YOU LIKE TO READ and Jamie likes to write. Wait, Jamie writes, and it would be fair to say that he feels compelled to do so, even that he finds solace and hope in a complete and well-crafted story, but like is too sanguine a term for it all. You don't like everything that you read. Nor do you like everything—each character, each paragraph with its show-off vocabulary—about the stories that you end up, on the whole, liking. Words with amorphous meanings are troubling to you. Words like amorphous, like sanguine. So let's back up: You read and Jamie writes. Fair enough.

Jamie writes in heavy digressions that often turn sad and tragic and only occasionally succeed in rousing a laugh or two from his reader. That's you. You want to laugh. Everyone wants to laugh. A laugh is so much in so little, a frivolity of wasted breath, an embarrassing lack of composure in chuckles and snorts and whinnies and, this embarrassment, the strongest weapon available in your struggles with an unrepentant world. Why not add some humor now? Say that Jamie does his best writing pantless in a stiff wooden chair and that the slats of cold wood leave a deep imprint of vertical lines in nearly perfect parallel to the cleft of his buttocks. Imagine these engraved stripes, in pink and red and hairy shadow, as he walks into the kitchen for a snack. That argyle sweater looks ridiculous now, doesn't it.

He looks for fruit. Jamie watches his diet, exercises vigorously but not obsessively and refrains from chocolate as much as he can, due more to its deleterious effect on his complexion than his arteries. As a reader, you deduce that Jamie is fit but cool about it, with suggestions of vanity that remain undefined. When he grabs a yogurt instead of an orange, you wonder if he might be a little lazy. Lazy, vain, in decent shape and eccentric, which you can presume from his bawdy writing style. Make up your own mind about the length and girth of his naked manhood, accounting for the fact that his apartment is old and drafty and the chill of early morning routinely shocks all of his organs, internal and otherwise, into a preservative retreat, a congealing and warming huddle beneath the skin left bare to face another dawn.

Where is your story? You should get to read the stories you like to read. Instead of striving toward this goal, Jamie is busy at his computer over some messy character study of Axl Rose. You don't even know who that is and if you did, would shudder to think him worthy of Jamie's writing and your reading attentions. Your story would be more about the writer, more about the magic of creating something in words that works. That works to make you think about it and then yourself and then the world, amidst a series of genuine and unexpected laughs bubbling out of the tragedies and digressions of life. You read for the tears and the laughs and want Jamie to give you these now. You want him to give it to you. That's why you're here. He's sipping a cup of tea and you can see him from down the hall, his slumped back and desperate eyes and bedded hair, the pressed ham of his butt cheeks forced between the slats of a wooden chair, his delicate fingers sometimes lifeless and sometimes frantic, his twitching at the ankle, the head of his penis peeking over the edge of the chair. This guy? He has what you want?

Jamie answers a knock at the door. Guess who. It's your mother, only she's young and pretty, reverse time-warped into a moment of her greatest beauty, a moment you surely missed. A moment before the sadness of the world, before the heaviness of conscience and age and complications and marriage. This loses you for a second, forces you to reexamine the story that led to this point and reaffirm your willingness to suspend enough belief to keep plodding through something that strays farther and farther from what you really want to read. But it's your mother; you have to see what happens. She looks wonderful and hands Jamie a bag of oranges. His semi-nudity no longer carries the shock it once did and you forget to even question her lack of surprise at finding him thus exposed. Maybe this lack of surprise suggests a familiarity and you're not sure how to handle that. Maybe your mother does notice Jamie's genitals and bare backside and gives him a pat, a good-natured hearty spank, like she's the head coach and Jamie the game-winning quarterback. They both laugh at this, Jamie and your mother. And oddly enough, you laugh too, just a little, at the absurd creation of your willful mother slapping a frustrating writer's chafed ass while he hugs a bag of oranges to his argyle sweater. It's not too uncomfortable an image, now is it.

Jamie wants to give you the story just the way you want it. He really does. But he doesn't know you and you don't know him.


RATHER THAN START OVER, to feed you a story in fits and starts that Jamie knows you might tolerate but will never truly like, he keeps at it, at the mess he has made for you. He sits back down to his computer, wedges his butt into the wood, and starts typing again. Your mother stands behind him, with her hands on his shoulders in what should only be construed as a gesture of support and encouragement. But Jamie's typing isn't really the story, so as he works, struggling with each character and word to get at what he thinks you might like, the mother takes over. She begins to draw the focus of your mind's camera eye. What does your mother do? Think about it. It's plain as day. There's nothing else for her to do but start talking to you.

'This Jamie is such a sweet boy, so sensitive and trapped, like your father in so many ways. He's genuine about his writing, too. No motivations beyond an innate desire to tell a heartfelt story. He needs money but doesn't write for it. He's scared of fame and wouldn't seek it out. He loves his family but is afraid of disappointing them. He loves a girl but is afraid of losing her. And he's sitting here, naked and cold, for you. Really it's for you, his reader, to read this and hold it in your heart for some small stretch of time.

'You'd like Jamie and he'd like you. Sure, it would take a while to let down your guard and get comfortable with each other, but think of how much you have in common. Fiction, language, a love of reading and writing, this story. You could certainly talk about this story, couldn't you? Make a new friend. You're too shy and too afraid of new people. Give it a shot.'

But the two of you are not quite ready to address each other, despite your mother's best intentions. Jamie is a pantless buffoon trying to earn some credit for the silly things inside his worthless head, and you, look at how successful you are! Wife and kids ... no? Husband and kids? Big career, full of awards and fat paychecks? No? What then. A pillar of the community with elevated station on several civic committees and church leagues and sporting collectives? Wait a minute. You're not another writer, are you? Stand up: Where are your pants?


