Writer’s Block
by Troy D. Nooe
part 1 of 2
The release of my first novel had been less than auspicious. That’s putting it lightly. The fact is, it tanked. Kidney stones get more circulation.
I was busy doing nothing in the retail job that passed for my own private hell when Andrea, one of the more annoying people I’ve ever known and a co-worker of mine, broke my train of non-thought.
“What are you thinking about?”
The truth was that I wasn’t actually thinking of anything in particular and was more in a trance of semi-conscious unawareness, but it was a question I’ve always hated and I felt like it needed answering.
“Suicide” I said, unsure why.
“Really?”
“No.”
There was one of those long ugly pauses in the conversation and I was loving every moment of it. So far, it was the highlight of my day. At least Andrea wasn’t speaking.
“How would you do it?” Nothing good lasts forever.
“Do what?”
“Suicide. How would you kill yourself?”
“I would just let you annoy me to death.”
Andrea let out one of her dry raspy laughs. It sounded like it was released from the very bowels of her being and wasn’t designed as an expression of amusement but more a torture tactic directed toward me. Like a normal person’s laugh being run across a cheese grater.
“No, really, how would you do it?”
“I would bludgeon myself to death with a ball peen hammer.”
There was that laugh again. It made me want to strangle one of us. I wasn’t sure which.
“I’m serious. How would you kill yourself?”
I looked around the empty store. Not that it was really empty. It was actually filled with all sorts of useless gadgets and do-dads. Worthless trinkets which it was my job to sell and stock and count in an endless cycle of pointless commerce designed to fill the pockets of some bigwig that I’d never met.
“I wouldn’t have to.” I finally answered. “I’m already dead.”
With those words my career in retail came to an abrupt end. I walked out the door without so much as looking back and I never saw Andrea again.
Even unemployment has its perks.
For the next three days I wandered around town with a spiral notebook and a pen. I had a little money set aside so I wasn’t too worried about finding another job right away.
By a little money I mean very little money. I probably had enough to keep me going for a few months as long as I took to living on the streets and ate nothing but canned tuna and water. Even then it might have been tough to make it last for a few months. In reality I had a wad of cash in my pocket that was just enough to make me feel like I wasn’t broke.
Still, I wasn’t worried. I had bigger fish to fry. I was working on starting my second novel and I was having some success. Success at starting it anyway.
Starting it was easy. I had started it dozens of times. It was the taking it from there part and the having any clue where it was going that was giving me trouble.
Writer’s block is a funny thing. It feels like a blank spot on your brain that you’re trying to scrape off with a gardening shovel in hopes of finding a sapling of an idea lying below the surface. It’s like looking for a nugget of inspiration in a mountain of nothing. It’s like having a hole in your soul and trying to plug it with chicken wire.
Maybe I’m being a tad melodramatic here. I guess it’s not quite that bad, but it does suck.
Reality is a funny thing, too. It tends to sneak up on you when you aren’t paying attention.
I suppose I should have seen the signs. The past-due notices in my mail box. The fact that my phone and electricity had been cut off. The eviction notice scotch taped to the front door. To the lesser-trained individual it might have seemed like I was in a bit of trouble, but I wasn’t worried. I had more important things to concern myself with. After all, I had a second novel to pump out.
My girlfriend, at the time, was named Jennifer. Probably still is, for all I know. Not Jen or Jenny but Jennifer. She was always very clear about that.
I showed up at her apartment with a few things I’d gathered from my place after I realized that I wouldn’t have anywhere to live anymore. I was carrying pretty much everything I had of value in a plastic grocery bag.
Jennifer and I had a strange relationship. She pretended to love the fact that I was a dark, brooding and struggling artist, but in reality I think she was just banking on the off-chance that I might actually make a few bucks with my writing. In return, I pretended that everything she did and said didn’t get on my nerves on the off chance that she might spread her legs for me every once in awhile.
I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking that I’m a pig. You’re probably not too far off the mark. You’re also thinking that I have woman issues as the only two women that I’ve mentioned so far have been painted in a less than flattering light. Trust me, it’s not just women.
Jennifer was actually a pretty girl. She might still be for all I know.
Once you got past the permanent scowl on her face and the nasty attitude that always seemed to engulf her, she was a petite blonde with small perky breasts and an ass you could bounce a quarter off of. She had big blue eyes and thin lips and her nose was small and puggish with a small lump in the center of it which was a never ending source of stress to her. She spent much of her time talking about having it fixed one day, but it was one of the few things about her that never bothered me.
“Where in the hell have you been?” Her standard greeting for me.
“Around.” My standard answer.
“What’s with the bag?”
“My stuff. I lost my place.”
“You lost your place? Exactly how do you lose a place? Did you set it down and forget where you put it? Did somebody move it when you weren’t looking?”
Jennifer always liked to do these really goofy word games when she got mad. Taking everything I said in its most literal form and throwing it back at me. I think it made her feel intellectually equal and in control when she was able to rub words in my writer’s face.
She always had anxieties of being inferior to me on some level because of the writing and it was her way of showing me that she could flex her brain too. It was very junior high, and if she’d of been able to climb inside of my mind and see, first hand, exactly how smart I really was, she would have seen that there was no need to bother. I was never all that smart. I was just pretty good at faking it.
“I got evicted.”
“You got evicted?” I could see her brain churning, looking for some kind of word play she could use with the word evicted, but she was coming up empty. “How in the hell did that happen?”
“I think it had something to do with me not paying the rent.”
A lecture from Jennifer would be considered cruel and inhumane punishment in some countries. Brutal in its pointlessness and nearly intolerable in its sheer repetition, it was a tough thing to get through without putting a bullet in your own head. Luckily for me, I didn’t even own a gun.
