storyteller first of all. She was quite verbose and enjoyed entertaining with a story whenever the opportunity arose. With her written stories, she hoped not only to entertain, but also to lead the reader to a deeper feeling and consequently perhaps a bit more insight about the complexities of our human species.

It is a daunting task to go through someone’s life work when they are no longer around to guide you. I felt like a trespasser as I read her most private musings. And as I read, reread and organized this collection, I realized how much Joan’s voice on the page so accurately conveys the Joanie that I knew and loved.

Because Joan kept everything, she left a lot of paper. Stacks and stacks of unorganized written words. A lot of it written notes with ideas — her ideas that now neither I nor anyone else has the capacity to explore. She had sometimes up to a dozen different drafts for the same story, making it unclear which one she would have considered the completed version — the finished work.

Perhaps none were really finished to Joan’s satisfaction. She was the consummate perfectionist, working, reworking, and polishing her stories for decades, never quite allowing herself the satisfaction that I, the reader, found in them. And although I had read most of the stories previously and had, in fact, advocated for their publication many years ago, I also found stories I never knew existed — stories I thought exceptional that had been sitting on a dusty shelf for decades....

So, in the end, I’ve trusted my reader’s intuition and included the work that I consider both a good read and worth reading.

The stories in this collection go back about 30 years and I’ve organized them in a loose kind of genre classification. Section I, The Androgynous Zone, contains stories with obvious LGBT themes. Section II, Penance, contains the work that in my view highlights morality issues, though, of course, the themes, the issues, necessarily overlap. I’ve also included two unfinished pieces; the first chapter draft of the novel Joan started but never fully developed as illness and its accompanying fatigue came to dominate her life, and what I think was probably the last story she wrote. Incomplete, but so full of her most recent voice and vision, I thought it appropriate it sees print.

It is also important to note that although Joan was a Lesbian who wrote, (and not the least bit shy about either fact), she did not consider herself a Lesbian Writer, per se. She did not want to be labeled, classified, or defined. When she was referred to as a Lesbian Writer, or a California Writer, she rejected both labels vehemently, saying she was if anything a midwestern, a country writer, shaped and formed by her solitary childhood along the shores of the Iroquois River in Illinois. Her worldview irrevocably influenced by the beauty and mystery she found in Catholicism and the total awe she felt in the Cathedral of the Natural World.

Mary Cuda

Part I

The Androgynous Zone

The Androgynous Zone

You have to understand: I will never stop returning to that long-ago-lost beach in my mind, never stop trying to push the young couple down on their knees in the sand; and that when it comes to the account of this I wrote back in 1973 — shortly to follow — I am well aware that if the shrink at the California clinic where I was then working had read it, he would have slapped on me fast the label of Personality Disorder and scribbled in his notes something like what I once transcribed for a patient’s record: ...another poor soul so in need of seeing herself, and being seen, as special that she has slipped over the edge into a fantasy of her own choosing.

Because, with his closed mind-set, he could not have accepted as valid so open a one as this: that for me, as a Catholic nurtured on mysteries and miracles, on angels of God invading our dreams to guide us, it is as natural as taking in air to accept the incomprehensible and ethereal as as-rock-solid-real as any base object you might thump your fists on.

So that although, admittedly, some of the events I recorded may sail more than a bit over the top, this makes them none the less real. And meaningful. Which is why I recorded them, as Gertrude Stein put it, both for myself, and strangers. And the only reason for my holding back this record until now is that, as the Scriptures point out, there is a time for everything. And not until now did I feel its time had come.

Back in 1973, of course, my language was much looser and reflected a slew of youthful conceits. But when I considered rewriting this account from my present, more mature (presumably) perspective, I realized that in doing so I would probably add rationalizations and justifications completely foreign to its original, spontaneous nature. And so I decided not to, afraid that I might shatter some fragile piece of that answer that still, these 35-odd years later, my beloved Jan feels may lie, scattered, throughout the account itself. And besides, as our staunchest friends, John and Bernie — Bernadette, his wife and fellow cop, keep reminding me: Often, well enough is best left alone.

* * *

August 15, 1973, approx. 7:40 am.

Had to call in sick, had Gladys go off her top about having no one else there today to tape group therapy sessions. But no way could I go in. Barely took time to have coffee with Jan before starting to write this down. Because what happened last night is too important to let slip away. And although it happened when I was awake, it had the transient quality of a dream; which, God knows, can slip away in the flash of an eyelid opening.

But because it was earlier in the evening, at the Santa Rosa J.C., that this thing began — or rather, got rolling, since actually it had begun months ago — I keep going back to that classroom. Keep looking at myself and the others. Thinking I might catch something off about me. Or them. Or pick up on some portentous something in the air.

But everything — everyone — seems normal enough. I seem normal enough. Or at least as normal as anyone else in the place.

There are a neat dozen of us, and we are seated on the floor at the front of the room in a circle, holding hands. And at the center of this circle, in Buddha posture atop a raised cushion, perches Blue Robin's Egg, or Wildflower of the Wohahnoes, or whatever it is she's calling herself. In reality, just some Erma Jones from the Sacramento Valley, transposed by the Sixties into Earth Goddess, Mother of the Universe et al., whose calling has become this: to inform us lesser beings of how we too might be transposed if only we too might awaken within us the others. The catch being — we just found out from Bluebell here — that these others no longer are, but only used to be.