IF YOU'RE A WRITER, how come you don't write? Instead, you sit here with me reading a frazzled story about me and your mother in a bone-chilled apartment writing a story about Axl Rose. I have no pants on and now you have no pants on and, if we're not very careful, pretty soon your mother will have no pants on. Since you're the real writer here, since everyone who reads is really the writer of their own story, the digestive force that turns ideas and page-bound words into lively thoughts and response, why don't you come sit down, right here next to me on this cold wooden chair and tell me your story. Save us all from the disgrace of another useless and misguided attempt, another frivolous puff of air. Save us from our laughter and write the story you want to read.


A VERY GRACIOUS AND ENCOURAGING READER stands in a room rubbing the shoulders of a very meek and listless writer. Neither has pants on. As the reader stoops and both heads align in studied focus of emerging words across a tiny computer screen, a conversation ensues.

'Jamie, lighten up. Don't get trapped in the story. You're sucking all the life out of it, breathing all its air. Stop using the word focus. Flow with it, don't make it turn somewhere it doesn't want to turn. I'm going to make a phone call and when I get back, I expect to see at least one fresh idea, one new thing jumping off this page. Excite me. Surprise me. Touch me.'

'I would if I could. It's all I really want to do.'

The gravid reader heads for the kitchen and leaves Jamie all alone with an assignment greater than god's suspect creation of man and world. Jamie seizes. You can see the tension in his muscles as he struggles with his own mind, the flex in his gluteus maximus and then it all relaxes. Is that a smile on his face? Are those his fingers flying across that keyboard, dancing into the dawn of a new story? Is that Axl Rose, freshly showered and toweled, approaching from the hall bathroom? It is. And he's coming closer. And so am I, the gracious and gravid reader, with yogurts in hand for everyone, for a healthy celebration of Jamie's epiphany. Look at the three of us. Pantless, pantless and heavy metal god in a salmon bath towel. Welcome to the jungle.

'That's it, Jamie. That's it exactly. Sometimes you amaze me. Now, keep it moving. Take this scenario and examine it, dissect it, expose all of its humor and tragedy, reveal its sympathetic ringing, the ring of familiarity in the mind's ear of all your soon to be captivated readers. Make it dance!'

'I thought I did that already.'

Axl takes his eyes from the computer and says, 'Jamie, I read your story about me. It's a non-starter. The idea behind it is clever and the experimental form is interesting, but they trap the heart of it, my heart. A caged bird cannot sing its true song. The heart of a story is what gives it warmth, what centers it. Otherwise you've got sprawl, sprawling narratives and sprawling dialogues and a jumbled, jarring mess of digression that no one wants to read. It's cold and formal. Somebody will read it, just like somebody reads this now, but they will not like it. And you will remain unsatisfied. I know what you're afraid of, the fear that keeps you from telling your best stories. We're all artists here, me, the reader now writing this sub-story [you], the writer of the reader and sub-story, you, me, your mother and everyone else whether they know it or not. You just need a heart, and that's what's so scary. What if you take a good hard look and can't find it. Or worse, don't like what you find, something timid and feeble and bloodless and caged. That's why you're running all these circles, around and around until you and your reader are too dizzy to remember that a good story should have a heart. Fine, you've dazzled me. Now move me. A good story has heart because its writer does, and because both share it freely.'

'Yeah, Jamie. Yeah, do that. Give us our hearts.'

Yeah, give us our hearts. Give yourself a heart if you think it's so easy.

'Axl, reader, go stand in the center of the room there. Axl, you'll need to reposition your towel. Hike it up to your armpits so that your male parts are exposed. Reader, did you reach your mother? Is she on her way? We need everyone here for this. It's going to be amazing and we all need to be bottomless and holding hands in the center of the room. This will change everything. It's exactly what they want.'

Jamie types feverishly into his little machine. If there were a referred heartbeat in the buttocks, you would see his racing. Axl and I stand behind him, rubbing his shoulders, egging him on to this grand awakening and my mother shows up too, to join us in witnessing this magical moment. Jamie is unstoppable. He throws in a monkey named Dan and a flying fish in a coat and tie. He moves the story from Kathmandu to Timbuktu. He flies and dives, shouts and cries. He pinpoints the exact nature of love and loss. He sets it down on the page, the reasons for it all and jumps up in a fit of final relief. He's done it! We dance together like schoolgirls, extremities flailing, pogo sticks of uncontrollable life. There's some joy and excitement but it mostly feels light and airy, as if all the balloons ever blown simultaneously expelled every last volume of their forced intake. And then Jamie has a coronary event, some stroke or attack of rapid arrhythmia, and collapses to the floor. You tell me, is he dead?


YOUR MOTHER IS HAPPY NOW. We've spoken, you and I, and come to some shared understanding about what it means to read and write, which are two of the most important things in our lives. And in this story. You've made a new friend, I hope, and I hope to be a good friend to you. Here's what I can offer: I'm thoughtful; I'm earnest about things to be earnest about; I'm honest and loyal and occasionally funny. My listening skills exceed my skills of expression, because every writer is really a reader, a yearning to be touched in our most sensitive parts just the way we like it, with little page-bound words and dangerous ideas that stir everything else up. As long as you've got a story to tell, I'll listen. As long as you write the story of your life, I'll read it. Do you see now? This isn't a story about Axl Rose or your mother or pantless writers and readers. They showed up just to see what you were doing, and I just pointed them out. This is the story you made. I want to know how it ends and promise to read every last word.


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