I sat through it, nodding my head and barely paying attention to what she was actually saying. It didn’t really matter. I’d heard it all before. The lecture was more for her benefit than mine. Jennifer always loved the sound of her own voice. Especially when she was right and I was wrong.
From the look in her eyes, I could tell that she was extremely satisfied with the rant she had just laid on me and from the blood redness slowly dissolving from her face I could see that she was calming down. I decided to tune back in to what she was saying.
“It’s just that we all have responsibilities. I know how important your writing is to you, but you can’t neglect the other things in your life. I want to feel like I’m a priority in your life too.”
Blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah. Maybe I tuned back in a bit too early.
I was waiting for the proper moment to cut in, but it didn’t seem like it was ever coming. There was no natural break or pause to her monotone ramblings and I was forced to butt in at what was almost certainly an inappropriate time. She had just begun on our future together.
“I was thinking I could crash here a while.”
Her eyes got wide and she gasped in shock. I could almost see the words ‘you’ve got some nerve’ written all over her face.
“You’ve got some nerve,” she finally said. “Haven’t you heard anything I’ve been saying?” I decided honesty was probably not the best way to answer the question.
“Of course I have.”
“Don’t you get it? This just isn’t working out.”
Now I got it. This wasn’t one of her pointless lectures designed to highlight my various flaws and shortcomings. This particular lecture had meaning. There was an actual purpose behind her rantings and ravings this time.
This was the break-up speech.
I couldn’t help but wonder how long she’d been stockpiling this one. Had she been sitting on this beauty the whole time we’d been together and just waiting for me to screw up bad enough to pull it out? Was it something she had been slowly putting together with each time I’d messed up over the years, piecing together her masterpiece with every mistake I’d made? Maybe it was just something she threw together at the last minute, inspired by the velocity of my latest blunder. It made me kind of sorry that I hadn’t paid more attention.
“Maybe it’s time we went our separate ways.”
“You’re breaking up with me,” I said, pointing out the obvious as I’m prone to do when I’m stunned or surprised by something I didn’t see coming.
“I just think that we both need a little space right now.”
I wanted to point out to her that the only space I really needed, just then, was a space to keep my stuff and to sleep in, but I decided not to bother. She seemed like she had her mind pretty well made up.
“This is really the best thing for both of us.” She was still going on.
It’s not so much the break up that bothered me. I never expected to be with Jennifer forever. The really disturbing part of the whole ordeal was having to listen to her babble on about it.
Enough already. Let’s cut our ties and be on our merry ways. Isn’t it bad enough that I have no job, no place to live and no promise of free and easy sex in my future? Not to mention, no idea where my second novel is heading. Do I really need the lecture too?
Her lips were still moving so I knew that she wasn’t quite through with me yet. In her mind she was trying to offer me some sort of comfort and solace. Letting me go as gently as she could, so to speak.
If you think about it, it’s not the easiest thing in the world to do tactfully. How do you tell someone that after being with them for some time and getting to know them on a personal level that you just don’t want to have anything to do with them anymore?
I’m really sorry. You’re a wonderful person and I wish you the best, but if I have to spend another minute with you I’m liable to put my head in my oven. I really do love you, but the thought of seeing your face again makes me want to retch. The torture which is our relationship must cease and desist before I put one of us out of our misery.
You have to give her credit for taking the time to spell it all out for me. I’ve always been more of a just stop-calling guy.
As I stood watching her talk, I was overwhelmed with the urge to try and talk her into one more roll in the hay for old time’s sake. One for the road, if you will.
I know. I’m a pig. We’ve already established that.
In the end, I decided against pursuing my gut instinct. Not that I didn’t want to. It’s not like I had anything better on my schedule for the afternoon. I just couldn’t come up with an argument that I thought she’d go for.
I left her apartment with my tail between my legs and my belongings in a plastic bag. Jennifer stood in her doorway and watched me walk off. There was a sad and concerned look on her face as we let whatever it was we had between us drift off into the abyss of life. That dark place where memories sulk off to die and be forgotten.
There I go with the melodrama again.
As far as writing goes, sometimes I think I’m the second coming of Hemingway and other times I truly believe that I’m a no-talent hack that couldn’t write his way out of a paper bag. The truth is, I’m probably somewhere in between. I hope so, anyway. I’m certainly no Hemingway.
Speaking of writing, I still wasn’t getting anywhere with my second novel. In fact, I had blown through all of my original ideas and was left with nothing. Less than nothing. I was worse off now than I was before.
What was the big deal? It’s just a stupid story. Boy meets girl, boy kills girl’s husband, boy covers up murder... How hard is that? Just write something. Anything.
That damn writer’s block had me by the short hairs.
The problem was that I didn’t want to write just anything. I wanted to write something great. Something earth-moving. Something that would reach into my reader’s innards and yank them out with the force of a cannon blast. The kind of thing that would make young girls cry and old men bleed from the ears. A tad overboard, I know, but you get the idea.
In the midst of this crucial writing crisis I was experiencing, I also had to figure out how I was going to eke out an existence with no job, funds, place to live or companionship.
Well, it’s not like I had nothing. I had the contents of my plastic grocery bag which consisted of a paperback copy of Cannery Row by John Steinbeck, a double compilation CD entitled The Story Of The Clash and a Girls Gone Wild DVD. I should mention that, at this point in my life, I owned neither a CD or DVD player.
Also in my bag was a toothbrush, a half used tube of Crest toothpaste, three packs of Marlboro Lights and a Bic lighter. Not to mention my spiral notebook and four pens. You could say that I was traveling light. It seemed to me that I had everything I needed. I also had a car, but it wasn’t in the grocery bag.
Copyright © 2007 by Troy D. Nooe