Outside the windows, the sky is reddening. I glance at my watch, see that it's going on eight, and wonder if anyone else is wishing this charade were over.

You're just too old for this, I think, too wise, and feel gratified to think that John — who sits on my right, who squeezes my hand and winks at me — is thinking the same thing. He and I are the only ones to show up from our Extension writers’ workshop, cancelled for this special event. His reason for coming I don't know. Mine was the hope that just for once such a presentation — this one promising an assimilation of our many selves — would be for real; that is, would help me deal with the several I's inside of me, who, for years now, have been struggling to come together into a single, comprehensive — and comprehensible — me.

And now... Earth Goddess pausing to smile angelically, each of you, individually, will come forward to join hands with me briefly, to center our energies and awaken within you that other, who... blah blah blah.

When my turn comes, I drag along under my can my notebook; there's a nasty-looking stain on the floor near her from some spilled drink that a hundred shoes have tromped through and spread into a filthy goo, and I'm worried about staining my chinos. You'd think she'd have brought along a blanket — pardon me! an Indian blanket — for us lesser beings to squat on.

There is a flicker of distaste around her mouth at my being concerned about such mundane matters as a clean ass. Or at the sudden realization that I'm not the young man she might have thought I was. A mistake many people make at first glance — that even Jan made on the night we met, thank God. Because otherwise, she later confessed, she would never have come after me....

Now up close to Bluebell, I catch the pungent odor of too much perfume applied to too sweaty a place. And I see that she's nowhere near as attractive as at a distance. There is a hardness around her mouth that her smile cannot soften. Her hair, teased out in batches of red curls, is frizzy, looks burnt out, as do her vapid hazel eyes. And I suspect a lack of personal cleanliness, the bra strap on a freckled shoulder, exposed by the drooping peasant blouse, a dingy gray.

Now, close your eyes, she instructs — which, dutifully, I do — and focus all of your energy on me.

Which, also, I dutifully do, thinking: Okay, honey, you asked for it, then letting her have it, full force.

Which — you'd better believe — is some energy, since in a recent biofeedback study, I discovered I could shut off the machine I was connected to. It was like I just suddenly knew I could and, just-like-that, leapt out of myself — beyond my biology is what I now call it — and shut it off. Which certainly surprised me, but didn't send me into a dither like it did the tech, who went into frantic button-punching and wire-checking until I told him what I had done and then proved it, turning the machine back on — then off again, on again — sending him into a muttered mantra of Jesus, Jesus... which seemed to be appropriate, since it was Christ who said that if you believe you can move a mountain, when you say move, it will move....

But now Bluebell's hands, holding mine, grow hot, clammy, and I feel a tremor pass up her arms. I open my eyes just in time to see her closed eyelids flicker wildly before popping open to expose her shock. I have leapt beyond my biology and entered her. But she, being grounded in her biology, can only interpret such intimacy as physical. I feel the sudden surge of her sexual energy and am not at all surprised. She is.

She drops my hands with a get-away-from-me thrust and breathes out heavily, Wow, what weird energy you have.

Her voice and smile have gone shaky. But she's doing her best, God love her. And, God knows, I'm usually no showoff, and rarely cruel. But her being out to sell the notion that we all have had a past life, perhaps many past lives, really tees me off. Because, even if true, it would get us nowhere.

And Christ's rebuke for using the dead as an excuse for not moving ahead into a new life jumps into my head and out of my mouth before I can stop it: Let the dead bury their dead. Which rings out in the quiet room, drawing from some girl behind me in the circle a loud giggle.

Bluebell's face blanches, a frown forming on it like a design being pushed into putty. And leaning in close to my face, in an exhalation of sour smoker's breath she demands: Who are you? Addressing, of course, not me, but some imagined persona of mine from the past.

I feel a jolt of surprise, and sadness, at her actually believing what she preaches, and again cannot help myself.

I am from the future, I say, intending simply to be perverse, yet, in the very act of saying it, sensing that this may be, in some obscure way, the truth. And I have no name, I inform her, and myself, again quite truthfully in the context of what I'm suddenly thinking of. Because I have no form — yet.

And, considering the impact on myself of this triune revelation, I probably look as stunned by it as she does.

But this is how it is with me most of the time when facing some new truth whose meaning I can't decipher — at least, not right away — for my own sake. Which is very like an aunt of mine said she felt when, dragging herself from the wreckage of her car and wandering down the road into a wayside station's restroom, she stood transfixed before the mirror — for how long, she never would know — deeply distressed. Because she couldn't figure out, for the life of her, what to make of what she saw there: the raw white of her jawbone jutting through the front of her bloodied face....

In other words, recognition does not equal comprehension.

At break-time I cut out — no way can I take any more of Bluebell's crap — and find John waiting outside the door, all smiles and questions about what I did to that poor child to so shake her. And I recall, from an earlier conversation, that he's got eight years on me, and wonder if he thinks I'm an adult yet.

I say nothing about what happened, but we go on joking and laughing about Bluebell all the way to the parking lot. Where our laughter ends with a mutually acknowledged guilt over making malicious fun of a basically innocent creature. While beneath this frivolity my mind winds 'round and ‘round its recent revelations, whose source I am anxious to get home and check out.

I say good night and get in my car. But I've barely turned the ignition key and rolled down the window for some air when John leans in to face me.

"Look, I know how much you wanted to go